Into the Valley

by Ruth Galm

  As though forgetting that weekends would still exist there, she had chosen to believe as others in the restorative powers and newness of the West for her own purposes. That a change to the West might help.

  And for a while, the new city did help. For the first year, the beauty had awed and distracted her (Boston had been a hill city, too, but the hills were small and heavy and rust-colored in her mind) and she’d been buoyed like everyone else by the pale and white buildings, the fuchsia bougainvillea, the sails on the water and whiffs of orange blossom and jasmine in winter. She’d ridden the cable car to work and eaten crab sandwiches at the wharf, listened to street music in the Italian neighborhood. She had liked to take walks, to spots known for some reputed charm—a robin’s-egg-blue Victorian; a brooding WPA mural; a grove of redwoods in the middle of the park. Once or twice, perhaps, the sight of a young unkempt man with a guitar, the smell of body oil they wore or the absence of handbag and stockings had disturbed the calming effect, had brought on the small buzzing at the back of her skull. But it had not lasted very long.

  The first thing to give way had been the buses. She had been accustomed to subways and elevateds in the East, but the main mode of travel around the city was the buses, and on them she could not read a book or write a letter because it made her dizzy, and so she was forced to spend the time looking and thinking. Every morning through Chinatown the painfully thin men wearing second-hand baseball caps for teams they did not follow and the women with their hair cut mannishly short, beautiful cheek bones with missing teeth, and the mounds of vegetables to be bought, and the stands to be dragged into place and filled and haggled over and emptied, and everything to start over the next day. She did not understand why it brought back memories like the prom with the Brylcreemed boy: sitting around with Cokes in her peach-colored satin dress and the gardenias on her wrist and the diamond brooch on her bust. The Brylcreemed boy telling her she was pretty and leading her around the floor and asking her to wear his pin at the next prom. Something in this memory felt like the Chinese and their vegetables. But how could this be anything like the Chinese and their vegetables? She couldn’t puzzle it out. So she tried to observe a sliver of the bay, with its whitecaps and sailboats, or a majestic bridge, or the exotic red calligraphy in the shop windows; but none of it helped. And so she came to hate the buses.

  Then she had been unable to find a beauty parlor she liked. It disturbed her acutely, the young women in the city walking around with long stringy hair and faces bare. This increased B.’s zeal to find the right salon, as if she were taking a stand against those other girls. She visited a half dozen salons in different neighborhoods, always finding some fault, in how her curls were set, in the too kitschy or too plain décor. In fact there was nothing manifestly wrong with these places: what she sought she could not have described in plain concrete terms, even to herself. She’d come close once or twice. In a salon in the nicest hill neighborhood, the walls had not been too pink or gold, the seats filled with women who seemed not too old or all married. She’d struck up a conversation with a woman at the dryers.

  “Whatever happened to a little smoothing out? A little help?” the woman said, pointing to a bra advertisement in a magazine without accompanying girdle. B. had smiled.

  “You remember that movie where Liz Taylor was insane, in the convent?” The woman’s nails were blood red.

  “The Tennessee Williams play.”

  “Right! And then Monty Clift let her have her hair done and ‘wear a pretty dress’ in the state bin, and presto, she’s still loony but at least now she has a waist!”

  B. smiled again, but a genuine smile that she might have in private. “And he falls in love,” she said.

  “You see? Right there, that’s the power of foundation garments!”

  But then something in the conversation spoiled. The woman began complaining about a man she was dating (“He’s next to a telephone all day. There’s nothing to prevent him from picking it up and dialing.”) and her voice sounded to B. like a high-pitched cry in an animal register. The spinning and nausea came on abruptly. After that, B. stopped trying to find a favorite beauty parlor and got her wash-and-sets wherever it was cheapest.

  Finally, there had been the bridge. It was a cliché, she knew, her love for it, but she had been drawn by the sheer size, its serious red color—not golden at all—and she went there almost every Sunday, standing in the middle of the span on the ocean side (the tourists preferring the bay side for the city views when the Pacific was the real wonder to her mind). The fog blew in like a divine force, the cables vibrating in the wind, and she saw the Spanish landing for the first time, and the sailors and priests and forty-niners, and she briefly forgot time and place, until her teeth chattered and the ocean was lost in fog.

  When she’d heard the siren, she had not immediately absorbed what was going on. Only later did B. understand that a woman not far down from her had gone over the railing. No interruption in the gust of cars or the vibrations of the cables or the tourists’ voices. A family of Germans who’d seen it told her the woman had been a teenager, that she’d worn plastic-frame glasses and a blue dress and tennis shoes. (B. could never absorb this last detail; she would always imagine the girl in kitten heels.) B. lingered near the Germans as they gave their eyewitness reports to the police, hoping the hearing of it would confer the realness of the incident on her. But the girl was just gone; she did not have any feeling about it. B. stood at the spot until the fog came in and finally made her depart. She did not visit the bridge again.

  7.

  “Joey loves the hazelnuts.”

  “Joey hates nuts.”

  “We’ll get him the hazelnuts and Aunt Edie the walnuts.”

  Billboards for the theme park had been on every highway: a playground to promote the local nut crops, with restaurant and gift shop and its own choo-choo train. As if in capitulation, she’d stopped. Now she wandered around the rocking horses and carousel, among the families on their way to Tahoe and Reno waiting for cocktails and burgers in the lounge or picnicking outside. She felt conspicuous, as if the already-wrinkled ivory sheath announced to them that she was on her way to neither the mountains nor the lake, that she had not packed for a vacation per se. She watched the families eat their peanut butter and jellies and drink their thermosed lemonade and tried to imagine herself as one of the mothers. Cajoling the children, scrubbing their dwarfed hands, dusting off their bottoms. But she couldn’t keep herself inside the smells, the textures, the gummy breath, the tiny eyelashes. She went into the gift shop.

  “He loves nuts, I tell you, he lives for them,” the wife said. She and the husband both in loud prints. “He eats about a pound if I put them out before supper.”

  “That’s not the Joey I know,” the husband said. “The Joey I know never ate a nut in his life.”

  “We’ll get him the almonds then.”

  She wondered what Joey really wanted. Did he want almonds or hazlenuts, or no nuts at all? Something about this line of thought and the rows of tightly wrapped cellophane packages done up in bows made the spinning come on quickly. She bought a bag of pecans and hurried out.

  She ran back to the Mustang, thinking she must find the antler bone. To rub it or sit with it, so it might calm her. But when she sat in the hot air with the bone in her lap, the carsickness only increased. She turned the ignition and screeched out of the nut-theme parking lot toward the nut town’s main street and bank as if there wasn’t a moment to lose.

  Her trembling slanted the writing on the check.

  “I feel much better,” she said out loud.

  The teller looked at her as if she understood. “That’s wonderful, ma’am. Enjoy your trip to Reno.”

  Afterward, she pored over every detail: the chilled air on her flushed skin, the right angles of the teller windows, the teller’s movements like a soothing port de bras. The girl’s face, young and full, her two
front teeth indented winsomely, a white Peter Pan collar and nude nail polish. And the shade of ivory on the walls that B. swore she had not seen in years, that had given way to the mustard yellows and lime greens exclusively, although she could not prove it.

  She pored over these details because it was never the money she did it for.

  8.

  “I don’t see why it’s so difficult for you,” her mother had said. She’d called to tell B. she was sending an embroidery kit. So that B. would know how to embroider for any occasion. “There’s an order to things,” she told B., “and I think it would help if you followed it.”

  “I’d like to.” B. nodded into the receiver.

  “You can, dear. Just try a little harder.”

  “I will.”

  But in the end B. could not bring herself to ask where this order began or how she had missed it or why it seemed to her mother so easy a thing to pick up.

  9.

  She drove on a two-lane road. The sun bore down on the car. For miles, nothing but the sere, parchment-colored fields, populated sporadically by black cows and rectangular stacks of yellow hay (it must be hay, she thought; it would be more solid, she would be better situated, she felt, if she could know these things for certain). The only vertical structure a line of skeletal electrical towers. She passed an outdated sign advertising July Fourth fireworks at the river. Then below it in red letters: caution: grass fire risk extreme.

  Eventually the road rounded and a few trees appeared. Houses, signs to the delta. She would hit the river soon, and if she continued too far along it, she would come to the capital. She took note of this.

  The road came through a small town with a few businesses, an auto mechanic, a burger stand, boat rentals, and as soon as she was through it the road curved and she was alongside the river. She parked the Mustang on the shoulder of the levee road. The levee rose high up from the water, tall green stalks on one side, which might be corn, or else sugar cane (again she felt vexed, undermined, not to know for sure); on the other side of the river, dozens of rows of full pear trees. The river was low and brown, but still she thought how nice it would be to swim—it had been ages since she’d been swimming. She noticed an elderly man fishing down the bank and wished she were alone.

  She hadn’t been swimming since her last trip to the lake house. Throughout her childhood her family had spent summer weekends at a lakeside cottage, where she and her mother had swum—her father never coming up until late Saturday or not at all. (In a faraway foreign land of legal pads and Dictaphones was how B. imagined him.) She and her mother swam and sunbathed and painted their nails, did their hair and read their books. And then one day after college her mother had informed her that she wasn’t welcome back alone. “It’s just not productive to come on your own anymore, darling,” her mother had said, her voice full of encouragement. “Even a group would be better, don’t you think?”

  B. had lost her favorite pair of gloves on that last visit. A light cotton pair, white with almost imperceptible red dots. On the bed, off her hands, they looked to her like those of a circus performer, the dwarfish child-women who rode horses standing up. But on her hands they were beautiful and delicate, a living porcelain. She’d brought them despite the heat and the trend away from gloves, for the occasional drive into town. But when she searched her suitcase they were gone. She’d hyperventilated slightly, she remembered, as if she’d misplaced her own hands.

  She looked down at her hands pink and swollen in the reflection from the river. She’d liked wearing gloves when it was the fashion. She could spend forty-five minutes looking for a lost one and feel as though she had spent the time as a person she knew how to be. Without the gloves, she had to adjust herself to feeling the dirt on trolley straps directly on her skin, to seeing women’s hands everywhere naked and raw. Her own hands with veins and hatches and mounds of epidermis. (And again her mind jumped at the young women in the city now who not only did not wear gloves, but did not wear heels or put on lipstick or comb their hair.) B. still kept her old gloves in a satin-covered box in her closet; she knew exactly how many pairs there were, which needed mending, which had stains; the kid gloves shriveled and waiting on top. She could not bring herself to throw them away.

  She took off her heels and climbed down the riverbank to the stairs of a dock. She walked to the end and sat, dipping her feet in the water. The combination of the hot sun and the cold water was soothing and she let herself sit circling her shins lazily. The man down the bank had not moved. B. could not see his face, just the white hair under a hat and the drooped shoulders, and yet his presence agitated her, as if he could overhear her mind running.

  She closed her eyes and tried in the heat and soothing water to daydream. She had difficulty daydreaming. There seemed a list of things she should be daydreaming about, what she knew the other secretaries daydreamed of: men, marriage, babies, money. But what came to her mind were never these things. What came to her mind were cool blue-white landscapes, featureless planes of snow or sand with no people or time. Whenever she made herself daydream about the secretaries’ list, things like the developer and Sherry came up.

  It was at a barbecue, one of the secretaries had invited B. during her first season in the city, also in the nicest hill neighborhood. She would have gone to the park with a book, but she knew her mother would ask later in their weekly phone call whether B. had “mingled” over the weekend. It was a rare hot and fogless day when one could go into the evening without a sweater, which made the city feel like a white-washed Mediterranean ville and made B. hopeful that something unexpected, even unrecognizable, might happen. When she walked into the party, all the women looked to be the same age (mid-twenties), most blonde like B., nails manicured and hair set, orange and pink and yellow dresses; the men wore button-down shirts and Bermudas and looked ill at ease and shiny in the heat.

  One of the men approached B. right away, two vodka tonics in his hand, a sheen of sweat on his neck. “Thought I’d say hullo,” he said, handing her one of the drinks. “Official unofficial welcoming committee.” On first glance his face was handsome, smooth and symmetrical with gray placid eyes and clear skin. But as he spoke, B. noticed that his eyebrows were too thin or too faint, so that he resembled one of the anemic subjects of a medieval Dutch painting. He worked in real estate.

  “It’s a boom time for us, you know, it’s all happening down 101—cineplexes, mini-malls. I’m Sherry’s.” He pointed to a woman across the deck who looked, except for her red hair, exactly like B. in her short bright sheath and matching headband. “We’re just engaged.”

  The back deck of the house was small and crowded and B. felt beads of sweat in the boning of her bra. As he went on, there seemed to her something disturbingly missing, some void of detection in the Dutch eyebrowless face, as if he were talking not to her but to her teeth.

  “Really, it’s simple, you work a couple of years and then you get out of the race, down the peninsula. The weather is perfect, fog always lifts. Have you been? I could drive you down.” He seemed unaware or unconcerned that he’d already told her about his fiancée. B. thought for a moment he might be drunk, but he seemed oddly sober, only growing too exuberant, almost jumpy, a twitch under his eye. “You really ought to see it. You’d like it better down there. Easy little yards and roads you can actually drive and mile-long grocery stores.” He leaned toward her and his perspiration smelled sour. “Don’t get me wrong, the city’s hip, the city’s stimulating, but it’s no place to raise children. The other day we were tossing around a few balls at the park—do you play? Sher and I lost one of our doubles—and these head-shaved loonies in their dresses lined the court, chanting that Oriental hokum. I thought to myself, let the freaks have the city, I’ll take Shangri-La.”

  When he tried unsuccessfully a few minutes later to kiss B., Sherry was suddenly at his side, locked into his arm as though nothing had happened. Without missing a beat, the de
veloper explained how he and Sherry had met—“Goddamn right ‘golden state’ when the prettiest woman at the broker’s office is a good Lutheran from Ohio with straight-ahead morals and a great pair of legs!” To this Sherry nodded, red hair perfectly curled, her arm clenched around the developer’s like a vice. B. realized then with an abrupt but diffuse kind of terror that it wasn’t just their outfits that were similar, it was the way the developer looked at them. With the same missing part of his gaze. A shudder went through her and she dropped her highball. Sherry stooped to the shards and the developer went for a broom, and B. excused herself and slipped out of the party.