Even Now (21 page)

She blinked slowly. “Instead of giving something up, Peter takes something
on.
A cause, usually.”

I hated that it hurt. He wasn’t mine. I couldn’t know. I handed a string of purple beads to a towheaded child crawling around
my feet. “And you?”

“Sex. Ever heard that one?”

A thousand times. Another punishing picture. China crashed somewhere.

Daintry sighed. “I hate Lent. Re
lent
less.”

“Oh, I do, too!” Lent was a kind of darkness, forty days of gloom. The pall stayed with you even after church services, with
their absence of alleluias and dirgelike hymns.

“I hate it because it takes Peter away from me so much. So many extra services.” Daintry’s reasons felt like a rebuke. “Remember
getting paid to pull weeds from between the terrace stones and then spending it all instead? Cheating on our mite boxes?”

I watched Peter, hand on Ben’s shoulder, then realized Daintry was waiting for me to respond. “And cheating on giving up.
Making all these exceptions to not drinking Cokes—it was okay on Sunday, it was okay if it was at someone else’s house. There
were a thousand ways to. . . cheat. Small sins.”

Daintry was watching Doesy Howard gather her things to leave. “Southern women dye their hair too blond,” she said, and idly
scratched a gabardined calf with her other foot. “The reason Doesy’s unsunny is that she’s sulking. She got blackballed from
the Historical Garden Club.” She cut her eyes at me. “La-di-da in Rural Ridge. You probably know that.” I knew nothing of
the club, had never even heard the name. “Not to mention the fact,” Daintry continued, “that Frances Mason is the member who
wielded the ax.”

Frances excluding Doesy? “But I thought they were such good friends.”

“Not good enough, apparently. Maybe someone was faking. And there’s always spite.”

I watched Doesy, and what I saw didn’t look like sulking. It looked like sadness. Maybe Daintry couldn’t tell the difference.
“Where did you hear that?”

“Church grapevine, a very thick weed. I’m sure you don’t have anything like it in the columbarium.”

I was saved from this oblique observation by a sixteen-year-old busboy who knocked over the basket of bills and change at
the entrance. At the table nearest us, a toddler wept in his mother’s lap while the father ineffectually mopped up spilled
milk with a shredded paper napkin. Daintry shook her head at the ruckus. “I could never have kids. They’re too. . . ”

“Loud?” I suggested.

Daintry paused. “Needy. Face it, doesn’t it all boil down to mud on the rugs and braces on the teeth and nightmares and piano
lessons and wrecking the car and having to bail them out and shore them up?” I was taken aback by her quiet vehemence. She
shook her head. “Never.”

Peter extracted himself from the general fray to join us. “Should have had mimes,” Daintry said as we were showered with a
handful of hard candy. “At least they’re silent.”

“Daintry,” Peter said patiently.

She elbowed me. “Look at Maude Burleigh.” The church secretary was sitting across from two boys calmly roasting their fork
tines in a candle flame. “So far out of her comfort zone she’s in another galaxy. Old biddy. Reminds me of Mrs. Mormon.”

Mrs. Mormon was our seventh-grade social studies teacher. “Young people,” she addressed the class. “Young people, turn to
page ninety-four.” Despite her gracious facade, though, she’d kept a paddle labeled BOARD OF EDUCATION and didn’t hesitate
to use it.

“I don’t know, though,” Daintry mused. “Maude’s kind of sexy when she sweats.”

I clamped a hand over my mouth to stifle my laughter. Not Peter. Peter clamped his own hand around his wife’s upper arm. “Daintry,”
he said softly, asking her to rein herself in. I knew; I’d heard it on occasion from my own husband, who was mouthing,
Let’s go,
across the room.

Daintry looked at Peter’s fingers, then directly into his eyes. “Don’t do that to me,” she said, equally softly.

“Good night,” I said, and left them.

“What’s better?” Ellen asked. I was teaching her to play gin since Asheville Academy had held its own Mardi Gras celebration
that day and she had no homework. Her small fingers were tensed with the effort of holding ten splayed cards. “Should I discard
a king I already have two of, or take a second three since it won’t count as much against me if I get ginned?”

“Discard it,” I said, “and start saving the threes.”

Hal unzipped his briefcase. “Keep the king,” he advised. “You already have two of them.”

Ellen kept the king. “Can I get my ears pierced?”

“When you’re older. You’re only in fourth grade.”

“Wendy Howard got her ears pierced in third grade.”

“If Wendy Howard jumped into the fire, would you?”

“Huh?”

My mother’s hypothetical question had the same negligible effect on Ellen as it once had on me. Except that if Daintry O’Connor
had jumped in the fire, I would have willingly, instantly followed her into the flames.
Go ahead. I dare you.

“I want to be older. If I was older, I could be in fifth grade and not in the same grade as Jennifer Tomlinson.”

I’d heard about Jennifer Tomlinson all year. I’d never met her, but I knew her well. One of those children—always girls—who
instinctively have their fingers on the pulse of all things desirable: clothes, music, slang. The ringleader. What Jennifer
Tomlinson said, went. “Ignore her. I knock with four.”

“Knock! That’s not fair.” Ellen put down her cards and slumped in the chair. “She’s mean to me.”

“How, mean?” Though I knew. Knew what girls require of one another and do to one another. I was well versed in the unshakable
intimacies and unspeakable cruelties, the hourly hurts and daily revenges, the lunch-room manipulations and recess whispers.

“She hates me because my father is a teacher and my uncle is the head. She leaves me out. She says my peanut-butter crackers
are gross. She laughed at the skirt I wore for our skit.”

Hal made no comment. Had we ever been mean, Daintry and I? Laughing at Margie Simmons with her chigger-bite legs and eat-up
socks. Laughing at Timmy Blanton, who picked his nose. Laughing at Marsha Ellett in the spelling bee, who began “drastic,”
“T, r, a. . . ”
Hurt me,
I thought,
but don’t hurt my child.

I gathered the cards. “Let me tell you something about girls. They’re awful.” Hal shot me a glance, but I ignored him, trying
to explain in language Ellen could comprehend. “Awful to each other. Girls always want other girls to like them best, so they
say mean things to make sure other girls don’t like you better. Some girls just need to know they’re the boss. They want other
girls to follow after them. They’ll cuss, or shave their legs first, or they have a phone in their room. And here’s the worst
part: You’re just beginning. It’ll be like this until your friends—and then only
some
of them—realize that it’s not worth competing.”

“Hannah,” Hal said warningly.

“Just be yourself,” I continued on obstinately, the easiest advice to dispense, the hardest to follow. “If you’re just normal
and nice, people realize it eventually and come back to you.” How could I convey to my daughter the awful dependencies of
childhood, once essential, eventually despised?

But I might as well have been spouting Marxism. “We have to do an interview with someone for a language arts project,” she
said. “I want to interview Daintry. Can I call her now?”

“No. It’s late. Run and get your pajamas on.” When she’d left the room I said, “I don’t like the sound of that Jennifer Tomlinson
business.”

Hal shrugged. “You know what teachers say: If you believe half of what you hear about school, we’ll believe half of what we
hear about home.”

It was small comfort. “Why is it that childless people are magnets for children? Seems to me Ellen could find somebody more
worthwhile to interview.” Was Ellen in the throes of an innocent crush, or was Daintry deliberately wooing her? I wasn’t resentful
that Ellen was smitten; I was afraid for her.

Hal laughed. “I’m sure your friend Daintry would love to hear herself described as not worthwhile.”

Ellen had her face to the wall when I went to give her a kiss. “Hey, pal,” I said. “Don’t pull a pout on me here. Give me
a you fix.”

Ellen grudgingly turned over but crossed her arms tightly on her chest, denying me. “Tell me a story.”

“I thought you were too
old
for stories.”

“I mean out of your mouth.”

“Stories out of my mouth” were “When I was a little girl . . .” tales. “When I was a little girl,” I began, “I used to build
Barbie houses on Saturdays out of cardboard boxes from the grocery store. I glued leftover pieces of rugs and wallpaper in
the boxes to make real rooms. And we stacked them up to make three-story houses, made little stairs out of the stiff cardboard
that came in my father’s shirts. Folding them the way you make fans, you know?”

Ellen nodded.

“And we knitted blankets for Barbie and Ken’s bed. And Skipper. The blankets were thicker than the dolls, though, with threads
hanging off that we were afraid to cut because they might unravel.”

“Who’s ‘we’?”

We. Of course “we.” “My friend and I.”

“Daintry?”

I nodded. When had our connection begun to fray and unravel? Who pulled that first thread?
You left me.

“What else did you do?”

“One Saturday we made brownies.”

“In Mommy J’s kitchen?”

“No, hers.” It was always hers. “And her big brother wanted to eat them before we’d even cut them out of the pan. So we were
trying to keep him out—pushing our shoulders against the swinging door, and he kept banging and pushing and we were laughing
so hard that she peed right down my leg.”

“Gross!” Ellen laughed.

“Right into my sock.” I pulled the sheet over her shoulder. “That’s enough stories out of my mouth for tonight.”

“What’s pussy?”

My own smile faded, though I was glad for her courage to ask. “Why?”

“Jennifer Tomlinson told Grace Albright that I was a pussy.”

Oh, I hated it. Hated Jennifer Tomlinson and Grace Albright and Ellen’s innocence and the inevitable destruction of it. Hated
what lay in wait for her. “It’s not a nice word.”

“But what does it mean?”

“It’s a bad, ugly word for girls’ private parts. For vagina.”

“Who made it up?”

“I don’t know,” I said, and tickled her soft, warm armpits. “Probably some bad, ugly boy.” She giggled, and I thought of Daintry
and myself at Ellen’s age, snickering over an assigned report on Phineas T. Barnum, how wicked we thought we were to notice
the similarity of the huckster’s name to
penis.
So harmlessly wicked and wise, giggling at the word “pupa” in our science texts, so close to
pubic.
And not so harmlessly wicked to each other, competing privately and ruthlessly to achieve the next level in the SRA reading
program, on from red to blue to aqua, scarcely knowing what we read as long as we beat the other, could report during recess
that we’d gotten to the brown level. And gotten there
first.

“I wish it would snow,” Ellen said.

I leaned to kiss her, glad for the short shelf life of ten-year-old anxiety. “See you in the morning,” I said as the phone
rang downstairs.

“That was Daintry O’Connor,” Hal said. “Mark’s at the rectory and needs a ride home.”

“That’s strange. Wendy was going to bring him home after they finished cleaning up. I’ll go.”

I’d never been inside the rectory, though I’d thought about it often enough, picturing Peter there. The two-story clapboard
looked appealing in the February darkness, the rectangles of lit windows vaguely reminiscent of something. I walked up the
steps and knocked on the door. It opened immediately, to Peter.

“Hannah,” he said, and though his eyes were kind and concerned, a look I couldn’t interpret crossed his face. “Come in.”

I stepped over the threshold into their house, Daintry’s home. Perhaps I expected an organ, beloved and disdained, in the
foyer. But there was only a killim rug and a table with the usual droppings: keys, letters, gold clip earrings in the shape
of knots. I was instantly, acutely uncomfortable. I didn’t belong here, and he didn’t belong to me. “Peter, I . . .” In the
mirror over the table I saw Daintry approaching. “I came to pick up Mark. I’m sorry he barged in on you like this. He could
have called us from the parish hall.”

“Mark’s fine,” Daintry said.

Fine? “Is something wrong?” I asked Peter. “Where is he?”

Daintry answered with a soft, mirthless laugh. “Upstairs taking a shower.” I heard the
sush
ing noise of falling water somewhere and thought of Daintry’s clear shower, that remark made months ago. “He’s been in there
awhile.”

Whatever she was suggesting, I ignored it. “He could have waited until he got home to take a shower. What did they do, have
a food fight?”

“No, no,” Peter said. “Mark left early, before we were finished. He said he was getting a ride home.”

“Yes, with Wendy Howard.”

“No, he. . . ”

I’d never seen Peter so uncertain. “Where did he go?”

“The cemetery, I think.”

“The cemetery? Peter—”

Daintry interrupted. “Mark
needed
a shower. He got sick all over himself because he’s drunk.”

“He
was
drunk,” Peter corrected, as though trying to soften the blow to me.

“Vomiting sobered him up, I expect,” Daintry said briskly. “Usually does.”

Save me,
I thought wildly to Peter as nausea glutted my throat.
Touch me.
But I couldn’t so much as glance at him because Daintry’s eyes held mine. “He knocked on the back door and Peter was still
at the church, so I’ve been”—she chuckled again—“ministering to him.” She fingered the diamond stud in her ear. “He’s clean
and he’s sober. But he’s going to feel like shit tomorrow morning.”

I hated her.

“Daintry?” Mark’s voice. She’d told him to call her Daintry, too, then.