Even Now

by Susan S. Kelly

  A bright burst of pinks and yellows wedged beside a flat of monkey grass caught my eye. Someone had crammed a Mason jar with the last of summer’s snapdragons.

  “Ellen,” I called. “Over here.” I pulled a stem from the jar and plucked off a single blossom. “Look.” With thumb and forefinger I gently pressed the end of the delicate flower. The odd-shaped bloom obligingly yawned open and shut, exposing a furry tongue of pistils. “Grr,” I growled. “See? It’s a dragon’s jaw. Snapdragon.”

  “Let me try,” Ellen said.

  “Careful. It’s fragile.”

  “If you do it too much, it’ll break,” someone finished my warning. I turned, took in the red sweater draped across her shoulders, the starch-creased shirt. Black hair escaped a toothed clip, spilling over in soft spikes. “Know what I’m talking about?”

  I knew instantly what Daintry referred to: Mrs. Payne’s gliding electric chair rising along the stair banister in the O’Connors’ house. With children’s innocent disregard for mortality, we’d dubbed it “the Heart Attack Ride.” The family had inherited the wondrous machine, and we’d ridden it up and down for hours at a time. Or until Kathleen O’Connor shooed us away with the warning Daintry had just delivered.

  “Peter asked me to buy a pumpkin for the church entrance.” She looked around at a row of painted plywood cutouts meant to be stuck in hay bales: witches on broomsticks, snaggle-toothed pumpkins. “But I don’t know. This stuff is awfully enticing.” She drilled an index finger in her cheek. “But what’ll I do next August, when there are no wooden Easter eggs or wooden hearts or wooden Uncle Sams or wooden turkeys?”

  I laughed. “Still cutting to the chase, I see.”

  Daintry looked down. “You’re. . . ”

  “Ellen,” I supplied. “This is Ms. O’Connor. She’s married to Pe—Mr. Whicker, from church.”

  “Call me Daintry,” she said, and smiled. Though I called Kathleen O’Connor by her first name, my mother had never granted the same privilege to Daintry.

  Ellen’s eyes brightened. “The one who said I can take communion.”

  Peter had announced the previous Sunday that a child of any age, whether or not confirmed, could receive communion. A parent might even dip the bread into the chalice wine and guide it into a toothless infant’s mouth.

  “Ellen brought her wafer back to the pew,” I said. “It finally disintegrated. How can a ten-year-old comprehend communion?”

  “The Eucharist is essentially a mystery to everyone.” Daintry looked at me with a mild, frank expression. “Unless you can explain it.”

  I picked up the box of my pathetic plants. “I don’t think I’ll argue with a master’s in theology.”

  And then she rescued me, as she’d done in countless situations decades earlier, asking Ellen, “What are you going to be for Halloween?”

  “A rock star,” Ellen answered from the side of a caramel apple.

  “Has your mother ever told you that the two of us dressed up in identical costumes every year? Twin hoboes, twin Gypsies.” Daintry turned to me. “I think our least successful costume was the mummies. I came undone because you didn’t roll the toilet paper tight enough.”

  “It wasn’t my fault. You had to go to the bathroom.”

  “With the toilet paper!” Ellen giggled.

  “Convenient revisionist history,” Daintry said. “Remember when we went as the Kennedys? We had a fight about who got to be Jackie.”

  “You won,” I said with mock glumness.

  “Moot point,” Daintry returned. “JFK was assassinated the next week.”

  Kennedy’s assassination had as much significance for Ellen as Illya Kuryakin had had for Mark. She was recalling a more recent reference. “Can you talk like Mary Poppins?”

  A smile spread across Daintry’s face. “Is that what your mother told you?” she returned in a lilting English accent. Ellen nodded, delighted. “What else did she tell you?” Daintry asked. As though I were invisible.

  “That you were her best friend.”

  “Did she?”

  “Yep.” Ellen dragged her sleeve across her taffygummed mouth. “Are you now?”

  “Ellen—”

  “Grown-ups don’t have best friends,” Daintry interrupted me. “Their husbands are their best friends.”

  Ellen looked dubious. She’d eaten breakfast that morning in uncustomary silence, her face closed with the worry spawned by subtle parental warring, a tense morning exchange.

  About Daintry.

  “You should call her,” Hal had said, “get together for lunch or something.”

  “She works.”

  “Seems you’d want to see her after spending half your life as friends,” he persisted.

  Half a life? What constitutes half a life? “We were apart after ninth grade.”

  “For three years. Didn’t she go to Carolina with you?”

  “She didn’t go with me. We went together. So did twenty thousand other students, including you. Daintry and I aren’t. . . not friends, but we’re not . . .” I’d hesitated, unable to categorize, to portray for Hal the uneasy ambivalent limbo of our recent relationship, if it was even that.

  “What’s the problem, then? What happened between you two? A man, I bet. Isn’t that the classic wedge that splits apart women friends?”

  “Give me a break. Leave it to men to think they’re the reason for everything.”

  “Whoa. Back off.”

  “Are y’all having a fight?” Ellen asked.

  “Oh, El,” Hal said, immediately congenial. “If Mommy and I ever fight, heaven will open and the angels will cry. Time for school.”

  Now Ellen said, “I like your hair. Mommy—Mom, I mean—won’t let me grow my hair long.”

  “Neither would her mother,” Daintry answered, but she was looking at me. “Right?”

  Not that the ruling had stopped me from trying to imitate Daintry’s smooth braids. My short stumps were brushy, more pigtail than plait. “Until Wyndham Hall,” Daintry said.

  “What’s that?” Ellen asked.

  “Your mother hasn’t told you about where she went to school?” Daintry bent to Ellen’s height and said earnestly, “There were hair dryers on the bathroom walls, like in hotels.”

  “There were not!” I denied, and changed the subject. “We’re on a double mission, for flowers and birthday favors. Those seed bells are nice, El, for the birds.” Ellen curled her lip with distaste.

  “Is it your birthday?” Daintry asked.

  “Right after Halloween. See, here’s my list.” She held up the piece of paper, numbered like Mark’s, with fervently desired items in an elaborate, curlicued font.

  “’Hang-head baby,‘” Daintry read aloud. “What’s that?”

  I loved Ellen’s term, the apt description. “A life-size doll, limp like a real newborn.” No sleek, plastic-limbed Barbie, no stiff, unyielding body of a bright and fake-eyed pseudoinfant.

  “I’ve changed my mind,” Ellen said. “I’m too old for hang-head babies.” I was stricken, and not only because I’d already purchased the doll.

  “Turn around, turn around . . .” Daintry hummed for my benefit, the refrain to an ancient Kodak ad. Not even old enough to know the meaning of poignancy, we’d nevertheless adored the mournful lyrics and melody and choreographed a halting ballet we danced whenever the advertisement aired. One of the many performances we staged solely for ourselves.

  “Mom, come pay.”

  As we walked toward the store’s entrance, Daintry said, “When I think of birthdays, I always remember yours.”

  “Why? Yours were the best.” Because of their stint in Mexico, O’Connor birthdays were celebrated with piñatas, and I’d been among the blindfolded, bat-wielding participants scrambling for candy when the papier-mâché burro or sombrero burst.

  “No,” Daintry said. “No, I mean your sixteenth.”

  “Oh.” I made a deliberate effort not to slow my stride. “That surprise party. I hated it.”


  “Because you don’t like surprises?”

  “Because. . . ”

  Because it was hard. Under the guise of a dentist appointment in Charlotte, Mother had secretly picked up four classmates from Wyndham Hall, springing them on me for an afternoon of sunbathing and gabbing and spending the night. Daintry was there, too, of course. So hard, watching my old life mesh uneasily with my new. And painful. Painful trying to include and translate for Daintry the subjects and incidents and names and situations she had no knowledge of or link to. The wretchedness of that afternoon reached across the years to engulf me.

  “I still remember their names,” Daintry said. “Meg and Amelia and Charlotte and. . . Sissy?”

  “Yes.”

  “They were. . . ”

  I knew what they were. Giggly and twittery with girly excitement and gossip and information: where they’d been, whom they’d seen, what they’d bought, who was in love with whom. “We hadn’t seen each other in a while,” I offered. But I knew what Daintry meant.

  “I hadn’t seen you for the whole school year,” Daintry said.

  And I saw it all, too, standing there among baskets of apples and onions, autumn’s bounty. Saw the six of us that hot afternoon sprawled in the backyard where Daintry and I had spent our childhoods. Saw Meg’s legs slowly scissoring above her monogrammed towel while Daintry tried to draw up her long legs that hung off her own shabby towel. Cheap and short and thin enough to have fit, years earlier, in a box of detergent. I’d envied that free gift once, envied that Kathleen O’Connor purchased such commercial wonders: flexible straws and jelly jars you could keep as drinking glasses, while the products at my house were so dull, so ordinary. Not advertised.

  I heard the peals of laughter as a bottle of Sun-In was passed around—Daintry silently demurring with a shake of her ebony head—and a crumpled tube of bronzing gel, Ban de Soleil, where baby oil had always sufficed for Daintry and me. I heard the fizz of popped sodas and saw the bright tin rings slid down fingers against gold signet rings. Saw Daintry’s wide-eyed amazement as Charlotte sat up to do breast exercises, then dropped her bikini top.

  “What do you think?” Charlotte had said, grinning, “Can you tell a difference or should I order Mark Eden?”

  “One of them had a. . . weight belt,” Daintry said, wonder tingeing her voice the way it hadn’t twenty years ago. Twenty years ago she’d hardly spoken at all.

  “Sissy,” I said, remembering the sandbag contraption secured around her waist with Velcro. “Sissy was always dieting.”

  Tourists milled about us in the narrow aisle, but I was sitting cross-legged under a cloudless sky again, grass warm and prickly against my thighs as I watched my Wyndham Hall friends squint at their split ends, bite them away with perfect teeth, chattering all the while. They wore bright purple-and-gold embroidered dresses as cover-ups, with tiny round mirrors stitched into the fabric, hippie garb. But Daintry wore a shirt of her father’s, the same shirt she’d shown me two years earlier before we packed for a classmate’s sleep-over, advising me not to bring my nightgown, that everyone wore their father’s shirt to sleep in now, just everyone. I’d wondered, watching her, sensing her acute discomfort, whether she still had the fake alpaca V-neck cardigan we’d searched for so diligently every week in Cullen’s lone clothing store the previous summer. Everyone at Cullen Central wore fake alpaca V-neck cardigans.

  Oh, those girls, with their big-city upbringing, their wealthy fathers. “Your mother stopped the car in the driveway of this ungodly awful house to play a joke on us,” Amelia said. “She announced, ‘We’re here!’ and waited to see what we’d do. You should have seen this place!”

  Over the ring of the cash register I heard it all. “What do you do around here? There’s not even a mall! Do they roll up the sidewalks at night? Let’s go to the Putt-Putt! No wonder you went away to school!”

  I saw the whole painful scene. Painful then, painful now. Heard the peals of laughter and teasing and ribbed disbelief. Oh, those girls. They weren’t especially pretty. They weren’t especially thin. They were soft with the obligatory dormitory pounds of consoling late night sweets and care package binges. But as they carried the extra weight they also carried assurance. They were fat with their supremacy, careless with their confidence. They knew who they were. Gifted, privileged, secure, and oblivious of their cruelty. To Daintry and her feelings as she looked for four-leaf clovers.

  I had hated it. I was miserable for Daintry, because I’d encountered it myself. For though I might have escaped the social intricacies and unwritten requirements of Cullen Central, the first few months at Wyndham Hall were an equally frightening initiation. While prepared for the academics, I was unprepared for the minute scrutiny bred in girls who live every moment together. Girls who are judging one another, assessing and comparing their possessions and personalities and talents. Who got more phone calls from boys, more letters in their mailbox, who had more shoes, for God’s sake. Who was cuter, skinnier, funnier, richer, smarter. Ratings never spoken aloud, but ceaselessly, silently tallied. And through that initiation, I’d ceaselessly, silently longed for Daintry, my cuter, skinnier, funnier, smarter, small-town friend.

  I imagined how it must have felt to be Daintry that afternoon: outnumbered by these girls as sleek and groomed and petted as cats. And outranked. She must surely have assumed I’d aligned myself with them, shifted away from her. Believed that she was no longer the one I would turn to, listen to, imitate.

  “Daintry,” I said. “They didn’t mean it. They . . .” What could I tell her with some belated apology, some tardy explanation? That there is nothing like boarding school to make you tough. You adapt and survive or are flattened and die. They didn’t mean it. It was just the way it was.

  “Mean what?” Daintry said, picked up a jar of honey and turned it upside down. The viscous golden nectar inched down the glass.

  Daintry was invited to spend the night, too. But instead she went home, to pack for a three-week youth leadership conference in Raleigh. (“Youth conference?” Meg had laughed as Daintry made her way back across the street. “What’s that?”) I never invited classmates to visit Cullen again. What had Daintry done? She went to her conference. She accomplished and organized and achieved. She became student body president. She had an affair with the driver’s ed teacher.

  A tendril slipped from the barrette’s grip to her shoulder. “You had a crush on somebody from a boy’s school,” Daintry said. She tucked the strand into the swept-up coil, and I looked at her hands, the manicured nails, and didn’t remember the way we wrote messages on our palms in junior high, self-important reminders to ourselves; did not remember inking smeary puppet lips and eyes on closed fists in elementary school; remembered instead her hands picking, plucking through the grass that sixteenth birthday afternoon. “Those girls were all singing ‘Son of a Preacher Man.’ Teasing you.”

  I remembered. Tim Todd, whom I’d met at a mixer and was exchanging letters with. Timothy Emerson Todd. “Because his father was a minister,” I said.

  “Just like Alan Geer’s father.” Alan, the Methodist rector’s son who’d finally noticed me at the end of our freshman year at Cullen High after I’d mooned over him from a distance. “I brokered Alan for you,” Daintry said.

  She had—managed to persuade Alan of my charms or convince him that my being interested in him was reason enough for reciprocation. Alan and I had gone out a few times that summer—“gotten together”—at some meeting place or another, before I left for Wyndham. “Wonder what happened to him.”

  “You mean after you told him how stupid his letters were?”

  Surprised and guilty, I looked at her. At Wyndham I’d read Alan’s sweetly gushing epistles aloud to my big-city roommates from Atlanta and Tampa. “Hometown honey,” they’d chorused until eventually I’d adopted their derision and become determined to shed Alan. A scorn that must have been evident in my replies. His final letter to me was neatly scissored into strips except f
or a small corner where Alan had written that I’d “torn his letters to shreds.” Remnant remorse made me squirm. “How did you know that?”

  “He showed me. He showed everyone.”

  I swallowed, stunned.

  “Alan fixes VCRs now. Has a beer belly and wears a gold chain.”

  “Oh. . . ”

  Daintry’s responding laugh was crueler in its way than Meg’s or Sissy’s or Amelia’s. “How would I know what happened to him, Hannah?” she said, condemning my ludicrous suggestion that she might. The sympathy that the recollection of that summer scene had elicited dissolved under her adversarial certainty.

  “It’s funny how you never . . .” I hesitated.

  “What?”

  “Never think about someone specifically, and yet they’re alive somewhere. They’ve gone on living in Denver or Boston or Pittsburgh. They’ve gotten out of bed every day just like you have, and eaten breakfast and watched television, and filled their car with gas and. . . people you once knew go on living.”

  “They tend to do that, yes,” Daintry said, rebuffing any tenderness in my sudden realization. Yet I was glad for the return of that authoritarian air. A similar assurance, in fact, to Meg’s and Sissy’s and Charlotte’s. “No,” Daintry went on, casually running her fingers through a bushel basket of peanuts. “I’ll tell you what’s funny: What’s funny is that you’ve always been attracted to PKs.”

  “PKs?”

  “Preacher’s kids. Eighth grade, tenth grade.” Heat rose in my face. I turned to the bins of spring bulbs. “So you’re—what, designing? implementing?—the new columbarium. Peter said you’d volunteered to take it on.”

  Volunteered? Had he told her this intentional lie? Or was it a misinterpretation on Daintry’s part, an obvious assumption? Had he told her that he came to visit as I cleared weeds, dug up the spindly magnolia? He surely hadn’t told her of teasing me that I looked like Mary Lennox from The Secret Garden, scratching in the dirt. Or that we discovered that we’d memorized the same poems in elementary school. Because if finding a common bond in something as small and specific as a passage from a book or a poem is surprising and thrilling, it’s also dangerous. Dangerous because of the thought that immediately follows: If we have this in common, there’s surely more.