A Book of Common Prayer by Joan Didion Read Free Book Online

westward expansion to have come to her attention. She also associated it with events in France and Russia that had probably turned out all right, otherwise why had they happened.
    A not atypical norteamericana .
    Of her time and place.
    It occurs to me tonight that give or take twenty years and a thousand miles Charlotte Douglas’s time and place and my time and place were not too different.
    Some things about Charlotte I never understood. She was a woman who grew faint when she noticed the blue arterial veins in her wrists, could not swim in clouded water, and once suffered an attack of acute terror while wading in water where an artesian well churned up the sand. Yet during the time she was in Boca Grande I saw her perform a number of tasks with the same instinctive lack of squeamishness I had seen that day at Millonario. I once saw her skin an iguana for stew. I once saw her make the necessary incision in the trachea of an OAS field worker who was choking on a piece of steak at the Jockey Club. A doctor had been called but the OAS man was turning blue. Charlotte did it with a boning knife plunged first in a vat of boiling rice. A few nights later the OAS man caused a scene because Charlotte refused to fellate him on the Caribe terrace, but that, although suggestive of the ambiguous signals Charlotte tended to transmit, is neither here nor there. Similarly, during the cholera outbreak that year Charlotte volunteered to give inoculations, and she did, for thirty-four hours without sleeping, until the remaining Lederle vaccine was appropriated by one of Victor’s colonels. When the colonel suggested that as a norteamericana she might be in a position to buy back some of the vaccine Charlotte only smiled, took off the white smock she had borrowed from the clinic, and dropped it at the colonel’s feet. For the rest of that day Charlotte sat on the edge of the Caribe pool with her feet in the water and stared at the birds circling in the white sky. She did not wear dark glasses and by five o’clock the pale skin around her eyes was burned and puffy. For a few days Charlotte spoke to Gerardo about leaving Boca Grande, but within a week she had revised the incident to coincide with her own view of human behavior and assured me that the vaccine had been taken only so that the army could lend its resources to the inoculation program. I used to think that the only event in Charlotte Douglas’s life to resist her revisions and erasures was Marin’s disappearance.
    “Interesting portrait there,” the thin FBI man said, his eyes still on the 10′ by 16′ silk screen given to Leonard by one of the Alameda Three.
    “Warhol,” Charlotte said.
    “I would have guessed Mao.”
    “Mao. Of course.” Charlotte had no idea how one of the Alameda Three had happened to come by a Warhol silk screen. Or maybe it had not been one of the Alameda Three at all, maybe it had been one of the Tacoma Eleven or some Indian or Panther or heir to a motion-picture studio, Charlotte could never keep Leonard’s clients straight. They came in packs and they ate and they asked for odd drinks and they went through her medicine cabinet and they borrowed and did not return her sweaters and they never addressed her directly and she could never remember their names. She wished that she could. She also wished that Marin would walk through the door of the house on California Street with a tow ticket tied to her windbreaker.
    “You see you don’t know Marin,” she added finally. “I know her.”
    The fat FBI man coughed. The other examined a matchbook he had picked up from a table.
    “I mean I’m her mother.”
    “Of course you are,” the fat FBI man said.
    “I don’t quite follow what she’s saying about this Chinese couple,” one of the new FBI men said. It was almost time for lunch and Charlotte had not yet eaten breakfast and the house on California Street seemed to be filling with men who spoke to each other as if Charlotte were not there.