Macon was quiet for a moment, and when she looked up again, he had cocked his head and was studying her. “Well, both actually. I brought it by to show you, yes, but I’m also leaving it.” He raised his voice to an oratorical pitch. “My wife, the fair Theresa, hath banished it from our castle! ‘Remove it from hence and take it thence,’ says she, ‘for our walls do groan with a surfeit of art.’ And when I remonstrate, ‘No, my sweet shrew, I cannot so soon relinquish my offspring,’ she points to the door and says, ‘Get thee to the gallery.’”
He paused again, and Celia walked over to turn the heat down. “And tomorrow is fine,” Macon said behind her, now adopting a deep southern drawl. “Like Miss Scarlett said, ‘After all, tomorrow is another day.’” He left after that without another word, but as he started up his van, he activated the sound system, and from the little trumpetlike amplifier sticking up on top came the sounds of a brawl in a western saloon, accompanied by the theme from the old Bonanza TV program.
Celia flipped the Open sign around to read Closed and stood for a moment watching Macon back up, then pull out of the parking lot. What a strange, strange man. She wondered if his wife had begun to regret marrying him. Or maybe she thought she was the luckiest woman alive.
Celia sighed now, turned from Through the Blinds, and walked into her kitchen. She wasn’t really hungry yet, but she needed to keep busy. Macaroni and cheese, that’s what she would make. She went to the stove and got out a pan, then turned on the water at the sink. As she watched it swirl down the drain, she thought of how fast a simple action could turn into irreversible consequences. Just as there was no way you could get that water back once it was sucked down the drain, neither could you undo things you had done. And just as you had to pay for every single drip of water you used, you also had to pay in some way for every careless action you committed. She set the pan down hard inside the sink.
She squeezed her eyes shut. This was going to be one of those long nights, she could tell. Too many things were spinning around in her head. No doubt she would need some help falling asleep later on. But for now, this was the plan—clatter around in the kitchen, make some noise and a little bit of a mess to clean up, also put something on in the background. As she walked into the living room to turn the television on, her eyes suddenly lighted on the shelf where she kept her videotapes. Without stopping to consider, she grabbed Pride and Prejudice and inserted it into her VCR. There, that would fill up space for a good long time.
* * *
She was glad her apartment was laid out in such a way that she could see the television from her kitchen. Most evenings she watched the news while she fixed and ate her supper, and more and more she was watching Wheel of Fortune after that, though she wouldn’t have told anyone for the world. She often found herself comparing Pat Sajak with Alex Trebek on Jeopardy, another old-people’s program she would never admit to watching.
After she put the pan of water on the stove to boil, she took a block of cheese out of the refrigerator, then got out the cutting board and grater. This was going to be real macaroni and cheese, not one of those box deals. It would take time to do it right, and it would leave her with two pans and the colander to clean up. She’d bake it in a Corning Ware dish and afterward would transfer what she didn’t eat to a smaller freezer container, which would leave the Corning Ware dish to scrape out and scour. She would bake it a little longer than the recipe stipulated because she liked it with a crunch around the edges, which would make the dish harder to get clean, also.
So this could stretch out to a couple of hours if she took it nice and slow. She would warm up two leftover corn-bread muffins to go with the macaroni and cheese and butter them with real butter, then take her time eating it all. Actually, these were two things her grandmother had done pretty well in the area of cooking—macaroni and cheese and corn bread. They might have been the only things she had done well in the kitchen. How ironic that Celia was using them to try to occupy her mind, to keep her from thinking, among other things, about her grandmother.
Pride and Prejudice was one of those movies Celia could watch continuously and never get tired of. She had probably seen it at least ten or twelve times by now, all six hours of it. The last three of those times had been on a single Sunday, the previous Christmas Eve, when she had started it at seven in the morning after being awakened by the Stewarts’ grandchildren upstairs. It sounded like they were jumping up and down all over the house on pogo sticks. The youngest, an infant, was crying at the top of his lungs. Celia had actually thought at first she was having another of her bad dreams, but finally it sank in that this was a real baby, alive, and in close proximity. Also not very happy.
She had lain in bed for a few minutes hoping the crying would stop, but when it didn’t, she had hit on the idea of watching Pride and Prejudice and turning the volume up extra loud. Thankfully the baby seemed to be in one of the back bedrooms upstairs instead of in the den or kitchen, both of which were directly over her apartment. Other sounds were coming from the den and kitchen, however. Evidently someone was already up and thunking around in the kitchen getting breakfast. Something substantial, like a rolling pin or can of shortening, was dropped on the floor, followed by what sounded like the slamming of a door. She could hear people talking, then the sounds of laughter and small feet running through the hall.
Then the thudding of larger feet. She often wished she had the nerve to ask Milton Stewart why he had to plant his heels so heavily whenever he walked through the house. He wasn’t that big a man, yet he sounded like Paul Bunyan with Babe the Blue Ox, the way he stomped around. And somehow this gene had been passed on to his sons, skinny boys both of them. She had moved into the apartment when the boys were in high school and had even gotten to where she could tell which of the three Stewart men was walking across the floor at any given time. When they were all three home and moving around, it sounded like a herd of stampeding buffalo up there. She had bought earplugs during those years, which helped some.
She lay in bed that Christmas Eve morning and wondered how long the Stewarts’ sons would be staying. At the time she thought only one of them was home for Christmas, but it turned out that both of them were up there, along with their wives and four children of assorted sizes. So there, without warning, went her plans for a quiet Christmas Eve. That had been back when she was still seeing Al, who was supposed to come over the next day to spend Christmas Day with her. He was bringing the turkey, dressing, and a pumpkin pie, and she was supposed to make everything else.
But the ruckus overhead, rather than inspiring her to action, enervated her. She had meant to clean her apartment and get a start on her part of Christmas dinner that day, but instead she spent the entire day watching Pride and Prejudice three times back to back, ending at one o’clock Christmas morning. She had fixed herself a sandwich around noon and heated up some leftover pizza that night, but she never once paused the movie except to rewind it.
Upstairs the hubbub continued all day, but she heard it only as faint background noise. Having spent all those hours with the Bennet family in eighteenth-century England, she had more than a little trouble extracting herself from them, and when Al called at some point that evening to talk about their schedule for Christmas Day, she treated him somewhat shabbily on the phone, trying to hurry him up so she could get back into the movie.
Celia wasn’t positive, but she thought that day may have actually been the very beginning of her disenchantment with Al. She wondered now if maybe she had subconsciously identified him with the insufferable Mr. Collins since his phone call had come right smack in the middle of Mr. Collins’ proposal to Elizabeth. It had occurred to her that Al was about the same size as Mr. Collins, both of them tending toward paunchy, though Al was a little taller and therefore hid his better. She knew that over the years, however, he would have to start buying larger clothes.
Mr. Collins was one of her favorite characters in the movie, with all of his comical affectations, and as she stood in
the kitchen grating cheese now, she found herself already looking forward to his first appearance on the screen. The opening credits were done by now, and Elizabeth Bennet had already viewed Bingley and Darcy from a distance as they surveyed nearby Netherfield on horseback.
The Bennet family was now leaving church, and Mrs. Bennet had just heard from someone that Netherfield was to be taken by a man of fortune, a man of “five thousand a year.” She was all aflutter with the possibilities this could open up for her five daughters. Mrs. Bennet was another favorite character of Celia. Her fussy, melodramatic mannerisms, combined with her intense seriousness over all things trivial, were such fun to watch. Poor Mr. Bennet, having to put up with that his whole married life.
It was funny how she had come to love all the movies based on Jane Austen’s books when she had detested the novels themselves in college. Once in a class called Critical Analysis of Literature—a class she had been forced to take because it was the only English elective she could fit into her schedule one semester—she had finally stated aloud her opinion of Emma, a novel they were required to read. Mercifully, she didn’t remember her exact words, but the gist of her speech was that these people had no life, all they ever did was make polite social calls and play silly card games and every now and then get really wild and have a hokey little dance, besides which Austen’s writing style was incredibly slow, and Celia didn’t see why the class had to spend so much time on her.
She still remembered the amused smirks of some of her classmates, who no doubt agreed with her but were too timid to say so, and for sure she still remembered the teacher’s comments to her after class that day when she asked Celia to stay behind for a moment. Her name was Dr. Quinn, and she had a small but conspicuous scar above one eyebrow that Celia wondered about. If she herself had such a scar, she knew she would wear long bangs to conceal it, but Dr. Quinn wore her hair pulled straight back. She stayed behind her desk and stared at Celia for a long time before she spoke, not unkindly really, but with something close to a puzzled expression. When she finally spoke, however, she sounded very certain, not puzzled at all.
“Miss Coleman,” she said, “I recall one of my professors keeping me after class one day, it must have been thirty-five years ago now, when I was a student at Delaware State, to tell me that my slip was showing and she knew I would want to go to the restroom to fix it before proceeding to my next class. I wanted to see you for a moment after class today to tell you that something of yours is also showing—your immaturity and ignorance. Unfortunately it can’t be fixed by ducking into a restroom for a few minutes, but it is my sincere hope that before you graduate you will understand the value of looking at literature in its own context, that you will not try to judge every book by how closely it matches your own extremely small and narrow experience of life.”
Dr. Quinn had worn a brooch at the neck of her dress that day, and Celia could still picture it—a large oval onyx with a flower etched in the center, in a gold setting. Before Celia had left the classroom, Dr. Quinn had leaned over her lectern and said, almost gently, “You’re a smart girl, Miss Coleman. Don’t let yourself get blown around by every little current of contemporary thought that comes along. Don’t think that your own generation has all the answers. Open up your mind.”
Which had struck Celia as preposterous at the time. Her mind was wide open! It was all those people in Austen’s books who were the stuffy ones, all prim and constricted, riding around in carriages and worrying about all the social conventions of the time! And, she suspected, Dr. Quinn herself wasn’t so all-fired open-minded, either, or she wouldn’t dress the way she did and offer her opinion in class that a fuddy-duddy writer like Jane Austen “was the brightest flower in the garden of British novelists.” And that comment about Celia’s “own generation”—why, people Dr. Quinn’s age thought that their generation had all the answers!
Well, at some point Celia had grown up, thankfully, and now she could hardly believe she had had those thoughts about Austen’s books, much less had the nerve to say them aloud in class. It was sad how much education was wasted on kids. How often she had wished she could go back and sit in some of those classes again.
Celia hadn’t intended to grate the whole block of cheese, but she realized all of a sudden that she had. She certainly didn’t need that much for a small recipe of macaroni and cheese, and now she wouldn’t have cheese for a sandwich if she wanted it. Oh well, too late to undo it now—like the water down the drain, like the stupid comments in Dr. Quinn’s class. She got out a zipped baggie and put the extra cheese into it, then stuck it in the freezer.
She was happy to realize as she proceeded through the recipe that she had hit on a good idea to fill up the hours. She was calmer now, and the thought of the finished macaroni and cheese and the anticipation of watching the rest of the movie made her feel proud of herself for coming up with a workable strategy. The article for the Derby News nagged at her a little, but she told herself she’d get back to it tomorrow for sure. She didn’t usually like to procrastinate, but it couldn’t be helped tonight.
She had discovered over the years that macaroni and cheese was even more flavorful if she sprinkled grated Parmesan cheese, along with the cheddar, between the layers. She also liked a little extra fresh-ground pepper. The white sauce was perfect this time, not too thick or too thin, and as she poured it slowly over the top of the casserole, from the VCR she heard Caroline Bingley tell Darcy that all the locals considered Elizabeth Bennet a great beauty. And just as Darcy curtly disagreed, right as he was delivering one of the funniest lines of the whole video—“I should as soon call her mother a wit”—Celia’s telephone rang.
10
Of Every Good Possessed
“Celia, I have a favor to ask.” It was Patsy Stewart from upstairs. She was most likely using the telephone back in her bedroom because Celia wasn’t getting the stereo effect she always did when Patsy phoned her from the kitchen directly overhead.
Patsy had a low, husky voice, though as far as Celia knew, she had never been a smoker. If most of what she said weren’t so mundane and totally devoid of double meaning, Patsy’s voice could possibly be described with adjectives such as sexy or sultry. If every now and then she would say something ambiguous or suggestive, something with the faintest innuendo of naughtiness or flippancy, it might be an interesting Bette Davis kind of voice. If she were the least bit witty, it would make a great comedienne’s voice. But, like Mrs. Bennet, no one would ever accuse Patsy Stewart of being a wit.
Or another idea: Celia could imagine somebody with a voice like Patsy’s sprinkling in endearments like darlin’, honey, sweetheart. With a southern accent, that would be a voice you’d take notice of and remember, one with a distinctive sort of charm. Patsy wasn’t one for endearments, though, and she barely even had an accent, though she had been born right here in South Carolina, in a small town called Greer over on the other side of Greenville. So as it was, her voice wasn’t any of these things—not sexy or sultry or interesting or memorable in any way. It was merely husky and a little on the loud side.
So she had a favor to ask. Celia already smelled something thick and musty, like a mixture of obligation and dread, seeping down through the floor of Patsy’s house and into her own apartment. In the brief second before she replied, Celia recalled that the last time Patsy had asked a favor had been when her husband, Milton, was in the hospital for a hernia operation a couple of weeks after Christmas. She had spent over an hour upstairs that time helping Patsy clear out her entire pantry, which was crawling with little black bugs. Some time back, Patsy had come across a sale on cornmeal and had bought three bags of it, which she had stored on a shelf of her pantry.
“I sure never expected it to go bad on me,” she told Celia. “I thought I’d use it all up before something like this happened.” It was hard to believe that a woman deep into her fifties with a long history of cooking behind her could think she could store that much cornmeal in a pantry without inviting tr
ouble. That’s when Celia told her about her grandmother’s practice of always putting flour and cornmeal in the freezer so the bugs wouldn’t get to it. Patsy said she’d have to try that next time.
The two of them stood at the door of the pantry closet for a long silent moment surveying the scene. Celia couldn’t imagine how that many bugs could have taken over without Patsy noticing anything earlier. Evidently as far as their reproduction rate went, rabbits couldn’t hold a candle to these little guys.
“I haven’t cooked much since Christmas,” Patsy told Celia, evidently guessing her thoughts. “After the boys left, we ate mostly leftovers, and then we had our new cupboards installed right after that, so I didn’t cook for another week or so. And then with Milton’s surgery, well . . . if I hadn’t been hankering for a cup of hot cocoa when I got home from the hospital tonight, there’s no telling when I would have discovered all this.” She dragged a small stool inside the pantry, then started handing things from the top shelf down to Celia, who was holding a big plastic trash bag. Patsy wasn’t taking any chances trying to salvage anything that was questionable.
The bugs were crawling all over almost everything, as if looking for a way in. Celia studied three or four of them, tiny dark ovals, wandering around on the outside of a box of raspberry Jell-O. She smashed one of them with her thumbnail, feeling the slightest crunch. She immediately wished she hadn’t done that. She knew she’d have the feeling all night that her hands weren’t clean.
It looked like the bugs had originated in the cornmeal and then had migrated throughout the pantry. Next to the cornmeal was a partially used bag of flour, which, although folded over securely and clipped at the top, was also crawling. Patsy started wondering aloud if the bugs had maybe started there instead and then somehow gained access to the cornmeal. She went on and on about this. Celia didn’t say anything but felt like telling Patsy it didn’t matter where they started, the point was they were everywhere now. An open box of cream of wheat, another of oatmeal, and two of dry cereal on the top shelf were also infested.
No Dark Valley Page 14