Where I Was From Read online

  Only in recent years did I come to realize that many of these dramatically pronounced opinions of my mother’s were defensive, her own version of her great-grandmother’s “fixed and settled principles, aims and motives in life,” a barricade against some deep apprehension of meaninglessness. There had been glimpses of this apprehension all along, overlooked by me, my own barricade. She did not see a point in making beds, for example, since “they just get slept in again.” Nor did she see a point in dusting, since dust just returned. “What difference does it make,” she would often say, by way of ending a discussion of whether an acquaintance should leave her husband, say, or whether a cousin should drop out of school and become a manicurist. “What difference does it make,” five words that had come to chill me at the bone, was what she said when I pressed her on the point about selling the cemetery. On the Good Friday after her own mother died she happened to be driving across the country with a friend from Sacramento. At the place where they stopped for dinner there had been no fish on the menu, only meat. “I took one bite and I thought of Mother and I wanted to throw up,” my mother said when she arrived at my apartment in New York a few days later. Her mother, she said, would never eat meat on Good Friday. Her mother did not like to cook fish, but she would get a crab and crack it. I was about to suggest that cracked Dungeness crab was hard to come by on the average mid western road trip, but before I could speak I noticed that she was crying. “What difference does it make,” she said finally.

  I had seen my mother cry only once before. The first time had been during World War Two, on a downtown street in some town where my father was stationed, Tacoma or Durham or Colorado Springs. My brother and I had been left in the car while our mother went into the military housing office that dealt with dependents. The office was crowded, women and children leaning against the plate glass windows and spilling outside. When our mother came back out onto the sidewalk she was crying: it seemed to be the end of some rope, one day too many on which there would be no place for us to stay.

  The blank dreariness, Sarah Royce wrote.

  Without house or home.

  When she got into the car her eyes were dry and her expression was determinedly cheerful. “It’s an adventure,” she said. “Its wartime, its history, you children will be thankful you got to see all this.” In one of those towns we finally got a room in a hotel, with a shared bathtub, into which she poured a bottle of pine disinfectant every day before bathing us. In Durham we had one room, with kitchen privileges, in the house of a fundamentalist preacher and his family who sat on the porch after dinner and ate peach ice cream, each from his or her own quart carton. The preacher’s daughter had a full set of Gone With the Wind paper dolls, off limits to me. It was in Durham where the neighborhood children crawled beneath the back stoop and ate the dirt, scooping it up with a cut raw potato and licking it off, craving some element their diet lacked.

  Pica.

  I knew the word even then, because my mother told me. “Poor children do it,” she said, with the same determinedly cheerful expression. “In the South. You never would have learned that in Sacramento.”

  It was in Durham where my mother noticed my brother reaching for something through the bars of his playpen and froze, unable to move, because what he was reaching for was a copperhead. The copperhead moved on, possibly another instance of the “providential interposition” that had spared my mother’s great-great-grandfather from the mad dog in Georgia.

  Something occurs to me as I write this: my mother did not kill the copperhead.

  Only once, in Colorado Springs, did we actually end up living in a house of our own—not much of a house, a four-room stucco bungalow, rented furnished, but a house. I had skipped part of first grade because we were moving around and I had skipped second grade because we were moving around but in Colorado Springs we had a house, in Colorado Springs I could go to school. I did. They were already doing multiplication and I had skipped learning how to subtract. Out at the base where my father was stationed pilots kept spiraling down through the high thin Colorado air. The way you knew was that you heard the crash wagons. A classmate told me that her mother did not allow her to play with military trash. My grandmother came by train to visit, bringing as usual material solace, thick blue towels and Helena Rubinstein soap in the shape of apple blossoms. I have snapshots of the two of us in front of the Broadmoor Hotel, my grandmother in a John Fredericks hat, me in a Brownie uniform. “You are just out of luck to be home because it’s so nice and warm here,” I wrote to her when she was gone. The letter, which I found with my mother’s snapshots of the period, is decorated with gold and silver stars and cutout Christmas trees, suggesting that I had been trying hard for the upbeat. “But Mommy heard a girl say on the base that ‘Remember last New Year’s? It was eighteen below, and we had just this kind of weather.’ We have a blue spruce Christmas tree. Jimmy and me are going to a party the 23rd at the base. They have a new name for the base. It’s Peterson field.”

  I remember that my mother made me give the apple-blossom soap to the wife of a departing colonel, a goodbye present. I remember that she encouraged me to build many of those corrals that Californians were meant to know how to build, branches lashed together with their own stripped bark, ready for any loose livestock that might come our way, one of many frontier survival techniques I have never had actual occasion to use. I remember that once when we were snowbound she taught me how to accept and decline formal invitations, a survival technique from a different daydream: Miss Joan Didion accepts with pleasure the kind invitation of, Miss Joan Didion regrets that she is unable to accept the kind invitation of. Another time when we were snowbound she gave me several old copies of Vogue, and pointed out in one of them an announcement of the competition Vogue then had for college seniors, the Prix de Paris, first prize a job in Vogues Paris or New York office.

  You could win that, she said. When the time comes. You could win that and live in Paris. Or New York. Wherever you wanted. But definitely you could win it.

  A dozen-plus years later, my senior year at Berkeley, I did win it, and drove to Sacramento with the telegram from Vogue in my bag. I had found the yellow envelope with the glassine window slipped under my apartment door when I got back from a class that afternoon. We are delighted to inform you, the little strips of yellow tape read. Miss Jessica Daves, Editor-in-Chief, Vogue. When I showed the telegram to my mother I reminded her that it had been her idea in the first place.

  “Really?” she said, doubtful.

  This calls for a drink, my father said, his solution, as hanging up was my mother’s solution, to any moment when emotion seemed likely to surface.

  Colorado Springs, I said, prompting her. When we were snowbound.

  “Imagine your remembering,” she said.

  I see now that World War Two was our own Big Sandy, Little Sandy, Humboldt Sink.

  Imagine your remembering.

  Something else I remembered: I remembered her telling me that when the war was over we would all go to live in Paris. Toute la famille. Paris had not yet been liberated but she already had a plan: my father was to reinvent himself as an architect, study architecture at the Sorbonne on the G.I. Bill. To this end she tried to teach me the French she had learned at Lowell High School in San Francisco.

  Pourquoi did we never go to live in Paris?

  Je ne sais pas.

  A few years after the war ended, when we were again living in Sacramento, I asked this question. My mother said that we had never gone to live in Paris because my father felt an obligation to his family to remain in Sacramento. I recall wondering how much of the plan she had actually discussed with him, since I had never been able to quite bring the picture of my father dropping everything and starting over in Paris into clear focus. The problem in the picture was not that he was risk-averse. Risk was in fact our bread and butter, risk was what put the lamb chops on the table. He had supported my mother and me during the Depression by playing poker with older and more s
ettled acquaintances at the Sutter Club, a men’s club in Sacramento to which he did not belong. Right now, after the war, he was supporting my mother and brother and me by buying houses and pieces of property with no money to speak of, then leveraging them, and buying some more. His idea of a relaxing way to make a payment was to drive to Nevada and shoot craps all night.

  No.

  “Risk” he definitely would have gone for.

  The problem in the picture was “Paris.”

  One of the few perfectly clear points in his belief system (there was much that remained opaque) was the conviction that France, where he had never been, was a worthless country peopled exclusively by the devious, the corrupt, the frivolous, and the collaborating. The name “Didion,” he insisted, was not French but German, the name of an ancestor who, although German, “happened to live in Alsace after the French took it over.” The first time I went to Paris I sent him a page from a telephone book on which many apparently French Parisians named “Didion” were listed, but he never mentioned it.

  One element in my mother’s version of the chimerical Paris adventure did hold up: it was true that my father felt an obligation to his family to remain in Sacramento. The reason he felt this obligation had been distilled, within the family and over the years, into a plausible sequence of events, a story so reasonable that it seemed unconvincing, a kind of cartoon. Here was the story: when his mother was dying of influenza in 1918 she had told him to take care of his younger brother, and when his brother lost an eye in a fireworks accident my father thought he had failed. In fact whatever unfulfilled and unfulfillable obligation he felt was less identifiable than that. There was about him a sadness so pervasive that it colored even those many moments when he seemed to be having a good time. He had many friends. He played golf, he played tennis, he played poker, he seemed to enjoy parties. Yet he could be in the middle of a party at our own house, sitting at the piano—playing “Darktown Strutter’s Ball,” say, or “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” a bourbon highball always within reach—and the tension he transmitted would seem so great that I would have to leave, run to my room and close the door.

  It was during my first year at Berkeley when the physical manifestations of this tension became sufficiently troubling that he was referred to Letterman Hospital, at the Presidio in San Francisco, to undergo a series of tests. I am unsure how long he spent at Letterman, but it was a period covering some weeks or months. My mother would drive down from Sacramento on the weekends, either Saturday or Sunday, and pick me up at the Tri Delt house in Berkeley. We would cross the Bay Bridge and go out to the Presidio and pick up my father for lunch. I remember that all he would eat that year were oysters, raw. I remember that after the oysters we would spend the rest of the afternoon driving—not back into the city, because he did not like San Francisco, but through Golden Gate Park, down the beach, over into Marin County, anywhere he was likely to see a pickup baseball game he could stop and watch. I remember that at the end of the afternoon he would instruct my mother to drop him not at the Presidio but at the southwesternmost end of Golden Gate Park, so that he could walk back to the hospital along the beach. Sometimes during the week he would walk across the Golden Gate Bridge, visit a cousin at his Sausalito office, and walk back. Once I walked across the bridge with him. I remember that it swayed. In his letters to my mother he dismissed the Letterman psychiatrists as “the mind guys,” or sometimes “the mind-over-matter guys,” but a year or so before he died, in his eighties, he told me that there had been “this woman doctor” at Letterman who had been “actually very helpful” to him. “We talked about my mother,” he said. It was several years after he died before I was able to fully articulate what could not have escaped either my or my mother’s fixedly narrowed attention on those weekend afternoons in 1953: those were bad walks for someone under observation for depression.

  It occurs to me how brave he must have been, to make those walks and come back.

  It also occurs to me how brave my mother must have been, to drive back alone to Sacramento while he made those walks.

  My father died in December of 1992. A few months later, in March, I happened to drive my mother from Monterey to Berkeley, where we were to spend a few nights at the Claremont Hotel and I was to speak at a University of California Charter Day ceremony.

  “Are we on the right road,” my mother had asked again and again as we drove up 101.

  I had repeatedly assured her that we were, at last pointing out an overhead sign: 101 North.

  “Then where did it all go,” she had asked.

  She meant where did Gilroy go, where was the Milias Hotel, where could my father eat short ribs now. She meant where did San Juan Bautista go, why was it no longer so sweetly remote as it had been on the day of my wedding there in 1964. She meant where had San Benito and Santa Clara Counties gone as she remembered them, the coastal hills north of Salinas, the cattle grazing, the familiar open vista that had been relentlessly replaced (during the year, two years, three, the blink of the eye during which she had been caring for my father) by mile after mile of pastel subdivisions and labyrinthine exits and entrances to freeways that had not previously existed.

  For some miles she was silent.

  California had become, she said then, “all San Jose.”

  In the bar at the Claremont that evening someone was playing, as if to reinforce what had become a certain time-travel aspect in our excursion, “Only Make Believe,” and “Where or When.”

  The smile you are smiling you were smiling then—

  But I can’t remember where or when—

  I had last been in the bar at the Claremont in 1955, with the son of a rancher from Mendocino County. I recall that I had my roommates driver’s license and a crème de menthe frappé. Thirty-eight years later, from the platform at the Charter Day ceremony, I glanced at the row where my mother was seated and found her chair empty. When I located her outside she told me that it had been essential to leave. She said that “something terrible” had happened during the academic procession, something that had made her fear that she would “cry in front of everybody.” It seemed that she had seen a banner reading “Class of 1931,” and had realized that the handful of men straggling along behind it (if there were any women she did not mention them) were having trouble walking.

  The Class of 1931 had been my father’s class at Berkeley. “They were all old men,” my mother said about those few of his former classmates who had made the procession. “They were just like your father.” Frank Reese “Jim” Didion, the memorial note for my father had read in the alumni magazine. December 19, in Carmel. A native of Sacramento, where he was active as a real estate investor, he majored in business at Cal and was a member of Chi Phi. He is survived by his wife, Eduene, two children, Joan Didion Dunne ’56 and James ’62, and four grandchildren, including Steven ’88 and Lori ’93. There was no believable comfort I could offer my mother: she was right. They were all old men and it was all San Jose. Child of the crossing story that I was, I left my mother with Lori ’93 and took the United redeye from San Francisco to Kennedy, the last plane to land before a storm CNN was calling “The Nor’easter of the Century” closed every airport and highway north of Atlanta. I remembered this abandonment the day she died.

  2

  I also remembered this one.

  Sacramento, July or August, 1971 or 1972.

  I had brought Quintana—my daughter, then five or six—to spend a few days with my mother and father. Because it would be 105 at two and 110 before the sun went down, my mother and I decided to take Quintana out to lunch, somewhere with air conditioning.

  My father did not believe in air conditioning.

  My father in fact believed that Sacramento summers had been too cold since the dams.

  We would go downtown, my mother said. We would have lunch in the Redevelopment. Old Sacramento. You haven’t even seen Old Sacramento, she said.

  I asked if she had seen Old Sacramento.

  Not e
xactly, she said. But she definitely wanted to. We would see it together, it would be an adventure.

  Quintana was wearing a pinafore, pale green, Liberty lawn.

  My mother gave her a big straw hat to wear against the sun.

  We drove downtown, we parked, we started walking on what had been Front Street, its view of the Tower Bridge pretty much constituting the “adventure” part.

  The sidewalks in the Redevelopment were wooden, to give the effect of 1850.

  Quintana was walking ahead of us.

  The lawn pinafore, the big hat, the wooden sidewalk, the shimmer of the heat.

  My father’s great-grandfather had owned a saloon on Front Street.

  I was about to explain this to Quintana—the saloon, the wooden sidewalk, the generations of cousins who had walked just as she was walking down just this street on days just this hot—when I stopped. Quintana was adopted. Any ghosts on this wooden sidewalk were not in fact Quintana’s responsibility. This wooden sidewalk did not in fact represent anywhere Quintana was from. Quintana’s only attachments on this wooden sidewalk were right now, here, me and my mother.

  In fact I had no more attachment to this wooden sidewalk than Quintana did: it was no more than a theme, a decorative effect.

  It was only Quintana who was real.

  Later it seemed to me that this had been the moment when all of it—the crossing, the redemption, the abandoned rosewood chests, the lost flatware, the rivers I had written to replace the rivers I had left, the twelve generations of circuit riders and county sheriffs and Indian fighters and country lawyers and Bible readers, the two hundred years of clearings in Virginia and Kentucky and Tennessee and then the break, the dream of America, the entire enchantment under which I had lived my life—began to seem remote.