No Dark Valley

by Jamie Langston Turner

  During the comments that followed, only one timid objection was raised by Cindy Petrarch, who suggested that the ones who hadn’t played yet might be fresher than the ones who had played both matches so far, and therefore might perform better in tomorrow’s match. On the other hand, Darla Smith said, the ones who had already played might feel warmed up and in a groove, and therefore more confident going into such a big match.

  Anastasia Elsey started repeating everything Nan and Judy had said earlier until Betsy Harris finally interrupted her and offered these words: “Hey, we’re all grown-ups here. Everybody knows who our best players are, and everybody knows I’m not one of them.” She laughed, and so did several others. “Like my mama used to say, what’s good isn’t always what’s fun. What’s good right now is for us to win. It might not be fun for some of us to sit out, but hey, we got something bigger going on here.” Betsy reached over and socked Bonnie in the arm. “Just because Bonnie doesn’t let me play much doesn’t mean she doesn’t love me. She might be mean, but she’s looking out for the team.”

  Celia didn’t hear much of what went on after that because Betsy’s words had called to mind “the forest versus the trees” way of seeing things that Elizabeth had talked about just a week ago. Right there on a screened porch in Charleston, this thought exploded into a truth that she had steadfastly refused to consider before now, a possibility that she had always slammed the door on when the slightest suggestion of it came tapping at her heart. Now, in an instant, the fact dropped down upon her like a sure blessing, like a garment that was tailor-made for her and all she had to do was lift her arms and let it slip down over her.

  Actually it was a confirmation of something that Margaret Tuttle had already said the week before at Aunt Cassie’s Kitchen, which had followed Elizabeth’s comment about looking at the forest instead of the trees. Somehow they had moved—or rather leapt, sprung, catapulted—from the poem Elizabeth had read at the table, the one titled “Early Shift at Duke’s Donuts,” to the subject of the good things that can come out of suffering. Celia had no idea how the transition had taken place, but suddenly there they were, talking about the heartaches they had been through.

  Not her, of course—she was only listening, that is, at first. Elizabeth and Margaret were astonishingly forthright in their divulging of personal trials. Sometime after Elizabeth said grace, Celia remembered cutting into her corn-bread muffin and placing a pat of butter between the two halves, then closing it up again and staring at it intently as Elizabeth said, “I’m such a chicken when it comes to telling people what God has done for me, so I asked Margaret to come with me for moral support.” That’s when it dawned on Celia that the whole thing had been premeditated, that Elizabeth had singled her out for special attention and had carefully timed her stop by the art gallery that day. It hadn’t been a spur-of-the-moment idea as she was driving by the Trio.

  Elizabeth had asked Margaret to talk first because, she said, the story really started with her. And somehow, between bites of her pork chop and mashed potatoes, Margaret told Celia a remarkable account of how as a girl she had lost her mother, had been preyed upon by her grandfather, and had lost her four-year-old son. She didn’t dwell on the details, but there was no mistaking the depth of her suffering. For a short while they ate in silence before she took up her story again. After many years, she said, a friend had come along to rescue her, to teach her again what love meant, and to lead her back to God.

  “Her name was Birdie,” Margaret said, “and I loved her with all my heart.”

  Someone came to refill their glasses of tea, and Margaret stopped again for a moment, during which time Celia felt the tug of wanting to hear the rest of the story, yet wishing she could stop up her ears against it at the same time. After the waitress left, Margaret told about Birdie’s sudden death and about her own vow to take up Birdie’s work on earth. She spoke briefly about her husband, Thomas, who “had waited patiently for me through the long drought.” At last, she said, when she had lifted her eyes to heaven and the “gentle showers of faith, hope, and love had begun their work” in her heart, she and Thomas discovered a joy they had never known.

  Ten minutes—that’s all it took to sum up almost forty years of human pain and divine redemption. The orange Sunkist clock on the wall behind Aunt Cassie’s cash register had shown six o’clock when Margaret began talking and ten minutes past when she finished up with “I do not speak of these things to bring attention to myself but to testify of God’s power to heal a broken heart.”

  At which point Elizabeth picked up the story and, as she was finishing up her meat loaf and butter beans, told how Margaret had indeed taken up Birdie’s mantle of ministering to others by coming alongside her during her own time of trouble. Elizabeth was wearing a short-sleeved olive green sweater and a necklace with a large coppery pendant, and Celia noticed how exactly her eyes matched the color of her sweater. If someone had asked Celia what color Elizabeth Landis’s eyes were, she wouldn’t have known, but evidently they were that sort of vague, accommodating gray-blue-green that takes on whatever color it’s near.

  Elizabeth gave few details but made it clear that her trouble somehow included her husband, Ken. “God used Margaret,” she said, “to teach me about grace. She told me first about God’s grace to me, and then showed me how I could be a giver of grace myself. God used her to help Ken and me repair our home.” She laid her hand on Margaret’s arm and added, “She’s still teaching me how to give myself to other people.”

  There was an awkward moment when Elizabeth stopped. Celia felt something rising in her throat, something like a choking sob or a cry for help, but she managed to swallow hard, then took a long drink of tea followed by a deep breath to calm herself. Common sense suggested that it was her turn to talk, but she didn’t trust herself right now. Who knew what would come out of her mouth if she tried to speak. She might start screaming and never stop.

  Thankfully, just then a minor disturbance distracted everybody’s attention for a little while. One of the three elderly women sitting at a nearby table somehow stumbled as she was getting up to leave and went down on her knees. Her pocketbook went flying and slid right under the feet of the old man with his beard in a ponytail. Maybe he looked a lot older than he really was, though, because he jumped up as lithe as a panther and dashed to her assistance. The two yuppie-looking men absorbed in their newspaper glanced over with only the mildest interest, then went back to reading.

  The woman wasn’t hurt, but the bearded man gallantly insisted on walking her out to the car. Before she could stop herself, Celia’s imagination got cranked up. Maybe neither one of them was married, and this time next year the woman might be telling someone, “We met at Aunt Cassie’s Kitchen one day when I slipped on the floor and he helped me up.” By then she might have talked him into cutting off his beard and sprucing himself up a little.

  The incident passed, and Celia started eating her apple cobbler, taking quick bites one right after the other. She was ready to leave this place and get back to the quiet of her apartment. She didn’t want to hear anybody else talk about hardships and recoveries. Her head suddenly felt swollen with the stories she had just heard. Her ears felt as if they were filling up with water, the same way they sometimes felt after a long tennis match.

  Elizabeth spoke again, her voice soft, almost pleading. “We didn’t ask you here to pump you, Celia,” she said. “We’re both sort of closed-up types ourselves, and we don’t want you thinking we go around telling our sob stories to everybody and then try to trap people into revealing all their deep dark secrets. I had to practically twist Margaret’s arm to get her to do this with me.”

  Margaret nodded. “These are not things we wish to make public.”

  So why pick on me? Celia thought. I didn’t ask to hear any of it!

  “Like I said, I’m a chicken,” Elizabeth said. “I’ve been praying for you, but I was so afraid to say anything. I would start to, then back out. I hate being nosy, but
God kept on telling me to talk to you.”

  “Elizabeth has been telling me about you for months,” Margaret said. “I felt that I already knew you when you came to our poetry meeting a few weeks ago. I, too, have been praying for you.”

  “But why?” Celia said, looking straight at Elizabeth. “Why me? Do I look like some horrible sinner or something?”

  Elizabeth shook her head slowly. She set her spoon down and wiped her mouth, then folded her arms and leaned forward. “You’re a beautiful girl, Celia,” she said, “but your eyes are sad. I’ve had this feeling that you were carrying around something heavy, and I’ve wanted so badly to help.” She paused. “If there’s any way I could, that is. But then, I might be wrong. Maybe you’re not sad at all. Maybe I’m imagining things. I’ve been known to do that.”

  There it was again . . . that thing about her sad eyes. Celia was tired of hearing it. How did a person get rid of a malady like that? There were all manner of medications for everything else, not to mention all the little cosmetic tricks to disguise a pointed chin or to make your face look thinner, but what could you do about something like sad eyes? That went too deep for pills or makeup to change. That was a soul sickness.

  At last Celia trusted herself to open her mouth, but she spoke lightly, casually, and she avoided looking at either Elizabeth or Margaret directly, fearful that her eyes might get more specific, might give away more than her general sadness. “Well, both of my parents died when I was fifteen,” Celia said. There, that should satisfy them. Anybody without either a mother or father would have cause to look sad.

  Margaret made a sympathetic sound, and Elizabeth said softly, “I’m sorry. That must have been awful for you.”

  And though neither one of them pressed her for more information, for some reason Celia heard herself add, “My grandmother took me in.” Her voice seemed to come from somewhere outside her body, reverberating all around her, as if she were at one end of a tunnel and the words were being spoken from the other end. And even as she noted this distortion of sound, she marveled not only that she had felt compelled to mention her grandmother but that she had chosen that particular way of saying it: “My grandmother took me in.” Was that really what she had said? Why hadn’t she stated it the way it really was? “I had no choice but to go live with my grandmother, and I hated every minute of it.”

  “Your grandmother must have loved you,” Margaret said, and though Celia couldn’t be sure, she thought she heard herself laugh at that. But then again, maybe she hadn’t laughed. Maybe she had only stared in confused silence.

  * * *

  It was a short time after that, before they left Aunt Cassie’s, that Elizabeth mentioned the forest and the trees in regard to different ways of thinking. “I’ve always been better at seeing the parts than the whole big picture,” she said. Celia didn’t remember how that had fit into their conversation, but it had made an impression. It had suggested a question, which she had shoved to the back of her mind to think about later: Could it be that she herself had looked so closely at all the negatives of living with her grandmother that she had missed something larger?

  And now, sitting in the flickering light of a screened porch two hundred miles away and a week later, the question came back to her, and she saw the truth in what Margaret and Elizabeth had said. And also in what Betsy Harris had just said about love. Somebody could do things you didn’t like but still love you. Somebody could be perceived as mean but still want the best for you.

  Grandmother loved me. It was as simple and undeniable a truth as the ones listed in the Declaration of Independence, those self-evident ones about all men being created equal, about being endowed with the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Grandmother loved me. Maybe she had stifled Celia’s liberty, had discouraged the pursuit of what Celia considered happiness, but she had certainly, most assuredly, loved her.

  Somehow she left the porch of the condo and found herself alone in the small bedroom she was sharing with Tammy Elias. Celia was sitting on the edge of the bed staring up at the wallpaper border of sailboats and leaping dolphins when Elizabeth peeked in. “Bonnie sent me to check on you,” she said. “You’re okay, aren’t you? She was wondering if today’s match did you in. She got worried when you left the meeting so suddenly.”

  Celia nodded. “I’m fine,” she said. “Just thinking—you know, forest and trees and all that. There’s a big picture I’m trying to see.”

  Elizabeth cocked her head and studied her. She looked as if she had a hundred questions she wanted to ask, but when she spoke, the only one that came out was “So I can tell her you’re on for tomorrow?”

  “Oh sure. I’m going to try to get to bed pretty soon and rest up.”

  Elizabeth hesitated at the door and said, “Is there anything . . . ?”

  But Celia stood up briskly and threw back the bedspread. “Tell her I’m feeling great. I’ll be ready to hit the courts in the morning.” She took her pajamas out of her suitcase and walked toward the bathroom. “Night, Elizabeth,” she said and closed the door.

  It was shortly after noon the next day, and Celia was sitting on the ground with her back against a tree at the country club in Charleston where the state tournament was being held. She had just finished her match, and her long winning streak for the season was over. She had not gone down without a fight, though. She and her opponent, a twenty-something woman named Kristin, had slugged it out for over two hours in the scorching heat, splitting sets 7–6, 5–7.

  Instead of playing a third set, the state tournament rules required what was called a third-set tiebreak, what amounted to a single long game to determine the winner. The first one to reach ten points and be ahead by two took the match. Tied at 10–all in the tiebreak, Celia had dumped a service return into the net and then in the next point had sent a lob only inches long.

  So in the end the difference between winning and losing had come down to a couple of inches. You could come that close and your performance would still be recorded as a loss, just as surely as if the score had been 6–0, 6–0. Nobody cared whether it was as close as it could have possibly been. The fact was that you lost, period. In fact, in a tennis match you could actually win more points, even more games, and still come out the loser. Celia had often wondered if there was something wrong with a scoring system like that. It reminded her of the way the electoral college worked in national elections.

  She couldn’t remember ever being so hot. She had played lots of other matches in the heat of the day, but she couldn’t remember anything quite like today. The weather report that morning had predicted a heat index of 115 degrees with humidity up around ninety percent. She was almost becoming used to the way stray lines from her grandmother’s hymns had started finding their way into everything she did, waiting for her around every bend, sidling up alongside her at the most unexpected times. “The burning of the noonday heat” was the phrase that slipped into her mind now from “Beneath the Cross of Jesus,” a hymn the organist had always played during Communion at Bethany Hills.

  She leaned her head back against the tree trunk and closed her eyes. Even though her match had lasted two hours, the other four matches were still going on. That was because she had gotten on the court almost a full hour before anyone else. The number-one singles player always went on first in a tournament, and the others were assigned courts as they came available. Things had gotten backed up today because of the heat. People were taking longer breaks between games and sets, and the officials and timekeepers weren’t saying a thing about it. Nobody wanted a player conking out here at the country club in the middle of the state championship.

  Anastasia Elsey was the only one who had been waiting for her after the match, and she had patted Celia’s arm comfortingly, then dashed off to spread the news of the loss to the other team members, all of whom were over watching Nan and Judy, who were engaged in a doubles match that was “nip and tuck,” as Anastasia put it. She didn’t know who was ahe
ad on the other courts, but she thought Elizabeth might have won the first set of her match.

  Celia dreaded facing her team. They had grown to count on her winning. Glad that none of the rest of them were around right then, she had walked to the rear of the clubhouse, away from the courts, where she had dropped her bag and collapsed under a tree. Every inch of her was dripping wet. She had her towel slung around her neck, but it was as wet as the rest of her.

  So here was another fact of life: All good things came to an end. You couldn’t go on winning forever. There would always be someone who could beat you. Even your best talents, considerable though they might be, could always be topped by somebody somewhere.

  The team still had a chance, of course, depending on how the other matches were going. If they could take three of the other four courts, they would play in the semifinals tomorrow morning, and if they won that, they’d go on to the finals tomorrow afternoon. She was so tired and hot right now, though, that she couldn’t let herself think of having to play two matches tomorrow.

  She heard a celebratory shout go up on one of the courts down where the men’s matches were being played. You could tell it was men by the way their voices carried, by the sustained roaring effect and guttural grunts. Evidently somebody had just won and made his team very happy. But that meant somebody had lost, too, maybe even in a squeaker like the one she had just played. She knew exactly how that man must feel right now. All that effort for nothing, only to be reduced on the master score sheet to a big fat zero.

  All of which reminded her that seven of her teammates were still out on the courts battling it out under the hot sun while she sat here in the shade. She pulled herself to her feet and headed over to the courts to see how things were going.

  Bonnie Maggio, who wasn’t playing this match, saw her coming and hurried to meet her. “There you are, girl. I’ve been looking everywhere for you. Tough match.” She squeezed Celia’s shoulder. “I watched most of your first set and part of the second. That girl was a machine.” She took Celia’s bag from her and hoisted it to her shoulder. “Don’t beat yourself up. You played hard.” She grinned, her eyes crinkling into slits. “Hey, look at it this way. Maybe they won’t bump you up to 4.5 now that you’ve finally lost a match.”