On Going Home (1967) by Joan Didion
I am home for my daughter’s first birthday. By “home” I do not mean the house
in Los Angeles where my husband and I and the baby live, but the place where
my family is, in the Central Valley of California. It is a vital although
troublesome distinction. My husband likes my family bit is uneasy in their house,
because once there I fall into their ways, which are difficult, oblique, deliberately
inarticulate, not my husband’s ways. We live in dusty houses (“D-U-S-T,” he
once 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 dessert
plates mean to him? how could he have known about the assay scales, why should
he care if he did know?), and we appear to talk exclusively about people we know
who have been committed to mental hospitals, about people we know who have
been booked on drunk-driving charges, and about property, particularly about
property, 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 advantage
in the rather common real-estate transaction known as “sale-leaseback,” and my
husband in turn does not understand why so many of the people he hears about in
my father’s house have been recently committed to mental hospitals or booked on
drunk-driving charges. Nor does he understand that when we talk about sale-
leasebacks and right-of-way condemnations we are talking in code about things
we like best, the yellow fields and the cottonwoods and the rivers rising and
falling and the mountain roads closing when the heavy snow comes in. We miss
each other’s points, have another drink and regard the fire. My brother refers to
my husband, in his presence, as “Joan’s husband.” Marriage is the classic
betrayal.
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 all
objective accounts a “normal” and a “happy” family situation, and yet I was
almost thirty years old before I could talk to my family on the telephone without
crying after I had hung up. We did not fight. Nothing was wrong. And yet some
nameless anxiety colored the emotional charges between me and the place that I
came from. The question of whether or not you could go home again was a very
real part of the sentimental and largely literary baggage with which we left home
in the fifties; I suspect that it is irrelevant to the children born of the fragmentation
after World War II. A few weeks ago in a San Francisco bar I saw a pretty young
girl 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 the
effect 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 by
meeting one’s past at every turn, around every corner, inside every cupboard, I go
aimlessly 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 was
seventeen. 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-painted
with cabbage roses and sign “E.M.,” my grandmother’s initials. There is no final
solution 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 and
look into his face, and do and do not see my own. I close the drawer, and have
another cup of coffee with my mother. We get along very well, veterans of a
guerilla 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 in
Los Angeles, people he has seen, letters which require attention, but because he
asks what I have been doing, suggests uneasily that I get out, drive to San
Francisco or Berkeley. Instead I drive across the river to a family graveyard. It
has been vandalized since my last visit and the monuments are broken, overturned
in the dry grass. Because I once saw a rattlesnake in the grass I stay in the car and
listen to a country-and-Western station. Later I drive with my father to a ranch he
has in the foothills. The man who runs his cattle on it asks us to the round-up, a
week from Sunday, and although I know that I will be in Los Angeles I say, in the
oblique way my family talks, that I will come. Once home I mention the broken
monuments 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 relative
last seen in 1948, and they ask if I still like living in New York City. I have lived
in Los Angeles for three years, but I say that I do. The baby is offered a
horehound 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 the
afternoon 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 the
evening, after she has gone to sleep, I kneel beside the crib and touch her face,
