Run River by Joan Didion Page A

from his personal and social furies, and those Eumenides at his back were what attracted and repelled Lily. “You’re my haunted lover,” she would laugh, although he was, literally, neither; a fact which, in his roommate’s eyes, tended to confirm Lily’s social uselessness.
    She had even invited him up the river for a day during spring week. Once home, she regretted having asked him. But he was delighted by the prospect of observing her in her native decay, and so she drove to Sacramento to meet him one morning. As soon as she saw him standing on the lawn in front of the Southern Pacific station, radiating the same intense concern which had first charmed her in Berkeley, she knew that it would be a difficult day. He was as alien to the Valley as she might have been to the Bronx, and the alienation went deeper than his black turtle-necked sweater, went beyond the copy of In Dubious Battle with which he had been briefing himself on the train. By the time she drove him to the station that evening (he had tried throughout dinner to correct the errors in Walter Knight’s impression of Upton Sinclair and EPIC), she was too exhausted even to speak. “You’ll be glad to get away from all this,” he said tentatively, taking a last drag on a cigarette and throwing it out the window. “Get away from all what?” she said, watching the sparks in the rearview mirror. “I meant you’ll feel free in New York. You’ll develop.” Uncomfortably aware that she had at some point agreed to go to New York with him (although she had never had the slightest intention of doing so), she increased her pressure on the accelerator. “I’m not likely to get away from all this,” she said, for once safe enough to say what she meant, her hands on the wheel of her father’s car, driving the roads for which her father paid. “Any more than you’re likely to get away from wherever it is you come from. And we don’t throw cigarettes out the window here. It starts fires.” She had meant to go to bed with him but because she had still to discover, at seventeen, the possibilities in someone she did not like, she had not.
    Abruptly, Lily stood up and lifted the damp hair off her neck. With aimless violence, she threw the beer glass down the slope, then ran after it to where the lawn faded into dirt and dry yellow grass. Kicking a faucet open with her foot, she let the clear water (well water, not the river water they used for irrigation) splash over her arms and face. It was a waste of water early in a dry summer, and its extravagance relieved her. That helped some, that and swinging from an oak branch about to break from the tree, and by the time she reached the house in her wet nightgown the telephone was ringing.
    “Sorry if I woke you,” Everett McClellan said. “I’m about to take a truck into town for some extra help.”
    “You didn’t wake me.” This was more like it. Hoping, although it could not matter, that her mother had not picked up the extension in her bedroom, she tried to smooth her hair with her free hand.
    “I mean I thought—” He spoke with some difficulty. “I thought you might like to ride in.”
    “Right now?”
    “You’re probably busy.”
    “Not really.” She wondered what he thought she did between six-thirty and seven-thirty in the morning. “I’ll get dressed.”
    As she shook out her wet hair with a towel she hummed softly, and looked in the mirror for the first time in months without regretting the waste of her perfectly good but constantly depreciating body.
    “You look younger than Marth,” Everett said when she climbed into the truck.
    “I’m older. A year.” She glanced down at her thin arms, brown against the white of her dress. Martha McClellan was not yet seventeen, a freshman come fall at the University of California at Davis. When Lily’s mother, on the behalf of the Pi Beta Phi Alumnae Club, had urged Martha to enroll at Berkeley and participate in rushing, Martha had told her