by Ruth Galm
A lizard with no tail skittered in front of her. A series of small signs appeared along the trail: “Ten thousand men crowded the bank here in search of a dream. But the dream was elusive.” The signs went on about claims and sluice boxes and the few who struck any gold and the multitudes who left destitute. The women were cooks and madams. B. remembered reading that somewhere.
She came to a stack of pans by the river, apparently for trying your own hand at panning. She picked one up and removed the bone-colored heels and climbed slowly into the freezing water. The cold woke her up out of the dream-gel substance, made her sharp and lucid inside the spinning. She moved into the water. The edges of the cut on her foot gilled. She bent down and shoveled up the dirt and shook it around the pan. Nothing. She dumped and tried again, shimmying the rocks and sand and coming up empty again, her hands turning blue in the icy water. She tried once more, the sharp buzzing in her head and throat. It would be easy to keep trying it all day, she saw, to go on hoping and waiting for something to appear. In frustration she tossed the pan into the water and watched it float away. She walked out of the river to one of the oaks and sat. From her spot she saw the girl get out of the car, climb onto a picnic table, light a cigarette and lie back in the sun. B. shivered. She reached into the ostrich-skin purse reflexively for a check, forgetting they were in the glove compartment. Instead she came up with the knife from the buttes.
She examined it for a long moment. Its sleekness was comforting to hold. She angled the blade so the sun glinted off and it gave her a feeling of sudden reassurance, as if she could reach into her purse and find whatever she needed. She leaned against the oak tree and let the comfort of the knife wash over her.
When she got back to the Mustang, the girl was in her seat with the door open, feet on the concrete, painting her nails with B.’s nail polish.
“You hit the motherlode?” The girl did not look up from her strokes. Her long hair was out of the bun now and back in her face. The bubblegum pink did not obscure the dirt in her nails. B. walked to the driver’s side without responding.
“We should do it now,” the girl said then. “Strike while the iron’s hot.” She was brushing out a last line of her big toe, swabbing the remnants with her fingernails.
B. was still at the oak tree, on a calm plane above the girl. “I don’t think it’s a good idea,” she answered.
“I didn’t ask whether it was a good idea,” the girl snapped. “If you don’t let me, I’ll turn you in.”
The absurdity of the conversation, the threat, did not touch B. She started the engine and backed out before the girl could move. “Shit, let me close the door!” The girl scrambled to get her feet in. After that, the girl remained silent for a while, having sensed the shift in mood. They drove down a two-lane road from the park and at the first gas station, B. turned in.
“You can change in the bathroom,” B. said.
“I need you to help me,” the girl said.
In the single restroom with its urinal and green flickering light, B. pulled the powder-blue dress out of the travel bag and thrust it at the girl. She got out her makeup case and haphazardly brushed eye shadow and mascara and blush onto the tan face.
“You can’t wear my heels anymore.”
“Why not?”
B. ignored her. “We’ll go to the nearest town with a store and a bank and get you your own shoes.”
“I’m not paying.”
B. yanked the girl’s hair back into a chignon as best she could. The girl said nothing, just stared at her face in the green-lit mirror, in the warm smell of urine and mothballs.
In the car, the girl began talking nervously again.
“It’s just that I don’t have those housewife hang-ups, you know. He’s free, I’m free. But if I come back with the bread, well, the groupies can’t give him that.” She absentmindedly smoothed the wrinkled lap of the dress as she spoke.
The next town they reached was two short blocks, a Mexican restaurant and an insurance shop on one side, a fabrics and sewing supply store on the other. Next to that a clothing store. B. parked in front. She noticed as she got out that the girl was still wearing an anklet, a strip of dark leather with hanging white shells. The girl should have taken off the anklet. “Wait here, I don’t want them to see you,” B. said. In the clothing store, there were outfits for everyone and everything—overalls, wedding dresses, toddlers’ rompers. A crescent-shaped display of shoes for all occasions. B. chose a pair of white pumps in her own size.
The saleswoman boxed up the shoes, offering tips for the stains on B.’s dress (“Little bit of selzer, little bit of baking soda, that’ll come right off.”), but B. was fixated on the anklet. It spoiled the calm from the gold rush park. The confusion of dark leather and shells and the powder-blue dress, the incongruity everywhere.
“You need to take that off,” she said slowly in the car. “Take it off if you’re going to do it right.”
The girl slipped on the heels and turned them this way and that on the dashboard admiring, the shells clicking. “Got that from the Indian lady too. It’s good luck.”
All at once B. remembered the antler bone on the motel room floor. Gone, no luck anywhere.
“You can’t wear that with the heels,” she told the girl.
“Relax,” the girl said. “Don’t worry so much. They’ll never see.”
The bank was at the end of a two-block street. The girl had already retrieved the checkbook from the glove compartment, ripped one out and written on it with her bubbled writing. She stepped out of the car without a word. B. watched the long solid back of the powder-blue dress, set off by the girl’s tan, the white pumps and the anklet. They disappeared through the glass doors.
On the road she had thought again of a house. With the girl. This time far up at the northern edge of the valley, where she’d never been, hundreds of miles away from the realtors and beauty salons and university men. The afternoon light in the windows as clear to her as if she’d seen it in person. A grove of eucalyptus and orange trees in back. A porch. And the girl in the afternoon light. “Come with me to a house,” B. had imagined saying in this fantasy. “Come with me and we can sort things out.”
When the girl sat back in the car, B. had the knife ready. She stuck the point at the girl’s ribs.
“Take the money and move on.”
The girl sat momentarily stunned. Then she tried to turn. B. pressed the knife further in.
“Fuck you and your twisted Donna Reed show,” the girl finally whispered. She grabbed the knapsack and got out of the car and kicked off the white pumps and threw them at the door.
“You crazy old cunt!”
B. did not look back. She imagined the girl barefoot in the anklet and powder-blue dress, receding.
The road seemed a series of waves moving her forward. She drove past billboards for casinos and ski resorts (like a practical joke in the heat) and knew she was heading into the mountains. She wondered for a moment if the girl might report her but decided she would not risk being shipped back to Fontana. B. thought of the girl’s mother—intent over the porcelain, dusting the petticoats, waiting for the girl to return. B. laid on the gas. The car sloped up and up, she could see the pines ahead. Surrounding her on all sides the spots of oak, gentle and lulling, drawing her on. She would tell the girl’s mother how she had tried to visit the bridge, to sit in the mission chapel, to take in the hummingbirds and crocuses. But that only the banks had worked. The carsickness was a violent and spinning nausea as she drove. B. imagined the girl’s mother would understand. Who had worn the kid gloves and sat for the wash-and-sets. Who had lost the daughter with the long loose hair and bare feet. What have you learned from this experience? The vault clocks ticked through B.’s mind. She saw she could just continue on, higher into the mountains, until she was through. Until she was out.
She skidded to a stop in the middle
of the road. The gentle bending grass alongside her and the dark jagged mountains ahead.
She brought the steering wheel around its column, turning the car in one single movement onto the shoulder and back in the other direction. Back into the valley.
III
&$9
27.
In an all-night laundromat, she drank a bottle of Coke from a machine. She put the cool glass between her legs. Out of the foothills her crotch had begun itching violently and in the ladies’ room at the laundromat, she’d discovered a forgotten last tampon. How many days? She no longer knew. Since before the night with the university professor. Forgetting this necessary feminine ceremony, and so it had been inadvertently rammed inside her and left to fester there, disintegrating, gathering its bacteria. She dug for several minutes for the string. The tampon halted on the way out, dry and bloated to twice its size, making her wince. She washed her fingers raw with the powdered soap. On the lip of the sink she had fanned out the bills (she’d collected everything from under the front seat, finding the sweaty cellophane-wrapped doughnuts too). She did not want to count the bills but to separate out the newest ones and roll these into her bra strap as she had that first day, understanding now their power as a totem next to her skin. Back in her blue plastic seat, she tensed her thighs together to stop the itching but it raged. The only other person in the laundromat was a woman folding endless pairs of shorts, some the size of napkins, and B. thought momentarily of striking up some conversation, but a slovenly aspect in the woman—a burst seam in her pedal pushers, a missing button on her blouse—made B. avoid her. She was too tired to drive to a motel. She preferred to sit and watch the suds in the washer tumble and churn. She might even plan a route as she watched, map out how she could conduct the banks in a prudent and logical manner this time, strategically.
But as she watched, the swirling liquid turned gray . . . the gray of the city . . . the gray of the fog. And suddenly she was back a few days before the first check. The day when the fog had never lifted, the day she’d left work early to settle her electric bill in person (her electricity turned off, the payment—was it two?—forgotten, when normally she stayed so on top of those things, on things like bill paying and facial masks). The fog had never lifted that day, hanging in gray veils between buildings. There was a buzzing at the back of her neck that had begun in the morning but she’d managed to contain it with typing and filing to a thin steady drone. As she walked the concrete canyons and could not find the bus stop, the droning got worse. The one-dimensional light brightening and deadening objects at the same time to a flat nothingness. She hurried past two drifters on a corner, a man with a guitar in striped pants and a woman in a tall, sinister bowler hat handing out carnations. When B. finally found the stop, shivering in her navy bouclé suit, she stood next to a pretty young woman and felt relief.
And yet on closer inspection, the young woman had worn no stockings, her hair long and frizzy, braless under the paisley dress. Carrying not a handbag or gloves but a satchel across her chest and a thick textbook titled Advanced Microbiology in her arm. Not a drifter and yet not anything B. had ever known before, not anything she recognized. For the first time with the carsickness she vomited. Retched onto the sidewalk. The girl tried to offer some help, but B. stumbled away and found a taxi, mailed the check to the utility company and lived for the rest of the week with candles.
“Where’s the nearest bank?” B. asked the woman folding laundry, turning away from the gray suds.
The woman explained and it seemed to B. that she understood exactly why B. had asked. She understood the gray suds and the girl at the bus stop and that the banks were the only answer.
&$9
She bought baby powder for her hair so she would not have to wash it. She remembered from college that cranberry juice helped the itching and bought two jars and drank them as she drove. The lipstick was also essential, the lipstick with the diamond brooch and the French twist (with the baby powder). She carefully applied a pink or a coral right before she went in, just as she carefully held down her shoulders and put on a smile and nodded during small talk. In the motels, while she still used them, she hung up the ivory sheath and slept in her bra and underwear. But when she began sleeping in the Mustang—in order to hoard more bills, and because she was not sleeping much anyway—she kept the dress on. It now had creases like cuts in it and an unmistakably sour stain of sweat. In truck-stop restrooms she forced herself to wash her armpits. (Some aspect of stepping into a shower would undo everything. She used the restroom soap just enough to cover her smell.) There was of course the light green poplin she had not even worn yet. But the ivory was now a talisman, a marker of some kind. The bone-colored heels were now a light brown.
Three a day was the most she managed because of the long distances. Her best one of the first, when she’d fallen into extended small talk with a teller about the preferred route to Tahoe, the girl emphatic about taking Highway 50 to avoid the trucks and come out on the south side. The girl’s passion for the distinction, her engrossment in the nuances—the importance of ending up at the casinos, for example—allowing B. time to absorb the straight lines, the subdued voices, the browns and beiges. The cool expansive feeling had lasted and lasted. She had not needed a second bank. That day she had parked under a eucalyptus break and slept peacefully in the shade all afternoon.
But as the days passed, the cool expansive feeling began to lessen. She attributed this first to mitigating factors: the bank that had been near a canning plant and so polluted with the awful tang of stewed tomatoes she could not take anything else in. Another where she’d become so distracted by her dirty fingernails—the black against the chipped pink—that she’d forgotten her opening bit about the weather and signed her own name on the check. (The teller had not noticed.) And even when it went off all right, the cool expansive feeling evaporated after a few minutes. Like a drug with no kick. The spinning and nausea returned fiercer than before, making her gun the engine for the next town and the next one after that.
The spree lasted five days, until the morning she walked into the bank and saw the small poster with the sketch. attractive blonde, early thirties, 5’7”, 120 pounds, wears diamond brooch. Even then she had considered continuing on to the counter, filling out one of the last checks, until a reflex finally kicked in and she walked out.
28.
At a gas station she bought a coffee and a doughnut to keep herself alert. She fingered her bra strap. There were too many bills to fit them all in there now: she had stuffed the rest into the ostrich-skin purse and back under the seat of the Mustang, as if surrounding herself with a protective force field. The gas station attendant eyed her as she nibbled the icing. She touched her hair; the baby powder had stopped absorbing the grease. She moved casually away from the door.
She walked behind the station. The mountains were no longer even visible in the brown haze, the valley an endless plain. At her feet everywhere were the wild poppies. Her brain pressed out against her skull, against the backs of her eye sockets. The neon-orange clusters in the dead dry grass pulsed at her. She chucked the coffee and doughnut and followed railroad tracks. The buzzing of the electrical wires like the whir in her head, the trash transmuting itself into diamonds and roses. She yanked a clutch of poppies. Like yanking out the incongruities, the inexplicable. She walked, mashing and dropping the petals, trying to see how she had got here, what to do next.
It had not seemed, as it now did, inevitable: She had risen that day like any other, slipped on the ivory sheath and pinned her hair. She had chosen the bone-colored heels to match the sheath and not taken a sweater for the fog because she was tired of wearing sweaters in July. She had picked up a newspaper to read before and after the bus (because of the motion sickness) and she had made it all as it usually was, even after the girl at the bus stop had made her vomit, even after her mother had called her a lesbian. She read the newspaper but inside was a pic
ture of a burning city in the East. The picture not of the police with shields or the people carrying off televisions, but of a group of black women at a police station. Bags under their eyes, deadened gazes, curlers in their hair, waiting. B. stood in the wet morning air, shivering without a sweater, riveted. She tried to scan other headlines: landslides in Japan and the stock market down. But the black women waiting remained. They were some kind of portent, a communiqué to her alone. The wave of nausea nearly buckled her. She dropped the newspaper in the trash and staggered onto the bus when it came. She gripped her seat. She knew she would not vomit again; she would not get off so easily. Across from her a Chinese woman with the short mannish hair, a suited man reading his paper. She grasped in her mind for a soothing memory, her mother demonstrating the proper method of folding a dress shirt. Collar down, shoulders indented, buttons pressed. B. moved her hands quietly in this rhythm, collar down, shoulders indented, buttons pressed. But the suited man, whom she’d seen day in and day out, with his paper cup of coffee and shiny gold band, small, balding, who never looked up from his paper, struck her, and she put it together: it was this or some other man’s dress shirt she was folding in her mind. The bus rattled under electric wires. The weekend to come again, the hours to be counted, and the only thing to be done to fold the suited man’s dress shirt in one’s mind. (While he went off to work with his coffee and paper, day after day, as if nothing was wrong, as if B. were not ill and the black women not waiting and the young women not loose-clothed and long-haired at bus stops.) At her stop, B. stumbled off and into her office building and at her desk she turned on the typewriter and typed the first letter in her basket without removing her purse from her wrist, and then another, and then another. The spinning on and on.