Ruth Galm - Into the Valley

The two women tellers each had long painted nails and teased hair, one blonde with softly flipped-up ends and the other brunette with a round, short style. They counted out the money to patrons, placing bills on the counter gently and politely as if setting out linens for tea.

“How far are the buttes from here?” B. heard herself asking the blonde teller.

“The buttes?” The young woman looked at her warmly, parentally, as if B. had spoken nonsense. She had hooded light blue eyes. “You mean Middle Mountain.”

“I guess so. I don’t know the name. Someone told me about them.”

“They’re not far, you take Twenty east toward Colusa. But I don’t think you can walk in them or anything.”

“I just wanted to see them.”

The teller nodded and again smiled patiently.

B. watched the teller place the check in a drawer and draw out the cash. She counted it quickly, a flash between her pink fingernails, then counted again, dealing it out on the counter. B. noted the neat rhythm, the tidy semicircle of cash. A tendril of the teller’s blonde hair fell forward. B. touched her own to make sure it was in place.

“Is there a beauty parlor around here?” B. asked. “Your hair is very pretty.”

The young woman smiled, still patient-looking. “If you go upriver. Jeannie’s. They have new dryers, not too hot.” She looked at B. sheepishly. “I really like your dress, and your brooch is lovely.”

“Thank you. I. Magnin for the dress.” Now came the cool expansive feeling. B. let it spread out her back, all the way to her fingers.

“I’ve always wanted to shop in the city.”

“You should take a special trip.”

B. gathered her bills and put them carefully in her purse. “Thank you,” she said, and walked toward the door.

“Oh, ma’am?” B. was almost outside.

She turned around. The cool expansive feeling had settled throughout her now and the young teller floated like a pale blonde aura over the marble counter.

“You forgot your receipt,” the teller said.

B. took the piece of paper. “Thank you so much.”

“Have a nice drive.”

She walked out of the bank with five hundred dollars.

It was fine now, everything was light. Along the levee road were lines of short leafy green plants bordered by dried yellow tufts of grass. B. stopped at a fruit stand and bought a bag of blackberries. She ate handfuls as she drove, the juice on her lips and fingers (she tried not to stain the powder-blue dress). She had a song in her head from the hotel lobby, about following along on a carousel — the ornate lacquered horses going round in her mind — and she wished for the song to be only about that.

Suddenly she wanted ice cream. She could not remember the last time she’d wanted ice cream. The cool expansive feeling carried her forward. She drove to the next town and asked around at the grocery store for a parlor and when the woman at the cash register told her there was none, she bought a tub of vanilla ice cream with a fifty-dollar bill. “Is there a spoon I could use?” she asked. The woman was still counting out her change, which B. dropped into the paper bag with the ice cream. The woman frowned and shook her head. “No spoons.”

B. sat in the Mustang with the tub in her lap and scooped the ice cream into her mouth with her fingers. She tasted the bubbles in the cream, the liquor of the vanilla. It seemed in just the past few minutes the river had become bluer, the trees edged in gold. A man walked by the car in jean overalls, dirtied from some work in a field (or a barn?), whistling a tune. It sounded hopeful and familiar. Now, eating her ice cream, thinking of the driving and fields and endless road, she was buoyed. She sang the song from the long-ago prom again putting the wounding bustier out of her mind. Her singing voice was high and weak, but more of the words came back to her this time, and she was pleased that she’d put them together, as if she had locked onto something real.

When she’d had enough she left the ice cream tub on the car floorboard and climbed down the riverbank. She washed her hands and mouth and a blue jay screeched from a walnut tree. In the sun, near the water, her mind began to soar. She imagined a small house, herself in it, with light pouring through the windows, quiet all around. She walked along the riverbank and stumbled on more of the poppies. This time she picked a handful and studied them, as if to persuade herself of the beauty of the bright flaming orange. They had no scent. She brought the bouquet back to the car and laid it on the gear shaft, next to the antler bone. She would put them in a glass of water somewhere. Maybe in a small house, a glass of water for her poppies.

A young Mexican wearing a stained white hip apron came out from behind a building and dumped a bag of trash. B. beamed at him. She smoothed her dress and sat at the wheel; her hands and face dried in the heat. She touched her fingers again to her hair, wondering how mussed it looked, and started the engine.

For a while she passed through asparagus fields along the river. They looked at first like ferns but soon she noted the vegetable stalks underneath, and her body hummed with a kind of power to recognize a crop by herself (before the hand-painted sign advertising asparagus bunches). The ice cream and this recognition and the still-lightness from the bank kept her moving along. Then she came to the sunflowers.

The stalks were mostly green but the flowers above were dead and hanging. The bent brown heads and leaning stalks made them look like a mass of defeated people, bound to go forward. Slowing down for the sunflowers B. saw the chapel standing in the middle of them.

She parked.

When she got near the sunflowers, they made a baleful dry rattling sound, as if they were trying to talk to her. She tried not to hear this.

B. stepped inside the unlocked door, through ratted spider webs. The whitewashed wood was pocked with dirt, a single window glazed in dust. Behind the altar was a painting of the Virgin Mary. The only other furnishings were a single pew and a cross.

The air was stifling but the room was bright in a way that seemed soothing and pristine. She sat in the pew and flipped through a weathered Bible. She put it down again and folded her hands in her lap.

She had tried once or twice to go to church in the city. The only place she had liked was the Spanish mission, not a church but a museum, with its white adobe walls and frescoes, its plain, uncarved wood. She especially loved the dioramas of peaceful mission life, contented Indians feeding cows and planting corn, beneficent-looking Franciscans, the small do not touch signs all around. But every time she left, the transition to daylight, the brown palm fronds rotting in the median outside, the diorama figures and the Christ on the cross far away like childhood dolls, and she realized all over again, unbearably, the hours to go until sunset. So she’d stopped going to the mission too.

The brightness and calm of the chapel in the middle of the field made her think it would feel different. The Virgin Mary’s beatific face not unlike the teller’s. Like that of a confidante B. had yet to make. She knelt down on the prie-dieu , clasped her hands together, looked hopefully at the Virgin.

But as she prayed — for help with the carsickness, for guidance in the valley — the spinning returned violently. The hot unmoved air smothering her. She gripped the edge of the pew.

It had been a mistake to stop.

When she sat back in the car the ice cream was a sickly dull puddle in the carton. She pulled over and dumped it in a ditch and drove on.

The beauty parlor the teller recommended was on the main street of the next river town, a sign shaped like a woman’s bust in profile. Inside were four barber chairs, two occupied by white-haired ladies. One had already been set with curlers, the other was being finished by the single hairdresser in the place.