Democracy by Joan Didion Read Free Book Online

the bench from which they could watch the sun on the sea. She had carried Jessie even from the house to the government car that returned at sundown to take them to the hotel where Harry was due at midnight.
    There in the sun on the redwood deck on San Luis Road Inez began to think of Berkeley as another place in which she might later remember being extremely happy, another borrowed house, and she resolved to keep this in mind, but by June of that year, back in New York, she was already losing the details. That was the June during which Adlai had the accident (the second accident, the bad one, the accident in which the fifteen-year-old from Denver lost her left eye and the function of one kidney), and it was also the June, 1973, during which Inez found Jessie on the floor of her bedroom with the disposable needle and the glassine envelope in her Snoopy wastebasket.
    “Let me die and get it over with,” Jessie said. “Let me be in the ground and go to sleep.”
    The doctor came in a sweat suit.
    “I got a D in history,” Jessie said. “Nobody sits with me at lunch. Don’t tell Daddy.”
    “I’m right here,” Harry said.
    “Daddy’s right here,” Inez said.
    “Don’t tell Daddy,” Jessie said.
    “It might be useful to talk about therapy,” the doctor said.
    “It might also be useful to assign some narcs to the Dalton School,” Harry said. “No. Strike that. Don’t quote me.”
    “This is a stressful time,” the doctor said.
    The first therapist the doctor recommended was a young woman attached to a clinic on East 61st Street that specialized in the treatment of what the therapist called adolescent substance abuse. “It might be useful to talk about you,” the therapist said. “Your own life, how you perceive it.”
    Inez remembered that the therapist was wearing a silver ankh.
    She remembered that she could see Jessie through a glass partition, chewing on a strand of her long blond hair, bent over the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory.
    “My life isn’t really the problem at hand,” she remembered saying. “Is it?”
    The therapist smiled.
    Inez lit a cigarette.
    It occurred to her that if she just walked into the next room and took Jessie by the hand and got her on a plane somewhere, still wearing her Dalton School sweat shirt, the whole thing might blow over. They could go meet Adlai in Colorado Springs. Adlai had gone back to Colorado Springs the day before, for summer session at the school where he was trying to accumulate enough units to get into a college accredited for draft deferment. They could go meet Harry in Ann Arbor. Harry had left for Ann Arbor that morning, to deliver his lecture on the uses and misuses of civil disobedience. “I can’t get through to her,” Harry had said before he left for Ann Arbor. “Adlai may be a fuck-up, but I can talk to Adlai. I talk to her, I’m talking to a UFO.”
    “Adlai,” Inez had said, “happens to believe that he can satisfy his American History requirement with a three-unit course called History of American Film.”
    “Very good, Inez. Broad, but good.”
    “Broad, but true. In addition to which. Moreover. I asked Adlai to make a point of going to the hospital to see Cynthia. Here’s what he said.”
    “Cynthia who?” Harry said.
    “Cynthia who he almost killed in the accident. ‘She’s definitely on the agenda.’ Is what he said.”
    “At least he said something. All you’d get from her is the stare.”
    “You always say her . Her name is Jessie.”
    “ I know her goddamn name. ”
    Strike Ann Arbor.
    Harry would be sitting around in his shirtsleeves expressing admiration (“Admiration, Christ no, what I feel when I see you guys is a kind of awe ”) for the most socially responsible generation ever to hit American campuses.
    Strike Colorado Springs.
    Adlai already had his agenda.
    Jessie looked up from the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory and smiled fleetingly at the glass partition.
    “The ‘problem