Ruth Galm - Into the Valley

Then she had been unable to find a beauty parlor she liked. It disturbed her acutely, the young women in the city walking around with long stringy hair and faces bare. This increased B.’s zeal to find the right salon, as if she were taking a stand against those other girls. She visited a half dozen salons in different neighborhoods, always finding some fault, in how her curls were set, in the too kitschy or too plain décor. In fact there was nothing manifestly wrong with these places: what she sought she could not have described in plain concrete terms, even to herself. She’d come close once or twice. In a salon in the nicest hill neighborhood, the walls had not been too pink or gold, the seats filled with women who seemed not too old or all married. She’d struck up a conversation with a woman at the dryers.

“Whatever happened to a little smoothing out? A little help?” the woman said, pointing to a bra advertisement in a magazine without accompanying girdle. B. had smiled.

“You remember that movie where Liz Taylor was insane, in the convent?” The woman’s nails were blood red.

“The Tennessee Williams play.”

“Right! And then Monty Clift let her have her hair done and ‘wear a pretty dress’ in the state bin, and presto, she’s still loony but at least now she has a waist!”

B. smiled again, but a genuine smile that she might have in private. “And he falls in love,” she said.

“You see? Right there, that’s the power of foundation garments!”

But then something in the conversation spoiled. The woman began complaining about a man she was dating (“He’s next to a telephone all day. There’s nothing to prevent him from picking it up and dialing. ”) and her voice sounded to B. like a high-pitched cry in an animal register. The spinning and nausea came on abruptly. After that, B. stopped trying to find a favorite beauty parlor and got her wash-and-sets wherever it was cheapest.

Finally, there had been the bridge. It was a cliché, she knew, her love for it, but she had been drawn by the sheer size, its serious red color — not golden at all — and she went there almost every Sunday, standing in the middle of the span on the ocean side (the tourists preferring the bay side for the city views when the Pacific was the real wonder to her mind). The fog blew in like a divine force, the cables vibrating in the wind, and she saw the Spanish landing for the first time, and the sailors and priests and forty-niners, and she briefly forgot time and place, until her teeth chattered and the ocean was lost in fog.

When she’d heard the siren, she had not immediately absorbed what was going on. Only later did B. understand that a woman not far down from her had gone over the railing. No interruption in the gust of cars or the vibrations of the cables or the tourists’ voices. A family of Germans who’d seen it told her the woman had been a teenager, that she’d worn plastic-frame glasses and a blue dress and tennis shoes. (B. could never absorb this last detail; she would always imagine the girl in kitten heels.) B. lingered near the Germans as they gave their eyewitness reports to the police, hoping the hearing of it would confer the realness of the incident on her. But the girl was just gone; she did not have any feeling about it. B. stood at the spot until the fog came in and finally made her depart. She did not visit the bridge again.

“Joey loves the hazelnuts.”

“Joey hates nuts.”

“We’ll get him the hazelnuts and Aunt Edie the walnuts.”

Billboards for the theme park had been on every highway: a playground to promote the local nut crops, with restaurant and gift shop and its own choo-choo train. As if in capitulation, she’d stopped. Now she wandered around the rocking horses and carousel, among the families on their way to Tahoe and Reno waiting for cocktails and burgers in the lounge or picnicking outside. She felt conspicuous, as if the already-wrinkled ivory sheath announced to them that she was on her way to neither the mountains nor the lake, that she had not packed for a vacation per se. She watched the families eat their peanut butter and jellies and drink their thermosed lemonade and tried to imagine herself as one of the mothers. Cajoling the children, scrubbing their dwarfed hands, dusting off their bottoms. But she couldn’t keep herself inside the smells, the textures, the gummy breath, the tiny eyelashes. She went into the gift shop.

“He loves nuts, I tell you, he lives for them,” the wife said. She and the husband both in loud prints. “He eats about a pound if I put them out before supper.”

“That’s not the Joey I know,” the husband said. “The Joey I know never ate a nut in his life.”

“We’ll get him the almonds then.”

She wondered what Joey really wanted. Did he want almonds or hazlenuts, or no nuts at all? Something about this line of thought and the rows of tightly wrapped cellophane packages done up in bows made the spinning come on quickly. She bought a bag of pecans and hurried out.

She ran back to the Mustang, thinking she must find the antler bone. To rub it or sit with it, so it might calm her. But when she sat in the hot air with the bone in her lap, the carsickness only increased. She turned the ignition and screeched out of the nut-theme parking lot toward the nut town’s main street and bank as if there wasn’t a moment to lose.

Her trembling slanted the writing on the check.

“I feel much better,” she said out loud.

The teller looked at her as if she understood. “That’s wonderful, ma’am. Enjoy your trip to Reno.”

Afterward, she pored over every detail: the chilled air on her flushed skin, the right angles of the teller windows, the teller’s movements like a soothing port de bras. The girl’s face, young and full, her two front teeth indented winsomely, a white Peter Pan collar and nude nail polish. And the shade of ivory on the walls that B. swore she had not seen in years, that had given way to the mustard yellows and lime greens exclusively, although she could not prove it.

She pored over these details because it was never the money she did it for.

“I don’t see why it’s so difficult for you,” her mother had said. She’d called to tell B. she was sending an embroidery kit. So that B. would know how to embroider for any occasion. “There’s an order to things,” she told B., “and I think it would help if you followed it.”

“I’d like to.” B. nodded into the receiver.

“You can, dear. Just try a little harder.”

“I will.”

But in the end B. could not bring herself to ask where this order began or how she had missed it or why it seemed to her mother so easy a thing to pick up.

She drove on a two-lane road. The sun bore down on the car. For miles, nothing but the sere, parchment-colored fields, populated sporadically by black cows and rectangular stacks of yellow hay (it must be hay, she thought; it would be more solid, she would be better situated, she felt, if she could know these things for certain). The only vertical structure a line of skeletal electrical towers. She passed an outdated sign advertising July Fourth fireworks at the river. Then below it in red letters: caution: grass fire risk extreme.

Eventually the road rounded and a few trees appeared. Houses, signs to the delta. She would hit the river soon, and if she continued too far along it, she would come to the capital. She took note of this.

The road came through a small town with a few businesses, an auto mechanic, a burger stand, boat rentals, and as soon as she was through it the road curved and she was alongside the river. She parked the Mustang on the shoulder of the levee road. The levee rose high up from the water, tall green stalks on one side, which might be corn, or else sugar cane (again she felt vexed, undermined, not to know for sure); on the other side of the river, dozens of rows of full pear trees. The river was low and brown, but still she thought how nice it would be to swim — it had been ages since she’d been swimming. She noticed an elderly man fishing down the bank and wished she were alone.