No Dark Valley (32 page)

Celia got out of her car and looked around. It was a peaceful-looking neighborhood, different in two important ways from many of the new subdivisions she had seen. First, it had a lot of trees, all kinds of full-grown ones—pine, oak, poplar, sweet gum. There was a beautiful Japanese maple by the mailbox in Elizabeth's front yard. And second, the houses weren't replicas of each other. Each one had its own personality. Too bad so few developers today understood how to plan new neighborhoods.

Celia knew Macon Mahoney lived across the street from Elizabeth, and she turned to study his house for a moment. She didn't know what she was expecting, but, except for his mustard-colored Volkswagen van in the driveway, she was struck by how normal it all looked. You'd never know, if you were strolling up the sidewalk admiring the hydrangea bushes planted in front of the porch, that when you mounted the steps and rang the doorbell, a kooky guy like Macon would come to the door and say something totally incomprehensible. When Celia had suggested to Elizabeth that she ask Macon to come to the poetry meeting instead of her and talk about one of his own paintings, Elizabeth had laughed and shaken her head. “You know Macon,” she had said. “Nobody can follow a word he says.”

As Celia turned back to look at Elizabeth's house, a man came out the front door. “You must be the guest speaker,” he said to her as he came down the steps. Celia didn't like the sound of that. A guest speaker was someone who gave a full-fledged, well-outlined speech, someone who did it often and well, not somebody who was about to chat extemporaneously for ten or fifteen minutes about a painting.

She recognized the man as Elizabeth's husband, Ken Landis. She had seen him in person once, conducting a July Fourth outdoor concert over at Harwood, and his picture had been in the paper a couple of times for other community events. He had also won some kind of award for musical composition not too long ago, and the Derby paper had printed an announcement, along with another picture of him in a tuxedo, holding a baton.

They shook hands and introduced themselves. He wasn't what you'd call a breathtakingly handsome man, Celia thought, but he had the kind of decidedly masculine looks—the dark straight hair, the deep-set eyes, the angular jawline—that could probably grow on you to the point that someday, when describing him, you might use the word
handsome
without even meaning to.

“Liz sent me out to help you with the painting,” he said, glancing at Celia's Mustang. He seemed a little uneasy to Celia, not nearly as warm and outgoing as he had come across in the July Fourth concert, when he had turned to address the audience between numbers. It must be one of those cases where the public persona was totally different from the private one.

The painting, covered by a thin blue blanket, was standing upright in Celia's car, leaning against the backseat. It was tight getting it out because her Mustang was a two-door, but Ken was careful and took his time. She closed the car door, then followed him up to the front door, where Elizabeth was now waiting. She greeted Celia and held the screen open for them. “I was hoping you wouldn't forget,” she said to Celia, winking.

“All I can say is I hope you don't nag your husband as much as you did me about this meeting tonight,” Celia said, to which Ken replied, “Oh, she does, she does, believe me.” He set the painting down inside the front door.

“We're meeting in the den,” Elizabeth said.

“Oh, that's right,” Ken said, picking the painting up again.

“Men,” sighed Elizabeth. “You have to tell them everything.”

“And that's something women are so good at—telling
everything
,” Ken said.

They smiled at each other but sideways, almost shyly, and only for the briefest second before each of them looked quickly away. It was almost as if they were new at teasing, trying it out to see how it worked.

As the three of them walked back to the den, Celia found herself wondering what kind of long-term relationship it was that produced smiles like the ones she had just observed. Was it that Elizabeth and her husband were closer than most couples? Or perhaps not as close? She assumed they had been married for at least twenty-five years. She had heard Elizabeth talk about a grown daughter and a son in college.

Was it possible that two people could be married that long and still maintain a sort of old-fashioned reserve around each other? Or maybe this was only a phase for Elizabeth and Ken. Maybe their marriage had long periods of intense closeness, followed by wintry spells, then gradually warming again. Maybe they were in transition right now, moving into early spring. Or maybe—and this was probably more likely—she had completely misread their smiles. She knew that, as a single woman, she tended to spend too much time scrutinizing married people, concocting theories that were probably nowhere close to the truth.

Suddenly she found herself at the doorway of the den, a large room with lots of windows, bookshelves, and art. All the women, already seated in a big circle around the room, grew quiet. Elizabeth put her arm around Celia's shoulder and pulled her forward to stand beside her, then began introducing her. Most of the women were married, Celia noticed. She had often wondered if her own quickness in spotting wedding and engagement rings was superior to that of other single women. Maybe it was working in the field of art for so many years that had given her such a sharp eye for details.

Someone had once told her that the spotting-a-wedding-ring talent was in direct proportion to how badly you wanted to be married yourself, but Celia wasn't so sure about that. She certainly didn't consider herself overly anxious to get married, not anymore. She could list dozens of advantages of being single. She could point to any number of marriages she wouldn't want to be any part of. Still, it was uncanny, and maybe a little amusing, how fast her eyes could sweep across a group of people and separate them into married and single. It wasn't hard, really. The ring finger on their left hand wasn't something most people tried to hide.

Sometimes married men didn't wear a ring, though. She knew that. If they worked with heavy machinery, for example. Or sometimes a ring got too small or caused a rash, and they left off wearing it. Often Celia's eagle eyes could detect a slight paleness, the faintest indentation on a man's third finger that spoke of a ring having been worn for a long time, then taken off.

Sometimes men wore their rings on unconventional fingers, too. Ollie wore his on his middle finger, for example. He had weighed 250 pounds when he married Connie but had gone on a diet and dropped about eighty pounds several years ago, so instead of getting his wedding ring resized, he had started wearing it on his middle finger. Celia had noticed that Bruce, her new next-door neighbor, wore his on his right hand, probably because of the scars on his left hand. Mike Owen down at the newspaper office wore his on a chain around his neck.

She shifted her eyes from the circle of women to the art on the walls as Elizabeth went on a little too long in her introduction. Celia knew Elizabeth loved art, but she was surprised at how much of it she had collected. Every spare section of wall that wasn't windows or bookshelves was covered with groupings of pictures, all sizes and subjects, in a variety of media—etchings, oils, prints, collagraphs, linocuts, photographs, watercolors, even some needlework. “And she's on my tennis team, too,” Elizabeth was saying now. “She's our number one singles player, which means she has to play the really tough opponents while I get the easier ones.”

Which wasn't exactly the way it always worked out. Celia could have broken in and set her straight, could have reminded her of their last playoff match two weeks earlier when the other team had reversed their number one and two singles players so that Elizabeth, instead of Celia, had been paired with Donna Cobb. Team captains sandbagged like this all the time—switched the order around for tactical advantage, sacrificing one court in hopes of having a better chance on another.

But it hadn't worked out for the other team. Elizabeth, still chagrined over her loss two days earlier, had come to the match full of resolve. When it was announced that her opponent was Donna Cobb, she had set her jaw and headed to the court to get started. And according to the ones who had seen the entire match, she had played “out of her mind,” making shots she had never made before and keeping Donna off balance by changing the pace of the game at crucial points. It made Donna's second defeat of the season, and if she had been mad at her loss to Celia back in March, she was livid at this one.

Afterward, Nan Meachum had overheard Donna in the restroom with one of her own teammates, crying and yelling about how she was “ten times better than a puffball player like that.” Nan had wanted to call out from her stall and remind Donna about Elizabeth's two service aces and some of the overhead slams and cross-court winners she couldn't even get her racket on. She had wanted to ask Donna exactly what her definition of a puffball was.

Elizabeth's victory had been even sweeter because it was the one that gave them the third win they needed to take the match, and therefore come in first in the playoff series. Two of the doubles lost, but the other doubles and both singles won. Celia had ended up with the number two player on a court behind Elizabeth's, and her match had stretched out much longer than it should have. She hadn't played her best tennis that day by any means, but in spite of missing far too many shots, she had managed to pull it out and win 6–4, 7–6. The team was now making plans to leave for Charleston in three weeks for the state playoffs.

Elizabeth finally wound up her introduction and asked Celia to sit in the chair closest to the door, where Ken had placed the painting on a makeshift easel against the wall, making sure the blanket still covered the front of it before he quickly disappeared. “We'll wait just another minute or two before starting,” Elizabeth said to everyone in general. “I think we're all here but Michelle, and she wasn't sure she was coming. One of the kids was running a fever.”

Just then there was the sound of deep bleating laughter from out in the kitchen, as if from a very large sheep, followed by the tread of heavy footsteps coming toward the den. “I'm a-comin'! Don't give up on me!” a voice called—a thick sticky bass voice you might hear on cartoons.

“Oh, here comes Eldeen,” Elizabeth said. “I'd forgotten she was in the bathroom.” Something about the name Eldeen and the peculiar sound of her voice sparked Celia's memory. It was one of those times when she felt that she was about to experience something she had already done before—something, strangely, that she both wanted to repeat and wished she could avoid.

It was hard to decide what would be the first adjective you'd use to describe the woman who came through the doorway of the den and made her way to her seat at the end of the sofa.
Big
might be a place to start. Or
old
. Those would be the obvious ones. There were others, of course—
talkative
, for from her mouth issued a mighty flow of words, and
outlandish
, for her clothing appeared to have been chosen in the dark. She wore a bright red cotton print dress with a splashy pattern of large white daisies, enormous brown sandals with white socks, and a bright teal blazer made of a nubby synthetic fabric.

Although the other women seemed to regard Eldeen's entrance quite casually, Celia couldn't take her eyes off the spectacle. How could you ever get
used
to someone who looked like that? Apparently addressing Elizabeth, Eldeen was explaining her delay in returning, laying it all to Elizabeth's account for having magazines in the bathroom: “ . . . the most
interesting
article in one of them old
National Geography
magazines you got in that wicker basket by the commode,” she was saying. “Whenever there's reading material in the lavatory, I got to watch myself or I'll lose track of the time. I reckon that's one of my besetting sins—though I can't see where it's a sin to want to broaden your mind, can you? There's just so much to learn in the world, I can't soak it all up fast enough!”

She lowered herself heavily onto the sofa, expressing hope that she could get back up once she got settled into the cushions. Then she leaned forward and continued talking to Elizabeth, who was sitting in a ladder-back chair three seats away. “Many's the time Jewel's come a-tappin' at the bathroom door, sayin', ‘Mama? Mama? It sure is quiet in there. You all right?' Not meanin' to be nosy, she's not, but just wantin' to make sure what happened to that woman over in Powdersville doesn't happen to me. You know, that one that slipped on the tile floor and banged her head against the bathtub and fell down unconscious and stayed that way for the longest time before her husband got in from plantin' corn, expectin' his supper to be on the table, and the kitchen just as dark and still as a sepulcher, and he had to go all around the house callin' her name till he found her just comin' out of her spell, a-settin' on the bathroom floor rubbin' her head, all bewildered and full of perplexity!”

The woman sitting next to Eldeen on the sofa, a tranquil, pretty, normal-sized woman who didn't look like she could possibly be related to her, placed her hand on Eldeen's arm in a daughterly sort of way, a gesture which, if intended to stanch the tide of the older woman's words, failed altogether. “I always start out tellin' myself I'm just going to look at the pictures, nothing more,” Eldeen said, “and then before I know it, I start reading the captions under the pictures, and then my appetite's so whetted I read a little tidge of the beginning, and then I just give in and start reading the whole kit and caboodle. This article I got started looking at a minute ago was about these men in Africa that hunts pythons, them big old snakes that can squeeze the breath out of a human person.”