Ruth Galm - Into the Valley

She hadn’t been swimming since her last trip to the lake house. Throughout her childhood her family had spent summer weekends at a lakeside cottage, where she and her mother had swum — her father never coming up until late Saturday or not at all. (In a faraway foreign land of legal pads and Dictaphones was how B. imagined him.) She and her mother swam and sunbathed and painted their nails, did their hair and read their books. And then one day after college her mother had informed her that she wasn’t welcome back alone. “It’s just not productive to come on your own anymore, darling,” her mother had said, her voice full of encouragement. “Even a group would be better, don’t you think?”

B. had lost her favorite pair of gloves on that last visit. A light cotton pair, white with almost imperceptible red dots. On the bed, off her hands, they looked to her like those of a circus performer, the dwarfish child-women who rode horses standing up. But on her hands they were beautiful and delicate, a living porcelain. She’d brought them despite the heat and the trend away from gloves, for the occasional drive into town. But when she searched her suitcase they were gone. She’d hyperventilated slightly, she remembered, as if she’d misplaced her own hands.

She looked down at her hands pink and swollen in the reflection from the river. She’d liked wearing gloves when it was the fashion. She could spend forty-five minutes looking for a lost one and feel as though she had spent the time as a person she knew how to be. Without the gloves, she had to adjust herself to feeling the dirt on trolley straps directly on her skin, to seeing women’s hands everywhere naked and raw. Her own hands with veins and hatches and mounds of epidermis. (And again her mind jumped at the young women in the city now who not only did not wear gloves, but did not wear heels or put on lipstick or comb their hair.) B. still kept her old gloves in a satin-covered box in her closet; she knew exactly how many pairs there were, which needed mending, which had stains; the kid gloves shriveled and waiting on top. She could not bring herself to throw them away.

She took off her heels and climbed down the riverbank to the stairs of a dock. She walked to the end and sat, dipping her feet in the water. The combination of the hot sun and the cold water was soothing and she let herself sit circling her shins lazily. The man down the bank had not moved. B. could not see his face, just the white hair under a hat and the drooped shoulders, and yet his presence agitated her, as if he could overhear her mind running.

She closed her eyes and tried in the heat and soothing water to daydream. She had difficulty daydreaming. There seemed a list of things she should be daydreaming about, what she knew the other secretaries daydreamed of: men, marriage, babies, money. But what came to her mind were never these things. What came to her mind were cool blue-white landscapes, featureless planes of snow or sand with no people or time. Whenever she made herself daydream about the secretaries’ list, things like the developer and Sherry came up.

It was at a barbecue, one of the secretaries had invited B. during her first season in the city, also in the nicest hill neighborhood. She would have gone to the park with a book, but she knew her mother would ask later in their weekly phone call whether B. had “mingled” over the weekend. It was a rare hot and fogless day when one could go into the evening without a sweater, which made the city feel like a white-washed Mediterranean ville and made B. hopeful that something unexpected, even unrecognizable, might happen. When she walked into the party, all the women looked to be the same age (mid-twenties), most blonde like B., nails manicured and hair set, orange and pink and yellow dresses; the men wore button-down shirts and Bermudas and looked ill at ease and shiny in the heat.

One of the men approached B. right away, two vodka tonics in his hand, a sheen of sweat on his neck. “Thought I’d say hullo,” he said, handing her one of the drinks. “Official unofficial welcoming committee.” On first glance his face was handsome, smooth and symmetrical with gray placid eyes and clear skin. But as he spoke, B. noticed that his eyebrows were too thin or too faint, so that he resembled one of the anemic subjects of a medieval Dutch painting. He worked in real estate.

“It’s a boom time for us, you know, it’s all happening down 101—cineplexes, mini-malls. I’m Sherry’s.” He pointed to a woman across the deck who looked, except for her red hair, exactly like B. in her short bright sheath and matching headband. “We’re just engaged.”

The back deck of the house was small and crowded and B. felt beads of sweat in the boning of her bra. As he went on, there seemed to her something disturbingly missing, some void of detection in the Dutch eyebrowless face, as if he were talking not to her but to her teeth.

“Really, it’s simple, you work a couple of years and then you get out of the race, down the peninsula. The weather is perfect, fog always lifts. Have you been? I could drive you down.” He seemed unaware or unconcerned that he’d already told her about his fiancée. B. thought for a moment he might be drunk, but he seemed oddly sober, only growing too exuberant, almost jumpy, a twitch under his eye. “You really ought to see it. You’d like it better down there. Easy little yards and roads you can actually drive and mile-long grocery stores.” He leaned toward her and his perspiration smelled sour. “Don’t get me wrong, the city’s hip, the city’s stimulating, but it’s no place to raise children. The other day we were tossing around a few balls at the park — do you play? Sher and I lost one of our doubles — and these head-shaved loonies in their dresses lined the court, chanting that Oriental hokum. I thought to myself, let the freaks have the city, I’ll take Shangri-La.”

When he tried unsuccessfully a few minutes later to kiss B., Sherry was suddenly at his side, locked into his arm as though nothing had happened. Without missing a beat, the developer explained how he and Sherry had met—“Goddamn right ‘golden state’ when the prettiest woman at the broker’s office is a good Lutheran from Ohio with straight-ahead morals and a great pair of legs!” To this Sherry nodded, red hair perfectly curled, her arm clenched around the developer’s like a vice. B. realized then with an abrupt but diffuse kind of terror that it wasn’t just their outfits that were similar, it was the way the developer looked at them. With the same missing part of his gaze. A shudder went through her and she dropped her highball. Sherry stooped to the shards and the developer went for a broom, and B. excused herself and slipped out of the party.

She could try to daydream about Daughtry. She felt the carsickness slightly less with him, with his endless chattering, his graceless ways. Her initial, un-thought-out belief was that he could take her away somehow. She didn’t know what she meant by away any more than she’d known what she meant by help . But the workingman calluses on Daughtry’s hands, their roughness when he guided her by the back of her neck into his coupe, made her feel he existed in a real, visceral way the anemic-looking developers could not. And so she had tried to overlook their differences, to convince herself they were an asset. For the Carmel trip, she’d bought a merry widow — an optimistic, pale pink lace in the corseted body, rosettes at the top of its garters. She’d bought a new dress and matching heels at I. Magnin. On the way home from Carmel Daughtry said, “We had a good time, didn’t we, baby? We saw the ocean, right? And I’ll get you to like abalone one day. I’ll get you to like me.” Then he laughed too loudly, his face tensed. He was a good person underneath the slicked hair and the gauche talk, B. thought. Probably better than she.