22.
The grocery store was off an exit. A pink rectangular building with a revolving plaster pig on top. The lot was almost empty. She sat in the Mustang, waiting to feel ready. It might not be so different from the banks, she told herself. Maybe more fun, more transporting. She could buy pints of ice cream, apples. She watched a feeble-looking man totter out with a bag in the crook of his arm. She took the checkbook from her purse and wrote “Cash” on the top one and ripped it out. Then she did not move. She wanted another bank. But the image of the thin-haired scar-lipped teller broke through this thought. She forced herself out of the Mustang.
Inside the air felt warm, even in the frozen section. She walked aimlessly up and down aisles. The walls were dirty green, the floor dishwater-colored linoleum. The aisles were crowded with boxes and cans, all of which looked the same to her. She felt as if they were pressing in on her. She decided she did not need to look like she was shopping. At the front two cashiers chatted back and forth; only one seemed to be working. B. waited behind an elderly woman with a basket of tuna cans and celery. The working cashier looked no older than twenty, ratted hair swirled on top of her head and dyed a harsh yellow that made her skin too pink. The other looked possibly B.'s age, her jawline beginning to slide into her neck a bit. She had short hair and thick black eyeliner that came out to triangles at the corners of her eyes.
“I don't care what he said,” the short-haired one was saying, her arms crossed on the divider next to the register. “He's got no job, he's gonna get snagged by the army and probably killed. How's he providing when you're laid up?”
“He's working the harvest at Michaelson's. And I know what you're thinking.” The bowl of harsh yellow hair quivered on the younger one as she rang up items. “But he's done with all that. He's not into that anymore.”
The older cashier shook her head, clucking her tongue.
“We went swimming in the river last week,” the younger one said. “You know what's funny? I haven't been in the river since I was a kid.”
“But what's he like
out
of the river is the thing,” the black-triangle-eyeliner woman said. “Still no job, still no future. Which means no future for you, get it?”
When B.'s turn came at the register, she asked about cashing the check.
“What? I can't hear you.”
“Please, I need to cash this.” She held up the paper.
“Charlie!” the yellow-haired girl yelled.
A fat man emerged from an aisle, clipboard in his right hand, looking preoccupied.
“ID?” he asked B.
“Oh.” B. remembered to widen her eyes, bite her lip. “It's in my other purse. I'm sorry about that.” She brought her hand to the diamond brooch, stroked her shoulder with her finger. The manager scanned her with his irritated face, nodded his head and then turned the check over on the clipboard and wrote on the back. “Don't forget it next time,” he said tiredly. B. nodded.
The yellow-haired cashier rang open the drawer. “It was so nice at the river, Dee,” she said, not even looking as she counted out the fifty dollars to B. “Why couldn't it be like that all the time? How d'you know it wouldn't?”
The bills were ragged, torn fives and tens, soft and old. B. forced herself not to pull her hand back.
“It never stays like at the river, honey.”
B. was out in the blinding sun with the fistful of bills.
The cashier's horrible hair quivered in her mind, the other's black triangles, and the carsickness rose into her throat. None of the calm of the banks. She braced against the door of the Mustang. She wanted to lay her spinning head on the roof but the metal was blistering. The cool expansive feeling must come. She waited. A woman wheeled out a heaping cart with a red-mouthed toddler in the front kicking and screaming over the bar. The woman spoke to him in a robotically soothing voice. Her hair looked limp and dull in the sun, her face drawn.
All the women in the valley looked tired, B. thought.
The carsickness surged. The cool expansive feeling did not come.
The toddler's stained mouth shrieked. The woman tossed the bags into the back of the station wagon, still speaking as if by rote. B. held
her stomach and steadied herself against the Mustang. Without thinking, she walked toward the woman as the last bag went in, the toddler shrieking almost in her ear. The woman ignored B. standing there. She slammed the rear door and pulled the child out of the cart, onto her hip. “I have some
extra money,” B. blurted out. The woman gave no signal that she had heard B. She put the boy in the front seat and slammed the door, walked stone-faced back to the driver's side. The boy's attention turned to B. and his wailing stopped, as if a television had been switched on. The woman sat still in the driver's seat for a moment. “I have a husband,” she said through the window. “I ain't no charity case, so whatever born-again Jehovah's Witness racket this is, go fuck yourself.” Then she started the engine, the toddler still fixed on B. as if she'd exploded or dropped off a cliff in a cartoon. They peeled out of the parking lot and B. stood in the exhaust.
This time she did not feel any urge to cry. Like an automaton she got into the car. She drove with the dirty grocery store bills in her right hand. Daughtry was in her thoughts somewhere, chiding. Her skull spun; she felt the whiteness on the inside of her jaw from clenching.
On the road back to the freeway, she passed a group of Chinese men huddled in a vacant lot in the thin shade of a pepper tree, smoking on their haunches. She stopped the Mustang. She walked over to them and threw down the crumpled grocery store bills. The men kept smoking, staring without speaking. Back in the car, she realized that she would rather at that moment be any one of them, with their strange eyes and stained teeth and dirty undershirts.
When she was back on the freeway, she lifted her hands off the wheel and closed her eyes. Eventually she opened them again. She lowered her hands back down but did not let her foot up off the gas.
II
&$9
23.
The plum trees were endless dark masses blotting the pale blue sky. She followed the gray trunks. She focused on getting to the end of each field, each orchard. One to the next, forward motion.
The girl from Sambo's was not even standing when she came upon her, but sitting on her knapsack, her bare brown legs in the cutoffs splayed in front of her. She wore the same white peasant blouse, now with a brown suede vest over, her feet shoeless. When B. stopped the car, the girl did not look surprised or grateful, just stood up and bent into the open window.
“You going to Reno?”
B. shook her head.
“Me either.”
The girl climbed in without another word or a second look at B., settling her knapsack on the floor. She unbuttoned the suede vest and stuffed it inside, rummaged for her cigarettes and lit one.
B. could see the girl's breasts clearly through the peasant blouse. She pulled the car back on the road. The girl smoked and stared out the window, as if there was nothing inside the car to hold her attention.
“I'm going to San Francisco,” she finally said on one of her exhales. “But not yet. My old man is there. But I don't need that scene right now.” A half dozen silver bracelets clinked at her wrist as she raised and lowered the cigarette.
“I used to live there,” B. said. “I don't think I'm going back.”
The girl did not seem to hear her. They passed an empty fruit stand, the bright red-lettered sign for
corn & apricots today
giving the impression that someone might show up any minute. Hot grainy air blew around the car, whipping the girl's long hair.
The girl held the cigarette between her lips and knotted the hair behind her. “We were camping for a while at the beach. My parents never took us to the ocean. Just pools. Chlorine and water wings and all that noise. Anyway, I told him he could leave for San Fran if he wanted, I was staying. He left.”
B. could not make sense of any part of this statement. “Where are you from?” she asked.
“Fontana. Wasteland of America.” General images of the southern half of the state rolled through B.'s mind, orange groves and salmon-colored houses and women in white sunglasses. B. saw in her peripheral vision the glint of blonde hair all over the girl's legs. Her fingernails were grimed black. They drove through an alfalfa field (she knew from the scattering butterflies), and past a small house with two date palms in front and a dead olive tree in back. B. wondered whether she'd already driven down this road.
“It's a drag because he'll miss me.” The girl drew a finger back and forth across her chapped lips. “Yeah, it'll be a real downer for him. But like I said, I have my own sceneâsee things, do things.”
The nausea thrummed through B. She tried to concentrate on what was happening inside the Mustang, on how the girl had come to be beside her, but she was having trouble processing all of it, the hair, the breasts, the dirt.
“What have you seen?” she said carefully through the thrumming.
“Lots of stuff. I saw my first real Indian the other day. I mean I've seen them hustling at concerts, but this one was real. He drove a bus and wore a funky necklace of feathers and beads with his uniform, and his hair was down his back. His nose was big. He looked angry.
“And I saw the governor's mansion. Jed and those groupies would think it's too straight. But if people visit, it's for a reason.”
B. tried and failed to picture the girl shuffling behind a velvet rope next to families and silver-haired retirees. It was at this moment she realized the girl had no recollection of her.
“What have you seen?” the girl asked indifferently.
B. flushed. “I saw the Sutter Buttes. They're mountains in the middle of the valley, not connected to anything, you see. It makes them interesting.”
The girl tilted her head back against the seat, eyes on the window.
“I've never been picked up by a woman before.”
“I don't mind,” was all B. could think of to say.
“You should go to the governor's mansion,” the girl said without enthusiasm.
They drove past another alfalfa field. A slinky metal irrigation machine wheeled through it but there was no one to see; a machine somewhere to make it run. B. understood this about the valley now.
The girl had already fallen asleep, snoring lightly. B. kneaded her temple. The thrum was across the backside of her eyes, down the base of her neck. A be-in type in her car now, a “crazy,” a “stinko,” the secretaries called them, and yet she seemed to B. only like a dirty, pitiable child. B. told herself that she must make a plan. To get back to the banks, yes, but then for after. This was what she must do. Because even if she got back to the banks, she had the hazy understanding that they would only be available to her for a limited time. B. recalled on the wrist of the first pretty teller a charm bracelet with gold miniatures of the Eiffel Tower and the London Bridge (and a four-leaf clover and a heart with an arrow through it and a diamond chip). Well B. could go abroad too, couldn't she? She could go to Paris and Rome.
But she saw quaint woven straw chairs and mansard roofs and sensed that this kind of plan was too similar to what she'd already done, coming west.
The thrumming went on.
All at once the heat returned to her again, the air flattening. A suffocation that mixed with the girl and the non-plan and the thrumming. There was no breathing. She pulled over. She got out and began walking blindly into a field. It was not until she saw a flash of red and smelled the sharp stickiness of the vines that she realized she was back in one of the tomato fields. Going on and on, helter-skelter, shadeless. But she had to move. The bone-colored heels caught in the crumbled dirt. Her face felt swollen. She wondered suddenly what she looked like to the girl. She reached into the purse for her compact. In the sunlight, her skin was pink and glazed, her throat beginning to sag, the skin draping slightly at her chin. Blackheads were visible in her pores, broken capillaries around her nose. She had, until recently, applied a facial mask every week to slough off old skin and expose new, as her mother had taught her.
She should try to find a facial mask in the valley.
The sound of splattering turned her around. The girl was squatted beside the Mustang, peeing in the dirt.
“I could have driven you somewhere,” B. said confusedly, stumbling back toward the car. “We could have stopped for you to
. . .
urinate.”
“I didn't want to
urinate
on your seat.” The girl stood up and buttoned her cutoffs and made no move to get back in the car. “You wanna get high?” She took a small cigarette from behind her ear. B. shook her head. “Suit yourself, it's good. Jamaican.” The girl walked past her into the field, her skin brown and firm in the sun. She took long drags on the joint and pulled tomatoes from the ground, tossing them as far as she could.
Now B. could not stand the tomato fields one minute longer. “We should get going,” she called.
The girl had picked a yellow tomato and was trying to look through it. “Going where?” she asked.
B.'s head throbbed, her scalp burned. “Well, I just stopped for a second. I'd rather keep moving.”
The girl shrugged. “I'm hungry,” she said.
“You'll have to put on some shoes if we stop.”
“I have shoes.”
Each square of land they passed was bleached in the heat and smog and against the washed-out sky. B. felt as if she'd always been in the valley. Daughtry's voice came into her head. Throw the checks out. They'll be looking for you. She shook it off. She concentrated on the bleached squares while the girl stared out the window. Finally they came on a sign for a roadside bar and restaurant.
open all day.
The front and back doors of the bar-restaurant were open, a sunlit tunnel into darkness. Fans on the ceiling spun but did not create any breeze. B. was relieved there were no other customers. She did not want to be seen with the girl. A man stacking glasses behind the counter took their orders and they sat down.
The girl ate her hamburger with a meticulousness that surprised B., French fries first, then the hamburger patty, then the pickle, placing the other trimmings inside the bun and closing it firmly. B. picked at her spaghetti. It had seemed the safest choice for the throbbing and spinning and heat but the noodles coagulated in a thick cloying sauce.
“What do you think you'll do, in San Francisco?” she asked the girl.
The girl had been spearing the hamburger bun with her fork. “I don't know. Hang out.”
“You don't really have a plan.”
The girl looked up from her stabbing and B. thought she might jab the fork at her but her face was expressionless. “Are we going soon?” she said. She got up and walked toward the jukebox.
B. stroked the ostrich-skin purse. The girl, she knew, would not offer any money. B. felt unwilling again to part with the bank bills. In the deep of her mind, Daughtry was warning her in his low bitter voice.
“It's so silly of me,” she said to the man behind the bar. “I forgot my cash in my other purse. Do you take checks?”
The man ran his eyes over her. “You from Sacramento?” he asked.
“I'm on a trip with my daughter, to Reno.” She paused and softened her voice. “We're going to meet my husband. He's on business there. He won't be surprised to hear I brought the wrong purse.” She handed him the check. “There's extra for the tip, of course.”
The man looked at her. “I don't know this bank, ma'am.”
“Oh, it's in the city. I can endorse it in front of you here.” She opened the purse, fumbled inside. “Well, I thought I had
. . .
Do you have a pen?” She smoothed her hair back, realizing she could not remember the last time she'd brushed it.
He reached next to the register and handed her a pen.
“I'll just take down your driver's license number,” he said.
“Yes, of course.” She rummaged the open purse again and dropped her shoulders, pretending exasperation. “Well, of all things. My license is in my other purse as well. Harold will think I'm hilarious.”
“I need some kind of identification, ma'am.”
“You could use my license plate.”
She was reading a script in her mind, without examining any of the lines. Behind the bar, a black-and-white pinup photo from the 1940s was glossy and signed. A girl in a one-piece, curls on top of her head, long legs in seamed-stockings and platform heels, peeping over her shoulder. B. could not quite make out the inscription.
be light! me tonight!
(take flight?)
On the check she wrote out an amount larger than the bill.
“Ma'am?”
“I can write the license number down for you,” B. heard herself saying next. She clutched the pen, beginning to write.
“No, I'll get it myself. That's yours over there?” The man gestured through the open door to the Mustang.
He stepped outside with his pad. B. stood in the doorway. The girl was busy examining the jukebox as if it were a riddle from a distant time. B. watched the man walk around the car, tilting his head. He went around the back and wrote on his pad. He came back inside and slipped the check into the register and counted out, minus the commission and tip, her change.
He looked B. in the eye. “I sure hope you're not scamming me. I'd hate to send two pretty ladies to jail.”
Be light! Take flight!
“I don't know what you mean.”
In the bathroom before they left, she tried to stick her finger down her throat. She only gagged. She knew not to expect the cool expansive feeling. But the throbbing seemed worse now. A new feeling of dread came over her, a feeling that she was heading the wrong way, that she should have turned or stopped somewhere earlier. Her body felt suddenly exhausted. The girl had gone outside, kicking at the dust of the parking lot, the loose thin leather that barely held together her sandals and her feet covered in dirt.
“I can't drive any more today,” B. said in the car. “I think we should stop at a motel.”
The girl looked straight at B. for the first time. “I don't do anything like that, okay?” The girl's eyes were brown and tired.
“No. I meant
. . .
it's too hot. I just want to rest. I'd rather drive in the morning.”
The eyes took this in. “If you're paying.”
B. stopped at the next roadside motel and got them a room with tw
o double beds. Dark blue bedspreads with giant purple and red flowers. The girl went into the bathroom. B. heard the shower turn on. While she could she went back to the car and hid the checkbook in the glove compartment and the money under the seat. Then she lay back on one of the beds.
The rough texture of the nylon threads scratched her legs but she did not move or turn down the comforter. There seemed to be glitter in the ceiling. She stared at the glitter and went through in her mind all the actions she could take right at that moment: get up, rip up the checks, change clothes, get into the car, go back to the city. She lay there, immobile. The dizziness held steady. The shower ran for a while and she realized she herself had not bathed in days. After the girl finished, she would shower. They would sleep. She would have coffee and a real breakfast in the morning and be able to drive for hours. Drive farther away. Perhaps she could find other quiet places, not like the supermarket or the bar. Department stores, maybe. But she would have to go into cities for that. She sat up and saw herself in the mirror across from the bed. She was sunburned, thin. Her dark roots were showing. Her cuticles dirty and her knuckle with a large cut, she could not remember how. She could start there: bathe, clean her fingernails. And yet she did not want to move, did not have the energy to scrub anything. Maybe it was better to let all these thoughts go. Maybe a plan would come to her that way, descend from somewhere. She held the vague recognition that someone might be after her now. The police. The people to whom the checks belonged. Daughtry. But the considerations were shadowy, faint, like a bell tolling in the distance.