The Last Love Song (9 page)

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If the world went dark for Didion during Sacramento's blackouts just days after her seventh birthday, darkness seemed to assume a personal shape and intent while she was eight years old and living in Colorado. One day, during a fire drill at the Columbia School, her right temple began to ache and she experienced the sensation that something had been “taken out of the middle” of her vision. She had lost something “mentally” as well. It was not just a headache. It “brutalize[d] me,” she said. The school called her mother, who took her home. Didion lay listless in bed. Her conversation drifted. After a while, Eduene took her to the infirmary at Peterson Field, where an Air Corps doctor prescribed an enema, useless in relieving the pain.

Maybe her mother was right after all. Maybe she
did
need the quiet of darkened rooms and the fussing of Sunday aunts.

Didion learned that her grandmother, her mother, and her father had all suffered from migraines most of their lives—“those sick headaches my family brought west with the seeds.” She had inherited the malady. It worsened during her adolescence and young adulthood, and though she would eventually learn to live with the recurring pain, she would never be entirely free of it. As recently as 2011, she would tell a filmmaker, interviewing her for a documentary, “I have [a migraine] right now. I have to fight for certain words. I can see you, but if you were to hold up a sign … I couldn't read the sign, probably.”

“It seemed to me that my life was totally unmanageable because it could be taken over at any time by a headache,” she said. This helplessness, compounded by not knowing when the next set of “orders” would upend the family's life again, disconcerted Didion, but it may have fed her self-image as a perversely “special” child whose main solace was writing. Nothing could motivate a person to become a “lonely rearranger” of things as much as sudden visitations of pain.

3

“My sense was that we lived in the only possible place where we could be, that we paid this immense price to be there. That sense was part of who I was,” Didion said. Before Washington, North Carolina, and Colorado, she did not question the “immense price” paid by her ancestors in their arduous continental crossings. California was the “only possible place” for her family because her family had fought so hard to secure land there. But after seeing a bit of the continent, after returning to Sacramento, only to have fallen behind in school, the “dumb girl” in class, ostracized by social circles formed while she was gone, she began to perceive
she
was the one paying an “immense price to be there.” Her ancestry was a burden and a trap. What had happened to her mother's promise of Paris? Eduene said her husband felt the family had an obligation to return to California.

Didion
was
happy to scan the flat horizons again (claustrophobic, all those mountains and trees!), happy to run through the tule fog in the winter and feel the summer heat. It made her strangely content when it rained so hard that the Natomas, the low-lying highway out to the airport, flooded. The land seemed to float. “There was a certain way that possibilities would seem to open up when the sun went down on really hot days,” she recalled years later.

It was near the end of 1943 when Eduene and the kids returned to Sacramento. Frank went on to Detroit to settle more defense contracts. “I think Mother just couldn't face looking for another room in Detroit,” Didion said. Eduene's mother and father took them in, in the house on Highland Avenue, while Frank served out the war. Didion attended the Arden School. “When the school was first built, it was in the middle of nowhere,” Kel Munger, a reporter for the
Sacramento News and Review,
told me. “It was mostly for the ranch and farm children—the
white
children. Of course, the kids of the people who actually worked the land were Mexican. The city didn't integrate the schools until Didion was much older.” Already, in 1943, the “middle of nowhere” was showing signs of becoming suburbia: a development the Didions hated.

Didion connected with none of her teachers. The “idea that I was smarter than other people” was “very rapidly punctured,” Didion said. She felt she “didn't get socialised” because of the family moves. She withdrew at school. She couldn't be cheered at home. She had little in common with her brother, who loved to chase his bouncy boxer dog through streets and fields, and had a chipper disposition.

She took to missing the bus after school and walking home so she could pass a commercial greenhouse. The silence, the closed-in heat, the way the sloped glass panes focused diffuse sunlight appealed to her. She'd offer a nickel to buy a pansy, hoping the greenhouse keeper would let her spend the rest of the day there. He told her a nickel wouldn't cut it. She was “using up the air.”

Often, migraines sent her to bed. On weekend outings, she'd cry and say she was afraid of the ski lift. She was afraid of rivers and sinkholes, afraid of snakes, afraid of the violence in comic books. The bridge over the Sacramento River? It was going to come crashing down someday. She exasperated her mother. Eduene couldn't promise her she would always be safe. What did promises mean to a woman who felt that nothing mattered? Eduene would sit across the table from her daughter in the kitchen, playing double solitaire. Shouldn't a mother teach her little girl to iron? To scramble an egg? “If you never learn how, you'll simply never have to,” Eduene explained with a shrug, tossing another card onto the discard pile.

“It was mystifying to my mother why I was so despondent,” Didion said. In an early essay, “On Going Home,” she wrote, “We did not fight. Nothing was wrong. And yet some nameless anxiety colored the emotional charges between me and the place I came from.” With Eduene, also despondent, often distant, she began “a guerilla war we never understood.”

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From Detroit, Frank brought Didion three silk twill handkerchiefs purchased at the J. L. Hudson Company. A saleswoman there had told him all the fashionable young girls these days wore them around their necks: orange, brown, and emerald green. Frank had never bought his daughter a gift—not without his wife's prodding. Didion was overwhelmed by the beauty of the silk, and even more awed by the fact that her father considered her a young lady. She sat with him for lunch: cracked crab and iced tea in a silver pitcher. A proper grown-up now, she reached for the pitcher to fill her glass and dropped the heavy thing, splashing tea all over the table. It was the mistake of a child, not the act of a young girl deserving gorgeous silk handkerchiefs. She ran to her room and locked the door.

4

The world war had been good to Sacramento. Though the Didions complained about the cosmetic and social changes spurred by war-related development, they prospered from it. McClellan Field had become enormously important to the war effort and helped establish the Sacramento Valley as a future center of weapons research and industry. Following Pearl Harbor, most of the B-25s and other U.S. Army Air Corps planes sent to the Pacific theater were prepared at McClellan. In just a few years, Aerojet-General would build a facility in nearby Rancho Cordova. Founded by Caltech scientists, Aerojet began manufacturing jet-assisted takeoff rockets in 1941, giving extra boosts to airplanes operating from aircraft carriers. The company's arrival in Rancho Cordova, and its need for worker housing, would be a boon to the Didion clan, which owned several hundred acres in the area.

Housing revitalized downtown as well. A resolution adopted by the Sacramento City Council on June 26, 1942, indicates that J. Frank Didion, Joan's grandfather, “Tax Collector of the County of Sacramento,” conveyed to the county a large tract of land between A Street and the American River, profiting handsomely.

Buoyed by the defense industry, many of the Okie families in the Central Valley left the migrant camps, renting and even buying small houses in growing communities and towns. Okie kids jammed the hallways of Arden School. Didion picked up their characteristic drawl, the slightly nasal register, the flattening of vowels, and the tendency to stretch one-syllable words into two. As late as the 1970s, in a television interview with Tom Brokaw, Didion's accent sounds unmistakably “Okie” to an Oklahoman. As she grew older, her voice lost that Great Plains edge, though not the habit of trailing off, as if she were speaking into the wind. Whether this was another Dust Bowl influence, her natural reticence, or a combination of the two, it's hard to say. But it stood in contrast to her confident handwriting, which settled into its lifelong gait around this time, the phrases pressed hard into the page like inscriptions in stone, straight lines with leafy
g
's and
t
's crossed backward, tempting the reader to turn and start each sentence again.

At school dances, the music had a rough twang now, a beat like the thumping of an old flat tire, a lilt of gospel, a gumbo of folk and blues. Okie tunes: country, swing, a little black holler church, and proto-rock pierced by Scots-Irish despair. Above the exhilarating tempos, emptiness threaded through the melodies. It was minor-key moroseness tricked up as sexual urgency, and in the coming decade, Didion would track its spread through American culture.

In the Elks Clubs and town halls of the valley, safer Midwest music—square dance reels—played most Friday and Saturday nights. At dances, parades, sports events, at the state fair in the summers (fireworks sizzling above the worn old levees), Didion renewed old friendships and made new bonds.

She reconnected with her cousin Brenda. She caught up in school. Perhaps her knowledge now of what lay beyond the flat horizon prompted her to take greater interest in global events. The Spanish Civil War. Hitler's march into Poland. The founding of Israel. A massacre in a country called El Salvador. FDR's New Deal was a fraught topic at her aunts' supper tables. It was socialism, they said, stunting the West's pioneer spirit. Republican business leaders in town, including the Didion men, took up the Christian libertarianism of the California preacher James W. Fifield. Fifield claimed that the “blessings of capitalism come from God.”

His sacred entrepreneurship inspired Didion's great-uncles when they opened a service station at Seventh and H, guided her uncle Robert when he established Didion Hardware on D Street, led Genevieve Didion when she planted camellias for tourists by the courthouse. These were fine examples of living up to “our heritage,” Didion said in her eighth-grade graduation speech at Arden School, delivered to a room full of Okies in June 1948. The speech had been developed with the help of her mother and grandfather, using themes straight out of the latter's book
California's El Dorado Yesterday and Today
(“We had an irrigation problem, so we built the greatest dams the world has known,” Didion wrote). Her mother helped her choose the perfect outfit for her performance, a crystal necklace and a pale green organdy dress, “a color that existed in the local landscape only for a few spring days when the rice first showed,” she said.

The speech impressed her teachers. “There's a lot of mystery to me about writing and performing and showing off in general,” she said later. Her confidence had been boosted by the fineries she wore (from then on, she never underestimated the power of fashion and style in presenting herself, publicly, as a writer), and by the conviction that her audience—most of them first-generation Californians, whose parents had been living in sod huts on the Great Plains just a few years ago—sorely needed the lessons she offered. How often had the Sunday aunts started a conversation by saying, “The trouble with these
new
people”? Then they'd blast the Dust Bowl natives who had come to California seeking handouts. Pioneer families like the Didions understood real work and taking pride in their work. They understood what it meant to “live up” to one's heritage.

The summer following her graduation speech, before classes began at California Junior High, Didion lived with her family on Walnut Avenue, on land apparently purchased by her father for subdividing and selling. It was “a downright rural region in the 1940s,” William Burg told me. “Sheep ranches and rolling hills: the housing stock there now is a mixture of mid-century single-family homes and mansions with horse property. The first shopping malls in the Sacramento area were built a bit north of this neighborhood.” Most of the land was divvied up from large old family ranches, Rancho Del Paso and others.

Didion recalled watching her brother on hot summer mornings take a shovel to the hardpan with the intention of digging a swimming pool on the property: a child's version of development fever (as an adult, Jim would follow his father into the real-estate business). Even utopia could not escape the postwar boom. In newspaper photographs, Didion said, Hawaii was now a place of “well-fed Lincoln-Mercury dealers relaxing beside an outrigger at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel.”

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One summer night, while the family was vacationing at Stinson Beach (where Didion, wearing a frayed bathing suit puckered with safety pins, would take a sack of nectarines to a nest of rocks above the surf and play solitaire), Didion told her parents she was going to take her little brother to a square dance. Her folks were playing cards with friends in their rented cottage and paid scant attention to what she said. She dropped Jimmy off at the dance at the Greyhound station—an old railroad depot with stucco walls and a steep slate roof—then hurried past the Two A.M. Club and Café, beyond faded signs for Coca-Cola lost among wild geraniums, and down to the water's edge. She had been writing stories about romantic suicides, people wandering San Francisco's streets before leaping off the Golden Gate Bridge or people walking into the sea. She “wanted to know what it would feel like” to head into “the big nasty surf,” so, clutching her notebook, she put her head down and aimed herself in the general direction of Hawaii. “It was dark,” she said. “I walked into the ocean thinking I'll get an idea of it by the time my knees are wet.” A huge wave picked her up and rolled her onto the sand. “I got out. I picked up my brother and went home.” It didn't come to anything. She wasn't serious about suicide. It was a literary experiment. She
was
serious about trying to grasp why a woman like her mother, with money and good looks, surrounded by family and friends, should “have so much trouble getting through the afternoon”—this sentiment appears in an early short story, “The Welfare Island Ferry.” The story paints a melancholy portrait of a “small woman in a bright dirndl skirt and high-heeled straw mules.” As the day wears on and the temperature approaches one hundred degrees, she wonders why on earth she should give a damn about the men's golf scores at the country club or about her husband and children or about anything at all. “[B]aby,” she asks her daughter, “you ever afraid of the dark any more?”