“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 two 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.
When the girl emerged from the bathroom she was wearing a long T-shirt, through which her nipples showed, wet hair hanging down to her ribs. B. saw clearly the dark circles under her eyes, beneath the tan.
“I usually watch TV.”
“Okay,” B. said.
The girl pushed the button on the box and sat on the other bed. A variety show came on and a series of ladies in black shorts with cummerbunds and tuxedo jackets spun canes and tipped their top hats. They did not sing, but moved in perfect mute unison, one woman with a big white smile, false eyelashes and a bow tie. When they finished a bald man came on and made jokes to a recorded laugh track.
“Aren’t you going to shower?” the girl asked.
“I just want to rest first.” B. lay back against her pillow. The skin over her body was tight from the sun and heat. Had she brought any body cream? The variety show ended and next they watched a talk show, a man in a corduroy suit in an armchair across from an actress in another armchair. The woman wore a minidress with a large bow, a pixie haircut and exaggerated eyelashes, making her look like a Pierrot. The host made jokes about the actress’s last film role; the actress smiled stiffly. The girl sat smoking and laughing at the jokes.
“Where are we?” B. asked.
“I dunno. Somewhere near Marysville.”
After a while, B. said, “Does it help, traveling around?”
“Help what?”
“I thought maybe you left for some reason. To get away from something.”
“From dying of boredom,” the girl said. “Cement plant, pinochle club on Saturday nights, Blue Hawaiians before dinner.” Her wet hair made mottled, transparent spots in her shirt. She inhaled the cigarette deeply, let all the smoke out before she spoke again.
“When Jed had enough money, we split. I called my mom from Fresno. She cried. Worrying is her thing. Worrying and cleaning. She’s never been farther than L.A. for Christ’s sake.”
The actress on the talk show was now laughing and flirting, but still stiffly, making the Pierrot effect more marked. Her lips moved in a quiet white-pink murmur. When the talk show host asked about her love life she put her fingers in front of her mouth.
“I was sick in the city, that’s why I left,” B. said. “I think I was dying.” It seemed true. “Do your parents know where you are now?” she asked.
The girl ignored the question. “Where are you going, anyway?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Around the valley.”
The girl continued to smoke and watch the show, genuinely pulled in it seemed. The comedian came back on and continued his shtick. The girl laughed again at his jokes.
“It was a kind of nausea, the reason I left the city,” B. went on. “I don’t suppose you’ve ever felt that way?”
“I puked as a kid.”
“But have you ever felt a nausea that wasn’t. . I mean, did you ever feel carsick when you weren’t really?”
The girl rose and rooted through the knapsack until she pulled out the crumpled magazine from the Sambo’s floor and flopped back on the bed. “I don’t get carsick,” she said.
The girl’s dirty fingernails, not clean even after the shower, closed around the crumpled white veil. The comedian finished and a woman brought on a short gray dog that flipped backward on command.
B. suddenly shivered. “The air-conditioning’s too high,” she said aloud. She got up and flicked the knob down.
After that she went into the bathroom, but the idea of showering exhausted her. She swiped her armpits with a washcloth, splashed her face and went back to the bed, listening to the girl laugh to the laugh track on television.