No Dark Valley (35 page)

The idea instantly made Celia nervous—eating out with two married women, trapped in an unfamiliar place, not knowing where the conversation might go. She knew Elizabeth, of course, but not Margaret, and to tell the truth, Margaret intimidated her a little. Her eyes had the wise, penetrating look of someone who could extract secrets you never intended to yield. Her beautiful face, her scholarly speech, her quiet dignity—they could hypnotize a person. She had a way of studying you that went beyond just friendly interest. It seemed that she
knew
.

“You would honor us with your company,” Margaret said to Celia.

And right then, as if to demonstrate Margaret's hypnotic effect, though Celia's mind was waving a thousand red flags, though sirens were screaming in her ears, she heard herself say, “Well, okay, I guess so. I was just going to fix a sandwich at home.”

They waited out on the sidewalk while she adjusted the air conditioning, activated the alarm, and turned off the lights. As she was flipping the sign to read Closed, the phone rang. She had no intention of answering it, but she waited nonetheless to see if someone would leave a message. Within seconds she heard Craig's voice, clearly exasperated. He didn't have to identify himself. No one else talked that rudely on the phone. “So you're gone already,” he said. “I needed something,” and then he hung up. Celia wasn't about to call him back. It was ten minutes past closing time. It irritated her that he made it sound like she had skipped out early.

She stepped outside and locked the door. Boo Newman, several doors down at the gift shop, was locking up, also. She hadn't stopped by the gallery in over a week, which pleased Celia just fine. But she cried out merrily now, “Hello, Celia! I'm coming down to see you tomorrow. Have I got a story for you!”

It was decided that they would all go in Elizabeth's car and leave Celia's Mustang at the gallery to pick up on the way home. Celia would have preferred to follow them in her car, but Elizabeth wouldn't hear of it. Thankfully, the conversation as they rode to Greenville was harmless, most of it relating to the gallery. Both Elizabeth and Margaret seemed consumed with curiosity about the everyday workings of an art gallery and plied her with question after question.

Celia didn't really mind all the questions, since they filled up time, and she liked the arrangement, with her sitting in the backseat giving her answers to the backs of their heads. She didn't rush her answers, even cast about for extra details to include. With every passing mile, what worried her more and more, though, was where the conversation would lead after Elizabeth and Margaret grew tired of the art gallery.

She knew how it went when women got together. She had been with the tennis team enough times to know that. But, ironically, the larger group was probably less risky. The smaller the number of women, the more personal and specific the talk would most likely get. So why in the world had she done this? What did she care about Aunt Cassie's Kitchen and its cheap good country cooking? What she was wishing for more than anything as the minutes passed was the safety of her own apartment, her own kitchen table, her own sandwich.

Elizabeth remarked about how interesting the layout of a new show always was and asked who decided how and where each piece was to be hung. She was obviously expecting Celia to describe some kind of complicated mathematical method of formatting, complete with graph paper and slide rules. Both Elizabeth and Margaret therefore thought it was very funny when she told them that though she usually came up with the groupings and general locations, Ollie most often did the actual hanging, using a procedure he had perfected called “the shoulder and nose method.”

They were nearing the city limits of Greenville now, so she tried hard to concentrate on giving a relentlessly thorough explanation of the procedure, which might last until they got to the restaurant. For the shoulder part of Ollie's method, she told them, he needed a long piece of yarn, a hammer, and couple of nails. He stood against the end of a wall so that his shoulder touched it, and then he drove in a nail at that point and wrapped the yarn around the nail. Then he walked the yarn down to the other end of the wall, stood against the wall again, and drove another nail, then tied the yarn to that. This gave him a reference line.

Next he eyeballed all the pieces Celia had laid out to be hung on that wall, then, starting in the middle, he stepped up to the carpeted wall until his nose touched it and with his finger marked the place. He then fished a nail out of his pocket with the other hand and placed it a couple or three inches to the left of the spot, then took the hammer, which was tucked into his waistband, and pounded the nail in. Then he hammered in another nail to the right of the spot so that each painting hung by two nails instead of one. That gave greater stability.

Ollie had hung so many shows by now that the art of centering and spacing had almost become intuitive. And Celia had watched and helped so many times that she could do it herself if necessary, which she had had to do the time Ollie had been rushed to the hospital for an emergency appendectomy. She could have asked Craig or Tara to come in and help that time, but she decided it wasn't worth the trouble. So she did it herself, copying Ollie's basic technique but modifying the “shoulder and nose method” to the “chin and top of the head method” to compensate for the difference in their heights. And though it had taken her longer than Ollie, the results were basically the same.

Margaret asked if there was ever much damage to worry about—pieces getting broken or smudged with fingerprints—and if people were held liable for breakage as in any other store. No major catastrophes, Celia told them, only minor stuff—a couple of broken frames that were easily replaced, and once she herself had snapped off the very tip of a tail feather on a polychromed wood sculpture of a rooster when she was moving things around in one of the rooms.

When she had shown it to Ollie the next day, he had laughed as if at a piddling concern, then had taken a magic marker out of the desk drawer and colored over the broken end, after which he spit on his finger and rubbed it in. “Piece of cake, Cecilia. Eric will never know, believe me. Anyway, he trusts my judgment. He would thank me for fixing it.” He had held the rooster out at arm's length. “I actually think it's even a little better now.” Celia had marveled at Ollie's nerve, tampering with somebody else's art, and wondered if the artist, Eric Lynch, would ever trust Ollie again if he had seen him using a magic marker and rubbing saliva on his sculpture.

True to Elizabeth's description, Aunt Cassie's Kitchen was nothing fancy. A simple storefront building with plate-glass windows, it was located between a Goodwill store and a beauty supply outlet on the west end of Greenville, out near Interstate 85. Though it was owned and operated by a black family, the clientele appeared to be a mix of all races and tongues. It wasn't much past five-thirty, yet the place was almost full.

A noisy table of black teenagers occupied a back corner, while several Mexicans wearing red Dink's Car Wash shirts sat near the door. They must have just gotten off work, for their shirts were wet, making Celia think the workers might have gone through the car wash themselves. A black-haired woman in a sari sat with two small wide-eyed children at a table by the window. Celia looked past them quickly, shifting her attention to a grizzled old man hunkered over a plate of barbecued ribs at another table, with unkempt hair down around his shoulders and his beard collected into a ponytail, cinched with a rubber band.

“Judy said we'd see a cross section of Greenville if we came here,” Elizabeth said after they were seated in one of only two low-backed booths, both of them situated close to the kitchen. Celia wished they had sat at a table instead of a booth. At a table you had more space, and your view was broader. In a booth you felt backed up against a wall, especially if you were sitting on one side by yourself, as Celia was, with two pairs of eyes facing you directly across the table.

Single sheets of paper propped up behind the ketchup bottle served as the menus, listing in hand-printed capital letters six different “plates,” all the same price and each consisting of a meat and two vegetables, plus drink, corn bread, and cobbler. Celia decided quickly on the fried chicken breast with rice and gravy and green beans. While Elizabeth and Margaret were still looking at the menu, she studied the restaurant, noticing that the floor was surprisingly clean for the number of people that evidently walked across it every day. The Formica tabletop also looked spotless.

A black woman in a flowered apron was wiping off an empty table by the window, taking her time about it. That was the secret to clean restaurant tables, Celia decided—let grown women do it instead of teenagers. The woman even picked up the salt and pepper shakers and wiped them off, then the napkin dispenser. Celia wondered if that might be Aunt Cassie herself, but she saw three or four other women moving in and out of the kitchen who also might qualify. It looked like a whole family of sisters ran the place, with maybe a couple of brothers and nephews thrown in. Maybe Aunt Cassie was the mother of the clan, having earned the right to sit in comfort at home while her children took care of the business.

An older couple sat at a nearby table, and Celia noticed how thin and feeble they both looked. They were eating silently and with great concentration, as if they needed every ounce of their energy to cut their meat loaf and butter their corn bread. She watched them for a moment and then moved on to another table, where two yuppie-looking men in shirts and ties sat reading the
Wall Street Journal
. How like men, she thought, to go out to eat together and then not say a word to each other. Of course, that would suit her fine right now, she realized. She would love to eat quickly and quietly and get back home.

Suddenly she was aware that Elizabeth and Margaret had stopped reading the menu and were both looking at her. She wondered if one of them had asked her a question, but before she could say anything, a waitress, maybe one of Aunt Cassie's daughters, showed up at their table and took an order pad out of her apron pocket.

“Hey there,” she said. “Y'all know what you want?” She reached back and pulled a pencil out of her knot of coiled braids. She was plump and had one of the widest smiles Celia had ever seen, adorned by a spectacular gold tooth. A jolly sort, she expressed approval at all their selections: “Yes'm, that's real good.” “We just cooked up a fresh batch of chicken.” “Mmm, you sure gonna like them butter beans.” She promised to be right back with their tea.

After she left, neither Elizabeth nor Margaret seemed to be in any hurry to start a conversation. Elizabeth was looking for something in her purse, while Margaret, after replacing the menus behind the ketchup bottle, was straightening up the other items next to the napkin dispenser. Celia watched her remove a napkin, wipe it across the table, and examine it.

Elizabeth noticed it, too. “Margaret's extra particular,” she said, glancing up. Then she went back to digging in her purse. Evidently she still hadn't found whatever she was looking for. “This is a real adventure for her—eating out. She'll probably figure out a way to inspect the kitchen before we eat.”

A different waitress, a young girl no more than fifteen, pretty and quick, brought their glasses of tea. She was gone in a flash.

“Elizabeth is of the opinion that I need to get out more,” Margaret said, smiling. “She has undertaken a campaign to acquaint me with a variety of restaurants. Sometimes we bring our husbands along.” She smiled and held up the paper napkin she had used to wipe the table. “Thus far Aunt Cassie is to be commended for cleanliness.” She folded the napkin neatly and placed it on top of the dispenser.

“It's a little like the vaccination principle,” Elizabeth said. “I'm introducing her to public germs a few at a time, building up her immunity so that one of these days she'll actually go to a restaurant without bringing her own silverware along.”

They all laughed. Apparently she was teasing, for Margaret took Aunt Cassie's utensils from the napkin they were wrapped in and laid them out, arranging each one on the proper side as carefully as she would set the table for company.

“There it is,” Elizabeth said, pulling a wrinkled scrap of paper out of her purse. “I knew it was in here somewhere.” She smoothed the paper out, then cleared her throat. “Okay, this is part of a poem I ran across the other day. See what you think. Don't worry, it's short.”

So while they waited for their meat loaf, fried chicken, and pork chop plates at Aunt Cassie's Kitchen, Elizabeth read aloud a poem titled “Early Shift at Duke's Donuts.” Celia wondered if anyone else had ever read poetry at one of Aunt Cassie's tables. Elizabeth had found the poem in an old issue of a writing magazine, she said, in an article called “Sharpening Your Poems to a Point.” It was a descriptive poem, bursting at the seams with the sights, sounds, and smells of a doughnut shop in Alabama. Celia was glad it wasn't one of those enigmatic poems by somebody like Wallace Stevens or T. S. Eliot or some other poet whose intellect was up in the stratosphere somewhere. The point of this poem seemed to be, simply put, that the world was gloriously full of all manner of people, although she couldn't help wondering if there was something else she might be missing.

Evidently not, though, for after she finished reading it, Elizabeth looked up, her eyes shining, and said, “Isn't that great? Doesn't he capture the whole seething mass of humanity right there in that doughnut shop?” Then she nodded toward the other tables in the restaurant and said, “Just like right here. Look at all these people. Isn't it fascinating?”

For several long moments the three of them sat in silence, looking around at the seething mass of humanity in Aunt Cassie's Kitchen in Greenville, South Carolina. And an idea suddenly hit Celia:
We're all alike
, she thought. She couldn't remember ever being hit so hard with an idea so elementary. She looked at another table, where three elderly women were finishing up, spoonfuls of cobbler moving slowly from their little green plastic bowls to their mouths. That could be the three of us a few years down the road, she thought.