by Joan Didion
“I’m sorry,” Martha said now. “It’s only that you were at it again.”
“At what again?”
“You know.” Martha paused. “Your dress is coming along nicely. That blue should be very good on Julie.”
Lily smiled, and held the dress up for Martha’s further approval.
“If only there weren’t that gap between her teeth.”
Lily laid the dress aside and began threading a needle. Martha had told Julie that unless her teeth were straightened immediately she would grow up to be a very unattractive little girl. For several days Julie had been inconsolable, repeatedly climbing up on the washbasin to inspect her teeth in the bathroom mirror.
“I told you before, her second teeth aren’t even in.” Lily finished threading the needle and inadvertently jammed it into her index finger.
Martha shrugged, her interest in orthodontia apparently ebbing.
“Ryder just wants things,” she repeated reflectively. “That’s exactly the thing about Ryder.”
“What does Ryder want now.”
Martha looked at her a long while. “This is what they call a mo-bile situation, see, Lily. Ryder is what they call up-ward mo-bile. Or on-the-make. Didn’t you ever take any courses? Didn’t you ever read any books by Lloyd Warner?”
“There’s—” Lily stopped. She had been about to say that there was nothing wrong in wanting to get ahead. She did not know what it was about Martha that inflexibly brought out in her diction the best of both Mr. McClellan and her mother.
“There’s what?” Martha demanded.
“Nothing.”
“ ‘There’s nothing wrong in wanting to get ahead,’ ” Martha mimicked. “I know you. Well there’s not. But you don’t understand about Ryder. He wants to use people.”
“Martha. Don’t get all upset.”
“Well he can’t use me.” Martha paused. “I don’t want anything from him. That’s the reason he can’t use me.”
“Martha,” Lily repeated.
“I don’t want his jobs, I don’t want his favors, I don’t want anything about him.”
What Martha did not want from Ryder Channing that morning was the job he had gotten her three weeks before on a Sacramento television station. It was the fourth or fifth such job for which he had arranged an interview; it was not only the first one Martha had taken but the first one, as far as Lily knew, for which she had even shown up for the initial appointment. The idea behind this particular job had been that Martha, after a month of answering letters from viewers and doing other small jobs around the station, would eventually work into doing both the morning interview program and the commercials during the afternoon movie, a job handled during the first year of the channel’s operation by the manager’s wife, now pregnant. It was, Ryder had declared, an unbeatable opportunity to get in on the ground floor of an industry with nowhere to go but up, and he had installed a borrowed television set on the sun porch so that Martha could observe the interview and commercial techniques developed by the manager’s wife, Maribeth Sidell. Martha had only to consider that Maribeth Sidell was a household word the length and breadth of the Sacramento Valley to realize, he pointed out, the future in the job.
Together, Lily and Martha had watched several of Maribeth Sidell’s programs, including one on which she interviewed, simultaneously, a retired disk jockey, Miss Sacramento, and two Japanese businessmen in the United States to arrange a trade fair. When the conversation turned to how Sacramento compared to Yokohama, Martha switched off the set and declared that she was a natural for the job. After avidly testing some of the products Maribeth advertised, in order to get what she called “fresh insights,” Martha drove into town, met Mr. Sidell, and reported at dinner that he had asked her to call him “Buzz,” had taken her to the Sacramento Hotel bar, and after two Manhattans (for him) and two sherries (for her) had announced that although she was no Jinx Falkenburg she had a lot of class and for his money ($75 a week) the ball was hers to run with. “I knew the sherry would get him,” Martha added enthusiastically. “The cornball.”
Although Lily never learned exactly where the ball had been dropped, Martha had worked only one full week and three days of last week. On the fourth day she had left the house as usual at seven-thirty, but by eleven, when Sidell called the ranch, she had not yet arrived at work.
Toward five o’clock she walked into the kitchen through the back door, runs in both her stockings and thistles caught along the hem of her white linen dress. “I was sick,” she explained shortly. “I drove to Yuba City and climbed on some rocks and watched a stretch of rapids in the Feather for a while.”
“Sidell called,” Lily said. “So did Ryder.”
“Did he.” Martha turned on the faucet in the sink and splashed water on her face and arms. “There was a dead rattlesnake caught in a backwater,” she said finally, reaching for a paper towel. “Bloated.”
When Ryder Channing called again at seven o’clock Martha at first said to tell him she was out, then, as Lily hesitated, put down her drink, reached across the table for a cigarette from Lily’s bag, and took the telephone from her.
“That’s right, I didn’t,” she said. “I didn’t feel good.”
Holding the receiver with her shoulder she lit the cigarette and made a face at Julie, who was illuminating with red and blue crayons a Standard Oil brochure addressed to Everett. “I just didn’t call, that’s all.”
“I’m not trying to do anything to you, Ryder,” she added after a pause. “It’s part of your egocentricity that you think everything I do is for the express purpose of getting on your nerves. I didn’t go in and I didn’t call and that’s all there is to it. It hasn’t got anything to do with you.” She paused, turning her face to the wall. “Ryder, I was scared. I don’t know why, I was just scared.”
“All right,” she said finally. “I never asked you to get me any jobs. I never asked you for anything but a little understanding and it’s perfectly apparent to me that you aren’t capable of giving anybody anything. All you want to do is use people.” She put out her cigarette, and took Julie’s hand, holding it very tightly. Julie looked at Lily and Lily shook her head. “I’m sure I don’t know what advantage there could possibly be for you in my having a job. I don’t know what goes through your mind. I only know there was an advantage or you wouldn’t have pushed me into it. You are forever pushing me and using me and I’m through.”
“Through,” she repeated.
“Don’t you get that way with me, Ryder Channing. I’ve heard that one before. I won’t miss anything about you and most of all, first on the list of things I will not miss, most of all I will not miss that.”
She hung up, picked up her drink, and walked outside.
Although no one mentioned it at dinner, Martha explained later to Everett that the job had been all right the first week but had become too difficult. The telephones distracted her and there was an enormous clock with a second hand that never stopped. Sidell insisted that letters from viewers be answered the day they came in, and frequently she did not know the answers to the questions raised. The week before she had stopped Sidell in the hall and asked him, in order to answer a letter, why the channel did not carry the program with Kukla, Fran, and Ollie. Sidell had looked at her for a long time and asked her if she had ever heard of networks and network affiliates. She had tried to tell him that of course she had—she had simply not thought of an answer so obvious—but he walked away and naturally she had not wanted to ask him any more questions. Instead she had begun putting difficult queries aside in a drawer of her desk, meaning to find out later how to answer them, but the days had gone by and the letters had not been answered and now Sidell would discover them and she simply could not go back. It would be all right if she could take the letters off somewhere and answer them by herself but there was no place in the office where you could get away from those clocks. She knew clocks weren’t supposed to stop, don’t be silly. She knew they needed a clock. But she c
ould not work with it going every second. When it was going every second that way she could not seem to take her eyes off it, and because it made no noise she found herself making the noise for it in her mind.
Everett, who had thought the job a good idea because Martha’s days did not seem to him generally constructive, suggested that possibly Martha would like to take a trip. Martha thought not.
For the rest of that week Martha had refused to answer the telephone, to look at her mail, or to leave the ranch, even for a wedding down the river in which she was to have been a bridesmaid. She was quite certain, she explained to Everett and Lily, that the four hundred guests, two flower girls, and seven remaining bridesmaids could sufficiently nerve Molly Bee to lose her cherry without any additional help from her. Everett walked out of the house then, neither speaking to Martha nor getting dressed for the wedding, and finally Lily had gone alone, late, to Molly Bee’s reception, where she tried to apologize for Martha and Everett, drank nine glasses of champagne in an hour and fifteen minutes, was warned by her mother that she would end up with a well-deserved headache, and kissed two of the ushers, one of whom, Molly Bee’s cousin from Tulare, insisted that she was in no condition to drive and that he would drive her home himself, later. That he would be returning the next day to Tulare lent him, when she was kissing him in the car, an air of infinite promise: she could make him want her and then never see him again, all of the possibilities still intact, neither his deficiencies nor her own ever revealed. You make me feel good, she whispered, and meant it.
When she arrived at the ranch not long after two A.M. Everett was sitting in the chair by their bedroom window, drinking a beer and looking at an old copy of Life. Although she tried to tell him who had been at Molly Bee’s wedding he did not seem interested, and after he had picked up the pink silk dress she had dropped on the bed and looked first at the indelible wrinkles in the skirt and then at her and had dropped the dress on the floor and gone downstairs, she lay on the bedspread in her slip and turned out the lights: she had gone and lost him again and not for any reason, not for any good reason at all. After a while, because she had a headache from the champagne and from the gin she had been drinking in the car with Molly Bee’s cousin and because she thought Everett would have to come if she told him she was sick, she went to the landing and called him. “Go back to sleep,” he said without moving.
On the following Monday a letter had arrived for Martha from the television station, but Martha shoved it unopened into the back of a drawer where Lily found it after her death. It contained only a note from Sidell expressing concern for her illness and a check for the eight days she had worked.
19
At ten-thirty on the morning of December 18, 1948, while she was having a fourth cup of coffee and wishing that she had not already worked the crossword puzzle, Martha saw in the social pages of the San Francisco Chronicle the announcement of Ryder Channing’s engagement to a Miss Nancy Dupree of Piedmont. After tearing the notice out of the Chronicle and securing it in the pocket of her jumper, Martha wrapped with her calling card—Miss Martha Currier McClellan, McClellan’s Landing, let Miss Nancy Dupree figure out who it was—a silver dish which Channing had once admired. It was a small dish which had been her mother’s, made to Mildred McClellan’s order at Shreve’s in San Francisco and marked M.C.McC. In a smaller box she placed another calling card, with her key to Channing’s apartment in Sacramento Scotch-taped over her name.
She had both packages ready to mail by early afternoon, driving in to the main post office in Sacramento and stopping first at the library to look up the Piedmont address in an Oakland telephone book. In the library she located as well several photographs of Nancy Dupree in a University of California yearbook, Class of 1947. A member of Kappa Kappa Gamma and Senior Class Council, she had one year been chosen not only Soph Doll but Sweetheart of Sigma Chi Attendant. Her major was listed as General Curriculum. She appeared to be somewhat less blond than Martha, with prettier features, and as Martha studied first one and then another picture she remembered that she had met the girl at a party in Piedmont to which Ryder had taken her. She had simply not remembered her name. It had been one of those parties at which she drank too much and became depressed, a party at which she had known none of the people Channing seemed to know; as she once explained to Everett, Ryder’s only real vocation was for remembering and being remembered by all the people he went out of his way to meet. At some point during the evening she had locked herself in the bathroom and stared at her reflection in the mirror for a long time and not looked like herself (Your name is Martha McClellan, she said again and again to the mirror, and then cried because it did not seem to be the Martha McClellan she had wanted to be), and when she came downstairs again she had told two strangers, a pretty girl and her husband who had made a perfunctory attempt to include her in a controversy over whether or not Ernie Heckscher had played for the hostess’s debut, that she was sick. “Come sit down a minute,” the pretty girl said, looking at Martha and then at her husband, but then Martha saw Ryder, standing by the piano singing “As Time Goes By” with his arm around a girl in Bermuda shorts and a Liberty lawn blouse, and she ran into the bedroom, pulled her sweater from beneath a pile of navy-blue and red and forest-green blazers, and walked out of the house. Go ahead, she screamed at Ryder when he followed her out to the car. You go on back in there and play whatever games you want to play. Just don’t think I don’t see. She could not now remember what she thought she saw, except that she had accidentally for once been right, because the girl at the piano singing “As Time Goes By,” the girl in the Liberty lawn blouse who had earlier asked Ryder if she could count on him for a Scotch foursome Sunday at Claremont Country Club, had been Nancy Dupree. Don’t think I don’t know, Martha had screamed there in the driveway as Ryder tried to take the car keys from her. Although she had not screamed loudly, he shoved her into the car and slapped her. Her first thought had been that it was Everett’s car and Ryder had no right to slap her in Everett’s car, but then she had remembered that Everett surely cared as little for her as Ryder did, and all during the two-hour drive to Sacramento she sat rigid against the door, trying to think how to hurt them both. What she had done finally was spend the night in Ryder’s apartment, an injury to Everett which, because he had assumed she was staying all night in Piedmont anyway, escaped him.
The more she remembered of the evening (“You’re Ryder’s best girl in the Valley,” the girl had said, taking Martha’s hand and smiling up at Ryder, “I’ve heard so much about you”), the more she resented Ryder now, and it was with a palpable knot of hatred in her stomach that she returned the yearbook to the librarian, crossed the street to the post office, and waited in line ten minutes to see that the clerk gave immediate attention to the key for Ryder, the silver dish for Nancy Dupree.
Rid of the boxes, she started back across the Plaza to the car, but because she felt both dizzy and a little silly, she stopped and sat on the edge of the fountain long enough to smoke two cigarettes and to chew, since an old man lay passed out at the foot of the water fountain, one of the phenobarbital tablets the doctor had told her to take three times a day. There were lighted Christmas wreaths strung across J Street and as the phenobarbital began to work she forgot about Ryder and began to wish, suddenly, that her father were alive, that Sarah could come home for Christmas. There was something about Christmas as managed by Lily that was not quite Christmas, although everyone tried very hard to pretend it was and although Edith Knight always came to stay on the ranch for a few days, decorating everything in sight, hanging stockings for Knight and Julie, and helping China Mary make quantities of eggnog which no one ever dropped by to drink.
A few minutes after she got back to the ranch, Ryder called her from a bar. She knew he was in a bar because she could hear the juke box.
Well, what a surprise. She wanted to offer him all her congratulations.
Oh, he said. He had called to see if she was home. He had planned to driv
e out and tell her himself. He had not thought of her seeing the San Francisco papers.
No, of course he would not have thought of her seeing the San Francisco papers. He had been on the ranch not more than a thousand, fourteen hundred times during the past four and a half years, and no one could have expected him to notice that they got the San Francisco papers. It wasn’t a bit nice to think about how life went on—papers got delivered, papers got read, that kind of thing—when one wasn’t counting on it, was it. But never mind. It was all very, very nice and she had only an hour before sent off her blessings to that most fortunate girl, Miss Nancy Dupree. Who was, she believed, the same Miss Nancy Dupree known to her friends in the East Bay Junior Assistance League as “Bugsy”? Just so. Nicknames. Cute as a bug’s ear. You knew that any girl who’d call herself Bugsy had a sense of fun. There was one little thing. She did think, couldn’t help thinking, that since his plans must have been more or less settled last night, he might have told her his surprise then. Of course they had been pretty busy last night, sorting his laundry, wondering where she had put the razor blades she had brought the day before, typing out his application for an extension on his personal loan at the Wells Fargo. There had been scarcely a minute for surprises, had there. Or possibly he had not known then. Possibly he and Bugsy had just decided late last night on the long-distance telephone and Bugsy had thrown on her forest-green blazer and rushed the news right over to the Chronicle. What a stroke of luck, deciding in time for the Valley Edition.
He did not know why he had called her at all. He should have known that she would only behave as stupidly as she was behaving now. Count on her to act like a gauche, bitchy little girl.
Oh. So he was drinking. She supposed he must be fairly proud of himself. She knew he was drinking or he would not have had the courage to call her in the first place. Drinking or not, his character was nothing to write home about. Even to his home, wherever and whatever that was. And as for that talent of which he was so proud, she could walk out the door and get it better from the first picker she came across. Without any of the games.