Joan Didion - Run River

Actually Everett had liked Naomi Kahn: he had liked the way her clothes smelled and liked the slightly derisive way she went to bed; she did it exactly the way she wrote out a midterm or drove a car, with a style and efficiency he had never observed in any of the girls with whom he had grown up, and he loved it. He sometimes thought he even loved her, usually when she had gone to spend the weekend with her parents in Palm Springs and he was left with the alternatives of sitting around the house drinking beer or calling up somebody like Annis McMahon. Palo Alto the winter of 1939 seemed full of girls like Annis McMahon, and Everett’s appreciation of Naomi’s singular virtues grew until he actually regretted, for something like four days after she eloped with the Young Communist from Berkeley, that he had not asked her to marry him.

Nonetheless, Naomi Kahn had not been, any more than Annis McMahon or for that matter Doris Jeanne Coe had been, someone with whom he could have lived on the ranch. During those four days when he wished he had married Naomi he never once thought of living anywhere with her: they were always driving someplace together, or he was putting her on an airplane, or they were registering at the Fairmont in San Francisco and she had on a black hat with a veil.

In the end Naomi had been just like Annis McMahon and a dozen or so girls he had known not as well: something he had tried and abandoned, before the effort became too strenuous, and none of it had to do with Lily. Even as he imagined himself registering at the Fairmont with Naomi Kahn, Everett knew without thinking that what he would do was live on the ranch with Lily Knight, knew it so remotely that if he had heard, during the years he rarely saw her, that she had married someone else he would have wished her well and gone on thinking about Naomi Kahn at the Fairmont, and only somewhere in the unused part of his mind would he have begun wondering, with an urgency he would not have understood, what he was going to do with the rest of his life. Lily required no commitment: Lily was already there.

It had not occurred to him that he could lose her (had not occurred to him even that he wanted her) until the week he came home from Stanford and saw her sitting on her father’s terrace in a faded pink dress, the late afternoon sun on her dusty bare feet and a large safety pin in place of a missing screw on her sunglass frames. It had seemed to him then that to risk losing her would be to risk losing Martha and Sarah and himself as well, that she alone could retrieve and keep for him the twenty-one years he had already spent. Convinced that he could ill afford to leave her untended for even that one night, he fell asleep finally with his clothes on, a cigarette still burning in the ashtray on his bedroom window sill, and when he woke in the morning he set out immediately to secure for himself the haven of her faded pink dress, her bare feet, the safety pin in her sunglasses.

As far as the safety pin went, it remained in her sunglasses until the summer she was pregnant with Julie, when he told her one night, irritated partly because she had just uncovered a grocery bill she had lost three months before and partly because she had dragged a sheet down to the sun porch the night before and slept there until ten o’clock but irritated mostly because it had been 105° for three days and she had accused him of not loving her as her father had loved her, that the safety pin in her sunglasses summed up all her unattractive habits, her sloppiness of mind, her inability to accomplish the routine tasks that could be done with one hand by any of the girls he had known at Stanford. She had gone upstairs without speaking. When he came to bed she had pretended to be asleep, and she had gotten up at seven the next morning to drive into Sacramento. She returned at noon with a new screw in her sunglasses and with, as well, a book called The Managerial Revolution in which she later read the first and last chapters (she pretended to have read it all but he read it himself and saw that she had not), an album of French language records which as far as he knew she never played, eight dollars’ worth of closet bags and boxes, and a large account book in which she wrote down, for two weeks, the exact amounts both she and China Mary spent on food and household supplies. The book was in fact labeled “Food and Household Supplies,” and she had shown it proudly to Martha. The first day’s entry, Martha reported with a degree of admiration, began with an itemized list showing the unit prices, the amount saved by buying in quantity, and a tax breakdown wherever a tax was involved, on twenty-four bottles of beer, twelve cans of mixed carrots and peas, twelve cans of puréed liver, four quarts of milk, two cartons of Lucky Strikes, six tins of smoked oysters, and fifteen cans of Campbell’s Soup; five consommé, five vegetable-beef, five cream of chicken. Totaled, these items came to $18.53, and were followed by an entry which read “Etc. — $27 (about).” When Martha asked what the $27 represented, Lily, absorbed in contemplating the neatness of her figuring, had shrugged. “You know. A mop handle. Things.” After Lily had abandoned “Food and Household Supplies,” Everett tore the entry from the book, carried it around with him for a couple of weeks and finally put it in a drawer where he kept his Stanford diploma, a clipping about a no-hit game he had pitched in high school, and a letter from Martha describing the only 4-H meeting she ever attended.

The truth was simply that he would not have known what to do with a wife who knew what to do with a book labeled “Food and Household Supplies”: it was not Everett’s idea of a wife’s function. Although he was not sure what his idea of a wife’s function was, he knew that Lily had been closest to fulfilling it when she had been trying least. She simply did not know how. She would concentrate upon the details while the essence eluded her, unable to see that one entry in the Pillsbury Bake-Off did not make a Mrs. America.

There as everywhere, Lily failed, even as she tried with pathetic concentration, to apprehend what was expected of her. The most insignificant social encounter was for Lily, as Martha had pointed out at dinner one night this spring, fraught with the apprehension of possible peril.

“I mean Lily can’t say simple things like ‘thank you’ or ‘I’d rather not’ or ‘please may I have more coffee,’ ” Martha had added, turning then to Lily. “I don’t know what’s wrong with you but you can’t.”

“Nothing’s wrong with her,” Everett said, although he saw Martha’s point. He had only a week before learned that Lily was allergic to strawberries, which he had seen her eating with apparent delight innumerable times. “I thought your father liked them,” she said, in explanation.

“Everett, it’s true . I’m not being mean to Lily, I’m only observing something interesting. Somebody holds the door open for Lily in a hardware store, and she thinks she has a very complex situation on her hands.”

Martha poured the rest of a bottle of wine into Lily’s glass and sat back, watching Lily. “First Lily says thank you. Then she wonders: did he hear her? If he didn’t, was he thinking how rude she was? Assuming that he heard her, was just ‘thank you’ enough? If not, what more? On the other hand maybe ‘thank you’ was too much. Maybe she should have just smiled. Maybe he thought she’d been forward. In fact maybe she’d been mistaken in thinking he was holding the door for her at all . Possibly he’d been holding it for someone behind her, his wife, or an old lady. If that was the case, thanking him made her look a perfect fool , and now she can’t remember why she came to the hardware store in the first place, and every now and then all day she thinks about how she might have handled it. I mean the crises Lily faces from day to day.”