No Dark Valley (37 page)

“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 ahead 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.”

As they walked over to where the rest of the team was sitting, Bonnie told her that Elizabeth had indeed won the first set of her match and was tied at five-all in the second. Nan and Judy had lost the first set 5–7 but were up one game in the second, and Jenny and Carol had lost the first set and were trailing in the second. They weren't sure about Cindy and Jane's match, because they weren't using the scorekeeping numbers on their court and nobody could hear them call out a score before a game. “We've got a chance, though,” Bonnie said. “Nobody's giving up. We might win this thing yet.”

Bonnie made Celia sit in her canvas chair while she sat on the grass beside her. It was hard enough to follow the score of one match, much less three or four, so Celia decided to focus on Elizabeth's court, which was right next to the one Nan and Judy were playing on. Focusing on anything was a little difficult at the moment, though, since Anastasia Elsey, seated on the other side of her, was talking nonstop, delivering a running commentary on every shot, on every player on the courts, and on every person who walked by. She changed subjects so often that it was impossible to keep up with her, and when she said, “Good grief, she sure thinks she's hot stuff, doesn't she?” Celia had no idea who it was she was talking about.

Horror vacui
—the Latin term for “the horror of empty space”—was what came to her mind all at once, something she had read about in an art magazine a long time ago. It was originally a concept in art tracing its roots to India, she thought, or maybe to the Middle East, where an artist's skill seemed to be determined by how much he could cram into a single painting, as if the tiniest blank space meant that his imagination had run dry. The concept also carried over to many other areas. In interior decorating, for example—the compulsion to fill up all the available space. Celia had often suspected, in fact, that she herself was approaching that point in the way she kept packing more art onto the walls of her apartment.

And, of course, in social settings, there were always those people, such as Anastasia, who seemed to have a horror of the empty space of silence. Celia decided it would be an interesting contest to have Anastasia Elsey and Eldeen Rafferty in the same room together.

As Celia watched a particularly long point during which Elizabeth's opponent ran her from one side of the court to the other, then up and back several times, something caught her eye outside the fence where they were playing. A little girl stood watching the match, her face pressed up against the fence, her fingers clutching the chain links. She was as skinny as one of the fence posts and had long blond braids. After Elizabeth won the point by drilling a shot down the line, the little girl called out, “That's okay, Mom! You can do it! Come on!”

Celia looked more closely at Elizabeth's opponent—a tall gangling woman who didn't exactly look like a spring chicken but, like Elizabeth, was evidently the kind of player who sank her teeth in and wouldn't let go of a point. Celia had learned not to underestimate singles players like her, who looked like they were past their prime but somehow had a battery that never wore down. What they lacked in power and technique, they often more than made up for in consistency and sheer determination.

“You must feel awful about losing your match,” Anastasia said beside her. “That girl you played sure strutted off the court, didn't she? Did you see that tattoo on her arm? I never could get close enough to see what the picture was. Did you?”

Too tired to talk, Celia merely shook her head and kept her eyes on Elizabeth's match. She always avoided looking at children close up, but she sometimes studied them from afar, and for some reason right now she kept coming back to the little girl by the fence. It took only seconds for her to realize why. At this distance, some forty feet away, the child looked exactly like Celia herself at that age, skinny with long braided pigtails.