I spent my childhood in Sherwood, Alabama. The town was spread out along the Arrowhead River, hemmed in by piney woods and red clay bluffs. There was a paper mill and Bell Tractor and a community college, work enough for six thousand men and women. It was a county seat, so there was a courthouse downtown, one of those white-washed beauties that you couldn’t find anymore. The day after my disaster with the Jehovah’s Witness, I sent letters to all three law firms in Sherwood and, to my surprise, one of them accepted my application.
The house was quiet when I returned, full of echoes and ghosts, but I got the pool cleaned up, the appliances running. The firm worked me to death most days, doing legwork and research for more senior attorneys, but I managed to sneak away from the office a few evenings a week and stretch out on a deck chair beside the pool. I liked to listen to the voices of lady golfers drifting over my fence. That seemed to me a deep and wonderful thing. The breeze ruffling the surface of the water, the grand evening shadows and those secret phrases in the air. Sometimes my neighbor, Bob Robinson, would be playing with his kids on their side of the fence. One dog or another was always barking down the street. It was one of those neighborhoods. Everybody owned an acre or two of simple pleasures. And the lady golfers—their voices were like memories of real speech, faint and easy, no more troubled than the day’s last light sifting down through the branches of the trees.
Summer was the busy season for attorneys. The air went heavy and damp and sound seemed to carry farther, the way it did underwater; the incessant ringing of insects, the machine rumble of traffic and construction, the earth itself coming to life again, greenery pushing in on highways, lawns refusing to stay mown. The days went on too long for you to fill them. You could taste the summer in Alabama, like walking into a room full of pipe smoke and breath and the closeness of bodies. It either tried your patience or made you languid and lazy in a way that I could understand.
My work was mostly civil, disputes between parties, generally resolved by a financial settlement, but the season had its effect on the non-criminal courts as well. There were more divorces filed in summer, for example, the heat wearing couples out, and more inheritance disputes. There was even a rise in complaints about loud music and dogs barking late into the night—animals, too, registered the change—simple things, ordinarily hashed out between reasonable people.
The second time I spoke to Delia Holladay, she came by to ask if she could use the pool. She was wearing a black one-piece swimsuit, a towel wrapped at her waist. I looked forward to those undisturbed afternoons, lounging with my lady golfers, but I didn’t see how I could refuse. Her hair was piled on top of her head, like magic, suspended there without any sort of device that I could see. I led her through the house, told her I had some things to take care of, then slipped upstairs and watched her from the window of my parents’ room—her toes-out walk across the flagstones, her hesitation at the edge of the pool, letting the towel trail behind her like a cape. She visited almost every evening and I moved a little closer each time, ducking out to see if she wanted something to drink the next day, then standing on the patio for a few minutes exchanging pleasantries the day after that, her hair slick against her skull, her arms and breasts buoyed by the water in the shallow end. Finally, in my deck chair, while she swam laps, cutting a path through clear water.
One day, I watched her climb the ladder, water streaming over her hips and legs, watched her shake the water from her hair with her fingers. I didn’t notice that she was aware of my staring, until she waved a hand across the line of my gaze and said, “You’ve never seen a woman in a bathing suit before?”
“My father died right where you’re standing,” I said.
She stood looking at me for a few seconds, her eyes going soft, then crossed the patio and rested her hand on the top of my head for an instant before going home. I hadn’t intended to tell her about my father, hadn’t even known that he was on my mind, until I said the words aloud. For three days, Delia didn’t show. I sat out by the pool alone, nursing a drink. The lady golfers chattered and chimed. Then Friday, hurrying home just in case, I found her walking up the street with a golf bag slung over one shoulder, her hair tied back in a ponytail. I stopped the car and rolled down the window to say hello. She waved and hesitated, then crossed her arms on the doorframe, rested her chin on the backs of her hands.
“You haven’t been swimming,” I said.
“I’m teaching myself to play golf,” she said. “How hard could it be? All those old ladies out there.”
“I used to play this course all the time.”
“Maybe you’ll give me a lesson one day,” she said. “Sam promised to teach me, but he has conveniently let it slip his mind.”
She grinned and adjusted the padded strap on her shoulder and walked off toward the first tee, her spikes ticking on the asphalt, the bag bumping against her hip. I sat there for a minute looking at the long row of houses. The place looked unfamiliar to me all of a sudden. I was on my street. I was sitting in my car. The sky was lazy with sunlight. I’d had the car detailed the day before and could smell the chemical odor of cleaning agent and the faintest trace of Delia’s perfume and shampoo and whatever else it was that made women smell the way they do. I had a distinct, dreamy sensation of lingering movement, as if my blood had changed direction on me. Before I knew what I was doing, I’d parked the car and hurried over to the course to watch her.
Delia’s stroke was something to see. Her chin tucked down, her shoulders sweeping around smoothly, her hand coming up to shade her eyes. Despite all that, she couldn’t hit a decent shot to save her life. She topped the ball with her driver, sending it dribbling a few yards from the tee. She managed both a slice and a hook from the fairway, the direction of the ball as unpredictable as gambling dice. Her chips were invariably too long, her putting abysmal. Every now and then, she’d lift the tail of her shirt, absently, to wipe her face, exposing her belly button and the breathtaking curve of her rib cage.
She played every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, always alone, always close to dusk when night was beginning to take the edge off of the heat. I was around for the first hole, hiding among the unused golf carts, and I was there at eighteen, when she would tally her scorecard in white ankle socks and saddle shoes. I kept to the rough, crouched among the young, sappy pines and fragrant dogwoods. She launched dozens of unwary balls into the woods, sending me scrambling for safety. I would press myself against the ground when she came in looking for them and pray that she didn’t find me instead.
“Here little ball,” she’d say, whistling softly as if calling a dog. “C’mere, little guy. I promise I’ll treat you better next time.”
She caught me on the sixteenth green, almost a month before my twenty-eighth birthday. I was hiding in a stand of trees, watching her putt, wet to the knees from a detour through a water hazard. It was an easy shot, eight inches at the outside, but she missed it anyway, the ball rimming out of the cup and settling a foot from the hole. Delia swore prettily and tapped the putter against the bottom of her shoe. She said, “Why don’t you come on out? I can’t concentrate with you back there.”
She wiped her brow and looked in my direction. I hunched down, tried to make myself smaller. I didn’t quite believe that she was talking to me. I could hear a sprinkler going in the distance, could feel the hairs on the back of my neck. My heart was like a ricochet. Delia brandished the putter above her head with both hands and said, “All right. If you won’t come out, I’m coming in after you.”
Then she came stalking across the green in big, determined steps, her knees flashing at the hem of her shorts. I considered making a break, but I couldn’t figure a way out of the rough without her identifying me anyway, so I stepped sheepishly from behind the trees and held my hands up in surrender.
“It’s me,” I said. “It’s Simon Bell.”
“Simon?” She lowered the putter and looked at me. “How long have you been following me? I heard you crashing around back
on eleven.”
“A few weeks,” I said.
“A few weeks?” she said, arching her eyebrows. “I meant how long today.”
She tilted her head slightly and squinted at me as if examining a blurred photograph. There was one of those early moons pressing against the sky, and all around us I could hear crickets in the grass, night making an entrance. “A few weeks,” she said again, her voice going gentle and amused, like that was the sweetest thing she had heard in a long time.
More Than One Way to Steal a Heart
Delia Holladay was a housekeeper’s daughter. She was still too young for school then, and her mother would bring her along most days, leave her on the living room couch in a stranger’s house, the black and white television muttering quietly, or set her to work on simpler tasks, emptying wastebaskets, wiping countertops, working a feather duster around alarm clocks and little dishes full of change and framed photographs of people she didn’t know.
Sometimes Delia, this little girl with skinny legs and ragged knees, with a rib cage like a dish drain and arms as lean and hard as a boy’s, would be left alone in a well-appointed bedroom, heavy curtains fanning beside the windows, silk pillows piled against the headboard of the bed, and sometimes she would find herself, almost against her will, standing in a walk-in closet, rows of dresses hanging around her like tired ghosts. She knew she would be skinned alive—her mother’s favorite threat—if she were discovered, but the desire was so strong, she couldn’t help herself. While her mother ironed or washed the dishes by hand, making other people’s messes disappear, Delia would press her cheeks against crisp evening gowns and slip negligees over her tank tops and cut-off jeans. She’d pose in front of a mirror in someone else’s lingerie and apply a little color to her lips, just for one look at herself, a glimpse into the future, a few seconds as a woman. Delia with her hair cropped short like a boy and her reckless elbows.
And sometimes, while her mother ran the vacuum cleaner, Delia would rifle through drawers in a polished bureau and choose one thing, just one, maybe a scarf that looked as though it hadn’t been worn in a while or a tarnished money clip or an earring without a mate or a pair of pantyhose or a discarded leather watchband, nothing of real value, and slip it into her pocket and make it her own. She kept her takings in a Red Goose shoe box under her bed. At night, when the house was quiet except for the synchronized snoring of her brothers, she’d open the lid and have a look at her takings, other people’s smells lifting up to her from the box, expensive perfume and animal skins and cool metals and what she believed must surely be a sort of joy.
Her father taught her to play the piano when she was eight years old. He worked at the Ramada Inn, doing standards for tourists, splitting the money that collected in his jar with the bartender. She had his careful hands and his ear for pitch and, to a degree, his love for music. Her parents couldn’t afford a piano so her father took an old card table and a black marking pen and drew diagrams of the keyboard on opposite sides. He would sit across from her and tell her to imitate the position of his fingers on the imaginary keys, first the major and minor chords, then scales, then simple songs that she could play with one hand. Her father hummed along while she tapped out notes, unsure of her accuracy because she couldn’t hear the music, her fingertips making a steady wincing sound, her father hunched close to watch her hands, nodding his head as if he could hear real music tumbling out of the table.
Nights she’d go with her mother down to the Ramada and watch her father play for as long as she could keep her eyes open, then fall asleep curled head to foot with her mother around one of the big horseshoe-shaped booths at the back of the bar. When he was finished, he would shake her shoulder gently and lead her over to the piano and let her have an hour or so while the staff cleaned around her. Delia loved those hours—Felix the Bartender shushing around with a push broom and the waitresses gathered at a table by the piano smoking cigarettes and counting tips. Even when she hit a sour chord, she loved the sound the piano made, full and rich and resonant as night.
When her father wasn’t playing the piano, he was home, working on an old MG convertible in the backyard. That always made perfect sense to her, engine work and piano playing, delicate tasks done with the hands. She would sit in the driver’s seat while her father tinkered and listen to him talk about howling down the highway with the top down, on up into Canada or Alaska maybe. The hood blocked her view of him and his voice, muffled and disembodied, sounded eerie to Delia. She didn’t notice then that when her father talked about driving to Alaska he always said “I” and never “we” or “us”.
Her father liked how on warm nights the labels of beer bottles would slip off sticky in your hands. He did not like the way he met his wife, which was through the classified ads. He was embarrassed that he couldn’t find a woman on his own. He always said he placed the ad on a bet, but Delia suspected he was lying. His ad read SMALL WHITE MAN, 5’4, SEEKS WHITE WOMAN WITH BIG HEART and he liked that. Her father thought that was very clever and so did her mother. They lived near the paper mill, and his idea of a perfect evening was driving up to the top of the red clay bluffs north of town and trying to pick out their house among all the distant, flickering lights in windows. They could always agree on which house was theirs, though Delia doubted that they were ever right.
When he left for good, Delia was fourteen. The first thing her mother did was buy Delia a piano, used and battered and expensive, and it hunched in the corner of the den, taking up too much space. She said, “At least he left you what was good in him. You shouldn’t lose that.”
She was teaching by the time she met Sam Holladay. She had taken a job at the public school in Sherwood, directing the chorus and organizing recitals for her students. Sam Holladay saw her in the wings of the stage. This young woman gesturing frantically at the performers, moving her lips, strangely, as if urging the proper notes from the piano with her voice. She was slender and a little awkward, with green eyes. She had an unpretending elegance about her. The old auditorium was without air-conditioning and the crowd was wasting away in the close air, but she seemed strangely unaffected, her face dry, her motion easy, as if she had discovered a remedy for summer in Alabama that no one else had ever heard of. He approached her after the show, found her backstage shepherding the children. His opening line, which he’d been considering all evening, was, “My name is Sam Holladay. I know all the history of the world.”
Six weeks later, they were married. Delia believed herself to be in love with this man, who taught history and who moved in that pleasingly precarious way that tall people have, like their bones can’t quite hold them the way they used to. He had a sweep of moon-white hair and a soft stomach and heavy arms. When he held her, really gathered her to him for the first time, they were leaning against a Cadillac in the parking lot of her apartment complex waiting for a locksmith to arrive. It was the night of their first official date, and Sam had locked his keys in his car with the engine running, and she found his absent-mindedness attractive. For two hours, they waited. The city was full of troublesome locks. She made the occasional trip upstairs for more beer and they talked—he about history, the immense scope of the world and the way everything ran in cycles, she about a house full of brothers in Mississippi—told each other the things that everyone tells as a way of revealing something about themselves. Cats nosed around the Dumpster, mewing softly. Every now and then, a car pulled into the lot and they stopped talking and squinted into the headlights, trying to see if the locksmith had arrived. If Delia knew the driver, she’d wave and Sam would raise his beer in greeting. A short silence would fall, but it wasn’t an uncomfortable sort of quiet—the two of them gathering their thoughts, the air damp from the afternoon rain. After a while, she said, “Are you ever going to kiss me, Sam?”
He leaned in too fast, their teeth bumping hard. He didn’t know what to do with his hands, but when he managed, finally, to get them situated around her back and shoulders, she felt like he was cove
ring her completely, the night air touching not a single molecule of her skin.
This was the man she married, all flesh and warmth and forgetfulness. He was gentle as a Saint Bernard with his students. She moved into his house on the golf course, not unlike the houses she had helped her mother clean as a little girl. They drove to school together in the mornings, home together at night, and she began to see a picture of her life stretching out before her like a sheet of music, the borders clear, the tone defined. It was not an entirely unpleasant idea, this life, just not quite the one she’d imagined for herself.
One night, lying in bed, she decided to tell Sam a story.
“There was a creek behind my family’s house,” she said. “A little stream, really, but in the winter it would swell and run fast enough to be dangerous. Dangerous to a child, anyway. I remember when I was ten there was this crazy ice storm. No one knew what to do in an ice storm. We’d never seen anything like it. And this was serious. Snapping whole trees. Power outages. Everything.”
She paused, propped up on her elbow. She took a breath. The curtains billowed lightly in the breeze. He didn’t make a sound.
She said, “My brothers stole some beer from the fridge and took a flashlight and I followed them down to the water. We could hear it from the house and we wanted to see it. There were these pieces of ice whipping around. It sounded like the river was full of broken glass. And there was this beaver dam that had a section ripped out of it by the current, that was all jagged and frozen over.”
Divining Rod Page 2
