Celia didn’t have the energy to carry on the same conversation with Boo that they’d had so many times before, so she just smiled and shrugged. “Everybody’s got his own tastes.” There was no reasoning with Boo; her idea of great art was the newest Precious Moments figurine.
Boo sighed and walked to the chair by the desk, the typical sign that she was settling in for a visit. She sat down gingerly, tilting herself a little sideways so she could wedge herself between the slender chrome arms of the chair. Once ensconced, her thighs spilled over and pooched out under the arms of the chair like two well-stuffed pillows. More than once Celia had imagined Boo trying to stand up too fast, the chair clamping onto her broad backside and coming with her.
Boo slipped her shoes off, then looked down at her puffy ankles. “I don’t think those pills are doing me a bit of good,” she said. “The doctor told me I’d see some difference right away, but I still feel as bloated as I ever did.” Bloating was a frequent complaint of Boo’s, and Celia had often been tempted to ask if the doctor had ever suggested she start exercising and go on a diet.
Celia didn’t move toward the desk. She knew there was no way she could sit here and listen to this woman right now, and she felt bad for letting her get seated, for not having spoken up sooner. “I’m kind of busy in the back,” she said. “I’m trying to reorganize some things and get ready for the new show next month. Sorry.”
She knew she wouldn’t be pressured for specifics, and she could be glad for that. Another good thing about Boo was that she didn’t get her feelings hurt easily. Although Celia knew she would have had the most sympathetic of ears had she chosen to confide in Boo Newman, who unlike a lot of talkers was also a good listener, she didn’t dare tell her the truth: I need to go sit still for a while and try to erase the picture of the Madonna from my mind. Boo loved talk shows where people told all their secrets and cried about them in public. She often shared the stories with Celia in great detail.
Boo was already putting her shoes back on, scrambling as much as a woman of her size could be said to scramble, trying to disengage herself from the armchair so she could be on her way. “Well, I needed to stop in down at the frame shop anyway to see if Ursula ever got that man’s prisoner of war certificate framed. It was the real thing, not a duplicate. The man took it right from the German POW camp office when they were liberated. Went right in and ransacked the drawers and found it, then brought it all the way back home to Plum Branch, South Carolina, and had it in a scrapbook all these years.” She stopped at the door and gave Celia a cheery wave. “It has his fingerprint on it, and you should see the size of that man’s thumb!”
Boo opened the door, then stopped again. “Oh, wait, did I tell you Desi is pregnant? That’s what I was meaning to tell you the other day when I stopped by and you were on the phone.” Desi, short for Desiree, was the girl who worked for Boo in the afternoons. She had a tangle of jet-black curls piled messily on top of her head and wore blue, green, and bronze fingernail polish to match whichever color of eye shadow she was wearing that day.
Celia felt something twist inside her. “Is that so?” She pretended to straighten a painting on the wall next to where she was standing.
“Yes, but she says she wants to keep working if I’ll have her.” Boo shook her head. “There used to be a time when women didn’t parade around in public when they were pregnant, but it’s a different world now. Girls these days, they work right up till the day the baby’s born.” She opened the door. “Of course girls used to be married to the fathers of their babies, too.” In earlier visits at the Trio, Boo had already covered at length the subject of Desi’s cohabitation with a car mechanic who dropped her off at work every afternoon in a black Corvette with orange and yellow flames painted along the sides, its pulsating rock music jiggling the little suncatchers on the gift shop window.
“She hasn’t told him yet,” Boo said. “She’s afraid he’s not going to want her to have it.” Right before she closed the door all the way, she added, “Desi wants the baby, though. She told me she’s been cheating on her birth control pills for the past three months.”
Finally she was gone. Celia fled to the back room and sat down again. It would always be this way, and she knew it. There would be no escape, ever. At any moment somebody could say something or she might see or do something that would bring it all back. The reminders would always be there, coming loose and crashing down on top of each other like a giant rockslide. She stared at her hands and remembered how they had trembled that day fourteen years ago when she had gone to the clinic, paid her money, and signed the papers. Well, no, they hadn’t actually started trembling until after she had signed the papers, when they led her from the waiting room to another room in the back.
She remembered how cold the room was and how she couldn’t quit shivering for days afterward. She had never asked anybody if that was normal—if everybody had that same deep-down frozen feeling in their bones. No one had warned her about the cold. She had been a graduate student at the time with a part-time job at a newspaper in Dover. A friend had driven her to and from the clinic, and she had stayed home from classes and work for three days, wrapped in blankets but unable to get warm. Right in the middle of summer, too.
And no one had warned her about this part of it, either—the smothering feeling she got every time she saw a mother with a baby, even a picture of a mother with a baby, or heard about someone getting pregnant or saw a pregnant woman or a new mother in a store. No one had told her about the dreams she would have almost every night for the rest of her life, all those babies she would see swirling around in her head, dead babies that should be silent but were instead emitting horrible wails.
No one had warned her that she would need to lay in a supply of pills to drug her into a dreamless sleep when the nights got especially long. Nobody at the clinic had bothered to tell her that she would look at children differently from that day on, that she would keep up with how old hers would have been, that she would feel an ice pick in her ribs whenever she saw a child that age.
She often found herself studying other women at the mall or in grocery stores, even clients who came into the art gallery, and she would wonder which of them had a secret like her own hidden away inside. At times she imagined she could spot the women who did have such a secret by a particular look in their eyes, but she had no way of knowing if she was right. If she happened to make eye contact with one of these grave, wistful-looking women in an aisle or a parking lot somewhere, she would fight the urge to touch her hand and say, “How long ago was yours?” or “Were the dreams especially bad last night?” She might pull up beside someone at a stoplight, take one look at her face, and think, “I know, oh, believe me, I know.”
It was hard for her to separate the guilt from the anger, she felt them both so much of the time. Part of her blamed her grandmother’s God for not letting her forget, for making her feel so keenly the weight of her guilt, for not having used all that power he was supposed to have to keep her from having an abortion in the first place. It was only further evidence to her that the God worshiped at Bethany Hills Bible Tabernacle kept strict, unrelenting account of everything a person did and then proceeded to get even for all the years to come. Celia had decided long ago that she didn’t want to have anything to do with that God, and she didn’t know about any other. So what if it was true about heaven and hell? She would take her chances. Anyway, she couldn’t imagine that heaven would be anything special with a God like that running things.
All of which meant that she blamed her grandmother, also, sometimes without even realizing she was doing it. Living with a woman like that had planted notions in Celia’s head of constantly being watched and judged by the great almighty Record Keeper. It had activated her imagination to the point that it interfered with her enjoyment of life, even after she made her break with religion as a high school senior.
Renee and Ansell and her other friends used to laugh about Celia’s conscience, calling it �
�the vermin within” and urging Celia to “exterminate” it by immersing herself in all the new things they were trying to teach her. “You know, baptize yourself with fun!” Ansell liked to say. Her own timidity and caution made her mad. If she didn’t live with her grandmother, she had reasoned, she could have grown up with normal attitudes about enjoying life.
But another part of her blamed herself for slipping up that one time. She had always been so careful before then. And certainly since then. One of Celia’s college roommates had teased her mercilessly about what she called Celia’s “religious” approach to birth control. “Must be that heavy-duty Sunday school background of yours,” the girl had said. Celia had told her all about her grandmother and Bethany Hills Bible Tabernacle.
That particular roommate was a history major named Amber, who regularly brought her boyfriend to their dorm room to spend the night. Celia had asked her once what she would do if she got pregnant, and Amber had laughed and waved it off. “It won’t happen. But if it does, it’s not like the end of the world. There are ways to take care of such problems, you know.” Amber hadn’t come back to school the next fall, and Celia never knew why.
She looked around her now, at the storage cupboards in the workroom, the sink and countertop, the small refrigerator, which held a leftover Caesar salad she planned to eat after she closed the gallery that evening and stayed late to work on the computer. At least that had been the plan when the day started. Now she wasn’t so sure. This day seemed oddly distorted, as if it had lasted for a whole week already. She thought of that Bible story from her childhood, the one where somebody—was it Joshua?—had lifted his rod and made the sun stand still. Perhaps someone had done the same thing today. Surely it hadn’t been only this morning that she had played tennis at the Holiday Inn.
Her eyes landed on the letter again—the one from the lawyers telling her she was the sole inheritor of her grandmother’s house. She felt a sudden and surprising pang of envy toward her grandmother—Sadie Madeline Ellsworth Burnes, though most people had known her as just Sadie Burnes. How unencumbered her life had been. She had simply gotten out of bed every morning and set about doing her duty. She read her Bible, did some housework, cooked a little, listened to a radio preacher, sent a card to a missionary or a shut-in, swept the front porch, hung out a few clothes—on and on with things like that until the day was filled up and it was time for bed. She could lay her head on her pillow every night without dreading the dark hours ahead and the dreams that came with them, and when the sun came up the next day, she would get up and start all over again. She could look at a school bus full of children passing her house and feel no burden of guilt.
As she did so often, Celia felt an intense wish gripping her heart, the wish that somehow there could be a way to go back and redo the past. One little mistake and you were never a free woman again. One especially handsome sweet-talker—a well-built PE major of all things, oh, the shame of it!—and you lost your head one night and got careless, thinking just this one time wouldn’t matter. But it did matter, and it kept on and on mattering because you had to remember it every single day and night for the rest of your life.
And to think she had actually paid four hundred dollars to torment herself for the rest of her life. But how could she have possibly known how far-reaching the effects of that visit to the clinic would be? She had been twenty-two, not exactly a kid, certainly old enough to think for herself, so why hadn’t she taken more time to consider it all? Why, when she was usually on the indecisive side about every little thing, had she so swiftly made up her mind to do that one huge thing?
And even when she had felt the first stirrings of doubt as they led her to the back room of the clinic, when her hands started trembling and the cold started seeping into her, why hadn’t she had the courage to say, “Wait a minute, I need to think this through some more”? She often wondered if other clinics had people who sat down and talked to the girls before they took their money and told them to undress, who warned them about this thing they were about to do and about what it would mean for all the years to follow.
The sweet-talking PE major had lost his appeal as soon as Celia had discovered she was pregnant. She wouldn’t have thought of seeking his opinion concerning what she was about to do nor of asking him to help pay for it. She dropped him like a hot potato and never offered a word of explanation. Nor did he press her to. He immediately took up with a tall, blond interior design major, and the two of them walked around campus looking like models for a college fashion magazine. Every time Celia saw him, she felt physically sick to think she had been so stupid.
* * *
“But life goes on,” she said now, quite loudly, in the back room of the art gallery. This was the refrain she forced herself to say after each episode of guilt knocked her down. Sometimes she said it a dozen times a day; other times she could almost make it through a whole day without saying it once. The gallery was a good job for her, much better than the newspaper job she’d had before, where she’d had to be around too many people all the time and cover stories that far too often seemed to involve children.
Some would probably say it didn’t make sense, that the newspaper job should have kept her thoughts so occupied that she wouldn’t have time to dwell on her own problems, but it hadn’t worked that way for her. Coming to work at the Trio had been a great relief. Some days it was as if she had been granted a reprieve—not a pardon, never that, but at least a brief stay. At times she could get her mind on something here at the gallery and concentrate so hard she could actually forget for a while that a child would be alive today if it hadn’t been for her carelessness.
And her selfishness. At some point during the last fourteen years, she had admitted to herself without even meaning to that this had been a big part of why she had gone to the clinic that day. She’d had things she wanted to do with her life, and a baby sure wasn’t part of them, not right then. A simple choice—and a totally self-centered one. It had been a black day when she had realized this. How depressing that a person’s own mind could turn against her that way. Nevertheless she had recognized it as the absolute truth.
She had long since given up arguing with herself that it wasn’t really a baby—and all those other attempts at justifying the act. It was nothing more than a little mindless clump of cells, not really a person, she had tried to tell herself for years. And any child brought into the world deserved to be loved and wanted, which this one wouldn’t be. And, of course, it could have easily been damaged in some way even at that early stage; maybe it would have been born deformed and never . . . blah, blah, blah. Oh, she knew them all, the same old tired thoughts.
She got up from the table and splashed water on her face again. She needed to go through the day’s stack of mail, make a couple of phone calls, and then start working on the mailing for the next show, which ought to go out in a week or two.
She was sitting at the front desk a few minutes later when she saw a mustard-colored Volkswagen van pull up in front of the gallery. She recognized it at once as belonging to Macon Mahoney, one of the gallery’s newer artists. She sighed—far too many people were showing up this afternoon.
She had always thought that Macon Mahoney could be a character in a book. He could have been somebody Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn ran across while drifting down the Mississippi River on a raft, some good-hearted fellow who joined up with them to try to get Jim to freedom. Or put him in a frock coat and top hat instead of his customary jeans and T-shirt, and he could be in a Dickens novel—maybe a kindly neighbor of the Cratchit family or another clerk, a nicer one, in the office where Uriah Heep worked. Half of what Macon Mahoney said didn’t make sense to Celia, but the other half was very funny and witty and showed a childlike love of life she didn’t often see in grown people. He was polite, too, and never acted as if he thought he was anything special, though in her opinion he was an artistic genius.
She watched him get out of his van now and walk around to open the side door. He
got back inside the van, but she could see him crawling around in the back of it. She wondered what he was bringing in now, for surely this was the reason for his visit. He usually stopped by every other week or so, bringing something he had recently finished or, more often, something old he wanted to swap for another piece of his in the gallery. Celia rarely had to worry about rotating Macon’s pieces because he kept them rotated himself. He was always changing things around at home or entering something in a contest or lending pieces out, sometimes even giving them away.
He was immensely talented, although Celia thought that he explored so many different forms and media that he still hadn’t found his home ground. She liked almost everything he did, however, so she didn’t know what advice she would give to an artist like him—if an artist like him would ever ask her opinion, that is. Would you tell a Macon Mahoney to keep experimenting and producing these highly unique pieces in every style, or would you tell him to spin a wheel and then zero in on whatever he happened to land on, forgetting everything else? A specialty was something Macon didn’t yet have, but was that a bad thing when you could do so much so well?
Celia remembered a lidded clay pot he had brought in with him the first day he had come to the gallery with color slides of his work. The pot looked like primitive southwestern art, a dusky mottled clay with crude figures of animals etched into it, like something you’d see on the wall of a cave, and she had fallen in love with it at first glance. In fact, she had bought it for herself before he left that day.
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