It had not seemed, as it now did, inevitable: She had risen that day like any other, slipped on the ivory sheath and pinned her hair. She had chosen the bone-colored heels to match the sheath and not taken a sweater for the fog because she was tired of wearing sweaters in July. She had picked up a newspaper to read before and after the bus (because of the motion sickness) and she had made it all as it usually was, even after the girl at the bus stop had made her vomit, even after her mother had called her a lesbian. She read the newspaper but inside was a picture of a burning city in the East. The picture not of the police with shields or the people carrying off televisions, but of a group of black women at a police station. Bags under their eyes, deadened gazes, curlers in their hair, waiting. B. stood in the wet morning air, shivering without a sweater, riveted. She tried to scan other headlines: landslides in Japan and the stock market down. But the black women waiting remained. They were some kind of portent, a communiqué to her alone. The wave of nausea nearly buckled her. She dropped the newspaper in the trash and staggered onto the bus when it came. She gripped her seat. She knew she would not vomit again; she would not get off so easily. Across from her a Chinese woman with the short mannish hair, a suited man reading his paper. She grasped in her mind for a soothing memory, her mother demonstrating the proper method of folding a dress shirt. Collar down, shoulders indented, buttons pressed. B. moved her hands quietly in this rhythm, collar down, shoulders indented, buttons pressed. But the suited man, whom she’d seen day in and day out, with his paper cup of coffee and shiny gold band, small, balding, who never looked up from his paper, struck her, and she put it together: it was this or some other man’s dress shirt she was folding in her mind. The bus rattled under electric wires. The weekend to come again, the hours to be counted, and the only thing to be done to fold the suited man’s dress shirt in one’s mind. (While he went off to work with his coffee and paper, day after day, as if nothing was wrong, as if B. were not ill and the black women not waiting and the young women not loose-clothed and long-haired at bus stops.) At her stop, B. stumbled off and into her office building and at her desk she turned on the typewriter and typed the first letter in her basket without removing her purse from her wrist, and then another, and then another. The spinning on and on.
Without thinking, she reached in her purse for one of the counterfeit checks she’d not yet dared touch. And like the detonating of a bomb the thoughts stopped.
She left her desk with the typewriter still humming. The bank a block away the oldest in the West, a plaque certified, and the brass fixtures shone and the glass panes lined up perfectly across the marble. There was nothing to focus on but the gleam and the panes and the softness of the teller’s hair, and there was no going back.
Out of her palm fell the crushed poppies. A train whistle blew in the near distance. She left the railroad tracks and walked back to the Mustang and understood exactly where to go next.
29
An ocherous afternoon light fell on the subdivision. B. drove past the gate, the colored flags flat in the dead air. The stucco houses looked blanched in the heat, which seemed to radiate up from the ground and in from fields and to bend the new trees along the street to nowhere. She parked the car and walked into the cul-de-sac. Her brain continuing to press against her skull. A toddler on a tricycle in a faded bathing suit stared blankly at her.
B. passed the unfinished houses with giant still-empty rooms and followed the walkway of the first occupied unit. She glanced around. The toddler continued to stare. B. flipped quickly through the letters, slipping anything official-looking into the ostrich-skin purse. She did this at three more houses. As she walked back to her car, the throbbing and swirling and heat and caffeine came together in a steady blaring in her mind.
A man came out of one of the houses. “Are you looking for Patty? Because she’s sick today.” B. walked on without answering, past the little girl, fumbling with the car keys. The man followed her.
“I can have her call you! She’ll hate to have missed—”
B. slammed the door of the Mustang and peeled out.
In a motel room with the drapes closed she opened the envelopes. She did not look at the amounts, just wrote down names and account numbers on a torn-out page of the phone book.
She dialed him. His face coalesced in her mind only in the vaguest form, black and pink dabs on a canvas.
He did not pick up. She lay her head on the bedspread, the heavy receiver at her ear. She dialed again and again. In the clicks and the tumbling she felt the carsickness drumming her down into a dark echoing pit.
When he finally answered, she said: “I’ll tell you the truth this time.”
Her mind focused on the single guiding image of the banks. “It’s some trouble I got into back east. A loan I took out under the table.”
There was silence on the line, the lighting of a cigarette. “Go on,” he said.
She waited for the signal of the image in her mind. “It was an operation. I’ve never told anyone. I was pregnant, by one of the college boys. He proposed. But he hit me.” She told him she’d gotten a backroom abortion but something had gone wrong; she’d had terrible pains. When she finally went to her doctor, he advised a hysterectomy.
It was a true story. She’d heard one of the secretaries tell it about a friend, except instead of having the operation the friend had hung herself by a belt in her closet.
She thought for a moment she’d lost him.
“So you couldn’t tell your mama and papa who sent you to the nice little college to marry a nice little college boy,” he said. But she heard in his voice the beginning of a desire to believe her.
“No.”
“You already lied to me once.”
“I’m not lying.”
She waited to hear cigarette paper crumpling, an exhale. She heard nothing.
Finally, he spoke. “I’m sorry that happened to you. It’s not right something like that should happen to you.”
“Will you help me then?”
She felt his vulnerability beating through the line. “What’s in it for me?” he asked.
“I’ll be your girl, Daughtry.”
She considered briefly how she was deceiving him. But the dark sinking pulled her down and she knew there was only one thing she cared about.
30
He was waiting for her in the lobby of a new Motel 6 off the freeway. As he walked through the glass doors she saw that he was unshaven, his thick black eyebrows unruly as if he had tossed and turned and left straight from bed. He told her to walk toward the Mustang with him and they sat in the front seats without looking at each other.
“I have new account numbers,” B. blurted out.
“What are you talking about?”
“I took them from a subdivision.”
He put his forehead in his hands. “You kidding me? Are you asking to get caught? It’s not as big as you think out here. You have to let me take care of that.”