Into the Valley (2 page)

I

&$9

1.

The car was low on gas. She had not checked the gauge before leaving the lot and she flushed at the thought of the salesman making a joke of her. (No, she had not wanted a Chevy or a Chrysler. She knew this instinctively, although she might only have been able to say it was the look of the car. Something strong and sharp in the Mustang that pared it down to a single purpose, an inarguable direction. She'd never considered owning a car before. The subways and elevateds in the East had obviated any need, and perhaps, more importantly, owning her own car had seemed somehow unseemly. The women in advertisements lounged around cars in feather boas in the company of tuxedoed dates or carted bags of groceries to the back of a station wagon. And so she had tried to put the thought out of her mind, like some lurid afternoon fantasy, but the empirical beauty of the Mustang had stayed with her, and the car was the first thing she thought of after the check.)

There were no buildings in sight. The July heat made her arms and back sweat, moistening and drying and moistening again. Her left arm turned red in the sun. The city never got hot. Even on the warmest days, she shivered, her toes chilled. She wetted her dry lips and tried to put the anxiety about the gas out of her mind, and when she began to see the first rows of fruit trees, she turned into a dirt lane and parked.

Hundreds of peach trees. She rolled down her stockings and took off the bone-colored heels. The ground was dry and hard, the trees not high but in full leaf, crammed with hard orange peaches. She walked until she found a good spot to sit down. The tree was uncomfortable to lean against and the branches too low, so she lay all the way down on her back and tried to relax. A hot day in her childhood, she had snuck into a vacant lot and lay hidden and cooled in the overgrown grass, among the sounds of cars and birds and cicadas. She'd been convinced of the fact she was erased from the world and breathed easy and fallen asleep. She could not remember another day like that since.

She ate her candy bar, moving her tongue along her teeth for the chocolate and clumps of coconut, and pondered the sky through the peaches. Her throat was dry. She had nothing to drink. It was somewhere after one o'clock on a Tuesday and no cars passed. She tried to keep lying as she had in the vacant lot those years ago but the dirt was hard, and she was not hidden, and eventually she went back to the car and drove on.

She passed a horse corral. No people seemed to be around anywhere. The sun blazed on the animals, their heads bent under the heat, their bodies a liquid brown. They seemed to B., in their unconsciousness, in a state of total equanimity. After the horses came a stretch of dry, uncultivated land and then finally there was a gas station.

She filled up and went to the small bathroom at the back of the building. She saw that the whole back of her dress was dirty. The ivory had not been a wise decision, not for driving or sitting in the dirt, not for the second day of her period. Her underwear had spots of blood where her tampon bled through. She never paid enough attention to when her period might arrive and so was never prepared. And when it did come she seemed, irrationally, to disbelieve that it could require more than one or two tampons. That the blood would run on and on for so many days. She was invariably left with soiled underwear and
bloody fingers. She took out the tampon and put another in and folded toilet paper over the blood spots. She went inside the store to pay for her gas, not touching the money in her bra. In her purse was a compact, a gold tube of lipstick, gum wrappers, aspirin, a few crumpled bills, and the checkbook.

A middle-aged woman with bleached hair looked at her blankly from the cash register.

“Do you have a water fountain?” B. asked the woman.

The woman did not acknowledge her question, just put down her magazine and went back behind a gray door and emerged with a paper cup of water.

“You on your way to Reno?” the woman asked.

“No.”

The woman looked annoyed.

“Do you sell maps?” B. asked.

The woman flicked her chin toward the back of the store. B. walked to a revolving rack. She picked up a map of the state. “Do you have anything just for the valley?” she called to the woman.

“The ‘valley'?” The woman frowned. “That's all we have over there.”

By the time B. returned to the counter the annoyance had set into the woman's features and she pushed the change toward B. and went back to her magazine without looking up again.

B. laid the map across the passenger seat. Hundreds of black names on pastel. She'd only wanted a small patch to concentrate on, just a piece. She folded the map up. The heat in the car and the smells of hot metal and plastic drugged her. She closed her eyes and leaned her head back against the square seat.

She must have fallen asleep because next the woman from the gas station was rapping at her windshield. “There's no loitering here,” she said. “Can't just park all day at the pumps. We got other customers, you know.”

B. rubbed her eyes. The woman glared at her. B. looked around; there were no other cars. “I'm sorry. I guess I was tired.”

The woman crossed her arms, the tanned skin draping.

“Is there a bank somewhere around?” B. asked.

“Go back to Suisun City or on to Rio Vista. There's nothin' in between.”

For a moment B. thought the woman said something else under her breath. But the woman only continued to glare from behind the sagging arms and B. had no way of knowing if she was right. 

When she came on Suisun City, the small main street and the pale tiled buildings were quaint but the marina behind the town startled B. Just like that, a row of boats in blue-brown water, masts bobbing against the flat yellow. She felt suddenly that the bay was following her, leaking out in a last menacing grab through the marsh stalks.

She jotted a random amount on the check.

“Good afternoon, ma'am.” The pretty teller standing among the calm straight lines and muted oil paintings.

“It's ‘miss' actually.”

“Oh, I'm sorry, ma'am. I mean, miss.”

But the cool expansive feeling still came. B. felt so light and cheerful afterward, she considered shaking the girl's hand, then thought better of it. As she walked back to the Mustang, the odd, misplaced marina did not disturb her in the least.

Back on the road the
heat and sleepiness were too much. She searched for a motel and had to return to the freeway to find a motor inn with a billboard of a bikini-clad woman diving into a pool. B. did not turn on the air conditioner when she got inside the room, just let the heat melt over her as she lay on the bed.

She took the money out of her bra strap. It was now at least a dozen fifty-dollar bills; she had no interest in counting them. She rifled through the vinyl travel bag, pulling out for a moment the velvet box with the diamond brooch, then replacing it. Instead she took out a bottle of nail polish.

The room was darkening but she left off the light. She thought of nothing but smoothing the pale iridescent pink from the brush, of the nicely piquant smell. She'd watched her mother at her vanity making her
toilette,
the French word she'd taught B. for pinning her hair, applying her lipstick, dabbing a crystal perfume bottle at her neck. Each gesture accruing to
her some invisible potency. Her mother had once given her the last tortoiseshell compact of her favorite face powder, a discontinued line, and B. kept it intact and untouched like a totem,
unsure what might happen if she finished it.

When her nails were painted, B. lay down again with her palms flat against the bed and fell asleep.

She woke on her side, the nail polish fretted with lines from
the bedspread. She had dreamed of the landscape from the car, the
contourless vista, a stream of yellow and white and green with no signs of people, and in the dream she had decided she would follow this land forever.

2.

The next morning the blood of her period had soaked through the toilet paper in her underwear. There was only the slightest brush of it on the inside of her dress. She hesitated to change. It was as if quitting the dress would disturb a key element to her new, fluid state. To bathe she sponged her armpits and her crotch and inserted a new tampon and put on new underwear. She threw the stockings from the day before in the trash, feeling vaguely guilty, but it was too hot. Then she worked on her face, the moisturizer and powder, the liquid liner at her eyes and the lipstick and perfume last. She pinned her hair back in place. There were young girls in the city now who let their hair go naturally, who never wore makeup, whose clothes were ill-fitting. These girls distressed B.

She'd forgotten a toothbrush. She walked from the motel toward a gas station. There was no town, only the motel (the pool in the daylight was small and chipped), a telephone booth, the gas station with a general store attached, and another street across the intersection. Her heels crunched in the pebbles along the road, the freeway cars moaning and thumping beside her. The morning sun already burned her shoulders. A watery-brown haze at the edge of the sky stung her eyes.

At the store, she bought a toothbrush and toothpaste, a doughnut and a cup of coffee.

“I'm just taking a tour of the valley,” she found herself saying to the paunchy older man at the cash register. “I just thought it would be very interesting.” She tried not to hear her own voice.

“Pretty hot time of year to choose.” The man's neck was a loose pink.

“Well, I don't have anything pressing in town right now. Nothing I can't miss.”

The man nodded as if this was clear and handed her the doughnut and paper cup.

As she drank the coffee in the shade of the building outside, she told herself there would be no police after her. What she'd done was not big or serious enough. And she was pretty. People had always seemed to like this. Her nose was aquiline, her lids heavy but eyes almond-shaped, this combination giving her, she'd been told, a bedroom quality. She had never experienced this quality but understood it appealed to people and so drew her eyeliner out to feline points at the sides of her eyes and kept her hair blonde. She was aware from the ballet lessons her mother had required that she moved with her shoulders down and neck long, which people also took to be ladylike and contented.

She walked across the intersection to the other street in the non-town. Two houses stood on it, one boarded up. The other was hidden by a wooden fence that when she peered inside was overrun with cacti. The cacti had clawed over a single arch of walkway to the door; everything else in the bramble dead and dry. A walnut tree bowed over the porch. The smell of dog feces baked in the sun, although no dog to be seen.

She opened the gate. (There were things she would not have done in the city: she'd wanted to enter a yard on one of the hills and peer into the mudroom at children's windbreakers on hooks and dirty sneakers lined up; she'd stopped herself.) She stooped under the cacti. The freeway blew; no dog barked. When she reached the door, she knocked without a clear reason. She had a sense the owner here lived alone, and she wanted to speak with him. She could tell the person she was new to the valley, ask for tips. The windows were layered in dust. She knocked again louder. On the porch under the windows was a collection: an enameled pot, several stones, tines of sharp antlers. B. glanced around. She slipped a small antler bone into her purse. For luck.

In the car, on the freeway, the non-town was already behind her. She tried to think of some current pop song, something fresh and summery to sing, but in truth she did not like the songs on the radio now. So she hummed her favorite parts from
The King and I
.

It was 1967. In the spring she had turned thirty.

3.

B. had once watc
he
d a boy playing in a sandbox in the city. In a playground in her neighborhood, perched like all the playgrounds in the city, it seemed to her, precariously on a hill, as if it might fall off the side of the world. The mothers had been pretty in their makeup and scarves, their clipped, determined movements—hands darting in and out of a pram, through a small child's hair with leaves—admirable to B. But it was too draining to watch the women; they spoke too vehemently about items and opinions she did not understand. Her attention had settled instead on the boy. He poured the sand over his hand with such concentration, such absorption at the run of the dry grains on his fingers, that nothing else mattered, nothing else touched him. Only the feel of the sand on his skin and the keeping of its cascading rhythm. B. watched the boy until the mothers called him away, and after they'd gone she felt strangely abandoned, as if she should have spoken to him. She got up and looked around to make sure no one was watching and then sat in the sandbox. Following the boy's movements, she poured the sand over her hand, but she felt only the irritating papery sensation on her skin and when her knees began to ache from kneeling, she got up and left.

She decided that the checks were for her like the sand for the boy, and she did not let her mind go beyond this thought.

4.

The radio announced a heat
wave for the valley. B. could not imagine it any hotter. The back of the ivory sheath had sweat through and her limbs felt swollen; her hair had half slipped out of its pins. She stopped at a restaurant on an exit. She brought her large makeup case into the bathroom and powdered and fixed her hair and unzipped her dress to spray perfume underneath.

She ordered an iced tea from the waiter. The young man stared at her so intensely she wondered for a moment if she knew him from somewhere. She asked if he lived nearby, and he nodded without speaking. She remarked on the heat and he continued to stare until finally he said, “Ma'am, your zipper's undone.”

She reached her hand to her back; her dress was flared open. “Oh. Thank you.” She flushed to her neck. Her bra strap had fallen down her shoulder and she smelled her own odor still pungent under the perfume. She gripped the zipper awkwardly and pulled it up as far as she could. “Thank you,” she mumbled. After he left, she pretended to study the menu with great absorption.

A woman with three small children was the only other customer in the place. She sat two tables over but kept staring at B. and the sky-blue makeup case. The woman looked old and childlike at the same time, small-boned, a high forehead with deep lines. She was wearing a sundress with a stain at the breast. In one arm she held a baby, while two young children ran back
and forth from the window to the table, eating half a French fry and
dropping it on the floor, sucking the juice off a pickle and putting it back. The woman sat like a statue in the midst of it.

“Do you live around here?” B. asked.

The woman's expression signaled the ridiculousness of the question. The baby squirmed. She hitched it higher and tighter on her lap without once glancing at it.

“I was just wondering if there was anything of interest to visit. For someone passing through.”

The woman looked at B. as if she had asked for directions to China. A strand of thin hair fell across the lined forehead.

“There's Old Town, I guess,” the woman said finally. “If you like the gold rush stuff. They have a railroad museum there, I think.” One of the children ran by and shoved the baby. The baby smiled wildly as if it was a game and not an aggression.

“Oh, I won't be going to Sacramento, actually.”

The woman seemed to accept this as understandable. “There's the buttes,” she went on. “On the way to Chico. Those are sort of strange. Just strange to look at, out there all alone. But they don't let you drive in them. It's private land, I guess.” She paused. “There's not much to see before Tahoe really.”

“They sound lovely. Thank you.”

B. absently fingered the handle of the makeup case.

“I'm from the city,” B. added.

The mother nodded curtly as if to put a stop to this need to state the obvious. The baby was kicking its legs and whining. It tried again to scootch off her lap but the woman's grip seemed an insensate vice. The baby gave up and sank back into watching the children, trapped, mesmerized.

“You travelin' alone?” the woman asked.

“Yes.”

“You lost or something?”

“No. Just driving. Just taking in the sights.”

The mother picked up a French fry and swirled it in ketchup without eating it. “Well, I'd go directly on to Reno if I was you. There's nothing to see before Reno. A lot of driving gets me irritated.”

The baby finally let out its wail then, sharp and steady. The mother hauled it to her shoulder and slapped it on the cheek, which only made the baby cry louder. Just then an adolescent boy opened the door of the restaurant and yelled, “We're parked in the back, he's waiting, come on!” The woman scooped up her purse and the baby and barked at the children to follow.

“Well, good luck with your trip,” she said over the baby's shrieks. “The buttes, I guess, but I don't know if they're worth it.” And in a burst of chaos and sun, she was gone.

The waiter finally brought her iced tea and B. twirled the straw, letting the ice circle. She looked out the window at the Mustang in the parking lot. The blue metallic sheen was already filmed with dirt. She tried to imagine the buttes. In her mind
they were snub-nosed, western, angular, removed. She left her tea and went back to the bathroom. Her eyeliner was still intact but her pores large again and her lipstick gone. She reapplied the powder and twisted up the lipstick and told herself once more that she was just taking in the sights, making an anthropological tour of the valley. A survey, she considered vaguely in the mirror. She drew on the pale pink until her lips were bloodless.