Even Now

by Susan S. Kelly

  I wandered lonely as a cloud. Like everything else, Daintry and I had memorized together, coaching each other through “Daffodils,” “Trees,” “The First Snowfall.” What Peter and I also had in common was Daintry.

  I began putting knobby bulbs into bags. “Maybe your church cat will keep the moles from eating these.”

  “Slutty animal,” Daintry said.

  “What?”

  “I think she’s pregnant.”

  “Don’t tell Ellen. A kitten would get the top slot on her birthday list.” I turned back to the bulbs, selecting the hardest, the roundest, the healthiest.

  “Mom.” Ellen displayed an ivory kernel for my inspection. “I lost a tooth in the taffy. It was ready to fall out, see? It’s barely bleedy.”

  I turned the tooth, no bigger than a pearl, between my fingers. “Oh, El, another one gone.” I peered into her open mouth. How could that tiny hole leave such a crater in my heart?

  Daintry paid for her pumpkin and looked over Ellen’s list again. “Now is there anything here that I can give you? Too bad it’s not April. I have a meeting in New York then. Would you like to go to New York, Ellen? See the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building?”

  “New York,” Ellen breathed.

  “We could combine it with Take Our Daughters to Work Day.”

  “April’s months away. . . ,” I began.

  “How about a kitten?” Daintry said. “Our cat’s going to have kittens.”

  “Oh, boy,” Ellen said. “Can I, Mom? Can we?”

  “I’ll think about it. Let’s go. We need to stop by the drugstore and get some things for Daddy. Plus he’ll be home soon and I haven’t started supper.”

  Daintry laughed. “You’re so married, Hannah.”

  “Tell Ms. O’Connor good-bye, El.”

  “It’s Daintry, Mom. Didn’t you hear her?”

  Of course I’d heard her. It was always Daintry.

  Long after her bedtime Ellen padded into the kitchen where I was folding laundry.

  “It’s thundering,” she said.

  “I know.” Low grumbles were echoing over the mountains and valleys. “Probably because it was so warm this afternoon.”

  “But it’s not supposed to be warm anymore. It’s Halloween in three days.”

  “I know.” I tossed a sock ball at her. “I know everything.”

  “Mom,” she asked hesitantly, “will you not fold my underpants on the counter?”

  I stopped midroll. “Why, babe?”

  “Because . . .” She shrugged helplessly. But I knew why. Ellen still wore baggy, bloomer-type panties decorated with eyelet. The undies were comfortable, but not stylish. Not acceptable. Not like everyone else’s, and she didn’t want them in plain view. “I’d be happy to buy you some bikinis.”

  “No, I like mine, they feel good, I just. . . ”

  “Don’t want anybody to see them,” I finished, and she nodded gratefully. “No prob, sweetie.” I tucked the panties under a bulky stack of jeans. Who would guide—or force—Ellen into clothing conformity? Because it had been Daintry, naturally, who’d dragged me into skinny-ribbed turtleneck sweaters and bell-bottomed pants, saying, “What you want is that long, lean, hungry look.” Daintry who’d ordered me to throw away the book satchel and carry textbooks by hand, hardbacks against hipbones.

  Ellen lingered, picking at the peeling Aladdin appliqué on a nightgown grown too short. “Can I have a you fix?” she asked timidly.

  I crooked my finger. “I’ll do you one better. How about a back tickle?”

  Ellen flopped stomach down on her bed, pulling the gown to her shoulders. I pressed palms to warm flesh, pliable and soft as dough. “Mmm,” she hummed softly.

  “Know what? If it thunders like this—when it’s not summer—it’s supposed to snow in two weeks.”

  She arched to look at me, and I watched hope and skepticism clash. “That’s one of those old wife things.”

  I silently marveled at the soft flawlessness of her skin. One penurious Christmas I’d presented Hal with a stapled booklet of back-scratch coupons, and I wondered now what had become of that homemade gift. Whether Hal had lost them, or never cashed them, or I’d reneged on redemption. Or had each one begun with playful rubbing and ended with passionate loving? “But I’m an old wife,” I said.

  “Moooom. But you should wear lipstick, like her.”

  “Okay,” I resolved. I knew who her was. “You help me remember.”

  Ellen’s hands slid beneath the pillow. “The tooth fairy hasn’t come.”

  “She stays up late. Besides, you have to be asleep.” Daintry had demolished those fantasy gift givers for me—tooth fairy and Santa Claus and Easter bunny— only months after her move across the street. “It’s all ’tend-like. Ask your mother.” I was dazzled, not deflated, by her wisdom, and everything else about her, and had no intention of asking my mother for corroboration. If Daintry said so, it was surely true. “Relax,” I said to Ellen, and she obediently turned over.

  “Mark is so lucky, having Wendy right here,” Ellen said, her voice muffled by the pillow. Luck was one word for it, I thought, picturing Mark at the Howards’ now. “We’re studying together,” he’d said. In her room, on her bed, thigh to thigh and shoulder to shoulder. No one only studied, not unless you were locked away at a single-sex boarding school. I instinctively recoiled from Wendy’s frequent, clipped, “Mark there?” over the telephone.

  “You just don’t like Wendy’s style,” Hal had joked. What I disliked was Mark’s infatuation with her. “He’s not old enough to be involved,” I’d worried aloud.

  Hal had laughed. “No, you’re not old enough for him to be involved.”

  “I wish I had a friend who lived across the street,” Ellen said, “like you did.”

  “Last month you wished you had a twin. Remember how we decided that sometimes it would be good and sometimes it would be bad? Fun, then not fun.” I spread my fingers over Ellen’s scalp, the firm sphere of skull beneath the fine hair. “A friend across the street is the same way.”

  Her head raised beneath my hand. “Did you hear that creak?”

  “It’s just the house settling. The wood contracts at night.” My fingers drifted to her neck, the sweet vulnerability of its downy groove. Oh, Ellen. By the time we’re old enough to understand what makes the noise, we’re old enough not to be afraid. By the time we have answers to our questions, it’s too late to change the outcome. My daughter’s back relaxed, and I kissed the cornsilk hair. When the phone rang in the kitchen, she was asleep.

  “What are you doing?”

  Ceel, with her usual opener. I stooped, squinted. “Cleaning out the refrigerator.”

  “How disgustingly domestic.”

  “I saw Daintry today.”

  “So?”

  “I don’t know. She used to make me jump, now she makes me jumpy. I devolve around her.”

  “Why should she unnerve you? It’s not like me with Geoff. I was in love with him.”

  “But—” But I’d loved Daintry, too.

  “Listen, I’m forcing paper whites for Christmas presents this year, so I have to start early. Can you dig up some sheet moss for me while you’re scrounging around in the woods, doing whatever it is you do at the colum-barium?”

  I thought of Peter, who’d brought me a muffin late that morning. “Left over from the Episcopal Churchwomen meeting,” he said. “What’s new since yesterday?”

  “Are you there?” Ceel went on. “The moss has to be in place before the bulbs start growing.”

  I cradled the phone in my neck, took out a can of thawed orange juice, and slowly peeled the sealing strip. “Ceel . . . do you remember that dish towel in the O’Connors’ kitchen? It always hung on the oven handle.”

  “What dish towel?”

  In the refrigerator’s crowded rear, I saw them. I moved the bottles and jars and tinfoiled dishes and tugged gingerly, afraid the cardboard baskets, no longer green but purply and damp,
might collapse. “It said ‘Be kind to married women, the wife you slave may be your own.‘”

  For a long moment I heard only my sister’s faint exhale. “Hannah,” she said finally, her voice low with amazement, “how can you remember things like that?”

  “How can you not?” I answered, and cupped the mottled containers in my hands. The shiny jewels of blackberries had grown gray and fuzzed and pulped, rotten with neglect.

  From Hannah’s quote book:

  When a woman is speaking to you, listen to what she says with her eyes.

  —Victor Hugo

  Chapter 7

  Some summer past, Ceel and I sat on a sofa beneath a flaking mounted sailfish in a rented beach cottage. Our husbands and my children had long since gone to bed, and we were watching David Letterman. “Stop drooling, Dave,” Ceel said. His guest was Madonna, and he was quizzing her about past lovers.

  “What about Warren Beatty, your Dick Tracy costar?”

  She looked from beneath thickly mascaraed lashes. “What about him?”

  “I hear he’s sexually insatiable,” Letterman said, leering. “And. . . ?”

  Madonna fingered the fringe of her skirt, purred knowingly: “He’s satiable.”

  As the audience howled, Ceel asked me, “If you were going to have a torrid affair with a movie star, who would you pick?”

  “I used to say Jack Nicholson.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he was masculine and incorrigible and looked, well, insatiable.”

  “Why ‘used to say’? Because he’s old now?” “

  Because I’m old now. That was a good girl’s predictable fantasy of a one-night bad-boy stand.”

  Ceel picked at the paint-clogged wicker. “But when you’re beyond the knight-in-shining-armor stage, beyond the bad-boy-one-night-stand phase, what would attract you now? What’s sexy?”

  “Those are two different things. What attracts and what’s sexy. Apples and oranges. I’d have to think.”

  She called a week later. “Callused hands.”

  “What?”

  “That’s what attracts my friend Janie. I asked her.”

  So I’d begun asking, too. When I thought of it, when I ran into someone. A casual poll of women of a certain age, my own. The range and variety of answers were surprising. But most surprising was their immediacy. No one hesitated, paused to ponder; to a one, the women were ready with their unabashed responses.

  “Someone who doesn’t change the subject,” Emily said. “Who doesn’t ask if I’ve had the oil changed while we’re having dinner out.”

  “Naughtiness,” Hillary said. “Sassy is sexy.”

  “A man who’s at his professional peak,” Martha said. “Can’t help it: Power attracts me.”

  “Fixes smoke detectors. Hangs pictures,” said my divorced friend Susan.

  “A touch,” Kathy said. “Not a grope. Just . . . a touch on the wrist, or the waist.”

  “Survey says?” Ceel would say when she called.

  I read my friend Kathryn’s postcard to her. “ ’I am attracted to gentleness above almost all other things.‘”

  “How eloquent,” Ceel said.

  “How’s this for eloquent?” I quoted my cynical friend Donna. “Too many women have traded one pile-of-shit relationship for another pile that turns out to be doody in a new form.”

  Here’s what no one said: Muscles. Money. Looks.

  “Brains,” Ann said. “Plus a good dancer who can make hollandaise and recites poetry.”

  “Someone who makes me laugh,” Julie said.

  “You know it when you see it, even if you can’t describe it,” Ceel said. “Like looking for a pair of new shoes.”

  “Wonder how Mother would answer,” I said.

  “You know what she’d say: ‘Timing is everything.‘”

  All those different answers, like fingerprints, no two alike. Later it occurred to me that I’d never cast my own vote. I hadn’t canvassed myself.

  While the columbarium’s design took shape in both my imagination and on paper, I tackled the physical preparation, clearing away a jungle of undergrowth, weeds, brambles, stumps, even the blameless pansies. The warm dry autumn weather was an Indian summer boon for the tourist leaf season and a blessing for the columbarium’s creation as well. Or re-creation. I’d come to view the project that way: not as a task, but as a re-creation, a private Eden.

  “I called three times this morning,” Ceel said. “Where are you every day? You’re never home.”

  “At the columbarium. Working.”

  “Yawn,” she said.

  But it wasn’t work, it was pleasure. Because most days, he came, too.

  “Hannah.”

  I hadn’t heard him approach over the scratch of my raking and the hammering up the hill. He’d read the surprise in my eyes.

  “They’re reroofing the parish house, and the racket’s making me insane. Not one of my changes.”

  Peter Whicker had wasted no time in enacting—or forcing, depending on the point of view—changes at St. Martin’s. The bulletin and newsletter font, the beribboned visitor cards, doodling crayons made available for bored children during the service. Wicker baskets had replaced the heavy brass collection plates, sold in turn to an Asheville antique store with the proceeds earmarked for outreach. Moreover, the contents of those collection baskets were being routed to a poor mission church rather than used to purchase periodicals for a diocesan rest home as they had been for decades. Every night now the parish hall was made available to community groups, ranging from Alcoholics Anonymous to Single Parents to Parents with Homosexual Children.

  “I’ve watched those roofers for two days now, and have decided they’ve got the ideal career,” Peter said. “A biscuit in the truck with your buddies at six in the morning. On the roof at first light. That wonderful”— he grappled for the word—“release of ripping off shingles one after the other and pitching them down with total abandon. Hammer like hell for three hours, and by four the day’s done, the team’s earned three thousand dollars, and you go home, drink beer, and watch TV.”

  He snapped his fingers. “And you don’t work when it rains.”

  I laughed. He circled a finger within the white collar at his throat. “This thing can get pretty binding. Literally and figuratively.”

  “I like it,” I said without thinking. He made me do that, unafraid to be frank. Or let me.

  The dark eyes widened with gratitude, or surprise. “You do?”

  What could I tell him? That the snowy circlet and fresh haircut and lack of a coat over that plain shirt made him look boyish, youthful as a twenty-year-old. “Mark wanted to wear a tie when he was only six, but I made him wait. He has all his life to dress like a man.”

  Peter pointed to the leaf pile. A squirrel brazenly nosed the fringes where the heavier acorns, resisting capture between the rake tines, accumulated. “Won’t you just have to do that again tomorrow? A new batch of leaves overnight?”

  “You don’t feel that way on Sundays, do you? There they go, sinners again tomorrow.”

  He laughed. “I refuse to answer that on the grounds that it may incriminate me.”

  I leaned my chin on the tip of the rake handle.

  “What?”

  “You’re the most unminister minister I’ve ever known.”

  “How many have you known?” Then the teasing tone vanished, and his expression sobered. “We’re only ordinary people.” I felt both chastised and confessed to. He shoved his hands into pockets of slaty twill pants, knuckles moving against the fabric, then pulled out his pocket watch as he had that night at Ceel’s. “Duty calls.” But, turning to leave, he pivoted slowly. “Can I come again, to visit? To escape?”

  He was asking permission. “Don’t you ever want to be anonymous?” I’d asked him at Ceel’s party. “Often,” he’d answered. I nodded, shook my head, nodded again. Yes, no, please, come. And proximity must have been part of it, that Peter became the person I saw most
often.

  He did come. At no particular time, for no particular reason. Sometimes he helped, more often he watched. And always we talked, of everything and nothing. “Talk to me,” he said, chin between his palms.

  I knew the distress symptom. “What is it?”

  “Phone’s ringing off the hook. My abolishing the parish dinner, and announcement—or pronouncement, rather—that the vestry vote will be taken during a Sunday service instead is creating a new and different furor.” He sat on a stump, hands dangling over his knees. “So talk to me. In person. Tell me something trivial.”

  So I did: what I was reading, what I was cooking for dinner, of friends I’d left in Durham, my father’s army stories of Okinawa. I taught him a little of gardening, how pansies need to be picked, how plantings should be done in threes, how a rusty nail made hydrangeas bloom blue, how tuberoses would winter over only if they were dug up in fall and saved.

  He picked up a spiral notebook lying on the ground. “This your journal?”

  “Nothing so fascinating,” I said, liking that he didn’t move to open it. “A list of plants for the columbarium. Quince, spirea, dwarf euonymous, daphne, if I can find a protected place. And those are just the shrubs. Perennials on this page, daylilies and columbine and coral bells and Lenten rose and . . .” I trailed off and looked at him apologetically. “Sorry. Completely carried away.”

  “Carried away gets things accomplished.” Though the day was still, a sudden shower of leaves fluttered down as thickly as snow. Not dried and brittle, but perfect yellow ovals still pliable with the velvety texture of living. They caught in our hair and shoulders, softened stones and tools and earth with autumn camouflage. “Carried away is another word for passionate,” he said.