Joan Didion - Run River

“Right now?”

“You’re probably busy.”

“Not really.” She wondered what he thought she did between six-thirty and seven-thirty in the morning. “I’ll get dressed.”

As she shook out her wet hair with a towel she hummed softly, and looked in the mirror for the first time in months without regretting the waste of her perfectly good but constantly depreciating body.

“You look younger than Marth,” Everett said when she climbed into the truck.

“I’m older. A year.” She glanced down at her thin arms, brown against the white of her dress. Martha McClellan was not yet seventeen, a freshman come fall at the University of California at Davis. When Lily’s mother, on the behalf of the Pi Beta Phi Alumnae Club, had urged Martha to enroll at Berkeley and participate in rushing, Martha had told her that it was necessary that she go to Davis, which was mainly an agricultural station, because her father wanted her to marry a rich rancher. And as a matter of fact so did she. Martha McClellan, Edith Knight had observed, was “a case.”

“I know how old you are,” Everett said without looking at her.

Lily pressed her forehead against the window, closed against the heat. Now in June the hops were starting up the strings, miles of them, ready to bear the thick green weight of the August vines. It was said to be a good year for the hops; because her father did not grow them she did not know why. She supposed that it had to do with when the rain had come. Everything else did.

“The hops are pretty,” she said.

“You think so?”

“Yes, I do,” she said, rather at a loss. When it came to conversation, Everett McClellan was not one to give much away. “I think they’re very pretty and I’m glad I’m home.”

They did not exchange another word until they reached the Labor Center in the West End, where Everett, getting out of the truck, ordered her to lock both doors from the inside and wait until he came back. As soon as he had entered the office, one of the Mexicans standing on the sidewalk outside made a face at Lily. She smiled, embarrassed, and then pretended to be reading a book in her lap. After Everett had recruited thirteen men, they started back out to the McClellan place; Everett looked once at her, when he had trouble starting the truck, and then neither looked at her nor spoke. Her eyes closed, she listened to the men in the back of the truck, singing Bing Crosby songs and passing around a bottle of dago red, and wondered why Everett had called her at all.

Mr. McClellan met them at the ranch, flagging wildly when he caught sight of the truck, an unnecessary exertion since he was standing where the trucks were habitually parked. Lily could not remember ever having seen him calm: even years before, when he had brought Everett and Martha and Sarah to call, he had given the appearance of a man beset by his own energy, scrawny with tension. He would leap to his feet when Edith Knight entered the room, accidentally knock over a chair, institute a prolonged search for a handkerchief, bound across the room to collar one of the children. He had always spoken to them as if they were puppies. Down, Martha. Sit, Martha .

“You should have got in there earlier,” he muttered now, leaning over Everett’s shoulder as Everett entered the names on the payroll ledger. “Nobody left come seven o’clock but high-school boys and drunken wetbacks. Here’s one fact you won’t learn in college, Miss Lily Knight: there’s nobody in God’s green world has less native intelligence than a goddamn wetback.” Everett had once explained that his father referred to all Mexicans and to most South Americans — including the President of Brazil, who had once been entertained on the river — as goddamn wetbacks, and to all Orientals as goddamn Filipinos. There was no use telling him that somebody was Chinese, or Malayan, or Madame Chiang Kai-shek; they were goddamn Filipinos to him. Easterners fell into two camps: goddamn pansies and goddamn Jews. On the whole, both categories had to do with attitudes, not facts, and occasionally they overlapped. His daughter Sarah had for example married a goddamn pansy and gone East to live, where she picked up those goddamn Jew ideas.

Lily stood watching Everett, aware of the dust on his Levis and of her incongruously white dress. There was one thing about the McClellans not true of her father: they wouldn’t run their ranches out of an office in the Russ Building even if they could afford to.

Everett looked up. “We could ride along the river when I’m finished.”

“I don’t ride very well.”

“Hah,” Mr. McClellan said. “I’ll say you don’t. She used to ride like she was sitting on a barbed-wire fence. I remember that much about Miss Lily Knight. Don’t be a fool, Everett. Take her swimming.”

“I don’t have my swimming suit.” Lily remembered that Martha not only jumped horses at the State Fair every year but had twice beaten the Del Paso Country Club junior swimming champion in unofficial competition. “That child sees a bird, she tries to race it,” Edith Knight had once observed of Martha. An admirer of competitiveness in all forms, Edith Knight had frequently urged Lily to “take a leaf from Martha McClellan’s book”; that Martha was a notoriously poor loser did not bother her, since she did not believe that losing was the point.

“There’s one thing Martha has plenty of, that’s tank suits,” Mr. McClellan declared. “We can suit you fine.” Pleased with this play on words, he repeated it, and then bounded up to the house, screaming ahead for China Mary to get Martha on the stick and rustle up some tank suits.

The McClellan house had the peculiarly sentimental look of a house kept by men. There were pictures of Sarah and of Mildred McClellan, who had died at Martha’s birth; above the piano (“How’s that for a piano?” Mr. McClellan liked to demand affectionately. “Came ’round the Horn in ’forty-eight”), the California Republic Bear Flag hung at what appeared to be half-mast. One wall was covered with framed certificates from the Native Sons of the Golden West and river maps showing channel depths during the summer of 1932; China Mary’s efforts toward brightening up ran to crocheted antimacassars on the chairs and orange zinnias crushed haphazardly into Limoges cream-soup bowls. In one corner of the living room, on a table covered with a mantilla, was an assortment of gold nuggets and ivory fans. Although the table had always been there, there had been, since Lily’s last visit to the McClellans, certain additions: over the table hung an old Vanity Fair cover, a photograph of Katherine Cornell and her cocker spaniel as Elizabeth Barrett and Flush, and a yellowed front page from the Sacramento Bee showing pictures of the Duke of Windsor and the English princesses. The headline read “KING EDWARD ABDICATES! DUKE OF YORK WILL RULE. ‘My Mind Is Made Up,’ Says King.” The words Sacramento Bee had been partly obscured with adhesive tape, in deference, Lily assumed, to Mr. McClellan, who had little use for the English but even less for the Bee .

“I see you’re admiring my memorabilia,” Martha said from the stair landing.

Startled, Lily looked up: she had not seen Martha since the Christmas parties, at which Martha had, night after night, in some indefinable way made a spectacle of herself. Although she had not been drinking and had done nothing extraordinary, it had been impossible not to notice her, as it might have been impossible not to notice someone running a high fever, or wearing a cellophane dress. She had the same look about her now: her long straight blond hair hung loose around her thin face, so tanned that her eyebrows looked bleached, and she had on what appeared to be a leotard and a long green silk jersey skirt which trailed after her on the stairs.