No Dark Valley

by Jamie Langston Turner

  She hadn’t been part of a group for a long time, had in fact taken care to avoid such a risk. You never knew, for instance, when someone would make a high-voltage comment, such as two weeks earlier, when Ellen Myers had been complaining about her youngest daughter, a fourteen-year-old, and her all-night phone marathons with her friends. And Jenny Steel had piped up and said, “Hey, why don’t you send her over to stay with Celia for a couple of weeks?” She had looked right at Celia and grinned. “Wouldn’t you like a little excitement at your place?”

  Celia had felt her spine stiffen and her face force itself into a smile as the others had laughed. Naturally Ellen and Jenny had no way of knowing that Celia would have a teenager of her own if she hadn’t done what she did. None of them could possibly know that the month of March always seemed twice as long to Celia than any other month, that if Celia hadn’t done what she did, another child would be having a birthday this month. This year she would have turned fourteen. Or he. Usually in her worst dreams during the longest nights, the child was a boy.

  And right before today’s match, Carol Sawyer had passed around a picture of her brand-new grandson. Carol had just gotten back from helping out a week at her daughter’s house and couldn’t quit talking about how sweet the baby was. They had named him Sawyer, too, which pleased her to no end. Celia had pretended to look at the picture when it came to her, but she had really looked down at the sidewalk where they were standing, then passed the picture along quickly.

  She hadn’t expected so many women to be on the team in the first place, which naturally intensified the socializing part. When Elizabeth had first invited her to join, she had imagined a team of around six or eight players, not fifteen. That was before she knew that for every match five courts were going at the same time—three doubles and two singles—so you had to have plenty of extra players available. She had learned all fourteen of her teammates’ names by now, but she was still sorting out all the relatives. Since she was the only one who wasn’t married, everybody else had other names connected with theirs—husbands, children, sons-in-law, daughters-in-law, even grandchildren.

  Anastasia Elsey, who wore a perky ponytail and form-fitting tops that showed off her well-endowed figure, was the only other one who didn’t have children besides Celia, but Anastasia was married. She and her husband were “waiting,” she had told them all, several times. They wanted to have their house paid off before they had children, which would happen in two years, when she was forty. She cited case after case of women she knew who had babies in their forties.

  People who had their lives overplanned like that annoyed Celia, but at least it made for one less person talking about her kids all the time. Not that Anastasia had any trouble finding other things to talk about. Though they all tolerated her good-naturedly, even teased with her, Celia had seen looks pass between some of the others when Anastasia got going.

  None of them seemed to mind that Celia was quiet, and they didn’t ask a lot of probing questions, so she was glad for that. They were probably relieved that she didn’t require a lot of attention. They were all friendly, except for Nan Meachum, who was frequently in a bad mood—“the team melancholic,” Bonnie Maggio called her. Nan had a sharp wit, though, and could be incredibly funny when she wasn’t mad at something or somebody.

  * * *

  Elizabeth wasn’t talking anymore now but seemed to be studying her teammates, who were gathered around Jane and Gloria. Betsy Harris walked back from the food table holding a plastic plate filled with chips, dip, celery, a sandwich, some grapes, and a brownie. “They don’t do food as good as we do,” she said, biting into a celery stick. “But I decided to be a martyr and try to choke it down anyway.” She grinned and walked on to meet the others. “Time to eat!” she called out to them. “I volunteered to be the taste tester in case of food poisoning.”

  Elizabeth smiled, then turned to face Celia and took a deep breath. “Okay, I can’t put it off any longer. I have something to ask you.” She licked her lips nervously. “Two things, really.”

  Celia felt her heart sink. She was pretty sure she knew what was coming, and she started trying to formulate an answer. No, I usually work on Sundays. No, I’m out of town a lot on the weekends. This last one wasn’t really true, but she had been known to get in her car sometimes and take a long drive on a Sunday afternoon. But, thankfully, she was wrong about Elizabeth’s question.

  “Do you ever let people buy things in installments?” Elizabeth said. The words poured out as if they had been pent up a long time.

  Because her mind had been on another track, it took a moment for Celia to understand. “Oh . . . you mean at the gallery? Well, yes, we’ve done that before,” she said. “It’s not something we broadcast, but if people ask, we can almost always work something out.”

  “I was afraid you’d . . . well, I didn’t really think the artists would go for that,” Elizabeth said. “It’s not the same when you get your money a little bit at a time instead of all at once.” She went on to tell Celia about the piece she had her eye on. It was Ollie’s painting of Little Tweed Creek, which Celia had put back out on display several weeks ago. Elizabeth had seen it when she came to the opening of Angela Wortheimer’s watercolors, and it seemed she hadn’t been able to get it out of her mind since. “I even dreamed about it last night,” she told Celia. She could pay a hundred dollars a month for the next year, she said, if the gallery could agree to that. She’d understand, too, if there had to be some kind of carrying fee added on.

  “Well, stop by sometime, and we’ll see what we can do,” Celia said. She’d have to talk with Ollie, of course, but she was sure he would agree. No one else had shown much interest in the piece.

  “Does that mean . . . well, can you hold it for me?” Elizabeth said. “Say if you go in to work this afternoon and somebody comes in and wants to buy it and can pay the whole amount right now, would you tell them it was already spoken for?” She was sitting forward a little in her chair now, looking at Celia hungrily as if her answer would be the climax in a long suspenseful plot.

  “Well, I have to talk to Ollie about it first, but I don’t think you have anything to worry about.”

  “Could I come in this afternoon? I mean, I hate to seem pushy, but do you think you could check on it today?” Elizabeth suddenly seemed embarrassed by her eagerness. She shook her head and sat back in her chair. “Sorry. I need to calm down, don’t I? It’s just that I’m subbing at Derby High the rest of this week, so today’s my only free day, and I really, really want this painting. I’d hate to think I’d finally gotten up the nerve to ask you about it and then somehow missed my opportunity.”

  The rest of the team had drifted off to the food table by now. Celia wasn’t all that hungry, but she thought she might like a little bit of the fruit and maybe a brownie. Forcing herself up from her chair, she told Elizabeth to come in sometime around four, and she’d try to have an answer for her. “Or you could call if you’d rather,” she said. “That might save you a trip.”

  Elizabeth’s face clouded. “If a hundred a month isn’t enough, tell him I could maybe pay two hundred some months.”

  “No, no, I meant in case I can’t get in touch with him today,” Celia said. “Don’t worry. I’ll hold the painting for you.” She was a little amused by Elizabeth’s almost childlike desperation, but she sympathized, also. She herself had wanted certain pieces of art so much that she had lost sleep over them and had been willing to spend a lot more than she should to buy them. She had bought things through the gallery by paying in installments, also, had put horrible strains on her budget so she could get yet another painting or sculpture. Sometimes she would lie awake at night and mentally rearrange all the things on her walls to fit in another piece she especially wanted. Her walls were full of nail holes from all the times she had moved paintings around.

  She wondered if it was similar to what Connie, Ollie’s wife, had told her about working at a dress shop one time. Connie had filled all her
closets to the point of bursting because she brought home so many new clothes. She finally decided to quit her job and go to work for a florist. “I’d get so frustrated every morning getting dressed,” Connie had said. “There was simply too much to choose from.” At her new job she wore mostly pants and a T-shirt under a blue smock. She had given a lot of her clothes away and claimed to be much happier and more balanced now. She wasn’t as tempted to bring home floral sprays as she had been new outfits.

  But it wasn’t the same thing at all. Art was totally different from clothing. In Celia’s opinion you could never have too much art. Art wasn’t something you bought to adorn yourself for public show. It was something you took home to expand and elevate your soul.

  If the national economy took a dip, it was Celia’s thinking that that was the perfect time to buy something beautiful to look at instead of hoarding your money and watching the stock market reports. She had gently expressed this opinion to more than one potential buyer at the gallery who was hesitating because his investments had recently lost money.

  And she got different responses from different people. One woman, she recalled, had turned to her, her face blooming with joy, and breathed, “Yes, you’re absolutely right. I’ll take it home with me right now.” And she had quickly written out a check for over three thousand dollars. Another collector, however, an elderly man who wore an eye patch, had wheeled on her and snapped, “It’s attitudes like that that lead to bankruptcy!”

  Elizabeth rose from her chair now and walked with Celia over to the food table. “Oh, and the other thing I wanted to ask you about,” she said, stopping, and again Celia felt a heavy sense of dread as she prepared for an invitation to church. But, again, she was wrong.

  “I’m supposed to speak to a poetry club in May,” Elizabeth said, “and I wondered if you’d be interested in coming.” She rolled her eyes and made a face. “Not to hear me, but . . . well, I have an ulterior motive.” Celia didn’t say anything. She knew all about religious people and their ulterior motives.

  “My part of the meeting is supposed to be about poetry and art,” Elizabeth continued. “I’m supposed to show some pictures of famous works of art and discuss the poems that have been inspired by them. It’s not supposed to last very long, only about fifteen or twenty minutes—that’s what I was told.” Celia still didn’t say anything. She really didn’t know much about poetry and didn’t have any particular interest in learning. She also didn’t see where this was leading.

  She must have been frowning because Elizabeth added, “I know, it does seem impossible, doesn’t it? I mean, how can you even talk about one painting and poem in that amount of time? But I’m planning to do a few shorter poems, certainly not that long one about Seurat’s Sunday painting and probably not even Ferlinghetti’s poem about The Kiss, even though that one is really intriguing the way it turns around at the end. I’m thinking I’ll probably do Williams’ poem about Demuth’s Number Five painting and Anne Sexton’s Starry Night poem for sure and maybe one other one. Maybe Auden’s poem about Brueghel’s Fall of Icarus.” She shook her head. “I’ll just barely have time to mention a couple of things about each one, but I think I’d rather do it that way than spend the whole time on one, you know?”

  Celia nodded but still didn’t say anything. She knew about the paintings—anybody who knew anything about art history would recognize those—but the poems were a mystery. She hadn’t heard of any of them. She had no idea that anybody sat around writing poems about famous paintings.

  One thing this tennis team was showing her more and more was that these women had a lot of experiences she didn’t know anything about. In a way she envied them for the fullness of their lives, for their maturity, for letting their hair turn gray without apology as they went right ahead enjoying life. There was a lot to be said for being in your forties and fifties, she had decided. She wished like everything that as she got older she could have that same depth, that placid acceptance of life’s ups and downs, that sense of security and the ability to throw her head back and laugh.

  “ . . . and suggested we do some sort of assignment just for fun,” Elizabeth went on. “I told her I could maybe bring in a painting of my own and talk about it a little and then let the women try writing poems about it. They’ll work on them at home and bring them back to the next meeting to read.”

  Celia nodded again. She was trying really hard to follow all this.

  “But then I had another idea, a much better one . . . if you think you’d have time to do it.” Elizabeth was talking a little faster now. “And if you don’t, I promise I’ll understand, but it shouldn’t take long, really. I don’t want you to feel—”

  Elizabeth stopped and took another deep breath. “Okay, I’ll get to the point. I was wondering if they’d let you bring something from the gallery, some painting you particularly like maybe and would feel comfortable talking about, and then after my part of the meeting, you could show the work and speak for a few minutes about it, point out some things about the technique and style and maybe even tell something about the artist. They might have some questions, too, and you could answer those.” She stopped talking abruptly, her eyes full of hope.

  So that was it. A speaking engagement. Celia had never heard of a poetry club around here. She wondered if it was held over in Greenville. The small outlying towns of Filbert, Derby, and Berea didn’t exactly strike her as centers of literary pursuits.

  “Hey, you two, y’all better quit talking and come get some food before it’s gone!” Cindy Petrarch called to Celia and Elizabeth from the food table.

  “Yeah, Betsy’s filling up her second plate,” Darla Smith said. Neither Cindy nor Darla had played that morning but had come to watch. Looking at them both, dressed nicely in slacks, pretty sweaters, and jewelry, with their hair neatly combed, Celia suddenly remembered how sweaty and disheveled she felt and how she needed to get home to shower and clean up before she went to work.

  “Let me think about it,” she said to Elizabeth. “I can probably come up with something. The meeting’s next month, did you say?”

  “No, not till May,” Elizabeth said. “So you’ve got plenty of time. It’s always the third Monday night of the month. You wouldn’t have to speak long . . . and we always have refreshments afterward.” As if that would be the clinching point, thought Celia.

  Elizabeth laughed. “Not that you strike me as the kind of person who would be swayed by the enticement of refreshments.”

  Celia laughed, too. She couldn’t help it. She had to admit something to herself. Church attendance notwithstanding, she liked Elizabeth Landis. She liked her a lot. In a lot of ways the two of them seemed to think alike. “Well, I was beginning to wonder if I looked like a will-work-for-food kind of person,” she said.

  They locked eyes for the briefest of moments, then turned and headed toward the food table together.

  12

  With Every Morning Sacrifice

  It was about two weeks later, on a Saturday afternoon, that Celia unlocked the front door of her grandmother’s house in Dunmore, Georgia, and stepped into the living room. The house had a sweetish medicinal smell, like a mixture of rotting fruit and Vicks VapoRub, with a touch of something else slightly rancid, like old bacon grease.

  She knew that the phone lines between her aunts’ houses had been buzzing with spiteful, gossipy complaints about how long it was taking her to get around to coming to Dunmore to see about her grandmother’s property. Even Aunt Beulah had finally called her sometime in mid-March to find out when she was coming, speaking gently but insistently. “We’re afraid somebody’s going to break in and do mischief to Sadie’s things” was how she put it.

  Celia had been tempted to snap back with “Hey, I didn’t ask to be named sole inheritor.” But she couldn’t bring herself to be rude to Aunt Beulah. As for anyone breaking into her grandmother’s house, well, that was laughable in Celia’s opinion. If you were intent on robbery, you sure wouldn’t target a pitiful little
tin box of a house beside a railroad track, not if you had any sense.

  She had known she couldn’t put off the job indefinitely, however, and besides, the property was paid for, so there was at least a small chance of selling it and making a little money, though Celia still couldn’t imagine who would want to buy it. But at last she had made arrangements with Ollie to be away from the gallery both Saturday and Monday so she could drive to Georgia and check things out. “So Cecilia’s gonna go gloat over all her loot, huh?” he had said, and Celia had rolled her eyes and said, “Yeah, right, all my loot.”

  So here she was surveying her domain. Walking through the house took all of two minutes, and when she returned to the living room, she felt so tired and weighed down from all the dark, dank memories lurking in every corner that she locked the door again, got into her car, and drove to Dunmore’s only motel, a family-owned enterprise at the edge of town called the Sunny Side Up. She checked in, then bought a small pizza at Little Bud’s Pizza Parlor across the road and took it back to her motel room. While she sat on the bed and ate her pizza, she used the remote control to switch among the four stations that came in clearly on the television.

  A little later she called Aunt Beulah from the motel and asked if she thought she could come over to her grandmother’s house tomorrow and help her go through some things. The thought of being cooped up in that little house by herself gave her the creeps. At least it was warm and springlike outside, so she could open up the doors and windows to let in some fresh air.