Into the Valley (4 page)

7.

“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.

8.

“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.

9.

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. 

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.

She watched a beer can float by on the river. A faintly sulfurous scent wafted up from the water. She got up and made her way back to the car.

Hungry, she drove back to the town with the burger stand. It was a small shack, rusted-metal outdoor seats and a window counter. A collarless cat bolted around the corner as B. appro
ached. Through the window she ordered a cheeseburger and a Coke from a thin teenage boy. She did not have enough money in her purse, so she excused herself to the dingy bathroom around back and took one of the fifties from her bra strap. But when she returned the teenage boy stared at the bill on the counter. “We don't have enough change for that, ma'am.” The
boy and B. both flushed. She slipped the stolen bill back into her purse. When she turned to leave, the teenager called her back and said under his breath he'd put it on the house.

There was a group of men sitting a few seats down. They were not much older than she, perhaps in their mid-thirties, with cloudy forearm tattoos, angular and leathered skin from too much sun. They talked and laughed tersely. B. sat down at one of the outdoor tables and picked up a left-behind newspaper to appear occupied. She flipped to a picture of the first lady and the president. B. had always preferred Lady Bird to Jackie, who was too aloof and enigmatic. Lady Bird with her dull matching suits and hair correctly curled would understand B.'s growing concern about the young women with unstyled hair. She would be equally dismayed at the unmatched clothes, the sitting in parks and dancing to guitars and smoking marijuana, the absence of stockings. And Lady Bird, she knew, would be most disturbed by the hazy blitheness in their eyes, as if beatitude came from disarray, as if one could go through life with nothing else expected of them.

B. sensed the men watching her in between their laconic exchanges.

Yes, she felt someone like Lady Bird ought to take the situation of the unstockinged young women in hand. As a national epidemic, a degenerative trend.

B. was gazing on the photo, lost in these thoughts, when one of the men was suddenly next to her.

“You lost, miss?”

“No.” She searched the pick-up window for her cheeseburger. The window was shut, the teenager gone.

She saw the man glance at her ring finger. “That your car?” He flicked his chin at the Mustang. He had seen her park it.

“Looks new,” he said.

“It is.”

“Give you a good run, I bet.”

“Yes.”

Her cheeseburger came up then. She excused herself to the counter and thanked the boy again, who blushed and mumbled something back. He had forgotten the Coke; she could not bring herself to ask for it. She pretended to start eating and the man went back to his friends, his smell of gasoline and sweat lingering. She ate a part of the bun and a few bites of meat but lost her appetite and folded the wrapper. The man came back.

“You travelin' alone?” A look of amusement crossed his broad face. He leaned against the counter and looked directly at her.

She noticed the narrowness of his hips in his leather belt. She wondered if the narrowness made him feel light, easy to move. She did not want to look him in the eye. “Yes, I am.”

“Well, I can give you directions if you like.”

“I don't need any directions, thank you.”

The deep lines at his mouth made him seem as if he was smirking at all times. “Well, I just thought
. . .
Well, a pretty lady like you might need some assistance.”

“No thank you.”

The smirk remained. He tipped his cap. “Well then, safe travels.”

She gathered her purse and walked past him back to her car, feeling his eyes on her. She fumbled for the keys and started the engine and as she was about to back out she saw the men watching her still. Without thinking, she killed the engine. She exited the car and walked up to the man.

“I know exactly where I'm going, actually. I don't need any directions.”

She could hear sniggering. “You said that.” The man tipped his cap again. “Didn't mean to offend, miss.” She went back to the car and sat behind the wheel and stared at them. She stared, losing track of time, until they began kicking the ground self-consciously. Then she started the engine again and backed out of the parking lot.