Ruth Galm - Into the Valley

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.

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.

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.