Joan Didion - Run River

“Great little girl,” the dealer said. “The finest.”

“I always liked the Carmelo place.” Martha smoothed her gloves in her lap. “They gave a dance once on the third floor and lined both the stairways with azalea. It was about the first dance I ever went to.”

“Termites,” the dealer said. “Rotten with termites.”

“Bugsy wants one storey,” Ryder said.

“Where is she?” the Cadillac dealer demanded querulously. “Why aren’t they here?” He turned to Martha. “She’s shopping with my wife. Mitzi said they’d meet us here at six-thirty.”

“It’s not quite six-thirty,” Ryder said. “I saw you last week at Nancy Slaughter’s. You were just leaving.”

“That’s right,” she said. “We were there a few minutes.”

“Listen, Marth.” He absently transferred some change from one pocket to another. “I’m glad I ran into you. I’m going to be out the river road tomorrow. Maybe I’ll stop by.”

“I won’t be home. But I’m sure Lily and Everett would like seeing you.”

“Some other time.” He stood up as Sam came back.

“Remember me to your dad, Marty,” the Cadillac dealer said. “Hasta luego for now.”

When Ryder arrived the next afternoon at two o’clock Martha was alone in the house: Lily had taken China Mary and the children to have their chest X-rays; Everett was out working on the levees. The rain had gone to the mountains and was melting the snow too fast. Although Lily had wanted Martha to come have her chest X-rayed with them (“Talk about sickly, you look tubercular right now”), Martha had refused: she wanted to lie down. She had not gotten home from Jackson until three A.M., and Sam Bradley, although she had told him it was not good business, had stayed until nearly five. I can’t abide your kind , she had ended up screaming at him; she did not know what had happened but it was the same thing that always happened. She would have a couple of drinks or simply get very tired or sometimes just wake up in the morning despising someone, everyone. If it happened in the morning she could lie there, hating, until it wore itself out, but if it happened around people she always ended up screaming. The very presence of Sam Bradley had seemed a personal affront to her: his bow tie a monument to both his vacuity and her lack of taste; his enthusiasm for the Mexican place in Jackson an affectation so transparent that she was mortified to have abetted it (he had greeted the cook warmly as “Mamacita,” and Martha had looked on with approval); his brand of cigarettes (not her own) the crushing evidence of his mediocrity, his blatancy, his subtle lack of the male principle. It had begun when Sam said that no matter what Everett said, Earl Warren was an intelligent and reasonable man; it could have begun as well had he merely said he liked her dress, or did not like a book he was reading. She had once turned viciously on Ryder for changing his shirt before dinner. His vanity. His shallowness. His carelessness. His thoughtlessness, his selfishness. Did he think the whole world existed simply to provide him with clean shirts. Even remembering it, she felt quite dizzy with loathing for Ryder.

“I thought you might be here,” Ryder said when she opened the door.

“I’m trying to sleep.” She did not ask him to take off his raincoat but simply stood there, trying for once to examine him closely, to make some final damning judgment. She remembered once seeing in his apartment a postcard from a girl, possibly even Nancy Dupree — it had been signed “XXXX and you know what, from B”—which read “Loved seeing you Saturday nite you looked so sexy in your white pants.” Although “sexy” was not a word she had ever applied to anyone, she had tried to see Ryder that way for several days. But all she had seen, then as now, was Ryder , and when she said, the next time he wore white pants, “You look fat-assed in those pants, Ryder, they don’t flatter you,” it was no judgment, only response.

“What are you looking at,” he said.

“I’ve been trying to sleep,” she repeated, defeated. “I’m not looking at anything.”

Fifteen minutes later he had her down on the floor; she had refused to go near the couch.

“You want it,” he said. She had her legs crossed and her face turned away from him.

“I do not.”

“What difference do you think it makes now.” He pushed her skirt up around her waist. “After I’ve screwed you maybe four, five times a week every week for the past five years.”

“Four and a half years,” she said faintly; his logic remained intact.

“Four and a half years.”

“I never wanted it.” Recognizing immediately that this clear untruth tended only to weaken her position, she amended it: “A lot of times I only pretended to want it.”

“You want it now, all right. You don’t have to start acting half-assed with me.”

After he had gone (Whose girl? Your girl) Martha went upstairs and lay on her bed until she heard, just as it was getting dark, the children’s voices downstairs.

She found Lily in the kitchen, pulling off Julie’s galoshes. “Where’s Everett?” she asked.

“Still working on the levees. I don’t know.”

“I’m going to see if I can find him.” Martha pulled on a raincoat, buttoned it briskly, and then, as if she had forgotten why she wanted the raincoat in the first place, sat down and slowly began to unbutton it again.

“You’re undoing your coat,” Julie said, laying her head in Martha’s lap. “Where you going?”

Martha smoothed Julie’s hair. “I guess nowhere. I guess I couldn’t find him.”

“I guess not,” Julie agreed. She was the kind of child who agreed with anything said by an adult. “You coming to the parade?”

“What parade is that?”

“The Saint Patrick’s Day Parade. It’s Saint Patrick’s Day in town.”

“Who all’s going?”

“Me and Mommy and Knight. Only Knight can’t go if he doesn’t apologize for breaking my pedometer.”

“Knight broke your pedometer? However will you figure mileage?”

“That’s the thing. Anyway, two of our cousins are in it.”

“In what?”

“In the par ade,” Lily said. “You aren’t following this very closely. Sally Randall’s children are marching and I thought we should go wave at them. We’re going to have hamburgers first. Why don’t you get dressed and come.”

“I guess I’m dressed all right. I don’t guess I have to get all done up for the Saint Patrick’s Day Parade, do I. You know what it’ll be. There’ll be a bagpipe band playing ‘The Campbells Are Coming.’ The Air Force Band playing ‘Loch Lomond.’ And a battalion of small girls in spangled two-piece bathing suits and white plastic Stetsons doing close-order drill to ‘Temptation.’ You-came-Ah was a-lone-Ah should-a-known — You were Taymp-tay-shun.”

“ Mar tha,” Julie screamed, throwing herself at Martha’s knees. “Stop making fun.”

“I’m not making fun.” Martha picked Julie up and swung her around. “I am telling you gospel. Because baby, I have seen Saint Patrick’s Day before, seen it all . ‘Temptation’ will be sung —through a public-address system on a truck behind the small girls — by a mother wearing a rose crêpe dress with bugle beads, a short red car coat, and harlequin-framed glasses. So much for that. There will also be the Sheriff’s Posse: fifteen dentists on fifteen palominos. And Julie baby, we’re so wide open out here there’ll probably even be the Masons.”

“The Masons are not our cousins.”

“That’s right, baby. The Randalls are our cousins.”

Lily stood up and picked up a lipstick from the shelf beside the sink. “You coming or not?”