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 same 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.