And it made her parents happy, too. Her junior high had a band, and in seventh grade Celia sat first chair among the ten clarinets. She liked seeing her parents in the audience when the band gave a concert. She liked the way the worry lines in her father’s face smoothed out when he listened to her practice at home. “You’re already better than I was when I graduated from high school,” he told her one day when she was thirteen.
Her fourteenth birthday had started out pretty much as expected. It was early August, hot as all get-out in Lawrenceville, Georgia, and when she woke up that morning, she lay in bed and rehearsed the joys ahead. She knew her mother was trying to finish up a bridesmaid’s dress today and was meeting with another woman who was moving into a brand-new house and wanted all new window treatments, which was the new term for what everybody used to call draperies or curtains. But at three o’clock, her mother had promised, they would ride the bus downtown to JCPenney to look at school clothes.
It had never seemed odd to Celia at all that her birthday presents were always necessities, never luxuries. School clothes, shoes, backpacks, notebooks, pens and pencils—these were the standard gifts. But this year was different. This year she got to help pick her own clothes, so even though some of the surprise would be missing, it made her feel grown-up to participate in the selection.
Celia got her own breakfast that morning, a bowl of Cream of Wheat and a piece of cinnamon toast, and ate it while she watched a rerun of Perry Mason, then practiced her clarinet for a while, read her Bible for the standard fifteen minutes, tidied her room, took some clothes off the clothesline for her mother and folded them, and read two chapters in a book her Sunday school teacher had given her, A Girl of the Limberlost.
She heard her mother talk to the bridesmaid on the phone and, later, to the rich lady who was getting all new window treatments. The bridesmaid came over for her final fitting around noon, and the rich lady arrived early, so the two of them overlapped a little. Celia herself went to the door to let the rich lady in, a tall, skinny, magazine-model type wearing a bright turquoise pantsuit and aggressively made up with heavy mascara and deep purplish lipstick. As she escorted her to her mother’s sewing room, Celia could feel the lady’s eyes behind her, taking in every detail of their modest home. It worried her a little, the way she looked down from her great height so condescendingly. What if she decided not to use her mother, to give her business to someone with more social class?
She shouldn’t have worried, though. As her mother explained to her later when they were on their way downtown to JCPenney, people like that really preferred their hired help to be of humble means. Her mother didn’t laugh all that often, but when she did, it was a beautiful sound, almost like singing. Celia remembered that she had laughed that day on the bus as she told Celia how rich people sometimes liked to boast to each other about such discoveries as “this amazing tailor I found in this little dump of a shop on the west end of town” or “the most exquisite artist of a carpenter whose shop is the filthiest little hole in the wall you ever saw.” If the workman himself were freakish in some way—say, a midget or a paraplegic—all the better for their story.
When Celia wondered aloud what the rich lady would tell her friends about them, her mother laughed again and, in a rare show of playacting, said in a breathy, gushy voice, accompanied by much hand fluttering, “You wouldn’t believe this little plain sparrow of a seamstress I ran across over in those shacks behind the bus depot! Does the most astounding things with this absolute relic of a sewing machine!” Then, evidently afraid she had gone too far and not wanting to set a bad example, her mother grew serious again. “I’m just teasing, you understand,” she said, patting Celia’s hand. “We all have our little oddities.”
They rode the rest of the way in silence, Celia reviewing the way things stacked up in unequal portions in life, some people having so much money and others not nearly enough. It troubled her to hear her mother describe herself as a plain sparrow. She was a small woman and didn’t go in much for fancy things, but in Celia’s opinion she was much, much prettier than the rich lady in her turquoise pantsuit. And the part about the shacks—that bothered her, too. Theirs wasn’t a grand house by any means, but it was clean and neat and plenty big for the three of them.
After a supper of grilled hamburgers that night, which was Celia’s birthday choice, she opened her presents—the things she had already picked out and tried on earlier that day, which her mother had brought home and wrapped. Celia remembered searching her father’s face as she opened each one, hoping he wouldn’t think they had spent too much money. But if he did, he didn’t show it. Grandmother had sent her a copy of Little Women, and Papa and Mums had sent a card and a ten-dollar bill.
After the gifts they had cake—yellow cake with white icing, decorated with brightly colored candy sprinkles—and then Celia started back to her bedroom to put her new things away. That’s when her father called her back. “Oh, say, Celie, there’s one more present we almost forgot about.”
Another present? Celia was astonished. Had she heard right? She had opened all the things she had picked out downtown. And it was plenty! They shouldn’t have spent more money on something else. Maybe her father was teasing, though it wasn’t like him to tease.
She turned back, clutching her new school clothes to her chest, and looked at her parents quizzically. Her mother laughed her beautiful singing laugh and said, “You should see your face!” And her father pulled out from under the table another present, a rectangular shape wrapped in shiny lime green paper with a big bow of curly white crinkle ribbon.
Astonishment heaped on top of astonishment as Celia put her clothes down on a chair and set about opening the surprise gift. She could hardly get her breath while she was unwrapping it, and afterward—well, she didn’t remember if she had even been able to get a word out. She did remember staring at it for a long, long time and at some point crying over the gift itself, the money it must have cost, her parents’ happy faces, and of course her own immense delight.
It was a new clarinet, at least new to her. As she lifted it gently out of its case, her mother told her the story. Her father had seen it in a pawn shop downtown one day and had called Mrs. Campbell to come down and take a look at it. Mrs. Campbell had tried not to let on in front of the shop owner as she looked it over, had even scowled and made some deprecating remarks about the finger pads and such, but she told Celia’s father as soon as they went back out on the sidewalk that it was a wonderful instrument worth about ten times what they were asking for it. She said the quality was such that Celia could play it all the way through college.
“Play it for us right now!” her father said, and Celia went to get a reed from her old case. She still couldn’t believe it—a new clarinet! How in the world had her parents paid for it? Just the week before, she had heard her father talking about needing to find a plumber to replace some pipes under the house.
When she came back to the kitchen, her mother had found a marker and was neatly printing Celia’s name on a little card. “Look, I got the nametag off that old brown suitcase in the attic,” she said. “We’ll put it on your case so nobody gets it mixed up with theirs.”
And as Celia picked up her new clarinet, the truth struck her. Her mother’s sewing machine fund had once again been robbed, in a very big way. She glanced over at her mother, who was smiling as her small fingers slipped the name card behind the little plastic cover of the tag, and Celia knew that those same hands would be using the old Singer relic for many, many months to come. No bells and whistles anytime soon.
* * *
Celia ran her thumb over the nametag now. The years might have faded the letters, but every detail of her fourteenth birthday was as clear as type rolled freshly inked off the press. She wasn’t surprised to find herself crying. This was a memory that warranted great bucketfuls of tears . . . her dear, sweet, good parents, both of them so full of joy at the gift they had given her.
If she had been readi
ng one of Frank Bledsoe’s deplorable stories and come across the phrase “her dear, sweet, good parents,” she would have slashed through it with her red pen and written in the margin, “Too gooey—cut the mush!” But those were the three best adjectives to describe her parents. They were other things, also—strict, frugal, serious, nervous. But first they were dear, sweet, and good. If she wrote the phrase herself, about her parents, and some editor told her to tone down the sentimentality, she would have to refuse, clinging to the higher standard of honesty.
As she walked back to the hall closet to put her clarinet away, Celia knew she was crying not only for the loss of her parents and their goodness, for the huge gap their death had left in her life, but also for what she knew would be their vast disappointment if they could see her today and know the things she had done. She was crying over the happy memory of her long-ago fourteenth birthday. And she was crying, also, because she was once again stabbed in the heart by the realization that right this very minute another fourteen-year-old could be alive if she hadn’t done the things she had done.
16
Not a Shadow, Not a Sigh
Celia arrived promptly at seven o’clock. Cars were parked in front of Elizabeth Landis’s house on both sides of the street, but Elizabeth had told Celia to pull into the driveway, since she would need to unload the painting she was bringing to the poetry club meeting. Celia was looking forward to having this evening behind her. She was afraid Elizabeth was expecting too much of her, and she suspected that this whole poetry club business was a little corny. She couldn’t figure out, though, how someone seemingly as classy as Elizabeth would be part of something corny.
The Women Well Versed—that was what they called themselves. The name was actually what had raised the first question mark in Celia’s mind about the seriousness of the group. They met once a month at a member’s home, and this month Elizabeth had volunteered her house. It was a brick ranch style, nothing pretentious but comfortable looking, with two big pots of red geraniums on the front steps and an American flag hanging by the front door, which was standing open.
From the driveway Celia could see through the bay window into the living room, which was softly lit but apparently unoccupied. The women must be meeting in another room. Maybe they were all in the kitchen sampling the refreshments.
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.”
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