Joan Didion - Run River

“Did you get the hops finished?” she whispered, opening her eyes.

“Yes,” he said. “Everything’s fine. Go to sleep.”

“Listen.” She took the washcloth from him and laid it across her eyes. “I love you.”

He looked at her for a long time.

“Stop feeling sorry for yourself,” he said finally.

She took the washcloth from her eyes and threw her arms around his neck. “Everett, baby. I do. I love you. I know you and you know me and nobody else does. Everett please baby love me.”

She clung to him while he kissed her hair, and when he moved to take her arms from his neck she tighened her hold. “Lie here with me,” she whispered. “Lie here with me until it’s all dark.”

“Later.” He stood up. “Go to sleep now, baby.”

He sat with Knight for half an hour on the third floor, from where they could see the fireworks in town, for that day happened also to be the opening of the State Fair. There would be fireworks every night for twelve days, great slow bursts of white and pink and green, barely visible from the ranch. Long before the last distant sparks had showered out and drifted down, Knight fell asleep in Everett’s arms, and he carried him downstairs without waking him and put him to bed in his playsuit.

He went downstairs then, wandering absently from room to room. The house was quiet: Julie was at her grandmother’s; Martha had gone to the Fair with Ryder Channing. Insisting that Lily and Everett must come with them, they had waited an hour to see if Lily might arrive; Everett had gotten rid of them only by saying that the four of them would go to the Fair over the weekend. After they had gone Everett had sat in the kitchen with a bottle of beer and an article Channing had brought him about what was described as a pioneer shopping center in Kansas City. The kitchen chairs were uncomfortable and Everett had found it increasingly difficult to concentrate on why some developers preferred shopping centers with mall layouts to shopping centers with cluster layouts, whatever a cluster layout was; the kitchen, however, was the only place in the house where he did not feel oppressed by the presence of telephones. Although he knew that there were only two telephones in the house and five on the entire ranch, the house had seemed, while he waited for Lily to call, equipped with enough telephones to service a handbook operation.

Now he sat down again in the kitchen and tried to finish the article Channing had given him, but after three or four more paragraphs abandoned it. For fifteen minutes he sat reading the labels on the beer bottle he had left on the table when Lily called, and finally he went outside and set sprinklers to run all night on the south lawn, an extravagance justified only by the possibility that it would cool Lily’s and the children’s room some. He thought automatically now of Lily’s room , and when he went to sleep at eleven o’clock it was, for the first time of many, in his father’s bed. Although during the night he thought he woke and heard voices in the driveway, first Channing’s, shut up you’re almost shouting , and then Martha’s, you think she’s so interesting-looking maybe you could knock her up yourself the next time , by morning it seemed easier to believe that he had only dreamed it.

There was nothing wrong with Ryder Channing, Martha observed, that could not be inferred from his habit, when he was at any house within fifty miles of San Francisco, of asking his hostess if she had at hand a copy of the 1948 San Francisco Social Register because he wanted to look up a new telephone number.

Actually, Martha amended, Ryder took her calling in San Francisco so infrequently that she had only once witnessed him asking for the 1948 Social Register to look up a telephone number, but she was certain that it had been no improvisation of the moment. It was of a piece with his routinely asking people from Cleveland where they lived in Shaker Heights.

“That’s not fair of me,” Martha added then with the instant contrition which tended, for a while quite successfully, to obscure the hostile edge on her voice; her standard conversational technique was that of a trial lawyer who pursues a tendentious line of questioning and then allows it stricken from the record.

“I mean that’s perfectly true about Ryder and the Social Register but it’s not fair. It’s not the whole Ryder. I mean Ryder goes around talking about big deals that never go through and all but that doesn’t mean Ryder’s a phony. Ryder just wants things. That’s not so bad, to want things. Is it.”

“Not at all,” Lily said, virtuously knotting a thread in a dress she was making by hand for Julie’s first day at school. The dress was an economy measure: Everett had said that their 1949 taxes would be double this year’s — both the riverfront and the Cosumnes ranches had been reassessed for the first time since the war — and Lily had resolved, without mentioning it to Everett, to save money. She had begun by saving the six or seven dollars she would normally have paid for Julie’s dress, instead buying four dollars’ worth of imported lawn and a sixty-cent pattern. After three weeks of intermittent work, the lawn was not only grimy from her fingers but spotted here and there with blood from her pricked fingers; it should, however, wash up very nicely. Good fabrics, good soap, and good hats, her mother often told her, were no extravagance.

Impressed with the fruit of her own economy, Lily added: “Wanting things and working to get them. It’s the basis of the American way.”

“Balls . You aren’t even listening to me.”

“Really, Martha.” Although Lily had never known exactly what the word meant, it did not sound conversational to her. She had for that matter first heard it from Martha, the afternoon Mr. McClellan died in Sutter Hospital. Because Martha was having a cigarette with one of the doctors, Lily had been alone in the room, holding Mr. McClellan’s hand, when he woke from the coma. “You’re a good girl, Miss Lily Knight,” he said, opening his eyes and squeezing her hand weakly. “You’re sickly-looking but you’re a good girl.” “Balls,” Martha said from the doorway, seeing that her father’s eyes were again closed and his hand fallen free of Lily’s. Involuntarily, Lily had put her hand out to shield Mr. McClellan from Martha’s voice, but ten minutes later he was dead and possibly he had heard neither Martha’s invective nor, a minute later, her sobbing.

“I’m sorry,” Martha said now. “It’s only that you were at it again.”

“At what again?”

“You know.” Martha paused. “Your dress is coming along nicely. That blue should be very good on Julie.”

Lily smiled, and held the dress up for Martha’s further approval.

“If only there weren’t that gap between her teeth.”

Lily laid the dress aside and began threading a needle. Martha had told Julie that unless her teeth were straightened immediately she would grow up to be a very unattractive little girl. For several days Julie had been inconsolable, repeatedly climbing up on the washbasin to inspect her teeth in the bathroom mirror.

“I told you before, her second teeth aren’t even in.” Lily finished threading the needle and inadvertently jammed it into her index finger.

Martha shrugged, her interest in orthodontia apparently ebbing.

“Ryder just wants things,” she repeated reflectively. “That’s exactly the thing about Ryder.”

“What does Ryder want now.”

Martha looked at her a long while. “This is what they call a mo-bile situation , see, Lily. Ryder is what they call up-ward mo-bile . Or on-the-make . Didn’t you ever take any courses? Didn’t you ever read any books by Lloyd Warner?”