by Ruth Galm
“It’s a drag because he’ll miss me.” The girl drew a finger back and forth across her chapped lips. “Yeah, it’ll be a real downer for him. But like I said, I have my own scene—see things, do things.”
The nausea thrummed through B. She tried to concentrate on what was happening inside the Mustang, on how the girl had come to be beside her, but she was having trouble processing all of it, the hair, the breasts, the dirt.
“What have you seen?” she said carefully through the thrumming.
“Lots of stuff. I saw my first real Indian the other day. I mean I’ve seen them hustling at concerts, but this one was real. He drove a bus and wore a funky necklace of feathers and beads with his uniform, and his hair was down his back. His nose was big. He looked angry.
“And I saw the governor’s mansion. Jed and those groupies would think it’s too straight. But if people visit, it’s for a reason.”
B. tried and failed to picture the girl shuffling behind a velvet rope next to families and silver-haired retirees. It was at this moment she realized the girl had no recollection of her.
“What have you seen?” the girl asked indifferently.
B. flushed. “I saw the Sutter Buttes. They’re mountains in the middle of the valley, not connected to anything, you see. It makes them interesting.”
The girl tilted her head back against the seat, eyes on the window.
“I’ve never been picked up by a woman before.”
“I don’t mind,” was all B. could think of to say.
“You should go to the governor’s mansion,” the girl said without enthusiasm.
They drove past another alfalfa field. A slinky metal irrigation machine wheeled through it but there was no one to see; a machine somewhere to make it run. B. understood this about the valley now.
The girl had already fallen asleep, snoring lightly. B. kneaded her temple. The thrum was across the backside of her eyes, down the base of her neck. A be-in type in her car now, a “crazy,” a “stinko,” the secretaries called them, and yet she seemed to B. only like a dirty, pitiable child. B. told herself that she must make a plan. To get back to the banks, yes, but then for after. This was what she must do. Because even if she got back to the banks, she had the hazy understanding that they would only be available to her for a limited time. B. recalled on the wrist of the first pretty teller a charm bracelet with gold miniatures of the Eiffel Tower and the London Bridge (and a four-leaf clover and a heart with an arrow through it and a diamond chip). Well B. could go abroad too, couldn’t she? She could go to Paris and Rome.
But she saw quaint woven straw chairs and mansard roofs and sensed that this kind of plan was too similar to what she’d already done, coming west.
The thrumming went on.
All at once the heat returned to her again, the air flattening. A suffocation that mixed with the girl and the non-plan and the thrumming. There was no breathing. She pulled over. She got out and began walking blindly into a field. It was not until she saw a flash of red and smelled the sharp stickiness of the vines that she realized she was back in one of the tomato fields. Going on and on, helter-skelter, shadeless. But she had to move. The bone-colored heels caught in the crumbled dirt. Her face felt swollen. She wondered suddenly what she looked like to the girl. She reached into the purse for her compact. In the sunlight, her skin was pink and glazed, her throat beginning to sag, the skin draping slightly at her chin. Blackheads were visible in her pores, broken capillaries around her nose. She had, until recently, applied a facial mask every week to slough off old skin and expose new, as her mother had taught her.
She should try to find a facial mask in the valley.
The sound of splattering turned her around. The girl was squatted beside the Mustang, peeing in the dirt.
“I could have driven you somewhere,” B. said confusedly, stumbling back toward the car. “We could have stopped for you to . . . urinate.”
“I didn’t want to urinate on your seat.” The girl stood up and buttoned her cutoffs and made no move to get back in the car. “You wanna get high?” She took a small cigarette from behind her ear. B. shook her head. “Suit yourself, it’s good. Jamaican.” The girl walked past her into the field, her skin brown and firm in the sun. She took long drags on the joint and pulled tomatoes from the ground, tossing them as far as she could.
Now B. could not stand the tomato fields one minute longer. “We should get going,” she called.
The girl had picked a yellow tomato and was trying to look through it. “Going where?” she asked.
B.’s head throbbed, her scalp burned. “Well, I just stopped for a second. I’d rather keep moving.”
The girl shrugged. “I’m hungry,” she said.
“You’ll have to put on some shoes if we stop.”
“I have shoes.”
Each square of land they passed was bleached in the heat and smog and against the washed-out sky. B. felt as if she’d always been in the valley. Daughtry’s voice came into her head. Throw the checks out. They’ll be looking for you. She shook it off. She concentrated on the bleached squares while the girl stared out the window. Finally they came on a sign for a roadside bar and restaurant. open all day.
The front and back doors of the bar-restaurant were open, a sunlit tunnel into darkness. Fans on the ceiling spun but did not create any breeze. B. was relieved there were no other customers. She did not want to be seen with the girl. A man stacking glasses behind the counter took their orders and they sat down.
The girl ate her hamburger with a meticulousness that surprised B., French fries first, then the hamburger patty, then the pickle, placing the other trimmings inside the bun and closing it firmly. B. picked at her spaghetti. It had seemed the safest choice for the throbbing and spinning and heat but the noodles coagulated in a thick cloying sauce.
“What do you think you’ll do, in San Francisco?” she asked the girl.
The girl had been spearing the hamburger bun with her fork. “I don’t know. Hang out.”
“You don’t really have a plan.”
The girl looked up from her stabbing and B. thought she might jab the fork at her but her face was expressionless. “Are we going soon?” she said. She got up and walked toward the jukebox.
B. stroked the ostrich-skin purse. The girl, she knew, would not offer any money. B. felt unwilling again to part with the bank bills. In the deep of her mind, Daughtry was warning her in his low bitter voice.
“It’s so silly of me,” she said to the man behind the bar. “I forgot my cash in my other purse. Do you take checks?”
The man ran his eyes over her. “You from Sacramento?” he asked.
“I’m on a trip with my daughter, to Reno.” She paused and softened her voice. “We’re going to meet my husband. He’s on business there. He won’t be surprised to hear I brought the wrong purse.” She handed him the check. “There’s extra for the tip, of course.”
The man looked at her. “I don’t know this bank, ma’am.”
“Oh, it’s in the city. I can endorse it in front of you here.” She opened the purse, fumbled inside. “Well, I thought I had . . . Do you have a pen?” She smoothed her hair back, realizing she could not remember the last time she’d brushed it.
He reached next to the register and handed her a pen.
“I’ll just take down your driver’s license number,” he said.
“Yes, of course.” She rummaged the open purse again and dropped her shoulders, pretending exasperation. “Well, of all things. My license is in my other purse as well. Harold will think I’m hilarious.”
“I need some kind of identification, ma’am.”
“You could use my license plate.”
She was reading a script in her mind, without examining any of the lines. Behind the bar, a black-and-white pinup photo from the 1940s was glossy and signed. A girl in a
one-piece, curls on top of her head, long legs in seamed-stockings and platform heels, peeping over her shoulder. B. could not quite make out the inscription. be light! me tonight! (take flight?) On the check she wrote out an amount larger than the bill.
“Ma’am?”
“I can write the license number down for you,” B. heard herself saying next. She clutched the pen, beginning to write.
“No, I’ll get it myself. That’s yours over there?” The man gestured through the open door to the Mustang.
He stepped outside with his pad. B. stood in the doorway. The girl was busy examining the jukebox as if it were a riddle from a distant time. B. watched the man walk around the car, tilting his head. He went around the back and wrote on his pad. He came back inside and slipped the check into the register and counted out, minus the commission and tip, her change.
He looked B. in the eye. “I sure hope you’re not scamming me. I’d hate to send two pretty ladies to jail.”
Be light! Take flight!
“I don’t know what you mean.”
In the bathroom before they left, she tried to stick her finger down her throat. She only gagged. She knew not to expect the cool expansive feeling. But the throbbing seemed worse now. A new feeling of dread came over her, a feeling that she was heading the wrong way, that she should have turned or stopped somewhere earlier. Her body felt suddenly exhausted. The girl had gone outside, kicking at the dust of the parking lot, the loose thin leather that barely held together her sandals and her feet covered in dirt.
“I can’t drive any more today,” B. said in the car. “I think we should stop at a motel.”
The girl looked straight at B. for the first time. “I don’t do anything like that, okay?” The girl’s eyes were brown and tired.
“No. I meant . . . it’s too hot. I just want to rest. I’d rather drive in the morning.”
The eyes took this in. “If you’re paying.”
B. stopped at the next roadside motel and got them a room with two double beds. Dark blue bedspreads with giant purple and red flowers. The girl went into the bathroom. B. heard the shower turn on. While she could she went back to the car and hid the checkbook in the glove compartment and the money under the seat. Then she lay back on one of the beds. The rough texture of the nylon threads scratched her legs but she did not move or turn down the comforter. There seemed to be glitter in the ceiling. She stared at the glitter and went through in her mind all the actions she could take right at that moment: get up, rip up the checks, change clothes, get into the car, go back to the city. She lay there, immobile. The dizziness held steady. The shower ran for a while and she realized she herself had not bathed in days. After the girl finished, she would shower. They would sleep. She would have coffee and a real breakfast in the morning and be able to drive for hours. Drive farther away. Perhaps she could find other quiet places, not like the supermarket or the bar. Department stores, maybe. But she would have to go into cities for that. She sat up and saw herself in the mirror across from the bed. She was sunburned, thin. Her dark roots were showing. Her cuticles dirty and her knuckle with a large cut, she could not remember how. She could start there: bathe, clean her fingernails. And yet she did not want to move, did not have the energy to scrub anything. Maybe it was better to let all these thoughts go. Maybe a plan would come to her that way, descend from somewhere. She held the vague recognition that someone might be after her now. The police. The people to whom the checks belonged. Daughtry. But the considerations were shadowy, faint, like a bell tolling in the distance.
When the girl emerged from the bathroom she was wearing a long T-shirt, through which her nipples showed, wet hair hanging down to her ribs. B. saw clearly the dark circles under her eyes, beneath the tan.
“I usually watch TV.”
“Okay,” B. said.
The girl pushed the button on the box and sat on the other bed. A variety show came on and a series of ladies in black shorts with cummerbunds and tuxedo jackets spun canes and tipped their top hats. They did not sing, but moved in perfect mute unison, one woman with a big white smile, false eyelashes and a bow tie. When they finished a bald man came on and made jokes to a recorded laugh track.
“Aren’t you going to shower?” the girl asked.
“I just want to rest first.” B. lay back against her pillow. The skin over her body was tight from the sun and heat. Had she brought any body cream? The variety show ended and next they watched a talk show, a man in a corduroy suit in an armchair across from an actress in another armchair. The woman wore a minidress with a large bow, a pixie haircut and exaggerated eyelashes, making her look like a Pierrot. The host made jokes about the actress’s last film role; the actress smiled stiffly. The girl sat smoking and laughing at the jokes.
“Where are we?” B. asked.
“I dunno. Somewhere near Marysville.”
After a while, B. said, “Does it help, traveling around?”
“Help what?”
“I thought maybe you left for some reason. To get away from something.”
“From dying of boredom,” the girl said. “Cement plant, pinochle club on Saturday nights, Blue Hawaiians before dinner.” Her wet hair made mottled, transparent spots in her shirt. She inhaled the cigarette deeply, let all the smoke out before she spoke again.
“When Jed had enough money, we split. I called my mom from Fresno. She cried. Worrying is her thing. Worrying and cleaning. She’s never been farther than L.A. for Christ’s sake.”
The actress on the talk show was now laughing and flirting, but still stiffly, making the Pierrot effect more marked. Her lips moved in a quiet white-pink murmur. When the talk show host asked about her love life she put her fingers in front of her mouth.
“I was sick in the city, that’s why I left,” B. said. “I think I was dying.” It seemed true. “Do your parents know where you are now?” she asked.
The girl ignored the question. “Where are you going, anyway?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Around the valley.”
The girl continued to smoke and watch the show, genuinely pulled in it seemed. The comedian came back on and continued his shtick. The girl laughed again at his jokes.
“It was a kind of nausea, the reason I left the city,” B. went on. “I don’t suppose you’ve ever felt that way?”
“I puked as a kid.”
“But have you ever felt a nausea that wasn’t . . . I mean, did you ever feel carsick when you weren’t really?”
The girl rose and rooted through the knapsack until she pulled out the crumpled magazine from the Sambo’s floor and flopped back on the bed. “I don’t get carsick,” she said.
The girl’s dirty fingernails, not clean even after the shower, closed around the crumpled white veil. The comedian finished and a woman brought on a short gray dog that flipped backward on command.
B. suddenly shivered. “The air-conditioning’s too high,” she said aloud. She got up and flicked the knob down.
After that she went into the bathroom, but the idea of showering exhausted her. She swiped her armpits with a washcloth, splashed her face and went back to the bed, listening to the girl laugh to the laugh track on television.
&$9
In Boston she had wanted to make friends with another woman. She thought perhaps her mother was right, it might help her to be more gay and light, it might help with the carsickness, and so she’d tried with Louise.
Louise was an old college dorm mate who lived in New York. When B. phoned her she seemed very eager to meet. “I’ll drive up today.” They met at a restaurant near B.’s apartment and Louise talked nonstop from the moment of their first martini.
“I volunteered for a while, you know, MoMA. One of the other girls was young, a coed. She would read these awful poems that went on and on and didn’t rhyme.” Louise sighed. “She wore blue jeans all the time and smoked gr
ass and I thought it was really sort of disgusting, but she liked me, you see. Maybe subconsciously she had some kind of effect, an influence of some kind.”
B. did not know what to do with this flood of words from another woman but it did not matter because Louise asked her nothing, just went on talking about New York and drinking more martinis. At some point her face turned slack with alcohol.
“Anyhow, I had this day—we have a horrible little flat in the Thirties but Ed is working his way up in the firm, you know, we’ll have a whole floor on the Upper East soon—well, I was trying to cook a roast in that silly little kitchen with no counter space and so I used our little table to chop the vegetables and then I was on the floor with the roasting pan because there was nowhere else to put it. I was trying to arrange all the trimmings and he came home and found me and laughed at me. He thought it was unbelievably funny somehow, me on the floor. And I don’t know what made me so mad . . . I don’t know what I was thinking . . . I bit him. I grabbed his arm and bit him! Have you ever heard of such a juvenile thing? And he laughed at that too. He thought I was being . . . romantic.” Louise’s eyes were large in the slack face as she spoke. “But I felt like biting his other arm, really gnawing his skin, and we made love right there on the kitchen floor—I can’t believe I’m telling you this—and that part was fine. But he fell asleep afterward, there on the floor, and he was snoring, and of course, yes, he works those long hours, but there I was with the roast uncooked and him snoring. And I walked out. I didn’t even bring my coat, you know. Already fall, but I wasn’t thinking—not even my coat! I kept walking until my teeth chattered. I didn’t even have money for a hotel, so I stayed with a friend, told her Ed was out of town on business and I was too scared to stay in the apartment alone, and she laughed at me too—everyone considered me just hilarious that day—and that night I went back and told him I was leaving him. And the funny part is I still don’t know why.