No Dark Valley (28 page)

So at the exact same moment Celia was experiencing a revelation—that she had totally lost interest in what she had two degrees in from Blackrock College and had for the past ten years considered to be her second job—she was also wondering if there was any way she could swing it financially with only her job at the gallery. All this while trying to maintain some semblance of paying attention to Mike on the other end of the phone.

“I mean, we've
got
to have something for Mother's Day,” he was saying now, his voice having taken on a wheedling note. “We'd never hear the end of it from our readers if we didn't. You'd be so perfect for this, Celia. And think of how much you'd learn. Think of how many pitfalls you could avoid after listening to all these other women talk. And as far as the time factor goes, why, you could probably do all the interviews in the normal course of your day. Just talk to women wherever you go. Right there at the art gallery, in the grocery store, in your neighborhood—why, you could—”

“I said I can't do it,” Celia said. “And I mean it, Mike. It doesn't matter how little time you think it'll take. Anything is too much. I can't do it. Not this week.” Her mind was still whirling over her revelation, but she didn't think this was the right time to break the news to him. She needed to think about it some more, to look at her budget and figure some things out first. You didn't cut off a supply of income on the spur of the moment.

“And you could think of it as a gift for your own mother.” Mike was good at the pretend-you-didn't-hear game, another ploy he sometimes used to get his way. “Wouldn't she be proud to read something you wrote specially for Mother's Day? Can't you see her carrying it around and showing it to—”

“My mother died twenty years ago,” Celia said. She felt sure she had told Mike about her parents at some point during all the time she had known him, but if she had, he had obviously forgotten. “Anyway,” she added as he cleared his throat and made apologetic noises on the other end, “I don't think an article about the mistakes mothers make would have thrilled her all that much.”

That was the concept of the article, as Mike had explained it to her at the beginning of their phone talk—to ask a dozen or so older mothers what they'd do differently if they had their child-rearing years to do all over again. “Another Shot at Motherhood” was the title Mike had suggested. The whole thing struck Celia as being a little depressing, not to mention insulting. Asking mothers to criticize themselves, then compiling it all into an article so that thousands of other people could read about their private blunders in dealing with their kids. Who wanted to open up the paper on Mother's Day and see a chronicle of mistakes committed by the segment of the population that was supposed to be setting the moral tone for the next generation? It didn't seem like much of a way to honor mothers. Granted, it might make a pretty interesting article for some other day, but not for Mother's Day.

Mike seemed to catch what she was implying, for he said, “Hey, wait a minute. You know what? You've got a point there. Guess I hadn't thought about it like that.” But instead of dropping the whole idea, he suddenly hatched an even worse one. “So let's see . . . say, how about this? How about doing something personal, some memory of your own mother before she died? That would work. Some nice little vignette. Warm and fuzzy.”

She should have cut him off, but she wasn't quick enough. She was distracted by a thought that flitted across her mind: Why didn't people take her seriously when she said no? Maybe it was her size, maybe her voice, maybe the simple fact that she was a woman. “You could sort of reminisce about your childhood,” Mike continued. “Maybe you've got some nugget about your mom—you know, one of those meaningful moments from childhood you could build the piece around. This could be great, Celia! We're on the right track now!” He was doing his best imitation of The Editor As Motivator-Cheerleader-Nurturer.

She couldn't believe she had let him get this far. Motherhood was not a subject she was going to write an article about—not now, not ever. Not from any perspective. She didn't even want to
think
about the subject, much less write about it. Anyway, she had just decided that her writing days were over. Maybe she should go ahead and tell him now. Or maybe she should try an appeal to his sympathy first. Maybe that would get him off her back for now.

“Mother's Day brings back a lot of painful memories I'd rather not dredge up,” she said quietly. That much was certainly true.

“Well, I can appreciate that,” Mike said quickly, “but, you know, Celia, maybe this could be therapeutic in a way. I mean, maybe you could—”

“No, I can't do it.” She let out a little gasp, which was part acting. “I really am busy this week, Mike, but even if I had the time, I couldn't do a Mother's Day piece. I just couldn't. End of discussion.”

Though Mike rarely swore, he did so now, but softly, not in anger. “Okay, kid,” he said after a long pause. “I give up. I'm gonna hang up now so I can start beating the bushes to find somebody else to do it. Got any other suggestions for me? That's the least you could do.”

Celia thought a moment. “How about that English teacher over in Filbert who covered the dog show a while back?”

Mike let out a snort of laughter. “You mean the one who had the love affair with adjectives? The one who called the winner of the show a . . . what was it? ‘A sprightly, self-assertive schnauzer with a stately stance and a squared-off schnoz'—something like that?”

“I think it was a soldierly stance.”

“Whatever. Can you imagine what somebody like that would do with an article about mothers?” Mike groaned. “Give me a buzz, kid, if you have any more bright ideas, okay?” Celia felt a flood of relief when she heard him hang up.

Motherhood—it would always be there, nibbling at her conscience. As long as she lived, there would be daily reminders that she wasn't a mother herself and because of what she had done she didn't deserve to ever be one. On Mother's Day she was always smitten with the thought that she didn't have a mother of her own and, furthermore, that her mother would have been heartbroken to know what she had done.

She closed her eyes for a minute before settling back against her pillows and picking up her book again. She had been right in the middle of an interesting story about the Met's acquisition of a huge, remarkably beautiful vase unearthed on the island of Crete and all the political difficulties associated with purchasing it and getting it out of its country of origin. She tried getting back into it but found her concentration gone.

As she closed the book and laid it on the table beside her bed, she let her eyes rest a moment on the sculpture of the nude couple embracing. It was a funny thing how she so often took only quick glances at this piece of art that she had paid more for than any other in her apartment. She had wondered before if it was another hangover from her upbringing, the whole Bible-belt phobia about nudity. Or maybe it wasn't that complicated. Maybe it just hit a nerve, seeing two people in love. She reached over and picked up the sculpture. It was heavy, though only seven or eight inches high. She made herself look directly at it.

The stylized figures were dull bronze and very smooth. The woman was sitting, her knees drawn up, and the man was kneeling beside her, facing her, his head resting on hers. Looking at it up close, Celia felt both happy and sad. Happy because it was so beautiful, but sad because it reminded her that she had no one to kneel beside her and embrace her and that, except for short-term flings, she probably never would. No one to help her ride out the storms through the long nights.

Celia clearly remembered stooping in front of the piece many times a day during the sculptor's exhibit at the Trio nine or ten years earlier. It had caught her eye the first time she had studied the artist's slides, and when he brought all the pieces down from Raleigh, North Carolina, in the back of his van for the opening of his show some months later and set this one on the floor in a corner with several others, she had felt something scrunch up in the pit of her stomach. Those were the days before she had given up hope, when she still considered it entirely within the realm of possibility that she would eventually meet someone she couldn't live without.

Before opening night she had placed a red dot beside the number of the sculpture, which was displayed on a small pedestal, to indicate that it had already been sold. And though she had inherited much of her father's cautious regard for money, she had gone to the bank and taken out of her savings account five thousand dollars in order to bring the piece home and call it hers. She had set it reverently on the table beside her bed, and though her churchgoing days were long gone, she felt that someone ought to say a benediction over something so beautiful.

She recalled a woman coming to the Trio before the show came down, firmly clutching the hand of her young son as she walked through the door. Celia hated to see people bring their children to the gallery, for more reasons than one. She could still hear the little boy's voice as they moved from piece to piece: “What is that?” “That looks like a robot.” “Is that a horse?” And when they came to
Embrace
, he had laughed, a high chirping laugh that his mother tried to shush. “Those people don't have any arms!” he had said. And it was true in the strictest sense. Yet every curve of the smooth bodies left no doubt in the viewer's mind that they were indeed embracing, and very intimately. Arms were totally unnecessary. Celia liked to think of it as a perfect example of the artist's power to suggest something from nothing and of the ability of the human eye to see beyond the literal.

Celia sat up straighter and leaned slightly forward, drawing her knees up much like the woman's posture, then set the sculpture on top of them so that her eyes were only inches away from it. She turned it around in a slow circle to study it from every angle. She wondered what it would be like to be able to do this for a living, to actually create the pieces instead of just showing and selling them as she did. She ran her hand down the smooth arc of the man's back, then the woman's. Then she traced a finger from the top of each head, across the smooth face, down to the neck, chest, around the inside curve of the stomach, and then to the knees. The woman's breasts were full and her stomach slightly rounded, but Celia could easily circle her waist with her thumb and index finger.

Celia studied the sculpture a minute longer, then finally set it back on her nightstand, turned off the lamp, and once more lay back against her pillows. She had intended to read for an hour or so and then take a Sunday afternoon nap, a habit she had developed as a child. When she closed her eyes, though, all she could see was the sculpture of the nude couple, except that now they were moving slightly. Then for some reason, perhaps because of Mike's mentioning her mother on the phone, the two people suddenly turned into her parents. She opened her eyes and shook her head. This certainly wasn't something she wanted to imagine. She would hate to see her parents every time she glanced at the bronze sculpture.

Though she had never asked anyone, Celia guessed that most orphans spent long hours thinking about their parents. If they never knew them, they probably tried to imagine what they looked like, how they laughed, what things in life gave them special pleasure. If they could remember them, they probably relived favorite incidents, trying to bring into focus a closeup picture of their faces, recalling exact words and small telling actions.

Which was exactly what Celia had tried
not
to do for almost twenty years. The first couple of years after they died, she had thought about her parents constantly. She had even talked to them at night after she said her prayers in her dark bedroom at Grandmother's house. She would tell them about school, about the changing of seasons, about the people of Dunmore. She would describe the daily details of life with Grandmother—her chickens, a sack of tomatoes that showed up on their doormat, the zinnias by the front steps, the potluck supper at church. She would always end her talks by asking their forgiveness for neglecting her prayers the day they died, and more often than not she would end up crying. She had learned to keep a box of tissues by her bed during those two years.

But it all changed her senior year of high school after she met Ansell and the others. After that, whenever she found herself thinking about one of her parents or seeing their faces in her mind, she immediately tried to erase the picture and move on to something else. She quit talking to them at night. It was her newly formed opinion that nothing good could come of dwelling on how things used to be. The biggest reason, though, was that she wanted to avoid their eyes. She didn't want to imagine their disappointment in her. She could bear her grandmother's wrath—her stern reproofs, her grunts of disapproval, her banging around in the kitchen—but not her parents' silent grief.

And later, in college, it was the same. She knew beyond a doubt that her parents wouldn't be proud of the person she had turned out to be, so she continued to block them from her memory. After her grandmother had come to her graduation, Celia had worn her mother's watch only a few weeks before taking it off, putting it in a box, and shoving it to the back of a drawer. She couldn't stand its tiny face staring up at her all day long.

After her visit to the clinic, it was even worse. She couldn't begin to imagine what words her mother would have spoken to her if she had known, nor what deep lines would have creased her father's already worried brow. Old Testament phrases would echo through her mind whenever their faces crossed her mind: “ashamed and confounded,” “sackcloth and ashes,” “weeping and wailing,” “the day of desolation.” Her parents often spiraled through her dreams, their heads bowed with sorrow, tears streaming from their eyes, and she would wake up trembling. She imagined she could hear her mother's old watch ticking faintly in the back of her drawer, like a baby's heartbeat.