Into the Valley Read online

  “You should take a special trip.”

  B. gathered her bills and put them carefully in her purse. “Thank you,” she said, and walked toward the door.

  “Oh, ma’am?” B. was almost outside.

  She turned around. The cool expansive feeling had settled throughout her now and the young teller floated like a pale blonde aura over the marble counter.

  “You forgot your receipt,” the teller said.

  B. took the piece of paper. “Thank you so much.”

  “Have a nice drive.”

  She walked out of the bank with five hundred dollars.

  It was fine now, everything was light. Along the levee road were lines of short leafy green plants bordered by dried yellow tufts of grass. B. stopped at a fruit stand and bought a bag of blackberries. She ate handfuls as she drove, the juice on her lips and fingers (she tried not to stain the powder-blue dress). She had a song in her head from the hotel lobby, about following along on a carousel—the ornate lacquered horses going round in her mind—and she wished for the song to be only about that.

  Suddenly she wanted ice cream. She could not remember the last time she’d wanted ice cream. The cool expansive feeling carried her forward. She drove to the next town and asked around at the grocery store for a parlor and when the woman at the cash register told her there was none, she bought a tub of vanilla ice cream with a fifty-dollar bill. “Is there a spoon I could use?” she asked. The woman was still counting out her change, which B. dropped into the paper bag with the ice cream. The woman frowned and shook her head. “No spoons.”

  B. sat in the Mustang with the tub in her lap and scooped the ice cream into her mouth with her fingers. She tasted the bubbles in the cream, the liquor of the vanilla. It seemed in just the past few minutes the river had become bluer, the trees edged in gold. A man walked by the car in jean overalls, dirtied from some work in a field (or a barn?), whistling a tune. It sounded hopeful and familiar. Now, eating her ice cream, thinking of the driving and fields and endless road, she was buoyed. She sang the song from the long-ago prom again putting the wounding bustier out of her mind. Her singing voice was high and weak, but more of the words came back to her this time, and she was pleased that she’d put them together, as if she had locked onto something real.

  When she’d had enough she left the ice cream tub on the car floorboard and climbed down the riverbank. She washed her hands and mouth and a blue jay screeched from a walnut tree. In the sun, near the water, her mind began to soar. She imagined a small house, herself in it, with light pouring through the windows, quiet all around. She walked along the riverbank and stumbled on more of the poppies. This time she picked a handful and studied them, as if to persuade herself of the beauty of the bright flaming orange. They had no scent. She brought the bouquet back to the car and laid it on the gear shaft, next to the antler bone. She would put them in a glass of water somewhere. Maybe in a small house, a glass of water for her poppies.

  A young Mexican wearing a stained white hip apron came out from behind a building and dumped a bag of trash. B. beamed at him. She smoothed her dress and sat at the wheel; her hands and face dried in the heat. She touched her fingers again to her hair, wondering how mussed it looked, and started the engine.

  For a while she passed through asparagus fields along the river. They looked at first like ferns but soon she noted the vegetable stalks underneath, and her body hummed with a kind of power to recognize a crop by herself (before the hand-painted sign advertising asparagus bunches). The ice cream and this recognition and the still-lightness from the bank kept her moving along. Then she came to the sunflowers.

  The stalks were mostly green but the flowers above were dead and hanging. The bent brown heads and leaning stalks made them look like a mass of defeated people, bound to go forward. Slowing down for the sunflowers B. saw the chapel standing in the middle of them.

  She parked.

  When she got near the sunflowers, they made a baleful dry rattling sound, as if they were trying to talk to her. She tried not to hear this.

  B. stepped inside the unlocked door, through ratted spider webs. The whitewashed wood was pocked with dirt, a single window glazed in dust. Behind the altar was a painting of the Virgin Mary. The only other furnishings were a single pew and a cross.

  The air was stifling but the room was bright in a way that seemed soothing and pristine. She sat in the pew and flipped through a weathered Bible. She put it down again and folded her hands in her lap.

  She had tried once or twice to go to church in the city. The only place she had liked was the Spanish mission, not a church but a museum, with its white adobe walls and frescoes, its plain, uncarved wood. She especially loved the dioramas of peaceful mission life, contented Indians feeding cows and planting corn, beneficent-looking Franciscans, the small do not touch signs all around. But every time she left, the transition to daylight, the brown palm fronds rotting in the median outside, the diorama figures and the Christ on the cross far away like childhood dolls, and she realized all over again, unbearably, the hours to go until sunset. So she’d stopped going to the mission too.

  The brightness and calm of the chapel in the middle of the field made her think it would feel different. The Virgin Mary’s beatific face not unlike the teller’s. Like that of a confidante B. had yet to make. She knelt down on the prie-dieu, clasped her hands together, looked hopefully at the Virgin.

  But as she prayed—for help with the carsickness, for guidance in the valley—the spinning returned violently. The hot unmoved air smothering her. She gripped the edge of the pew.

  It had been a mistake to stop.

  When she sat back in the car the ice cream was a sickly dull puddle in the carton. She pulled over and dumped it in a ditch and drove on.

  14.

  The beauty parlor the teller recommended was on the main street of the next river town, a sign shaped like a woman’s bust in profile. Inside were four barber chairs, two occupied by white-haired ladies. One had already been set with curlers, the other was being finished by the single hairdresser in the place.

  B. sat on a folding chair near the door. An air-conditioning box sputtered in the corner. This was a better idea, she told herself, better than stopping at the chapel. She watched the hairdresser, a thin woman with sunken cheeks. The hairdresser’s own hair did not look well-styled, an attempt for some kind of lift at the crown that only looked like she’d just woken up. Oscillating fans on the counters blew the fine ends off her shoulders, but she seemed no more cooled off.

  B. ignored all this. She felt certain the beauty parlors in the valley would be better than in the city, would hold some deeper significance, for their realness, their location among “truer” women. When the hairdresser finished the second woman and put them under the dryers, she approached B.

  “I’d like a set, please.”

  “We do wash-and-set, ma’am.”

  “But it’s already clean.”

  “We’ll have to wet it anyhow.”

  B. tried not to sound defeated. “Alright, however you’d like.”

  The valley hairdresser shampooed her quickly, scraping B.’s scalp with her long fingernails, then sat her in front of the mirror and sectioned her hair with the tail of a comb. She rolled each section up into a wire curler and pinned it tightly, until B.’s temples hurt. The hairdresser’s extreme thinness, chipped scarlet nails and limp hair made her look older at first, but as B. watched the woman curl and pin she realized they were probably the same age.

  When B. had gone with her mother to the beauty parlor as a girl, her mother’s stiff handbag had sat on the floor with gloves laid carefully on top. She chatted with the other ladies in the same crests and falls, attuned to some shared rhythm.

  And yet B. could not recall what the women spoke of, or how vital these subjects were, or whether these seemed to be the conversations they really wanted.


  B. watched the two older women under the dryers. One was thin like the hairdresser, her skin mottled, the bones in her elbows protruding; the other was weighed down by fat that bulged off her torso and arms. Their voices rattled in the vibration of the dryers. B. listened to their conversation, trying to discern a thread that might be illuminating in some way, that might be what she had come for.

  “Well that was just it, and so I took it back to the supermarket and showed them the opened carton. Full of lumps! I said, ‘I bought this milk yesterday and I’m not leaving without my money back.’”

  “And did they give it?”

  “Of course they did.”

  “Well, I like it there. I’m not going to stop going there.”

  The thin lady harrumphed.

  There was a silence. B. waited for something else.

  “I saw that greedy yellow bird again,” the thin one began. “Damn bird has no business around here, and it keeps showing up in my apple tree, picking at my apples and leaving holes.”

  “Did you hear me?” she snapped at the other.

  “Uh-huh.” But the fat woman was drifting off to sleep.

  “You think I could get Fred to poison it? You think that’s legal?”

  B. turned to them, encouraged. “Was it a warbler?” she asked. The hairdresser cupped B.’s skull and forced her face back to the mirror to set another curler. B. settled for the old women’s reflection.

  “Well, no, it was a thrush, I think,” the thin woman said. She eyed B. “Do you know birds?”

  “Well, not much really,” B. said. “I thought warblers were yellow, though.”

  “I’m from the city,” she added, as if this explained her error. “But I was thinking of staying here.”

  “Most coastal folks can’t take the heat,” the fat woman said flatly.

  “People usually driving through here to get somewhere else,” the thin woman said. “They don’t stay.”

  “I like the heat,” B. said. “I think the valley is interesting.”

  “You one of them hippies? You trying to set up one of them camps or something?”

  “Oh no, of course not. I just liked . . . I’m just interested in how you live.”

  B. waited hopefully for more, but they only stared at her. They resumed a discussion, privately now, murmuring under the whir of the dryers. She watched their lips in the mirror, the deeply cut wrinkles. B.’s own skin pinched from the curlers and pins. A disappointment sank through her. She brushed it off.

  “Do you get many young people coming in?” she tried with the hairdresser.

  “Same as everywhere,” the woman replied. She did not glance toward B. in the mirror, just pulled at her hair, shoving the final pins in. B. stayed quiet. She watched the hairdresser’s half-red nails flutter like bright frightening insects over her head.

  Her mother had become increasingly disturbed lately by shades of nail polish. “I’d rather see the white than nothing at all, I suppose,” she’d explain to B. “But the yellow is horrible. Clown colors, Easter egg colors. Better nude than colors like that.” Her mother had begun calling her often that rainless winter, a creamy haze swallowing the city and her mother phoning almost daily. That January the “human be-in” had happened in the park and her mother seemed obsessed by it.

  “The woman with the floppy hat . . . she was in The Globe . . . She looked so strange, you know. Dirty. I thought I should call you.”

  B. had seen the posters around the city—a man with a pyramid and third eye at his forehead, long tangled hair, his face vaguely, eerily African—and she’d seen the pictures in the newspaper, the thousands of bodies standing and dancing and the rock-and-roll bands and flowers and long hair everywhere. B. was disturbed by the be-in too, but all the chatter about it made her more uneasy; as if the more they talked about it, the more portentous it grew. But her mother did not let up.

  “Well, she looked ridiculous in that hat. And her hair was the same color as yours, did you realize that?”

  “But the photo was black-and-white.”

  “No, it was the exact same color, I could tell. So I just wanted to call.”

  “I didn’t go. I wasn’t there.”

  Her mother pretended not to hear. She moved on to whom B. had seen that week, what she’d done. After that B. began to let the phone ring without answering.

  The hairdresser finished the last of the pins and put B. under a dryer next to the now-sleeping women. Close up the thin old woman’s hands were coiled with veins and brown spots like a series of stains. B. reached for a nearby magazine and flipped through it, but her mind drifted to her mother, the white nail polish, the woman in the floppy hat. She turned a page and there was the first lady again, standing in front of a bed of blue flowers in Washington, D.C. B. studied the photograph: red suit and implacable hair, the sea of blue flowers. She felt calmer.

  The dryer heat baked into her cells. She must have dozed off because when she woke her scalp was raw and her hair hard and the white-haired women gone.

  “How do you want it styled?” the hairdresser asked.

  “I’m not really going anywhere.”

  The hairdresser looked piqued. “However you think best,” B. tried to add. But the woman started yanking out the curlers in silence. B. tried not to flinch. She felt silly to have come to the valley parlor at all.

  Just then a girl came in. She was perhaps twenty, naturally blonde hair falling to her shoulders. B. felt as though she had not seen a person this girl’s age in a beauty parlor in years. She was wearing shorts and a baby-doll halter that showed her midriff. B.’s mood brightened.

  “Hiya, Trudy. You have time for me?”

  “Sure, Kat. Just let me finish this lady. Up or down today?”

  “Down. Most definitely down.”

  The girl plopped into the barber chair next to B. She was not exactly pretty, but had the firmness of youth to her skin, a tight and tan body. She wore heavy makeup, thick pancake shining slightly in the heat, pale blue eye shadow with black eyeliner and thick, black mascara, which made her eyes look small and bruised.

  The girl was examining her various profiles in the mirror. “He’ll ask me now, Trudy,” she said. “It’s for sure.”

  “I don’t see why not,” the hairdresser responded, but her tone was noncommittal, as if she had visited this conversation before and used up the requisite energy.

  “His daddy’ll just have to park it,” the girl went on, biting her thumbnail in between sentences, still glancing sidelong at her reflection. Then she turned straight on in the mirror. “I’m tired of all the judgments, you know? Sick and tired.” The thumbnail went back into her mouth.

  “We’ll fix you up, hon,” the hairdresser said without enthusiasm.

  “I like your dress,” the girl said abruptly to B.

  “Thank you.”

  “It’s from the city, I can tell. Couldn’t be from around here. Maybe I’ll go to the city for my wedding dress. I’m getting engaged tonight.”

  The girl turned back to the hairdresser, making pouty lips into the mirror. “Listen, Trudy, I need you to pull out all the stops this time. Totally bitchin’, okay?”

  The girl’s clouded eyes began to haunt B. It was too hard to make out what was behind them. B. rubbed her hands together nervously.

  “We do nails, too,” the hairdresser said listlessly.

  B. glanced down at the rutted pink polish and dug her nails into her lap. “That’s alright.”

  “I’d like to move to the city,” the girl said, turning to B. again. “Have our own apartment there. Robby could work in a skyscraper or something. My best friend Debbie was all set to go—you know Deb, don’tcha Trudy?—but she got married last summer and she’s already full up with diapers.”

  “I’m not afraid of the city,” the girl added. “My mom thinks it�
��s all druggies and pervs, but I think it’d be boss. Anything to get outta here.”

  “Oh, well if you want to know anything,” B. offered, “I can tell you—”

  “—I mean, Robby is going into the Air Force first, and so we’ll probably have a house at McClellan to start, but then after he has his pilot’s license, we’ll go then . . .” Her voice drifted off.

  B. did not know why it mattered to her if the girl went to the city or not. And yet she felt betrayed, as if the girl were stranding her by not going to the city. “There are nice beauty parlors in the city,” B. murmured. “You might really like them.”

  “Thing is, it all depends on Mr. Robert R. Taylor senior. What a candyass. But he has the money, so it all depends on what he says. I just hope he gets the golf club for the reception. I just hope he’s not too candyass to do that.” The girl’s eyes were a terrifying smear now, irises and pupils lost in the blue powder and black liner, no reflection at all, calculating opaquely about the golf club for the reception.

  “He likes it down, but it’s got to be classy. You know, memorable.” The girl gnawed on the thumbnail. “Trudes, do you think maybe an updo? Oh, God, if they photograph us at the restaurant, I want a good picture. I want a damn good picture in the paper.”

  “So you ready for me now?” The girl’s bruised eyes pleading. “Trudy?”

  The spinning and tightness vibrated in B.’s teeth. She reached for a bank bill to pay and get out and for the first time felt reluctant to part with the money, as if it pulsed out the calm and relief of the banks itself. She forced herself to lay it down on the counter.

  The hairdresser did not even notice. The girl was still pleading with her. “God knows I’ve waited—right, Trudy? No one’s waited as long as I have.”

  B. hurried out of the salon. At the end of the block she went into a columned stone building and came out again. She put the three hundred dollars in her purse. The plaguing voice vanished. She left the windows down in the Mustang and let her new curls fly.