Joan Didion - Run River

Lily had blown out the candles on the table and transparently misunderstood Martha: “I don’t think good manners are ever amiss,” she said. But later, when she was brushing her hair and he was working at the card table he had covered with tax records, he looked up and saw that she was crying, crying and brushing her hair as if she wanted to brush it out. He had put aside the depreciation schedule and picked her up in his arms, the hairbrush still in her hand. Her voice muffled against his shoulder, she explained that she wanted to be like other people, wanted to be able to talk to people. “You’re shy,” he said. “There’s nothing wrong with being shy.” There was, Lily sobbed, something wrong with being shy when you were going on twenty-four years old, and anyway she was not shy, she was simply no good around people and that was that. He had lain on the bed with her and the hairbrush and told her that she was not to talk that way, that she was not other people. She was, he added, turning out the light, his baby. It occurred to Everett later that he had in that commonplace endearment put his finger on some of Lily’s virtues and certain of her failings.

Lily came home from San Francisco on a Greyhound bus crowded with Mexican pickers and sailors. From San Francisco to Vallejo she sat next to a sailor who was going to meet his girl in Salt Lake City. She lived with her folks in Salt Lake but Frisco, he explained, was their lucky town. They had met there, in a gin mill on Market Street, four days before he shipped out in 1943. When she promised to wait had been the A-1 moment in his life, and the second A-1 moment had been a week before on the U.S.S. Chester when he got his first sight in two years of the Golden Gate Bridge. There had been fog in the morning and when the fog broke he saw it there, shining way off in the distance like it wasn’t attached to anything. The band on the well deck had started in on “California Here I Come” and everybody had belted it out along with the band and it might sound cornball to her but it made him want to sit down and bawl like a baby. Lily began to cry, struck by the superiority of his appreciations to her own, and the sailor said wait a minute, hold your horses, it wasn’t sad, honey, it was like women crying at weddings. She looked to him like the kind who cried at weddings. It was like that. When the sailor got off at Vallejo to wait for the Salt Lake express Lily wished him good luck and watched him covertly through the window. He was sitting on his duffel bag reading a comic book and eating a Milky Way, and she wanted to get off the bus and give him her garnet ring for his girl, but did not know how to go about it. It was not until the bus had rolled out of the station that Lily remembered that at any rate the garnet ring had been Everett’s grandmother’s and was therefore not in the strictest sense hers to give.

From Vallejo to Sacramento she sat next to a woman who was a part-time cashier at a drive-in across the highway from Hotel El Rancho, west of Sacramento. The woman had been in Vallejo visiting her daughter, who had a nice place, not large but fixed up cute, above a florist’s shop on Tennessee Street. No doubt Lily knew the florist’s shop. No? The woman had thought surely she would because they did all the society weddings in Vallejo, it was very well-known.

Regretful that she had not pretended to recognize the florist’s name and anxious that the woman not think she had been trying to snub her, Lily hurried to surmount what seemed to her an impasse by asking if the daughter were married. Well, not exactly. It seemed that Sue Ann’s husband, a seaman first class but a bastard from the word go, had got his at Okinawa — Sue Ann had been just about set to blow the whistle anyway, as far as that went — and Sue Ann was now supporting their six-year-old son, Billy Jack, by car-hopping at Stan’s off U.S. 40.

The woman paused, and Lily quickly assured her that she knew Stan’s. (As it happened, she did, because when Everett first went away she had listened nights on the radio to Stan’s Private Line , and had even wondered academically from time to time whether or not she could have made the grade among the leather-jacketed jeunesse dorée who gathered nightly at Stan’s to eat Double-Burgers and dedicate songs to one another.) The woman ignored her. Naturally Sue Ann got asked on a lot of dates — she was about Lily’s age but a real doll, built like Rita Hayworth. You could hardly tell them apart except for the hair, and nobody would ever convince her that Rita’s was natural anyway. But don’t get her started on that. So Sue Ann had been playing the field, but now she had a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to marry a young fellow who in turn had a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to wrap up the Kirby Party franchise for the entire Greater Vallejo area. You know, Kirby Parties. You invite a congenial group to your home and serve a little something, doughnuts and soft drinks, and then the Kirby representative comes and demonstrates the vacuum cleaners and all. You get a bonus gift for getting a certain number to come and you get in a little girl-talk besides. If Lily wasn’t on to Kirby Parties she ought to take Fred’s number and call him the next time she was in the area, providing his deal went through. Anyway. The only catch was that Fred didn’t know about Billy Jack. Or rather he knew about Billy Jack but believed him to be Sue Ann’s little brother. She had warned Sue Ann it was a crazy mad thing to do, trying to pass off Billy Jack as her own mother’s change-of-life baby, but what could you do. Sue Ann had her right to happiness as much as the next one. What did Lily think.

As the bus rolled out of the Coast Range and into the heat of the Valley, Lily stopped thinking altogether, lulled by the even rhythm of the telephone poles against field after dry yellow field, by the regular rise and fall of the woman’s voice, by the grinding and shifting of gears as the bus swung off the highway and down the streets of towns in which she seemed to have spent her life: Fairfield-Suisun, Vacaville, Dixon. Although she did not suppose that she had driven through any one of the towns more than on the outside twenty times, they had about them an imprint which to perceive once, especially if that once was on an August afternoon when the streets looked abandoned and the frame buildings as fragile as tinder, was to possess forever. She could close her eyes and tick it off: the Bank of America building, the W.T. Grant store, the Lincoln-Mercury agency; the lone woman in a shapeless dress and flowered straw hat, sitting on the porch of the hotel until her husband was through in town. Off the main street there would be a few blocks of houses, three-storey houses in need of paint, each fronted by a patch of dry grass, maybe a tricycle overturned on the cracked concrete walk. The blinds would be drawn and there would not be any people, anywhere. The afternoon heat could bleach those towns so clean that the houses and the buildings seemed always on the verge of dematerializing; there was the sense that to close one’s eyes on a Valley town was to risk opening them a moment later on dry fields, the sun bleaching out the last traces of habitation, a flowered straw hat, a neon advertisement which had blinked a moment before from a wall no longer visible: More Yield from Every Acre with Seeds from Northrup-King .

It was a great comfort, watching the towns come and go through the tinted window of the Greyhound bus. The heat drained the distinctions from things — marriage and divorce and new curtains and overdrafts at the bank, all the same — and Lily could not at the moment imagine any preoccupation strong enough to withstand the summer. At least any preoccupation of hers; Sue Ann, now, was another case. There would be nothing ambiguous about Sue Ann’s responses, nothing ambivalent about her wants: Sue Ann would have kissed Joe Templeton goodbye with no second thoughts. Sue Ann’s problems, unlike her own, offered the compression, the foreshortening of art; her own were inadvertent, makeshift affairs at best, and there with her head resting against the bus window she could not think why she had gone to San Francisco or why she had caused a scene with Everett or how she had gotten pregnant in the first place by somebody she did not much like or why, the heart of the matter, she had thought it made any difference.