She skidded to a stop in the middle of the road. The gentle bending grass alongside her and the dark jagged mountains ahead.
She brought the steering wheel around its column, turning the car in one single movement onto the shoulder and back in the other direction. Back into the valley.
III &$9
27
In an all-night laundromat, she drank a bottle of Coke from a machine. She put the cool glass between her legs. Out of the foothills her crotch had begun itching violently and in the ladies’ room at the laundromat, she’d discovered a forgotten last tampon. How many days? She no longer knew. Since before the night with the university professor. Forgetting this necessary feminine ceremony, and so it had been inadvertently rammed inside her and left to fester there, disintegrating, gathering its bacteria. She dug for several minutes for the string. The tampon halted on the way out, dry and bloated to twice its size, making her wince. She washed her fingers raw with the powdered soap. On the lip of the sink she had fanned out the bills (she’d collected everything from under the front seat, finding the sweaty cellophane-wrapped doughnuts too). She did not want to count the bills but to separate out the newest ones and roll these into her bra strap as she had that first day, understanding now their power as a totem next to her skin. Back in her blue plastic seat, she tensed her thighs together to stop the itching but it raged. The only other person in the laundromat was a woman folding endless pairs of shorts, some the size of napkins, and B. thought momentarily of striking up some conversation, but a slovenly aspect in the woman — a burst seam in her pedal pushers, a missing button on her blouse — made B. avoid her. She was too tired to drive to a motel. She preferred to sit and watch the suds in the washer tumble and churn. She might even plan a route as she watched, map out how she could conduct the banks in a prudent and logical manner this time, strategically.
But as she watched, the swirling liquid turned gray. . the gray of the city. . the gray of the fog. And suddenly she was back a few days before the first check. The day when the fog had never lifted, the day she’d left work early to settle her electric bill in person (her electricity turned off, the payment — was it two? — forgotten, when normally she stayed so on top of those things, on things like bill paying and facial masks). The fog had never lifted that day, hanging in gray veils between buildings. There was a buzzing at the back of her neck that had begun in the morning but she’d managed to contain it with typing and filing to a thin steady drone. As she walked the concrete canyons and could not find the bus stop, the droning got worse. The one-dimensional light brightening and deadening objects at the same time to a flat nothingness. She hurried past two drifters on a corner, a man with a guitar in striped pants and a woman in a tall, sinister bowler hat handing out carnations. When B. finally found the stop, shivering in her navy bouclé suit, she stood next to a pretty young woman and felt relief.
And yet on closer inspection, the young woman had worn no stockings, her hair long and frizzy, braless under the paisley dress. Carrying not a handbag or gloves but a satchel across her chest and a thick textbook titled Advanced Microbiology in her arm. Not a drifter and yet not anything B. had ever known before, not anything she recognized. For the first time with the carsickness she vomited. Retched onto the sidewalk. The girl tried to offer some help, but B. stumbled away and found a taxi, mailed the check to the utility company and lived for the rest of the week with candles.
“Where’s the nearest bank?” B. asked the woman folding laundry, turning away from the gray suds.
The woman explained and it seemed to B. that she understood exactly why B. had asked. She understood the gray suds and the girl at the bus stop and that the banks were the only answer.
&$9
She bought baby powder for her hair so she would not have to wash it. She remembered from college that cranberry juice helped the itching and bought two jars and drank them as she drove. The lipstick was also essential, the lipstick with the diamond brooch and the French twist (with the baby powder). She carefully applied a pink or a coral right before she went in, just as she carefully held down her shoulders and put on a smile and nodded during small talk. In the motels, while she still used them, she hung up the ivory sheath and slept in her bra and underwear. But when she began sleeping in the Mustang — in order to hoard more bills, and because she was not sleeping much anyway — she kept the dress on. It now had creases like cuts in it and an unmistakably sour stain of sweat. In truck-stop restrooms she forced herself to wash her armpits. (Some aspect of stepping into a shower would undo everything. She used the restroom soap just enough to cover her smell.) There was of course the light green poplin she had not even worn yet. But the ivory was now a talisman, a marker of some kind. The bone-colored heels were now a light brown.
Three a day was the most she managed because of the long distances. Her best one of the first, when she’d fallen into extended small talk with a teller about the preferred route to Tahoe, the girl emphatic about taking Highway 50 to avoid the trucks and come out on the south side. The girl’s passion for the distinction, her engrossment in the nuances — the importance of ending up at the casinos, for example — allowing B. time to absorb the straight lines, the subdued voices, the browns and beiges. The cool expansive feeling had lasted and lasted. She had not needed a second bank. That day she had parked under a eucalyptus break and slept peacefully in the shade all afternoon.
But as the days passed, the cool expansive feeling began to lessen. She attributed this first to mitigating factors: the bank that had been near a canning plant and so polluted with the awful tang of stewed tomatoes she could not take anything else in. Another where she’d become so distracted by her dirty fingernails — the black against the chipped pink — that she’d forgotten her opening bit about the weather and signed her own name on the check. (The teller had not noticed.) And even when it went off all right, the cool expansive feeling evaporated after a few minutes. Like a drug with no kick. The spinning and nausea returned fiercer than before, making her gun the engine for the next town and the next one after that.
The spree lasted five days, until the morning she walked into the bank and saw the small poster with the sketch. attractive blonde, early thirties, 5’7”, 120 pounds, wears diamond brooch. Even then she had considered continuing on to the counter, filling out one of the last checks, until a reflex finally kicked in and she walked out.
28
At a gas station she bought a coffee and a doughnut to keep herself alert. She fingered her bra strap. There were too many bills to fit them all in there now: she had stuffed the rest into the ostrich-skin purse and back under the seat of the Mustang, as if surrounding herself with a protective force field. The gas station attendant eyed her as she nibbled the icing. She touched her hair; the baby powder had stopped absorbing the grease. She moved casually away from the door.
She walked behind the station. The mountains were no longer even visible in the brown haze, the valley an endless plain. At her feet everywhere were the wild poppies. Her brain pressed out against her skull, against the backs of her eye sockets. The neon-orange clusters in the dead dry grass pulsed at her. She chucked the coffee and doughnut and followed railroad tracks. The buzzing of the electrical wires like the whir in her head, the trash transmuting itself into diamonds and roses. She yanked a clutch of poppies. Like yanking out the incongruities, the inexplicable. She walked, mashing and dropping the petals, trying to see how she had got here, what to do next.