Into the Valley

by Ruth Galm

  When her nails were painted, B. lay down again with her palms flat against the bed and fell asleep.

  She woke on her side, the nail polish fretted with lines from the bedspread. She had dreamed of the landscape from the car, the contourless vista, a stream of yellow and white and green with no signs of people, and in the dream she had decided she would follow this land forever.

  2.

  The next morning the blood of her period had soaked through the toilet paper in her underwear. There was only the slightest brush of it on the inside of her dress. She hesitated to change. It was as if quitting the dress would disturb a key element to her new, fluid state. To bathe she sponged her armpits and her crotch and inserted a new tampon and put on new underwear. She threw the stockings from the day before in the trash, feeling vaguely guilty, but it was too hot. Then she worked on her face, the moisturizer and powder, the liquid liner at her eyes and the lipstick and perfume last. She pinned her hair back in place. There were young girls in the city now who let their hair go naturally, who never wore makeup, whose clothes were ill-fitting. These girls distressed B.

  She’d forgotten a toothbrush. She walked from the motel toward a gas station. There was no town, only the motel (the pool in the daylight was small and chipped), a telephone booth, the gas station with a general store attached, and another street across the intersection. Her heels crunched in the pebbles along the road, the freeway cars moaning and thumping beside her. The morning sun already burned her shoulders. A watery-brown haze at the edge of the sky stung her eyes.

  At the store, she bought a toothbrush and toothpaste, a doughnut and a cup of coffee.

  “I’m just taking a tour of the valley,” she found herself saying to the paunchy older man at the cash register. “I just thought it would be very interesting.” She tried not to hear her own voice.

  “Pretty hot time of year to choose.” The man’s neck was a loose pink.

  “Well, I don’t have anything pressing in town right now. Nothing I can’t miss.”

  The man nodded as if this was clear and handed her the doughnut and paper cup.

  As she drank the coffee in the shade of the building outside, she told herself there would be no police after her. What she’d done was not big or serious enough. And she was pretty. People had always seemed to like this. Her nose was aquiline, her lids heavy but eyes almond-shaped, this combination giving her, she’d been told, a bedroom quality. She had never experienced this quality but understood it appealed to people and so drew her eyeliner out to feline points at the sides of her eyes and kept her hair blonde. She was aware from the ballet lessons her mother had required that she moved with her shoulders down and neck long, which people also took to be ladylike and contented.

  She walked across the intersection to the other street in the non-town. Two houses stood on it, one boarded up. The other was hidden by a wooden fence that when she peered inside was overrun with cacti. The cacti had clawed over a single arch of walkway to the door; everything else in the bramble dead and dry. A walnut tree bowed over the porch. The smell of dog feces baked in the sun, although no dog to be seen.

  She opened the gate. (There were things she would not have done in the city: she’d wanted to enter a yard on one of the hills and peer into the mudroom at children’s windbreakers on hooks and dirty sneakers lined up; she’d stopped herself.) She stooped under the cacti. The freeway blew; no dog barked. When she reached the door, she knocked without a clear reason. She had a sense the owner here lived alone, and she wanted to speak with him. She could tell the person she was new to the valley, ask for tips. The windows were layered in dust. She knocked again louder. On the porch under the windows was a collection: an enameled pot, several stones, tines of sharp antlers. B. glanced around. She slipped a small antler bone into her purse. For luck.

  In the car, on the freeway, the non-town was already behind her. She tried to think of some current pop song, something fresh and summery to sing, but in truth she did not like the songs on the radio now. So she hummed her favorite parts from The King and I.

  It was 1967. In the spring she had turned thirty.

  3.

  B. had once watched a boy playing in a sandbox in the city. In a playground in her neighborhood, perched like all the playgrounds in the city, it seemed to her, precariously on a hill, as if it might fall off the side of the world. The mothers had been pretty in their makeup and scarves, their clipped, determined movements—hands darting in and out of a pram, through a small child’s hair with leaves—admirable to B. But it was too draining to watch the women; they spoke too vehemently about items and opinions she did not understand. Her attention had settled instead on the boy. He poured the sand over his hand with such concentration, such absorption at the run of the dry grains on his fingers, that nothing else mattered, nothing else touched him. Only the feel of the sand on his skin and the keeping of its cascading rhythm. B. watched the boy until the mothers called him away, and after they’d gone she felt strangely abandoned, as if she should have spoken to him. She got up and looked around to make sure no one was watching and then sat in the sandbox. Following the boy’s movements, she poured the sand over her hand, but she felt only the irritating papery sensation on her skin and when her knees began to ache from kneeling, she got up and left.

  She decided that the checks were for her like the sand for the boy, and she did not let her mind go beyond this thought.

  4.

  The radio announced a heat wave for the valley. B. could not imagine it any hotter. The back of the ivory sheath had sweat through and her limbs felt swollen; her hair had half slipped out of its pins. She stopped at a restaurant on an exit. She brought her large makeup case into the bathroom and powdered and fixed her hair and unzipped her dress to spray perfume underneath.

  She ordered an iced tea from the waiter. The young man stared at her so intensely she wondered for a moment if she knew him from somewhere. She asked if he lived nearby, and he nodded without speaking. She remarked on the heat and he continued to stare until finally he said, “Ma’am, your zipper’s undone.”

  She reached her hand to her back; her dress was flared open. “Oh. Thank you.” She flushed to her neck. Her bra strap had fallen down her shoulder and she smelled her own odor still pungent under the perfume. She gripped the zipper awkwardly and pulled it up as far as she could. “Thank you,” she mumbled. After he left, she pretended to study the menu with great absorption.

  A woman with three small children was the only other customer in the place. She sat two tables over but kept staring at B. and the sky-blue makeup case. The woman looked old and childlike at the same time, small-boned, a high forehead with deep lines. She was wearing a sundress with a stain at the breast. In one arm she held a baby, while two young children ran back and forth from the window to the table, eating half a French fry and dropping it on the floor, sucking the juice off a pickle and putting it back. The woman sat like a statue in the midst of it.

  “Do you live around here?” B. asked.

  The woman’s expression signaled the ridiculousness of the question. The baby squirmed. She hitched it higher and tighter on her lap without once glancing at it.

  “I was just wondering if there was anything of interest to visit. For someone passing through.”

  The woman looked at B. as if she had asked for directions to China. A strand of thin hair fell across the lined forehead.

  “There’s Old Town, I guess,” the woman said finally. “If you like the gold rush stuff. They have a railroad museum there, I think.” One of the children ran by and shoved the baby. The baby smiled wildly as if it was a game and not an aggression.

  “Oh, I won’t be going to Sacramento, actually.”

  The woman seemed to accept this as understandable. “There’s the buttes,” she went on. “On the way to Chico. Those are sort of strange. Just strange to look at, out there all alone. But they don’t l
et you drive in them. It’s private land, I guess.” She paused. “There’s not much to see before Tahoe really.”

  “They sound lovely. Thank you.”

  B. absently fingered the handle of the makeup case.

  “I’m from the city,” B. added.

  The mother nodded curtly as if to put a stop to this need to state the obvious. The baby was kicking its legs and whining. It tried again to scootch off her lap but the woman’s grip seemed an insensate vice. The baby gave up and sank back into watching the children, trapped, mesmerized.

  “You travelin’ alone?” the woman asked.

  “Yes.”

  “You lost or something?”

  “No. Just driving. Just taking in the sights.”

  The mother picked up a French fry and swirled it in ketchup without eating it. “Well, I’d go directly on to Reno if I was you. There’s nothing to see before Reno. A lot of driving gets me irritated.”

  The baby finally let out its wail then, sharp and steady. The mother hauled it to her shoulder and slapped it on the cheek, which only made the baby cry louder. Just then an adolescent boy opened the door of the restaurant and yelled, “We’re parked in the back, he’s waiting, come on!” The woman scooped up her purse and the baby and barked at the children to follow.

  “Well, good luck with your trip,” she said over the baby’s shrieks. “The buttes, I guess, but I don’t know if they’re worth it.” And in a burst of chaos and sun, she was gone.

  The waiter finally brought her iced tea and B. twirled the straw, letting the ice circle. She looked out the window at the Mustang in the parking lot. The blue metallic sheen was already filmed with dirt. She tried to imagine the buttes. In her mind they were snub-nosed, western, angular, removed. She left her tea and went back to the bathroom. Her eyeliner was still intact but her pores large again and her lipstick gone. She reapplied the powder and twisted up the lipstick and told herself once more that she was just taking in the sights, making an anthropological tour of the valley. A survey, she considered vaguely in the mirror. She drew on the pale pink until her lips were bloodless.

  5.

  “It’s nothing you have to worry about. It’s nothing that touches you. I just want it off my chest. I don’t want to bring that shit into this.”

  That was how the checks began: Daughtry had used them on a trip to Carmel. He’d driven her down the coast to a restaurant with white tablecloths and a view of the ocean, where the chicken was mealy and the carrots oversweet and elevator music piped out through invisible speakers. He had insisted she taste his abalone although she nearly gagged and could not reconcile the notion that the runny meat had nestled inside the jeweled interiors of shell. He ordered champagne and blathered on about the drive.

  “Those mansions on all those cliffs, dammit! Those rich people knew exactly where we would want to sightsee and now we get their walls and garages. ‘Scenic drive’ bullshit. Fucking criminals. Imagine taking your whiskey there every night, the ocean and those crazy pine trees and just watching the sun set . . . You wouldn’t have a care in the world. Who would?”

  His nervous chatter was what helped her. About a lousy baseball pitcher or the shape of her face or the city degraded by the “hippie trash.” So she did not have to think or deflect anything from her mind while he spoke. She could concentrate on his deeply felt conviction in each phrase, wrap her mind around the banal images and observations, and before she knew it an hour had passed. And when his head canted and the hangdog, self-defeating look came over him at some gaffe he’d made—an expletive, an ignorance of some kind—she might even reach out and stroke his cheek.

  But on the way out of the city that day Daughtry had been unusually quiet. His palm damp as he cupped her shoulder, the car door not closed all the way when he ran into the bank, so it blew rhythmically as cars barreled by on California Street.

  “What’s wrong?” she’d asked. But he did not speak until they got past Daly City and then he only talked about getting out of the “rat-race city.”

  It was not until after the white-tableclothed restaurant, when they had gone back to a motel on the main drag in Carmel, that Daughtry, drunk, had confessed about the checks.

  “I don’t want you to get the wrong impression, it’s not that I want to do these things, but it’s always the money thing, you know. Who isn’t behind the eight ball every once in a while? You can get canned pretty easily when you’re not union, and the union scene with the dues and the fucking meetings . . . It’s just been a way to tide over. You, you don’t have to worry about stuff like that. You make their offices look good.”

  She’d met Daughtry in the building where she worked. He came to their floor to fix dead lightbulbs, unclog toilets. (She once saw him huddled against a window because one of the girls lost her earring behind a heating vent.) His smile was large, his voice raspy. He was not very tall. His hair was black and thick and combed with oil and he had light green eyes. “I like your hair up that way,” he told her one day as she ate a sandwich at her desk and read her book. He had on his coveralls and was carrying a hammer; she did not know his first name. “Most men want it down all the time,” he said, “but it gives you class.” Her hair was thick and in between the wash-and-sets she pinned it up in a French twist. She thanked him and burrowed into her page, trying to ignore him as he stood there.

  “You don’t look like a secretary,” he went on.

  “I am a secretary,” she answered.

  “But I see you read all those books.”

  “That doesn’t mean I’m not a secretary,” she said, and she got up and excused herself to the bathroom.

  He was undeterred. The next day he found her outside on the concrete steps in the brief sun that passed between the wisps of fog, her arms goose-pimpled in her cardigan, and he told her she was too good for that office. She had gone to college, he could tell just by looking at her, been raised in a good family. She told him then she wished he would leave her alone. He nodded as if he’d known she would say it. And he did leave her alone after that, a look of melancholy on his face any time their eyes met.

  But on her bus ride in the evenings through Chinatown, looking out on the mashed vegetables on the sidewalk and the Chinese rushing for home with their paper bags, only to leave new rotting vegetables on the sidewalk the next day, she thought of Daughtry. Or she remembered her musty dark apartment waiting for her, and she thought, I’ll have a drink with him. Why not? And he told her he would take her away from the city.

  So they had gone to Carmel.

  In the motel room, sitting on the bed, the hard grooves of his black hair coming undone, still in his leather blazer, Daughtry had cried. “You’re fancy. I wanted to do something fancy for you. But I can’t get back into the checks. I did it this one time, there’s no way they can peg the one on me. But I’m never going back to jail again.” He got up and vomited in the toilet and returned to the bed and now his hair was mopped forward, his nose red and his green eyes sallow. He stretched out on the comforter and began to tell her, although she had not asked, how it was done. She lay next to him, listening as he explained each step of the crime. “You don’t want just any account numbers, you want it from the right mailboxes, in the right zip codes . . . It’s like you and the teller are in this dance, and she takes a step and you take a step and as long as you don’t step on her toes, you’re free.”

  And she realized as he spoke that the carsickness had gone away. The nausea or ringing or tightness or whatever it was that was back now worse than in the East, had momentarily disappeared. When Daughtry switched to his childhood in the Irish neighborhood with the cramped stucco houses—on and on, about the freeway cutting it up and his drunk mother—she asked him to go back to the checks.

  “You like the bad-boy stuff, huh? You like to slum?” She just wanted to understand, she said. “Well, alright, baby. I do happen to have a certain style for the
se things . . .”

  She’d listened intently to this man—to whom she was not in truth attracted, whose breath reeked of liquor and vomit, with whom she would spend the night—tell her about money he had stolen to take her to a forgettable dinner in Carmel. And she had felt better.

  6.

  She had been in San Francisco two years. It was not the weather that had drawn her; she liked the fall leaves and the snow and the humid nights in the East well enough. It was not, as it seemed for the young people who came that spring, with their grass-smoking and greasy hair, the idea of a counterculture, the attraction of some newer, freer community opposing itself to the mainstream; she had no objection to the mainstream. She could not say the exact reason she had come west except that she thought it would help.

  What needed helping was hard to pin down. She only knew that it had to do with the carsickness. She could not take walks anymore and she could not be with people, she could not go to the movies or have a drink or visit a museum or read a book without feeling carsick. This was her only term for it. It simulated the thin buzzing nausea of sitting in the backseat of an ever-curving car, except it was not at all related to motion. “Nausea” was not the term either, too clinical and specific. It was not a migraine or a flu. It was the slightest spinning sensation gripping the back of her neck. Like a slow, pitched whine at the outer edge of her skull, behind her eyes, in the joints of her jaw. It was almost imperceptible at first, as if a small humming switch had been left on in her head. But it always grew. It was worst on weekends. The long stretches of free time without occupation—she was relieved to work, to type letters and stuff envelopes at her office jobs, although she did not enjoy it, was not stimulated by it—ineluctable days, no matter sunny or dark, like a dull disc hanging over her, giving off a relentless cardboard light. On the weekends, she tried to divide the days into tenable units. Mornings, to sit with coffee and the newspaper until at least ten o’clock, even if her body buzzed, if her vision blurred with tension. She did not allow herself to clench anything, to go back to bed. If she could make it through newspaper and coffee, she could next turn to some cleaning or tidying task, necessary or not—pulling out every scarf from her dresser and refolding them, for example—until a decent enough time to turn to preparing lunch. Here she made her movements agonizingly slow, scooping out one flaky chunk of tuna at a time, layering in a single spoonful of mayonnaise, dropping single bits of celery and onion, and then repeating the whole exercise over again. When her lunch was ready, she waited with her plate at the table until exactly noon, no sooner. After lunch, anything to keep busy, the walks, a museum if she could bear it—reading never worked at its worst—any activity to stretch the time until mid-afternoon, late afternoon on good days. At that point she could return to her apartment and take a nap or sit by her window watching the light dim. Only then could she reassure herself of the sloping of the day toward evening. Darkness the goal. Darkness to kill the day.