Joan Didion - Run River

“What in the name of sweet Christ is that get-up?” Mr. McClellan said. “You been practicing your ballet dancing?”

“I haven’t taken ballet since I was twelve years old, thanks to the fact that nobody in this family except Sarah would ever drive me to my lessons. I’ve been reading.”

“Nobody gives a goddamn what you’ve been doing. Get Lily Knight here a tank suit.”

“Everett,” Martha called imperiously. “Guess what I’ve been reading.”

Everett looked up. Throughout this exchange he had seemed to withdraw: Lily had watched him fish in his pocket for a cigarette, inspect the cover of a Reader’s Digest which lay in a chair, whistle between his teeth.

“What,” he said now. “What have you been reading, baby.”

“The Anatomy of Melancholy . It’s number twenty-two on the list.”

“She asked me for a reading list,” Everett said as Martha started back up the stairs. “I gave her one from Stanford. She’s already read about half the books on it.”

“Strange little creature,” Mr. McClellan said.

“You upset her,” Everett said with apparent effort.

Mr. McClellan ignored him. “Melancholia’s one study you don’t need any lessons in,” he shouted up the stairs. “You strange little creature.”

“Your brother thinks I upset you,” he added as Martha came trailing downstairs again with a swimming suit in one hand.

“Poor old Everett,” Martha said indulgently.

“Don’t be a fool, Everett. Now let that girl get suited up.”

They swam in the river, striking out for the far bank and swimming downstream with the current, still running cold with late melting snow from the mountains. When Everett reached the bank he waded back out to where the shallow ledge dropped off into the channel and pulled Lily, still struggling with the current, across the ledge and up onto the bank.

“You do all right,” he said, pulling himself up after her.

“I always think I’ll get dragged under.” She did not let go his arm.

He moved as if to push her back into the water and then caught her, laughing, his arms low on her back.

“You better not,” she laughed.

“Why not.”

“You just better not.” She was pleased with their dialogue: it had about it the authentic ring of teasing, of inconsequentiality, that had eluded her at Berkeley. She had known all along that she could do it with someone she knew. Delighted, she lay back over Everett’s arms and stretched her legs in the hot dry air. By contracting her stomach she could make it concave beneath the wet coolness of Martha’s swimming suit. She lifted one leg and saw, besides the water still glistening on it, a long scratch on her left thigh, gradually turning bruised where Everett had pulled her across a submerged root into the shallow water.

“You look good.” Everett touched the scratch.

“I feel good.”

“You have the prettiest legs,” Everett said slowly, “of any small girl I ever saw.”

“I guess you like tall girls better.” There: she was still doing it.

Everett looked at her, not smiling, and she was struck by anxiety: in her ignorance of how the game was played she had said the wrong thing, broken some rule.

“I like you all right,” he said after a while, still looking at her. “I never thought about it until last night.”

“Never thought about what?”

Everett said nothing, and she wondered if she had angered or disappointed him, wondered if it was possible that she could lose Everett McClellan, in the sense that you could lose people who were not your father or your brother.

“I wish you would kiss me,” she whispered, feeling again that Everett was suddenly not Everett but a stranger, someone to be won.

He kissed her, and she clung to him a long time, watching the oak leaves swimming against the sun and feeling the ends of her hair floating just on the surface of the water and after a while opening her mouth and pulling down the straps of Martha’s bathing suit, before his hand tightened over the scratch on her left thigh. All right , she whispered over and over, and after a while she began to think it could never happen because it hurt so much. When Everett finally said, again and again in a kind of triumph, you feel it? baby feel it , she assumed that it had happened. Later the scratch on her thigh became infected from the river water and left a drawn white scar noticeable whenever her legs got brown, but she did not think of it at the time.

Lily , he whispered every time as he lay spent in the rising morning heat, but she hesitated, equivocated, wondered if she was really obliged to marry him simply because he had wanted and taken her.

That was in June. In July, when she figured that she had been screwed (the word, which she had heard Everett use in reference to someone else, pleased her with its crisp efficiency, its lack of ambiguity) a total of twenty-seven times, they once had an entire morning to spend: coming back from the narrow strip of beach they waded in the irrigation ditches, knee-deep in the soft ditch grass and slow muddy water, the sun hot on their heads. All around them were her father’s orchards: the pears hanging warm and heavy, dropping to rot on the ground beneath the trees, going brown and bruised and drawing flies, going to waste in that endless summer as she, thank God and Everett , was not. She let her dress trail in the water and ran splashing through the ditch with her eyes closed against the sun. Catching her, Everett rubbed her face and bare sunburned arms with the cloudy river water that bubbled from a supply pipe; they laughed (Everett you fool my sunglasses I like you for being so brown Everett baby so hard I love you) and fell down again together, for the pickers were working the far orchards that week, and when she screamed beneath him, remembering that snakes infested the ditches, he neither told her that there was no snake nor told her that the snake (if there was one) was harmless, but picked her up and held her until she was quiet and until the snake (if there was a snake at all) had gone away. Shortly before noon she told Everett that she would marry him, and then she ran up to the house to change her dress for lunch. It seemed as inescapable as the ripening of the pears, as fated as the exile from Eden.

She mentioned it, however, to no one; scarcely thought of it away from Everett. Through day after summer day she moved as if sunstruck, dimly aware that any announcement would disturb the delicately achieved decision which had been, really, no decision at all: only an acquiescence. Was it, after all, so inevitable? The word why , once spoken out loud, could bring the pears all tumbling down. She would have to say that she loved him: it was the only incantation which would satisfy them, even as it would dispel her own illusions. Unspoken, it might still be true.

Everett remained the flaw in the grain. His constant and incontrovertible presence intruded upon her, prevented her from contemplating the idea of him, from polishing that idea into some acceptable fact. Sometimes when she came downstairs in the morning Everett would be sitting there, reading the Chronicle; he would call her several times during the day, and a suggestion, from Edith Knight, that she and Lily might go to San Francisco for the day could throw him into such despair that he would call every half-hour, all evening, to see when they were going, what they would do, when they would be home. Every scene Lily saw seemed to include Everett; all she heard was Everett’s voice, asking when they would be married.

“I don’t know,” she said finally one morning on the river. “I mean I don’t want to think about it right now.”