“You don’t even know if anything happened,” I said.
She turned her head and gave me an eyebrow raise, almost the exact same expression she’d worn that day on the golf course, full of pity and tenderness and surprise. My lady golfers chorused beyond the fence, doing harmony with the nimble insects and the lawn mowers up and down the street. Delia walked over and stood beside me and pushed my eyes closed with her fingertips. She sat on the edge of the chair without taking her hands from my face and lowered her head down to my chest, like she was listening to my heart. We stayed like that for what seemed like a very long time, Delia breathing against my neck, me listening while the world made itself heard around us.
Near the end of June, Sam Holladay left town for a week to go to a teacher’s conference in Atlanta. Delia didn’t mention the trip beforehand, just showed up at my house when he was gone and stayed for four days. She went home once in a while, of course, to pick up clean clothes or check the messages on her answering machine or to wait for Sam to call, but for the most part we were together all the time. We cooked dinner together and ate it in the dining room, silverware ticking pleasantly against our plates. Delia liked to leave the dishes in the sink, then rush off to the bedroom or the couch or anywhere there was space enough for the two of us to make love. We promised ourselves that we would get around to doing the dishes, but we never did. I liked the dirty dishes as much as anything else that week. It was like when you were a kid and your parents went out of town. You wrecked the house and everything, because there was no one around to keep an eye on you.
One evening, I came horne from work and dropped my briefcase just inside the door and heard piano music coming from the living room. It was one of those overly formal rooms where no one ever actually spent time. I stood there for a minute just listening, thinking that this was what I wanted. This moment and this faint watery sound and this dim hallway. I was already taking off my tie when I came around the corner, and there was Delia on the piano bench with Bob Robinson’s daughter, Maddie, beside her.
“Sorry,” I said, straightening my tie. “I didn’t know anyone else was here.”
They swiveled around to look at me. Delia said, “I’m teaching Maddie the piano. She wants to be in the Junior Miss thing, and I think piano is a much more dignified talent than baton twirling.”
“That’s nice,” I said.
Maddie said, “Hi, Mr. Bell. I’m not good yet.”
“You’ve only been at it for an afternoon,” Delia said. “Have a little patience, sweetie. You’re a natural.”
Delia tousled her hair. Maddie looked at me. “I’m a natural,” she said.
“I’m sure you are a natural,” I said. “But I think you better run home now. It’s almost dinnertime, isn’t it? Your daddy’s probably worried about you.”
“He isn’t worried,” she said. But she slipped down from the piano stool anyway and started for the door. She was wearing socks and no shoes and moved her feet across the wood floor like she was ice skating. As she was sliding around the corner, she grabbed the doorjamb and looked back at Delia and said, “Bye, Mrs. Holladay,” then kept skidding down the hall until she was out of sight. Delia waved at the spot where Maddie had been. I said, “Are you crazy? She’s gonna tell Bob she was here. That you were here.”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said.
She was in a good mood, I could tell, and she didn’t want me to do anything to ruin it. My mother had hung lace curtains on the windows in this room and the floor was dappled with shadow. The window was open, and I could smell a cook-out somewhere on the street. I wasn’t going to make her unhappy. I sat beside her on the bench and said, “Teach me?”
“I don’t do adults,” she said, patting my knee. “Adults are set in their bad habits. Kids are better at learning.”
That night, I sat up in bed reading over a client’s will after Delia had fallen asleep. The sheet was gathered below her waist, her hip curving smoothly into the pool of light from the bedside lamp, her ribs arching toward her breasts, her arms folded in tight like she was cold, her whole body impossibly soft from sleep. I moved to cover her and she stirred, rolled toward me and threw an arm across my middle. She said something that I couldn’t hear, some affectionate murmur too quiet to understand and all of a sudden I felt a weight of indefinable sadness rising up in me like a memory. I thought of the man we had spied on just a few days before, waiting out his life for my mother to love him back, thought of my mother, beautiful and young and married to a man almost twice her age. When I came home from college for her funeral, I couldn’t bring myself to look closely at the body. Two of her cousins-twin sisters from Mississippi-had identified her for the police, and it seemed possible, at that moment, that they had made a mistake, that it wasn’t my mother in the casket at all. She was living out her life somewhere else, with a new husband and new children. And sometimes she was afraid to fall asleep at night for fear that when she woke all the passing years would be erased, and she would find herself again in this house with a dead husband and a son in college and the burden of her own betrayal fresh and heavy in her chest.
Delia, sleeping still, shaped her hand against my thigh. I remembered my father as well, how he had managed to bend our lives back to normal, how he had managed to go on loving her, despite everything. And I wondered if a similar time was around the corner in my future, when Sam Holladay would take his wife back from me. I worried about Sam sometimes, I really did. Not that he would find us out—I wouldn’t have minded being caught. Part of me wanted it to happen, in fact, wanted to have everything out in the open, clear of shadows and shame—but I worried what the discovery would do to him. He moved into the neighborhood just a year after my family. I used to cut his grass now and then when I was old enough. I’d be out doing our yard on a riding mower that my father had brought home from work and see Sam Holladay shoving a push model back and forth across the grass. He’d get caught in the tall weeds near the curb and the engine would cut out on him. He had to stop every fifteen or twenty minutes and take a break from the heat. Summer was serious business in Alabama. I’d wheel over and knock his lawn out in no time. I felt good doing it. I never asked for compensation, but sometimes he’d slip five bucks into my shirt pocket.
A few days before he left for the conference, I ran into him at the only twenty-four-hour convenience store in Sherwood. I’d gone to buy some coffee for the morning and there he was staring at the shelves of miscellaneous items, school supplies and birthday candles and toys that looked like they’d break if you even thought about touching them. He kept wringing his hands and shifting his weight from foot to foot. His hair was disheveled, like he’d come here straight from bed.
“Mr. Holladay?” I said. I couldn’t help speaking to him. “Everything okay? Anything I can help you with?”
“He’s been eyeballing that same merchandise for nearly an hour,” the clerk said. She was in her teens with heavy black eye shadow and a safety pin through her lower lip. “You tell him I’ve got one finger on the alarm if he’s thinking about making off with anything.”
“I’m not going to rob you,” he said. “I’m just not sure what I want.”
“You tell him he better make up his mind in hurry,” she said to me. “Else I’m calling the cops.”
Sam Holladay shrugged and shook my hand.
“She won’t talk to me,” he said.
I said, “What brings you out this late?”
“My anniversary is tomorrow,” he said. “I forgot.”
“You’re shopping here?”
He shrugged again and pushed his fingers through his hair, like he was just realizing how he looked. He was wearing wrinkled suit pants and his shirt was untucked. Brittle whiskers stood out on his chin.
He said, “All the other stores are closed. It’s my first anniversary. I can’t show up at the breakfast table emptyhanded.”
“Shit,” I said. Then, “Oh, sorry.”
A young guy in a black leather jacket and black j
eans pushed the door open, making the cowbell chime, and stalked around behind the counter to the sales clerk. The two of them hunched against the cash register, whispering. At that moment, it occurred to me that I was talking to Delia’s husband. Not just my childhood neighbor and the man who taught me history in eleventh grade. This was the man we’d been hiding from, the man she was betraying for me. My pulse cranked up and I could feel the hair on my arms. A light in the back of the store was blinking on and off noisily. I thought about my father and how hard it had been for him. How I’d find him lying on the couch in the middle of the night. He would tell me that it was too hot in his room or that my mother was tossing in her sleep. But I suspected that it was his proximity to her—her body a constant, awful reminder—that kept him awake. I thought, as well, about what it would be like to have an anniversary to forget, a wife to fret over in the middle of the night. I imagined Delia at home, his home, lying in his bed, the blankets gathered at her hips, her arm sprawled drowsily in the place where he had been. My house was empty and as quiet as the grave.
“What do you think?” he said, holding something up in front of me. “The set of fingernail files or the legal pad?” He laughed, sadly, to himself. “I’m screwed. How does a man forget his first anniversary?”
“Listen,” I said. “Hargrove’s Department Store opens at eight. You can be standing at the door when they start business and get her something nice. A dress or something. They have lots of nice things.”
“A dress isn’t what I had in mind for our first anniversary,” he said. “I want to give her something she won’t forget.”
“She definitely won’t forget a fingernail file,” I said.
“She won’t let me forget it, you mean,” he said and both of us laughed.
We stood there for a minute, looking at each other, then he thanked me and walked out the door. I watched him get into the car, watched his taillights until they disappeared around the corner. I couldn’t for the life of me remember why I’d come. The salesgirl said, “Now, what’s your problem?” And I wondered if the man who had stolen my mother for a little while, assuming that there was such a man, was anything like me.
When I was fifteen, my father sold his company to a Dutch manufacturer who wanted to get started in the States but needed a known and respected company name to draw business. My father agreed on the condition that he be allowed to drive the Dutch tractors before the sale. He said he didn’t want his name associated with an inferior product. So we went out to the acreage that Bell Tractor used for product testing and my mother and I were introduced to the Dutchman and his wife. The occasion was to be a sort of party as well, a celebration of new beginnings. There was a bar set up over by the warehouse and a swing band on the tarmac, everything arranged by the Dutch company. They had shipped over their machines, hulking bulldozers and gleaming combines and threshers, all lined up beside the field like an invading army. My father chose to test the combine first, and he asked me to ride with him. I said I’d rather not, but he insisted, so I climbed up the ladder and squeezed into the cockpit beside him. For a while, we just drove along the rows, corn falling away in our wake, my father’s hands rattling on the wheel.
I said, “What will you do now, Dad?”
He looked at me a little surprised, like he hadn’t considered the fact that he was going to have some time on his hands. He said, “I don’t know. Your mother, she-” Then he stopped and looked at me, his eyes funny because we were sitting so close. It was the only time in my life I’d ever seen my father not know what to say. He rapped the windshield with his wedding band and shook his head. He said, “You have to do things sometimes. You’ll see what I mean when you’re grown. I work too hard. I don’t want to lose your mother.”
We kept riding for a while in silence. I didn’t know what to say, didn’t know anything yet, except that it scared me some to see my father like this. A world in which my father didn’t know exactly what do was not a world I wanted to live anywhere near. We finished a row and made the turn back toward the warehouse where my mother and the Dutch people were waiting. A change seemed to come over my father as were were cornering to go the other way. He nudged me in the ribs and said, “Watch this,” and goosed the throttle until we were rumbling along so fast I thought the combine would fly apart. My teeth shook. I could see the crowd watching us get closer and closer, their eyes going wide and uncertain when my father showed no sign of slowing down. They started backpedaling when we were maybe thirty yards away, still disbelieving, not sure that my father was about to do what it looked like he was going to do. Then we were on top of them, and they scattered, and my father kept going until he plowed into the stage, sending the band members diving for cover in their tuxedos, shoving the stage itself and all the instruments ahead of us, until finally my father cut the engine, hopped down from the cockpit, and let out the whoop of a much younger man.
“That’s a fine machine, Jan,” he said. “You’ve got yourself a deal.”
After that, my father was home all the time. He wanted to spend more time with my mother and me—at least that was the reason he gave for retiring—but whenever she suggested something, a picnic or drive down to Mobile Bay, he just said no, he was tired, maybe in a couple of days.
My mother was already consulting the stars then, though not so much that it affected the way she lived her life. She read horoscopes and bought scrolled charts in line at the grocery store. She read my father’s horoscope as well, looked for hints on how to handle his new inactivity, how to make him love her again.
“Look, S,” she’d say. My mother always called him by his first initial. “It says that you are about to embark on a new adventure. What do you think that means?” Her voice was too happy, the way a mother speaks to a saddened child. She was still lovely, my mother.
It cheered me a little to think that he might have something new in his life, but the only adventure my father embarked on, if you could call it that, was when he bought himself a ham radio. He set it up on a card table in the attic, added sophisticated equipment to enhance his reception, then spent hours up there, talking to people all over the world. He could get towns in Southern Mexico, he said. He’d once talked to a guy in Guam. The sleek black boxes dangled wires like scuppernong vines. My father was amazed that the night could be so full of invisible, tenebrous signals.
Delia found the radio equipment when she stayed at my parents’ house. I took a shower after work, and when I got out, I could hear footsteps moving above my head. I thought at first that she was just looking around on the second floor, but when I went up there, I discovered that the attic ladder had been lowered. I found her sitting on the floor listening to a guy in Hawaii talk about his pets.
“I’ve got a dog,” he was saying, “and peacock and two goats. We got a potbellied pig that you’d get a kick out of. Boy, the kids sure love that pig. Do you have pets, Ramona?”
“Who’s Ramona?” I said.
Delia grinned and pressed a finger to her lips. She whispered, “I’m using a fake name. Think of a name for yourself and you can talk to him. It’s fun.”
The voice said, “Come in, Ramona. Did I lose the transmission? Dammit to hell.”
“No, Chuck, I’m still here,” Delia said into the mouthpiece. “This is Ramona. My friend—” She paused and looked a question at me, and when I couldn’t think of a name right away, she said, “My friend, De La Renta, is here now, too.”
“Hey there, De La Renta,” he said. “Glad to know you. You got any pets?”
“An iguana,” I said. Delia was holding the mouthpiece in front of my lips. Her fingers smelled like soap. “We also have a tarantula that lives in a fish tank.”
Delia laughed and rocked back on her shoulders, brought her knees up to her chest. I stretched out beside her and kissed her elbow and took the microphone from her hand. The floor was a plywood sheet that my father had carried up to cover the insulation. Chuck said, “Are you guys married?”
“Yes,
” I said after a second. “Almost three years now.”
“That’s nice,” he said. “That’s real nice.”
Delia sat up and circled her knees with her arms. She was looking toward the round window at the apex of the ceiling, which was too smudged and dirty to see through. All I could make out were streetlights on the glass. I’d gone by to visit Betty Fowler on my way home from work, and I thought of her then, talking to this man with a potbellied pig in Hawaii. I wondered if she was all right. If she minded too much being alone. I said, “Hey, Chuck, you believe in divining for gold?”
But before Chuck could give me his take on divining, Delia stood and flipped the switch on the radio, shutting it down, and his voice hummed into silence. She was wearing only her bra and panties, but it was hot enough in the attic that her skin was slicked with a faint layer of perspiration. She drew her hair over one shoulder and held it with both hands.
“Why did you tell him we were married?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I was just pretending.”
She sat in the folding chair where my father used to sit and crossed her legs. I could see a haze of dust on the balls of her feet. Her toenails were painted creamy red. I thought I’d once heard her call that color coral. She said, “My husband will be home in two days.”
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything.”
She nodded and twisted her hair. I heard the air conditioner bump to life somewhere in the house, but we couldn’t feel it up here. Delia said, “What’s she like? Mrs. Fowler, I mean.”
“She’s crazy,” I said. “But nice enough. She thinks her husband buried a chest of gold coins in the golf course.”
“I know. Sam told me the story,” she said.
I walked around behind her and took the hair from her hands. She let me. I spread it on her back, then began to plait it into a braid. There was a woman once, in college, who showed me how. Over, under, across, repeat. Delia tilted her chin forward, and I played with her hair, as weightless in my fingers as fibers of spiderweb. After a while, she said, “All that wonderful technology and that guy wanted to talk about his pets.”
Divining Rod Page 8
