Run River

by Joan Didion

  Some nights at dinner Martha would announce that she planned to take some land and develop it herself and make them all rich; some nights she would sit at the table, not eating, and make Everett promise, again and again, that he and Sarah would never try to sell the ranch without her. Other nights she would not come to dinner at all, but would go instead to her room and lie in the dark with the sheet over her head, pretending, when Everett or Lily opened the door, to be asleep.

  At six o’clock on the sixteenth of March, Martha was sitting in the bar at Del Paso Country Club wondering how it would feel to get laid in the rain on the golf course and listening to Sam Bradley, one of the river boys who had gone into real estate, explain how he had happened to join Del Paso: it was deductible and it was good business. Although they had been sitting in the bar an hour, Martha had seen no one she had ever seen before with two exceptions, the bartender and a gynecologist’s wife whose picture was frequently in the paper in connection with the Opera Guild. “Meet a President,” the pictures were always captioned. “No Stranger to the Gavel.” No matter how hard you tried it was difficult to keep up with who was who now, and on the whole Martha would rather be on the golf course, but there were always too many people, everywhere.

  Did Sam know any of these people, she wanted to know.

  What the hell difference did it make if he knew any of these people. All he wanted to do, as he had been telling her off and on for twenty minutes, was get the hell out of here and drive up to that Mexican place in Jackson for dinner.

  She loved that Mexican place. She had told him three times she loved that Mexican place. But Jackson was fifty miles away and it had been raining for three days and she really did not feel like driving fifty miles and back in the rain in his Austin-Healey.

  They could get another car. They could get his brother’s car. They could get her car. He hadn’t planned to take the goddamn Austin-Healey.

  Since both his brother’s car and her car were approximately thirty-five miles from Del Paso and in the opposite direction from Jackson, that made it a drive of eighty-five miles each way. Besides, she did not even think the Mexican place was open week nights. Anyway there was illegal gambling there and he did not want, did he, to get caught in a raid. That wouldn’t be very good business, would it.

  Go to hell, he said. He would telephone ahead.

  All right, she said, go find out, and as Sam got up from the table she saw Ryder Channing walk in from the golf course with a balding fat man. It was the first time she had seen Ryder without Nancy Dupree since December and she was faintly depressed to find that she still could not look at him as she looked at other people. She had seen him walking through the door and had thought Ryder, just as she always had, without any of the instant judgments she normally made about people she saw. She had been making judgments upon Sam Bradley from the moment he picked her up; she had already made maybe twenty small judgments upon the man with Ryder. But when she looked at Ryder all she thought was Ryder.

  The other man was, she learned when Ryder brought him to the table, a Cadillac dealer from down the Valley who played, although Ryder had beaten him 79-88, a great game of golf.

  “The rain put you off your game,” Martha suggested to the Cadillac dealer.

  He shrugged.

  “You must have known Martha’s father,” Ryder said, not looking at Martha.

  “Who’s your dad, Marty?”

  “John McClellan.”

  The Cadillac dealer looked blankly at Ryder. “Sure. Sure I know him. I probably run into him at Sacramento Rotary.”

  “I don’t think so,” Martha said. “Actually he’s been dead since 1944.”

  “Well,” said the dealer, “I wasn’t here in 1944.”

  “How you been?” Martha asked Ryder.

  “I’m fine. You look real good.”

  “I’ve been sleeping and eating a lot. I hear you’re living in the old Carmelo place.”

  “A friend of Bugsy’s family bought it and lent it to us until he decides what to do with it. We’re going to build as soon as Bugsy finds some plans she likes.”

  “Great little girl,” the dealer said. “The finest.”

  “I always liked the Carmelo place.” Martha smoothed her gloves in her lap. “They gave a dance once on the third floor and lined both the stairways with azalea. It was about the first dance I ever went to.”

  “Termites,” the dealer said. “Rotten with termites.”

  “Bugsy wants one storey,” Ryder said.

  “Where is she?” the Cadillac dealer demanded querulously. “Why aren’t they here?” He turned to Martha. “She’s shopping with my wife. Mitzi said they’d meet us here at six-thirty.”

  “It’s not quite six-thirty,” Ryder said. “I saw you last week at Nancy Slaughter’s. You were just leaving.”

  “That’s right,” she said. “We were there a few minutes.”

  “Listen, Marth.” He absently transferred some change from one pocket to another. “I’m glad I ran into you. I’m going to be out the river road tomorrow. Maybe I’ll stop by.”

  “I won’t be home. But I’m sure Lily and Everett would like seeing you.”

  “Some other time.” He stood up as Sam came back.

  “Remember me to your dad, Marty,” the Cadillac dealer said. “Hasta luego for now.”

  When Ryder arrived the next afternoon at two o’clock Martha was alone in the house: Lily had taken China Mary and the children to have their chest X-rays; Everett was out working on the levees. The rain had gone to the mountains and was melting the snow too fast. Although Lily had wanted Martha to come have her chest X-rayed with them (“Talk about sickly, you look tubercular right now”), Martha had refused: she wanted to lie down. She had not gotten home from Jackson until three A.M., and Sam Bradley, although she had told him it was not good business, had stayed until nearly five. I can’t abide your kind, she had ended up screaming at him; she did not know what had happened but it was the same thing that always happened. She would have a couple of drinks or simply get very tired or sometimes just wake up in the morning despising someone, everyone. If it happened in the morning she could lie there, hating, until it wore itself out, but if it happened around people she always ended up screaming. The very presence of Sam Bradley had seemed a personal affront to her: his bow tie a monument to both his vacuity and her lack of taste; his enthusiasm for the Mexican place in Jackson an affectation so transparent that she was mortified to have abetted it (he had greeted the cook warmly as “Mamacita,” and Martha had looked on with approval); his brand of cigarettes (not her own) the crushing evidence of his mediocrity, his blatancy, his subtle lack of the male principle. It had begun when Sam said that no matter what Everett said, Earl Warren was an intelligent and reasonable man; it could have begun as well had he merely said he liked her dress, or did not like a book he was reading. She had once turned viciously on Ryder for changing his shirt before dinner. His vanity. His shallowness. His carelessness. His thoughtlessness, his selfishness. Did he think the whole world existed simply to provide him with clean shirts. Even remembering it, she felt quite dizzy with loathing for Ryder.

  “I thought you might be here,” Ryder said when she opened the door.

  “I’m trying to sleep.” She did not ask him to take off his raincoat but simply stood there, trying for once to examine him closely, to make some final damning judgment. She remembered once seeing in his apartment a postcard from a girl, possibly even Nancy Dupree—it had been signed “XXXX and you know what, from B”—which read “Loved seeing you Saturday nite you looked so sexy in your white pants.” Although “sexy” was not a word she had ever applied to anyone, she had tried to see Ryder that way for several days. But all she had seen, then as now, was Ryder, and when she said, the next time he wore white pants, “You look fat-assed in those pants, Ryder, they don’t flatter you,” it was no judgment, only response.

  “What are you looking at,” he said.

  “I’ve been trying
to sleep,” she repeated, defeated. “I’m not looking at anything.”

  Fifteen minutes later he had her down on the floor; she had refused to go near the couch.

  “You want it,” he said. She had her legs crossed and her face turned away from him.

  “I do not.”

  “What difference do you think it makes now.” He pushed her skirt up around her waist. “After I’ve screwed you maybe four, five times a week every week for the past five years.”

  “Four and a half years,” she said faintly; his logic remained intact.

  “Four and a half years.”

  “I never wanted it.” Recognizing immediately that this clear untruth tended only to weaken her position, she amended it: “A lot of times I only pretended to want it.”

  “You want it now, all right. You don’t have to start acting half-assed with me.”

  After he had gone (Whose girl? Your girl) Martha went upstairs and lay on her bed until she heard, just as it was getting dark, the children’s voices downstairs.

  She found Lily in the kitchen, pulling off Julie’s galoshes. “Where’s Everett?” she asked.

  “Still working on the levees. I don’t know.”

  “I’m going to see if I can find him.” Martha pulled on a raincoat, buttoned it briskly, and then, as if she had forgotten why she wanted the raincoat in the first place, sat down and slowly began to unbutton it again.

  “You’re undoing your coat,” Julie said, laying her head in Martha’s lap. “Where you going?”

  Martha smoothed Julie’s hair. “I guess nowhere. I guess I couldn’t find him.”

  “I guess not,” Julie agreed. She was the kind of child who agreed with anything said by an adult. “You coming to the parade?”

  “What parade is that?”

  “The Saint Patrick’s Day Parade. It’s Saint Patrick’s Day in town.”

  “Who all’s going?”

  “Me and Mommy and Knight. Only Knight can’t go if he doesn’t apologize for breaking my pedometer.”

  “Knight broke your pedometer? However will you figure mileage?”

  “That’s the thing. Anyway, two of our cousins are in it.”

  “In what?”

  “In the parade,” Lily said. “You aren’t following this very closely. Sally Randall’s children are marching and I thought we should go wave at them. We’re going to have hamburgers first. Why don’t you get dressed and come.”

  “I guess I’m dressed all right. I don’t guess I have to get all done up for the Saint Patrick’s Day Parade, do I. You know what it’ll be. There’ll be a bagpipe band playing ‘The Campbells Are Coming.’ The Air Force Band playing ‘Loch Lomond.’ And a battalion of small girls in spangled two-piece bathing suits and white plastic Stetsons doing close-order drill to ‘Temptation.’ You-came-Ah was a-lone-Ah should-a-known—You were Taymp-tay-shun.”

  “Martha,” Julie screamed, throwing herself at Martha’s knees. “Stop making fun.”

  “I’m not making fun.” Martha picked Julie up and swung her around. “I am telling you gospel. Because baby, I have seen Saint Patrick’s Day before, seen it all. ‘Temptation’ will be sung—through a public-address system on a truck behind the small girls—by a mother wearing a rose crêpe dress with bugle beads, a short red car coat, and harlequin-framed glasses. So much for that. There will also be the Sheriff’s Posse: fifteen dentists on fifteen palominos. And Julie baby, we’re so wide open out here there’ll probably even be the Masons.”

  “The Masons are not our cousins.”

  “That’s right, baby. The Randalls are our cousins.”

  Lily stood up and picked up a lipstick from the shelf beside the sink. “You coming or not?”

  Suddenly listless, Martha did not answer.

  “If you’re coming you better put on some shoes.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Six. A little before.”

  “I was supposed to go somewhere. Sam Bradley and his brother were supposed to pick me up at six-thirty.”

  Lily blotted her lipstick on a piece of paper toweling and looked at Martha. “Then you can’t come.”

  “Yes I can. I can come all right.” Martha stood up and took from the pocket of her raincoat the dark glasses she wore almost constantly now.

  “You want to call Sam before we go?”

  “If I wanted to call Sam I’d call him, I mean wouldn’t I?”

  By the time they had driven into town (“Knight can look for Nevada plates and Julie for Arizona. That’s right, there are more people in Arizona but you forget Nevada is closer. All right, both of you look for Arizona plates”) and stopped at a drive-in for hamburgers (“I said hamburgers, Knight, I did not say steak sandwich and I did not say chicken-in-a-basket. All right, chiliburgers. You don’t even like chili”), the parade was already underway: they had missed, a policeman told them as Lily was locking the station wagon, the Mayor’s Cavalcade and the Knights of Columbus. “Cheer up, sweetie,” he said to Julie. “There’ll be more.”

  “You bet there will, sweetie,” Martha whispered, giggling with Julie as fifteen palominos pranced into view, and then Knight was yelling Hey Horse! Why did the chicken cross the road? and Horse turned out to be not a horse at all but the name by which Sally Randall’s son was known to his intimates; not long after Horse Randall and the Elk Grove Firehouse Five passed by, followed by a shivering blond drum majorette and a ragged line of high-school boys whistling and hooting, the rain began again, and when they looked for Martha she was gone. By the time they saw her, standing in front of the Rexall drugstore on the corner, the crowd was breaking up, going for cover, scattering into doorways and automobiles.

  “Meet us at the car,” Lily shouted over the idling of motors, the shifting of gears.

  Instead Martha ran back down the block to where Lily stood with the children. Rain streamed down her face, across her sunglasses, down the neck of her unbuttoned raincoat.

  “I was trying to call Sarah. Nobody answered.”

  “Sarah? In Philadelphia?”

  Martha took Julie’s hand and followed Lily and Knight to the station wagon. “I wanted to tell her about the parade,” she said, lifting Julie into the middle seat.

  “The parade,” Lily repeated after her, fumbling beneath the brake pedal for the keys she had just found and dropped.

  “Honestly,” Martha said. “You’d think there might have been somebody there.”

  “You can try her again when we get home.” Lily fitted the key into the ignition with meticulous care while she tried to work the parade, the rain, and Sarah into some reasonable sequence. “By then it’ll be after midnight in Philadelphia. Maybe they’ll be home then.”

  “Oh no,” Martha said. “It’s only five-thirty there now. The man in the Rexall told me.”

  “It’s almost eight-thirty here. You know it’s later there.”

  “I’m sure I don’t know why the man in the Rexall would have told me a deliberate lie.”

  “If he told you that he just didn’t know. We know.”

  Martha shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t know what to believe.”

  Lily switched on the windshield wipers but did not start the engine.

  “Anyway it’s too late,” Martha said. “If it’s midnight there, as you insist it is, it’s too late.”

  “Too late for what?”

  Martha leaned against the window and took off her sunglasses. Her eyes were closed. “I don’t know,” she said. “I didn’t want to go home and I thought I might go there, but it’s too late.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Sarah. I’m talking about my sister. I wanted to talk to Sarah. If you don’t mind.”

  21

  They buried Martha’s body beneath the cherry tree near the levee on the morning of the twenty-second of March. Everett and Henry Sears (who had been sleeping off the flu and a four-day drunk when Everett had the night before begun shouting and pounding at the door o
f the foreman’s cottage Sears you bastard Sears get out here) carried the coffin: a long rope-handled sea chest, packed for the past thirty years with Mildred McClellan’s linens, ends of lace, a box of jet beading from a dress, and the ivory fan carried by Martha’s great-great-grandmother Currier at Governor Leland Stanford’s Inaugural Ball in 1862; unpacked the night before when Everett said I’m telling you for the last time, Lily, get McGrath out of here, get his deputy out of here, and get that son of a bitch quack doctor out of here, she’s my sister, I’m going to bury her, and I’m going to bury her on the ranch.

  Lily walked behind them, her arms full of flowers. Everett had been out before dawn, pulling up every daffodil left after the rain, tearing down whole branches of camellias. When they reached the place Everett had chosen they laid the sea chest on the wet ground, and Everett spelled Sears digging the grave. Numb with the morning cold, Lily stood holding the flowers and listening to the water. Every hour now, the river ran faster and higher with the melting mountain snow: tearing at the banks, jamming together logs and debris and then smashing through the jams.

  As she watched Sears dig it occurred to her that Martha’s body could well be washed out by evening, the unnailed lid of the sea chest ripped open and Martha free again in the water in the white silk dress with the butterflies. ($250, I should wear it every day, every evening, and every night to bed, she had said last night when she was dressing for the party and Lily had warned the rain might spot the silk, Just ask Everett if I shouldn’t.) It was not right to bury her this way: McGrath had said it (I’m telling you, Everett, it’s against the law of the State of California); Edith Knight had said it this morning when she came in her robe to pick up the children (I’m not talking about the law. I’m not talking about any law run through by the undertakers’ lobby. I’m talking about what’s right and what’s wrong); the doctor had said it; she had said it herself. Everett baby you don’t know what you’re doing. They had each said it for different reasons and Everett had listened to none of them.