Even Now

by Susan S. Kelly

  “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.

  “How I what?”

  “Went,” I said softly, “left me.”

  Daintry’s fingers tightened around the purse strap on her shoulder. I’d ruined something, immediately rued my frankness and wanted the brief shared hilarity back, even if it had been at my expense. Like the double billing, it wouldn’t be the first time. “I should have known
then,” I said lightly, “that you’d go off and marry yourself a minister. You started hanging out with religious types early.”

  A horn honked from the parking lot, and Mark beckoned from the car window.

  “What, no van?” Daintry said.

  “No van,” I said evenly. “Let’s get together.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

  I knew the refrain, a song from The Parent Trap. But there was nothing nostalgic, no elbow-poked reminder in the answer, and I strained to decipher the subtext. Don’t, Daintry, don’t, I wanted to say, it’s me.

  “Where were you during Sunday school?” Hal said at home as he stood at the kitchen counter, forking pickles from a jar.

  I stared out the window over the sink, where a wooden bird feeder squirrels had gnawed nearly to splinters hung motionless from a branch. “Talking to Daintry.”

  “So you knew her growing up?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Well?”

  Well? “At their Sunday lunches, Dr. O’Connor would go around the table and make each child summarize a portion of the sermon. His eyebrows grew in a straight line across his forehead.”

  Hal’s own eyebrows, fair and chamois colored in the noon sun invading the window, lifted at my non sequitur. He clattered the fork in the sink. “Small world.”

  Yes. And here we were, reunited in another village so small that it barely graced a map. Yet Daintry was distant, different. I wrenched free from a swamp of emotions too varied and complex for categorization— gladness, embarrassment, sentiment, anxiety.

  “You two can pick up where you left off,” Hal added blithely, unaware that was precisely the problem. What hindered our new relationship was the loose ends and rough edges of our old one.

  From Hannah’s quote book:

  . . . but she—after the nature of women and cats, which will not come when they are called and which come when they are not called—

  —Carmen, Merimee

  Chapter 5

  I breathed through my mouth to avoid the smell of canned ravioli rising from the lurid orange sauce bubbling and burping in the saucepan. “Are you sure you want this stuff for lunch?”

  “Everyone at AA brings ravioli in a thermos,” Ellen declared.

  I’d hoped for another year or two of uncomplicated innocence for my daughter. “But do you like it?” I persisted, knowing even as I asked that I’d wanted to be like everyone else, too. Or at least like Daintry O’Connor.

  An image of Daintry preparing for her own day rose before me. Across the village, dressing before a mirror, perhaps, as we once stood before my full-length mirror. Daintry hadn’t had such a luxury, and she’d taught me to dance the dirty dog before it: “Don’t buck your knees like you’re about to fall,” she’d said. “And point your thumbs.”

  Now she would be buttoning her chic and understated outfit, pulling on stockings. Or hose, as Kathleen O’Connor called them, a term I’d never heard.

  Hal straightened a batch of papers, stuffed them into his briefcase, and sighed.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked. “Flunking someone already?”

  “If only that were it. I’m meeting with a mad mommy today whose seventh-grader was issued a white card for leaning back in his chair.”

  Two white cards in one month resulted in suspension hall. “That seems a little extreme.”

  “Not when falling backward might take a computer down with him. It would be funny if it weren’t so irritating.”

  Ellen interrupted. “Don’t forget to get my stencils, Mom.”

  “Since when am I ‘Mom’ and not ‘Mommy’?”

  But in answer Ellen gave me only a secretive smile. Spooning the gummy pasta into a thermos, I remembered crouching beside Mother in her garden and announcing that I was too old to call her “Mommy.” To shield myself from her stricken expression I’d pressed my face into the soft ruffled whiteness of cottage pinks, drinking in their sweet scent.

  I’d never succeeded in finding the identical pinks for my own garden, to duplicate that perfume. Pinks were “dianthus” now, flash-and-show hybrid varieties: multipetaled, brightly colored, and odorless. As if in some horticultural conspiracy, the spare simplicity of the old strains had been bred out.

  Hal put his coffee mug on the counter. “What’s on your list today?” His A.M. query was regular as the sun.

  “Just errands,” I said. “The usual.”

  Balancing newspapers in one hand, I struggled to open the heavy steel door of the recycle bin with the other. Twice it slammed shut, practically taking off my fingers.

  “Here, let me help.”

  An arm grazed the back of my head, and I ducked beneath it. He’d surprised me. The lot of the community recycling center had been empty when I parked. As he lifted the lid and dumped in my load, I stepped aside and watched Peter Whicker. He was a physical opposite of Hal, with the kind of sturdy, wholly male physique that intimidated me in college. Peter was dark where my husband was fair. Stocky and broad where Hal was lean and rangy.

  “That it?” He’d caught me staring. My head reached Hal’s chin, Peter’s shoulder.

  I nodded. “My good citizen deed for the day.”

  “What’s next on your list?”

  I started at the question, an echo of Hal’s. “Why?”

  “Forgive my nosiness. I was driving by and saw you. Thought I’d catch you in Sunday school yesterday, but you obviously didn’t attend my Inquirer’s class. I got tangled up with Frances Mason instead. She had the bound-tos to harass me with unanswerable questions.”

  “’The bound-tos’ must be related to ’the re-andres.‘”

  “Which are. . . ?”

  “If my father said too much or drank too much or did anything too much, the next day he suffered from the re-and-res: regrets and remorses.”

  “So what class did you attend?” He laughed. “How’s that for on the spot?”

  I hesitated, but Peter’s frankness was contagious. “The abstainer’s class. If you’ll teach me something, I’ll come. But classes where you break into small groups and discuss. . . ”

  Peter folded his bare arms across the charcoal expanse of his buttonless shirtfront. “Then I don’t suppose you’re waiting for me to make a call on you.” At my alarmed expression he added, “Don’t worry. I’m not the pastoral-care type. I’m the rabble-rousing type.”

  There was that unexpected irreverence again. “What were you trying to ‘catch’ me for?”

  “Your horticultural reputation precedes you. I was hoping you’d come look at the columbarium. Or the weed pit that passes for it.”

  “Me? Now?”

  “Just a look. Please?”

  I debated, stalled. “Hal did ask me to pick up a lectionary study guide at the church.”

  “Put them in the narthex myself,” Peter said. “Let’s go.”

  He was reaching for the car door before I’d turned off the engine. “I can’t remember the last time someone held a door open for me.”

  “Mean mother,” he said. “Meaner nuns. My good Catholic upbringing.”

  “Catholic? But—”

  “I don’t look Catholic, do I?” he said, deadpan. I laughed, and he shrugged. “Jumped the fence.”

  “What happened?”

  “What makes you think something happened?”

  The answer was abrupt, and I regretted the question. “I’m sorry. Forgive my nosiness.”

  Recognizing his own earlier apology, he shook his head. “No, I’m sorry for snapping. Too many rules. I was just a classic bad boy.”

  I could see it in him still. In his bearing, loose limbed with pent energy. In the quick eyes and stubborn sideways flop of hair. An appealing shagginess. “The choir-boy with the whoopee cushion?”

  “No, acolyte.” He grinned, restored.

  On either side of the church’s arched stone entrance, sugar maples were crimson tipped with fall’s first touch. The sky was pure blue, the hue of spring forget-menots. I appreciate
d the pretty solitude of the scene, the weekday vacancy. “When I was a child my mother claimed that every Episcopal church was left unlocked so anyone anytime anywhere could go inside,” I said. “It’s a Wednesday. Is St. Martin’s unlocked?”

  “Care to test it?”

  “If it’s not true, I don’t want to know anymore. It was the idea that I loved.”

  The parish house door opened and a frizzy-headed older woman walked briskly toward us. “The messages are piling up, Mr. Whicker.”

  “’Peter,’ Maude. I keep telling you, call me Peter.”

  “Yes, well, you need to get to them.” She peered at me suspiciously.

  “Soon, soon. Hannah, this is Maude Burleigh, the church secretary and my jailor. Hannah’s going to overhaul the columbarium garden.” I opened my mouth to protest.

  The woman frowned. “I’d talk to the vestry before proceeding with that idea.”

  Peter ignored her. “Have the new visitor cards come back from the printer yet? And the sexton needs to install hooks for them on the pew backs.”

  Maude Burleigh dramatically shifted her belt upward on her thick torso. “I’m not at all sure our parishioners will approve of the yellow ribbons that you want pinned to the visitor cards. Much less their dangling from the pew backs when they’re trying to kneel.”

  “But Maude, our parishioners are already members now, aren’t they?” Peter said, undeterred. “They don’t need to like the ribbons. They just need to be welcoming. You know my job description. Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”

  Unconvinced, Maude frowned again and crossed her arms over her wide bosom.

  “And what about that new font for the newsletter and bulletin?” Peter continued. “Something clean and contemporary instead of that English Gothic.” He stepped on my toe. “Mrs. Marsh here told me it looks just like the title for that Dark Shadows soap opera. Did you ever watch Dark Shadows, Maude?” I looked at my foot to keep from laughing.

  The woman only pulled at the collar of her dress and turned to go. “It’s going to be expensive to change. Don’t forget about the messages,” she added over her shoulder.