Joan Didion - Run River

What was wrong with Japanese engineers, Everett wanted to know. If you were on a ship going to Japan you presumably liked Japanese people in the first place.

Everett was, Lily said, missing the point altogether. There was nothing wrong with Japanese engineers. It was simply that a certain kind of girl would say that. Sally Dupree. That tennis player.

Everett did not recall that Lily had even met Annis McMahon.

Well, she had. And if she was not mistaken Martha had too. Hadn’t Martha met Annis McMahon?

Martha did not know. Possibly she had.

She did not raise her eyes from her own hand on the table, as if she could scarcely summon up enough interest to answer at all.

After Lily had left the table to put Knight and Julie to bed, Martha lit a cigarette from the candles and then blew them out one by one.

“I wish we had some brandy.”

“We drank two bottles of wine between us.”

“That’s not the same thing, Everett. Get with it.”

“You drink too much.”

“Now Everett. Sometimes I drink too much. Sometimes you drink too much. But neither of us quote unquote drinks too much. Francie Templeton is practically the only person you know who categorically drinks too much.”

“You are tight right now.”

“All right,” Martha said without interest, scraping candle wax off the tablecloth with her fingernail.

“I never did like Channing,” Everett said suddenly. “I never did think you should be messing around with him.”

“Everett. Ryder Channing has been and is now my best friend.”

She pushed back her chair and stood up. “Now you sing some Christmas carols with me.”

Everett stood behind her at the piano, singing an occasional phrase of “O Little Town of Bethlehem” as she picked out the notes with her right hand.

Still playing, she said abruptly: “Remember before Sarah got married when we used to go to Carmel at Christmas time?”

“Yes,” he said. “I remember.”

“You remember we’d go to the graveyard first and put a holly wreath on Mother’s grave, then drive on down to Carmel?”

“I remember,” he repeated. “Why?”

“It was nice then, that’s all.”

Over and over Martha played the same phrase: Above thy deep and dreamless sleep the silent stars go by . Because she had not turned on the lights, the blaze from the fireplace and the colored lights on the Christmas tree flickered all around the room.

“I always think about how nice it was at Christmas, that’s all.” She stopped playing. “I always thought it was you and me together, against Sarah and Daddy. Because they remembered Mother and you really didn’t. I always figured they thought she wouldn’t have died if it hadn’t been for me.”

“You shouldn’t have thought that,” Everett said absently, letting his hand drop to her hair.

“But anyway I did. And we always took that same house out on the point?”

“It was Aunt Grace’s house.”

“I thought it was ours. I looked for it when I was down last year but I couldn’t find it. And you always carried me upstairs to bed?”

“I’d forgotten.”

“But you did.” As she turned to face him his hand dropped from her hair to her shoulder. “You did.”

“I remember now, baby.” She turned back to the keyboard and began again to pick out notes. How still we see thee lie .

“What about it?” he said.

“Nothing about it.” She twisted her shoulder away from his hand. “This piano needs tuning.”

Because Everett told her that she should see some people and buy some new clothes, she did. She went to parties every night between Christmas and New Year’s, and on the first business day of 1949 she went to San Francisco and charged $758.90 to her and Lily’s account at Magnin’s. Because she could not see that dressing like what the elevator advertisements called a Marima Shop Young Fashionable had gotten her very far in the past, she went not to the sixth floor, where she and Lily normally shopped, but to the third, where nothing was on racks and all the labels were oversized, heavy enough to stand alone, and embroidered with such intrinsically expensive words as Traina-Norell for I. Magnin . “Something way out,” she told the saleswoman, and she came home that night with a red coat, a white chiffon dinner dress, two black lace slips, and a white silk dress appliquéd with silk butterflies the exact pale color of her hair. The dress with the butterflies cost $250 and was expressly to wear on the twenty-second of January at Nancy Dupree’s wedding. Although Everett thought $250 a great deal to pay for a little dress with some butterflies thrown on it, it was all, he agreed, way out, and on the day of the wedding, when she put on the dress for the first time, he assured her that she had never looked prettier. Because Lily and the children had virus and Everett did not want to leave them, Martha drove down alone to the wedding, rehearsing out loud, in the car, things she could say. Ryder’s so lucky. She looks beautiful. I’ve never been busier . By the time she reached Piedmont, however, she could remember none of them; her hands were shaking on the steering wheel and as she drove past the church she did not see how she could possibly go in. Anyway she would be late by the time she found a parking place, and anyway no one ever noticed who was at the church. She would drive around and pull herself together and by the time she got to the reception it would be all right. Although she began to feel better immediately, her hands began shaking again as she drove to the reception, and she sat in the Claremont Country Club parking lot for ten minutes, putting on lipstick and then blotting it off, trying to brush back a strand of hair which fell forward over her face, and smoking one cigarette after another. It was all right, however, once she went inside. Everyone said how marvelous she looked, and she kissed Ryder on the cheek and told him she already loved both his bride and his sister (whom she had just met and been delighted to find rather tackily dressed); she drank a great deal of champagne and danced with everyone — it was a good dress to dance in because the butterflies appeared to move — and when she left it was with a man who seemed to be about forty and who had a suite at the Claremont Hotel. She stayed there until 4 A.M., when she woke up and told him that the way he looked disgusted her, the way he talked disgusted her, and she disgusted herself, she was no better than Lily. Who was Lily, he wanted to know; she’s my sister , Martha said, and you aren’t good enough to say her name .

I’ve never been busier , she told them at the wedding, and in fact she had not been. Although neither she nor Lily had ever joined the Junior League, Martha now became a provisional member, spent every evening and most afternoons in town, and at the end of February calculated that she had received proposals of marriage from two of the boys with whom she had grown up and had gone to bed with three, counting one who was married and not counting the man she had met at Nancy Dupree’s wedding reception whose last name she did not remember. (She believed he had something to do with shopping centers, but it was all mixed up in her mind, as in Everett’s, with Henry Kaiser.) Since everyone else was at the moment married that just about cleaned the situation up, and when she tallied up their assets and their liabilities, the balance was, as she had hoped it would be, nada .

All the connections had been broken, all the bridges burned miles back in the country she had crossed to achieve this insular victory. Even Ryder was included in her pervasive contempt: he could no longer touch her. There, the battle had turned. All the others had been civilian casualties, lost somewhere beyond the front lines: Channing was her dam on the Ruhr, her Guadalcanal, her Stalingrad. Thinking herself victorious, she despised all the vulnerable: all those who liked or disliked, wanted or did not want, damaged themselves with loving and hating and migraine headaches. She imagined that she had emerged triumphant, and that the banner she planted read Noli Me Tangere .