Ruth Galm - Into the Valley

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.

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.”