Even Now (22 page)

“Mark? It’s Mom.”

The responding silence was thick, fraught, and though I couldn’t see him, I could picture the workings of his brain. The concocted
and fumbled defenses, the urge to flee, the dread and longing and the wishing it was days from now. He didn’t answer me, directing
his question to Daintry instead. But I heard the tremor. “Did you say you had some clothes I could wear?”

I moved toward the stairs, but Daintry’s hand closed on my arm, reminding me of who she was and where I was. “Let Peter.”
He strode past me, my elbow bumping his chest as he mounted the stairs.

“He’ll be a minute getting dressed,” Daintry said. “Come sit down.”

Sweating with shame and fury and discomfort, I followed her into the den. She motioned to the sofa, and I promptly sank deep
into its down plushness while Dain- try herself took a wing chair, firmer and higher ground. “Did you know Mark had been drinking?”

Oh, that tone. When Mark was two, we found him in the bathroom surrounded by a papery cloud of unrolled toilet tissue and
clutching a crumpled tube of Neosporin. Afraid he might have eaten the antibiotic like toothpaste, I’d called poison control
and asked what symptoms to watch for. They questioned me closely about every detail of the incident and for several days afterward
had called back asking, asking, checking up on me. I was angered by their suspicions, by what seemed an indictment of my parenting.
Daintry’s question, its superior tone of the concerned social worker who clearly faulted the mother, sparked the same anger
now. I wanted to defend Mark even as I wanted to kill him.
You know how teenagers are,
I might say. Or
Yes, we suspected.
Or
No, not my child. I had no idea.
Or
He’s been under pressure.
And they all seemed lame, if true. Too similar to Doesy Howard’s denials. “We wondered,” I murmured. “Hal will be furious.”

“Aren’t you?”

There it was again, both censure and scolding.
Didn’t you know Ellen was supposed to bring two liters of soda for the class party? Didn’t you know Mark was running a fever
when he came to school today? Didn’t you know the birthday party was over at six?
“Of course I am. I can’t believe he’s done this. And involved you and Peter.”

“I hardly call it
involved,”
Daintry responded dryly, then changed tack, to nonchalance. “Little Mardi Gras gaiety, that’s all. He’s a good kid, bless
his heart.”

I knew the low-blow cut of “bless his heart,” disparagement disguised as sympathy. My son wasn’t hers to compliment or punish.
“Thank God nothing worse happened. Thank God he wasn’t in a car.”

“God looks after children and drunks. It’s a rite of passage. Haven’t you ever been drunk in your life?” She laughed. “You
know you have.
I
know you have. To this day I can’t hear the word ‘Woodstock’ without thinking of you.”

Before our senior high school year, at the end of that mind-numbing summer of belting and buttoning, Daintry got me a date.
I was unenthused, but she was insistent. John Waring, whom she was dating casually, had a friend named Sam Troxler. “I’ve
told him all about you,” Daintry said on our break as we swung our legs from the loading dock outside the showroom. She knuckled
my arm. “You need to get out more. It’ll be fun. Don’t you want to see
Woodstock?”

A year after its initial release,
Woodstock
was finally playing in nearby, more cosmopolitan Shelby. I was curious not only about the movie, but about Daintry, what
she could possibly be doing with John Waring since her name was linked with Mike Simpson’s, in whispers, at least. I agreed
to go.

That night she paid me back for my sixteenth birthday. I sat in the backseat of John’s car with Sam, excluded from every nuance
of the conversation, every private joke and piece of gossip and question about the upcoming year. I didn’t know the teachers
they discussed, or the couples, or the athletic stats. John and Sam snuck a fifth of rum past the sleepy-eyed ticket seller,
and we gulped it down with Coke and popcorn. The film was long, and the return ride to Cullen was another thirty minutes.
The rum lasted; I didn’t.

By the time John parked near the fourteenth hole of the Cullen golf course, I was smashed, reeling onto the green just yards
from a giant oak where Daintry and I once peddled lemonade from a rickety table to golfers on weekends. Where we picked at
errant golf balls, certain we were the only people in the world who’d discovered the marvelous sphere of rubber bands beneath
the dimpled skin. I was drunk because I was drinking, and I was drinking to escape from the unfamiliar; from what I’d grown
beyond or left behind or wasn’t grownup yet enough to confront. All the things Daintry already was.

“She’s shitfaced,” Sam said, pulling me onto the green. I remember how good the soft itch of the cropped grass felt against
my arms in my sleeveless shirt. Remember the good feel of Sam’s fingers on my breasts when he unbuttoned that shirt and pulled
up my bra around my neck like a scarf. Daintry and John had stayed in the parked car, and now and then I would hear Daintry’s
low laughter, and once, the horn honked, a comical blare in the night, followed by John’s sharp swearing. I don’t remember
whether there were stars or a moon, but I remember how the earth spun when I closed my eyes.

“Shut your eyes,” Sam grumbled more than once. I wanted to, wanted not to see his face, but it spun so, the world and the
sky and the golf course and Sam’s head at my neck. I remember how the vomit bubbled up from my mouth into his, thick with
popcorn bits and burning with rum. Sam had jumped up and back, hollering. I remember his disgust. “She puked on me!”

“Get it in the hole! Par three!” John laughed from the car. Dizzy, stinking, drooling, disgraced, I waited, trying to button
my shirt and wipe my mouth with it at the same time. Waited for Daintry to come.

But she didn’t. It was Sam who pulled me up like a rag doll and stumbled me toward the car.

“Watch the upholstery,” John directed Sam as he shoved me into the backseat.

“Next time,” Sam directed Daintry, “find me somebody who can hold their liquor. Somebody from Cullen.”

I was still waiting, in the murk of my misery, for Daintry’s rescue.
She
is
from Cullen,
I waited for her to say.
Lay off my friend,
I waited for her to say. Something. Anything. But she merely stared out the dashboard window, silent on the subject of me.
She rubbed her face. “How about a closer shave next time, John? My chin’s chapped.”

Like milk or laundry, I was deposited curbside. My parents were safely away for the evening, visiting a couple who summered
in Tryon. Ceel took me in, my bad-girl sister, washed me and consoled me and tucked me into bed. “How was the movie?” Mother
asked the next morning.

“Fine,” I said. I was fine, too, but for a queasy stomach and a hickey above my nipple no one would ever see.

“And. . . what was his name—Sam—how was he?” “Fine.”

“Did you want to get new tennis shoes before school?”

All I wanted was to be gone, away, confined at Wyndham where I was safe, protected.

“You’ve hardly seen anything of Daintry,” Mother had remarked once during the two weeks remaining before school began. I had,
but only from the hall window upstairs, where I watched Daintry bake herself in the backyard those final days of August in
her attempt to look like a South Pacific native.

“I have summer reading,” I’d told Mother, and held up
Cry, The Beloved Country.
“Daintry has play practice.”

“Oh yes, I forgot. Who is she again?”

“Liat.”

Now Daintry clasped her hands round her knee, an avuncular, advising posture. “Don’t be too hard on Mark. Nobody was hard
on you, were they?”

I sat forward on the squashed cushions. “I didn’t want to go on that date. You made me.”

“Why didn’t you want to go?”

“I wasn’t interested in Sam Troxler. I didn’t even
know
Sam Troxler.”

“Was there
anybody
in Cullen you were interested in?” It was challenge, pure and simple. There was something dangerous simmering between us.

“You. I went to be your cover.”

Her hands dropped.

Peter came down the stairs followed by Mark, dressed in clothes obviously not his and clutching a grocery bag of his soiled
clothing. In his expression and thin, gangly posture—loose and shambling as a marionette—I recognized conflicting emotions
of guilt, gratitude, self-pity, fear, defiance. A plea to be loved, forgiven. I knew an equal play of emotions was visible
in my own face and didn’t want Daintry to catalog them.

“Mark,” I said evenly, “let’s go home.” Whatever scene was to follow, whatever explanation there was to hear, belonged only
between the two of us. “Thank you,” I pointedly told Peter, and only Peter.
You left me,
I told Daintry silently.
Again.

Mark was quiet on the drive home, his face turned to the window. Waiting, no doubt, for the boom to lower, the yelling to
begin. “Mark,” I said. He drew a finger down the shallow channel separating nose from lip where fuzz was sprouting. What breaks
your heart most? When they ask for deodorant, for boxers, for a razor. They’re gone then. You’ve lost them. “Tell me what
happened.”

“She told you what happened.”

Not the right approach. “Why were you drinking?” Silence. “You wanted to be drunk.” Silence. “Why did you, Mark?”

“They left.”

“Left the cleanup?”

He nodded.

“Who?”

“The other people.”

“Did you know them?” Another abbreviated nod. “Did they give you the liquor? Is that how you got it?”

“Mom.” Specifics and logistics were too embarrassing to relate. I understood. You can do anything, get anything, if you put
your mind to it. Seconds ticked by at Rural Ridge’s single stoplight. The streets were empty.

“Wendy,” he finally said, and began punching the door lock back and forth, back and forth, taking some comfort in the obedient
responsive
clunk,
an action he could control. “She said I couldn’t come with them. She left me. She told them what to do and they left me.
They’re my friends,” he said.
Muh frenz,
I heard.
“It’s muh stuff,”
he’d said that afternoon of packing months ago. Playfully then, wounded now. It wasn’t Mardi Gras gaiety. It was exclusion.

“Did you do something that made them—her—act like that?”

“No,” he said miserably. “I don’t know.” I waited for more, but he turned back to the window, his expression a blurred burgundy
in the stoplight’s glow.

“Mark. You haven’t—you’re not—”

“You can’t understand it,” he said finally, and the light turned green.

Oh, but I could. Did, had. For there was another part of the drunk equation.

The production of
South Pacific
marked the first time I’d been back to the Cullen High auditorium since Up with People. Daintry had been in school for two
weeks, but Wyndham didn’t begin until mid-September. As Liat, Daintry was deeply tanned, her long black hair set off stunningly
by bronzed skin and a scarlet sarong. I don’t recall who played Lieutenant Cable; by then I knew scarcely a soul at Cullen
High, had lost touch. Notwithstanding the rumors about Daintry and Mike Simpson, her performance was lovely. I and everyone
in the audience were rapt with her “Happy Talk” grace, the mute misunderstanding and pain she radiated as the bewildered native
girl who couldn’t comprehend why she was being left.

I’d waited then, too, in the wings. Waited with milling parents and siblings and well-wishers to congratulate the players
after the performance. Backstage was noisy and hot and chaotic, the actors animated and excited with success. I glimpsed her
black head and tanned shoulders, but she didn’t acknowledge me. “See you at the cast party!” they called to one another, these
strangers to me, and I left without having spoken to her.

I’d been leaving for two years by then. Coming home for brief respites from school at Thanksgiving and Christmas, hectic,
family-filled times when either Daintry or I was often out of town. My March spring vacations didn’t coincide with the Cullen
schools, and I begged off church on Sundays with the excuse that I had twice daily chapel at Wyndham Hall.

But I knew as I walked up that auditorium aisle away from Daintry that this time I was gone for good. There was nothing left
for me in Cullen. Summer was ending, I was returning to Virginia a senior, and the soft night, the parking lot filled with
dark moving silhouettes and erratic beams of headlights, were in themselves a kind of elegy.

I sat on the hood of the car, the old station wagon I’d practiced a three-point turn in, using the O’Connor driveway as practice
pavement just as Daintry had used our opposing one to practice hers. Sat until the last car had left the lot, scratchin’ out,
gettin’ a wheel. Daintry and I could perfectly imitate the redneck accents of Cullen, twanging away with our ain’ts and cain’t
hardlys and ever’whichaways.
What you know good?
We never thought twice about it.

I got in the car and drove around. “Driving around,” the time-honored small-town means of adolescent socializing, one I’d
never taken part in because I’d been away. And tried to picture what Daintry’s life had been without me. Hers had gone on
as mine had gone on, parallel lines with few intersecting points.

I drove to the Little League field, dark and flat and fenced, the refreshment stand a sagging shack. I drove to the golf course,
site of my recent debacle and my date’s disgust. Drove to the town pool, bumping over the risen roots of the pines, and parked
there. The Ping-Pong table was gone, naked sawhorses the only evidence of where it had once stood. Drove past St. Francis,
where through the stained-glass windows whose dates I’d long ago memorized I could make out the dim red lamp burning in the
sacristy as it did day and night. Drove past the elementary school with the oiled wood floors that my sixth-grade teacher
had made Jimmy Lawson cover with “A preposition is always followed by an object.” In between the desks and our legs, he’d
struggled to chalk the words.