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.
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.