No Dark Valley (31 page)

Celia always knew that part of the reason her father was so concerned about finances was that, unlike many of her friends at school, hers was a one-income family. Though her mother had taught first grade before Celia was born, she had quit her job and stayed home after discovering, jubilantly, that she was finally pregnant after nine long years of waiting and hoping. Or
trying
, as Celia had heard people describe it today. Thereafter, when filling out forms with a blank for occupation, her mother had proudly written in “homemaker, wife, and mother.” And her father approved wholeheartedly. He wanted her mother to stay home. He liked being the sole breadwinner, even if it did worry him sick at times.

Her mother was a skilled seamstress, though, and gradually, as Celia got older, she took on sewing projects to make a little extra money. After several years, her father cleared out the spare bedroom and made it into a sewing room with a big worktable in the middle and a three-sided mirror mounted in the corner. Her mother used an old Singer sewing machine that had hardly any attachments, but nobody seemed to care about her equipment when she could turn out such perfect draperies and neatly tailored dresses.

Every month her parents made a ritual of sitting at the kitchen table and paying all the bills together, during which time Celia would sit quietly in the living room right around the corner, pretending to read or do homework, listening for signs of trouble. She remembered the feeling of relief when it was over, when the last stamp was licked and stuck on the last envelope, when her mother would sigh and say something like “Okay, that leaves fifteen dollars to put in the fund.”

“The fund” was for a new sewing machine her mother had her eye on, one “with all the bells and whistles,” as she called it. The fund had been a fourth presence in their home for as long as Celia could remember. It was raided regularly, however, to pay for emergencies, such as a brake job or a dental bill, and once her mother had taken fifty dollars out of it to send Celia to a summer camp sponsored by the Baptist church they attended in Lawrenceville, Georgia. And when Celia started clarinet lessons in sixth grade, her mother paid for them out of her sewing money, which meant less left over for the fund.

Keenly aware of the extra expense, Celia threw herself into her lessons and practiced fiercely. If she was going to strain the budget, she was going to make sure her parents saw results. And they did. Her teacher, Mrs. Campbell, had nothing but praise for her efforts in spite of the castoff instrument Celia was using, which had been the one her father had played in high school.

He had told her that if she did well on the clarinet, he would take her out and show her how to use the tennis racket in his closet, which he had also used in high school. The summer before eighth grade he had kept his promise, and she had picked up on tennis as quickly and as well as she had on clarinet.

Several times, as Celia continued to improve, Mrs. Campbell had suggested to her mother that they look for a better clarinet, and her mother had always acted embarrassed and said, “I'll tell my husband, and we'll think about it.” Which made Celia wonder if she should back off and stop improving so her teacher would quit talking about her parents spending more money. By then, however, she loved playing so much she couldn't make herself ease up.

And it made her parents happy, too. Her junior high had a band, and in seventh grade Celia sat first chair among the ten clarinets. She liked seeing her parents in the audience when the band gave a concert. She liked the way the worry lines in her father's face smoothed out when he listened to her practice at home. “You're already better than I was when I graduated from high school,” he told her one day when she was thirteen.

Her fourteenth birthday had started out pretty much as expected. It was early August, hot as all get-out in Lawrenceville, Georgia, and when she woke up that morning, she lay in bed and rehearsed the joys ahead. She knew her mother was trying to finish up a bridesmaid's dress today and was meeting with another woman who was moving into a brand-new house and wanted all new window treatments, which was the new term for what everybody used to call draperies or curtains. But at three o'clock, her mother had promised, they would ride the bus downtown to JCPenney to look at school clothes.

It had never seemed odd to Celia at all that her birthday presents were always necessities, never luxuries. School clothes, shoes, backpacks, notebooks, pens and pencils—these were the standard gifts. But this year was different. This year she got to help pick her own clothes, so even though some of the surprise would be missing, it made her feel grown-up to participate in the selection.

Celia got her own breakfast that morning, a bowl of Cream of Wheat and a piece of cinnamon toast, and ate it while she watched a rerun of
Perry Mason
, then practiced her clarinet for a while, read her Bible for the standard fifteen minutes, tidied her room, took some clothes off the clothesline for her mother and folded them, and read two chapters in a book her Sunday school teacher had given her,
A Girl of the Limberlost
.

She heard her mother talk to the bridesmaid on the phone and, later, to the rich lady who was getting all new window treatments. The bridesmaid came over for her final fitting around noon, and the rich lady arrived early, so the two of them overlapped a little. Celia herself went to the door to let the rich lady in, a tall, skinny, magazine-model type wearing a bright turquoise pantsuit and aggressively made up with heavy mascara and deep purplish lipstick. As she escorted her to her mother's sewing room, Celia could feel the lady's eyes behind her, taking in every detail of their modest home. It worried her a little, the way she looked down from her great height so condescendingly. What if she decided not to use her mother, to give her business to someone with more social class?

She shouldn't have worried, though. As her mother explained to her later when they were on their way downtown to JCPenney, people like that really preferred their hired help to be of humble means. Her mother didn't laugh all that often, but when she did, it was a beautiful sound, almost like singing. Celia remembered that she had laughed that day on the bus as she told Celia how rich people sometimes liked to boast to each other about such discoveries as “this amazing tailor I found in this little dump of a shop on the west end of town” or “the most exquisite
artist
of a carpenter whose shop is the filthiest little hole in the wall you ever saw.” If the workman himself were freakish in some way—say, a midget or a paraplegic—all the better for their story.

When Celia wondered aloud what the rich lady would tell her friends about
them
, her mother laughed again and, in a rare show of playacting, said in a breathy, gushy voice, accompanied by much hand fluttering, “You wouldn't believe this little plain sparrow of a seamstress I ran across over in those shacks behind the bus depot! Does the most astounding things with this absolute
relic
of a sewing machine!” Then, evidently afraid she had gone too far and not wanting to set a bad example, her mother grew serious again. “I'm just teasing, you understand,” she said, patting Celia's hand. “We all have our little oddities.”

They rode the rest of the way in silence, Celia reviewing the way things stacked up in unequal portions in life, some people having so much money and others not nearly enough. It troubled her to hear her mother describe herself as a plain sparrow. She was a small woman and didn't go in much for fancy things, but in Celia's opinion she was much, much prettier than the rich lady in her turquoise pantsuit. And the part about the shacks—that bothered her, too. Theirs wasn't a grand house by any means, but it was clean and neat and plenty big for the three of them.

After a supper of grilled hamburgers that night, which was Celia's birthday choice, she opened her presents—the things she had already picked out and tried on earlier that day, which her mother had brought home and wrapped. Celia remembered searching her father's face as she opened each one, hoping he wouldn't think they had spent too much money. But if he did, he didn't show it. Grandmother had sent her a copy of
Little Women
, and Papa and Mums had sent a card and a ten-dollar bill.

After the gifts they had cake—yellow cake with white icing, decorated with brightly colored candy sprinkles—and then Celia started back to her bedroom to put her new things away. That's when her father called her back. “Oh, say, Celie, there's one more present we almost forgot about.”

Another present? Celia was astonished. Had she heard right? She had opened all the things she had picked out downtown. And it was plenty! They shouldn't have spent more money on something else. Maybe her father was teasing, though it wasn't like him to tease.

She turned back, clutching her new school clothes to her chest, and looked at her parents quizzically. Her mother laughed her beautiful singing laugh and said, “You should see your face!” And her father pulled out from under the table another present, a rectangular shape wrapped in shiny lime green paper with a big bow of curly white crinkle ribbon.

Astonishment heaped on top of astonishment as Celia put her clothes down on a chair and set about opening the surprise gift. She could hardly get her breath while she was unwrapping it, and afterward—well, she didn't remember if she had even been able to get a word out. She did remember staring at it for a long, long time and at some point crying over the gift itself, the money it must have cost, her parents' happy faces, and of course her own immense delight.

It was a new clarinet, at least new to her. As she lifted it gently out of its case, her mother told her the story. Her father had seen it in a pawn shop downtown one day and had called Mrs. Campbell to come down and take a look at it. Mrs. Campbell had tried not to let on in front of the shop owner as she looked it over, had even scowled and made some deprecating remarks about the finger pads and such, but she told Celia's father as soon as they went back out on the sidewalk that it was a wonderful instrument worth about ten times what they were asking for it. She said the quality was such that Celia could play it all the way through college.

“Play it for us right now!” her father said, and Celia went to get a reed from her old case. She still couldn't believe it—a new clarinet! How in the world had her parents paid for it? Just the week before, she had heard her father talking about needing to find a plumber to replace some pipes under the house.

When she came back to the kitchen, her mother had found a marker and was neatly printing Celia's name on a little card. “Look, I got the nametag off that old brown suitcase in the attic,” she said. “We'll put it on your case so nobody gets it mixed up with theirs.”

And as Celia picked up her new clarinet, the truth struck her. Her mother's sewing machine fund had once again been robbed, in a very big way. She glanced over at her mother, who was smiling as her small fingers slipped the name card behind the little plastic cover of the tag, and Celia knew that those same hands would be using the old Singer relic for many, many months to come. No bells and whistles anytime soon.

Celia ran her thumb over the nametag now. The years might have faded the letters, but every detail of her fourteenth birthday was as clear as type rolled freshly inked off the press. She wasn't surprised to find herself crying. This was a memory that warranted great bucketfuls of tears . . . her dear, sweet, good parents, both of them so full of joy at the gift they had given her.

If she had been reading one of Frank Bledsoe's deplorable stories and come across the phrase “her dear, sweet, good parents,” she would have slashed through it with her red pen and written in the margin, “Too gooey—cut the mush!” But those were the three best adjectives to describe her parents. They were other things, also—strict, frugal, serious, nervous. But first they were dear, sweet, and good. If she wrote the phrase herself, about her parents, and some editor told her to tone down the sentimentality, she would have to refuse, clinging to the higher standard of honesty.

As she walked back to the hall closet to put her clarinet away, Celia knew she was crying not only for the loss of her parents and their goodness, for the huge gap their death had left in her life, but also for what she knew would be their vast disappointment if they could see her today and know the things she had done. She was crying over the happy memory of her long-ago fourteenth birthday. And she was crying, also, because she was once again stabbed in the heart by the realization that right this very minute another fourteen-year-old could be alive if she hadn't done the things she had done.

16

Not a Shadow, Not a Sigh

Celia arrived promptly at seven o'clock. Cars were parked in front of Elizabeth Landis's house on both sides of the street, but Elizabeth had told Celia to pull into the driveway, since she would need to unload the painting she was bringing to the poetry club meeting. Celia was looking forward to having this evening behind her. She was afraid Elizabeth was expecting too much of her, and she suspected that this whole poetry club business was a little corny. She couldn't figure out, though, how someone seemingly as classy as Elizabeth would be part of something corny.

The Women Well Versed—that was what they called themselves. The name was actually what had raised the first question mark in Celia's mind about the seriousness of the group. They met once a month at a member's home, and this month Elizabeth had volunteered her house. It was a brick ranch style, nothing pretentious but comfortable looking, with two big pots of red geraniums on the front steps and an American flag hanging by the front door, which was standing open.

From the driveway Celia could see through the bay window into the living room, which was softly lit but apparently unoccupied. The women must be meeting in another room. Maybe they were all in the kitchen sampling the refreshments.