Even Now (7 page)

I knew the auditorium well, had sat there for lectures, band recitals, Tuesday assemblies when a minister from a local church
would visit to preach. Except our church, of course, mine and Daintry’s. We laughed, a united front pretending not to care.
Still, we felt hopeful every Tuesday morning on the bus and disappointed when an unfamiliar face invariably appeared at the
podium.

The huge high windows were open, and in the low-lit room Daintry and I and six other girls sat where we pleased instead of
alphabetically by class. People jostled and talked as we waited to be entertained, flipping the wooden seats up and down in
excited anticipation. Parents had dropped us off, so we were in charge of ourselves; it was night; it wasn’t school; it was
mysterious. The atmosphere in the auditorium was charged with a carnival air.

I remember it well, that peppy professional presentation, orchestrated and choreographed with quick-step dancing to rapid
tempos and the harmonizing voices of clean-cut performers. A spectacle of pure, rousing fun. But not like I remember what
happened afterward. At the conclusion a sweet-voiced soprano sang “America the Beautiful” and we waited for the houselights
to brighten and signal for applause.

Instead, the born-again choir started swaying hypnotically as they began an unfamiliar song, slow and throbbing. At the microphone,
the leader implored each person present to come forward and pledge their commitment to Jesus. Members of the chorus stepped
down from the risers and wept as they spoke of their transformation, their sins, their beliefs. The lights indeed came on,
and there was no hiding.

Daintry elbowed me. “There goes Laura Hodge,” she whispered. “God! Did you see Jimmy Stoneman
trip
when he went up the stairs?”

“Listen to Becky Yelton,” I murmured in return, giggling as a girl from Latin class tearfully whispered something into the
leader’s ear and he translated for the benefit of us sinners still in our seats. We knew this act. Wasn’t it
stupid?
Could you be
lieve
it?

But our snickering was silenced as one by one, a slow trickle from the audience became a steady stream. Classmates made their
way to the lighted stage and sobbed a personal testament into the microphone. “Jesus loves you!” the leader crooned, moaned,
beckoned, pleading for another sinner to join the newly saved. The aisles teemed, and what had seemed comical became menacing.
A hairball of anxiety knotted in my stomach as, trancelike, surrounding friends left their seats for something that might
have been magnetic, that might have been mesmerizing, but wasn’t God.

I was grateful for Daintry, experiencing the same un-ease as I. But watching the stage, Daintry had grown quiet. And then,
incredibly, she stood. Her seat clattered up.

“Daintry,” I said, tugging at her skirt. We’d made them together, of blue jeans ripped open at the crotch and resewn as minis.
She ignored me, strode purposefully toward the crowded stage where people clapped as though the last drowning holdout had
been pulled from the waters. Rooted, alone, brutally visible, I watched Daintry far away and above me, her arms flung around
and shoulder to shoulder with fellow penitents. She didn’t gesture
Come.
She smiled, and she sang, and she left me.

Two hours later the Up with People bus left Cullen and its converts, spirit-bound for the next town and the next auditorium.
Daintry and I managed to avoid each other for three long weeks, until I left Cullen, too; the first time in my life I felt
the pull of the new.

What peace I’d taken from the service and from Peter Whicker’s visible faith was shattered when Doesy Howard found me outside.
“I want you to meet my daughter. Wendy!” she called, gesturing. “Looks like she and Mark have already found each other!”

A pretty, long-haired teenager wearing a flimsy spaghetti-strapped dress slouched over with the studied nonchalance available
only to those who are wholly aware of their attraction. Wendy greeted me minimally, Mark trailing her like the sweetish cologne
the girl exuded. If the collection plate had been the high point of Ellen’s Sunday morning, finding Wendy Howard was obviously
Mark’s.

“And you’ll be going to Blue Ridge High, too, honey?” Doesy asked. Mark nodded. I made a mental note to tease him later as
my father had done to me:
Catching flies? Close your mouth.

“Didn’t you just
adore
high school?” Doesy asked me. “Wendy got a new car for her sixteenth birthday and would
love
to give Mark a ride to school every day! Although now that Wendy has her license, we hardly see a hair of her, do we, darling.”
Doesy clutched my sleeve. “Wendy’s so popular!”

I thought of Daintry’s mother. “Aren’t they wonderful?” she agreed if someone complimented her children. Kathleen O’Connor
must have seemed an oddity and aberration to my mother and her self-deprecating friends, Southern women quick to deflect a
compliment.
Oh, it’s nothing.

“I’m so glad your family will be coming to St. Martin’s,” Doesy was saying. “We switched from West Methodist because we knew
everyone there. It’s just wonderful the way you Episcopalians do things. Sunday school only lasts thirty minutes and the rest
is all socializing. Got to run. Coming to Sunday school?”

It was hard to know which astounding sentence or question to respond to first. “I . . .” I looked for help in the form of
Hal, but he’d taken Ellen to find her classroom. Mark, for a change, had been only too happy to go to Sunday school as long
as Wendy Howard was going, too. People were dispersing to cars and classes and parish house coffee. Then I saw her, walking
toward the far side of the church.

I nearly trotted, determined to move beyond the remnant discomfort of our stilted greeting the previous night. Hoping I’d
imagined it. “Daintry,” I said, not wanting to overwhelm her with gushed enthusiasm as Doesy had me.

She turned, eyes hidden behind dark glasses. “Hannah.”

“Where were you?”

“Pardon?” Incredulity tinged the question, as though I’d presumed a claim upon her. Once, though, I did. We both did, demanding,
“Where
were
you?” of one another after an absence of only hours. “I was sitting in the organ loft, upstairs out of sight,” she said.
“The perfect Episcopal position: in the back, and above the hoi polloi.” I laughed at the deadpan tone, the ironic truth of
it. “Not going to Sunday school?” she asked.

“I’m not a big Sunday school person.”

“No, we never were, were we?”

I was happy, warmed. “I can still plink out ‘Fairest Lord Jesus’ on the piano.” To escape church we volunteered to keep the
children’s nursery at St. Francis and lead their abbreviated chapel.

“No,” Daintry corrected me, “it was ’All Things Bright and Beautiful.‘”

“I doubt my children even know those hymns.”

“I saw them from the loft. Two?”

“Mark’s fifteen and Ellen is nine. She’s fretting over school starting tomorrow, and I don’t blame her. I wouldn’t go back
to those days for anything. All that . . . savagery. Wondering if you were going to be the last pick for dodgeball. Getting
paired with someone who hated you—and vice versa—for a project.”

Daintry’s gaze was even. “But you escaped, though, didn’t you? To Wyndham Hall.”

“’Escaped’? I’m not sure that’s the right verb.” Still, I self-consciously tucked hair behind an ear, knowing and remembering
how ready I’d been to leave. Ready to distance myself from high school intrigues I couldn’t follow, a far cry from elementary
grades, where hard work and good marks and obedience mattered. In high school, looks and perkiness and popularity mattered.
Other friends had made memorizing the names of upperclassmen at Cullen High—and even the cars they drove—their reason for
living.

But not Daintry. Not sensible Daintry. The summer before I was slated to go, while peers passed hot nights perched and flirting
on car hoods at the Putt-Putt, Daintry and I were side by side before my bathroom mirror. We were practicing smiling without
showing our gums. Or rehearsing for my upcoming adventure, pretending to be roommates brushing our teeth in the communal bathroom,
speaking from a wholly imaginary script.

“Can I borrow your notes for history?”

“Sure! That Mrs. Thompson has it out for me, I swear!”

“Want to go to breakfast together tomorrow morning?”

“Yeah, let’s not forget to set the alarm.”

“What about Ceel?” Daintry asked. “Where are her kids? Too young to come to church?”

“She and Ben don’t have children. Yet.”

“Are they trying?” Daintry said.

How like her it was, that unabashed bluntness. Except that
trying
no longer applied to Ceel, who’d undergone fertility treatments with little regard for distance or expense. She and Ben had
attempted every means of conception, whether herbal, homeopathic, or sheer old wives’ tale. Financially depleted and physically
exhausted, they were pursuing adoption now, subject to fat application packets, exorbitant and ever-rising fees, the maze
of dead-end avenues, and the waiting. “I don’t know,” I said.

Daintry knew I was lying. She looked toward the empty church lawn. “I didn’t talk to Ceel long enough last night to catch
her up on Geoff. She’d probably like to know what he’s up to.”

She probably would. Leftover love for Geoff O’Connor prevented Ceel from resenting him. I pictured his handsome teasing face,
long legs banging the kitchen cabinets as he sang Simon and Garfunkel’s “Cecilia” to my sister. Ceel had had no same-age O’Connor
sibling to latch on to and became an ignored or scorned tag-along to Daintry and me. When the O’Connors adopted Sean, she
was already six. But eventually Ceel too had fallen under an O’Connor’s sway—later, when age made no difference.

Canny, candid, quick with pitch and smile, and eight years older than Ceel, Geoff was a pharmaceutical salesman using his
parents’ house as home base for road trips across the Southeast. From his first swift but serious appraisal of Ceel in a long
white dress during her graduation festivities, this next-door scamp grown lovely, ready, ripe, Geoff had wooed and pursued
Ceel throughout her four years at Sewanee. Smitten with his salesman’s charm, complimented by his affection, she’d been easy
prey, giving her heart and body completely to Geoff O’Connor and what she’d believed was his love.

“How is Geoff?” I asked only from politeness. I didn’t care how Geoff O’Connor was. Hadn’t cared since that terrible Christmas
of Ceel’s senior year. Just after Thanksgiving Geoff ended their relationship for someone else, a name Ceel had never even
heard. During exams she’d become ill with infection and fever— and heartbreak—and had to be flown home.

Daintry shrugged. “His Catholicism seems to have re-asserted itself. He’s got five kids.”

A fact I wouldn’t report to Ceel. “God’s paying me back for being such a wild child,” she’d joked of her infertility. “The
great checks-and-balances system in the sky.”

I didn’t laugh. “Don’t be absurd.”

“How do you know? Does God talk to you? Damn, I thought he liked me better.”

“It doesn’t work that way, Ceel,” I’d said softly. “I just know.” But I didn’t know whether what my sister would always fear
and wonder was true: if her determination not to conceive then had left her with an inability to conceive ever. Because over
that Christmas vacation Mother had nursed Ceel’s wounded psyche and a gynecologist had dug out her embedded IUD.

I wanted to hear no more of Daintry’s brother, think no more of the multiple heartaches he’d caused my sister. “Doesn’t St.
Martin’s remind you of St. Francis?”

Daintry’s mouth twitched in a slight smile of agreement beneath the black lenses. “But no playground or swing set.”

I’d forgotten. Like the bulky hassocks, the St. Francis swing set was old-fashioned as well, a twelve-foot steel structure
uncomplicated with the ladders and winding slides and chin-up bars of contemporary playground equipment. The swing seats were
wide straps scavenged from a local textile mill, conveyor belt lengths that snugged the behind. I could picture us easily,
pumping and pumping and climbing, the gradual rise and falling away, the thrilling momentary conviction that you might circle
the top of the set itself, then leaning our heads far back and down to drag our hair in the dust. Stomachs to seat, we twisted
the parallel chains so tightly that we were flung spiraling as they unwound.

“Haven’t seen one of those old sets since,” I said.

She lifted the sunglasses. “Have you had an orgasm since?”

“What?”

Daintry’s laughter sang out in the churchyard. “Scooting up the poles, trying to reach the top. Unless there’s something you
haven’t told me. I used to know your sex life pretty well. C’mon, Hannah,” she said, “you remember.”

I looked into those pretty eyes—gray, impaling, and, even lacking the shades, fathomless—and did remember.

“’Course, once I figured it out, I was humping hard as you.” A breeze flattened her skirt against her thighs, leaving her
crotch in clear veed relief. She pulled it away, rolling her eyes the same way she had when our health teacher pronounced
“hormones” as “har- mones.” “The only thing that feels that good nowadays is”—Daintry tapped her chin thoughtfully—“gouging
your ear with a Q-Tip.” She put her finger in her ear, rotated it, and moaned.

I laughed. There was no one like her. “God, it’s good to see you.”

“What, got nobody to talk nasty with?”

“And all morning I was congratulating myself on
my
good memory.”

“Really.” She lifted her chin. “What were you remembering?”

If she could tease me, surely I could reciprocate. “Up with People. How you. . . ”

When I look back, comb through the countless little ways it began disintegrating, that summer after our high school freshman
year glows as our last happy span of time together. Because we were still young, I believe. Still willing to suspend belief
about the future, about the way things would be, would become, once I left.