No Dark Valley (46 page)

The preacher was on a roll and, no doubt trying to be poetic, rattled off a whole string of these little Christian banalities. “Once you fall in love with the Savior,” he said, “the things of this life seem pretty trivial,” and “Once you cast your lot with the Almighty, you forget about all the little trinkets that clutter up your life.” And nobody around her seemed to catch on that he was repeating himself over and over. They all acted like every statement was something brand-new. There were amens all over the place, and Denise scribbled away furiously on her piece of paper. “Once you experience the mercies of God,” said the preacher, “it sort of spoils the pleasures this old world offers.”

The mercies of God—it wasn't a concept old Brother Thacker used to talk much about, his sermons always leaning as they did toward the judgments of God. Then later, out in the parking lot before she escaped, Celia heard it again from Denise. She had paused a long time after Celia's complaint about the illogical connection between blood and cleansing, then had evidently decided to ignore it for the time being. “God wants you to be his child, Celia,” she said at length. “He reaches out to you in love and mercy. Nobody is beyond his saving power. Nobody.”

“Not even the chiefest of sinners, huh?” Celia said. It was a phrase she remembered from years ago. She wasn't trying to be sarcastic, though, and Denise seemed to know it.

“That's right,” she said kindly. “Not even the chiefest of sinners.” She smiled, and her eyes scrunched up into little blue stars. “And that could describe most of us, you know.”

Celia opened her door at that point and got inside her car. But she rolled down the window after she started the engine and looked up at Denise for a long moment. “Thank you for your interest in me,” she told her, “but I need to leave now.” And as she backed out, she waved to Denise and said, “See you later,” as if they were parting for just a few hours instead of forever.

23

Pilgrim Through This Barren Land

Five weeks later on the first of August, after Celia and the Holiday Winners had come back from the USTA Southeastern Regional Tournament in Louisville, Kentucky, Celia was returning her suitcase to her storage area in the basement when she noticed how asymmetrical and messy it all looked. She stepped back and studied the stacks. If she took the time to move all the plastic sacks and paper bags to the same side, it would help some.

So she set her suitcase down and picked up two brown grocery sacks with the tops folded over. This wouldn't take long, since most of them didn't weigh much. She had forgotten what all was in them, and now certainly wasn't the time to do an inventory. She had to finish tidying her apartment and then get supper going for her company tonight. Just move them, she told herself, and don't start digging through them.

Now that this last tennis trip was over, it was time to settle down again and give her full attention to the art gallery. After all, it was already August, and summer would soon be over. Ollie and Tara had been good to fill in for her at the Trio, but everybody was ready for things to get back to normal.

A new show had gone up the week before, while Celia was in Louisville, and Connie had been in charge of the reception table. The artist, Yvette Song, did mostly delicate pen-and-ink drawings of Oriental subjects, and Celia had suggested they go the predictable route with the refreshments and table decorations, serving tea, rice cakes, goldfish crackers, and homemade fortune cookies. They rigged up a pretty little trickling fountain as a centerpiece, along with a rock garden and a couple of bonsai.

Before she left for her tennis trip, Celia had found some miniature paper lanterns to string above the table and had typed out over a hundred little sayings about art for Connie to insert into the fortune cookies she was making, things like “Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art,” and “The excellency of every art is its intensity.” She wasn't even sure she agreed with them all, but if somebody famous said it, like Leonardo da Vinci or John Keats, she knew the art crowd would love them.

It was the first time in ten years that Celia had not been there on the opening night of a show, and she hoped it was the last. She had been sitting with her teammates in a steakhouse in Louisville that Thursday night of the opening, and she was sure the others must have noticed how fidgety she had been the whole time, although they couldn't have known it was because her mind was back at the Trio, wondering how things were going—if there was a good turnout, if Craig had remembered to meet Yvette at the airport that afternoon, if Ollie had gotten all the pieces hung in plenty of time, if Connie had run into any snags with the fortune cookies, what kind of speaker Yvette had turned out to be, and so forth.

Her teammates probably thought she was just nervous because of the match against the Arkansas team the next morning. They all knew they had to really be on top of things to pull off a win at this level, where the competition was cutthroat. It was rumored that one of the Arkansas singles players hadn't lost a single set since the beginning of the season back in February.

As it had turned out, the Holiday Winners did perform well enough to beat the Arkansas team the next day but not the Tennessee team after that. And something inside Celia was secretly glad. She had had enough traveling for a while, and she had no desire to pack up again in a few months and fly to Tucson for the nationals. Maybe another year, but not this one.

A few seconds later, as Celia lifted a sack that was considerably heavier than the others, she momentarily forgot her resolve not to look inside. When she opened it, she saw that it contained nothing but steno pads. A fusty smell came wafting up from inside the sack. Oh yes, Grandmother's makeshift diaries. There must be more than two dozen of them, the exact kind of steno pads Celia herself had used as a sophomore in high school when they still offered courses like typing and shorthand, both of which her grandmother had insisted she take that year. “A girl can always use secretary skills,” she had told both Celia and the school counselor when they had gone to Dunmore High that first day to get Celia enrolled.

And Grandmother had been so interested in those two courses for some reason! Celia had heard her on the telephone with various aunts that whole year, proudly announcing that Celia was “earning high marks in her secretary classes.” From time to time Celia would find her poring over her Gregg typing and shorthand manuals.

One of the few times Celia could remember her grandmother laughing, as a matter of fact, was when Celia found her reading aloud the practice exercises for the letters
x, y
, and
z
in Celia's typing manual. “Rex and Alex mixed the extra beeswax exactly,” Grandmother had said. “Yes, young Sally played with a cymbal and a yellow yo-yo.” Standing in the doorway behind her, Celia saw her grandmother's shoulders shaking. “Zesty zebras zigzagged crazily in the Zanesville Zoo,” Grandmother concluded, and then she leaned back and actually laughed right out loud. Celia was so surprised that she had tiptoed back to her bedroom without a word.

Several years later when she was away at college, her grandmother had written that the high school had a brand-new computer laboratory, according to the newspaper, and was selling all their typewriters for twenty-five dollars each. “Seems like a pure waste to me to get rid of perfectly good equipment,” she had written. Instead of typing and shorthand, she reported, they were offering Computer Skills. It was funny how Celia could tell just from Grandmother's handwriting, darker and more angular in that paragraph, that she thought the whole thing was a pack of foolishness, one more sign that the world was going to pot.

Of course, it wouldn't have mattered if someone had pointed out that Dunmore High actually lagged way behind the times, that other schools all over the nation had switched from typewriters to computers a couple of years earlier. In Grandmother's opinion they should have held out and refused to give in. So what if everybody else changed? If everybody else jumped off a cliff, did that make it right? What was wrong with the old ways? They should have stuck with their typewriters and steno pads.

But evidently Grandmother had taken advantage of the new ways when she ran across a bargain on steno pads around that same time. Celia set the sack down and counted them now. Thirty-one of them, all identical, all filled up from front to back with Grandmother's handwriting. About half of them had a red sticker on the back marked Clearance, with the price of twenty-five cents stamped below. So Grandmother might have frowned upon Dunmore High's surrendering so easily in the war of technology, but she sure had been quick enough to pick up a few spoils from that particular battle.

Celia had flipped through several of them while clearing out the house back in Dunmore, and why she hadn't tossed them in a trash bag right then she couldn't say. Another thing she couldn't say was why she had never before realized her grandmother had such a compulsion to write things down, even the most insignificant of details. She guessed she should have known from the number of letters her grandmother wrote and the kinds of letters, too—always crammed with the trivia and tedium of everyday life on Old Campground Road.

And Grandmother's Bible—that should have been another clue. Every page was heavily underlined, and the margins were crowded with handwritten notes of all kinds—cross-references, sermon outlines, definitions of words, even little corny pithy sayings like “An excuse is a lie with a thin skin of reason around it,” or “Never doubt in the dark what God told you in the light.” So why should Celia have been surprised to find steno pad after steno pad filled to the brim and overflowing with words, words, and more words?

As far as women went, Grandmother hadn't been that much of a talker, not to the extent of someone like Aunt Clara or Boo Newman or Anastasia Elsey. And certainly not like that old woman named Eldeen that Celia still thought about from time to time. Once not long ago, in fact, she had rounded the corner in the Winn-Dixie and had seen in front of her a very large woman hunched over a shopping cart, shuffling through a handful of coupons. Celia had stopped dead still at the end of the aisle, wondering whether to go speak to her or run the other direction. She had decided to skip that aisle but had seen the old woman again later by the dairy case and found that it wasn't Eldeen after all.

She had been a little surprised to feel a twinge of disappointment. It was funny how a person you hardly even knew, didn't really
want
to know, could stick with you like that. Sometimes during the night when she was trying to get to sleep, Celia would think about Eldeen and try to imagine what it would be like to live next door to her. She would hear her deep sticky voice at odd times during the day: “I can tell you how to get yourself a ticket if you want me to,” or “Yes, sir, I'm marching through Immanuel's ground right here in Derby!”

Her grandmother might not have done much talking in person, but she had evidently done her share of it on paper, far more than Celia had known at the time. The diaries were just one more of the many, many things she hadn't noticed as a girl. She tried now to picture Grandmother sitting in the living room bent over a steno pad, filling the lines with words. Surely she could remember something like that. But it was no good—the picture wouldn't focus. Maybe Grandmother had done her diary writing in her bedroom with the door closed.

Thinking back over it, Celia was fairly certain now that her grandmother had approved of her majoring in journalism in college, though she never actually said so. Maybe some of her approval had to do with the fact that it involved writing, something Grandmother thought was important. She had always wanted Celia to be a teacher, but spending her days in a classroom wasn't Celia's idea of a fulfilling life. Nor was the life of a secretary, another acceptable career in Grandmother's opinion. Celia knew that answering the phone and typing letters would get boring in a hurry.

Which was exactly what journalism had turned out to be. Covering dinky little community events, sitting in on dull school board meetings, interviewing local politicians, and all that—it had given her a steady job, sure, but not one she really cared about. She had often wished she could make up tantalizing tidbits and stick them in. So what if they weren't true? At least they'd be interesting!
City Councilman Brant Hummel spoke out boldly against the increased funding for the new arts center, an unsightly piece of dark green lettuce wedged between his front teeth
, or
Gail Penninger, the youngest member of the school board, was out of town for Tuesday's meeting, having gone to Columbia for a breast implant
.

Back when she had changed her major to journalism, after Ansell's departure from Blackrock, it sounded like something you could make a career out of, more than literature. She had liked the possibility of traveling and interviewing famous people. Besides, she had been ready to assert herself, to do things nobody else suggested. Journalism hadn't been a hard major, nor a particularly enjoyable one—certainly nothing she was passionate about. But she had done well enough to get an internship with a small newspaper in Blackrock, which eventually worked into a job with a larger newspaper in nearby Dover during grad school and later another job with a paper here in South Carolina.

It was amazing that she had stayed in the field so long after discovering how little she liked it. She remembered the feeling of exhilaration after landing the job at the Trio Gallery. The thing she couldn't get over in those early days was driving to work with a sense of eagerness, stepping outside her dark little world for a while and actually looking forward to what the day would hold. Not that she could ever totally escape, but sometimes for hours at a time the weight of who she really was would be lifted and she might even notice that the sun was shining outside.