Joan Didion - Where I Was From

She was passionately opinionated on a number of points that reflected, on examination, no belief she actually held. She thought of herself as an Episcopalian, as her mother had been. She was married at Trinity Episcopal Pro-Cathedral in Sacramento. She had me christened there. She buried her mother there. My brother and I had her own funeral service at Saint John’s Episcopal Chapel in Monterey, a church she had actually attended only two or three times but favored as an idea not only because it was a “California” church (it was built in the 1880s by Charles Crocker and C. P. Huntington on the grounds of the Southern Pacific’s Del Monte Hotel) but also because the litany used was that from the 1928, as opposed to the revised, Book of Common Prayer. Yet she had herself at age twelve refused outright to be confirmed an Episcopalian: she had gone through the instruction and been presented to the bishop, but, when asked for the usual rote affirmation of a fairly key doctrinal point, had declared resoundingly, as if it were a debate, that she found herself “incapable of believing” that Christ was the son of God. By the time of my own confirmation, she had further hardened this position. “The only church I could possibly go to would be Unitarian,” she announced when my grandmother asked why she never went to church with us.

“Eduene,” my grandmother said, a soft keening. “How can you say that.”

“I have to say it, if I want to be honest,” my mother said, the voice of sweet reason. “Since I don’t believe that Christ is the son of God.”

My grandmother brightened, seeing space for resolution. “Then it’s fine,” she said. “Because nobody has to believe all that.”

Only in recent years did I come to realize that many of these dramatically pronounced opinions of my mother’s were defensive, her own version of her great-grandmother’s “fixed and settled principles, aims and motives in life,” a barricade against some deep apprehension of meaninglessness. There had been glimpses of this apprehension all along, overlooked by me, my own barricade. She did not see a point in making beds, for example, since “they just get slept in again.” Nor did she see a point in dusting, since dust just returned. “What difference does it make,” she would often say, by way of ending a discussion of whether an acquaintance should leave her husband, say, or whether a cousin should drop out of school and become a manicurist. “What difference does it make,” five words that had come to chill me at the bone, was what she said when I pressed her on the point about selling the cemetery. On the Good Friday after her own mother died she happened to be driving across the country with a friend from Sacramento. At the place where they stopped for dinner there had been no fish on the menu, only meat. “I took one bite and I thought of Mother and I wanted to throw up,” my mother said when she arrived at my apartment in New York a few days later. Her mother, she said, would never eat meat on Good Friday. Her mother did not like to cook fish, but she would get a crab and crack it. I was about to suggest that cracked Dungeness crab was hard to come by on the average mid western road trip, but before I could speak I noticed that she was crying. “What difference does it make,” she said finally.

Ihad seen my mother cry only once before. The first time had been during World War Two, on a downtown street in some town where my father was stationed, Tacoma or Durham or Colorado Springs. My brother and I had been left in the car while our mother went into the military housing office that dealt with dependents. The office was crowded, women and children leaning against the plate glass windows and spilling outside. When our mother came back out onto the sidewalk she was crying: it seemed to be the end of some rope, one day too many on which there would be no place for us to stay.

The blank dreariness , Sarah Royce wrote.

Without house or home.

When she got into the car her eyes were dry and her expression was determinedly cheerful. “It’s an adventure,” she said. “Its wartime, its history, you children will be thankful you got to see all this.” In one of those towns we finally got a room in a hotel, with a shared bathtub, into which she poured a bottle of pine disinfectant every day before bathing us. In Durham we had one room, with kitchen privileges, in the house of a fundamentalist preacher and his family who sat on the porch after dinner and ate peach ice cream, each from his or her own quart carton. The preacher’s daughter had a full set of Gone With the Wind paper dolls, off limits to me. It was in Durham where the neighborhood children crawled beneath the back stoop and ate the dirt, scooping it up with a cut raw potato and licking it off, craving some element their diet lacked.

Pica.

I knew the word even then, because my mother told me. “Poor children do it,” she said, with the same determinedly cheerful expression. “In the South. You never would have learned that in Sacramento.”

It was in Durham where my mother noticed my brother reaching for something through the bars of his playpen and froze, unable to move, because what he was reaching for was a copperhead. The copperhead moved on, possibly another instance of the “providential interposition” that had spared my mother’s great-great-grandfather from the mad dog in Georgia.

Something occurs to me as I write this: my mother did not kill the copperhead.

Only once, in Colorado Springs, did we actually end up living in a house of our own — not much of a house, a four-room stucco bungalow, rented furnished, but a house. I had skipped part of first grade because we were moving around and I had skipped second grade because we were moving around but in Colorado Springs we had a house, in Colorado Springs I could go to school. I did. They were already doing multiplication and I had skipped learning how to subtract. Out at the base where my father was stationed pilots kept spiraling down through the high thin Colorado air. The way you knew was that you heard the crash wagons. A classmate told me that her mother did not allow her to play with military trash. My grandmother came by train to visit, bringing as usual material solace, thick blue towels and Helena Rubinstein soap in the shape of apple blossoms. I have snapshots of the two of us in front of the Broadmoor Hotel, my grandmother in a John Fredericks hat, me in a Brownie uniform. “You are just out of luck to be home because it’s so nice and warm here,” I wrote to her when she was gone. The letter, which I found with my mother’s snapshots of the period, is decorated with gold and silver stars and cutout Christmas trees, suggesting that I had been trying hard for the upbeat. “But Mommy heard a girl say on the base that ‘Remember last New Year’s? It was eighteen below, and we had just this kind of weather.’ We have a blue spruce Christmas tree. Jimmy and me are going to a party the 23rd at the base. They have a new name for the base. It’s Peterson field.”

I remember that my mother made me give the apple-blossom soap to the wife of a departing colonel, a goodbye present. I remember that she encouraged me to build many of those corrals that Californians were meant to know how to build, branches lashed together with their own stripped bark, ready for any loose livestock that might come our way, one of many frontier survival techniques I have never had actual occasion to use. I remember that once when we were snowbound she taught me how to accept and decline formal invitations, a survival technique from a different daydream: Miss Joan Didion accepts with pleasure the kind invitation of, Miss Joan Didion regrets that she is unable to accept the kind invitation of. Another time when we were snowbound she gave me several old copies of Vogue , and pointed out in one of them an announcement of the competition Vogue then had for college seniors, the Prix de Paris, first prize a job in Vogues Paris or New York office.