Ruth Galm - Into the Valley

“He doesn’t understand that sometimes a person just wants to see something pretty. What’s wrong with that. The ocean, for example. And I thought the governor’s mansion would be like Pasadena. Once on a field trip we visited a grower’s mansion and I’ll never forget the long curtains like silk or velvet or whatever, all soft and shiny. . A person just likes to see that.”

Any sudden effusion was related to Jed, B. now understood. “I don’t think you have to explain yourself,” she said.

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.”