No Dark Valley (43 page)

Suddenly a car coming toward her, going north on Highway 41, honked and blinked its lights. For a moment Celia bristled. What in the world was that guy doing? Then she realized how fast she was driving. Maybe the other car was trying to warn her about something. She eased up on the gas pedal, and no sooner had the speedometer fallen below sixty than she saw it up ahead—a police car pulled over in a thicket of trees by a roadside park. She wished she could thank that other driver now. She had never gotten a speeding ticket in her life, though one of the men she used to date—she thought maybe it was Chris—got them routinely, usually not bothering to go to court but simply mailing in his two or three hundred dollars each time.

She would hate spending two hundred dollars on something like that. What a waste. At the thought she couldn't help smiling a little. At least she recognized the irony of it all. The more money a person had, the more he tended to clutch it to himself. And another thing that struck her just now was how much she had grown to be like her father in regard to money.

Not that she invested in stocks and kept up with the Dow average every day as he had. Utilities, mutual funds, and money markets were as daring as she ever got. But she often found herself fretting over her finances, shifting money around, hyperventilating over whether to write a check or charge a certain item, counting the cash in her billfold over and over and stashing little wads of it in the different zippered compartments of her purse. She wondered if it could be partly due to the fact that she was single and had no husband to take care of paying the bills. She wondered if it would get worse as she got older until she got to be as bad a penny pincher as her grandmother had been. That would be awful.

She remembered Ansell taking a roll of bills out of his pocket after she got into the car on prom night. He had grinned at her and said, “Hot time tonight, baby.” It had surprised her—not the money, but his calling her “baby.” He never did that. He hadn't rented a tux for the prom the way some of the guys did. Ansell wouldn't have thought of doing something so “rich-boy sissy,” as he called it. He was wearing one of his father's old sport coats, a deep burnt orange, with a white silk handkerchief peeking out of the pocket, and a pair of loose-fitting white linen pants he had found at the same consignment shop in Cartersville where Celia had gotten her dress. Ansell liked to imagine that he looked like Robert Redford in the movie
Out of Africa
, which they had driven to Rome to see the year before.

He had already told Celia not to expect anything traditional and normal tonight, so she wasn't looking for flowers or candy of any kind. Instead, he handed her a brown paper bag as they backed out of the driveway, inside which she found a large coconut. “In lieu of the standard,” he told her, winking. The wink was something else he never did. Ansell had painted a goofy face on the coconut and given it the name Derwood. He had also written a long poem about it, typed and folded up inside the paper bag, a bawdy saga about Derwood's attempts to seduce a girl coconut named Gladys. This he insisted Celia read aloud after they had picked up Glenn and Renee.

The plan was, he told them all, to bust Derwood open later on in the evening and drink the milk together around a fire. He had brought goblets along, also a book of poems by W. H. Auden, and they were going to have a little
carpe diem
ceremony up at the old quarry. He had an audiocassette of music from the forties he was planning to play in the background.

Just south of Adairsville on Highway 41, Celia decided to go ahead and get on I-75. Though the scenery wouldn't be as interesting, she could make better time. Maybe all the interstate traffic would keep her mind off things she didn't want to think about. From the interstate outside Rome, she could see what looked like a new subdivision. Children were playing on a swing set in one backyard, and a woman in a big straw hat was watering flowers in another. Garbage cans were lined up beside driveways, and Celia wrinkled her nose at the thought of all the disgusting things oozing inside them. She imagined for a moment the inside of the garbage truck, where all those cans would be dumped, where the impact would puncture the bags, where all that nasty stuff would comingle and send up putrid vapors.

All of a sudden she remembered going with Grandmother a few times to the landfill. Most people paid the city of Dunmore a fee for garbage pickup, but on Old Campground Road, which was outside the city limits, they had a choice, and Grandmother had chosen not to pay. Every couple of weeks she put their collection of garbage into the trunk of her Mercury Comet and drove it out to the landfill herself, then hurled each bag into the pit reserved for Fresh Garbage. There was actually a printed sign with those words on it. At the time Celia hadn't thought anything of it, but now it seemed like the ultimate oxymoron.

Instead of buying regular garbage bags with twist ties, Grandmother had always used plastic grocery bags and knotted the handles together tightly. Because the grocery bags were smaller, that meant she had more of them to throw, and Celia could still see her now, giving each bag a brisk little half swing above her head before letting go, like David wielding his slingshot. And right now, even as Celia remembered the raw, rank smell of the place, the crows that picked among the heaps of trash, and the clouds of black flies, she couldn't help thinking a little sheepishly of all the plastic grocery bags stored in her kitchen cupboard back home, especially to be used for trash so she wouldn't have to spend the money for real garbage bags.

Oh yes, Grandmother had rubbed off on her in ways she never intended. She also thought guiltily of the drawerful of used aluminum foil in her kitchen right this very minute. How many times she had started to throw away all those neatly folded squares, but somehow she just couldn't. They were still perfectly usable. What an embarrassment if anyone were to find them.

Her mind returned to the landfill. She remembered the toothless old man who sat out there year-round to make sure all the rules in the fine art of garbage disposal were followed. Uncle Shep was what everybody called him. Celia had always been sure his clothes were salvaged from other people's trash, and she used to imagine him scrabbling about in the pit every evening for his supper.

She passed another row of backyards in another subdivision along the interstate. She saw a community swimming pool full of little bodies bobbing up and down, and nearby were two tennis courts, where a man appeared to be giving lessons to several children, all of whom no doubt wished they were over at the pool instead. Balls were scattered all over the courts, and two little boys were swinging their rackets at each other's head.

Tennis—Celia reminded herself that that was something she needed to be thinking about again. She had talked with Bonnie Maggio before leaving on this trip and told her she'd try to be at every practice after she got home from Georgia. In four weeks the team would be leaving for Louisville, Kentucky, for the Southeastern Regional Championships. It was still hard for them all to believe they had squeaked by with the victory in Charleston two weeks ago. Their chances had looked so bleak at first, then suddenly it had gotten incredibly close, and then somehow they had pulled it out.

“The competition's going to be even tougher in Louisville,” Bonnie had told them at their first practice after returning from Charleston. “We've got to be in top shape or we won't have a prayer.” The higher you went in the playoffs, she reminded them, the better the teams got. And younger, too. “They're going to take one look at us walking onto the courts and think they've got the match in the bag,” she said, smiling.

Judy Howell had piped up and said, “And aren't they going to be surprised when us old bags get out there and whip up on them.”

Celia tried hard to keep her mind on tennis, but prom night kept nagging at her. How irritating the way her thoughts always seemed to insist on finishing a story. She might succeed for a short time in weaning her attention from a certain subject, but always, always, her mind would circle around and move in again from a different angle. Maybe that came from all those journalism courses in college, that drive to get all the facts laid out. Still, it seemed that a person ought to be able to stop thinking about something if she wanted to, to pull it right out by the roots like a pesky weed. After all, it was
her
mind. If she couldn't control it, then who could?

Ansell had decided they wouldn't go to the prom right away but would drive around for a little while listening to the radio, maybe even go out to the old quarry and make sure things were in good order for their ceremony around the fire later. Nobody in the car disagreed with him, although Celia's preference would have been to go to the prom first and save the driving around for afterward. As for the old quarry, that could wait indefinitely for all she cared. Why did they have to go all the way up there to read poetry and drink coconut milk? That place gave her the creeps.

She wanted to see everybody from school, what they were wearing, who was together, even the decorations and the band. The juniors had decorated the gymnasium, and though it was supposed to be a secret, everybody knew the theme was Paris and there was a miniature Eiffel Tower set up in the middle of the dance floor. Ansell had pronounced the whole thing hokey, though, so Celia didn't dare act too eager to get there.

In the backseat Renee and Glenn were following Ansell's lead. Sure, they said, by all means let's drive around. Nah, we're in no hurry to get there. Why, we wouldn't care if we skipped the whole stupid thing! Who wants to be all jammed up together in the gym anyway, bumping into a fake Eiffel Tower, with chaperons standing along the walls smiling and nodding, talking among themselves about what fun the young folks were having?

Then Ansell turned the radio up so loud that nobody tried to talk over it, and before long they were on the dirt road that led out to the quarry. He turned the radio down a little to comment on what a boring bunch of kids they went to school with, one of his pet subjects. Not more than a handful in the whole student body of Dunmore High who had enough imagination and gumption to try anything adventurous, even something as childishly predictable as spiking the punch. Glenn, Renee, and Celia all agreed, laughing condescendingly at the thought of their classmates, all scrubbed and gussied up, flocking mindlessly right this minute to the gymnasium for a night of High School Fun. “The pathetic conforming masses,” Ansell called them. “Dwarf minds,” said Glenn. “Future Sunday school teachers of America,” Renee added.

Yeah, Glenn and Renee said, this is a lot more fun. Yeah, Celia agreed as she pictured the No Trespassing signs they had seen posted all over the place last time they had driven out here. She surely didn't care about getting out of the car and walking around up on the hillside above the lake. There had been a lot of rain recently, and she imagined getting her silver sandals and the hem of her blue dress all muddy. Which also reminded her that Ansell hadn't even shown the courtesy yet of complimenting her on how she looked.

In Celia's opinion the old quarry was a depressing place, a close second to the landfill. She never could figure out what attracted Ansell to it so much. She had been here only two times before, and both times she had felt a great sense of relief when she left. Last Halloween, when she had been a newcomer to the group, the four of them plus three other girls had come out to build a bonfire and roast hot dogs. They had all piled into Ansell's car together. Ansell got drunk that night, and two of the girls went off for a walk with him while the rest of them sat around the fire and talked and laughed. That was the first time Celia had a drink of beer, and the taste of it made her sick to her stomach.

Later in the evening Renee got mad at one of the other girls and started walking home. After a while Glenn took Ansell's keys and drove off to find her, leaving the rest of them sitting around for over an hour, trying to act like they were still having a good time. It was such a pointless night that Celia couldn't figure out why she ever agreed to go out with Ansell and the others the next time they asked, but she did—and the next time, and the next time after that. Part of it, she knew now, was simply the heady feeling of being part of a select group.

Talk about embarrassment. Embarrassment wasn't reusing plastic bags and tin foil. Embarrassment was letting a jerk like Ansell control your whole life for over a year. The shame of that year rushed over her right now, and she saw herself returning home after three in the morning on prom night, the left shoulder of her blue dress ripped, her makeup smeared, and her hair pulled out of the pretty rhinestone clip. Glenn had brought her home after Ansell had driven his car into a ditch.

Oh, to be able to go back and revise your life as if it had been a rough draft. Only one thing about that whole night made Celia the least bit glad now, and that was the fact that when Ansell started fiddling with the zipper of her dress, the word
no
had erupted from some deep buried place within her. Even after she pushed him away, he pretended not to hear or believe her until she raised her voice and shouted the word again, louder this time.

Surprisingly, it was the first time he had ever tried anything with her, and she saw now that he had no doubt planned it as the grand finale of their carpe diem ritual. He had kept her in the trophy case long enough, and now it was time to take her out and handle her. But somehow everything flew apart at that moment. Suddenly everything seemed dirty—the filmy coating of the coconut milk inside her mouth, the cheap wine on Ansell's breath, the dying ashes of the fire, the spongy earth and damp pine needles, the scratchy blanket beneath them. The night air felt heavy, and the black sky was starless. Even her silver sandals looked shoddy and sleazy, lying on their sides at the edge of the blanket.

She remembered leaping up from the blanket, stepping right on top of Ansell's book of poetry, fumbling to get her sandals back on, and walking to the car. The windows were down, and she could hear Renee laughing hysterically in the backseat. Her laughter died, however, as soon as Celia yanked open the door and got in the front seat. There was a great deal of scrambling around in back, and Glenn said, “Hey, what's the deal?”