Joan Didion - Run River

When the bus arrived in Sacramento at six o’clock, however, she emerged as if from a darkened theater into the sudden glare, the sudden presence of people, and the sudden recollection of why it made any difference. Standing on the loading platform, holding her raincoat and her overnight bag, she could remember just about everything except why she had chosen a four-hour bus ride over two air-conditioned hours in a Southern Pacific club car. For reasons now lost to her, it had seemed in San Francisco the thing to do; had seemed the way of the Cross.

I’ve been worried , Joe said when she called him from the bus station. There seemed to her reproof in every syllable.

“I’m sorry. I just got into town.” She did not want to talk to Joe and did not know why she had called him, except that she had promised to.

“I worried,” he repeated. “I couldn’t sleep. I yelled at Francie.”

“You yelled at Francie.” She leaned against the wall of the telephone booth and tried to open the glass door with her foot, succeeding only in catching her heel between the door and the jamb.

“How are you?”

“I’m all right.” Working her foot free, she let the shoe drop. “I’m fine.”

“You sound pretty good.”

“How did you expect me to sound?”

In the prolonged silence which followed she reached to retrieve her shoe and saw that she had snagged her stocking on the lock of her overnight case.

“Damn it.” She jammed her foot into her shoe and brushed her damp hair from her face.

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing’s the matter. I was just putting my shoe on.”

“Putting your shoe on? Why did you have your shoes off?”

“No reason, Joe, no reason. I’m just down here in the Greyhound bus station barefoot, see.”

“Cut it out.”

“I’m sorry.”

After a silence Joe said tentatively: “You saw the doctor?”

“Yes.”

“How did it go?”

“It was fine. Everything was just fine.”

“I told you it would be.”

She did not say anything.

“He didn’t charge you any more, did he?”

“No. It went all right.”

“I told you it would. He didn’t want any more money?”

“No , I said.” She was irritated by his preoccupation with the money; it had been her five hundred dollars in the first place. To get the cash she had sold ten shares of an oil stock her father had given her as a wedding present, and she did not like to be reminded of it. Although she had not thought of it before, there was something about Joe’s inability to put his hands on five hundred dollars without Francie’s knowing about it which summed up all his rather aggressive weaknesses.

“I would have cut off my right arm if I could have gone down there for you.”

“Now you cut it out,” she said, and was immediately touched with remorse: if he was dishonest so was she. If she were honest she would not even be talking to him on the telephone.

“There was nothing you could do,” she added, ashamed.

“It’s been pretty bad. You know how bad I felt about it.” He paused. “Maybe I could see you tomorrow.”

“No,” she said rapidly. “I mean I can’t. I have to rest.”

“I guess you better.” He sounded relieved. “I just thought you’d want to talk to someone.”

“Oh Christ. No. I don’t want to talk to someone. I don’t want to talk to anyone.”

She clicked off the connection with her finger and dropped the receiver in her lap. Her silk suit was damp with perspiration and stained not only with dust but tea, spilled at the counter in the San Francisco bus station. She should have let the waitress sponge it off but her bus had already been called and she had not wanted to run; she had been afraid that if she moved too quickly the bleeding would begin again.

If she had not wanted to talk to Joe, she certainly did not want to talk to Everett. Nonetheless, she had to get home and felt incapable of explaining to anyone else what she was doing with her suitcase in the Greyhound bus station. She had meant to take the river bus out to the ranch, but the drivers had gone on strike. If it was not one thing it was another. Fumbling in her bag for a cigarette, she dropped two coins in the telephone and dialed her mother’s number. When her mother answered she felt tears rising, hung up without saying anything, and smoked the cigarette down to her fingers. I would have cut off my right arm , she thought viciously. He knew what he could cut off. She blew her nose, snapped her bag shut, and called the ranch.

Everett answered on the first ring. “Sweet Jesus, Lily. You all right?”

“I’m fine.”

“Where the hell are you?”

She hesitated. Where was she. It was the giveaway, the proof of how she felt, the evidence that she would never be the kind who could carry things off.

“At the Greyhound bus station,” she said at last.

“You fool,” he said softly. “You goddamn little ass.”

She drank some warm Coca-Cola in a sticky paper cup and went outside the station to wait for Everett. At six-thirty everything seemed still: the traffic had already thinned out and the thick branches of the plane trees hung heavy and motionless over the street. In front of the loading platform a sailor was trying to pick up two girls; both the girls wore white peasant blouses, pulled down off their shoulders, and one had her hair tied up in a magenta scarf. When the sailor, teasing, pulled off the scarf, Lily saw that the girl’s head was covered with pin curls. Snatching the scarf back, the girl struck an exaggerated pose with it, and they all laughed. They seemed to be having a very good time and it tired Lily to think that she was probably no older than they were.

Depressed, she turned her attention across the street to a parking lot where a few men, apparently late from their offices and obviously all acquainted, were picking up their cars. She reflected sadly that they would no doubt arrive home to find their well-behaved sun-tanned wives getting out of their swimming suits and dressed for dinner. It was too hot a night to cook; all over town those loving summer wives were brushing the chlorine out of their hair and putting on dresses to go out to dinner. The would be at the country club tonight, wearing their bright clean linen dresses loosely, as if they were unaccustomed to wearing clothes at all. They would talk about their diets and their children and their golf scores, display their even dispositions and their gold charm bracelets, and presently they would go home to take off the bright clean linen dresses, to lie on hot sheets and wait patiently for the day to begin again. You would never catch one of them standing around the Greyhound bus station in a tea-stained wrinkled silk suit not wanting to see her husband. You would never even catch one of them standing around anywhere in a tea-stained wrinkled silk suit. There was the kind of wife Everett should have, and look what he had instead. Martha had said it all: Lily had no right to her brother. Everett, like Sue Ann, had his right to happiness as much as the next one.

It was almost seven-thirty before Everett arrived. Unshaven and wearing a dirty khaki shirt, he double-parked the station wagon, swung himself over the rear bumper of a parked Chevrolet, and took Lily’s arm. She had not at first seen him, and smiled tentatively when he touched her. He picked up her suitcase, helped her around the Chevrolet, and opened the station-wagon door without speaking. Before they were home she had fallen asleep, dry-eyed for a change, her head in the way of the gear shift.

Later he put her to bed, opened the shutters which had been closed all day against the heat, and wiped her face with a washcloth soaked in witch hazel.