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.