By Ruth Galm
She had been in San Francisco two years. It was not the weather that had drawn her; she liked the fall leaves and the snow and the humid nights in the East well enough. It was not, as it seemed for the young people who came that spring, with their grass-smoking and greasy hair, the idea of a counterculture, the attraction of some newer, freer community opposing itself to the mainstream; she had no objection to the mainstream. She could not say the exact reason she had come west except that she thought it would help.
What needed helping was hard to pin down. She only knew that it had to do with the carsickness. She could not take walks anymore and she could not be with people, she could not go to the movies or have a drink or visit a museum or read a book without feeling carsick. This was her only term for it. It simulated the thin buzzing nausea of sitting in the backseat of an ever-curving car, except it was not at all related to motion. “Nausea” was not the term either, too clinical and specific. It was not a migraine or a flu. It was the slightest spinning sensation gripping the back of her neck. Like a slow, pitched whine at the outer edge of her skull, behind her eyes, in the joints of her jaw. It was almost imperceptible at first, as if a small humming switch had been left on in her head. But it always grew. It was worst on weekends. The long stretches of free time without occupation—she was relieved to work, to type letters and stuff envelopes at her office jobs, although she did not enjoy it, was not stimulated by it—ineluctable days, no matter sunny or dark, like a dull disc hanging over her, giving off a relentless cardboard light. On the weekends, she tried to divide the days into tenable units. Mornings, to sit with coffee and the newspaper until at least ten o’clock, even if her body buzzed, if her vision blurred with tension. She did not allow herself to clench anything, to go back to bed. If she could make it through newspaper and coffee, she could next turn to some cleaning or tidying task, necessary or not—pulling out every scarf from her dresser and refolding them, for example—until a decent enough time to turn to pre- paring lunch. Here she made her movements agonizingly slow, scooping out one flaky chunk of tuna at a time, layering in a single spoonful of mayonnaise, dropping single bits of celery and onion, and then repeating the whole exercise over again. When her lunch was ready, she waited with her plate at the table until exactly noon, no sooner. After lunch, anything to keep busy, the walks, a museum if she could bear it—reading never worked at its worst—any activity to stretch the time until mid-afternoon, late afternoon on good days. At that point she could return to her apartment and take a nap or sit by her window watching the light dim. Only then could she reassure herself of the sloping of the day toward evening. Darkness the goal. Darkness to kill the day.
As though forgetting that weekends would still exist there, she had chosen to believe as others in the restorative powers and newness of the West for her own purposes. That a change to the West might help.
And for a while, the new city did help. For the first year, the beauty had awed and distracted her (Boston had been a hill city, too, but the hills were small and heavy and rust-colored in her mind) and she’d been buoyed like everyone else by the pale and white buildings, the fuchsia bougainvillea, the sails on the water and whiffs of orange blossom and jasmine in winter. She’d ridden the cable car to work and eaten crab sandwiches at the wharf, listened to street music in the Italian neighbor- hood. She had liked to take walks, to spots known for some reputed charm—a robin’s-egg-blue Victorian; a brooding WPA mural; a grove of redwoods in the middle of the park. Once or twice, perhaps, the sight of a young unkempt man with a guitar, the smell of body oil they wore or the absence of handbag and stockings had disturbed the calming effect, had brought on the small buzzing at the back of her skull. But it had not lasted very long.
The first thing to give way had been the buses. She had been accustomed to subways and elevateds in the East, but the main mode of travel around the city was the buses, and on them she could not read a book or write a letter because it made her dizzy, and so she was forced to spend the time looking and thinking. Every morning through Chinatown the painfully thin men wearing second-hand baseball caps for teams they did not follow and the women with their hair cut mannishly short, beautiful cheek bones with missing teeth, and the mounds of vegetables to be bought, and the stands to be dragged into place and filled and haggled over and emptied, and everything to start over the next day. She did not understand why it brought back memories like the prom with the Brylcreemed boy: sitting around with Cokes in her peach-colored satin dress and the gardenias on her wrist and the diamond brooch on her bust. The Brylcreemed boy telling her she was pretty and leading her around the floor and asking her to wear his pin at the next prom. Something in this memory felt like the Chinese and their vegetables. But how could this be anything like the Chinese and their vegetables? She couldn’t puzzle it out. So she tried to observe a sliver of the bay, with its whitecaps and sailboats, or a majestic bridge, or the exotic red calligraphy in the shop windows; but none of it helped. And so she came to hate the buses.
Then she had been unable to find a beauty parlor she liked. It disturbed her acutely, the young women in the city walking around with long stringy hair and faces bare. This increased B.’s zeal to find the right salon, as if she were taking a stand against those other girls. She visited a half dozen salons in different neighborhoods, always finding some fault, in how her curls were set, in the too kitschy or too plain décor. In fact there was nothing manifestly wrong with these places: what she sought she could not have described in plain concrete terms, even to herself. She’d come close once or twice. In a salon in the nicest hill neighborhood, the walls had not been too pink or gold, the seats filled with women who seemed not too old or all married. She’d struck up a conversation with a woman at the dryers.
“Whatever happened to a little smoothing out? A little help?” the woman said, pointing to a bra advertisement in a magazine without accompanying girdle. B. had smiled.
“You remember that movie where Liz Taylor was insane, in the convent?” The woman’s nails were blood red.
“The Tennessee Williams play.”
“Right! And then Monty Clift let her have her hair done and ‘wear a pretty dress’ in the state bin, and presto, she’s still loony but at least now she has a waist!”
B. smiled again, but a genuine smile that she might have in private. “And he falls in love,” she said.
“You see? Right there, that’s the power of foundation garments!”
But then something in the conversation spoiled. The woman began complaining about a man she was dating (“He’s next to a telephone all day. There’s nothing to prevent him from picking it up and dialing.”) and her voice sounded to B. like a high-pitched cry in an animal register. The spinning and nausea came on abruptly. After that, B. stopped trying to find a favorite beauty parlor and got her wash-and-sets wherever it was cheapest.
Finally, there had been the bridge. It was a cliché, she knew, her love for it, but she had been drawn by the sheer size, its serious red color—not golden at all—and she went there almost every Sunday, standing in the middle of the span on the ocean side (the tourists preferring the bay side for the city views when the Pacific was the real wonder to her mind). The fog blew in like a divine force, the cables vibrating in the wind, and she saw the Spanish landing for the first time, and the sailors and priests and forty-niners, and she briefly forgot time and place, until her teeth chattered and the ocean was lost in fog.
When she’d heard the siren, she had not immediately absorbed what was going on. Only later did B. understand that a woman not far down from her had gone over the railing. No interruption in the gust of cars or the vibrations of the cables or the tourists’ voices. A family of Germans who’d seen it told her the woman had been a teenager, that she’d worn plastic- frame glasses and a blue dress and tennis shoes. (B. could never absorb this last detail; she would always imagine the girl in kitten heels.) B. lingered near the Germans as they gave their eyewitness reports to the police, hoping the hearing of it would confer the realness of the incident on her. But the girl was just gone; she did not have any feeling about it. B. stood at the spot until the fog came in and finally made her depart. She did not visit the bridge again.
Excerpted with permission from Into the Valley by Ruth Galm (c) Soho Press, 2015.
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Ruth Galm was born and raised in San José, California, earned an MFA from Columbia University, and has lived in San Francisco ever since. Her short fiction has appeared in Kenyon Review Online, Indiana Review, and Joyland, and she is a past resident of the Ucross Foundation. Into the Valley is her first novel. (Photo courtesy Harry Gregory)