Into the Valley Read Free

the town startled B. Just like that, a row of boats in blue-brown water, masts bobbing against the flat yellow. She felt suddenly that the bay was following her, leaking out in a last menacing grab through the marsh stalks.
    She jotted a random amount on the check.
    â€œGood afternoon, ma’am.” The pretty teller standing among the calm straight lines and muted oil paintings.
    â€œIt’s ‘miss’ actually.”
    â€œOh, I’m sorry, ma’am. I mean, miss.”
    But the cool expansive feeling still came. B. felt so light and cheerful afterward, she considered shaking the girl’s hand, then thought better of it. As she walked back to the Mustang, the odd, misplaced marina did not disturb her in the least.
    Back on the road the heat and sleepiness were too much. She searched for a motel and had to return to the freeway to find a motor inn with a billboard of a bikini-clad woman diving into a pool. B. did not turn on the air conditioner when she got inside the room, just let the heat melt over her as she lay on the bed.
    She took the money out of her bra strap. It was now at least a dozen fifty-dollar bills; she had no interest in counting them. She rifled through the vinyl travel bag, pulling out for a moment the velvet box with the diamond brooch, then replacing it. Instead she took out a bottle of nail polish.
    The room was darkening but she left off the light. She thought of nothing but smoothing the pale iridescent pink from the brush, of the nicely piquant smell. She’d watched her mother at her vanity making her toilette, the French word she’d taught B. for pinning her hair, applying her lipstick, dabbing a crystal perfume bottle at her neck. Each gesture accruing to her some invisible potency. Her mother had once given her the last tortoiseshell compact of her favorite face powder, a discontinued line, and B. kept it intact and untouched like a totem, unsure what might happen if she finished it.
    When her nails were painted, B. lay down again with her palms flat against the bed and fell asleep.
    She woke on her side, the nail polish fretted with lines from the bedspread. She had dreamed of the landscape from the car, the contourless vista, a stream of yellow and white and green with no signs of people, and in the dream she had decided she would follow this land forever.

2.
    The next morning the blood of her period had soaked through the toilet paper in her underwear. There was only the slightest brush of it on the inside of her dress. She hesitated to change. It was as if quitting the dress would disturb a key element to her new, fluid state. To bathe she sponged her armpits and her crotch and inserted a new tampon and put on new underwear. She threw the stockings from the day before in the trash, feeling vaguely guilty, but it was too hot. Then she worked on her face, the moisturizer and powder, the liquid liner at her eyes and the lipstick and perfume last. She pinned her hair back in place. There were young girls in the city now who let their hair go naturally, who never wore makeup, whose clothes were ill-fitting. These girls distressed B.
    She’d forgotten a toothbrush. She walked from the motel toward a gas station. There was no town, only the motel (the pool in the daylight was small and chipped), a telephone booth, the gas station with a general store attached, and another street across the intersection. Her heels crunched in the pebbles along the road, the freeway cars moaning and thumping beside her. The morning sun already burned her shoulders. A watery-brown haze at the edge of the sky stung her eyes.
    At the store, she bought a toothbrush and toothpaste, a doughnut and a cup of coffee.
    â€œI’m just taking a tour of the valley,” she found herself saying to the paunchy older man at the cash register. “I just thought it would be very interesting.” She tried not to hear her own voice.
    â€œPretty hot time of year to choose.” The