Free Run River by Joan Didion

among them seemed every day more unthinkable.
    “You have to tell them. Your father likes me all right. Although nobody’d know you did, the way you act when they’re around.”
    “I’m not demonstrative.” She picked up a white pebble and skimmed it across the surface of the water, angling it downstream to catch the drift. “I don’t guess you learned to skip stones like that at Stanford.”
    “Lily,” he pleaded, sitting up and grasping her shoulders. “Listen to me.”
    She traced an L and a K and half of McC on his chest with her fingernail, not looking at his face.
    “There’s no use talking to Daddy until he gets the fruit out of the way,” she said at last.
    But when all the pears had been shipped to the canneries and the hops on the McClellan place had been down six weeks, she still had told no one.
    “I don’t think you want to,” Everett said finally. “I don’t believe you want to marry me.”
    “Ah, sweet.” She kissed the back of his neck, ran a finger down his backbone. “It’s not you.”
    “What is it?”
    “It’s anyone. Sometimes I don’t want to marry anyone. Some afternoons I lie on my bed and the light comes through the shutters on the floor and I think I never want to leave my own room.”
    “You’ll have a whole house. Isn’t that better?”
    She patted his hand and looked away down the river. “It’s your father’s house,” she said finally, grasping at the nearest point although not the one she had in mind.
    “We’ll build another house if you want. Would you like that?”
    “I don’t know.” She was abruptly weary of trying to talk to Everett at all. “I don’t think you understand what I mean.”
    He turned away from her. “No. I don’t think I do.”
    She felt, as physically as she would a headache, the weight of Everett’s vulnerability.
    “Of course I want to,” she said flatly. “You know I want to.”
    Although they agreed that she would have told Edith and Walter Knight by the time Everett came by for dessert that night, she had not. Telling them, she whispered to Everett when she opened the door, was impossible. Accepting this as fact, he got up from Walter Knight’s table and drove Lily to Reno that October evening, the night the year’s first snow settled over the Sierra Nevada, and had her declared his wife in the name of Washoe County and the State of Nevada. The ceremony was witnessed by the wife and son of the justice: the son pulled on blue jeans, the fly open, over his maroon-striped pajamas; the wife, roused unwillingly but dutiful, smiled drowsily and patted Lily’s hair. Not quite eighteen, Lily had the distinct impression throughout the ceremony that her lie about her age would render the marriage invalid, nullify the entire affair, no tears, nothing irrevocable, only a polite misunderstanding among good acquaintances. Later, from their hotel room, she called down a telegram reading “MARRIED EVERETT NOW AT RIVERSIDE RENO HOME SOON LOVE LILY”; whatever her extravagances, long telegrams were not among them. Everett called the ranch to tell his father, but Martha answered the telephone.
    Covering the receiver, Everett turned to Lily, who sat, still wearing the skirt and sweater she had worn at dinner, on the edge of the bed with Hotel Riverside embroidered on the sheets.
    “Martha’s crying. She says I’m leaving her alone.”
    “You’ll be living right there.”
    “She says that’s not the same thing and I must be a fool to think it is.”
    Lily lay down on the bed and buried her face in the pillow. She wanted nothing so much as to have her father there, to be downstairs watching him shoot craps, lulled by the action, the play of chips and silver on the green board, the ring of the silver dollars as he stacked them. Make it the hard way .
    “Maybe she’s right,” she said, her voice muffled.
    They stayed a week in Reno. Lily bought a toothbrush and a pair of stockings in a Rexall drugstore, located some white cotton