In the morning, he made her shower and wash her hair. “We gotta get you dolled up the way I first saw you,” he said. She shrunk under the water as if the drops burned her skin. She made no move to lather or scrub. But Daughtry was waiting. She knew he would make her do it again. She forced herself to soap a washcloth and pass it over her body once, to pour out shampoo and rub it through her hair.
Daughtry appraised her in the mirror as she applied her makeup. He got out the diamond brooch from her bag (she did not ask how he’d known it was there). She did not want to alarm him by telling him about the flyer. “I think that’s too formal for day, don’t you?” she said. He shrugged. The green poplin dress was laid out on the bed. “But I want to wear the ivory,” she said. “Baby, that’s a godawful mess, no offense. You look rundown in that.” He held out the green and when she did not immediately take it, he did not lower his arm. When she finally took it, she knew already it was wrong: the color too bright, the poplin too flimsy, the girlish belling of the skirt. Pulling her back somewhere she did not want to go. He brushed his fingers across her forehead and she forced herself not to flinch.
“We’ll get you new dresses, baby. All brand new.”
They went back to the lobby of the Motel 6 and a short wiry man with a blond goatee was waiting, wearing in the heat a buttoned-up dark denim jacket like Daughtry wore his leather blazer. Daughtry had B. stay outside on the hot asphalt where she shifted in the green dress, feeling conspicuous, watching the goateed man and Daughtry enact the mime of exchanging an envelope and shaking hands under the orbed hanging lamps of the lobby. The smell of hot tar from the parking lot sharpened the carsickness.
They took the Mustang. Daughtry sat in the driver’s seat without asking.
“Can I see the checks?” she asked.
He laughed. “When we get there, doll. Just hold your horses.”
She distracted herself by counting the rows of crops and fruit trees. But they went too quickly and the telephone poles too slowly and she could not block out Daughtry rambling on about the fishing “down South.” The only thing she could do to escape the growing of ill portent (not holding the checks, the green poplin dress) was to close her eyes and pretend to sleep. But she felt the dread still behind her eyelids. Before she knew it they were parked in front of a cinder-block building hedged by pruned oleanders, the sun glaring off its silver-coated doors. She had a moment’s hesitation that she’d already been to this bank. She decided she had not.
“Can I see them now?” B. asked.
“Sure, baby.” Daughtry handed over the vinyl book but watched her with it as if she were a small child handling a delicate ornament. She ran her fingers over the paper, studying the lines, the block address and cool blue pattern, the name to match the fake license.
“You know what to do?” he asked.
This struck her as funny and she laughed the first genuine laugh she could remember in months, until she saw his injured expression. She patted his hand and told him she knew and got out.
The entire length of her rushed with blood. She felt as she walked toward the entrance that her skin needed only to be brushed up against for her to explode. But the bad signal came immediately in her reflection in the glass door. The light green and belling skirt. When she swung open the door the air inside was too cold. The ivory on the walls not soothing but dull, the line of teller windows a row of draining rectangles and the empty desks pointless.
She made her way to the middle island. She jerkily filled out a withdrawal form; she crumpled it and started over. She absentmindedly put her hand to her heart but the diamond brooch was not there. In the corners of the ceiling she noticed the security cameras for the first time.
The teller’s perfume had hints of gardenia, bringing the Brylcreemed boy and the graduation luncheon briefly into her head. She made her way past the stiff bow tie and the white linens in her mind, concentrating to speak each word.
“I’d like to make this out to cash.”
“You’re from the city,” the teller said (except it sounded like “thity” because of the girl’s lisp).
“How did you know?” B. whispered.
“It says so on your check.” Her lisp had disappeared. “And you don’t look like you’re from here,” the girl said without a shadow of malice. Then the lisp returned: “Now just a minute, Miss Lawthon, I’ll thee if we can accommodate this request.”
The girl walked over to a manager at one of the empty desks. B. waited for her palms to dampen or her heart to race but no fear or anxiety was in her. Her body seemed to slacken, as if it were ready to be led away. But when the manager glanced over, his easy nod and smile showed that he had no qualms about her, the pretty patron with her clean dress and washed hair. The cool expansive feeling did come then. She thanked the teller and gathered the cash and walked out.
In the car, she presented the money to Daughtry. “Sweet Jesus. They practically handed you the reserves. Is this how easy it’s been for you? We should do another, baby! While we’re on a goddamn roll.”
But by then the cool expansive feeling had already faded.
He drove them an hour north and when she did the next bank, an old stone building with ionic columns and octagonal-shaped lamps, it was the same easy success and the same fleeting cool expansive feeling. A siren rose faintly in her head. Like a careening from a distance, the pitch higher and higher but never arriving.
“C’mon, let’s do another,” Daughtry said. “Hell, I’m Irish, we know a thing or two about luck.” He drove an hour southwest this time, babbling about Mexico on the way. “. . . and in the little fishing villages, you can live right on the cliffs. Right on the Pacific Ocean. Just like those Seventeen-Mile Drive bastards, except ours . . . They have a beautiful kind of tuna down there, baby, a gorgeous fish, tastes like steak and they swim around by the boatloads. And all the water warm as a bath, no fog, no cold . . . And then, baby, after we finish the season, we’ll travel. We’ll see the whole goddamned beautiful continent, the ruins and the jungles, and never think of this rat race again.” B. heard him only intermittently through the siren. It blared behind her eyes now, rising to a shriek. It was white in her mind. She clutched the seat. She tried to focus on Daughtry’s house at the sea but she could only glance at a pink adobe with birds of paradise and then watch it vanish.
At the last bank, she could not walk steadily. The shrill of the siren bleaching everything to a white blur. Before she got as far as the start of the line, she buckled. She got up before anyone got near her and turned around. In the car, she told Daughtry the same thing she told herself: she was too hungry and too tired and it would go better in the morning.
Daughtry took her to a steakhouse they’d passed on the way in. It was an old Victorian, with tall shutters and a porch edged in scallops, stained floral wallpaper behind the leather booths and chairs. Daughtry ordered her a T-bone with a side of spinach and a martini. “You need iron. And you need a drink.”
He smiled a wide dopey smile and grasped her hand. “I like taking care of you,” he said. Then he lowered his voice. “I want to take care of you every night, baby. Every night I want to make you feel good.” Inside the siren B. could only nod at his short yellow teeth.
He watched her eat. The grainy meat stuck in her throat, it made her gag. She finished her martini and asked for another. By the third round Daughtry stopped watching so closely and the alcohol at least blunted the surface of the siren, letting the churn continue deeper down. She waited until Daughtry got up for the men’s room and slid the rest of her steak into her napkin. In the small opening created by the martinis, she tried to grasp at the pink adobe house as a way to breathe. She tried to think reasonably about a house again, to think about it in a way she had not yet: she could go there with Daughtry. It might not be so bad, she told herself. To learn to make fish soups, to embroider festive blouses and arrange tropical flowers in vases. (She had no other vision of what she would do in the house.) Maybe she had been wrong about marriage. Perhaps this had been the answer all along—never the banks, never the checks. But as she told herself this, the siren drilled violently through the alcohol to the top of her skull. She seized the edge of the table, knocking over her martini. Gin dribbled onto the green dress. Somewhere inside the violent tilting, she knew it would not matter if it was Daughtry or the Boston almost-fiancé or the university man or the developer and Sherry. It would not matter who was in the pink adobe house with her, she did not want to live in it with any of them. She did not want to make fish soups. She did not want to be taken care of or to fix her hair. She wanted only to get away, to start over, to undo something that seemed to bind her. She wanted only to find a calm quiet place to breathe. The landscape of her daydreams, the blue-white featureless expanse.
Daughtry came back from the bathroom and slid beside her, nibbled her neck. His aftershave and sweat and meaty breath only vaguely penetrating the careening. Her fingertips were bloodless from gripping. She pressed herself against his chest and palmed his lapel pocket.
He snatched her hand. “What d’you need those for, huh? Don’t you have enough here?” He leaned her back and wiped at the green dress with a napkin. “What d’you need those for right now?”
She sat immobile as he wiped her. “Get me out of here,” she whispered. Daughtry downed the rest of his martini, unfurled the new bills on the table and led her out by the elbow.
He made a point of locking the checks in the trunk of the Mustang, and in the motel room he dragged the mattress from the bed and shoved it against the door. “You’re beat. We both need a good night’s sleep without getting up drunk and having an accident.” She lay down on the mattress and closed her eyes, as if this might have any effect on the siren. Daughtry held her to him. “The last thing I need—Christ, the very last thing—is kids. I see you worrying, and you don’t have to. Not with me.” He kissed her cheek.
He had never asked her how there could be no scar. No mark from the invented hysterectomy. He did not, she knew, really want to know.
“Shhh.” She put her finger to her lips. “Let’s just sleep.” From her lock in his arms, she watched the shaft of yellow porch light through the curtains. She kept her eyes on the shaft of light for as long as she could.