Run River by Joan Didion Read Free Book Online Page B

seemed in retrospect an amusing story, and Lily wondered, the June afternoon in 1940 when Everett and his father came to the house for a drink, whether or not she should tell it. She decided that she should not: his four years at Stanford and her one at Berkeley had made Everett seem almost a stranger. She could not remember even seeing him for a couple of years, except once that winter when she had gone down to Stanford for a party and had gotten sick on Mission Bell wine at the Deke house. (Everett had gotten her some cold coffee from the kitchen and had made her date stay in another room until she felt better; she had thought herself humiliated, and neither she nor Everett’s girl, a blond tennis player from Atherton, had much appreciated his gallantry.) He looked, now, taller than she remembered, and older. She wondered whether some small tragedy had befallen him and hardened his face, whether perhaps he had thought himself in love with and spurned by the tennis player. He would be, she thought, the type.
    “I tell him he ought to go into the law,” John McClellan said, taking off his rimless glasses and polishing them on a corner of his jacket. “Into politics. We could use some growers in Sacramento.”
    “Maybe I better get to be a grower first,” Everett said politely. He had been, Lily remembered, a precociously polite child. Her clearest recollections were of him assuming full responsibility for Martha’s social errors, gravely apologizing for the spilt strawberry punch, the uprooted azalea, the hysteria when someone other than Martha pinned the tail on the donkey.
    “You tell him how they need us,” Mr. McClellan said. “You’re the one to tell him.”
    Walter Knight picked up a pair of garden shears from the tiled terrace floor and pruned a branch from a dwarf lemon.
    “I’m not sure they do,” he said finally, intent upon the lemon. “I’m not at all sure they need us. The San Joaquin still makes itself heard.”
    “Hah,” Mr. McClellan said triumphantly. “The big boys. The corporation boys. There’s your point.”
    Lily did not look at her father. When he spoke at last there was no inflection in his voice.
    “This isn’t the San Joaquin. They don’t run ranches around here from offices in the Russ Building in San Francisco.”
    “There’s your point,” Mr. McClellan repeated.
    “Here’s my point,” Walter Knight said. “We’re expendable.”
    Everett smiled at Lily. The sun was setting behind his chair and his blond hair, cut close, looked white in the sunset blaze. Lily extended one bare foot and contemplated it, not smiling back. Neither she nor her mother ever mentioned politics to her father any more: it had been tactless to speak of the Legislature.
    Although Everett called her at six-thirty the next morning he did not wake her, because the heat had stayed all night and she had gotten up at five-thirty to lie on the terrace in her nightgown. By six o’clock the sun had been high enough to make the heat shimmer in the air again. Looking to the east and squinting to block out the sun, she could make out the Sierra Nevada swimming clear on the horizon.
    She wanted to go somewhere but did not know where. There was a glass of beer on the table, left from the night before, and she flicked a small colorless spider from the rim with her fingernail and let the warm flat beer trickle down her throat. That there was really nowhere to go (she did not like the mountains and had only a week before come home from the coast) made her no less restless, lying almost motionless in the still morning heat and chewing absently on the sash to her nightgown. She wanted to stay here and she wanted something else besides. Her grades had arrived from Berkeley yesterday, neatly and irrevocably recorded on the self-addressed postcards she had left in her bluebooks. One B-minus, in English 1B; a C in History 17A, a C in Psychology 1B, a C-minus in Geology 1 (commonly known as a football players’ course