Into the Valley

by Ruth Galm

  The one she found was new. A rectangular building finished in concrete. Carpet on the floors, blinds on the windows, all the furniture an approximation of dark wood. But the same innocuous, soothing tones, the same calm safe lines. She stood for a moment near the door, just breathing. She approached the island with deposit and withdrawal slips, ran her hand back and forth along the smooth counter until it steadied and filled out one of the slips.

  She heard herself making small talk—about the heat, about the girl’s birthstone ring (“Topaz, it has healing powers. I would invest in some, Sag or not.”)—watched the girl stamp the check and place it in a drawer and deal out the cash. She stood there as the light softened, the blue veins in the teller’s neck receded, the sallow skin under the girl’s dyed-black hair pinkened, the spinning stopped.

  But when she climbed back into the Mustang, the town was like a maze. She circled the surface streets without finding the highway. She passed the same liquor store twice, two old sunburned men outside, leering at her, she thought. The tight pulse returned behind her eyes. It had never come back so quickly. She sped up but the tightening only increased. She couldn’t stand it; she turned the car around. When she reached the bank she stepped in and sat on one of the hard settees, clutching the ostrich-skin purse.

  “Did you need something else?” The teller was beside her, smiling with a ghostly white lipstick B. had not noticed the first time. “I’m going on my break.”

  “No, I’m sorry. I just . . . I was a bit lost . . . I’m not sure . . .” B. zeroed in on the girl’s teeth. They were small and straight and attractive. She looked from the teeth to the clean desks to the beige-colored carpet.

  “We probably have a map here somewhere.”

  “No. I just need to rest. Thank you.” She spoke very slowly to the teeth.

  The girl nodded sympathetically, but B. picked up in a corner of her eye the silver badge and white shirt of the security guard.

  “It’s nice and cool in here,” the girl said, nodding. “It can get outta sight, especially for someone from the city. Would you like a glass of water?”

  “No, really, I’m fine. Thank you.” The teeth and the lines and the orderliness doing their work now. The cool expansive feeling returning, her pulse relaxing.

  “Well, take your time. And thank you for banking Delta Savings and Loan.”

  After the teller walked away, B. saw the security guard still watching her. She waited a few moments before she stood up, leaning against the slick beige wall. She exited as casually as possible out the glass door, the cool expansiveness pouring through her. She sat for a few more seconds in the car, noting the silver badge glinting behind the glass. This time she drove carefully, following the main street straight to the highway. Then she gunned the engine, eye on the rearview mirror.

  17.

  At one time B. had wondered whether marriage was the way things would “work out.” The girls at her small women’s college had come to find husbands; a few had ambitions for publishing jobs or teaching positions, but most came for a ring or a promise, and sometimes they deliberately got pregnant. B. had not railed against or even chafed at this reality. It had seemed an acceptable fact. But remote, like growing old, something she could navigate later. She’d simply enjoyed reading her textbooks, about floral imagery in Japanese art or the brutal deaths of Roman emperors. She dated a few boys from the men’s college, all perfectly fine, but the prospect of the dates always seemed more entertaining for her roommates, who dressed her and fixed her makeup and hair and talked about the boy’s height or skin and told bawdy jokes about penises. B. liked to be touched and kissed by the young men but she did not feel in their brief interludes particularly engrossed by them. She could never overcome, the way her classmates seemed able to, her discomfort at the gap between what she was thinking and what she was supposed to say. (A boy had once told her “You seem like a real fun girl” at the exact moment she had been wondering whether Bloody Queen Mary of Scots still had feeling in her neck between the first and second hacks; she’d nodded to the boy, not wanting to embarrass him.) One boy wanted to see her often. They had a date at a soda counter and one at a movie where his large knee brushing hers made her groin surge; they kissed for long periods. After a few more dates no different than these, the boy proposed. He did not seem bothered by the fact that they had spoken probably an hour total to each other, that he had no idea what she’d really thought of the movie (sentimental) or why she typically avoided soda counters (a tendency to spill). She lied that she was already engaged and the boy had called her heartless. She’d watched his slumped shoulders with relief as he walked away.

  But a few years later, living in Boston and working as a secretary, no longer studying Japanese art or Roman emperors or thinking about Bloody Queen Mary of Scots, B. wondered if the presence of another person every day could keep away the tightening and spinning in her skull. She looked up the boy who’d proposed and invited him for a drink. They saw each other for several weeks, but each night after he fell asleep the carsickness resurfaced as it had before, the boy’s warm and prone body like an island unto itself, and she reeled in the dark. She broke it off with him again and this time he spat at her. After that she no longer wondered if marriage was the answer.

  And so it had all become a haunting, really, the idea of things “working out.” As if she were missing the other half of a position. As if she had gotten herself to a ledge with no intention of leaping off.

  18.

  On the map from the gas station, they were a few jagged circles alone, disconnected. She took the freeway in her hurry to get there.

  It was private land, she understood. She would not be allowed to drive in the buttes. But she felt suddenly desperate to see their desultoriness up close. Geological anomalies, mountains in the middle of a valley. She felt some aspect of them must elucidate something, must point her in a direction.

  To her right the shoulder was a streak of yellow grass dotted with trash. On and on, unvarying. Still, in this unending line, B. found herself waiting for something to appear. How could she be waiting? There was no sign that anything but the line of yellow grass would continue. This waiting, she sensed, was part of the problem. The feeling that if she just waited, somehow things would be resolved. Descend on her, materialize, make themselves clear. She felt programmed for it, she realized, as if to wait had been implanted in her body before she was born.

  She sped up the car.

  A crew of orange-vested men flashed by in the yellow line, picking up the trash. The blip of their faces pained in the heat. On another stretch the thump of a dead animal. The freeway streaming on. In her head a nursery rhyme drummed: Seventeen, eighteen, maids in waiting.

  Her eyes watered from the smog. She rolled up her window. She reached out to touch the checkbook, but the ostrich-skin purse was on the floorboard out of reach.

  The buttes when they finally rose in her windshield were ugly. Mounts of yellow brown in the haze, bare land with a few shrubs and oaks in its crevices. She drove on, determined. She reached the base and pulled onto a dirt road. At a locked gate not far in she parked. She got out; the dead engine pinged. At the gate, she climbed awkwardly over in her dress, stumbling in her heels as she jumped down. She followed along barbed wire, the hillside smelling of dry mustard and dust.

  The sun blazed down. There were no buildings anywhere. Bits of trash from other trespassers, a beer bottle, silver pull tabs, crumpled brown bags. The silver tabs were flashing a message maybe. Thirteen, fourteen, maids a-courting, fifteen, sixteen, maids in the kitchen. She watched the tabs, then gave up and walked on.

  She left the road and began hiking up the hillside. There was “chaparral”—this one classification of tangled green bushes so foreign to her when she came west that she’d had to learn the name—and oak trees scattered and stooping. The powder-blue dress chafed at her underarms. Her heels were blistering. She took o
ff the shoes. The dead grass and rocks pricked her feet but she could not put her throbbing soles back in the heels.

  She felt whatever she was looking for must be farther on.

  The top was not far. The sun fell in one pure burn into her skin. Finally she collapsed under one of the oaks, throat dry, too hot to continue. The flatness of the valley spread for hundreds of miles below, the mountains in the far distance like figments behind the haze. She could not make out any message, no revelation in any of it. She leaned against the tree. The feeling of solitude, at least, was pleasurable. No one would disturb her here. She closed her eyes.

  In her mind, two women swirled. The first from a party, the only contact she’d had with “the scene.” A man in line at the supermarket had asked B. whether the grapes in her basket were picked by Mexican migrant workers, and when she could not say they hadn’t been, he’d begun declaiming about seasonal labor movements and the exploitation of brown-skinned “proles” by capitalist dictators (“in this so-called ‘democratic’ society”) and then asked her to coffee. He had a wisp of awful breath and a slight droop to his left eye. Perhaps out of curiosity, or to occupy the hours, as with Daughtry, she’d accepted. When they met he did not ask her thoughts on anything. He listed his work in the service of the poor and downtrodden and disdained the “bourgeois café” where he had suggested they meet. He invited her to a party. The breath was worse, of a person who never flossed, whose teeth held rotting pieces of food. But she thought of the basement apartment and the long weekend ahead and again she accepted.

  The party was in a run-down Victorian in the neighborhood where the young people flocked. Stairs led to a railroad flat with fewer people than B. had imagined, a phonograph playing a rock band she did not know, one sagging couch. Pages from books were taped to the wall, a Dylan Thomas poem, an illustration of what she guessed from the many arms and blue skin was some Hindu god, an astrological chart over a dying, half-brown ficus in the corner. Her date left to talk to friends and a woman near the liquor table handed B. a paper cup of wine and began asking her whether she understood that an orgasm was a basic human right. “I mean like food and oxygen,” the woman clarified. She demanded to know whether B. let strangers call her by her first name. “They do it at the doctor’s office, the dry cleaner’s, and you need to tell them. Instruct them. ‘It’s Miss Smith, thank you.’ I mean, would they call a man by his first name?” The woman glowered, seemingly at the dry cleaners and grocery men in her mind. “It’s the insidious shit that keeps us down.”

  Her voice began stirring up the carsickness. B. drank more wine. But the tight spinning at the back of her neck seemed to coat the room and yellow the walls. B. excused herself to the bathroom to escape and wandered into a dark hallway that seemed to go on forever. At the end of it was a woman. She sat in the dark on the floor, wearing, B. could just make out, a short dress the weight of a handkerchief, with African-looking patterns and a deep V in front showing her nipples; her hair went past her shoulders, her sandals snaked up her legs. She did not move at B.’s approach. Her trance was total, her head tilted back, her eyes rolling under their lids. B. understood from all these signs that the woman was on a “trip,” that she was beyond herself, in another realm. B. had no interest in acid. But she could not stop watching the woman. She would have reached out to touch her, to ask for her advice somehow, to look into her eyes—perhaps help her cover the nipples—if B.’s date had not found her, with his sulfurous breath and another story about organizing the workers (to which B. asked if he spoke Spanish and to which he’d replied that this was beside the point). He led her back into the party and B. lost the woman in the dark.

  The other woman swirling in her mind was dead. B. had heard about it from one of the secretaries: the woman had been running across the street—her hair and nails clearly just done, the cherry red polish shining brightly in the sunlight—and then she had gone up and over the hood of a car and onto the ground. Her grocery bag torn and a wine bottle staining the asphalt and freshly cut daisies shivering in blood. All of which details B. saw vividly in her mind, the secretary having mentioned none of them. B. remembered thinking at the time that this woman had probably felt everything was “working out.” She’d bought the wine and picked the flowers and manicured her nails. And B. had felt a strange relief for her.

  She sat like this under the oak tree, her mind confused but soft, the two women swirling, for she did not know how long. The heat dissolved. At some point, the chaparral shivered on the hillside. Stories of mountain lions pierced her trance briefly, but she did not want to move. She felt as if she was just on the other side of something—an answer? a riddle? But the woman from the party frightened her and the woman in the street was dead. There was nothing to put together. She grazed her fingernails back and forth in the dirt.

  When the chaparral below her rustled again, she forced herself up. She climbed higher through the hard dirt and dried grass. She looked back for the mountain lion and at that moment stabbed the sole of her foot. The piece of glass was partway in. She removed it. She limped along without stopping. The top of the buttes was too near.

  When she got there, it felt as if she were in one of the banks. The silence and remove, the calm and peace. A pleasant cloudiness spread through her, making nothing particular about her in that moment, everything fluid and easy to deflect; no stories, no afflictions; she was only a vapor. Her foot stung, her mouth gluey, the sun burning directly on her scalp. A trickle of blood ran from her foot; the cut was marbled with dirt. And yet in this moment above the pink smogged air, she could occlude from her mind further thoughts about waiting, marriage, about things “working out,” about the drugged woman at the party and the dead woman in the street. She thought vaguely she must get a bandage. She thought vaguely, I’d like to sleep here. It was only the idea of the mountain lion that kept her from lying down in the dirt and dead grass to stay. Finally, after an hour or so, she forced herself to go down again the way she’d come, limping on the side of her foot.

  Something on the way down glinted in the sun. A pocket knife in the grass, the blade open. She could not think why it would be there. She picked it up and took it with her. Her mind was already losing its relaxedness, the pleasant cloudiness dissipating. Thoughts began to crowd her again . . . Seventeen, eighteen, maids a-waiting . . . She walked faster. The cut brushed on each step.

  By the time she came back to the Mustang, the sun was coming down the western half of the sky. Her feet and hands were filthy, her face and shoulders red. Flies buzzed her neck. In the car, she tore a piece of the map and wiped away the blood and wrapped the paper around her foot. She put the heels back on. When she tilted the rearview, there was a streak of dust across her chest and a fingerprint of blood at her collar bone. She tilted the mirror away and drove.

  She drove south. Huge trucks barreled by her on the freeway. She was light-headed from hunger and thirst. She stopped at a taco stand off an exit ramp. A small Mexican man stood at a window in the side of a trailer, a short heavyset woman behind him at a grill. There was no shade anywhere as the late afternoon sun bore down on them. The smell of onions and sizzling pork made B. momentarily sick. She braced herself against the counter. The woman handed her a paper cup of water. “You alright, ma’am?” B. gulped it down and nodded, trying to smile. She ordered a taco and an orange soda. There was a third Mexican leaning on the trailer, chatting with the cook in Spanish. He was laughing and B. saw him look at her feet, the torn map, her dress. When the taco was ready, she went back to the Mustang although it was stifling inside. She gulped down the soda in one pull. She took a few bites of the taco but nausea and dizziness made her stop and she wrapped it back in its tinfoil and put it on the floor. She lay across her seats for a moment, trying to push through the dizziness.

  She never should have left the buttes, she thought.

  She made herself rise and start the engine. The light was copper through the car but B. did n
ot notice it. She repeated to herself the nursery rhyme. Then she repeated to herself to the rhythm of the concrete breaks: get there, get there, get there. Her foot throbbed. Images of the realtor and the blue-smeared eyes of the girl returned. And it was not until the sky turned gray and the fields had dimmed that she finally realized: the banks were closed.

  19.

  When she entered the next town, a college town, there was already a sliver of moon. In the absence of a bank she must get to a motel and lie down, she told herself. But first a bandage. She scanned the streets for a drugstore. Everything deserted, the campus empty. The student-rented houses looked derelict even in the dark, couches on sidewalks, sagging stairs and porches, overgrown straw lawns. She parked the car to find a corner store at least. She walked through the abandoned campus. Crickets buzzed loudly. Her feet were raw in the bone-colored heels, the wound oozing through the paper. She sat on a bench. A few young people passed along the cement paths, in and out of pools of lamplight. The crickets droned on, the air smelled of grass, the night was hot. From nowhere it seemed a man came out of the dark and sat next to her.

  “Best time to be here,” the man said. “No students.”

  “It’s very quiet.”

  “Quiet. Obscured.”

  She did not turn her head to him, in part because she knew she must look terrible, in part because she was afraid to see his face, she did not know why. “I’m trying to find a drugstore,” she finally said.

  “Are you alright?” He turned toward her then, and she made herself look. He was maybe a decade older than she, but tanned and handsome, thick brown hair that had begun to gray at the temples. She wished she had the energy to take out her compact.