Even Now

by Susan S. Kelly

  “Hannah,” Hal said warningly.

  “Just be yourself,” I continued on obstinately, the easiest advice to dispense, the hardest to follow. “If you’re just normal and nice, people realize it eventually and come back to you.” How could I convey to my daughter the awful dependencies of childhood, once essential, eventually despised?

  But I might as well have been spouting Marxism. “We have to do an interview with someone for a language arts project,” she said. “I want to interview Daintry. Can I call her now?”

  “No. It’s late. Run and get your pajamas on.” When she’d left the room I said, “I don’t like the sound of that Jennifer Tomlinson business.”

  Hal shrugged. “You know what teachers say: If you believe half of what you hear about school, we’ll believe half of what we hear about home.”

  It was small comfort. “Why is it that childless people are magnets for children? Seems to me Ellen could find somebody more worthwhile to interview.” Was Ellen in the throes of an innocent crush, or was Daintry deliberately wooing her? I wasn’t resentful that Ellen was smitten; I was afraid for her.

  Hal laughed. “I’m sure your friend Daintry would love to hear herself described as not worthwhile.”

  Ellen had her face to the wall when I went to give her a kiss. “Hey, pal,” I said. “Don’t pull a pout on me here. Give me a you fix.”

  Ellen grudgingly turned over but crossed her arms tightly on her chest, denying me. “Tell me a story.”

  “I thought you were too old for stories.”

  “I mean out of your mouth.”

  “Stories out of my mouth” were “When I was a little girl . . .” tales. “When I was a little girl,” I began, “I used to build Barbie houses on Saturdays out of cardboard boxes from the grocery store. I glued leftover pieces of rugs and wallpaper in the boxes to make real rooms. And we stacked them up to make three-story houses, made little stairs out of the stiff cardboard that came in my father’s shirts. Folding them the way you make fans, you know?”

  Ellen nodded.

  “And we knitted blankets for Barbie and Ken’s bed. And Skipper. The blankets were thicker than the dolls, though, with threads hanging off that we were afraid to cut because they might unravel.”

  “Who’s ‘we’?”

  We. Of course “we.” “My friend and I.”

  “Daintry?”

  I nodded. When had our connection begun to fray and unravel? Who pulled that first thread? You left me.

  “What else did you do?”

  “One Saturday we made brownies.”

  “In Mommy J’s kitchen?”

  “No, hers.” It was always hers. “And her big brother wanted to eat them before we’d even cut them out of the pan. So we were trying to keep him out—pushing our shoulders against the swinging door, and he kept banging and pushing and we were laughing so hard that she peed right down my leg.”

  “Gross!” Ellen laughed.

  “Right into my sock.” I pulled the sheet over her shoulder. “That’s enough stories out of my mouth for tonight.”

  “What’s pussy?”

  My own smile faded, though I was glad for her courage to ask. “Why?”

  “Jennifer Tomlinson told Grace Albright that I was a pussy.”

  Oh, I hated it. Hated Jennifer Tomlinson and Grace Albright and Ellen’s innocence and the inevitable destruction of it. Hated what lay in wait for her. “It’s not a nice word.”

  “But what does it mean?”

  “It’s a bad, ugly word for girls’ private parts. For vagina.”

  “Who made it up?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, and tickled her soft, warm armpits. “Probably some bad, ugly boy.” She giggled, and I thought of Daintry and myself at Ellen’s age, snickering over an assigned report on Phineas T. Barnum, how wicked we thought we were to notice the similarity of the huckster’s name to penis. So harmlessly wicked and wise, giggling at the word “pupa” in our science texts, so close to pubic. And not so harmlessly wicked to each other, competing privately and ruthlessly to achieve the next level in the SRA reading program, on from red to blue to aqua, scarcely knowing what we read as long as we beat the other, could report during recess that we’d gotten to the brown level. And gotten there first.

  “I wish it would snow,” Ellen said.

  I leaned to kiss her, glad for the short shelf life of ten-year-old anxiety. “See you in the morning,” I said as the phone rang downstairs.

  “That was Daintry O’Connor,” Hal said. “Mark’s at the rectory and needs a ride home.”

  “That’s strange. Wendy was going to bring him home after they finished cleaning up. I’ll go.”

  I’d never been inside the rectory, though I’d thought about it often enough, picturing Peter there. The two-story clapboard looked appealing in the February darkness, the rectangles of lit windows vaguely reminiscent of something. I walked up the steps and knocked on the door. It opened immediately, to Peter.

  “Hannah,” he said, and though his eyes were kind and concerned, a look I couldn’t interpret crossed his face. “Come in.”

  I stepped over the threshold into their house, Daintry’s home. Perhaps I expected an organ, beloved and disdained, in the foyer. But there was only a killim rug and a table with the usual droppings: keys, letters, gold clip earrings in the shape of knots. I was instantly, acutely uncomfortable. I didn’t belong here, and he didn’t belong to me. “Peter, I . . .” In the mirror over the table I saw Daintry approaching. “I came to pick up Mark. I’m sorry he barged in on you like this. He could have called us from the parish hall.”

  “Mark’s fine,” Daintry said.

  Fine? “Is something wrong?” I asked Peter. “Where is he?”

  Daintry answered with a soft, mirthless laugh. “Upstairs taking a shower.” I heard the sushing noise of falling water somewhere and thought of Daintry’s clear shower, that remark made months ago. “He’s been in there awhile.”

  Whatever she was suggesting, I ignored it. “He could have waited until he got home to take a shower. What did they do, have a food fight?”

  “No, no,” Peter said. “Mark left early, before we were finished. He said he was getting a ride home.”

  “Yes, with Wendy Howard.”

  “No, he. . . ”

  I’d never seen Peter so uncertain. “Where did he go?”

  “The cemetery, I think.”

  “The cemetery? Peter—”

  Daintry interrupted. “Mark needed a shower. He got sick all over himself because he’s drunk.”

  “He was drunk,” Peter corrected, as though trying to soften the blow to me.

  “Vomiting sobered him up, I expect,” Daintry said briskly. “Usually does.”

  Save me, I thought wildly to Peter as nausea glutted my throat. Touch me. But I couldn’t so much as glance at him because Daintry’s eyes held mine. “He knocked on the back door and Peter was still at the church, so I’ve been”—she chuckled again—“ministering to him.” She fingered the diamond stud in her ear. “He’s clean and he’s sober. But he’s going to feel like shit tomorrow morning.”

  I hated her.

  “Daintry?” Mark’s voice. She’d told him to call her Daintry, too, then.

  “Mark? It’s Mom.”

  The responding silence was thick, fraught, and though I couldn’t see him, I could picture the workings of his brain. The concocted and fumbled defenses, the urge to flee, the dread and longing and the wishing it was days from now. He didn’t answer me, directing his question to Daintry instead. But I heard the tremor. “Did you say you had some clothes I could wear?”

  I moved toward the stairs, but Daintry’s hand closed on my arm, reminding me of who she was and where I was. “Let Peter.” He strode past me, my elbow bumping his chest as he mounted the stairs.

  “He’ll be a minute getting dressed,” Daintry said. “Come sit down.”

  Sweating with shame and fury and discomfort, I followed her into the den. S
he motioned to the sofa, and I promptly sank deep into its down plushness while Dain- try herself took a wing chair, firmer and higher ground. “Did you know Mark had been drinking?”

  Oh, that tone. When Mark was two, we found him in the bathroom surrounded by a papery cloud of unrolled toilet tissue and clutching a crumpled tube of Neosporin. Afraid he might have eaten the antibiotic like toothpaste, I’d called poison control and asked what symptoms to watch for. They questioned me closely about every detail of the incident and for several days afterward had called back asking, asking, checking up on me. I was angered by their suspicions, by what seemed an indictment of my parenting. Daintry’s question, its superior tone of the concerned social worker who clearly faulted the mother, sparked the same anger now. I wanted to defend Mark even as I wanted to kill him. You know how teenagers are, I might say. Or Yes, we suspected. Or No, not my child. I had no idea. Or He’s been under pressure. And they all seemed lame, if true. Too similar to Doesy Howard’s denials. “We wondered,” I murmured. “Hal will be furious.”

  “Aren’t you?”

  There it was again, both censure and scolding. Didn’t you know Ellen was supposed to bring two liters of soda for the class party? Didn’t you know Mark was running a fever when he came to school today? Didn’t you know the birthday party was over at six? “Of course I am. I can’t believe he’s done this. And involved you and Peter.”

  “I hardly call it involved,” Daintry responded dryly, then changed tack, to nonchalance. “Little Mardi Gras gaiety, that’s all. He’s a good kid, bless his heart.”

  I knew the low-blow cut of “bless his heart,” disparagement disguised as sympathy. My son wasn’t hers to compliment or punish. “Thank God nothing worse happened. Thank God he wasn’t in a car.”

  “God looks after children and drunks. It’s a rite of passage. Haven’t you ever been drunk in your life?” She laughed. “You know you have. I know you have. To this day I can’t hear the word ‘Woodstock’ without thinking of you.”

  Before our senior high school year, at the end of that mind-numbing summer of belting and buttoning, Daintry got me a date. I was unenthused, but she was insistent. John Waring, whom she was dating casually, had a friend named Sam Troxler. “I’ve told him all about you,” Daintry said on our break as we swung our legs from the loading dock outside the showroom. She knuckled my arm. “You need to get out more. It’ll be fun. Don’t you want to see Woodstock?”

  A year after its initial release, Woodstock was finally playing in nearby, more cosmopolitan Shelby. I was curious not only about the movie, but about Daintry, what she could possibly be doing with John Waring since her name was linked with Mike Simpson’s, in whispers, at least. I agreed to go.

  That night she paid me back for my sixteenth birthday. I sat in the backseat of John’s car with Sam, excluded from every nuance of the conversation, every private joke and piece of gossip and question about the upcoming year. I didn’t know the teachers they discussed, or the couples, or the athletic stats. John and Sam snuck a fifth of rum past the sleepy-eyed ticket seller, and we gulped it down with Coke and popcorn. The film was long, and the return ride to Cullen was another thirty minutes. The rum lasted; I didn’t.

  By the time John parked near the fourteenth hole of the Cullen golf course, I was smashed, reeling onto the green just yards from a giant oak where Daintry and I once peddled lemonade from a rickety table to golfers on weekends. Where we picked at errant golf balls, certain we were the only people in the world who’d discovered the marvelous sphere of rubber bands beneath the dimpled skin. I was drunk because I was drinking, and I was drinking to escape from the unfamiliar; from what I’d grown beyond or left behind or wasn’t grownup yet enough to confront. All the things Daintry already was.

  “She’s shitfaced,” Sam said, pulling me onto the green. I remember how good the soft itch of the cropped grass felt against my arms in my sleeveless shirt. Remember the good feel of Sam’s fingers on my breasts when he unbuttoned that shirt and pulled up my bra around my neck like a scarf. Daintry and John had stayed in the parked car, and now and then I would hear Daintry’s low laughter, and once, the horn honked, a comical blare in the night, followed by John’s sharp swearing. I don’t remember whether there were stars or a moon, but I remember how the earth spun when I closed my eyes.

  “Shut your eyes,” Sam grumbled more than once. I wanted to, wanted not to see his face, but it spun so, the world and the sky and the golf course and Sam’s head at my neck. I remember how the vomit bubbled up from my mouth into his, thick with popcorn bits and burning with rum. Sam had jumped up and back, hollering. I remember his disgust. “She puked on me!”

  “Get it in the hole! Par three!” John laughed from the car. Dizzy, stinking, drooling, disgraced, I waited, trying to button my shirt and wipe my mouth with it at the same time. Waited for Daintry to come.

  But she didn’t. It was Sam who pulled me up like a rag doll and stumbled me toward the car.

  “Watch the upholstery,” John directed Sam as he shoved me into the backseat.

  “Next time,” Sam directed Daintry, “find me somebody who can hold their liquor. Somebody from Cullen.”

  I was still waiting, in the murk of my misery, for Daintry’s rescue. She is from Cullen, I waited for her to say. Lay off my friend, I waited for her to say. Something. Anything. But she merely stared out the dashboard window, silent on the subject of me. She rubbed her face. “How about a closer shave next time, John? My chin’s chapped.”

  Like milk or laundry, I was deposited curbside. My parents were safely away for the evening, visiting a couple who summered in Tryon. Ceel took me in, my bad-girl sister, washed me and consoled me and tucked me into bed. “How was the movie?” Mother asked the next morning.

  “Fine,” I said. I was fine, too, but for a queasy stomach and a hickey above my nipple no one would ever see.

  “And. . . what was his name—Sam—how was he?” “Fine.”

  “Did you want to get new tennis shoes before school?”

  All I wanted was to be gone, away, confined at Wyndham where I was safe, protected.

  “You’ve hardly seen anything of Daintry,” Mother had remarked once during the two weeks remaining before school began. I had, but only from the hall window upstairs, where I watched Daintry bake herself in the backyard those final days of August in her attempt to look like a South Pacific native.

  “I have summer reading,” I’d told Mother, and held up Cry, The Beloved Country. “Daintry has play practice.”

  “Oh yes, I forgot. Who is she again?”

  “Liat.”

  Now Daintry clasped her hands round her knee, an avuncular, advising posture. “Don’t be too hard on Mark. Nobody was hard on you, were they?”

  I sat forward on the squashed cushions. “I didn’t want to go on that date. You made me.”

  “Why didn’t you want to go?”

  “I wasn’t interested in Sam Troxler. I didn’t even know Sam Troxler.”

  “Was there anybody in Cullen you were interested in?” It was challenge, pure and simple. There was something dangerous simmering between us.

  “You. I went to be your cover.”

  Her hands dropped.

  Peter came down the stairs followed by Mark, dressed in clothes obviously not his and clutching a grocery bag of his soiled clothing. In his expression and thin, gangly posture—loose and shambling as a marionette—I recognized conflicting emotions of guilt, gratitude, self-pity, fear, defiance. A plea to be loved, forgiven. I knew an equal play of emotions was visible in my own face and didn’t want Daintry to catalog them.

  “Mark,” I said evenly, “let’s go home.” Whatever scene was to follow, whatever explanation there was to hear, belonged only between the two of us. “Thank you,” I pointedly told Peter, and only Peter. You left me, I told Daintry silently. Again.

  Mark was quiet on the drive home, his face turned to the window. Waiting, no doubt, for the boom to lower, the yelling to begin.
“Mark,” I said. He drew a finger down the shallow channel separating nose from lip where fuzz was sprouting. What breaks your heart most? When they ask for deodorant, for boxers, for a razor. They’re gone then. You’ve lost them. “Tell me what happened.”

  “She told you what happened.”

  Not the right approach. “Why were you drinking?” Silence. “You wanted to be drunk.” Silence. “Why did you, Mark?”

  “They left.”

  “Left the cleanup?”

  He nodded.

  “Who?”

  “The other people.”

  “Did you know them?” Another abbreviated nod. “Did they give you the liquor? Is that how you got it?”

  “Mom.” Specifics and logistics were too embarrassing to relate. I understood. You can do anything, get anything, if you put your mind to it. Seconds ticked by at Rural Ridge’s single stoplight. The streets were empty.

  “Wendy,” he finally said, and began punching the door lock back and forth, back and forth, taking some comfort in the obedient responsive clunk, an action he could control. “She said I couldn’t come with them. She left me. She told them what to do and they left me. They’re my friends,” he said. Muh frenz, I heard. “It’s muh stuff,” he’d said that afternoon of packing months ago. Playfully then, wounded now. It wasn’t Mardi Gras gaiety. It was exclusion.

  “Did you do something that made them—her—act like that?”

  “No,” he said miserably. “I don’t know.” I waited for more, but he turned back to the window, his expression a blurred burgundy in the stoplight’s glow.

  “Mark. You haven’t—you’re not—”

  “You can’t understand it,” he said finally, and the light turned green.

  Oh, but I could. Did, had. For there was another part of the drunk equation.

  The production of South Pacific marked the first time I’d been back to the Cullen High auditorium since Up with People. Daintry had been in school for two weeks, but Wyndham didn’t begin until mid-September. As Liat, Daintry was deeply tanned, her long black hair set off stunningly by bronzed skin and a scarlet sarong. I don’t recall who played Lieutenant Cable; by then I knew scarcely a soul at Cullen High, had lost touch. Notwithstanding the rumors about Daintry and Mike Simpson, her performance was lovely. I and everyone in the audience were rapt with her “Happy Talk” grace, the mute misunderstanding and pain she radiated as the bewildered native girl who couldn’t comprehend why she was being left.