Joan Didion - Run River

“I kept writing you,” Lily reminded him, never looking up from her knitting. It seemed to him that she had been knitting steadily since his arrival. Whenever she caught him looking at her she would bite her lip, ostentatiously readjust her needles, and knit faster.

He turned, wordless, to Martha.

“I never noticed anybody letting me run this ranch,” she said. “I can’t even write a check around here.”

“We did everything we could,” Lily said. “Your father wasn’t asking for any advice from us.”

“If only someone had let Everett know.” Sarah closed the box of old dance programs and pressed orchids which had claimed her attention since dinner. “If only someone had let me know.”

“If only someone had thought.” Martha leaned to touch Lily’s arm. “Sarah could have forwarded us some pamphlets from the United States Department of Agriculture. Or maybe she could have talked it over with Peter.”

“I haven’t seen Peter since 1939.”

“This new one then,” Martha said. “I can’t ever think of his name.”

“It’s on all my note paper,” Sarah said with an attempt at serenity. “Robert Carr Warfield, Jr.” She paused. “Bud,” she added doubtfully.

“Bud. That’s it. Maybe you and Bud could have put your heads together and gotten this place in shape by air mail.”

Lily put down her knitting and looked up at Everett.

He understood: he had never meant to cast doubts upon their intentions. Nonetheless, he would be away another few months until his discharge was processed, and someone would have to take hold. Could they do that, could they get the poles up and the fields cleared and above all could they get the Engineers to do something about the levee before they found themselves floating around the Delta?

“You tell the men I’m running it and I will,” Martha said.

“Joe Templeton will help us,” Lily said.

“Joe Templeton will help us,” Martha repeated. “Oh my yes. Old Joe Templeton will absolutely leap at the opportunity to help us. Yes indeed. Joe Templeton can be depended upon, Everett, count on that.” She had been playing nervously with one of Lily’s knitting needles; now she jammed it into a ball of yarn and walked to the window.

Three days after the funeral Everett put Sarah on a plane back to Philadelphia (“back home,” she said, apparently oblivious to the pain she could cause her brother simply by shifting the locus of her belonging), carrying a paper bag full of dried hops to show to her children and to the stranger who was now her husband. The hops had been Martha’s idea. “They’ll think I’m bringing candy,” Sarah laughed, nervous as they stood in the rain at the gate. “I should have bought something, they won’t realize I came for a funeral.” Her voice trailed off as she watched the propellers catching. Tentatively, Everett put his arm around her shoulders, thick in her black fleece coat, too heavy for California. She turned, smiling brilliantly and blowing him a kiss. “You come visit us,” she called as she ran to the plane, “come visit whenever you can.”

After the plane had left the runway Everett sat in the empty parking lot, bent over the steering wheel of the station wagon with the rain blowing in through the open window and the strings of Christmas tinsel stars clinking in the wind between the low buildings, and cried for the first time that he could remember, not so much for his father as for Sarah’s defection, because she had lost all memory of the family they had been on that day when he got a little drunk on champagne.

“Everett,” she said. “Everett.”

He turned toward her, fumbling blindly through the wrinkled sheets for her body, meaning to draw her to him in the hot bed and drop back into sleep, wanting only to quiet her.

“Everett. Please. Everett.”

He opened his eyes. Lily lay on her back smoking a cigarette. He had been home from Bliss six months now, ever since his discharge in February, and through those two seasons of 1945 he had not slept one night without the dim troubled sense that Lily was awake, shifting in bed, walking around the room or sitting by the window in the dark. (She could not remember, she told him, a summer so hot: she had not been able to breathe for months.) Not until he woke in the morning would she be asleep, sometimes in the chair by the window, her legs stretched out across the low sill and her nightgown fallen from her shoulders; sometimes on the far edge of the bed, one hand flat on the floor, the other flung toward him but not touching him. She would lie for hours then without waking; one morning he had sat on the bed and held her hand for twenty minutes while she lay as if drugged, neither clenching nor withdrawing her fingers.

“Go to sleep,” he said now. “Go to sleep, baby.”

“I have to talk to you.”

He ran his fingers over the moist ends of her hair and across her face. Her eyes were wet. Jesus Christ . How many nights had he heard Lily crying. As some parents sleep through fire, thunderstorms, and voices at the back door only to wake at a child’s whisper, so Everett heard Lily crying at night. Her muffled sobs seemed to have broken his dreams for years. He had heard her even at Fort Lewis, even in Georgia, finally at Bliss. That was Lily crying in the wings whenever the priests came to tear up his mother’s grave. Lily cried in the twilight field where he picked wild poppies with Martha; Lily’s was the cry he heard those nights the kiln burned, the levee broke, the ranch went to nothing.

“What is it, Lily.”

She crushed out her cigarette. “I have to tell you.”

He brushed the damp hair back from her forehead and kissed her closed eyelids, tasting the salt on his tongue.

“I didn’t want to tell you but I have to.”

“What is it,” he said. “What do you have to tell me, baby.”

He did not want her to say it. He had known for maybe three weeks, since that morning (it was the morning the pump broke, the Monday after they had gone to Lake Tahoe with Marth and Channing) when he had gotten up and found Lily sitting on the edge of the bathtub, her head down, her arms crossed as if she were having a chill. Her nightgown was down around her waist and a glass of orange juice was spilled on the pink tile floor. Her hands were shaking, her eyes glazed; he knew she had been sick. As he helped her back to bed it occurred to him that she was overdue that month. He was not sure. She had not taken her eyes from his face as he pulled the sheet over her, and while he tried to clean up the orange juice with toilet paper (for some reason he had not wanted to leave it for China Mary to see) he recalled that she had been sick on orange juice the first few months both times before. He had hoped (so fiercely that it was a constant prayer, now after three weeks as automatic as breathing) that he was mistaken, about the one thing if not the other, hoped that she would not say the words. But he had known she would. He had known all along she would wake him some night. I didn’t want to tell you but I have to .

He moved his arm beneath her shoulders. Her body was rigid. He would have to let her say it. He was the goddamn priest who would have to hear it.

“I’m pregnant.” Her eyes were shut tight, as if she expected him to hit her. “I’m pregnant and I don’t think by you.”

Her voice was as smooth and anonymous as a recording. She must have rehearsed the words so often that all inflection had been erased. He threw off the sheet and sat up on the edge of the bed, reaching toward the table for a cigarette, stalling less from shock than from a sense of anticlimax. Spoken, the words had lost their power.