by Ruth Galm
The girl was staring at her. “Can I wear one of your dresses?” she asked out of nowhere, chocolate ice cream in the corners of her mouth.
B. took the girl in, with her cutoffs, wearing only a lace-topped camisole and the leather choker around her neck, large turquoise in the center.
“They haven’t been cleaned in a while,” B. said.
The girl shrugged. “I don’t care.”
B. had a brief vision of the girl in her dress, on the bus through Chinatown, at the beauty salons. She held the irrational thought that perhaps the girl would understand then. Maybe then she could tell the girl about the walks and the crocus. They went back to the trunk of the Mustang, the organ music whining behind them. B. pulled the powder-blue dress from the travel bag. (She had put back on the ivory; she only wanted the ivory sheath now.) “I should really hang them up in the back,” she said. “I don’t know why I don’t.” She didn’t have another pair of heels; the girl would have to wear her sandals.
“I can fix your hair and makeup,” B. offered.
“Alright.”
The girl changed in the backseat while B. got out her brush. When she stepped out the hard nipples were pressed against the bust of the dress. B. tried not to look. She removed the braids and feathers and brushed through the girl’s hair, pulling out tangles. “Ouch. Ow!” “I can’t help it, your knots are horrible.” The girl’s hair was too long to keep any kind of style so B. twirled it up on top of her head and arranged it like a crown with her bobby pins. Then she painted the girl’s eyelids black with liner and mascaraed her long lashes and drew on the pink lipstick. B. unhooked the diamond brooch from her own chest and pinned it at the girl’s collarbone. The girl eyed B. “I’ve never worn a diamond before.” She gazed at herself in the car windows, fingering the brooch. “Like a movie star,” she said. The girl’s shins were still blotched white with calamine. She needed stockings, a handbag, B. thought vaguely.
They went back to the midway and walked under the winking bulbs. The girl’s neck looked long with her hair up. B. watched the farmers grin but the girl did not seem to notice.
“Let’s have some beer,” the girl said.
B. bought two bottles and it appeared that whatever substances the girl had imbibed in her short life, she had not had much beer. She seemed immediately drunk. They sat on a wooden picnic bench and watched the crowd in the jangle of the midway and the girl babbled on about her favorite rock groups, the first time she took acid, an ice cream parlor in Fontana where her mother threw her a “goofy” six-year-old birthday party. The crowd, B. observed as the girl talked, was sunburned couples and sunburned teenagers and a few Mexicans. No other women with hitchhiking girls.
The girl kept smoothing down the wrinkles at her lap. “You must feel like a lady in these getups. Who wears this stuff, anyway? Hello, I’m Mrs. Lady.”
The girl insisted on doing the swing ride again in the new outfit. But by the time she returned to the picnic bench her expression had changed back to the indifference. She slumped next to B., her head leaning to the side, a new bottle of beer somehow in her hand.
“It’s too tight on me. I can’t breathe.”
“It fits perfectly.”
The girl drank the whole beer. “You should wear my clothes now,” she said.
B. did not respond. She had, in truth, wondered what they felt like, the suede and the bare legs and the leather choker. But only in passing.
“You too good for my clothes?”
“I just don’t feel like changing right now.”
The girl grabbed B.’s bottle out of her hand and drank that too. “You’re one of those snobs,” she hissed. Her eyes seemed only able to land in some middle distance beyond B. “Snobby cunt won’t wear my clothes.”
“It’s getting late,” B. said. “We should find a motel.”
“Blah blah blah, you think you’re too good, that’s it. You think you’re just driving around this shit valley for the sights or something. What sights? Like this?” She gestured mockingly at the midway.
“I know what you’re doing,” the girl went on, tossing the beer bottle in the dirt, looking slightly addled now with hair falling out of the crown, lipstick smeared. “I’m not stupid. I’ve seen things on the road. I want in on the action. Jed and me need the dough.”
B. kept her eyes level on the midway. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“I mean the pile of cash under your seat.”
B.’s body went oddly still, the heaving down deep where she could not feel it yet.
“Don’t worry, I didn’t take any.” More hair fell out of its bun as she spoke, head bobbing. “How do you set up the tricks anyway? You can’t just hang out on corners like in the city. Do you offer to blow the farmers at their fruit stands or something? Out in the fields?”
“You’re drunk.”
“One of those ladies who gets her rocks off hooking. Does your husband think you’re on a reducing weekend or something?”
She yanked the girl up by the arm. The spinning instantly and violently back now, a searing tightening in her head that made her knees almost buckle. The girl let herself be guided back to the Mustang, mumbling incoherently. In the car, her eyes closed and her body went slack, but the muttering continued. “Snob! Snobby driving cunt . . . They won’t get him, goddamn whores. Don’t you understand? He’s meant to be with me. Pack of goddamn whores.”
By the time B. found a motor lodge, the girl was comatose. The night manager said nothing as B. paid in advance, parting with her precious bank bills, and then watched as if he had seen it all before B. lift the girl to her feet, string the brown arm around her shoulders and drag her to the room. She dumped the girl on a bed still in the dress. The girl looking now like a beat-up doll, face placid, hair askew, eyeliner wiped up her cheek.
B. kicked off her heels and went into the bathroom. She put her hands to her forehead against the spinning. In the mirror she saw her reflection: blackened eyes, greasy hair, pieces of sunburned skin flaking from her shoulders. Slowly, in a trance, she began peeling away the dead patches of skin. She peeled until her shoulders were raw, until translucent patches curled in the sink.
When she came out of the bathroom, the girl was up. She was squatted next to the bed flicking cigarette ash onto the carpet, mumbling again. The powder-blue dress lay crumpled on the floor. She was not wearing any shirt or underpants, just the jean cutoffs with her knees jutted out so her pubic hair showed, her small breasts two white circles against her brown tan, her eyelids fluttering open and closed. She had tried and failed, it appeared, to put on the turquoise leather choker—it lay over her shoulder, ties hanging down. (“I got it from an Indian lady at a concert. The real-deal stuff, no fakes.”) B. noticed then the girl was wearing the bone-colored heels. Squatting naked in the bone-colored heels. With a surge of anger, B. shoved the girl on her bottom, yanked off the heels and threw them across the room. “I sa’ put back on my own clothez,” the girl slurred, up on her elbows, breasts upright. “Mise own clothes better.”
B. pulled the girl up from the floor and pushed her back on the bed, flipping the bedspread to cover the dark nipples. “Go to sleep!” she yelled. The girl closed her eyes, her expression instantly serene. It was only then B. realized she must have taken something with the beers. Some hippie tab or root. B. retrieved the heels and, face hot, brushed them harshly with her fingers, as if this would remove the dirt and gouges. She hid them under her bed. She shook out the powder-blue dress and laid it over the television.
She went to the knapsack.
She took out the crumpled LIFE magazine, the wedding dress stained and the couple’s faces now ripped beyond recognition. The carsickness was in every part of her body again, crushing her like a vice. She dropped the magazine in the trash.
It was a juvenile kind of writing in the notebook, bubbled letters and hearts dotting the i’s.
The entries just like the script, childish, stolid, complaints about her parents and Fontana, about Jed and the other women. This one was a “square,” that one was a “phony,” “a goddamn bummer.” There was a creased flyer for a rock concert with obscene doodling. A list of highs, ranked.
Halfway through the girl had written an essay. The type a student might write for a junior high school English class, with centered underlined title: Why I liked the Governer’s [sic] Mansion. “The pretty cups for tea,” “a place for quiet for the governer to think.” “What did you learn from this experience?” the girl wrote in conclusion. “Everyone needs his proper home.”
B. clutched the page. Inside the crushing an inexplicable sadness rose. She thought of her own essay, what could it say. Why I Like the Valley. “The sights, the agriculture . . . The variety of the region’s banks . . . The nothingness, the non-walks, the erasing heat . . . the driving . . . To keep driving.”
She dropped the notebook to the floor. Still in a trance, she went to the knapsack and pulled out the suede vest, heavy with tobacco and body odor and musk. She unzipped her dress and stepped out, unhooked her bra. With the vest she hung a string of painted wooden beads around her neck. She placed one of the feathers in her knotted hair. The girl’s blue jeans were too small over her hips; she sat in her underwear and lit one of the girl’s cigarettes.
She tried to hum the rock song. The man’s silky smug words commanding her not to hesitate, not to wallow. She got up and found the antler bone in her purse and sat with it in her lap. She tried inside the violent spinning to daydream: she was on the side of the highway, thinking of Andalusia, of the Indians, unconcerned, uninhibited, waiting for nothing, expectant of everything. Free.
The spinning broke through all of it. The drumming nausea. Her breasts sagged against the vest. She dug her nails into her palms. She tried to recite some of the Indian prayer. It was ridiculous. It was impossible.
The girl had come too late. The girl and her chants and her looseness. The sadness pooled at the bottom of the spinning. She lay down on the floor. The antler tumbled off. She stroked her cheek back and forth against the carpet. The only thing was the banks. The only irrefutable truth. Lying on the carpet she heard the tick tick tick of the clocks above the vault, the whoosh of paper across the counters.
26.
She woke with a thick, confused feeling, as if she’d slept while everyone else had stayed awake. Her mouth tasted like ash. The sun was trying to break through in futile hatches in the drapes.
B. lifted herself up. Somewhere in the night she had crawled to her bed. She made out the form of the girl watching her in silence. B. stumbled out of bed and grabbed the powder-blue dress off the television and went into the bathroom. As she sat on the toilet she felt the carsickness saturate every pore, juddering and expanding as she wiped herself, as she stood up. The force of it renewed as though it had only been quietly metastasizing. She dug her nails into her palms.
When she came out, the girl was watching television, the smoke from her cigarette twisting in spectral columns in the dimness. Her hair was still half in and half out of its bun, but otherwise she looked no worse for wear. As if the night had been B.’s personal hallucination.
“Whatever you’re doing, I want in,” the girl said.
She was inscrutable in the smoke, staring at the television.
B. did not answer.
“My mom collects these figurines,” the girl went on. “All porcelain with gold at the edges, Little Bo Peeps and farmers and squirrels.” She paused with a cool, almost clinical expression. “She puts them in a glass case and dusts them every day. Goes to work and comes home and doesn’t talk to my dad, just rearranges the figurines. I don’t want any figurines, any cement factory, any goddamn pools. But you need money to be free, don’t you? You need money to get away. I want money, for Jed and me.”
The girl’s voice like a metal ringing in B.’s skull. The banks arranged themselves in her mind, the long fluorescent lights and neat rows of teller windows and evenly spaced islands for filling out forms. She wanted the girl to shut up so she could be alone with the images.
But the girl would not shut up. “I had my first diaphragm when I was fifteen and when my mother found it, she thought it was a strainer. For tea. Didn’t even know what it was. Jed says it’s a conspiracy they’ve been feeding us, like cyanide on our corn flakes.”
“Like arsenic on corn flakes.”
“Anyway, whatever you’re doing, I want in. I want in on the action.” The metal ringing hammering out in waves.
“I need coffee,” B. said.
Outside, the day glared hot and smoggy yellow. Was it still July? B. did not know. In the office she poured herself a cup of coffee as the woman at the counter openly stared at her. “We’re paid up,” B. said. The woman did not even nod, just continued to stare.
The girl kept up her diatribe in the car. “The only person I’d marry is Jed, but we don’t have those hangups.” B. wondered if the girl had seen the LIFE magazine in the trash. The girl lit a new cigarette, marijuana this time. “We don’t need it because I’m his old lady and he’s my old man.”
“And he’s sleeping with other girls right now.”
“You can goddamn take that back.” The girl jabbed the joint at B., her hair slipping from the half-bun as she spoke. “That’s none of your goddamn business.”
They drove in silence for a while, the grass smoke acrid in the car.
“I’m not a prostitute,” B. said finally.
“What then? You deal? My dealer in Fontana drives a yellow Corvette and could get us into the hippest shows in L.A. You don’t seem the type.”
“I’m not doing anything.”
The girl sighed, the same sigh B. imagined she gave when her mother misconstrued the diaphragm. “Fine, you’re not doing anything. You’re just here with a stack of bills under your seat, driving around the valley picking up girls for charity.”
“And there are blood stains,” the girl said. “On the floorboard.”
They drove through low green fields. B. no longer cared about classifying the crops. She felt somewhere in her reeling a need to make the girl stop her crazy ideas, to make her understand. “I like the banks,” B. said. “I like the colors and the furniture and the people. They’re safe and quiet. It’s not for the money.”
“So work in a bank.”
“You’re missing the point,” B. said.
“I’m getting the point alright,” the girl said. “It’s called robbing banks. Checks, right? ’Cause I don’t see you pulling this off with a gun and mask. Jed tried to pass a check once and they were on him in two seconds flat. But I can see that angle being right up your alley. The diamond and the heels and the hair and all. I can see that being exactly your thing.”
“Why haven’t you done any with me? Did they catch you or something?” the girl went on without missing a beat. “Well they won’t recognize me.”
“I could help you,” she said. “I could help with your sickness or whatever.”
For a moment, the idea held B. Someone to take away the affliction, to lay her down and pat her hair and tell her stories. But the girl’s tired face and disordered hair hardened in front of her and B. knew this girl possessed no such balm.
The teller windows returned to her. The perfect squares of wood and glass, the soothing ivory walls. She must get rid of the girl.
The girl was still at it. “I see how the whole lady getup is the angle now. I can do that, like last night. I can do the lady thing, no problem.”
“The dresses are dirty,” B. protested. “They’re too big.”
“You said last night it fit perfectly,” the girl retorted. B. suddenly understood her as the druggist had, something out of a German fairytale, vicious and hungry, not to be let in the door.
“I’m not asking for fifty-fifty. Whatever’s f
air. Any bread will help. For me and Jed, for our trip.”
“We’ll do the next one together,” the girl was saying. “We can trade off. I’ll do it and you can see how good I am and then you decide how much. And if you don’t, I’ll report you.”
Everything was moving in its own dreamy, gel-like substance inside the carsickness. “I want to see the gold rush park first,” B. said. “The one the man at the gas station told us about.” She felt inexplicably that the gold rush park was the next step in the journey: the girl’s threat, her chatter, the park—all of them ripples inside the thick, surreal wave that would get her back to the banks. No need for any plan. Now she understood. The banks were the only plan.
“Bunch of hicks came and missed the gold, got syphilis and died, the end.”
“I want to see the park first,” B. said implacably. “I don’t care what we do after that.”
“Fine. It’s your trip. But don’t stall on me.”
B. took the small road back to the freeway. She pointed the car in the direction of the foothills. Leaving the valley now had its own part in the dream-gel logic. The girl chatted on, almost nervously, about how she’d stolen from five and dimes and corner stores since she was little. B. flattened the girl’s voice into a distant hum. The slope rose almost imperceptibly as they drove, and then all of a sudden they were in the foothills, the anise scent in the bleached grasses and the hunched oak trees and the valley behind remote and blurred.
There were no landmarks near the sign. B. parked in the shadeless lot near a few picnic tables. The heat sucked instantly inside the car. She gathered her purse and sat for a moment, looking out the window. “I won’t be long,” she said. The girl said nothing.
At the park entrance, a ranger stood in a shack. A transistor radio crackled behind him, the baseball game organ scaling up and down, the cheers of the crowd listless ripples in the heat. Under the man’s ranger hat he wore dark wraparound glasses so that B. couldn’t see his eyes. “It’s self-guided,” he said, handing her a pamphlet. “Over a hundred years of state history in one park, ma’am. Happy prospecting.” A languid cheer whined from the game.