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In this poignant essay, joan didion explores the concept of 'home' and the complexities of family ties. She reflects on her experiences of returning to her family's home in california and the contrasting ways of life between her family and her husband. The essay delves into the generational divide, the misunderstandings, and the sense of belonging or not belonging to a place. It is a thought-provoking piece on the emotional and psychological aspects of family and identity.
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(1967)
I am home for my daughter’s first birthday. By “home” I do not mean the housein Los Angeles where my husband and I and the baby live, but the place wheremy family is, in the Central Valley of California. It is a vital althoughtroublesome distinction. My husband likes my family bit is uneasy in their house,because once there I fall into their ways, which are difficult, oblique, deliberatelyinarticulate, not my husband’s ways. We live in dusty houses (“D-U-S-T,” heonce wrote with his finger on surfaces all over the house, but no one noticed it)filled with mementos quite without value to him (what could the Canton dessertplates mean to him? how could he have known about the assay scales, why shouldhe care if he did know?), and we appear to talk exclusively about people we knowwho have been committed to mental hospitals, about people we know who havebeen booked on drunk-driving charges, and about property, particularly aboutproperty, land, price per acre and C-2 zoning and assessments and freeway access.My brother does not understand my husband’s inability to perceive the advantagein the rather common real-estate transaction known as “sale-leaseback,” and myhusband in turn does not understand why so many of the people he hears about inmy father’s house have been recently committed to mental hospitals or booked ondrunk-driving charges. Nor does he understand that when we talk about sale-leasebacks and right-of-way condemnations we are talking in code about thingswe like best, the yellow fields and the cottonwoods and the rivers rising andfalling and the mountain roads closing when the heavy snow comes in. We misseach other’s points, have another drink and regard the fire. My brother refers tomy husband, in his presence, as “Joan’s husband.” Marriage is the classicbetrayal.
Or perhaps it is not any more. Sometimes, I think that those of us who are now in our thirties were born into the last generation to carry the burden of“home,” to find in family life the source of all tension and drama. I had by allobjective accounts a “normal” and a “happy” family situation, and yet I wasalmost thirty years old before I could talk to my family on the telephone withoutcrying after I had hung up. We did not fight. Nothing was wrong. And yet somenameless anxiety colored the emotional charges between me and the place that Icame from. The question of whether or not you could go home again was a veryreal part of the sentimental and largely literary baggage with which we left homein the fifties; I suspect that it is irrelevant to the children born of the fragmentationafter World War II. A few weeks ago in a San Francisco bar I saw a pretty younggirl on crystal take off her clothes and dance for the cash prize in an “amateur-topless” contest. There was no particular sense of moment about this, none of theeffect of romantic degradation, of “dark journey,” for which my generation
strived so assiduously. What sense could that girl possibly make of, say,
Long
Day’s Journey into Night
? Who is beside the point?
That I am trapped in this particular irrelevancy is never more apparent to me than when I am home. Paralyzed by the neurotic lassitude engendered bymeeting one’s past at every turn, around every corner, inside every cupboard, I goaimlessly from room to room. I decide to meet it head-on and clear out a drawer,and I spread the contents on the bed. A bathing suit I wore the summer I wasseventeen. A letter of rejection from
The Nation
, an aerial photograph of the site
for a shopping center my father did not build in 1954. Three teacups hand-paintedwith cabbage roses and sign “E.M.,” my grandmother’s initials. There is no finalsolution for letters of rejection from
The Nation
and teacups handpainted in 1900.
Nor is there any answer to snapshots of one’s grandfather as a young man on skis,surveying around Donner Pass in the year1910. I smooth out the snapshot andlook into his face, and do and do not see my own. I close the drawer, and haveanother cup of coffee with my mother. We get along very well, veterans of aguerilla war we never understood.
Days pass. I see no one. I come to dread my husband’s evening call, not only because he is full of news of what by now seems to me our remote life inLos Angeles, people he has seen, letters which require attention, but because heasks what I have been doing, suggests uneasily that I get out, drive to SanFrancisco or Berkeley. Instead I drive across the river to a family graveyard. Ithas been vandalized since my last visit and the monuments are broken, overturnedin the dry grass. Because I once saw a rattlesnake in the grass I stay in the car andlisten to a country-and-Western station. Later I drive with my father to a ranch hehas in the foothills. The man who runs his cattle on it asks us to the round-up, aweek from Sunday, and although I know that I will be in Los Angeles I say, in theoblique way my family talks, that I will come. Once home I mention the brokenmonuments in the graveyard. My mother shrugs.
I go to visit my great-aunts. A few of them think now that I am my cousin, or their daughter who died young. We recall an anecdote about a relativelast seen in 1948, and they ask if I still like living in New York City. I have livedin Los Angeles for three years, but I say that I do. The baby is offered ahorehound drop, and I am slipped a dollar bill “to buy a treat.” Questions trail off,answers are abandoned, the baby plays with the dust motes in a shaft of theafternoon sun.
It is time for the baby’s birthday party: a white cake, strawberry- marshmallow ice cream, a bottle of champagne saved from another party. In theevening, after she has gone to sleep, I kneel beside the crib and touch her face,
where it is pressed against the slats, with mine. She is an open and trusting child,unprepared for and unaccustomed to the ambushes of family life, and perhaps it isjust as well that I can offer her little of that life. I would like to give her more. Iwould like to promise her that she will grow up with a sense of her cousins and ofrivers and her great-grandmother’s teacups, would like to pledge her a picnic on ariver with fried chicken and her hair uncombed, would like to give her
home
for
her birthday, but we live differently now and I can promise her nothing like that. Igive her a xylophone and a sundress from Madeira, and promise to tell her afunny story.