Even Now

by Susan S. Kelly

  “No, Hannah,” she’d said that day in the driver’s license office. “I was gone by then.” Now I knew why.

  But for storage boxes, the room was devoid of Christmas, returned to the regular. And I was glad. I would not be crushed, humiliated; refused to be. I was glad I hadn’t known, even grateful. I took down the wreath, separating the velvet bow from the boxwood branches to preserve for next year.

  But it was all futile activity. I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes again, hard, until dizzying ribbons of color streaked the darkness behind the lids. I kneaded my face, pulled my hair back tightly as though pain equaled erasure. Of Daintry showing me the correct organ knob, Daintry telling me to use rubber bands to hold up my knee socks, Daintry tsking over my outie belly button, Daintry elbowing me at confirmation classes, Daintry persuading me to “suicide” a sorority on bid night. And Daintry in her present incarnation: regal, chiseled, capricious.

  I added the bow to the pile of Christmas trappings and looked around. Christmas was finished, dismantled. Nothing remained to do but empty the trash.

  Outside near the border of shrubbery, Doesy’s paper-bag luminaries lay flattened by a careless driver. Wendy, no doubt. Several had blown into our yard. I picked one up, then another, and as I stooped something glinted, catching my eye. Beneath the feathery hemlock boughs, conveniently evergreen, was a stash of empty airplane liquor bottles. Vodka, rum, bourbon. Perfect miniatures of their bigger brothers.

  Doesy came outside, dressed in spandex and sweatshirt. “I was just on my way to the fitness center. What are you doing under there?”

  I showed her two luminary bags I’d filled with the bottles.

  “Goodness! Litterbugs.”

  “Doesy, these aren’t highway litterbugs. These are . . .” I chose my words carefully. “Could they be Wendy’s?”

  Hand on the car door, Doesy halted. “Well, let’s just ask her, shall we?”

  “But Wendy’s not going to just admit that she—”

  Doesy leaned into her car and blared the horn. Wendy appeared in the doorway, languid and slouched, a cropped sweater above low-riding jeans exposing her navel to the December chill.

  “Mrs. Marsh has found some liquor bottles out here. Do you know where they came from?”

  Wendy’s eyebrows raised in innocence. “Beats me. They aren’t mine.” She shrugged and closed the door.

  “See?” Doesy said.

  “But—”

  She climbed into her car without a backward glance. “My daughter has said they aren’t hers, and I choose to believe my daughter.” The window glided down. “Ask Mark. Don’t you remember what you were doing at his age?” Gravel shot defiantly beneath the Jeep’s tires as she accelerated from the driveway.

  I stood, dumbfounded, debating my choices of what to do next. The day stretched empty and silent before me, yet crowded and noisy with revelation.

  The columbarium. I hadn’t been there since the children’s vacation and the onslaught of holiday activities. Stillness, quiet, mine.

  Unsure whether to take the bags by the recycling center—a darkly comic effort at good citizenship—or confront Mark with them, I was still holding them when I reached the columbarium. The teak bench I’d ordered had arrived, a slatted two-seater with a curving back, and I sat down on it, calmed and pleased with the way it looked even without any greenery to soften the legs.

  “Kind of a lonely way to spend New Year’s Eve, isn’t it?”

  The bare tree branches behind Peter radiated from his head like his own crown of thorns. Or stiff Medusa snakes. “Depends on your definition of loneliness.”

  He sat beside me and gestured to the paper bags. “It’s too late and too cold for picnics. What are these?” I unwound the necks and showed him. “You’ve been drinking on the sly down here and didn’t invite me. No, you’ve started celebrating New Year’s early and didn’t invite me.” His eyes were rueful. “Daintry says I have the highest need for inclusion of anyone she’s ever known.”

  Inclusion, exclusion, Daintry. Familiar topics. “We used to spend New Year’s Eve watching TV together. Eating popcorn. Burning saucepans to fix popcorn. One year we made confetti with a hole puncher. Do you have any idea how long it takes to make confetti one polka dot at a time?”

  He smiled. “Would you like to come over and spend New Year’s with us? I’d need to check,” he went on, “and I know you’ll want to ask Hal, but—”

  “Peter.” I put my hand on his arm. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  In the dimming afternoon light his collar gleamed palely. “Tell me what’s wrong.”

  “I found these hidden under bushes beside our driveway.” There was no point in mentioning Doesy or Wendy. “I just wonder what . . . children are doing. Mark doesn’t talk to me much these days.”

  “Wasn’t there a time when you didn’t talk to your mother?”

  My mother. Halfway home by now, unburdened of confession. “Yes.” I sighed and pulled at a tag wired to the arm of the bench. “Growing up is hard.”

  He laid his arm lightly along the back of the bench, behind me. I was conscious of its placement, knew that proprietary gesture. “You mean growing up was hard.”

  “No,” I said softly, looking at him, at all he didn’t know. “I mean is.”

  “But that’s not it. Something’s hurt you.”

  “No.”

  “Someone’s hurt you. Haven’t they.”

  No. Neither. Both. I didn’t answer.

  “Don’t let it, Hannah. Don’t let them. Let it go. Let. It. Go.”

  “Turn the other cheek? Are you counseling me?”

  Then he did, literally, turn my cheek with the flat of his palm, fingers at my ear. “Don’t be sarcastic.” I wouldn’t meet his eyes. “Look at me. Someone pushed the Catholic Church in my face for so long that I left it just to hurt her. That’s why I jumped the fence. Just to hurt someone.”

  “Who, Daintry?” Peter said nothing. “Who was it?” Prying, testing, pushing him to prove something.

  He drew a hand across his forehead. “My mother.”

  Gray glinted at his temples, silver I’d never noticed. It had hurt him to admit it, and I’d hurt him by asking. “So you atoned by becoming a priest?”

  In the chill late afternoon gloom his breath escaped in puffs. “It doesn’t work that way. Don’t make me tell you that. I forgave her, and she forgave me.”

  I knew it; had said the identical words to Ceel about the reasons for her childlessness. It doesn’t work that way. Payback and retribution aren’t valid. Ashamed, I cupped hands to my face, warming the cold knob of nose. “I’m sorry. Sorry for pushing, for the sarcasm.”

  “Hey. I forgive you, too.” He tugged my fingers down, folding them inside his own warm hands skin to skin. “And I’ve missed you,” he said, then leaned and kissed me. And in the windless cocooning silence, I leaned and kissed him back.

  From Hannah’s quote book:

  To be young. To be young. There is nothing else like it: there is nothing else in the world.

  —William Faulkner, Light in August

  Chapter 12

  Daintry and I were standing against the wall in the St. Martin’s parish hall, watching what passed for a Shrove Tuesday pancake supper. Leaning, rather, as though the noise and activity had shoved us there. Plates of pancakes swimming in syrup were pushed through the same kitchen window as dirty dishes. Long tables were littered with remains of dinners. Children clamored for attention as parents roamed the room, looking for vacant seats. People pawed through silverware and spilled sugar and coffee on another messy table. Teenagers were running the show, tossing Mardi Gras trinkets, juggling, vying for the microphone to perform a song or joke. “Keep it clean,” I heard Peter shout over the popping balloons to a boy wearing oversize flapping clown feet.

  “How do you spell headache?” Daintry said to me over the din. “P-a-n-c-a-k-e.”

  I laughed and raised my own voice. “Has it alway
s been like this, or was it”—I was equally reluctant to cast aspersions or to say his name, afraid its very syllables would betray me—“your husband’s idea?”

  “Peter thought it might be a good way to involve the older kids in something worthwhile.” Though I continued to watch the chaos, I felt Daintry’s eyes on me. “He said you’d given him the idea, actually.”

  Had I? I couldn’t fully remember the content of our conversation about Mark on the columbarium bench. What I remembered was our embrace, our kisses. I hadn’t been back since. With January’s cold and plantings gone dormant there was no work to do, no reason to visit. And I didn’t trust any other reason.

  Hal was standing in line for coffee. Wendy was tying the strings of a fresh white apron at Mark’s rear. Ceel noticed and made an exaggerated pointing gesture with her hand, laughing. Ellen was on her second round. Doesy and Bill Howard sat in one of the few upholstered chairs in the room, picking at plates.

  Doesy had barely acknowledged me when I’d said hello, and I’d chalked it up to our terse exchange earlier in the week. She’d been out of town for the weekend, and though Wendy was supposedly spending the night with a friend, lights and music were on at the Howards’ house until late. Mark could tell me exactly how late, in fact, since he’d been forbidden to go over there and had watched from the window.

  When Doesy pulled in the driveway, I was picking up cigarette butts. “Have a good trip to Atlanta?”

  “Great fun with my old pals. So nice to get away this dreary time of year. Did I miss anything?”

  I debated, then plunged on. “I think you missed a party at your house.”

  Doesy shook her head. “That Wendy.” She lifted her shoulders with helplessness. “But what can we do? She has to have a key.”

  I’d gaped at the patent lameness of the excuse, but Doesy was on to other news. “Did Mark tell you about Laura Cathcart giving—oh, what was his name—Dennis, that’s it, Dennis Hunter a blow job in the high school parking lot? That’s what teenagers consider safe sex nowadays. I didn’t even know what a blow job was in ninth grade, did you?”

  I closed my eyes and rubbed my temples. I didn’t know because Mark hadn’t told me; didn’t know Laura or Dennis; didn’t know what a blow job was in ninth grade. I wondered how Doesy would respond if I’d said, I didn’t know anything about sex unless your minister’s wife told me.

  Doesy, though, assigned her own interpretation to my expression. “Wendy still talks to me. She still tells me everything.” Clearly Doesy pitied me.

  Now I watched my neighbor slowly push a sausage link to the lip of her plate. “Doesy doesn’t seem her usual, uh—” I began.

  “Sunny self?” Daintry finished.

  It felt good to gossip harmlessly, natural in a way that so many of our conversations weren’t. “Wonder why.”

  “Lent,” Daintry suggested wryly. “What are you giving up this year?”

  “I’m giving up giving things up. It’s hopeless. Last year I gave up chocolate and Hal begged me to go buy a Snickers after day three. Once in college, Hal gave up alcohol and I nearly died of boredom.”

  “Was that before or after I saw you in the library?”

  I had a flashing, punishing vision of my mother striking her deal with Daintry, but she’d turned her head back to the chaos. “What does”—it was easier now— “Peter give up?”

  She blinked slowly. “Instead of giving something up, Peter takes something on. A cause, usually.”

  I hated that it hurt. He wasn’t mine. I couldn’t know. I handed a string of purple beads to a towheaded child crawling around my feet. “And you?”

  “Sex. Ever heard that one?”

  A thousand times. Another punishing picture. China crashed somewhere.

  Daintry sighed. “I hate Lent. Relentless.”

  “Oh, I do, too!” Lent was a kind of darkness, forty days of gloom. The pall stayed with you even after church services, with their absence of alleluias and dirgelike hymns.

  “I hate it because it takes Peter away from me so much. So many extra services.” Daintry’s reasons felt like a rebuke. “Remember getting paid to pull weeds from between the terrace stones and then spending it all instead? Cheating on our mite boxes?”

  I watched Peter, hand on Ben’s shoulder, then realized Daintry was waiting for me to respond. “And cheating on giving up. Making all these exceptions to not drinking Cokes—it was okay on Sunday, it was okay if it was at someone else’s house. There were a thousand ways to. . . cheat. Small sins.”

  Daintry was watching Doesy Howard gather her things to leave. “Southern women dye their hair too blond,” she said, and idly scratched a gabardined calf with her other foot. “The reason Doesy’s unsunny is that she’s sulking. She got blackballed from the Historical Garden Club.” She cut her eyes at me. “La-di-da in Rural Ridge. You probably know that.” I knew nothing of the club, had never even heard the name. “Not to mention the fact,” Daintry continued, “that Frances Mason is the member who wielded the ax.”

  Frances excluding Doesy? “But I thought they were such good friends.”

  “Not good enough, apparently. Maybe someone was faking. And there’s always spite.”

  I watched Doesy, and what I saw didn’t look like sulking. It looked like sadness. Maybe Daintry couldn’t tell the difference. “Where did you hear that?”

  “Church grapevine, a very thick weed. I’m sure you don’t have anything like it in the columbarium.”

  I was saved from this oblique observation by a sixteen-year-old busboy who knocked over the basket of bills and change at the entrance. At the table nearest us, a toddler wept in his mother’s lap while the father ineffectually mopped up spilled milk with a shredded paper napkin. Daintry shook her head at the ruckus. “I could never have kids. They’re too. . . ”

  “Loud?” I suggested.

  Daintry paused. “Needy. Face it, doesn’t it all boil down to mud on the rugs and braces on the teeth and nightmares and piano lessons and wrecking the car and having to bail them out and shore them up?” I was taken aback by her quiet vehemence. She shook her head. “Never.”

  Peter extracted himself from the general fray to join us. “Should have had mimes,” Daintry said as we were showered with a handful of hard candy. “At least they’re silent.”

  “Daintry,” Peter said patiently.

  She elbowed me. “Look at Maude Burleigh.” The church secretary was sitting across from two boys calmly roasting their fork tines in a candle flame. “So far out of her comfort zone she’s in another galaxy. Old biddy. Reminds me of Mrs. Mormon.”

  Mrs. Mormon was our seventh-grade social studies teacher. “Young people,” she addressed the class. “Young people, turn to page ninety-four.” Despite her gracious facade, though, she’d kept a paddle labeled BOARD OF EDUCATION and didn’t hesitate to use it.

  “I don’t know, though,” Daintry mused. “Maude’s kind of sexy when she sweats.”

  I clamped a hand over my mouth to stifle my laughter. Not Peter. Peter clamped his own hand around his wife’s upper arm. “Daintry,” he said softly, asking her to rein herself in. I knew; I’d heard it on occasion from my own husband, who was mouthing, Let’s go, across the room.

  Daintry looked at Peter’s fingers, then directly into his eyes. “Don’t do that to me,” she said, equally softly.

  “Good night,” I said, and left them.

  “What’s better?” Ellen asked. I was teaching her to play gin since Asheville Academy had held its own Mardi Gras celebration that day and she had no homework. Her small fingers were tensed with the effort of holding ten splayed cards. “Should I discard a king I already have two of, or take a second three since it won’t count as much against me if I get ginned?”

  “Discard it,” I said, “and start saving the threes.”

  Hal unzipped his briefcase. “Keep the king,” he advised. “You already have two of them.”

  Ellen kept the king. “Can I get my ears pierced?”


  “When you’re older. You’re only in fourth grade.”

  “Wendy Howard got her ears pierced in third grade.”

  “If Wendy Howard jumped into the fire, would you?”

  “Huh?”

  My mother’s hypothetical question had the same negligible effect on Ellen as it once had on me. Except that if Daintry O’Connor had jumped in the fire, I would have willingly, instantly followed her into the flames. Go ahead. I dare you.

  “I want to be older. If I was older, I could be in fifth grade and not in the same grade as Jennifer Tomlinson.”

  I’d heard about Jennifer Tomlinson all year. I’d never met her, but I knew her well. One of those children—always girls—who instinctively have their fingers on the pulse of all things desirable: clothes, music, slang. The ringleader. What Jennifer Tomlinson said, went. “Ignore her. I knock with four.”

  “Knock! That’s not fair.” Ellen put down her cards and slumped in the chair. “She’s mean to me.”

  “How, mean?” Though I knew. Knew what girls require of one another and do to one another. I was well versed in the unshakable intimacies and unspeakable cruelties, the hourly hurts and daily revenges, the lunch-room manipulations and recess whispers.

  “She hates me because my father is a teacher and my uncle is the head. She leaves me out. She says my peanut-butter crackers are gross. She laughed at the skirt I wore for our skit.”

  Hal made no comment. Had we ever been mean, Daintry and I? Laughing at Margie Simmons with her chigger-bite legs and eat-up socks. Laughing at Timmy Blanton, who picked his nose. Laughing at Marsha Ellett in the spelling bee, who began “drastic,” “T, r, a. . . ” Hurt me, I thought, but don’t hurt my child.

  I gathered the cards. “Let me tell you something about girls. They’re awful.” Hal shot me a glance, but I ignored him, trying to explain in language Ellen could comprehend. “Awful to each other. Girls always want other girls to like them best, so they say mean things to make sure other girls don’t like you better. Some girls just need to know they’re the boss. They want other girls to follow after them. They’ll cuss, or shave their legs first, or they have a phone in their room. And here’s the worst part: You’re just beginning. It’ll be like this until your friends—and then only some of them—realize that it’s not worth competing.”