With the same stick, the girl began drawing a sun and a moon inside the circle, very seriously, standing back at points to check her work. She added stars. The dirt was grainy between B.’s toes; she forgot the still-open cut. The pears gave off no scent, only the smell of dirt and leaves. When the girl finished the drawings, she began to orbit the circle. She put her palms up and out and began: “Dear moon, we are your children. Show us the way. Dear sun, we are your children. Show us the way.” The girl’s voice was loud and solemn; B. suppressed another urge to laugh. “Mother Earth, we are far away from you, we are lost. Show us the way. Show us in the stars. Sun and moon, we give ourselves to you, show us the way.” The girl began to ululate. “Heya heya heya!” She sped up and began to spin and hop around the circle. The movements fascinated B.; she had not imagined the girl to have any energy at all. “Heya heya heya! Oh!. .We don’t give to the government man or the business man or the police man. . Heya heya heya! We don’t give them a goddamn thing. . Oh! Heya heya heya! We give to the people, the people, the people.” Dancing and moaning, the girl grabbed B.’s hand and pulled her along. “We give ourselves to the sun and the moon and the earth and the stars cuz we need your protection, man! We need you to show us the way! We’re ready to take back the way!” B. felt ridiculous, going around in the circle, until the girl released her abruptly and she was left to watch her twirling fast in the center of the circle, arms wide, braids whipping out, utterly free.
Are you funny about women, is that it? Don’t you want to be normal? Her mother’s voice sharp and panicked into the phone. And B. had wanted to ask her, plead with her, “Is that all there is? Isn’t there anything else?” But she’d told her mother everything would be fine.
B. watched the girl chanting and dancing around her. Then she stepped into the circle. She turned around slowly. Slowly, slowly the pear trees went by. The carsickness felt remote; her body empty. She began to sob.
The girl stopped. She stared with the same blank stare from Sambo’s. Without a word, she turned and walked through the dirt drawings back to the Mustang. After a few moments B. followed.
They did not speak of the Indian prayer again.
Their motel room that night had a single queen bed with lumpy mattress, dripping faucet, cracked plaster walls. The girl fell asleep immediately while B. lay next to her aware of every breath, of the heat radiating off her brown arms and legs. She tried to count the cracks in the ceiling. The carsickness still remote; the banks abstract and unsubstantial in her thoughts.
She took the girl’s hand and held it. The girl inhaling and exhaling so easily.
25
They woke late again. They stopped for lunch and the girl devoured a meatloaf sandwich, two scoops of chocolate ice cream and an orange soda. (B. had coffee and bits of Danish.) Afterward they drove aimlessly on the small roads. It seemed easier now for B. to drive without speaking, to follow wherever the road took them, the girl’s feet up on the dashboard, hot wind through the windows. (The heat itself now a welcome stupor.) The carsickness was still subdued. Maybe if she could stay this way with the girl. Maybe, she thought, something with her had cured it.
When the sun was just above the western hills, they intersected the freeway again and came on a small carnival by the side of it. The girl perked up.
“Can we stop?”
The rides were old and ramshackle. But B.’s lower back ached from driving and the girl was too excited.
“Okay,” B. said.
The girl bounced in her seat until they parked. She asked B. for money and went to the entrance without waiting. It was all seedy: the half-dozen rickety rides with rusting metal and flaking paint, the faded concession stands, the operators’ road-weary faces. The music oomped-oomped and the dingy bulbs winked. There was a whirling tilted octopus ride, bumper cars, an airplane merry-go-round for small children, a spinning column of swings. But no Ferris wheel. B. would have liked to go above the valley again; she would have liked to compare it with the buttes. The girl made her ride the bumper cars, the clanging and crashing and sparks of which B. hated, and then the octopus, which made her neck ache. When the girl insisted on riding the spinning column of swings, B. refused and she watched the girl go around, long braids and feathers sailing, face indecipherable. B. bought her a caramel apple and an ice cream cone. (The girl had not refused anything since the doughnuts.) She bought herself a bag of popcorn and they walked along the midway as the last blue in the sky blackened.
“He doesn’t understand that sometimes a person just wants to see something pretty. What’s wrong with that. The ocean, for example. And I thought the governor’s mansion would be like Pasadena. Once on a field trip we visited a grower’s mansion and I’ll never forget the long curtains like silk or velvet or whatever, all soft and shiny. . A person just likes to see that.”
Any sudden effusion was related to Jed, B. now understood. “I don’t think you have to explain yourself,” she said.
The girl was staring at her. “Can I wear one of your dresses?” she asked out of nowhere, chocolate ice cream in the corners of her mouth.
B. took the girl in, with her cutoffs, wearing only a lace-topped camisole and the leather choker around her neck, large turquoise in the center.
“They haven’t been cleaned in a while,” B. said.
The girl shrugged. “I don’t care.”
B. had a brief vision of the girl in her dress, on the bus through Chinatown, at the beauty salons. She held the irrational thought that perhaps the girl would understand then. Maybe then she could tell the girl about the walks and the crocus. They went back to the trunk of the Mustang, the organ music whining behind them. B. pulled the powder-blue dress from the travel bag. (She had put back on the ivory; she only wanted the ivory sheath now.) “I should really hang them up in the back,” she said. “I don’t know why I don’t.” She didn’t have another pair of heels; the girl would have to wear her sandals.
“I can fix your hair and makeup,” B. offered.
“Alright.”
The girl changed in the backseat while B. got out her brush. When she stepped out the hard nipples were pressed against the bust of the dress. B. tried not to look. She removed the braids and feathers and brushed through the girl’s hair, pulling out tangles. “Ouch. Ow!” “I can’t help it, your knots are horrible.” The girl’s hair was too long to keep any kind of style so B. twirled it up on top of her head and arranged it like a crown with her bobby pins. Then she painted the girl’s eyelids black with liner and mascaraed her long lashes and drew on the pink lipstick. B. unhooked the diamond brooch from her own chest and pinned it at the girl’s collarbone. The girl eyed B. “I’ve never worn a diamond before.” She gazed at herself in the car windows, fingering the brooch. “Like a movie star,” she said. The girl’s shins were still blotched white with calamine. She needed stockings, a handbag, B. thought vaguely.
They went back to the midway and walked under the winking bulbs. The girl’s neck looked long with her hair up. B. watched the farmers grin but the girl did not seem to notice.
“Let’s have some beer,” the girl said.
B. bought two bottles and it appeared that whatever substances the girl had imbibed in her short life, she had not had much beer. She seemed immediately drunk. They sat on a wooden picnic bench and watched the crowd in the jangle of the midway and the girl babbled on about her favorite rock groups, the first time she took acid, an ice cream parlor in Fontana where her mother threw her a “goofy” six-year-old birthday party. The crowd, B. observed as the girl talked, was sunburned couples and sunburned teenagers and a few Mexicans. No other women with hitchhiking girls.