Joan Didion's Car Eggs

Get busy living, or get busy peeling

My apologies to Joan Didion and Julian Wasser for what I consider fair use. :)

The day after the total solar eclipse in central Texas, I packed my bags into my car at four-thirty in the morning to drive west across the state. When I arrived where I would be hiking, at about noon, I propped the door open for fresh air and pulled two hardboiled eggs out of my cooler. I thought, as I often do, about the protagonist in Joan Didion’s 1970 novel, Play It As It Lays, cracking and peeling an egg on the steering wheel of her Corvette while driving at seventy miles an hour. I gave one of the eggs a spirited crack at the rubberized wheel of my parked 2009 Toyota; alas, it could have bounced that sucker into the ceiling, but the egg was unchanged.

I think about this detail because I try to work out the practical physics of the maneuver in motion, figuratively, dear god, figuratively—where do the egg shells go, which hand does what, which hand holds the wheel (please tell me one of the hands holds the wheel)—and find it completely unfathomable, impossible. This is not to say I don’t believe someone outside of fiction could crack and peel an egg at seventy miles an hour. In fact, I do believe someone outside of fiction has cracked and peeled an egg at seventy miles an hour, namely Joan Didion.

Every morning, Didion’s Maria drives California’s numerous freeways. Like any other risky-to-destructive coping mechanism, the ritual act keeps her mind too busy during these hours prime for dwelling to dwell on what troubles her:

“She dressed every morning with a greater sense of purpose than she had felt in some time, a cotton skirt, a jersey, sandals she could kick off when she wanted the touch of the accelerator, and she dressed very fast, running a brush through her hair once or twice and tying it back with ribbon, for it was essential (to pause was to throw herself into unspeakable peril) that she be on the freeway by ten o’clock. Not somewhere on Hollywood Boulevard, not on her way to the freeway, but actually on the freeway. If she was not she lost the day’s rhythm, its precariously imposed momentum…. So that she would not have to stop for food she kept a hard-boiled egg on the passenger seat of the Corvette. She could shell and eat a hard-boiled egg at seventy miles an hour (crack it on the steering wheel, never mind salt, salt bloats, no matter what happened she remembered her body) and she drank Coca-Cola in Union 76 stations, Standard stations, Flying A’s.”

I understand the motivation, and I understand the terrible irony of fearing bloat, of all things, while cracking and peeling an egg at seventy miles an hour. But I have questions beyond the mechanics of the thing. If you don’t want to stop for food, why stop for coke? Why not also wait to crack and peel the eggs in unmoving Union 76 stations, Standard stations, Flying A’s? WHERE DO THE EGG SHELLS GO?

It reads like meaning made backwards, originating not in Didion’s writerly brain but in her own hungry hands, cracking and peeling an egg at seventy miles an hour, then working it into the plot (thus, the egg begetting the chicken). And I wouldn’t say this with any particular conviction were it not for her essay, “Bureaucrats,” published a year after the novel.

Here, she plays the seemingly reasonable sceptic of then-new and controversial “diamond lanes”—high-occupancy vehicle lanes for buses and cars with three or more passengers—which she sees as the state’s attempt to “eradicate a central Southern California illusion, that of individual mobility, without anyone really noticing.” She also refers to driving on the freeway—albeit only a “total surrender” to the freeway, which not every driver can achieve (I am certain I have never achieved this)—as “secular communion.” She likens the “cryptic” and “contradictory” statements released to the public by the state transportation department to those made by the Johnson administration regarding the Vietnam War. And she describes her own exhilaration felt after a dangerous highway passage, shared with her protagonist Maria:

“It takes only a few seconds to get off the Santa Monica Freeway at National-Overland, which is a difficult exit requiring the driver to cross two new lanes of traffic streamed in from the San Diego Freeway, those few seconds always seem to me the longest part of the trip. The moment is dangerous. The exhilaration is in doing it.” — “Bureaucrats,” 1971

“Again and again she returned to an intricate stretch just south of the interchange where successful passage from the Hollywood onto the Harbor required a diagonal move across four lanes of traffic. On the afternoon she finally did it without once braking or once losing the beat on the radio she was exhilarated, and that night slept dreamlessly.” — Play It As It Lays, 1970

I tell you that woman was careening down the freeway, egg in hand—as she herself wrote—“in a state of mechanized rapture.”