No Dark Valley (29 page)

She remembered something a former boyfriend had told her. It must have been eight years ago now, because her car was eight years old. His name was Todd Robard, and he had majored in psychology in college, though he owned a small car dealership over in Greenville, which is where she had met him while shopping for her Ford Mustang, the same one she still drove. It was Todd who had talked her into getting a red one.

“Face your fear.” That's what Todd had said that came back to her now. He had tried repeatedly to probe into her past, wanting her to “open up her shell,” as he called it, but she had always managed to elude his questions. Of all the men she had ever dated, Todd Robard was probably the most insightful, and therefore the one who scared her most. Whereas other men let her do most of the talking, Todd liked to discuss and analyze things, freely expressing not only his opinions but also his feelings.

During the couple of months they dated, Todd had been in the process of remodeling his house and had asked her one night, which turned out to be the last night they were together, to come over and help him install insulation and new wiring. Celia laughed, then accepted. And it was fun at first. Todd ordered a pizza, and they sat on his kitchen floor, which was covered with brown paper to protect it. The work wasn't hard. He did most of it, asking her only to help measure, hand him the staple gun, and tap on the kitchen ceiling to help him locate the old wires in the attic.

It was later, after they had cleaned up and were eating shortbread cookies straight out of the bag, that Todd leaned forward, put a hand on each of her shoulders, and said, “Whatever it is that's haunting those pretty eyes of yours, Celia, needs to be dealt with. Quit running from it. Turn around and face your fear. Cut off the dragon's head.” He said it kindly, but it was clear that he wasn't the type to let a matter drop. She could tell from the precise way he had cut the bats of insulation, folded the winged edges out so neatly, and stapled them at exact intervals that he liked to tackle a problem systematically and see it through to completion. And though, looking back on it now, he might have been exactly what she needed, she never saw him again after that night.

“Face your fear”—it sounded so easy. But how did you go about doing that? And what exactly did she fear?
Okay, make a list
, she told herself. She sat up and opened the drawer of her nightstand to get a pen and note pad. She wondered what Todd would say if he knew that his long-ago advice had lodged in her memory and was finally bearing fruit.

She first wrote the word
Fears
at the top, then numbered from one through five, as if she were about to take a spelling test, although she had no idea why she chose to stop at five. She went back to number one, thought a moment, then wrote,
Living with what I did fourteen years ago
. She went down to number two, paused again, then wrote,
Being alone
. The rest followed quickly: Number three was
Nighttime
, number four,
Children
, and number five,
Grandmother
. This fifth one surprised her a little, but as she studied the list, she soon saw the connection among all five. Numbers two through five were actually only subpoints of number one, and
Grandmother
wasn't really her grandmother as a person, but rather what she believed—her whole system of religion, of paying for your sins, or more specifically, of burning in hell for eternity because of your sins.

She could feel herself breathing harder. Here she was, almost thirty-seven years old, and she could probably expect to live at least another thirty-seven years. Yet, as her eyes ran up and down her list of five, she saw no relief in the years to come. She thought of her tennis teammates, their hearts and minds continuing to expand gracefully as they grew older, surrounded by their families and a lifetime of happy memories. Then she saw herself, shut inside her apartment, choking for breathing space as she filled her walls with more and more art, driving back and forth between home and work, watching television, running the vacuum, hearing snatches of old hymns, waking up during the night, alone.

Life would be so much easier if you could talk yourself into believing, as Grandmother had, that sins could be washed away like magic, that prayers were answered, that someday you'd die and go to heaven, where it was always daytime, where there was “no dark valley”—there was a song about that in Grandmother's hymnal.

It was a hymn her grandmother had sung a lot at the kitchen sink, the light chink of dishes bumping each other under the sudsy water as she sang, “There'll be no dark valley when Jesus comes to gather his loved ones home.” And “no more sorrow” and “no more weeping”—she'd go through all the stanzas. Grandmother's creed said you simply did your Christian duty day in and day out, even in the dark valleys of life on this earth, of which there were plenty, until the angels rang those golden bells for you and transported you to that sweet land “just beyond the shining river.”

Of course, the catch in Grandmother's religion was that everything was so black and white, that there was no fun in that creed of hers. So many pleasures were labeled “sin,” and sin was punished by a God who didn't spare the rod, who applied that rod with a might heavy hand and kept the fires of hell stoked with a steady supply of unrepentant sinners.

Celia ripped the list of fears out of the note pad and crumpled it slowly in one fist. The trash can, a white wicker one, was neatly positioned in the corner over beside her dresser. She swung her legs over the side of the bed, took aim, and let go—a high loopy lob. The paper ball fell considerably short. On the tennis court, it would have made an easy putaway for the opponent at the net.

15

Yonder Sacred Throng

Two days later, on Tuesday morning, during the second playoff match against a Greenville team, Celia was receiving a serve from a woman named Sissy when all at once she thought of her clarinet. She tried to put it out of her mind because she really did want to close out this match. The temperature was already in the high eighties and climbing at the tennis club in Greenville, where the playoffs were being held. The clarinet wouldn't go away, though. It must have originated from the sound of a crow that had perched itself on the corner of the fence. Not that she would ever, during her clarinet-playing days, have compared the sound of her instrument to the strident caw of a crow.

Perhaps the thought was further encouraged by the heat. As she pushed her visor up and wiped her brow with the back of her hand, she suddenly remembered for some strange reason how hot she used to get wearing her band uniform during the halftime shows in tenth and eleventh grades—the dark blue pants, the long-sleeved jacket, and the snug taxi-style cap. The uniforms, which were purchased with November in mind, were beastly hot under the stadium lights at those September football games in Georgia.

Another stimulus could have been the jazzy big-band sound of Benny Goodman blasting from a Porsche convertible that had pulled into the parking lot beside the court she was playing on. It stopped as soon as the driver cut the engine, but she had heard it clearly. At any rate, it all must have combined—the crow, the heat, the music—to make her think of her clarinet.

Her opponent, Sissy, had to be the world's longest ball bouncer before a serve. At some point during the match, Celia had started counting the number of bounces. The record so far was eighteen, though it was usually only ten or twelve. She wondered if in the history of tennis anyone had ever lodged a complaint against an opponent for excessive pre-serve ball bouncing. It could be considered a delay-of-game tactic. Sissy was down 15–40 in this game and 2–4 in the second set, so maybe she was trying to revise her strategy during all that ball bouncing.

But now, when Celia needed to bear down and concentrate on breaking Sissy's serve to bring the match within one game of being finished, she was instead trying to remember when she had last played her clarinet and exactly what piece she had played. She had thought about getting it back out this summer and seeing if she could play in a couple of the park concerts in Spartanburg, but so far she hadn't even taken the case out of her closet and dusted it off. She had been meaning to ask Elizabeth Landis if her husband, the band director at Harwood College, had any suggestions for a former clarinetist on how to go about easing back into it after an almost twenty-year hiatus. Maybe she should find a teacher and start lessons again.

Fortunately for Celia, Sissy must have lost her concentration, too, for she hit Celia's service return a good three feet long, putting Celia ahead in the set 5–2. But when they changed sides, Sissy dusted her palms with rosin, took a quick swig of Gatorade, then strode back onto the court without even sitting down, apparently eager to get started on her comeback. Celia took another drink from her thermos and wiped off her racket grip before getting up from the bench and walking to her side of the court. People who tried to rush between changes always annoyed her. “See, I'm in better shape than you,” they seemed to be saying. “I don't need to stop and catch my breath.”

If Celia could win this game, the match would be over. Sissy wasn't really much competition, but these were the matches that sometimes turned on you. You'd get overconfident, let your mind wander, blow a few easy shots, and then before you knew it, the other person would catch up. A few points later, and you'd be behind. She was far from behind now, however, so there was plenty of time to get her attention back on the game.

As she walked to the service line, she reminded herself that these were the local playoffs, not just a regular match, and that the winning team would advance to the state championship. She remembered Bonnie Maggio's words to the team this morning when they had met for what Bonnie always referred to as their “prematch rah-rah”: “Okay, girls, go out there and dominate your court. Play like it all depends on
you
whether the team wins or loses this match. Fight for every point.” Bonnie had gone on to remind them about the playoffs the year before, when two teams ended up tied and they had to count individual games to determine the winner.

Celia wished she knew how the other singles and the three doubles matches were going, but she and Sissy had been assigned to the end court next to the parking lot, while all the others were up closer to the clubhouse. The Holiday Winners had won four out of the five courts the day before, against a team from Oconee, but the Greenville team they were playing today was a stronger team overall.

Celia took her place behind the service line and began her own ball bouncing. Okay, focus on what you're doing, she told herself. Keep your mind on the court and make every shot count. Win this game and the match is yours. Pretend that we've already won two courts and lost two, and yours is the deciding one.

Just as she tossed the ball up to serve, however, the person driving the Porsche started it up again, and Benny Goodman picked right up where he had left off. Her serve went into the net, then started rolling back into the court. She took her time retrieving it so the Porsche could leave before she served again. She went down the T with her second serve, forcing Sissy to hit a backhand return, a soft midcourt shot that Celia returned deep and down the line for a winner.

Three points later, however, the score was tied at 30–all. A second crow had now stationed itself on the adjacent court, on top of the fence, and had joined the other one in what seemed to be a cawing contest. Three of Celia's teammates who weren't playing today had also walked over to see how things were going. They were standing quietly outside the fence, but she was still very much aware of their presence. Watch the ball, she told herself. Forget the crows, forget the spectators.

As she tossed the ball up to serve, she caught sight of another crow flying over the far corner of the court. Was this a third one, she wondered, or one of the others moving to a better spot? Her toss was off, so she caught the ball and tried again. Evidently there were a lot more than two or three crows, because suddenly a great raucous chorus went up, ragged and argumentative. It sounded like it was coming from somewhere behind her. The first guy must be the head honcho, summoning them all for a meeting.

Celia's serve landed long, and she saw Sissy relax and move in. Though this could be seen as the time for caution, she decided to go for her second serve instead of letting up. She bounced the ball several times, then served hard to the corner of the service box. And it worked. The ball skipped off the line with such speed that it caught Sissy by surprise, and though she got her racket on it, it blooped off sideways and landed in the next court.

Celia heard one of her teammates say, “Way to go, Celia.” Sissy stepped up to where the serve had landed and scowled down at the court, as if looking for a ball mark, then moved over to the ad court. She danced lightly on the tips of her toes as Celia prepared to serve, as if to say, “Okay, try that again. I'm ready now.”

But a few seconds later they were shaking hands at the net, Celia having won the final point when Sissy's service return hit the tape and dropped back onto her own side of the court. As they walked to the benches, Celia saw that the crows appeared to be settled in the trees on the other side of the parking lot, where it sounded like a heated family conference was going on. Celia nodded toward them and said to Sissy, “Interesting sound effects today, huh?”

Sissy sighed. “Yeah, they should do something about that. You shouldn't have to put up with stuff like that during playoffs. I'm going to complain to Melanie.” Melanie, one of the league coordinators, was the one monitoring today's match. Celia glanced quickly at Sissy to see if she was teasing, but evidently she wasn't. Grim-faced, she was shoving her things back into her tennis bag.

Celia tried to imagine exactly what Sissy would say to Melanie: “The crows distracted me” maybe. And while they were at it, Celia could chime in with her own complaints. “Yeah, and Sissy bounced the ball too many times, and a Porsche was playing loud music.”