Ruth Galm - Into the Valley

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 grass 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.

“My family doesn’t know yet. Well, no one really knows. When you called, I took that as a sign! I could move up here near you. A new city, fresh start. We could go out together.”

“I don’t go out much.”

“Well, we could start, you know. We could have cocktail parties and potlucks and things.”

“Maybe you should go back to Ed,” was all B. could think of to say.

Louise’s slack face shook. “I didn’t think you’d say that. I thought you of all people would say something else.”

B. tried then to tell Louise about the carsickness. But the other woman stiffened. “Well that’s quite strange,” she said coldly. “You should see a doctor.” B. told her she had and it hadn’t helped, and after that Louise grew quiet and said she was going to vomit from the martinis and B. took her home.

She passed out on B.’s couch. In the morning, Louise’s black makeup flaked under her eyes and her cheeks were rutted from the couch. She made a fuss about an early appointment and spilled her coffee in her rush to leave. After that the rug was stained and the carsickness was worse and B. decided to try San Francisco.

&$9

She woke up sometime after midnight. The television was blaring a rainbow screen. She switched it off. The girl snored lightly, mouth open, arms flung out across the bed and hair splashed across the pillow, face calm and untroubled.