Divining Rod

by Michael Knight

  She carried the phone back to the master bathroom and had Maddie sit in a chair at her dressing table. Maddie closed her eyes as Delia went over her cheeks and lips and eyelids with a wet cloth, her face shining and damp as the makeup came away. She looked at the two of them in the mirror, when Delia was finished, and said, “You’re very pretty.”

  “Thank you, Maddie, so are you.”

  “Who are you waiting for to call you?” Maddie said.

  “My husband. Here now, close your eyes so we can redo the shadow.”

  Maddie did as she asked, shut her eyes again and lifted her chin so that her face was to the light. There were small round bulbs outlining the mirror. Delia could feel their heat on her arms. Maddie said, “Mr. Bell, you mean?”

  “No,” Delia said, running an eyeliner pencil over Maddie’s lids. “I don’t live at Mr. Bell’s house. I’m just staying there for a while.”

  “Who’s your husband?” Maddie’s eyelids fluttered like moths beneath Delia’s fingers and Delia blew across them to dust away the excess color.

  “His name is Sam Holladay,” Delia said. She glanced at her watch. A little after ten. Then she looked at the phone. “He’s a history teacher. You’ll probably have him in school in a few years.”

  “What does he look like?” the girl said.

  Right then, the phone rang and Delia dropped the eyeliner and reached across Maddie to answer it. She said, “Sam?”

  “Sorry,” he said. “I lost track of time. I had dinner with a guy who teaches over at the university. He was telling the funniest stories you ever heard about Catullus and Ovid and all those other lovesick Roman poets.”

  His voice sounded excited and far away. Delia stood and let her hand rest on top of Maddie’s head. She watched Maddie admiring herself in the mirror. She said, “That sounds nice.”

  “It was,” he said. “The lecture was good today, too.”

  “What was it about?” she said.

  “The parallels between modern society and the state of the empire at the decline of Roman power.” He made his voice bland, like he was making fun of himself, but she knew it was the sort of thing he enjoyed. “The guy was a political scientist, not a historian, but he was entertaining at least.”

  “Sounds like it,” she said.

  Maddie had the lipstick tube and was rubbing it over her mouth, making a mess, and Delia took it from her and held her chin gently in one hand, pinching the phone between her shoulder and her cheek. She pursed her lips so Maddie would know what to do, then dabbed the lipstick into place.

  Sam said, “Oh come on, it sounds boring as hell. But you’re nice for pretending. So, thanks.”

  “I’m not pretending,” she said. “I like to hear you talk about history.”

  “Well,” he said.

  “I love you,” she said.

  She thought at first that he hadn’t heard, because there was a pause and a burst of static, but then he was back. He said, “I love you, too.”

  They talked for a few more minutes until he said he had to go, he had an early morning, and Delia said good-bye and hung up the phone with her thumb. Maddie was waiting, making kissing faces at the mirror. She turned to look at Delia and smiled, and Delia thought for just an instant that she was going to cry. She closed her eyes and made herself be absolutely still until the feeling went away. When she opened them, the little girl was still looking at her, a confused expression on her face, and Delia pointed at the mirror and said, “Look, Maddie. See that. That’s you. That’s exactly how you’ll look when you’re all grown up. Beautiful.”

  “And I can play the piano,” she said.

  “Yes,” Delia said. “You can play the piano.”

  It was getting late and Delia said she thought Maddie had better be getting home. They walked outside together. Delia wanted to let Maddie leave before going back to Simon’s house. Simon was expecting her. He might be getting worried, as well, but she didn’t want the little girl to see her going there tonight. She watched Maddie skip across the lawn. Just as she was crossing Simon’s yard, she stopped and turned back and said, “I heard a riddle today. My brother told it to me.”

  “What is it?” Delia said.

  Maddie put both hands on top of her head, as if that might help her remember. She said, “There are three words in the English language that end in the letters g-r-y. Two of them are hungry and angry. What’s the third word? I guess it isn’t really a riddle. It’s more just a question.”

  Delia put her hands in the pockets of her jeans and thought about it, running through words in her mind. She turned a slow circle in the grass. Leafy oaks, silhouetted against the sky. Dark windows on the houses across the street. The street still damp from an afternoon shower. She said, “What’s the answer?”

  “I don’t know,” Maddie said. “I thought you would know.”

  That night, Delia couldn’t sleep. She lay in bed beside Simon and listened to night sounds drifting out of the dark like static. Maddie’s riddle kept coming back to her, and she couldn’t think of the solution. She considered the fact that maybe Maddie had been teasing. Maybe she had asked a question with no right answer. She closed her eyes, the sheets warm beneath her, and played the riddle over in her head for a long time—hungry, angry, hungry, angry—thinking that the answer would materialize, if she said the words enough.

  Love for Beginners

  I caught my mother spying on me in college. This was in November, three months after my father died, and I was sitting on the mezzanine of the student section at an Alabama football game. Bobby Humphrey had just gone over for a touchdown, bringing seventy-five thousand people to their feet, and there, two dozen rows below me, standing perfectly still among all the bellowing fans, was my mother. She was wearing a white woolen overcoat, her hands stuffed into the big pockets, and her cheeks were red from the cold. She was smiling, watching me through the crowd. I left my date and went trotting down the stairs, but when I reached the spot where she’d been standing, my mother was gone, vanished into the crowd like a hallucination.

  Later, as I walked home along Bear Bryant Drive that night, too drunk to be aware of the cold, her car came easing up beside me and she pushed the passenger door open and told me to get in before I froze to death. She had a cigarette in one hand, a pencil line of smoke trailing up from between her knuckles. I said, “What are you doing here, Mom?”

  “You drink too much,” she said. “I saw you in that bar.”

  “You were at the bar?” I said. “Jesus, Mom. I don’t drink too much and you didn’t answer my question. You shouldn’t be spying on me anyway.”

  We were idling slowly beside the curb and she stopped the car, kept her eyes ahead of us like she was looking for something. Old oak trees loomed in the darkness, their branches bare. “I just wanted to make sure you were all right,” she said. “That’s all.” She took a drag from her cigarette, let the smoke trail wistfully up from between her lips.

  I said, “That’s another thing. You don’t smoke.”

  She smiled, took my hand and held it between hers. She said, “Your mother is full of surprises, Simon. There’s a lot you don’t know about your mother.”

  “Are you drunk?” I said. “You’re acting very, very weird.”

  “A little,” she said. “I had to stand in that bar for hours.”

  I laughed and took my hand back and propped my feet up on the dash. The heater and our talking made the windshield mist over. Every now and then, a group of students would go stumbling past on the sidewalk, their voices like a burst of color, their shoulders bumping all the way. The sky was crazy with stars. I shook my head and said, “My mother is drunk. Does this have something to do with that psychic lady?”

  “I was just worried about you, that’s all,” she said.

  “I’m fine. There’s no need for you to worry. I’m fine, okay?”

  She pulled the gear shift back down into drive and we rolled forward again, making our lazy progress through campus. Al
abama had come from behind to beat LSU that day and everywhere you looked were the trappings of celebration, streamers of toilet paper in the trees, empty bottles beside the road, bits of crepe paper from torn banners blowing across the wintry lawns. My mother asked if I would mind driving around with her for a little while before she went back to her hotel and I said that was okay with me. She told me about Madame Florence and her connection to the other world, reminded me that I should be more polite to my dates. We never left campus, just cruised past the fraternity houses, still lit and still loud, even at this hour, and past the stadium, where RVs were parked in long rows like military barracks, humming quietly in the darkness. I said, “Are you okay, Mom? You’re going through those cigarettes.” And she said that she was fine, too, she just missed my father. There were a few things she had wanted to tell him before he died and for some reason Madame Florence was having trouble channeling his ghost.

  I saw her again at Christmas, but she was the lady I remembered this time, no smoking or mysterious behavior or spying on me late at night. She tried hard over the break to live up to my idea of her. We trimmed the tree and stood at the windows on Christmas Eve to watch all the neighborhood men gather at the curb with a drink and commiserate about the missing pieces of toys and batteries not being included. “Your father used to stand out there with them,” she said, “but he never really felt a part of things. He was older than most of the fathers around here.”

  I had made each of us a martini and was feeling very mature with my alcohol and my grief. Beyond the window, Christmas lights were strung along the eaves of houses; there were even strings of white lights in a few of the evergreens along the golf course, all of them combining to make the neighborhood look vaguely unreal, something you might see in a magazine advertisement.

  “You can never plan what will happen in your life,” she said. “Your father didn’t understand that some things are beyond your control.” She pointed out the window like what she was talking about was somewhere out there. “Have you ever been in love, Simon? You don’t have to answer if it makes you uncomfortable talking to your mother about this.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “Well,” she said. “That’s okay, too.”

  An hour or so later she fell asleep on the couch, and I covered her with a quilt when I couldn’t wake her. I stayed awake for long time, sat on the floor beside her and watched the fire dance in the fireplace. I’d never stayed up this late on Christmas Eve, and it was nice to be there in my quiet house. I wrapped my mother’s presents and put them beneath the tree, doing a little Santa Claus impersonation of my own.

  Just before I went to bed, I walked back to the front of the house and looked out the windows again. The men were gone, finishing up their last-minute preparations. Across the road, lit faintly by the strings of lights, was Betty Fowler, searching diligently, even on Christmas Eve, for the gold her husband had promised. He died my first year of college, and I couldn’t remember him at all that night, couldn’t call his face to mind or even remember a single occasion on which we’d spoken, though I was sure we must have, since I’d lived a few doors down from them my whole life. I had no idea then, standing at the window of my parents’ house, that I would be out there with her years later, receiving lessons from her on how to find a thing which more than likely did not exist. She would stand to one side while I made my clumsy way along the course, holding the rod in my hands per instruction. Since I had nothing to look for of my own, she had me focus on her husband’s gold, told me to imagine a miniature mahogany chest, filled with gold coins, pirate coins, she said. Fucking doubloons.

  On the third day of July, the same day Sam Holladay was to return from his conference, Betty Fowler asked me to revise her will. She came by my office and handed the evidence of her existence across my desk: the deed to her house, an inventory of material possessions, what was left of her husband’s investment portfolio. She had a copy of the most recent draft—there had been several, it seemed—and I noticed on the second page that she had bequeathed a chest of gold coins to a someone named Grapefruit Wilkins.

  “Is this the gold on the golf course?” I said.

  “It is,” she said. “That’s what I want to change.”

  I started to tell her that, for estate tax reasons, she couldn’t claim something that she wasn’t even sure existed, but I figured that the previous attorney had probably felt sorry for her and let her list it anyway. She didn’t have dependents who would be burdened with untangling the tax code. She didn’t have anyone and that seemed to me reason enough to go along with the charade. She was wearing a Sunday dress, midnight-blue and shapeless, a strand of pearls looped twice around her neck. There was a window behind my desk, rain tapping against the glass, and I stood to pull the shade.

  “Who’s Grapefruit Wilkins?” I said.

  She said, “He’s a gospel singer out of Tuscaloosa. It was just this crazy idea I had to leave the gold to him. I saw him on television one time.”

  “What made you change your mind?” I said.

  “Well,” she said, smoothing her dress across her thighs, “there’s someone else I’d like to give it to now.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “I want you to have it,” she said. “I’m bound to find it eventually, and if I don’t then you’ll know how to look.”

  I cleared my throat, pushed my fingers through my hair. I walked around my desk and sat beside Betty Fowler on the couch. I said, “Mrs. Fowler, I appreciate the thought. I really do. But I can’t let you change your will for me. There’s legal propriety to think about, for one thing. How would it look for me to write myself in for such a generous gift? Plus, I just don’t feel right about accepting something your husband meant for you.”

  “I’ll find another attorney then,” she said. “I mean for you to have it.”

  She put her hand on my knee, tugged at the fabric of my suit pants. She was looking at my tie. I had this globe that had stood in my father’s office, the kind with misshapen continents and painted-on sea monsters, and I gave it a spin, let it go around a few times before stopping it with my finger.

  “I’Il tell you what. Why don’t we just leave it out for now? We’ll know that it’s there and what you intend for it. There doesn’t seem to me any reason to go to all the trouble of making it official. We’ll know.”

  “You’ll take it if we do it that way?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Anything you want. Thank you.”

  “All right,” she said.

  We stood, and I offered her my hand, but she leaned in and kissed me on the cheek, her mouth warm and whiskery. She drew back and rubbed my jawbone with her thumb, saying, “Lipstick.” She looked at me for a moment, then gave my face a final scrub before heading off down the hall and out the door and into the weather, using her umbrella like a cane.

  * * *

  The same rain that sent me home early from work, because the power kept blinking out and the computers went on the fritz, stranded Sam Holladay at the Atlanta airport. It was one of those summer thunderstorms that blew inland from the Gulf of Mexico, choking gutters and rattling windows. Air traffic was backed up all over the southeast, and Delia told me Sam wouldn’t be able to get home until the weather service okayed the skies. Delia asked me to come over and help her clean the house for his arrival. I vacuumed while she put clean sheets on the bed; I dusted in the bedroom while Delia wiped the kitchen counter. We were mostly quiet, the end of our week together hanging in the air like smoke. When she was finished in the kitchen, we sat on the floor of her bedroom and played Crazy Eights by candlelight, because the power had gone out again.

  Delia said, “What do you think of me, Simon?”

  “How do you mean?” I said. “I love you, if that’s what you mean.”

  I said the words without thinking and they felt surprising in my mouth, almost as if they had a taste. Delia played an eight, changing the suit to clubs, which she knew I didn’t have. I had to draw ca
rds until my hand was fat as a paperback book. My fingers were shaking. Delia looked at me for a long moment over the top of her cards. She said, “That’s not what I mean and you’re not in love with me anyway. I mean what sort of woman do you think I am? Sitting here with you while my husband is stranded in the rain at some godforsaken airport.”

  “I do love you,” I said, too loud this time.

  “Please, Simon,” she said. “How could you possibly be in love with a woman like me? For the twenty-seventh time in a month, I’m about to have sex with a man who isn’t my husband. We are about to have sex, aren’t we?”

  “I hope so.” I tried a smile. “Is that how many times really?”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  Rain tapped the roof, the muted sound of drumming fingers. I’d been in her bedroom before, but only once, the first time we were together, and it surprised me to see so many signs of her husband here. His trousers draped across the back of a chair, a belt still slung through the loops. Change on the dresser top that I could imagine him scattering when he came home from work. Delia always seemed completely her own person to me, unattached to anyone, but she was here as well in the form of hair on the pillowcase and dresses in the closet and makeup and perfume on the dressing table in the bathroom.

  She said, “I don’t want you to be in love with me, Simon. I don’t think you are, but just in case, let me remind you about that man from the other day. He was the saddest man I have ever seen. That’s what happens when you fall in love with a married woman. You get all broken up and read dirty magazines and say lewd things to young women. He was pathetic.”

  “I thought he wasn’t the right guy,” I said. “Maybe he was lewd and pathetic from the day he was born. He didn’t even know my mother.”

  “Regardless,” she said. “It’s nice of you say something like that to make me feel better, but let me assure that you are not in love with me, okay?” She played her last card, folded the deck back into a perfect rectangle and stuffed it into its box, then stood and began unbuttoning her blouse. “You may have some feelings for me, but they aren’t what you think.”