Divining Rod

by Michael Knight

  “How did you get this scar?” Simon said, like he was reading her mind.

  She had the strange sensation that his finger was moving past the hard white skin and touching it years back when it was still pink and raw. She had to lower the magazine and look for herself to be certain that it was healed. “I fell. I was playing dress-up and running around the house like a maniac. I was always trying to make myself look grown in those days.”

  He looked at her and smiled curiously.

  “Wait here,” he said.

  She heard the footsteps on the stairs, then on the floor above her. Outside, she could hear cars flicking by on the road, the steady murmur of insects. They were sounds you stopped noticing after a while, easy enough to mistake for silence. She flipped pages in the magazine but didn’t pay attention to what she was reading. When he returned, Simon was carrying a backless black evening dress with a cardboard cut-out supporting the bodice.

  “Would you put it on?” he said. “I want to see how you look all grown up.”

  She waved a hand over her chest and said, “This is as grown up as I get,” but she did as he asked, climbed out of bed and took the dress from his hands and held it against her, the silk cool against her skin. He told her the dress had belonged to his mother and she slipped it over her head, the fabric whispering secrets as it passed the length of her, then turned around so he could run the zipper up the back. She shook her hair out with her fingers.

  Her own mother had always said that you could learn more about a person from their history than you could from anything they might choose to show you of themselves, and standing there in his mother’s dress, she felt as if she had stepped briefly from the flow of her own life into his. He held her shoulders and walked her into the bathroom so she could see herself in the mirror. The fluorescent light showing the constellation of freckles on her chest. His face over her shoulder in the mirror. Simon had told her stories about his parents and it seemed important then to know what had happened between his mother and father, to know if this woman, whom she had never met, could have been made happy by the rest of her life. If she understood that one thing, Delia thought, it might be possible to avoid all the old mistakes of the past. She pulled the bodice up over her nose, like a bandit, and inhaled, smelling her own sweat and the soap she used and behind that a trace of dry cleaning fluid and the musty odor of disuse. Simon lifted the skirt and ran his hands along her thighs.

  They spent the last hour before Sam came home going through old photo albums. Simon brought them down from upstairs and they sat cross-legged on the living room floor, flipping stiff pages. Delia would open an album on her lap and make a fuss over his baby pictures: Simon at the zoo, Simon in a sailor suit, Simon at the beach. She lingered on that one for a while, wondered if it was taken during the summer he had described for her. In the picture, Simon was running toward the camera and she could see his mother standing knee-deep in shorebreak just behind him, smiling not at the photographer but at her son. The photographer’s long shadow stretched into the frame. Simon had fixed her a drink and she sipped it shallow. She asked if his father had taken the picture and he said, “I can’t remember for sure, but I doubt it. Dad wasn’t much of a photographer back then. Most of the pictures in here are of me and him, because Mom had to take them herself. I think she asked some guy on the beach to take this one for her.”

  “There were pictures of her in the first album,” she said.

  “That was later,” he said. “Dad mellowed in his old age.”

  Sometimes, when Sam was at the college and she was waiting for Simon to come home from work and her own house was too quiet to bear, Delia would take the key he had given her and let herself in an hour or so early. She’d sneak upstairs and dig the albums from the back of the closet and settle on the bed. The more recent ones-Simon dressed for his high school graduation, Simon in his dorm at college, were also full of pictures of his mother, nonsense photographs showing her peeking around a shower curtain with shampoo in her hair and waving the photographer away, or coming through the front door with her keys in one hand and a bag of groceries in the other, or catching her just waking up, one hand covering her face, her nightgown rumpled, the strap hanging loose on her shoulder. And Delia imagined his father following her around with a camera, desperate to capture her, at least a part of her, on film. He could have something permanent then, something indelible and real.

  But more often than not she would pore over the pictures of Simon, arrange the albums in order to watch the way he aged, showing more of his father as a baby, then his mother when he was learning to walk. It amazed her how much the two of them were intermingled in his features. He could be the spitting image of either one of them depending on the light and the angle and the expression on his face. Then he would come home, and she would put the albums away and let him draw her own memories up from her skin.

  * * *

  One night, she said good-bye to Simon, pulled the door closed behind her, and found a little girl standing in her driveway. The girl was twirling a baton, her back to Delia. She was eight, maybe nine years old, her hair brown, shoulder length, clean-looking but disheveled. She was wearing a man’s white V-neck undershirt that reached to her knees and had cream-colored Keds on her feet. She flicked the baton skyward, and when Delia said, “Hey there,” the girl turned, distracted, and the baton came clattering to the pavement.

  “Who do you belong to, sweetie?”

  She gave Delia a serious look and picked up the baton.

  “I’m training for the Junior Miss.”

  “Is that right?” she said. “I know you. You’re Bob Robinson’s girl. You came by dressed as Miss America last Halloween. That was some costume.”

  She nodded and smiled, said, “You’re Mrs. Holladay. Do you have another name? My mother has another name.”

  “Holladay is my husband’s name.” Delia smiled back at her, studied her face. Skinny, with high cheekbones and a round mouth. “My maiden name is Simpson.”

  “I like Holladay better,” the girl said.

  “Me, too,” Delia said.

  The girl smiled again and moved off in the direction of her house, crossing Simon Bell’s yard, then tossed the baton into the air and followed it with her eyes. She caught it on the downward arc and kept it pin wheeling smoothly through her fingers. Delia went inside and showered away the last traces of her evening with Simon, then fixed dinner, stir-fried chicken and vegetables, and she didn’t think about the girl again until her husband was home from class. They were sitting across from one another at the little table in the kitchen, Sam poking at the peppers and onions on his plate. The table was pushed against the wall beneath the window. The window was open, warm air sighing through the screen, ruffling a basket of paper napkins.

  Delia said, “Do you ever think about children anymore?”

  “We’ve talked about that,” he said. “I’m too old. You can have children with your next husband.”

  “Stop,” she said. “I’m serious.”

  He said, “So am I,” but his voice was soft and teasing. “The average life expectancy for a white male in the southern United States who eats too much red meat and fried chicken and occasionally smokes a cigar is seventy-one years old. I’m sixty-three now. That’s eight years left to me. I want to spend them with my wife. When I’m buried and you’re still fertile and alluring, you can start looking for the father of your children.”

  “Don’t joke,” she said.

  Sam tried to change the subject after that, but Delia didn’t have anything to say. She wasn’t angry. They had talked about children before they decided to get married and agreed that they would be happier alone, no distractions. When Sam had finished his dinner and was standing at the sink rinsing dishes, she thought, No, I don’t want children, then she said it out loud, “No, you’re right. We shouldn’t have children. It’ll be just the two of us,” and that sounded fit to her. She walked over to Sam and nudged him aside, told him to go into t
he living room. She’d finish up and be right there. A few seconds later she heard the stereo come on, something classical that she didn’t recognize, extravagant with strings.

  Just as she was drying the last of the dishes, a face appeared at the window, the little girl from today pressing herself against the screen. “Do I look funny?” the girl said, her voice through the mesh a brittle-sounding buzz. The screen pushed her nose flat, made her cheeks look fuzzy.

  “Pretty funny,” Delia said. “I thought you said you were going home. Shouldn’t you be practicing your baton?”

  “Ahhhhhhhhh.” The girl made her voice deep, relishing the sound distortion. Then, doing a throaty Darth Vader, she said, “Luke,” drawing the word out for effect, “Luke, you are not my father.”

  “That’s not right, is it?” Delia said. “Doesn’t he tell him, ‘Luke, I am your father’? Isn’t that the whole deal with the movie? The big surprise?”

  “Some surprise,” she said. “It’s a stupid movie.”

  “I liked it,” Delia said. “I don’t know your name.”

  “My name’s Maddie.” The girl ducked out of sight beneath the sill. Delia could hear music from down the hall, then the low, consoling tones of the public radio announcer. She said, “You still there, Maddie? How long have you been out there listening?”

  She thought she should say something about life and love and the way of adult matters, in case the girl heard something that she didn’t understand. Then Maddie was at the window again, rattling the screen, startling Delia despite herself, saying, “Luke, Luke. Come to me, Luke. Come over to the dark side, my son.”

  The house seemed impossibly quiet that night. She lay in bed for a long time, listening to Sam breathe, because that was the only sound she could locate. She had heard that older men tended to be light sleepers, up and down all night long, but Sam generally slept like the dead, his breathing shallow and quick, like a child. After a while, she went into the other room and got the television going, flicked channels until she found a movie that she liked and pressed mute, the characters mouthing the words silently. She thought about calling Paula or Gardenia Lawrence from the poker game, but decided against it. Then she locked the door and dialed Simon’s number. He answered on the first ring.

  “Delia?” he said.

  “How did you know it was me?”

  “I have ESP,” he said. “That’s my thing, guessing who’s calling me in the middle of the night. It’s not very lucrative, but you take what you can get.”

  “Are you watching television?”

  “I’m in bed.”

  “Turn the TV on. Put it on Channel Thirteen.”

  He sighed, and she said please. She heard him getting out of bed, imagined him in his boxer shorts, long legs ashen in the darkness, picking his way through the forest of discarded clothes on his bedroom floor to turn on the television.

  “This is one of my favorite movies,” she told him when he returned. “I know for a fact it’ll be over in about fifteen minutes, counting commercials.”

  “Why don’t you come over? Is Sam asleep?”

  “No,” she said. “I mean yes, he’s asleep, but no I won’t come to your house. See that guy.” She pointed at the screen though she knew he couldn’t see her. “He’ll be dead in a second. Someone tampered with his brakes. We’ll just talk until the movie’s over.”

  He said that was okay, and she turned off the light and settled back against the couch. A bank of long windows faced the backyard, and she could see his pool, luminous in the darkness, casting scattered reflections. He was always forgetting to turn out the lights. She reminded him, and he said he’d take care of it when they were finished. It was a seventies’ movie, and they poked fun at the Afros and fly collars and bell-bottomed pants. The house was cool and pleasant. She wanted that movie to last a long time.

  The Habit of Seasons

  On Halloween, Sam dressed himself as Frankenstein’s Monster. Delia smeared pallid makeup on his cheeks and slicked his hair with dye and Vaseline. She lined her own mouth with black lipstick and made a witch’s hat from a cardboard box, so the two of them would be appropriately scary when the Trick-or-Treaters showed. But, by and large, the children stayed away. Sam said he was sorry, he hadn’t been very good about holidays in the past. When it was clear that no one else was coming, Delia piled the hem of her witch’s dress in her lap and ate the leftover candy, scattering gaudy wrappers on the rug. Sam couldn’t get over her knees, couldn’t believe the arches of her bare feet. He leaned against the doorframe and said, “What is it that you see in me exactly?”

  She smiled, lipstick on her teeth, and brushed crumbs from her dress.

  “C’mere, Frankenstein,” she said. “Isn’t there a movie about you?”

  He told her to wait a minute, went to the porch and snuffed the candle in the pumpkin. Across the street, Betty Fowler was plying her ridiculous magic on the golf course, a perfect holiday prop. He stood watching her for a few seconds, the sheen of her gray hair in the moonlight, her shadow long on the neat grass. The moon was appropriately full. Then he made his way back to the living room and made love to his wife in the dark, her kisses tasting like chocolate. He thought of Mary Youngblood and the women that followed her, marveled at the difference here, felt dizzy, almost drunk, at the pressure of Delia’s knees at his side, the tickle of her hair at his face when she leaned over him, the hard floor against his back.

  The seasons changed abruptly in Alabama. Winter stormed in while everyone was asleep, shaking the leaves from the trees and bringing cold November rain. They brought the extra blankets down from the linen closet. Delia drove him to work in bad weather because his eyes were going bad. One morning in December, rain streaking the hood like ice skater’s tracks, the defrost working hard to keep the windshield clear, she didn’t stop when they reached the high school. He asked where she was going, but she grinned and stayed mysterious, kept driving until he guessed their destination. He said, “We can’t go to New Orleans, Delia, I’ve got a test to give. We’re doing the Plebian Council and the Gracchae.”

  They were on the interstate, fifteen, maybe twenty minutes from town. She said he was right and turned around at the next exit, headed back the other way. The road was spitting mist. Delia’s cheeks were red with cold.

  “It was a good idea,” she said, patting his thigh.

  “Yes,” he said. “It was a good idea.”

  A few days before Christmas, they drove out to a tree farm, and Sam cut down a scotch pine for their house. They decorated it with lights and glass balls they had bought the same day at the supermarket in town, and Delia strung berries to weave along the branches. For a long time after they were finished, they stood in the half light from the colored bulbs with a drink and appraised the work that they had done. Some of the berries were broken, insides seeping out onto the thread and the ornaments looked cheap and obvious to Sam. He said, “It takes a long time to accumulate the right stuff for a good Christmas tree.”

  “I know,” Delia said. “This tree is fine. It’s fine. Really, Sam, it’s perfect.”

  She bloomed again in March, cotton dresses dancing around her legs, preparations for the spring recital invigorating her. She carried sheet music everywhere she went. On the night of the performance, Sam sat in the third row beside a woman who kept talking about her son, the cellist. That woman has done wonders for Allister, she kept saying, he’s never been so thrilled to play his music. Sam nodded and smiled. He knew Allister’s motivation. He watched Delia, exactly the way he’d watched her before she was his wife, her hands waving in time to the music, her mouth circling the notes, but instead of feeling relieved at her happiness or enchanted at the sight of her, he felt oddly desperate and old, his limbs heavy on his bones. He could not imagine how he had managed to live his life without her.

  They surprised Delia’s mother on her birthday, April 21, brought her flowers and a microwave oven, which nearly killed Sam when he carried it from the car. Mrs. Simpson
asked him how he liked married life and he said, “I like it fine, Margaret. Just fine.”

  “Liar,” she joked. She pointed at him with a last forkful of cake. “This girl’s running you ragged. I can see it in your face. You’ve aged ten years.”

  Delia took her plate and slapped her mother playfully on the shoulder and said, “You shut up. Sam and I couldn’t be happier.”

  A few weeks later, he came home from teaching his class and Delia was nowhere to be found. He knew she was probably fine, but he couldn’t stop his heart from jumping to conclusions, pinballing around in his chest. He went from room to room turning on lights, calling her name, but she didn’t answer. He found her on the back patio in a green and yellow swimsuit, toweling her hair, her legs and arms still slick with water. She’d been using the neighbor’s pool in the afternoons. He opened the sliding glass door and said, “Lord, I’ve been calling you for five minutes. I thought you’d been abducted by aliens.”

  She smiled and rubbed the towel over her leg and said, “I’m sorry, Sam. I didn’t hear a thing. My mind must have been somewhere else.”

  Her hair was crazy from the towel, her nipples showing through her bathing suit. Porch light glistened on her skin. Just then, he remembered what she’d said to her mother—Sam and I couldn’t be happier—and he wondered if it was true. His voice was fat and mealy when he said, “Would you like me to build you a swimming pool?”

  “You know we can’t afford it,” she said. “Simon Bell’s is fine.”

  “I was just noticing the yard,” he said. “It’s empty, nothing but grass.”

  “That’s not true. We’ve got the flower beds beside the house. We’ve got the magnolia.” She pointed at the big magnolia near the fence, white flowers beginning to fold with the coming darkness. “We don’t need a thing,” she said, tossing the towel into his chest and kissing his cheek as she slipped past him into the house. He stood there, holding the towel, feeling the water from her body on his hands, the clammy kiss on his cheek, smelling chlorine and Delia in the fabric, until he heard the shower running in the other room.