Joan Didion - Run River

“There’s—” Lily stopped. She had been about to say that there was nothing wrong in wanting to get ahead. She did not know what it was about Martha that inflexibly brought out in her diction the best of both Mr. McClellan and her mother.

“There’s what?” Martha demanded.

“Nothing.”

“ ‘There’s nothing wrong in wanting to get ahead,’ ” Martha mimicked. “I know you. Well there’s not. But you don’t understand about Ryder. He wants to use people.”

“Martha. Don’t get all upset.”

“Well he can’t use me.” Martha paused. “I don’t want anything from him. That’s the reason he can’t use me.”

“Martha,” Lily repeated.

“I don’t want his jobs , I don’t want his favors , I don’t want anything about him.”

What Martha did not want from Ryder Channing that morning was the job he had gotten her three weeks before on a Sacramento television station. It was the fourth or fifth such job for which he had arranged an interview; it was not only the first one Martha had taken but the first one, as far as Lily knew, for which she had even shown up for the initial appointment. The idea behind this particular job had been that Martha, after a month of answering letters from viewers and doing other small jobs around the station, would eventually work into doing both the morning interview program and the commercials during the afternoon movie, a job handled during the first year of the channel’s operation by the manager’s wife, now pregnant. It was, Ryder had declared, an unbeatable opportunity to get in on the ground floor of an industry with nowhere to go but up, and he had installed a borrowed television set on the sun porch so that Martha could observe the interview and commercial techniques developed by the manager’s wife, Maribeth Sidell. Martha had only to consider that Maribeth Sidell was a household word the length and breadth of the Sacramento Valley to realize, he pointed out, the future in the job.

Together, Lily and Martha had watched several of Maribeth Sidell’s programs, including one on which she interviewed, simultaneously, a retired disk jockey, Miss Sacramento, and two Japanese businessmen in the United States to arrange a trade fair. When the conversation turned to how Sacramento compared to Yokohama, Martha switched off the set and declared that she was a natural for the job. After avidly testing some of the products Maribeth advertised, in order to get what she called “fresh insights,” Martha drove into town, met Mr. Sidell, and reported at dinner that he had asked her to call him “Buzz,” had taken her to the Sacramento Hotel bar, and after two Manhattans (for him) and two sherries (for her) had announced that although she was no Jinx Falkenburg she had a lot of class and for his money ($75 a week) the ball was hers to run with. “I knew the sherry would get him,” Martha added enthusiastically. “The cornball.”

Although Lily never learned exactly where the ball had been dropped, Martha had worked only one full week and three days of last week. On the fourth day she had left the house as usual at seven-thirty, but by eleven, when Sidell called the ranch, she had not yet arrived at work.

Toward five o’clock she walked into the kitchen through the back door, runs in both her stockings and thistles caught along the hem of her white linen dress. “I was sick,” she explained shortly. “I drove to Yuba City and climbed on some rocks and watched a stretch of rapids in the Feather for a while.”

“Sidell called,” Lily said. “So did Ryder.”

“Did he.” Martha turned on the faucet in the sink and splashed water on her face and arms. “There was a dead rattlesnake caught in a backwater,” she said finally, reaching for a paper towel. “Bloated.”

When Ryder Channing called again at seven o’clock Martha at first said to tell him she was out, then, as Lily hesitated, put down her drink, reached across the table for a cigarette from Lily’s bag, and took the telephone from her.

“That’s right, I didn’t,” she said. “I didn’t feel good.”

Holding the receiver with her shoulder she lit the cigarette and made a face at Julie, who was illuminating with red and blue crayons a Standard Oil brochure addressed to Everett. “I just didn’t call, that’s all.”

“I’m not trying to do anything to you, Ryder,” she added after a pause. “It’s part of your e gocen tric ity that you think everything I do is for the express purpose of getting on your nerves. I didn’t go in and I didn’t call and that’s all there is to it. It hasn’t got anything to do with you.” She paused, turning her face to the wall. “Ryder, I was scared. I don’t know why, I was just scared.”

“All right,” she said finally. “I never asked you to get me any jobs. I never asked you for anything but a little understanding and it’s perfectly apparent to me that you aren’t capable of giving anybody anything. All you want to do is use people.” She put out her cigarette, and took Julie’s hand, holding it very tightly. Julie looked at Lily and Lily shook her head. “I’m sure I don’t know what advantage there could possibly be for you in my having a job. I don’t know what goes through your mind. I only know there was an advantage or you wouldn’t have pushed me into it. You are forever pushing me and using me and I’m through.”

“Through,” she repeated.

“Don’t you get that way with me, Ryder Channing. I’ve heard that one before. I won’t miss anything about you and most of all, first on the list of things I will not miss, most of all I will not miss that.”

She hung up, picked up her drink, and walked outside.

Although no one mentioned it at dinner, Martha explained later to Everett that the job had been all right the first week but had become too difficult. The telephones distracted her and there was an enormous clock with a second hand that never stopped. Sidell insisted that letters from viewers be answered the day they came in, and frequently she did not know the answers to the questions raised. The week before she had stopped Sidell in the hall and asked him, in order to answer a letter, why the channel did not carry the program with Kukla, Fran, and Ollie. Sidell had looked at her for a long time and asked her if she had ever heard of networks and network affiliates. She had tried to tell him that of course she had — she had simply not thought of an answer so obvious — but he walked away and naturally she had not wanted to ask him any more questions. Instead she had begun putting difficult queries aside in a drawer of her desk, meaning to find out later how to answer them, but the days had gone by and the letters had not been answered and now Sidell would discover them and she simply could not go back. It would be all right if she could take the letters off somewhere and answer them by herself but there was no place in the office where you could get away from those clocks. She knew clocks weren’t supposed to stop, don’t be silly. She knew they needed a clock. But she could not work with it going every second. When it was going every second that way she could not seem to take her eyes off it, and because it made no noise she found herself making the noise for it in her mind.

Everett, who had thought the job a good idea because Martha’s days did not seem to him generally constructive, suggested that possibly Martha would like to take a trip. Martha thought not.

For the rest of that week Martha had refused to answer the telephone, to look at her mail, or to leave the ranch, even for a wedding down the river in which she was to have been a bridesmaid. She was quite certain, she explained to Everett and Lily, that the four hundred guests, two flower girls, and seven remaining bridesmaids could sufficiently nerve Molly Bee to lose her cherry without any additional help from her. Everett walked out of the house then, neither speaking to Martha nor getting dressed for the wedding, and finally Lily had gone alone, late, to Molly Bee’s reception, where she tried to apologize for Martha and Everett, drank nine glasses of champagne in an hour and fifteen minutes, was warned by her mother that she would end up with a well-deserved headache, and kissed two of the ushers, one of whom, Molly Bee’s cousin from Tulare, insisted that she was in no condition to drive and that he would drive her home himself, later. That he would be returning the next day to Tulare lent him, when she was kissing him in the car, an air of infinite promise: she could make him want her and then never see him again, all of the possibilities still intact, neither his deficiencies nor her own ever revealed. You make me feel good , she whispered, and meant it.