Run River

by Joan Didion

  The woman paused, and Lily quickly assured her that she knew Stan’s. (As it happened, she did, because when Everett first went away she had listened nights on the radio to Stan’s Private Line, and had even wondered academically from time to time whether or not she could have made the grade among the leather-jacketed jeunesse dorée who gathered nightly at Stan’s to eat Double-Burgers and dedicate songs to one another.) The woman ignored her. Naturally Sue Ann got asked on a lot of dates—she was about Lily’s age but a real doll, built like Rita Hayworth. You could hardly tell them apart except for the hair, and nobody would ever convince her that Rita’s was natural anyway. But don’t get her started on that. So Sue Ann had been playing the field, but now she had a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to marry a young fellow who in turn had a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to wrap up the Kirby Party franchise for the entire Greater Vallejo area. You know, Kirby Parties. You invite a congenial group to your home and serve a little something, doughnuts and soft drinks, and then the Kirby representative comes and demonstrates the vacuum cleaners and all. You get a bonus gift for getting a certain number to come and you get in a little girl-talk besides. If Lily wasn’t on to Kirby Parties she ought to take Fred’s number and call him the next time she was in the area, providing his deal went through. Anyway. The only catch was that Fred didn’t know about Billy Jack. Or rather he knew about Billy Jack but believed him to be Sue Ann’s little brother. She had warned Sue Ann it was a crazy mad thing to do, trying to pass off Billy Jack as her own mother’s change-of-life baby, but what could you do. Sue Ann had her right to happiness as much as the next one. What did Lily think.

  As the bus rolled out of the Coast Range and into the heat of the Valley, Lily stopped thinking altogether, lulled by the even rhythm of the telephone poles against field after dry yellow field, by the regular rise and fall of the woman’s voice, by the grinding and shifting of gears as the bus swung off the highway and down the streets of towns in which she seemed to have spent her life: Fairfield-Suisun, Vacaville, Dixon. Although she did not suppose that she had driven through any one of the towns more than on the outside twenty times, they had about them an imprint which to perceive once, especially if that once was on an August afternoon when the streets looked abandoned and the frame buildings as fragile as tinder, was to possess forever. She could close her eyes and tick it off: the Bank of America building, the W.T. Grant store, the Lincoln-Mercury agency; the lone woman in a shapeless dress and flowered straw hat, sitting on the porch of the hotel until her husband was through in town. Off the main street there would be a few blocks of houses, three-storey houses in need of paint, each fronted by a patch of dry grass, maybe a tricycle overturned on the cracked concrete walk. The blinds would be drawn and there would not be any people, anywhere. The afternoon heat could bleach those towns so clean that the houses and the buildings seemed always on the verge of dematerializing; there was the sense that to close one’s eyes on a Valley town was to risk opening them a moment later on dry fields, the sun bleaching out the last traces of habitation, a flowered straw hat, a neon advertisement which had blinked a moment before from a wall no longer visible: More Yield from Every Acre with Seeds from Northrup-King.

  It was a great comfort, watching the towns come and go through the tinted window of the Greyhound bus. The heat drained the distinctions from things—marriage and divorce and new curtains and overdrafts at the bank, all the same—and Lily could not at the moment imagine any preoccupation strong enough to withstand the summer. At least any preoccupation of hers; Sue Ann, now, was another case. There would be nothing ambiguous about Sue Ann’s responses, nothing ambivalent about her wants: Sue Ann would have kissed Joe Templeton goodbye with no second thoughts. Sue Ann’s problems, unlike her own, offered the compression, the foreshortening of art; her own were inadvertent, makeshift affairs at best, and there with her head resting against the bus window she could not think why she had gone to San Francisco or why she had caused a scene with Everett or how she had gotten pregnant in the first place by somebody she did not much like or why, the heart of the matter, she had thought it made any difference.

  When the bus arrived in Sacramento at six o’clock, however, she emerged as if from a darkened theater into the sudden glare, the sudden presence of people, and the sudden recollection of why it made any difference. Standing on the loading platform, holding her raincoat and her overnight bag, she could remember just about everything except why she had chosen a four-hour bus ride over two air-conditioned hours in a Southern Pacific club car. For reasons now lost to her, it had seemed in San Francisco the thing to do; had seemed the way of the Cross.

  I’ve been worried, Joe said when she called him from the bus station. There seemed to her reproof in every syllable.

  “I’m sorry. I just got into town.” She did not want to talk to Joe and did not know why she had called him, except that she had promised to.

  “I worried,” he repeated. “I couldn’t sleep. I yelled at Francie.”

  “You yelled at Francie.” She leaned against the wall of the telephone booth and tried to open the glass door with her foot, succeeding only in catching her heel between the door and the jamb.

  “How are you?”

  “I’m all right.” Working her foot free, she let the shoe drop. “I’m fine.”

  “You sound pretty good.”

  “How did you expect me to sound?”

  In the prolonged silence which followed she reached to retrieve her shoe and saw that she had snagged her stocking on the lock of her overnight case.

  “Damn it.” She jammed her foot into her shoe and brushed her damp hair from her face.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing’s the matter. I was just putting my shoe on.”

  “Putting your shoe on? Why did you have your shoes off?”

  “No reason, Joe, no reason. I’m just down here in the Greyhound bus station barefoot, see.”

  “Cut it out.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  After a silence Joe said tentatively: “You saw the doctor?”

  “Yes.”

  “How did it go?”

  “It was fine. Everything was just fine.”

  “I told you it would be.”

  She did not say anything.

  “He didn’t charge you any more, did he?”

  “No. It went all right.”

  “I told you it would. He didn’t want any more money?”

  “No, I said.” She was irritated by his preoccupation with the money; it had been her five hundred dollars in the first place. To get the cash she had sold ten shares of an oil stock her father had given her as a wedding present, and she did not like to be reminded of it. Although she had not thought of it before, there was something about Joe’s inability to put his hands on five hundred dollars without Francie’s knowing about it which summed up all his rather aggressive weaknesses.

  “I would have cut off my right arm if I could have gone down there for you.”

  “Now you cut it out,” she said, and was immediately touched with remorse: if he was dishonest so was she. If she were honest she would not even be talking to him on the telephone.

  “There was nothing you could do,” she added, ashamed.

  “It’s been pretty bad. You know how bad I felt about it.” He paused. “Maybe I could see you tomorrow.”

  “No,” she said rapidly. “I mean I can’t. I have to rest.”

  “I guess you better.” He sounded relieved. “I just thought you’d want to talk to someone.”

  “Oh Christ. No. I don’t want to talk to someone. I don’t want to talk to anyone.”

  She clicked off the connection with her finger and dropped the receiver in her lap. Her silk suit was damp with perspiration and stained not only with dust but tea, spilled at the counter in the San Francisco bus station. She should have let the waitress sponge it off but her bus had already been called and she had not wanted to run; she had been afraid that if she moved too q
uickly the bleeding would begin again.

  If she had not wanted to talk to Joe, she certainly did not want to talk to Everett. Nonetheless, she had to get home and felt incapable of explaining to anyone else what she was doing with her suitcase in the Greyhound bus station. She had meant to take the river bus out to the ranch, but the drivers had gone on strike. If it was not one thing it was another. Fumbling in her bag for a cigarette, she dropped two coins in the telephone and dialed her mother’s number. When her mother answered she felt tears rising, hung up without saying anything, and smoked the cigarette down to her fingers. I would have cut off my right arm, she thought viciously. He knew what he could cut off. She blew her nose, snapped her bag shut, and called the ranch.

  Everett answered on the first ring. “Sweet Jesus, Lily. You all right?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Where the hell are you?”

  She hesitated. Where was she. It was the giveaway, the proof of how she felt, the evidence that she would never be the kind who could carry things off.

  “At the Greyhound bus station,” she said at last.

  “You fool,” he said softly. “You goddamn little ass.”

  She drank some warm Coca-Cola in a sticky paper cup and went outside the station to wait for Everett. At six-thirty everything seemed still: the traffic had already thinned out and the thick branches of the plane trees hung heavy and motionless over the street. In front of the loading platform a sailor was trying to pick up two girls; both the girls wore white peasant blouses, pulled down off their shoulders, and one had her hair tied up in a magenta scarf. When the sailor, teasing, pulled off the scarf, Lily saw that the girl’s head was covered with pin curls. Snatching the scarf back, the girl struck an exaggerated pose with it, and they all laughed. They seemed to be having a very good time and it tired Lily to think that she was probably no older than they were.

  Depressed, she turned her attention across the street to a parking lot where a few men, apparently late from their offices and obviously all acquainted, were picking up their cars. She reflected sadly that they would no doubt arrive home to find their well-behaved sun-tanned wives getting out of their swimming suits and dressed for dinner. It was too hot a night to cook; all over town those loving summer wives were brushing the chlorine out of their hair and putting on dresses to go out to dinner. The would be at the country club tonight, wearing their bright clean linen dresses loosely, as if they were unaccustomed to wearing clothes at all. They would talk about their diets and their children and their golf scores, display their even dispositions and their gold charm bracelets, and presently they would go home to take off the bright clean linen dresses, to lie on hot sheets and wait patiently for the day to begin again. You would never catch one of them standing around the Greyhound bus station in a tea-stained wrinkled silk suit not wanting to see her husband. You would never even catch one of them standing around anywhere in a tea-stained wrinkled silk suit. There was the kind of wife Everett should have, and look what he had instead. Martha had said it all: Lily had no right to her brother. Everett, like Sue Ann, had his right to happiness as much as the next one.

  It was almost seven-thirty before Everett arrived. Unshaven and wearing a dirty khaki shirt, he double-parked the station wagon, swung himself over the rear bumper of a parked Chevrolet, and took Lily’s arm. She had not at first seen him, and smiled tentatively when he touched her. He picked up her suitcase, helped her around the Chevrolet, and opened the station-wagon door without speaking. Before they were home she had fallen asleep, dry-eyed for a change, her head in the way of the gear shift.

  Later he put her to bed, opened the shutters which had been closed all day against the heat, and wiped her face with a washcloth soaked in witch hazel.

  “Did you get the hops finished?” she whispered, opening her eyes.

  “Yes,” he said. “Everything’s fine. Go to sleep.”

  “Listen.” She took the washcloth from him and laid it across her eyes. “I love you.”

  He looked at her for a long time.

  “Stop feeling sorry for yourself,” he said finally.

  She took the washcloth from her eyes and threw her arms around his neck. “Everett, baby. I do. I love you. I know you and you know me and nobody else does. Everett please baby love me.”

  She clung to him while he kissed her hair, and when he moved to take her arms from his neck she tighened her hold. “Lie here with me,” she whispered. “Lie here with me until it’s all dark.”

  “Later.” He stood up. “Go to sleep now, baby.”

  He sat with Knight for half an hour on the third floor, from where they could see the fireworks in town, for that day happened also to be the opening of the State Fair. There would be fireworks every night for twelve days, great slow bursts of white and pink and green, barely visible from the ranch. Long before the last distant sparks had showered out and drifted down, Knight fell asleep in Everett’s arms, and he carried him downstairs without waking him and put him to bed in his playsuit.

  He went downstairs then, wandering absently from room to room. The house was quiet: Julie was at her grandmother’s; Martha had gone to the Fair with Ryder Channing. Insisting that Lily and Everett must come with them, they had waited an hour to see if Lily might arrive; Everett had gotten rid of them only by saying that the four of them would go to the Fair over the weekend. After they had gone Everett had sat in the kitchen with a bottle of beer and an article Channing had brought him about what was described as a pioneer shopping center in Kansas City. The kitchen chairs were uncomfortable and Everett had found it increasingly difficult to concentrate on why some developers preferred shopping centers with mall layouts to shopping centers with cluster layouts, whatever a cluster layout was; the kitchen, however, was the only place in the house where he did not feel oppressed by the presence of telephones. Although he knew that there were only two telephones in the house and five on the entire ranch, the house had seemed, while he waited for Lily to call, equipped with enough telephones to service a handbook operation.

  Now he sat down again in the kitchen and tried to finish the article Channing had given him, but after three or four more paragraphs abandoned it. For fifteen minutes he sat reading the labels on the beer bottle he had left on the table when Lily called, and finally he went outside and set sprinklers to run all night on the south lawn, an extravagance justified only by the possibility that it would cool Lily’s and the children’s room some. He thought automatically now of Lily’s room, and when he went to sleep at eleven o’clock it was, for the first time of many, in his father’s bed. Although during the night he thought he woke and heard voices in the driveway, first Channing’s, shut up you’re almost shouting, and then Martha’s, you think she’s so interesting-looking maybe you could knock her up yourself the next time, by morning it seemed easier to believe that he had only dreamed it.

  18

  There was nothing wrong with Ryder Channing, Martha observed, that could not be inferred from his habit, when he was at any house within fifty miles of San Francisco, of asking his hostess if she had at hand a copy of the 1948 San Francisco Social Register because he wanted to look up a new telephone number.

  Actually, Martha amended, Ryder took her calling in San Francisco so infrequently that she had only once witnessed him asking for the 1948 Social Register to look up a telephone number, but she was certain that it had been no improvisation of the moment. It was of a piece with his routinely asking people from Cleveland where they lived in Shaker Heights.

  “That’s not fair of me,” Martha added then with the instant contrition which tended, for a while quite successfully, to obscure the hostile edge on her voice; her standard conversational technique was that of a trial lawyer who pursues a tendentious line of questioning and then allows it stricken from the record.

  “I mean that’s perfectly true about Ryder and the Social Register but it’s not fair. It’s not the whole Ryder. I mean Ryder goes around talking about big deals that nev
er go through and all but that doesn’t mean Ryder’s a phony. Ryder just wants things. That’s not so bad, to want things. Is it.”

  “Not at all,” Lily said, virtuously knotting a thread in a dress she was making by hand for Julie’s first day at school. The dress was an economy measure: Everett had said that their 1949 taxes would be double this year’s—both the riverfront and the Cosumnes ranches had been reassessed for the first time since the war—and Lily had resolved, without mentioning it to Everett, to save money. She had begun by saving the six or seven dollars she would normally have paid for Julie’s dress, instead buying four dollars’ worth of imported lawn and a sixty-cent pattern. After three weeks of intermittent work, the lawn was not only grimy from her fingers but spotted here and there with blood from her pricked fingers; it should, however, wash up very nicely. Good fabrics, good soap, and good hats, her mother often told her, were no extravagance.

  Impressed with the fruit of her own economy, Lily added: “Wanting things and working to get them. It’s the basis of the American way.”

  “Balls. You aren’t even listening to me.”

  “Really, Martha.” Although Lily had never known exactly what the word meant, it did not sound conversational to her. She had for that matter first heard it from Martha, the afternoon Mr. McClellan died in Sutter Hospital. Because Martha was having a cigarette with one of the doctors, Lily had been alone in the room, holding Mr. McClellan’s hand, when he woke from the coma. “You’re a good girl, Miss Lily Knight,” he said, opening his eyes and squeezing her hand weakly. “You’re sickly-looking but you’re a good girl.” “Balls,” Martha said from the doorway, seeing that her father’s eyes were again closed and his hand fallen free of Lily’s. Involuntarily, Lily had put her hand out to shield Mr. McClellan from Martha’s voice, but ten minutes later he was dead and possibly he had heard neither Martha’s invective nor, a minute later, her sobbing.