Where I Was From

1

To me as a child, the State was the world as I knew it, and I pictured other States and countries as pretty much

MY MOTHER died on May 15, 2001, in Monterey, two weeks short of her ninety-first birthday. The preceding afternoon I had talked to her on the telephone from New York and she had hung up midsentence, a way of saying goodbye so characteristic of her — especially by way of allowing her callers to economize on what she still called “long distance”—that it did not occur to me until morning, when my brother called, that in this one last instance she had been just too frail to keep the connection.

Maybe not just too frail.

Maybe too aware of what could be the import of this particular goodbye.

Flying to Monterey I had a sharp apprehension of the many times before when I had, like Lincoln Steffens, “come back,” flown west, followed the sun, each time experiencing a lightening of spirit as the land below opened up, the checkerboards of the midwestern plains giving way to the vast empty reach between the Rockies and the Sierra Nevada; then home, there, where I was from, me, California. It would be a while before I realized that “me” is what we think when our parents die, even at my age, who will look out for me now, who will remember me as I was, who will know what happens to me now, where will I be from.

In the aftermath of my mother’s death I found myself thinking a good deal about the confusions and contradictions in California life, many of which she had herself embodied. She despised, for example, the federal government and its “giveaways,” but saw no contradiction between this view and her reliance on my father’s military reserve status to make free use of Air Force doctors and pharmacies, or to shop at the commissaries and exchanges of whatever military installation she happened to be near. She thought of the true California spirit as one of unfettered individualism, but carried the idea of individual rights to dizzying and often punitive lengths. She definitely aimed for an appearance of being “stern,” a word she seemed to think synonymous with what was not then called “parenting.” As a child herself in the upper Sacramento Valley she had watched men hung in front of the courthouse. When John Kennedy was assassinated she insisted that Lee Harvey Oswald had “every right” to assassinate him, that Jack Ruby in turn had “every right” to kill Lee Harvey Oswald, and that any breakdown of natural order in the event had been on the part of the Dallas police, who had failed to exercise their own right, which was “to shoot Ruby on the spot.” When I introduced her to my future husband, she advised him immediately that he would find her political beliefs so far to the right that he would think her “the original little old lady in tennis shoes.” At Christmas that year he gave her the entire John Birch library, dozens of call-to-action pamphlets, boxed. She was delighted, amused, displaying the pamphlets to everyone who came by the house that season, but to the best of my knowledge she never opened one.

She was passionately opinionated on a number of points that reflected, on examination, no belief she actually held. She thought of herself as an Episcopalian, as her mother had been. She was married at Trinity Episcopal Pro-Cathedral in Sacramento. She had me christened there. She buried her mother there. My brother and I had her own funeral service at Saint John’s Episcopal Chapel in Monterey, a church she had actually attended only two or three times but favored as an idea not only because it was a “California” church (it was built in the 1880s by Charles Crocker and C. P. Huntington on the grounds of the Southern Pacific’s Del Monte Hotel) but also because the litany used was that from the 1928, as opposed to the revised, Book of Common Prayer. Yet she had herself at age twelve refused outright to be confirmed an Episcopalian: she had gone through the instruction and been presented to the bishop, but, when asked for the usual rote affirmation of a fairly key doctrinal point, had declared resoundingly, as if it were a debate, that she found herself “incapable of believing” that Christ was the son of God. By the time of my own confirmation, she had further hardened this position. “The only church I could possibly go to would be Unitarian,” she announced when my grandmother asked why she never went to church with us.

“Eduene,” my grandmother said, a soft keening. “How can you say that.”

“I have to say it, if I want to be honest,” my mother said, the voice of sweet reason. “Since I don’t believe that Christ is the son of God.”

My grandmother brightened, seeing space for resolution. “Then it’s fine,” she said. “Because nobody has to believe all that.”

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 settled 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 exactly, 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.

3

ON the afternoon after our mother’s funeral my brother and I divided what few pieces of furniture she still had among her grandchildren, my brother’s three children and Quintana. There was not much left; during the previous few years she had been systematically giving away what she had, giving back Christmas presents, jettisoning belongings. I do not remember what Quintana’s cousins Kelley and Steven and Lori took. I do remember what Quintana took, because I have seen the pieces since in her apartment in New York. There was an oval Victorian table with a marble top that had come to my mother from some part of the family, I no longer remember which. There was a carved teak chest that had been in my mother and father’s bedroom when I was a child. There was a small piecrust table that had been my grandmother’s. There was, from among my mother’s clothes, an Italian angora cape that she had been wearing ever since my father gave it to her, one Christmas in the late 1940s.

Actually I took the angora cape.

I remembered her wearing it the spring before, at the wedding in Pebble Beach, of my brother’s youngest child. I remembered her wearing it in 1964 at my own wedding, wrapping herself in it for the drive from San Juan Bautista to the reception in Pebble Beach.

A representative from Allied came.

The pieces got tagged for shipment.

I put what I did not want to be thrown away — letters, photographs, clippings, folders and envelopes I could not that day summon up the time or the heart to open — in a large box.

Some weeks later the box arrived at my apartment in New York, where it sat in the dining room for perhaps a month, unopened. Finally I opened it. There were pictures of me on the beach at Carmel in 1936, pictures of me and my brother on the beach at Stinson Beach in 1946, pictures of me and my brother and my rabbit in the snow in Colorado Springs. There were pictures of great-aunts and cousins and great-great-grandparents who could be identified only because our mother, on the evening before she died, had thought to tell the names to my brother, who wrote them on the backing of the frames. There were pictures of my mother as a two-year-old visiting her grandmother in Oregon in 1912, there were pictures of my mother at a Peterson Field barbecue in 1943, a young woman in her early thirties wearing flowers in her hair as she makes hamburgers. There was an unframed watercolor of my grandmother’s. There were letters my grandmother’s brother Jim, like her father a merchant sea captain, had sent her in 1918 from England, where his ship, the S.S. Armenia, was in drydock at Southampton after having been torpedoed. There were letters my father had written to his own father in 1928, from a summer job on a construction crew outside Crescent City — my father asking, in letter after letter, if his father could please put in a word for him with an acquaintance who did the hiring for the State Fair jobs, a plea I happen to know was in vain.

I know this because I once wanted my father to make the same call for me.

My mother had told me to forget asking him, because he’s just like his own father, everybody in Sacramento picks up the phone to get their children jobs at the Fair but your father and his father never will, they won’t ask for favors.

There were also letters from me, letters I had written my mother from Berkeley, from the time I went down for summer school in 1952, making up credits between high school and college, until the time I graduated in 1956. These letters were in many ways unsettling, even dispiriting, in that I both recognized myself and did not. Have never been so depressed as when I got back here Sunday night, one of the first letters reads, from the summer of 1952. I keep thinking about Sacramento and what people are doing. I got a letter from Nancy — she misses Sacramento too. They saw “The King and I,” “Where’s Charley,” “Guys and Dolls,” and “Pal Joey.” A woman committed suicide by jumping out a window across from the Waldorf while they were there. Nancy said it was terrible, they had to clean up the street with fire hoses.

Nancy was my best friend from Sacramento, traveling with her parents (this is only a guess, but an informed one, since another letter to my mother that summer mentions having “heard from Nancy who is at the Greenbrier and so bored”) before beginning Stanford.

Nancy and I had known each other since we were five, when we had been in the same ballet class at Miss Marion Halls dancing school in Sacramento.

In fact there was also, in the box that came from my mother’s house, a program for a recital of that very ballet class: Joan Didion and Nancy Kennedy, the program read. “Les Petites.” There were also in the box many photographs of Nancy and me: modeling children’s clothes in a charity fashion show, wearing matching corsages around our wrists at a high-school dance, standing on the lawn outside Nancy’s house on the day of her wedding, Nancy in bouffant white, the bridesmaids in pale green organza, all of us smiling.

The last time I saw Nancy was at the Outrigger Canoe Club in Honolulu, during the Christmas season of the Iran hostage crisis. She was at the next table, having dinner with her husband and children. They were laughing and arguing and interrupting just as she and her brothers and her mother and father had laughed and argued and interrupted in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when I would have dinner at their house two or three times a week.

We kissed, we had a drink together, we promised to keep in touch.

A few months later Nancy was dead, of cancer, at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York.

I sent the recital program to Nancy’s brother, to send on to her daughter.

I had my grandmother’s watercolor framed and sent it to the next oldest of her three granddaughters, my cousin Brenda, in Sacramento.

I closed the box and put it in a closet.

There is no real way to deal with everything we lose.

When my father died I kept moving. When my mother died I could not. The last time I saw her was eight weeks before she died. She had been in the hospital, my brother and I had gotten her home, we had arranged for oxygen and shifts of nurses, we had filled the prescriptions for morphine and Ativan. On the morning Quintana and I were to leave for New York, my mother insisted that we bring her a painted metal box that sat on a small table in her bedroom, a box in which she kept papers she thought might have importance, for example a copy of the deed to a gold mine in El Dorado County that she and her sister had inherited from their father and no longer owned. My brother said that she did not need the box, that he had already extracted any still operable papers and put them in safekeeping. She was insistent. She wanted the metal box. Quintana brought the box and set it on the bed. From it my mother took two pieces of silver flatware, a small ladle and a small serving spoon, each wrapped in smoothed scraps of used tissue paper. She gave the serving spoon to Quintana and the ladle to me. I protested: she had already given me all her silver, I had ladles, she had given me ladles. “Not this one,” she said. She pointed out the curve of the handle. It seemed that she had what she called “a special feeling” for the way the handle curved on this particular ladle. It seemed that she found this ladle so satisfying to touch that she had set it aside, kept it. I said that since it gave her pleasure she should continue to keep it. “Take it,” she said, her voice urgent. “I don’t want it lost.” I was still pretending that she would get through the Sierra before the snows fell. She was not.