Into the Valley (6 page)

14.

The beauty parlor the teller recommended was on the main street of the next river town, a sign shaped like a woman's bust in profile. Inside were four barber chairs, two occupied by white-haired ladies. One had already been set with curlers, the other was being finished by the single hairdresser in the place.

B. sat on a folding chair near the door. An air-conditioning box sputtered in the corner. This was a better idea, she told herself, better than stopping at the chapel. She watched the hairdresser, a thin woman with sunken cheeks. The hairdresser's own hair did not look well-styled, an attempt for some kind of lift at the crown that only looked like she'd just woken up. Oscillating fans on the counters blew the fine ends off her shoulders, but she seemed no more cooled off.

B. ignored all this. She felt certain the beauty parlors in the valley would be better than in the city, would hold some deeper significance, for their realness, their location among “truer” women. When the hairdresser finished the second woman and put them under the dryers, she approached B.

“I'd like a set, please.”

“We do wash-and-set, ma'am.”

“But it's already clean.”

“We'll have to wet it anyhow.”

B. tried not to sound defeated. “Alright, however you'd like.”

The valley hairdresser shampooed her quickly, scraping B.'s scalp with her long fingernails, then sat her in front of the mirror and sectioned her hair with the tail of a comb. She rolled each section up into a wire curler and pinned it tightly, until B.'s temples hurt. The hairdresser's extreme thinness, chipped scarlet nails and limp hair made her look older at first, but as B. watched the woman curl and pin she realized they were probably the same age.

When B. had gone with her mother to the beauty parlor as a girl, her mother's stiff handbag had sat on the floor with gloves laid carefully on top. She chatted with the other ladies in the same crests and falls, attuned to some shared rhythm.

And yet B. could not recall what the women spoke of, or how vital these subjects were, or whether these seemed to be the conversations they really wanted.

B. watched the two older women under the dryers. One was thin like the hairdresser, her skin mottled, the bones in her elbows protruding; the other was weighed down by fat that bulged off her torso and arms. Their voices rattled in the vibration of the dryers. B. listened to their conversation, trying to discern a thread that might be illuminating in some way, that might be what she had come for.

“Well that was just it, and so I took it back to the supermarket and showed them the opened carton. Full of lumps! I said, ‘I bought this milk yesterday and I'm not leaving without my money back.'”

“And did they give it?”

“Of course they did.”

“Well, I like it there. I'm not going to stop going there.”

The thin lady harrumphed.

There was a silence. B. waited for something else.

“I saw that greedy yellow bird again,” the thin one began. “Damn bird has no business around here, and it keeps showing up in my apple tree, picking at my apples and leaving holes.”

“Did you hear me?” she snapped at the other.

“Uh-huh.” But the fat woman was drifting off to sleep.

“You think I could get Fred to poison it? You think that's legal?”

B. turned to them, encouraged. “Was it a warbler?” she asked. The hairdresser cupped B.'s skull and forced her face back to the mirror to set another curler. B. settled for the old women's reflection.

“Well, no, it was a thrush, I think,” the thin woman said. She eyed B. “Do you know birds?”

“Well, not much really,” B. said. “I thought warblers were yellow, though.”

“I'm from the city,” she added, as if this explained her error. “But I was thinking of staying here.”

“Most coastal folks can't take the heat,” the fat woman said flatly.

“People usually driving through here to get somewhere else,” the thin woman said. “They don't stay.”

“I like the heat,” B. said. “I think the valley is interesting.”

“You one of them hippies? You trying to set up one of them camps or something?”

“Oh no, of course not. I just liked
. . .
I'm just interested in how you live.”

B. waited hopefully for more, but they only stared at her. They resumed a discussion, privately now, murmuring under the whir of the dryers. She watched their lips in the mirror, the deeply cut wrinkles. B.'s own skin pinched from the curlers and pins. A disappointment sank through her. She brushed it off.

“Do you get many young people coming in?” she tried with the hairdresser.

“Same as everywhere,” the woman replied. She did not glance toward B. in the mirror, just pulled at her hair, shoving the final pins in. B. stayed quiet. She watched the hairdresser's half-red nails flutter like bright frightening insects over her head.

Her mother had become increasingly disturbed lately by shades of nail polish. “I'd rather see the white than nothing at all, I suppose,” she'd explain to B. “But the yellow is horrible. Clown colors, Easter egg colors. Better nude than colors like that.” Her mother had begun calling her often that rainless winter, a creamy haze swallowing the city and her mother phoning almost daily. That January the “human be-in” had happened in the park and her mother seemed obsessed by it.

“The woman with the floppy hat
. . .
she was in
The Globe
. . .
She looked so strange, you know. Dirty. I thought I should call you.”

B. had seen the posters around the city—a man with a pyramid and third eye at his forehead, long tangled hair, his face vaguely, eerily African—and she'd seen the pictures in the newspaper, the thousands of bodies standing and dancing and the rock-and-roll bands and flowers and long hair everywhere. B. was disturbed by the be-in too, but all the chatter about it made her more uneasy; as if the more they talked about it, the more portentous it grew. But her mother did not let up.

“Well, she looked ridiculous in that hat. And her hair was the same color as yours, did you realize that?”

“But the photo was black-and-white.”

“No, it was the exact same color, I could tell. So I just wanted to call.”

“I didn't go. I wasn't there.”

Her mother pretended not to hear. She moved on to whom B. had seen that week, what she'd done. After that B. began to let the phone ring without answering.

The hairdresser finished the last of the pins and put B. under a dryer next to the now-sleeping women. Close up the thin old woman's hands were coiled with veins and brown spots like a series of stains. B. reached for a nearby magazine and flipped through it, but her mind drifted to her mother, the white nail polish, the woman in the floppy hat. She turned a page and there was the first lady again, standing in front of a bed of blue flowers in Washington, D.C. B. studied the photograph: red suit and implacable hair, the sea of blue flowers. She felt calmer.

The dryer heat baked into her cells. She must have dozed off because when she woke her scalp was raw and her hair hard and the white-haired women gone.

“How do you want it styled?” the hairdresser asked.

“I'm not really going anywhere.”

The hairdresser looked piqued. “However you think best,” B. tried to add. But the woman started yanking out the curlers in silence. B. tried not to flinch. She felt silly to have come to the valley parlor at all.

Just then a girl came in. She was perhaps twenty, naturally blonde hair falling to her shoulders. B. felt as though she had not seen a person this girl's age in a beauty parlor in years. She was wearing shorts and a baby-doll halter that showed her midriff. B.'s mood brightened.

“Hiya, Trudy. You have time for me?”

“Sure, Kat. Just let me finish this lady. Up or down today?”

“Down. Most definitely
down
.”

The girl plopped into the barber chair next to B. She was not exactly pretty, but had the firmness of youth to her skin, a tight and tan body. She wore heavy makeup, thick pancake shining slightly in the heat, pale blue eye shadow with black eyeliner and thick, black mascara, which made her eyes look small and bruised.

The girl was examining her various profiles in the mirror. “He'll ask me now, Trudy,” she said. “It's for sure.”

“I don't see why not,” the hairdresser responded, but her tone was noncommittal, as if she had visited this conversation before and used up the requisite energy.

“His daddy'll just have to park it,” the girl went on, biting her thumbnail in between sentences, still glancing sidelong at her reflection. Then she turned straight on in the mirror. “I'm tired of all the judgments, you know? Sick and tired.” The thumbnail went back into her mouth.

“We'll fix you up, hon,” the hairdresser said without enthusiasm.

“I like your dress,” the girl said abruptly to B.

“Thank you.”

“It's from the city, I can tell. Couldn't be from around here. Maybe I'll go to the city for my wedding dress. I'm getting engaged tonight.”

The girl turned back to the hairdresser, making pouty lips into the mirror. “Listen, Trudy, I need you to pull out all the stops this time. Totally bitchin', okay?”

The girl's clouded eyes began to haunt B. It was too hard to make out what was behind them. B. rubbed her hands together nervously.

“We do nails, too,” the hairdresser said listlessly.

B. glanced down at the rutted pink polish and dug her nails into her lap. “That's alright.”

“I'd like to move to the city,” the girl said, turning to B. again. “Have our own apartment there. Robby could work in a skyscraper or something. My best friend Debbie was all set to go—you know Deb, don'tcha Trudy?—but she got married last summer and she's already full up with diapers.”

“I'm not afraid of the city,” the girl added. “My mom thinks it's all druggies and pervs, but I think it'd be boss. Anything to get outta here.”

“Oh, well if you want to know anything,” B. offered, “I can tell you—”

“—I mean, Robby is going into the Air Force first, and so we'll probably have a house at McClellan to start, but then after he has his pilot's license, we'll go then
. . .
” Her voice drifted off.

B. did not know why it mattered to her if the girl went to the city or not. And yet she felt betrayed, as if the girl were stranding her by not going to the city. “There are nice beauty parlors in the city,” B. murmured. “You might really like them.”

“Thing is, it all depends on Mr. Robert R. Taylor
senior
. What a candyass. But he has the money, so it all depends on what he says. I just hope he gets the golf club for the reception. I just hope he's not too candyass to do that.” The girl's eyes were a terrifying smear now, irises and pupils lost in the blue powder and black liner, no reflection at all, calculating opaquely about the golf club for the reception.

“He likes it down, but it's got to be classy. You know, memorable.” The girl gnawed on the thumbnail. “Trudes, do you think maybe an updo? Oh, God, if they photograph us at the restaurant, I want a good picture. I want a damn good picture in the paper.”

“So you ready for me now?” The girl's bruised eyes pleading. “Trudy?”

The spinning and tightness vibrated in B.'s teeth. She reached for a bank bill to pay and get out and for the first time felt reluctant to part with the money, as if it pulsed out the calm and relief of the banks itself. She forced herself to lay it down on the counter.

The hairdresser did not even notice. The girl was still pleading with her. “God knows I've waited—right, Trudy? No one's waited as long as I have.”

B. hurried out of the salon. At the end of the block she went into a columned stone building and came out again. She put the three hundred dollars in her purse. The plaguing voice vanished. She left the windows down in the Mustang and let her new curls fly.

15.

The next town B. came on was the largest she'd seen in the valley. She avoided for a while anything but the fields, driving straight
through the flat green and the flat yellow, concentrating on the line in the road. The town appeared from out of nowhere, like an oasis. (Or was she farther south in the valley than she'd thought? She was no longer exactly sure where she was.) The milky blue sky beat down on its empty streets. A few tall palms listed over the main drag, a movie theater with missing letters in its marquee and a church and a Woolworth's. A sign pointed toward a river, the existence of which seemed doubtful in the heat.

She turned down the streets until she came accidentally into a neighborhood. A collection of small one-story cottages. Each yard seemed carefully planted, with gladioli and rose bushes, geraniums and fuchsia. Actual trees, a rare collection, stooped over the houses. There was a quietness about the place. Everything seemed quaint and tidy and protected. She parked the car and got out.

She walked up the block. At a cream-colored stucco house she walked up to the arched window. The entire living room was visible. She stood in the shade of a magnolia tree and peered in at a dark green couch and dark green armchair, both decorated with antimacassars at the heads and arms. In the corner of the room a black-and-white television was on. On the dark dining room table she could see a stack of envelopes and a thick book whose title she could not make out. There was a large crucifix in the center of one wall, two small ceramic angels around it. She waited to discern something, some message or communication from these choices, this arrangement. The beauty parlor girl's blue-and-black smears and the old thin woman's mottled hands flashed at her. She moved to a different part of the window and continued to watch.

B. waited for someone to come into the front room. For a split second she saw her reflection in the window, the curls wind-ragged, her shoulders pink. The reflection seemed far away; it was the image of a disheveled thin woman. She waited for someone to turn off the television and its flickering gray images. No one came.

She stood there she was not sure how long until she noticed a different reflection. A mailman watching from across the street. She raised her hand to wave. He did not wave back.

Finally she walked back to the Mustang. She sat at the wheel. The television images from the stucco house flitted in front of her: a woman with a box of laundry detergent; a man with a briefcase; a woman in an evening dress. She tried to put these images together in illustration of something, a code to the house, to its way of life.

She did not notice the police officer until he was knocking on the window. The sun was angled low behind him, blurring his outline. She rolled the window down.

“Oh, I'm sorry,” she said. “Is there something wrong?”

“Do you have a license, ma'am?”

“Of course.” She reached over to her purse on the passenger seat. There was a stain from the ice cream on the floorboard; she hoped the police officer could not see it. She drew out her wallet, trying not to open the purse too wide to reveal the fifty-dollar bills.

“I was just feeling tired. They say it's better not to drive when you're tired.”

He studied her license. Her face flushed; how closely would he look at it? His fingers around it were large and ruddy, big blond hair follicles in the knuckles. He stooped to her eye level, elbow in the door.

“You're a ways from the city.”

She made herself observe his badge, his holster. “I'm meeting a friend in Reno, and I was just stopping to do an errand and I wanted to see the neighborhood, and
. . .
it's such a nice-seeming neighborhood
. . .
then I realized I was a little tired.”

He peered down at the license again, then at her. He could not, she reminded herself, know about the checkbook. Or the bills. Then she realized from the way his gaze returned to her and darted shyly over her face that he was finding her attractive. She had learned she must respond to these cues, that to do so put her at an advantage in a situation.

She brushed a strand of hair out of her eyes. “Maybe I should get a cup of coffee,” she said, biting her lip. “Could you recommend a place?”

The officer coughed. “Well, there's a Sambo's at Second and Main. Just take a right here and go about five blocks.”

“Thank you.”

He hesitated and cleared his throat. “Try not to let someone find you like this again.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you.”

The houses looked gilded and soft in the late light; she did not want to leave them. But the policeman would not start his squad car until she started the Mustang, after which he followed. Her shoulders tensed until finally he turned.

The Sambo's was a bright orange color outside, the booths and light fixtures the sam
e lurid orange inside. The theme of the restaurant unfolded in a vaguely disturbing cartoon along the walls, in which a tiger was turned into butter as punishment for
trying to eat a child. But the melted butter did make one think of pancakes, B. thought, and she ordered a stack and coffee.

Things were happening that B. had not intended. She had not intended to stand on a lawn looking into someone else's picture window in broad daylight. She had not intended to present a fake license to a police officer. She should, she knew, stop to consider these events. Ascertain some schema to them, formulate a plan in reaction. But she sensed for the first time that something dire might occur if she stopped to do this, if she stopped to examine any of it. What was so terrible about wanting to move forward? she thought.

Cheered by this slant on things and the coffee, B. borrowed a pen from the waitress and began sketching on a napkin the stucco house and the dining room table. When her pancakes came, she noticed a girl sitting alone in a corner booth, also writing, in a notebook. The girl sat with a cup of coffee and a few balled-up dollar bills, a large knapsack at her feet. It was unclear whether she'd eaten or not. Her skin was deeply tanned, her long hair falling in greasy sections to the table. She wore fraying blue jeans, dirty at the hems, a loose peasant blouse, and
a choker made of leather. Her feet were bare. She seemed like a
brown and wind-tangled child just come in from the beach, except for the frown lines in her forehead and the shadows under her eyes.

“I'd appreciate it oh so much if I could get more coffee the same as everyone else,” the girl said to the waitress, who seemed to be ignoring her. “Jesus Christ. You'd think I wasn't
paying
.”

A
LIFE
magazine protruded from underneath the girl's knapsack; she ran her toes back and forth over the gloss. B. had seen the cover everywhere in the spring: the bride in a mushroom cloud of white veil, cascading white and yellow roses, the groom's hair slicked carefully to the side, ascot gray and black. The young senator's daughter and the young wealthy family's son. A picture making all the sense in the world.

Except that after the cover appeared, B. had begun having the same dream. Her graduation luncheon, the white-linened tables and camellias in glass bowls, the early humidity glazing her face. (The yellow dress her mother had insisted on to complement her hair sometimes lavender, sometimes blue.) What upset her in the dream was that the speech was never intelligible. The Rotarian's or Junior Leaguer's or fundraising committee chair's words always cut off by a faint high-pitched scream, a terrified animal shriek B. imagined might occur during a stabbing or a rape. What came through made no sense: “Take the higher road
. . .
gentle abiding
. . .
look happy, now
. . .
” What could it mean?

B. woke from these dreams with her nightgown sweat through.

The girl arranged sugar packets in a circle on the table. She seemed engrossed in getting the white packets to curve out smoothly, widening larger and larger until she ran out. The waitress returned and said something under her breath, not refilling the girl's cup, and at that moment the girl casually swept her arm across the table and dropped all the sugar packets onto the floor.

B. gaped at the scattered packets.

“You should pick those up.” She had not meant to say it out loud.

“Why?”

The girl seemed to look right through her. The blank stare frightened B. She jumped up from her booth, knocking over the silverware, trying to get out. On the way to the register she dropped her purse, the ostrich skin strangely flesh-like against the orange-flecked linoleum, her lipstick rolling onto the floor, the checkbook slipping out. B. scrambled to gather them and pay. Outside, the air was still hot and dry. The town in the dusk looked even more empty. She walked quickly down a few blocks, the white packets raining on the floor and the girl's sullen blank eyes on her, and when she passed underneath a decorative Spanish arch, there was only the same empty street on the other side.