The valley was because of the man on the bus. She tried always to smile at people in public as her mother had taught her, to look polite and receptive, and they mistook this for an invitation to unburden themselves, when in fact she did not really even want to talk. When he found out she was from the East, the man told her about the long table of land just beyond the mountains and bay. “Nothing happens there. Not one thing.” That’s why, he explained, the easterners never even knew about it. “No pretty scenes, no trees. Just flat. I won’t go back in a million years.” She could see in the man’s features—he was young with large pores glazed in oil and jagged purple veins on his eyelids—something strained and unbalanced. His eyes blazed. He began to mumble. “But I’m safe here, I really am.” B. listened politely for a few more seconds, then got off the bus two stops before her own.
And yet, since the encounter, her thoughts had often drifted to this valley. She imagined that in this long unvarying plane, all the contradictions of the city might fall away. That its bareness would reveal something, provide an answer she had failed to acquire. A place of unvarnished truth to which she must go.
Because it was no longer just the dirty young people in the city who disturbed her. In the restroom at I. Magnin recently, she’d encountered a mother and her teenage daughter. The girl with clear breasts and long legs, as tall as the woman. But the daughter was trying to pull her skirt off. “I’m not sure I want to be wearing it all day,” she said. “What if I get cold? What will I do?” The mother hushing and soothing her, keeping the girl’s hands from the skirt while the girl shuddered. B. washed herself quickly, but the mother looked straight at her, voice harried: “She’s only ten. She looks older, but she’s only ten.” B. had nodded and run out.