Even Now (11 page)

“Mean what?” Daintry said, picked up a jar of honey and turned it upside down. The viscous golden nectar inched down the glass.

Daintry was invited to spend the night, too. But instead she went home, to pack for a three-week youth leadership conference
in Raleigh. (“
Youth
conference?” Meg had laughed as Daintry made her way back across the street. “What’s
that?”
) I never invited classmates to visit Cullen again. What had Daintry done? She went to her conference. She accomplished and
organized and achieved. She became student body president. She had an affair with the driver’s ed teacher.

A tendril slipped from the barrette’s grip to her shoulder. “You had a crush on somebody from a boy’s school,” Daintry said.
She tucked the strand into the swept-up coil, and I looked at her hands, the manicured nails, and didn’t remember the way
we wrote messages on our palms in junior high, self-important reminders to ourselves; did not remember inking smeary puppet
lips and eyes on closed fists in elementary school; remembered instead her hands picking, plucking through the grass that
sixteenth birthday afternoon. “Those girls were all singing ‘Son of a Preacher Man.’ Teasing you.”

I remembered. Tim Todd, whom I’d met at a mixer and was exchanging letters with. Timothy Emerson Todd. “Because his father
was a minister,” I said.

“Just like Alan Geer’s father.” Alan, the Methodist rector’s son who’d finally noticed me at the end of our freshman year
at Cullen High after I’d mooned over him from a distance. “I brokered Alan for you,” Daintry said.

She had—managed to persuade Alan of my charms or convince him that my being interested in him was reason enough for reciprocation.
Alan and I had gone out a few times that summer—“gotten together”—at some meeting place or another, before I left for Wyndham.
“Wonder what happened to him.”

“You mean
after
you told him how stupid his letters were?”

Surprised and guilty, I looked at her. At Wyndham I’d read Alan’s sweetly gushing epistles aloud to my big-city roommates
from Atlanta and Tampa. “Hometown honey,” they’d chorused until eventually I’d adopted their derision and become determined
to shed Alan. A scorn that must have been evident in my replies. His final letter to me was neatly scissored into strips except
for a small corner where Alan had written that I’d “torn his letters to shreds.” Remnant remorse made me squirm. “How did
you know that?”

“He showed me. He showed everyone.”

I swallowed, stunned.

“Alan fixes VCRs now. Has a beer belly and wears a gold chain.”

“Oh. . . ”

Daintry’s responding laugh was crueler in its way than Meg’s or Sissy’s or Amelia’s. “How would
I
know what happened to him, Hannah?” she said, condemning my ludicrous suggestion that she might. The sympathy that the recollection
of that summer scene had elicited dissolved under her adversarial certainty.

“It’s funny how you never . . .” I hesitated.

“What?”

“Never think about someone specifically, and yet they’re alive somewhere. They’ve gone on living in Denver or Boston or Pittsburgh.
They’ve gotten out of bed every day just like you have, and eaten breakfast and watched television, and filled their car with
gas and. . . people you once knew go on
living.”

“They tend to do that, yes,” Daintry said, rebuffing any tenderness in my sudden realization. Yet I was glad for the return
of that authoritarian air. A similar assurance, in fact, to Meg’s and Sissy’s and Charlotte’s. “No,” Daintry went on, casually
running her fingers through a bushel basket of peanuts. “I’ll tell you what’s funny: What’s funny is that you’ve always been
attracted to PKs.”

“PKs?”

“Preacher’s kids. Eighth grade, tenth grade.” Heat rose in my face. I turned to the bins of spring bulbs. “So you’re—what,
designing? implementing?—the new columbarium. Peter said you’d volunteered to take it on.”

Volunteered? Had he told her this intentional lie? Or was it a misinterpretation on Daintry’s part, an obvious assumption?
Had he told her that he came to visit as I cleared weeds, dug up the spindly magnolia? He surely hadn’t told her of teasing
me that I looked like Mary Lennox from
The Secret Garden,
scratching in the dirt. Or that we discovered that we’d memorized the same poems in elementary school. Because if finding
a common bond in something as small and specific as a passage from a book or a poem is surprising and thrilling, it’s also
dangerous. Dangerous because of the thought that immediately follows:
If we have this in common, there’s surely more.

I wandered lonely as a cloud.
Like everything else, Daintry and I had memorized together, coaching each other through “Daffodils,” “Trees,” “The First
Snowfall.” What Peter and I also had in common was Daintry.

I began putting knobby bulbs into bags. “Maybe your church cat will keep the moles from eating these.”

“Slutty animal,” Daintry said.

“What?”

“I think she’s pregnant.”

“Don’t tell Ellen. A kitten would get the top slot on her birthday list.” I turned back to the bulbs, selecting the hardest,
the roundest, the healthiest.

“Mom.” Ellen displayed an ivory kernel for my inspection. “I lost a tooth in the taffy. It was ready to fall out, see? It’s
barely bleedy.”

I turned the tooth, no bigger than a pearl, between my fingers. “Oh, El, another one gone.” I peered into her open mouth.
How could that tiny hole leave such a crater in my heart?

Daintry paid for her pumpkin and looked over Ellen’s list again. “Now is there anything here that I can give you? Too bad
it’s not April. I have a meeting in New York then. Would you like to go to New York, Ellen? See the Statue of Liberty and
the Empire State Building?”

“New York,”
Ellen breathed.

“We could combine it with Take Our Daughters to Work Day.”

“April’s months away. . . ,” I began.

“How about a kitten?” Daintry said. “Our cat’s going to have kittens.”

“Oh, boy,” Ellen said. “Can I, Mom? Can we?”

“I’ll think about it. Let’s go. We need to stop by the drugstore and get some things for Daddy. Plus he’ll be home soon and
I haven’t started supper.”

Daintry laughed. “You’re so
married,
Hannah.”

“Tell Ms. O’Connor good-bye, El.”

“It’s
Daintry,
Mom. Didn’t you hear her?”

Of course I’d heard her. It was always Daintry.

Long after her bedtime Ellen padded into the kitchen where I was folding laundry.

“It’s thundering,” she said.

“I know.” Low grumbles were echoing over the mountains and valleys. “Probably because it was so warm this afternoon.”

“But it’s not
supposed
to be warm anymore. It’s Halloween in three days.”

“I know.” I tossed a sock ball at her. “I know
everything.
”

“Mom,” she asked hesitantly, “will you not fold my underpants on the counter?”

I stopped midroll. “Why, babe?”

“Because . . .” She shrugged helplessly. But I knew why. Ellen still wore baggy, bloomer-type panties decorated with eyelet.
The undies were comfortable, but not stylish. Not acceptable. Not like everyone else’s, and she didn’t want them in plain
view. “I’d be happy to buy you some bikinis.”

“No, I like mine, they feel good, I just. . . ”

“Don’t want anybody to see them,” I finished, and she nodded gratefully. “No prob, sweetie.” I tucked the panties under a
bulky stack of jeans. Who would guide—or force—Ellen into clothing conformity? Because it had been Daintry, naturally, who’d
dragged me into skinny-ribbed turtleneck sweaters and bell-bottomed pants, saying, “What you want is that long, lean, hungry
look.” Daintry who’d ordered me to throw away the book satchel and carry textbooks by hand, hardbacks against hipbones.

Ellen lingered, picking at the peeling Aladdin appliqué on a nightgown grown too short. “Can I have a you fix?” she asked
timidly.

I crooked my finger. “I’ll do you one better. How about a back tickle?”

Ellen flopped stomach down on her bed, pulling the gown to her shoulders. I pressed palms to warm flesh, pliable and soft
as dough. “Mmm,” she hummed softly.

“Know what? If it thunders like this—when it’s not summer—it’s supposed to snow in two weeks.”

She arched to look at me, and I watched hope and skepticism clash. “That’s one of those old wife things.”

I silently marveled at the soft flawlessness of her skin. One penurious Christmas I’d presented Hal with a stapled booklet
of back-scratch coupons, and I wondered now what had become of that homemade gift. Whether Hal had lost them, or never cashed
them, or I’d reneged on redemption. Or had each one begun with playful rubbing and ended with passionate loving? “But I’m
an old wife,” I said.

“Moooom. But you should wear lipstick, like her.”

“Okay,” I resolved. I knew who
her
was. “You help me remember.”

Ellen’s hands slid beneath the pillow. “The tooth fairy hasn’t come.”

“She stays up late. Besides, you have to be asleep.” Daintry had demolished those fantasy gift givers for me—tooth fairy and
Santa Claus and Easter bunny— only months after her move across the street.
“It’s all ’tend-like. Ask your mother.”
I was dazzled, not deflated, by her wisdom, and everything else about her, and had no intention of asking my mother for corroboration.
If Daintry said so, it was surely true. “Relax,” I said to Ellen, and she obediently turned over.

“Mark is so lucky, having Wendy right here,” Ellen said, her voice muffled by the pillow. Luck was one word for it, I thought,
picturing Mark at the Howards’ now. “We’re studying together,” he’d said. In her room, on her bed, thigh to thigh and shoulder
to shoulder. No one
only studied,
not unless you were locked away at a single-sex boarding school. I instinctively recoiled from Wendy’s frequent, clipped,
“Mark there?” over the telephone.

“You just don’t like Wendy’s style,” Hal had joked. What I disliked was Mark’s infatuation with her. “He’s not old enough
to be involved,” I’d worried aloud.

Hal had laughed. “No,
you’re
not old enough for him to be involved.”

“I wish I had a friend who lived across the street,” Ellen said, “like you did.”

“Last month you wished you had a twin. Remember how we decided that sometimes it would be good and sometimes it would be bad?
Fun, then not fun.” I spread my fingers over Ellen’s scalp, the firm sphere of skull beneath the fine hair. “A friend across
the street is the same way.”

Her head raised beneath my hand. “Did you hear that creak?”

“It’s just the house settling. The wood contracts at night.” My fingers drifted to her neck, the sweet vulnerability of its
downy groove. Oh, Ellen. By the time we’re old enough to understand what makes the noise, we’re old enough not to be afraid.
By the time we have answers to our questions, it’s too late to change the outcome. My daughter’s back relaxed, and I kissed
the cornsilk hair. When the phone rang in the kitchen, she was asleep.

“What are you doing?”

Ceel, with her usual opener. I stooped, squinted. “Cleaning out the refrigerator.”

“How disgustingly domestic.”

“I saw Daintry today.”

“So?”

“I don’t know. She used to make me jump, now she makes me jumpy. I devolve around her.”

“Why should she unnerve you? It’s not like me with Geoff. I was
in love
with him.”

“But—” But I’d loved Daintry, too.

“Listen, I’m forcing paper whites for Christmas presents this year, so I have to start early. Can you dig up some sheet moss
for me while you’re scrounging around in the woods, doing whatever it is you do at the colum-barium?”

I thought of Peter, who’d brought me a muffin late that morning. “Left over from the Episcopal Churchwomen meeting,” he said.
“What’s new since yesterday?”

“Are you there?” Ceel went on. “The moss has to be in place before the bulbs start growing.”

I cradled the phone in my neck, took out a can of thawed orange juice, and slowly peeled the sealing strip. “Ceel . . . do
you remember that dish towel in the O’Connors’ kitchen? It always hung on the oven handle.”

“
What
dish towel?”

In the refrigerator’s crowded rear, I saw them. I moved the bottles and jars and tinfoiled dishes and tugged gingerly, afraid
the cardboard baskets, no longer green but purply and damp, might collapse. “It said ‘Be kind to married women, the wife you
slave may be your own.‘”

For a long moment I heard only my sister’s faint exhale. “Hannah,” she said finally, her voice low with amazement, “how can
you remember things like that?”

“How can you not?” I answered, and cupped the mottled containers in my hands. The shiny jewels of blackberries had grown gray
and fuzzed and pulped, rotten with neglect.

From Hannah’s quote book:

When a woman is speaking to you, listen to what she says with her eyes.

—Victor Hugo

S
ome summer past, Ceel and I sat on a sofa beneath a flaking mounted sailfish in a rented beach cottage. Our
husbands and my children had long since gone to bed, and we were watching David Letterman. “Stop drooling, Dave,” Ceel said.
His guest was Madonna, and he was quizzing her about past lovers.

“What about Warren Beatty, your
Dick Tracy
costar?”

She looked from beneath thickly mascaraed lashes. “What about him?”

“I hear he’s sexually insatiable,” Letterman said, leering. “And. . . ?”

Madonna fingered the fringe of her skirt, purred knowingly: “He’s
satiable.”

As the audience howled, Ceel asked me, “If you were going to have a torrid affair with a movie star, who would you pick?”

“I used to say Jack Nicholson.”

“Why?”

“Because he was masculine and incorrigible and looked, well, insatiable.”

“Why ‘used to say’? Because he’s old now?” “

Because
I’m
old now. That was a good girl’s predictable fantasy of a one-night bad-boy stand.”