Even Now

by Susan S. Kelly

  Something softened in her expression, and I still recognized it: amusement. I remembered the pleasure of making Daintry laugh, coaxing and cajoling her from the occasional black mood she was prey to, long hours of a sourceless, stubborn gloom. “You have to decide whether Daintry’s friendship is worth it,” Mother would tell me as I moped and waited. I’d worked so hard for the privilege of her company.

  “Well put.” She laughed. “Strange bedfellows.”

  I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what she was talking about. Despite those times I had wanted to know, shamelessly asking even though—unenlightened and inexperienced—I’d had no sexual tales of my own to swap. “Okay, I’ll tell you what it’s like. I almost choked on his tongue.”

  “He put his tongue in you?”

  “So far in I could feel his taste buds. Then”—her eyes flickered toward mine, as if gauging my reaction—“he felt me off.”

  “You let him?” I breathed.

  “Hannah, grow up. It feels sooo good. Better than his tongue.” She giggled, snapping the tension. “But you can’t ask me anything else because I won’t tell you. Not after second base.”

  “I just had no idea . . .” I tried again, childishly tongue-tied.

  Small diamond studs glittered at her ears. “No idea of what?”

  It had not faded, that old power. “Anything. Everything,” I said lamely. Where would I have been without you? You who convinced me that I needed a shirt with a poor-boy collar. You who persuaded me to replace bulletin board pictures of Julie Andrews with teenage idols. You who corrected me in the song lyrics of “Don’t Sleep in the Subway” before I made a sing-along fool of myself before other, less kind peers. Unprotected from the land mines of nonconforming, where would I have been without you during that dangerous age? You were savvier and smarter and better in every way.

  “You’ve hardly changed, Hannah. You look just the same.”

  “I hope not,” I said. “But thanks. You either. All those afternoons baking our faces didn’t affect your skin.” She smiled then, a gift, and I knew she was recalling the homemade reflectors of tinfoil-wrapped shirt cardboards we held under our chins in our determination to be what the fashion magazines termed “tawny.”

  “Your freckles have disappeared,” she said, and brushed two fingers over my cheek. The touch was intimate, surprising. Grown women don’t touch. They hug and they tap and they even shove each other with teasing, but they don’t touch.

  “Finally. You were lucky that way.” Always lucky. “After all these years,” I said softly, risking sentiment. “I can’t believe it.” She stood there, the very embodiment of my childhood. Returned to me was this cherished friend with whom I’d fashioned bracelets from the colorful ganglia of wires beneath the dashboard of her father’s broken-down sedan perched on blocks in the driveway, to my mother’s continued dismay. This friend with whom I’d conducted solemn funerals for overfed goldfish and cat-mangled birds we coffined in shoe-boxes. With Daintry I’d concocted a Raggedy Ann salad from a peach-half face, shredded cheddar hair, a pimiento mouth, and raisin eyes. A lettuce leaf was her dress, and though we wouldn’t think of tasting our creation, we’d won first prize at a school fair. Here was Daintry, from whom—long before needing the information—I’d learned about sex while her brother Sean beat on the locked bedroom door. This was Daintry, with whom I’d pooled savings to buy a Barbie wedding dress and four years later a shared set of electric rollers from, of all places, the Western Auto.

  Here was Daintry, developed at thirteen when it would be another two years before I could covertly check to make sure my small swells were still there. I’d liked the feel of the thick elastic band hugging my chest, the reflexive shoulder ripple of adjusting, the unfamiliar binding tightness both a comfort and a torture. In the wake of her early spurt of hormones Daintry had dragged me to try on bras in what passed for Cullen’s department store.

  “Watch,” she’d said, and bent over, naked to the waist. Her breasts bobbed downward, and she fitted them into the bra cups with her hands. “Always lean over for the best fit,” she said behind the ebony drape of her hair. I laughed so hard that I fell to the dressing room rug, where scattered straight pins pricked my rear. “It’s true,” she’d asserted calmly. “I read it in one of Heather’s magazines.”

  For she was lucky even with birth order, blessed with an older sister, Heather, a font of romance and grooming advice I had access to only through Daintry. Or on the occasional weekend when my mother shelved her poorly veiled scorn for the O’Connors and hired Heather to baby-sit. Wise, glamorous Heather, with her “fall,” a hank of fake hair. “That James West,” she’d say with sly admiration, lounging with feline grace on our den floor as Ceel and I watched The Wild Wild West. “Those tight pants,” she’d say, twirling her fingers through a bowl of popcorn between legs shaved smooth as plastic. Like snapshots, the scenes replayed themselves with eerie, eidetic detail.

  “Your new position sounds like a lot of responsibility.”

  “Who told you that? Peter?” The query carried sarcasm. She glanced at her husband, talking to Hal and Ben.

  “Hal has no idea what I do all day, either,” I said, the automatic ally. Easily, helplessly spiraling back to an earlier role.

  But Daintry only smoothed the lapels of her suit, and I felt stumpy and matronly suddenly, diminished by that implacable composure. “I’m not worried,” she returned.

  “No, of course not,” I said, and meant it. Leadership roles were nothing new to Daintry. She’d been demonstrating that talent since I’d left Cullen for Wyndham Hall and Daintry had stayed behind to conquer Cullen Central High. She’d become a member or officer of a dozen organizations—Debating Club, Hop Committee, Keydettes, Yearbook, Glee Club. She was elected class president three successive years and awarded Girl Scouts’ highest honors.

  “The title is both privilege and albatross,” she was saying. “All the credit or all the blame.” But I couldn’t picture Daintry failing at anything. Never had I known her to doubt herself.

  “How are your parents?” I asked.

  “They’re living in a double-wide outside Nashville.”

  “Oh,” I floundered.

  Daintry grinned. “Gotcha last.”

  “Stop that,” I said. Don’t. Don’t let this become one of those artificial reunions where acquaintances declare, I never get to see you anymore, and mean, We have nothing to talk about anymore. “Didn’t those O’Connors live across the street from you?” a Wyndham Hall friend had drilled me at a reunion function. “Tell me what they were like. Whatever those parents did for those kids, I want to do for mine. I’ve heard Heather’s NPR essays, met Geoff once at a medical awards dinner. And didn’t the youngest—Sean?—make a perfect sixteen hundred on his college boards?”

  I assumed the classmate was joking. “Well. They weren’t allowed desserts, so they came to our house for sweets.”

  My classmate stared, nonplussed by my glib response. “The O’Connors were born perfect,” I’d finally told her, and that, she’d accepted.

  “Does your mother. . . still have the organ?” I asked Daintry now.

  “What next?” my mother had mused to no one that moving day as she’d watched a wicker chair with peacock-fanned headpiece hauled indoors, a bristling hedgehog foot wiper placed on the front step. What next was Kathleen O’Connor’s organ, a massive electronic instrument installed boldly in the foyer. I loved the organ’s double rows of ivory keys, the flanking knobs that added rhumba or bongo rhythms, instantly changing the music’s tone to mournful or mysterious. I loved the complicated symmetry of the foot pedals, the sheet music carelessly scattered about the organ’s slickly varnished veneer: “Born Free,” “Danny Boy,” “My Funny Valentine.” I loved Daintry, and I loved the O’Connors, and thus I loved whatever was theirs.

  Kathleen O’Connor taught piano and directed the seventh- and eighth-grade chorus at Cullen Elementary, and I was anxious to age, to fall under her tutelage and dress
for performances in a navy skirt and stockings. To wear loafers rather than my black-and-white saddle shoes Daintry referred to as “fairy stompers.” Even now I recalled the pleasure, the glad warmth, that suffused me during an afternoon of errands when a clerk had touched my head and asked Mrs. O’Connor, “Is this one of yours, too?”

  “No,” Daintry’s mother had said with a smile. “But she might as well be.”

  “She still has the organ.” Daintry ran manicured nails around the rim of her glass. “Do you still have your quote book?”

  “I . . .” The unexpected question silenced me. I did, though I hadn’t thought of it in years. An aunt had given me the blank-paged book when I left for Wyndham, and throughout high school and college I’d faithfully penned treasured snippets of popular songs or movie dialogue into it, French phrases, lines lifted from novels or poems or speeches.

  “I still remember some of those quotes,” Daintry said.

  My neck warmed. “Sentimental stuff.”

  Daintry’s smile was wry. “I was sorry to hear of your father’s death,” she said, and I was glad for the tough curtness of the word, no euphemism of “passing away.” “So sudden.” Her eyes met mine again, and I glimpsed something truthful there. “I remember. . . ,” she began.

  I remembered, too. Daddy had “traveled,” his year in the women’s apparel business dictated by and divided into five seasons rather than four: spring, summer, fall, winter, resort. Mondays through Thursdays he walked Manhattan’s crowded streets, but often on Sundays he took the two of us to the deserted asphalt of the Winn-Dixie parking lot to roller-skate. He sat on the curb smoking until Daintry and I complained of pinched toes and feet itching from friction.

  “He brought us those wonderful surprise balls,” she said, an almost wistful tone, and in it I heard the girls we were. Big as grapefruits, the surprise balls with clown or princess or pirate faces seemed too pretty to unwrap. But we did, slowly unwinding yard upon yard of tightly bound crepe-paper strips, savoring the process far more than the worthless trinkets hidden at the center.

  “Your father had the rings,” I said, motivated by some pathological need to mete fairness, equality in advantages. The rings were cheap, glittering bits of tinted glass nested in foam rubber slots, “good behavior” bribes at his two-room pediatrics office decorated with a flop-footed Goofy mural Kathleen O’Connor herself had painted. Daintry and I had selected a new ring every week, the length of time it took for the previous one to bend, break, or turn our knuckles green. “They were wonderful, too.”

  But Daintry was still thinking of my father. “And he brought you that paper dress. It was. . . a cat.”

  “Yes.” A shift of thick newsprint whose countless dots viewed from the proper distance formed a cat’s face. “It didn’t fit me, so I let you have it.”

  “One time your father told me I could do anything I wanted if I put my mind to it,” Daintry said. She smiled. “He ate that candy medicine all the time—what was it? Something minty.”

  “Tums. Now Mother’s hooked, for the calcium. She badgers me about taking them.”

  My quotidian observation had brought her back. “Is your mother still so much in your life?”

  “She’s just trying to—”

  “It must have been very difficult to lose him,” Daintry interrupted, “as close as you all were. Are,” she concluded crisply. I sensed reproof in her self-correction, but she merely gazed placidly about her. “I like the openness of Ceel’s house. The rectory is so ‘quaint’—all nooks and cubbyholes and crawl spaces. Makes me feel like a giant in a dollhouse. At least some former priest had the sense to renovate the upstairs bath. Though I’ve never understood what people see in clear shower stalls.”

  “Maybe that’s the point?” Daintry laughed, and I was absurdly pleased. “Ceel loves the rectory. She looked into our buying it.”

  Daintry wagged her finger. “But unavailable to laymen. Laypeople. It’s too much like our house in Cullen, which has sold again, I hear. Something like the fifth set of owners since we left.”

  I was surprised and saddened. With the O’Connors’ arrival I’d finally been allowed entry to the eccentricities of recently deceased Mrs. Payne’s house and came to know it as well as I knew my own. Daintry and I pressed our faces to the wavy leaded glass of the front door. We regarded the telephone closet off the kitchen as our personal indoor phone booth. Even Mother was envious when I reported that the house boasted an attic flight of permanent steps rather than flimsy fold-downs like ours. I ate untold numbers of grilled-cheese sandwiches in the O’Connor kitchen, its wallpaper patterned with canisters and soup cans whose not-meant-to-be-legible labels Daintry and I spent hours deciphering.

  “And the rest of your family?” I said. “Why don’t we ever do something with the O’Connors as a family? Cook out together, or go swimming together, or something?”

  “Because we’re only neighbors, not social friends.”

  “They’re all fine, of course,” Daintry said, shaking the black hair she shared with all her siblings, an uncanny resemblance noticed by all of Cullen. “I’m adopted,” she’d asserted to me that first summer together. “We all are”—claiming the fact with such superiority that I’d scurried for my baby album, checking the language on the copy of the birth certificate pasted to its pages in hopes of possible fraud. But I wasn’t adopted by anyone, except Daintry.

  “They’re living all over,” she said. “Habits die hard.”

  For they’d come to Cullen from Ireland, the most recent setting of Jack O’Connor’s career, and thus the pretty litany of those Irish names: Heather, Geoffrey, Daintry, Sean. A pediatrician who shunned the security of group practice for charity cases, their father had spent ten years treating the poor in far-flung locales but had decided his family needed a home base and consistent schooling. Before Ireland they’d lived in Mexico, and when her children misbehaved Kathleen O’Connor scolded them in Spanish, sparing them the humiliation of a public upbraiding. Whatever their country of origin, I thought even their names were beautiful, musical as Kathleen herself. Geoffrey with a G, Sean with no h, the Heather on the Hill. And of course Daintry, a name I’d never heard at all.

  Mrs. O’Connor’s tales of foreign hardships and oddities entranced me. She shook her head as she recalled the unrecognizable cuts of beef and lamb dangling from butchers’ hooks in Mexican mercados, the gamey taste of meats lacking American-mandated preservatives. She described Irish weather, the rain so constant that a stroller fitted with a zippered bonnet of clear plastic was required to take her children to the village for daily shopping. In Ireland the O’Connor children weren’t bad; they were bold.

  “What did you do all the time?” I pestered, fascinated by their self-imposed exile. They stayed in bed beside their mother until noon, playing with toy soldiers and puzzles amid the messy sheets and blankets, present-day Robert Louis Stevensons. As a result of that forced confinement the O’Connor offspring were industrious, self-entertaining children, never at a loss for something to do. For me, everything about the O’Connors was fabulous, fabled. Even their history.

  But their history had taken an ugly turn, because Jack O’Connor’s business had not only been the business of pediatrics. When panicked young girls in Cullen and its environs came to him with their pregnancies, he delivered the unplanned and unwanted babies. And then delivered them a second time—to childless couples around the state. Birth mothers and adoptive mothers were equally grateful for his go-between humanitarianism, which, like his medical practice, was charitable. But illegal: His Good Samaritan efforts were outside formal adoption agencies or statutes of law. Years later some citizen’s long-held suspicion became conviction, and the authorities were notified. It was no accident after all that the O’Connor children looked alike. Jack O’Connor had personally known their mothers.

  Though his medical license hadn’t been revoked, though he was never arrested, accused, or tried, he was sentenced all the same. His reputation in C
ullen was too marred by the scandal for him to continue practicing there. I was already a mother by the time the O’Connors moved to Tennessee.

  Snared in memory, I hardly noticed that Hal had materialized at my elbow. “You must be Daintry Whicker.”

  “I use my maiden name, O’Connor. Even though Peter thinks it scandalizes the parishioners.”

  “Doesn’t it get confusing with children?” Hal asked.

  “Not in our case,” Daintry said. “We don’t have any.”

  No children, I thought. And realized, We never got around to that topic, either, Peter and I.

  “That’s certainly understandable,” Hal continued. “As busy as you both must be. Not to mention moving from parish to parish.”

  “No, no,” Daintry said. “We opted not. I had enough domestic chaos the first twenty years of my life.” A disorganization and communal chaos I myself had craved. Often left to fend for themselves, the O’Connor children existed on frozen pizza, ants on a log, fluffernutter sandwiches, or whatever they came across in the cabinets. Dishes went unwashed, food was taken to bedrooms, and if Heather or Daintry decided to change the furniture position in their rooms, no one objected. With no adult present, arguments were decided by strength or cunning. The last Popsicle or the stereo volume, the best chair before the television—and even the particular television show—depended upon the first sibling to claim it and keep it. When Daintry was assigned the task of bathing Sean, she was merciless with her taunts, calling him spaghetti dick, making fun of his tightiewhities. The ruthlessness thrilled me. My household, with its dull requirement of taking turns, was prim and rigid and straitlaced by comparison.

  Doesy Howard approached us. “Isn’t it a wonder what Ceel’s done with these sunflowers? They’re so perfectly arranged! Where is Ceel? I’ve been looking for her all night.”

  Daintry glanced away from me, as though she might oblige Doesy’s intrusion by locating Ceel. I didn’t look, didn’t help, didn’t want Ceel to be found. Couldn’t bear for my sister, yearning desperately for a child, to hear Daintry’s easy explanation, the cruel, casual rhyme: “We opted not.”