26
She woke with a thick, confused feeling, as if she’d slept while everyone else had stayed awake. Her mouth tasted like ash. The sun was trying to break through in futile hatches in the drapes.
B. lifted herself up. Somewhere in the night she had crawled to her bed. She made out the form of the girl watching her in silence. B. stumbled out of bed and grabbed the powder-blue dress off the television and went into the bathroom. As she sat on the toilet she felt the carsickness saturate every pore, juddering and expanding as she wiped herself, as she stood up. The force of it renewed as though it had only been quietly metastasizing. She dug her nails into her palms.
When she came out, the girl was watching television, the smoke from her cigarette twisting in spectral columns in the dimness. Her hair was still half in and half out of its bun, but otherwise she looked no worse for wear. As if the night had been B.’s personal hallucination.
“Whatever you’re doing, I want in,” the girl said.
She was inscrutable in the smoke, staring at the television.
B. did not answer.
“My mom collects these figurines,” the girl went on. “All porcelain with gold at the edges, Little Bo Peeps and farmers and squirrels.” She paused with a cool, almost clinical expression. “She puts them in a glass case and dusts them every day. Goes to work and comes home and doesn’t talk to my dad, just rearranges the figurines. I don’t want any figurines, any cement factory, any goddamn pools. But you need money to be free, don’t you? You need money to get away. I want money, for Jed and me.”
The girl’s voice like a metal ringing in B.’s skull. The banks arranged themselves in her mind, the long fluorescent lights and neat rows of teller windows and evenly spaced islands for filling out forms. She wanted the girl to shut up so she could be alone with the images.
But the girl would not shut up. “I had my first diaphragm when I was fifteen and when my mother found it, she thought it was a strainer. For tea. Didn’t even know what it was. Jed says it’s a conspiracy they’ve been feeding us, like cyanide on our corn flakes.”
“Like arsenic on corn flakes.”
“Anyway, whatever you’re doing, I want in. I want in on the action.” The metal ringing hammering out in waves.
“I need coffee,” B. said.
Outside, the day glared hot and smoggy yellow. Was it still July? B. did not know. In the office she poured herself a cup of coffee as the woman at the counter openly stared at her. “We’re paid up,” B. said. The woman did not even nod, just continued to stare.
The girl kept up her diatribe in the car. “The only person I’d marry is Jed, but we don’t have those hangups.” B. wondered if the girl had seen the LIFE magazine in the trash. The girl lit a new cigarette, marijuana this time. “We don’t need it because I’m his old lady and he’s my old man.”
“And he’s sleeping with other girls right now.”
“You can goddamn take that back.” The girl jabbed the joint at B., her hair slipping from the half-bun as she spoke. “That’s none of your goddamn business.”
They drove in silence for a while, the grass smoke acrid in the car.
“I’m not a prostitute,” B. said finally.
“What then? You deal? My dealer in Fontana drives a yellow Corvette and could get us into the hippest shows in L.A. You don’t seem the type.”
“I’m not doing anything.”
The girl sighed, the same sigh B. imagined she gave when her mother misconstrued the diaphragm. “Fine, you’re not doing anything. You’re just here with a stack of bills under your seat, driving around the valley picking up girls for charity.”
“And there are blood stains,” the girl said. “On the floorboard.”
They drove through low green fields. B. no longer cared about classifying the crops. She felt somewhere in her reeling a need to make the girl stop her crazy ideas, to make her understand. “I like the banks,” B. said. “I like the colors and the furniture and the people. They’re safe and quiet. It’s not for the money.”
“So work in a bank.”
“You’re missing the point,” B. said.
“I’m getting the point alright,” the girl said. “It’s called robbing banks. Checks, right? ’Cause I don’t see you pulling this off with a gun and mask. Jed tried to pass a check once and they were on him in two seconds flat. But I can see that angle being right up your alley. The diamond and the heels and the hair and all. I can see that being exactly your thing.”
“Why haven’t you done any with me? Did they catch you or something?” the girl went on without missing a beat. “Well they won’t recognize me.”
“I could help you,” she said. “I could help with your sickness or whatever.”
For a moment, the idea held B. Someone to take away the affliction, to lay her down and pat her hair and tell her stories. But the girl’s tired face and disordered hair hardened in front of her and B. knew this girl possessed no such balm.
The teller windows returned to her. The perfect squares of wood and glass, the soothing ivory walls. She must get rid of the girl.
The girl was still at it. “I see how the whole lady getup is the angle now. I can do that, like last night. I can do the lady thing, no problem.”
“The dresses are dirty,” B. protested. “They’re too big.”
“You said last night it fit perfectly,” the girl retorted. B. suddenly understood her as the druggist had, something out of a German fairytale, vicious and hungry, not to be let in the door.
“I’m not asking for fifty-fifty. Whatever’s fair. Any bread will help. For me and Jed, for our trip.”
“We’ll do the next one together,” the girl was saying. “We can trade off. I’ll do it and you can see how good I am and then you decide how much. And if you don’t, I’ll report you.”
Everything was moving in its own dreamy, gel-like substance inside the carsickness. “I want to see the gold rush park first,” B. said. “The one the man at the gas station told us about.” She felt inexplicably that the gold rush park was the next step in the journey: the girl’s threat, her chatter, the park — all of them ripples inside the thick, surreal wave that would get her back to the banks. No need for any plan. Now she understood. The banks were the only plan.
“Bunch of hicks came and missed the gold, got syphilis and died, the end.”
“I want to see the park first,” B. said implacably. “I don’t care what we do after that.”
“Fine. It’s your trip. But don’t stall on me.”
B. took the small road back to the freeway. She pointed the car in the direction of the foothills. Leaving the valley now had its own part in the dream-gel logic. The girl chatted on, almost nervously, about how she’d stolen from five and dimes and corner stores since she was little. B. flattened the girl’s voice into a distant hum. The slope rose almost imperceptibly as they drove, and then all of a sudden they were in the foothills, the anise scent in the bleached grasses and the hunched oak trees and the valley behind remote and blurred.
There were no landmarks near the sign. B. parked in the shadeless lot near a few picnic tables. The heat sucked instantly inside the car. She gathered her purse and sat for a moment, looking out the window. “I won’t be long,” she said. The girl said nothing.
At the park entrance, a ranger stood in a shack. A transistor radio crackled behind him, the baseball game organ scaling up and down, the cheers of the crowd listless ripples in the heat. Under the man’s ranger hat he wore dark wraparound glasses so that B. couldn’t see his eyes. “It’s self-guided,” he said, handing her a pamphlet. “Over a hundred years of state history in one park, ma’am. Happy prospecting.” A languid cheer whined from the game.