Where I Was From
Page 17
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ON the afternoon after our mother’s funeral my brother and I divided what few pieces of furniture she still had among her grandchildren, my brother’s three children and Quintana. There was not much left; during the previous few years she had been systematically giving away what she had, giving back Christmas presents, jettisoning belongings. I do not remember what Quintana’s cousins Kelley and Steven and Lori took. I do remember what Quintana took, because I have seen the pieces since in her apartment in New York. There was an oval Victorian table with a marble top that had come to my mother from some part of the family, I no longer remember which. There was a carved teak chest that had been in my mother and father’s bedroom when I was a child. There was a small piecrust table that had been my grandmother’s. There was, from among my mother’s clothes, an Italian angora cape that she had been wearing ever since my father gave it to her, one Christmas in the late 1940s.
Actually I took the angora cape.
I remembered her wearing it the spring before, at the wedding in Pebble Beach, of my brother’s youngest child. I remembered her wearing it in 1964 at my own wedding, wrapping herself in it for the drive from San Juan Bautista to the reception in Pebble Beach.
A representative from Allied came.
The pieces got tagged for shipment.
I put what I did not want to be thrown away—letters, photographs, clippings, folders and envelopes I could not that day summon up the time or the heart to open—in a large box.
Some weeks later the box arrived at my apartment in New York, where it sat in the dining room for perhaps a month, unopened. Finally I opened it. There were pictures of me on the beach at Carmel in 1936, pictures of me and my brother on the beach at Stinson Beach in 1946, pictures of me and my brother and my rabbit in the snow in Colorado Springs. There were pictures of great-aunts and cousins and great-great-grandparents who could be identified only because our mother, on the evening before she died, had thought to tell the names to my brother, who wrote them on the backing of the frames. There were pictures of my mother as a two-year-old visiting her grandmother in Oregon in 1912, there were pictures of my mother at a Peterson Field barbecue in 1943, a young woman in her early thirties wearing flowers in her hair as she makes hamburgers. There was an unframed watercolor of my grandmother’s. There were letters my grandmother’s brother Jim, like her father a merchant sea captain, had sent her in 1918 from England, where his ship, the S.S. Armenia, was in drydock at Southampton after having been torpedoed. There were letters my father had written to his own father in 1928, from a summer job on a construction crew outside Crescent City—my father asking, in letter after letter, if his father could please put in a word for him with an acquaintance who did the hiring for the State Fair jobs, a plea I happen to know was in vain.
I know this because I once wanted my father to make the same call for me.
My mother had told me to forget asking him, because he’s just like his own father, everybody in Sacramento picks up the phone to get their children jobs at the Fair but your father and his father never will, they won’t ask for favors.
There were also letters from me, letters I had written my mother from Berkeley, from the time I went down for summer school in 1952, making up credits between high school and college, until the time I graduated in 1956. These letters were in many ways unsettling, even dispiriting, in that I both recognized myself and did not. Have never been so depressed as when I got back here Sunday night, one of the first letters reads, from the summer of 1952. I keep thinking about Sacramento and what people are doing. I got a letter from Nancy—she misses Sacramento too. They saw “The King and I,” “Where’s Charley,” “Guys and Dolls,” and “Pal Joey.” A woman committed suicide by jumping out a window across from the Waldorf while they were there. Nancy said it was terrible, they had to clean up the street with fire hoses.
Nancy was my best friend from Sacramento, traveling with her parents (this is only a guess, but an informed one, since another letter to my mother that summer mentions having “heard from Nancy who is at the Greenbrier and so bored”) before beginning Stanford.
Nancy and I had known each other since we were five, when we had been in the same ballet class at Miss Marion Halls dancing school in Sacramento.
In fact there was also, in the box that came from my mother’s house, a program for a recital of that very ballet class: Joan Didion and Nancy Kennedy, the program read. “Les Petites.” There were also in the box many photographs of Nancy and me: modeling children’s clothes in a charity fashion show, wearing matching corsages around our wrists at a high-school dance, standing on the lawn outside Nancy’s house on the day of her wedding, Nancy in bouffant white, the bridesmaids in pale green organza, all of us smiling.
The last time I saw Nancy was at the Outrigger Canoe Club in Honolulu, during the Christmas season of the Iran hostage crisis. She was at the next table, having dinner with her husband and children. They were laughing and arguing and interrupting just as she and her brothers and her mother and father had laughed and argued and interrupted in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when I would have dinner at their house two or three times a week.
We kissed, we had a drink together, we promised to keep in touch.
A few months later Nancy was dead, of cancer, at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York.
I sent the recital program to Nancy’s brother, to send on to her daughter.
I had my grandmother’s watercolor framed and sent it to the next oldest of her three granddaughters, my cousin Brenda, in Sacramento.
I closed the box and put it in a closet.
There is no real way to deal with everything we lose.
When my father died I kept moving. When my mother died I could not. The last time I saw her was eight weeks before she died. She had been in the hospital, my brother and I had gotten her home, we had arranged for oxygen and shifts of nurses, we had filled the prescriptions for morphine and Ativan. On the morning Quintana and I were to leave for New York, my mother insisted that we bring her a painted metal box that sat on a small table in her bedroom, a box in which she kept papers she thought might have importance, for example a copy of the deed to a gold mine in El Dorado County that she and her sister had inherited from their father and no longer owned. My brother said that she did not need the box, that he had already extracted any still operable papers and put them in safekeeping. She was insistent. She wanted the metal box. Quintana brought the box and set it on the bed. From it my mother took two pieces of silver flatware, a small ladle and a small serving spoon, each wrapped in smoothed scraps of used tissue paper. She gave the serving spoon to Quintana and the ladle to me. I protested: she had already given me all her silver, I had ladles, she had given me ladles. “Not this one,” she said. She pointed out the curve of the handle. It seemed that she had what she called “a special feeling” for the way the handle curved on this particular ladle. It seemed that she found this ladle so satisfying to touch that she had set it aside, kept it. I said that since it gave her pleasure she should continue to keep it. “Take it,” she said, her voice urgent. “I don’t want it lost.” I was still pretending that she would get through the Sierra before the snows fell. She was not.
Joan Didion was born in California and lives in New York City. She is the author of five novels and seven previous books of nonfiction, including The Year of Magical Thinking. Her collected nonfiction, We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live, was published by Everyman’s Library in September 2006.
BOOKS BY JOAN DIDION
WE TELL OURSELVES STORIES IN ORDER TO LIVE
THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING
WHERE I WAS FROM
POLITICAL FICTIONS
THE LAST THING HE WANTED
AFTER HENRY
MIAMI
DEMOCRACY
SALVADOR
THE WHITE ALBUM
A BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER
PLAY IT AS IT LAYS
SLOUCHING TOWARDS BETHLEHEM
> RUN RIVER
ALSO BY JOAN DIDION
AFTER HENRY
In After Henry, Joan Didion covers ground from Washington to Los Angeles, from a TV producer’s gargantuan “manor” to the racial battlefields of New York’s criminal courts. At each stop she uncovers the mythic narratives that elude other observers: Didion tells us about the fantasies the media construct around crime victims and presidential candidates, and gives us new interpretations of the stories of Nancy Reagan and Patty Hearst. A bracing amalgam of skepticism and sympathy, After Henry is further proof of Didion’s infallible radar for the true spirit of our age.
Current Affairs/Essays/978-0-679-74539-6
A BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER
Writing with the telegraphic swiftness that has made her one of our most distinguished journalists, Joan Didion creates a shimmering novel of innocence and evil. Charlotte Douglas has come to the derelict Central American nation of Boca Grande vaguely and vainly hoping to be reunited with her fugitive daughter. As imagined by Didion, her fate is at once utterly particular and fearfully emblematic of an age of conscienceless authority and unfathomable violence.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-75486-2
DEMOCRACY
Inez Victor knows that the major casualty of the political life is memory. But the people around Inez have made careers out of the losing track. Her senator husband wants to forget the failure of his last bid for the presidency. Her husband’s handler would like the press to forget Inez’s father is a murderer. Moving deftly between romance, farce and tragedy, Democracy is a tour de force from a writer who can dissect an entire society with a single phrase.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-75485-5
THE LAST THING HE WANTED
Joan Didion trains her eye on the far frontiers of the Monroe Doctrine, where history dissolves into conspiracy (Dallas in 1963, Iran Contra in 1984), and fashions a moral thriller as hypnotic and provocative as any by Joseph Conrad or Graham Greene. In that latter year Elena McMahon walks off the presidential campaign she has been covering for a major newspaper to do a favor for her father. Elena’s father does deals. And it is while acting as his agent in one such deal —a deal that shortly goes spectacularly wrong—that she finds herself on an island where tourism has been superseded by arms dealing, covert action, and assassination.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-75285-1
MIAMI
No one has observed Miami’s pastel surfaces and murky intrigues more astutely than Joan Didion. As this unerring social commentator follows Miami’s drift into a Third World capital, she also locates its position in the secret history of the Cold War. Miami is not just a portrait of a city, but a masterly study of immigration and exile, passion and hypocrisy—and of political violence turned as personal as a family feud.
Current Affairs/Literature/978-0-679-78180-6
POLITICAL FICTIONS
In these coolly observant essays, Joan Didion looks at the American political process and at “that handful of insiders who invent, year in and year out, the narrative of public life.” Through the deconstruction of the sound bites and photo ops of three presidential campaigns, one presidential impeachment, and an unforgettable sex scandal, Didion reveals the mechanics of American politics. She tells us the uncomfortable truth about the way we vote, the candidates we vote for, and the people who tell us to vote for them. These pieces build, one on the other, into a disturbing portrait of the American political landscape, providing essential reading on our democracy.
Essays/Political/978-0-375-71890-8
RUN RIVER
Joan Didion’s electrifying first novel is a haunting portrait of a marriage whose wrong turns and betrayals are at once absolutely idiosyncratic and a razor-sharp commentary on the history of California. Everett McClellan and his wife, Lily, are the great-grandchildren of pioneers, and what happens to them is a tragic epilogue to the pioneer experience, a story of murder and betrayal that only Didion could tell with such nuance, sympathy, and suspense.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-75250-9
SALVADOR
“Terror is the given of the place.” The place is El Salvador in 1982, at the ghastly height of its civil war. The writer is Joan Didion, who delivers an anatomy of that country’s particular brand of terror—its mechanisms, rationales, and intimate relation to United States foreign policy. As she travels from battlefields to body dumps, interviews a puppet president, and considers the distinctly Salvadoran grammar of the verb “to disappear,” Didion gives us a book that is germane to any country in which bloodshed has become a standard tool of politics.
Current Affairs/Literature/978-0-679-75183-0
WHERE I WAS FROM
In this moving and insightful book, Joan Didion reassesses parts of her life, her work, her history and ours. A native Californian, Didion applies her scalpel-like intelligence to the state’s ethic of ruthless self-sufficiency in order to examine that ethic’s often tenuous relationship to reality. Didion is an unparalleled observer, and her book is at once intellectually provocative and deeply personal.
History/Memoir/978-0-679-75286-8
THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING
From one of America’s iconic writers, a stunning book of electric honesty and passion. Joan Didion explores an intensely personal yet universal experience: a portrait of marriage—and a life, in good times and bad—that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child.
Memoir/978-1-4000-7843-1
VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL
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FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, SEPTEMBER 2004
Copyright © 2003 by Joan Didion
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2003.
Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage International and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
In progress and in different form, parts of Where I Was From appeared in The New York Review of Books, Esquire, and The New Yorker.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material.
The Free Press: Excerpts from The Land Was Everything: Letters from an American Farmer by Victor Davis Hanson. Copyright © 2000 by Victor Davis Hanson. Reprinted by permission of The Free Press, a division of Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group. Penguin Putnam Inc.: Excerpts from “Introduction” by Kevin Starr from Octopus by Frank Norris. Reprinted by permission of Penguin Putnam Inc.
Robert Scheer and Creators Syndicate Inc.: Excerpts from “The Poor Are the Underpinnings of Our Lifestyle” by Robert Scheer from The Los Angeles Times (June 8, 1992). Copyright © 1992. Reprinted by permission of Robert Scheer and Creators Syndicate Inc. Random House, Inc.: Excerpt from the poems “Apology for Bad Dreams,” copyright © 1925 and renewed 1953 by Robinson Jeffers, and “Shine, Perishing Republic,” copyright © 1934 and renewed 1962 by Donnan Jeffers and Garth Jeffers from Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers by Robinson Jeffers. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc. University of California Press: Excerpts from The Valley of the Moon by Jack London. Copyright © 1999. Reprinted by permission of the University of California Press.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Didion, Joan.
Where I was from / Joan Didion.—1st ed.
p. cm.
1. California—History. 2. California—Social conditions.
3. California—In literature. 4. National characteristics, American. I. Title
F861.D53 2003
979.4—dc21 2002043325
eISBN: 978-0-307-76329-7
www.vintagebooks.com
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