She knew she had always cared too much about her looks. She sometimes wondered how different her life might have been had she not been pretty. Maybe things would have been a lot better. She found herself suddenly thinking about the preacher’s wife in Dunmore. Plain little Denise Davidson, with her very clear, very direct, very blue eyes, which were no doubt closed in peaceful sleep right now. She thought of Denise and Newt, their heads side by side on their pillows in the small white parsonage next to the church on Old Campground Road.
She wondered if Denise ever had nights when she couldn’t sleep. Probably not. People with clean consciences usually slept well. But maybe Denise was a worrier. Maybe she stayed awake fretting over their finances or a recalcitrant church member or an upcoming doctor’s appointment. She remembered what Denise had said to her that evening in the parking lot outside the church: “God reaches out to you in love and mercy. Nobody is beyond his saving power.” And just what did a naïve little goody-goody like Denise Davidson know about the great distances a person could travel away from God, about all the bridges he could burn as he fled further and further?
Celia went back into her bedroom and sat on the edge of the bed. She remembered a time long ago when she used to fall asleep praying in bed. When she first went to live with Grandmother, she was always afraid she hadn’t prayed enough that day. She would force herself to lie awake, working her way through a long list of petitions until somewhere along the way she slipped into a dream and was out for the night. She also remembered the last year, when she would see Grandmother’s light still on late at night, shining through the crack under her bedroom door. Sometimes as Celia tiptoed past her door, she would hear her voice, never in a loud showy display of piety but low and earnest, the words indistinguishable.
“Didn’t sleep good last night”—that was a recurring phrase she had run across in Grandmother’s diary. Often the reason followed: “Came a hard rain and kept it up till near dawn,” or “Heartburn from Molly’s chili,” or, more often, something like “Celia not home till past 2 A.M.” Never anything like “Bad dreams,” though. Grandmother would probably have considered it a sin to have bad dreams. She wouldn’t have approved of anything that showed too active an imagination or hinted at hidden guilt.
Well, one good thing about staying awake all night was that it kept the bad dreams at bay. No crying babies tonight, no disappointed looks on the faces of her parents, no snarling cats or old women in caskets. But besides not being able to function tomorrow, staying awake had other drawbacks tonight. It left too much time to think about what had happened at the kitchen window earlier that evening. She was still mortified over it.
* * *
She had behaved horribly, had known it even as she spoke the words, and had been so ashamed afterward that she had actually broken down and cried in front of Elizabeth. They had finished the meal, cleaned up the kitchen together, and even sat in the living room talking for a good hour after that, but Celia had wished the whole time that she could go hide in a closet. Not that Elizabeth hadn’t done her best to smooth things over, to salve Celia’s embarrassment first with cheerful talk, then with confidences of some of her own past blunders.
But nothing could wipe away the meanness Celia felt, the echo she still heard of her small-minded accusations, her tone of hysteria. Oh, how unspeakably arrogant she must have sounded to Bruce! How petty and childish she had felt as soon as the words were out of her mouth. Perhaps it had been her loss of control, however, that had opened her up to what happened after Elizabeth left. Maybe she would have put off reading her grandmother’s diaries indefinitely if she hadn’t already erred so badly that night. Maybe after recognizing your blatant fallibility in one area, you were more willing to consider it in others.
Whatever the cause, she had opened one of the diaries around ten o’clock, while soaking in the bathtub, and had closed it an hour and a half later after the water was cool. She hadn’t shed a tear during the whole reading of it, but at the end she had been overcome with remorse and pity, with the pain of her many failures, had bowed her head and let the tears come. She had watched them fall from her face into the bath water, had thought, I am washing myself with my own tears, had wished they could possess some healing for her guilt, some retroactive power to comfort her grandmother’s broken heart.
So what was to be done? How could she ever know those fathomless billows of peace the hymn talked about? Her eyes lighted on the telephone beside her bed. What would Denise Davidson say if Celia called her right now? It would be easy to find out her phone number from directory assistance. But her husband would no doubt answer the phone. And what would Celia say to the Reverend Davidson? “Hi, Newt, do you know that song that goes ‘Peace, peace, wonderful peace’? Well, I keep hearing it in my mind, and I know it’s past three in the morning, but I can’t sleep, see, and I need your wife to explain something we talked about in the parking lot six weeks ago, about how the balancing act works between sin and mercy.”
Oh, the silly things that went through your mind when you were sleep deprived. Celia heaved a sigh and got up from the bed. She walked out into the living room. Maybe she could fall asleep on the couch. Maybe she should turn on the television and see what kinds of things came on at this time of morning. But she felt too restless to lie down again.
She went to her front door and unlocked it. She opened the screen and stepped out onto the concrete stoop in her bare feet. She looked up at the treetops, then past them to the black sky. One especially bright star stood out from the rest—a sign maybe? But then she saw it was only an airplane, and soon it was out of sight. It was a still night yet mild for early August. I must do something. The thought was bearing down on her. I can’t go on this way. And then without meaning to, she fixed her eyes on the night sky and said aloud, “Show me how to start.”
She turned and looked across the driveway to Kimberly and Bruce’s house. She saw again the look of shock, then anger, in his eyes through the kitchen window earlier that night. Holding the struggling cat against his chest, he might have presented a comical image, but when he had spoken he was deadly serious. She had been too flustered at the end to make amends, and she couldn’t imagine bringing herself to apologize now. No, she would just ignore him and hope that he would, like any typical male, forget the specifics of the incident over time.
She stepped back inside and locked the door. As she turned to go back to her bedroom, her eyes landed on the small table beside the door, the one where she always laid her mail and keys. She usually discarded junk mail right away, but because she had been busy preparing for Elizabeth’s supper visit, she hadn’t done so that afternoon. And there, right on top, was a piece of junk mail with these words printed in bright red letters on the envelope: Do you need help? Write for free information. The return address was Marchant & Buchanan, Public Auctions—certainly not an enterprise to lend the kind of help Celia needed, but she looked again at the message.
“Write for free information”—maybe this was a place to start. And instantly a person came to mind, the same one she had thought of only minutes earlier. How curious that a totally silly thought could transform itself into something that seemed not only feasible but absolutely right. She would write a letter to Denise Davidson. An old-fashioned letter, the kind she never wrote her grandmother. In fact, she couldn’t remember the last time she had written a real letter to anyone. She knew she had some stationery in a drawer in her bedroom. She would get it out now, sit right down, and write a letter for help.
And suddenly she couldn’t wait to do it. The idea was like a little shiny key to a door that had long been bolted shut. She went straight to the right bureau drawer, removed the stationery, and headed for the kitchen table. She wouldn’t worry about what Denise Davidson would think of her. She had already shown her shabby side to Bruce and Elizabeth earlier tonight, so she might as well push it a step further. She would set things down on paper tonight that would take Denise’s breath away. Then she would see wh
at the preacher’s wife had to say about the subject of mercy after this.
Celia could see why the Roman Catholic idea of confession had its appeal. There had to be some feeling of cleansing after verbalizing your worst sins out loud to another person, some sense of transferring a small part of a heavy burden. She knew, of course, that Denise couldn’t expiate her sins, but it would be interesting to see what a sheltered soul like her would say when she knew the truth about Celia.
As Celia arranged a sheet of plain white stationery on the table in front of her and took the cap off her pen, Denise’s blue eyes once again rose before her. She also thought of Elizabeth, with her kind, searching gray-green eyes that seemed to want to say more than she allowed her lips to speak. She thought of her grandmother’s tired old eyes peering out from all the frown lines around them, the irises a weak watery blue, the whites like discolored porcelain. She thought of her own sad, sleepy eyes reflected in the bathroom mirror.
And right before setting her pen to paper, she glanced up at the kitchen window and remembered Bruce’s angry dark eyes. How instructive it might be, she thought suddenly, to be able to see yourself through someone else’s eyes, to view a movie of yourself at the end of every day. She could imagine her own protests if such a movie were shown of this very day: But that’s not the real me! she would say. Which would be absolutely true. No, such a movie couldn’t begin to show the real Cecilia Annette Coleman, with all the deep ugly cracks of sin beneath the surface faults of today.
Part Two:
HEAR, O HEAR US
WHEN WE PRAY
25
One Holy Passion
On a Sunday afternoon in late October, Bruce Healey was sitting at the patio table in the backyard trying to carve a jack-o’-lantern to surprise Madison when he saw Celia pull into the driveway next door and park her red Mustang. It still surprised him that a woman like her, so efficient, sensible, and reclusive, drove a red Mustang instead of, say, a dark brown Volvo 280.
He had already gotten all the stringy goop and seeds out of the pumpkin and was working on the second eye—a simple triangular design, which was turning out to be larger than the first eye and a little lower on the face, down toward the middle of its cheek actually. So it would be a freak, but who cared? Nobody expected perfection when it came to jack-o’-lanterns.
He paused for a moment to watch Celia get out of her car and walk to her front door. He opened his mouth to call to her but for some reason decided against it. He realized he even had a legitimate question already framed and ready to ask: “How many trick-or-treaters usually come around this neighborhood on Halloween?” In fact, he knew in his heart that he was sitting here in the backyard with the express hope of seeing her. But something about the brisk, beeline way she was moving toward the door kept him from speaking. Not that it was much different from the way she normally walked to the door—as if she had just remembered she’d left a cake in the oven. After watching her disappear inside her apartment, shutting the door firmly behind her, he turned his attention back to the jack-o’-lantern’s enormous misaligned eye.
Bruce Healey had met a lot of women in his life. All shapes and sizes, young and old, all kinds of dull and fascinating personalities, faces that made you look twice, others that made you wish you hadn’t. When he was in college, he used to say he could never get married because he’d always be wondering about all those other women he hadn’t had a chance to meet.
Sometimes in grad school in Montgomery, Alabama, he had sat in coffeehouses just thinking about all the women he had been with, his mind always wandering eventually to the more eccentric ones. The redheaded vegetarian from Hattiesburg who had had her first name legally changed from Audrey to Unity; the blond six-footer from Mobile who could bench-press one-eighty; Tamara something from Kosciusko who sang backup for an Elvis impersonator on weekends; those twin sisters—Tanya and Sonja—from Memphis who competed in demolition derbies; and dozens and dozens of others. His friends liked to joke that he was particularly attracted to the weird types.
Although he didn’t really like the idea of lumping girls into categories, he had often said to other guys in his bragging days, “Name a type, I’ve met her.” And he probably had. He had passed through a lot of towns in the South, the region of the country he considered the only reasonable place to settle down permanently, and a good number in the Midwest and Northeast, too, meeting girls everywhere he went. His friends envied him, mostly good-naturedly, because not only did Bruce really like girls, but for some reason none of the guys could figure out, girls really liked him back.
And it was a sad, pitiful thing, Bruce used to tell them, that they couldn’t see why girls liked him so much. It was as fundamental a principle as the ones in science books—geotropism, photosynthesis, entropy, friction, cytokinesis, evaporation, thermodynamics, on and on. Simple cause and effect. It all boiled down, as he tried to explain from time to time, to the fact that he had a very high regard for the whole female population. And women could tell it.
Women were smarter in different ways from men. They were more loyal, they could be incredibly tough, they sensed things without being told, they kept the world running with their attention to detail, they had more compassion, could keep track of so many different things at the same time, and, obviously, there was the whole physical part of it. All that soft roundness—with a few exceptions, such as the blond six-footer. That woman had biceps as hard as baseballs and a torso like a steel cage.
But really, there was nothing difficult about it all. If you treated people right, they would like you. That’s what his mother had told him on his first day of kindergarten as she had stooped down in front of him at the door and planted a wet, sloppy kiss on his forehead, which he had instinctively known he shouldn’t wipe off because it might hurt her feelings.
When he thought of his mother now, as a grown man, this was the picture that most often came to mind instead of all the other more recent and less pleasant ones he could have conjured up: That day, about thirty-five years ago when she had kissed him at the front door and said, “Remember, be nice to everybody, Brucie, and they’ll be nice back to you.” And it had worked except in a very few cases, none of which could really be laid to the fault of the principle itself.
It had worked especially well with girls. Even in elementary school, girls had liked him because he had been nice to them. Not in a sissy, simpering way, but forthrightly and courteously. He had often wondered why it was that he understood this basic fact about women so much better than most of the other men he knew. Or at least he thought he did most of the time. There were always those other times after an encounter with a woman when he came away feeling that he’d had all his neat little theories shoved inside a paper bag, shaken up, and then released in a high stiff wind.
But even those times contributed to the fun. Those were the times that had always pointed him back to the ultimate pleasure of life: The Mystery of Womankind. Those were the times that helped fuel what he used to call his “one holy passion,” a phrase he had heard somewhere and thought was a good way to describe his avid pursuit of that ultimate pleasure. He didn’t call it that anymore. For one thing, he had pretty much given up the pursuit, and for another, he had heard those exact three words sung in a hymn at church not long ago in reference to loving God, something that legitimately deserved the adjective holy.
But anyway, the point still stood. It was good to be surprised, to have your predictions overturned when it came to dealing with women. If you could ever definitively interpret and label them, could ever really, finally corral and corner them, pin them down and identify their secrets, you’d ruin the grandest adventure in life.
Of course that adventure was mostly a thing of the past now. He tried to keep from thinking about all the casual liaisons he had made in years gone by, and whenever he saw an especially attractive woman walk by now, he tried to avert his eyes, at least most of the time. It was hard, though—a lot harder than most women realized. Any ma
n trying to clean up his heart and mind these days had a really hard row to hoe with all the visual stimulation coming at him from all directions.
Bruce set to work on the jack-o’-lantern’s mouth now, first marking the outline with a smaller knife, curving the grin up higher on the side where the eye was in its normal position. He would make it a big goofy snaggletoothed grin. Madison would like that.
Of all the girls and women he had ever met, though, he had never met one quite like the little ice cube next door. Celia was her name, a name that matched her perfectly, that sounded cold and zipped up like a plastic freezer bag. The first night Bruce had laid eyes on her, back in February sometime, Kimberly had said to him after they left her apartment, “Not exactly Miss Hospitality, was she?” And he had said, “Miss Hostility is more like it.”
When he was honest with himself, he had to admit that his great gift for understanding and attracting women hadn’t really paid such great dividends in the end. He could have used all that time in his youth a lot more profitably. And during those same honest moments, there was always that bad business of three years ago to remind him over and over that solving the mystery of womankind was something no mortal man should ever try to do. Things that seemed like such fun at first so often turned into tragedy.
The first night he had met Celia, when he and Kimberly had dropped by to see her apartment, he got the feeling she didn’t want to be anywhere near them, yet, on the other hand, it seemed as though she wanted to follow them around with the vacuum cleaner and dustcloth to make sure they didn’t mess anything up. Besides understanding women better, Bruce was also pretty sure that he paid more attention to details than the average man, and one thing he had noticed that first night was that the mail on the table by Celia’s door was spread out in a tidy little fan. It made him want to knock it on the floor just to see what she would do.
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