Joan Didion: Where I Was From

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.