Even Now

by Susan S. Kelly

  I’d waited then, too, in the wings. Waited with milling parents and siblings and well-wishers to congratulate the players after the performance. Backstage was noisy and hot and chaotic, the actors animated and excited with success. I glimpsed her black head and tanned shoulders, but she didn’t acknowledge me. “See you at the cast party!” they called to one another, these strangers to me, and I left without having spoken to her.

  I’d been leaving for two years by then. Coming home for brief respites from school at Thanksgiving and Christmas, hectic, family-filled times when either Daintry or I was often out of town. My March spring vacations didn’t coincide with the Cullen schools, and I begged off church on Sundays with the excuse that I had twice daily chapel at Wyndham Hall.

  But I knew as I walked up that auditorium aisle away from Daintry that this time I was gone for good. There was nothing left for me in Cullen. Summer was ending, I was returning to Virginia a senior, and the soft night, the parking lot filled with dark moving silhouettes and erratic beams of headlights, were in themselves a kind of elegy.

  I sat on the hood of the car, the old station wagon I’d practiced a three-point turn in, using the O’Connor driveway as practice pavement just as Daintry had used our opposing one to practice hers. Sat until the last car had left the lot, scratchin’ out, gettin’ a wheel. Daintry and I could perfectly imitate the redneck accents of Cullen, twanging away with our ain’ts and cain’t hardlys and ever’whichaways. What you know good? We never thought twice about it.

  I got in the car and drove around. “Driving around,” the time-honored small-town means of adolescent socializing, one I’d never taken part in because I’d been away. And tried to picture what Daintry’s life had been without me. Hers had gone on as mine had gone on, parallel lines with few intersecting points.

  I drove to the Little League field, dark and flat and fenced, the refreshment stand a sagging shack. I drove to the golf course, site of my recent debacle and my date’s disgust. Drove to the town pool, bumping over the risen roots of the pines, and parked there. The Ping-Pong table was gone, naked sawhorses the only evidence of where it had once stood. Drove past St. Francis, where through the stained-glass windows whose dates I’d long ago memorized I could make out the dim red lamp burning in the sacristy as it did day and night. Drove past the elementary school with the oiled wood floors that my sixth-grade teacher had made Jimmy Lawson cover with “A preposition is always followed by an object.” In between the desks and our legs, he’d struggled to chalk the words.

  Drove past Ledbetter’s, where we bought Kits and Black Cows and ice-cream sandwiches with our lemonade money, and fart cushions that burst within hours after their purchase. Drove down Main Street past First Methodist and the Rexall, whose fountain with warmed oatmeal pies had been closed and whose shelves were no longer enticingly laden with Yardley and Love’s Baby Soft cosmetics. Drove past the library, where I’d checked out so many books that summer before Wyndham Hall, fearful that my unknown classmates would be smarter, ahead, more learned. Unfounded fears. Teenage girls are the same everywhere, though there is always someone smarter, someone who has more. It’s how you interpret yourself against the knowers and the havers.

  Drove past the showroom, where headless, limbless mannequins stood stiff in the bay windows, wearing the shirtwaist dresses Daintry or I had likely belted and buttoned. Taking it all in, all of Cullen, the geography of my childhood, what I’d been there.

  I found her near the factory, where we’d spent so many Saturdays with my father. The sign had always stood there, at a junction on the outskirts of Cullen. It was ugly, a brick-and-timbered eight-foot wall beaming WELCOME TO CULLEN to passing motorists. The thick plastic letters were surrounded by plaques and metal signs of civic organizations, no different from any small town anywhere proud of its citizens and anxious for more members to live among their supposedly contented company.

  When I pulled to a stop at the intersection I glanced toward the looming sign as though regarding it for the last time. In the wide conical beam of a spotlight poorly hidden among scrubby shrubs some well-meaning Jaycette member had planted at the base of the WELCOME sign, a figure was silhouetted, straddling the narrow slanted roof sheltering the sign. It was Daintry. Barefoot, red faced, disheveled. Alone.

  She didn’t notice as I threaded among the knee-high bushes, trampling a border of tired summer salvia. “Daintry,” I said, shielding my eyes from the thousand-watt glare.

  She lifted her head from the board and peered down. “Well now. Well now, look what the cat drug in.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Having a swell time,” she said thickly, tonelessly. “Almost as swell a time as I had at the cast party. Good stuff, PJ. Purple Jesus. Mixed in a trash can this high,” she said, and held her arm out as if to measure. Her body lurched forward. “Whoops,” she cackled, grabbing on to the roof again. “Wouldn’t want to lose my balance.” Her legs dangled, then jerked, and she vomited down the front of the sign. As she gagged and spat I stood transfixed and horrified. “Think I’ll just lose my cookies instead,” she said, and leaned dangerously forward again, looking. “Did I get them all? Did I?”

  “Get what?”

  “Lions!” she shouted. “Ruritans! Woodmen of the World!” she brayed, and with each name kicked one of the soldered metal plates. “Civitans, Jaycees, a smorgasbord of belonging! Home, sweet home, here’s where I belong, forever and ever, amen.” She sighed, hiccuped. “Gross,” she said, drawing fingers through her hair. “There’re puke chunks in my hair.”

  “Daintry, come down. You’re going to hurt yourself.”

  “Remember, Hannah?” she crooned. “Remember Woodmen of the World? I won them. Won them over. Yep. Woodmen of the World Citizenship Award. Top banana. Eighth grade.” She lifted herself momentarily from the slanted board and dramatically put her finger to her cheek. “Or was that the DAR? That was you, no, wasn’t it? DAR?”

  I thought of my paper, “The Battle of the Coral Sea.” “No, Daintry. You won that, too.”

  “Yeah. Yeah.”

  “Come down. Please.”

  “What are you doing here, Hannah? This is a private party.”

  “I came to see you in the play. You were great. Perfect.”

  “Perfect. Happy talk.” She began a singsong chant I recognized, one that had nothing to do with Rodgers and Hammerstein. “Behind the ’frigerator, there is a piece of glass, and every time you step on it, it goes right up your ass me no more questions, tell me no more lies, the boys are in the bathroom, pulling down their—”

  “How did you get here?”

  She frowned, slitted her eyes. “Friends. I got lots and lots of friends. This is my goddamn deadbeat home,” she said with slurred, sickening bitterness.

  “I’m your friend, Daintry. Please come down. I’ll help you get cleaned up.”

  She pulled herself to a sitting position. “Go away, Hannah. Go away.” Her voice was strident and accusing. “You . . .” Then, as if she had suddenly been drained of fury, she slumped against the slender roof again, pressed her cheek to the weathered board, and began to cry, bashing her heels against the disk of the Civitan logo, a hollow, mournful clang. “You can’t understand it,” she said. “Go away.”

  I stepped forward, grabbed her foot, and stretched my other hand toward her hip. But she’d gone limp again, limbs dangling. Her head lay against the wooden framework, her face turned from me to the dark fields behind the sign. I got back in the car and sat watching her inert body for long moments, debating what to do. Finally I drove away. Just as I always had, I did what she told me to do. I left her.

  “How was Daintry?” Mother asked the next morning.

  “She was good,” I lied. We’ve left each other. “Looked the part perfectly.”

  “Sunlamp,” Mother had said. “Ruins your skin.”

  I killed the headlights in our driveway. “Mom,” Mark said. Contriteness and fear quavered in his voice. “Dad—”

/>   “I’ll handle Dad,” I said. “But let me tell you, son.” I took his hand. “It’s not worth it.”

  Only inches from mine, his eyes—Hal’s eyes—were huge in the dark car. He didn’t ask, What? What’s not worth it?

  None of it, I would have said. The exclusion or the meanness. Not even the hangover. None of it, I could have told him. But as Daintry was, and I had been, he was still too young to understand.

  From Hannah’s quote book:

  But suppose, as some folks say, the sky should fall?

  —Terence

  Chapter 13

  When Mark was nine, a neighborhood chum shoplifted a pocket flashlight while his mother stood in the checkout lane at Kmart. The mother never found out, but the confessional urge and that old push-pull of thrill and terror compelled Mark to tell me, adding, “I’ll never do anything like that.”

  “I know,” I replied. What I should have said was, You’ll never know what you’ll never do until you’ve already done it.

  I’d always wondered how people did it. The mothers with the tennis teachers, the fathers with the aerobics instructors, workers with co-workers, students with professors, wives with husbands of friends. The next day phone call after a nighttime party. Over a lunch, at the office, during golf dates. The mechanics and logistics.

  An assignation is astonishingly simple to arrange. There are a hundred ways to do it. Hadn’t I myself heard how from my father on dozens of occasions? You can do anything if you put your mind to it. Until the unknowns—the mitigating and propelling factors—are all that remain. Is there any single catapulting component? No. There’s never one simple reason.

  It’s the trivial, the accidental, the correction veiled as comment. The dinner table conversation. “These don’t taste like regular baked potatoes,” Mark said.

  “Did you use baking potatoes?” Hal asked me.

  “I think they’re russets.”

  “No wonder they don’t taste right,” he said. “You didn’t use the right kind of potato.” That. “Why is it the Girl Scout cookies always arrive during Lent?” he groused good-naturedly. Five weeks earlier, on Ash Wednesday, Hal had come home from work still bearing the dark bruise of ashes on his brow from the morning service at St. Martin’s. As though he’d been not smudged, but bludgeoned with the fundamental agenda of Lent: repent. For five long weeks he’d eschewed desserts, substituting apples and cheese for sweets. Tonight, as the children and I ate thin mint cookies, a pathetic pile of raisins lay on Hal’s straw placemat. The dark pellets seemed to accuse my inability to deny myself. That.

  “You’ll make it,” I said. “Less than a week of Lent left. Lent comes from Middle English, lencten, meaning longer days.”

  “How do you know that?” Mark asked.

  “I know everything.” Not exactly; Peter had told me. “Teach me something,” I’d asked him. And he had.

  As I was tucking Ellen in, Hal stuck his head in the door and said, “Did Mommy say your prayers?”

  I looked him dead in the eye, remembered Peter’s hand and Daintry’s warning. There were still a few things Daintry and I had in common. “Don’t do that to me,” I said.

  Hal’s face was a blank, bland mask of innocence. “Do what?” That.

  “No, I didn’t say her prayers,” I said, and brushed by him. “I knew you could do it better.”

  There are mornings you rise immediately content, with a sense of well-being that gilds the day. Then there are the mornings you wake ambushed by malaise, a funk with no reason. The day progresses, and the front doorknob falls off in your hand and the car’s rearview mirror comes unglued. You open a window and notice how rotten and splintery the frames are. So many popcorn kernels have collected in the back of the sofa that if not for the layer of lint balls, they’d rattle. You know how it is. You eat cold leftover pizza for lunch and a milkshake midafternoon and some potato chips to counteract the sweetness and maybe a candy bar while you’re running errands, and even though dinner is planned you have to go out for french fries or nachos because once you start throwing your day away it’s a lost cause. That.

  Ceel understood. Only her head was visible from the woolly afghan she was wrapped in on the sofa. “I have a case of mild despair.”

  “Like how?”

  “Like it’s afternoon and I haven’t made up my bed yet. I can’t explain it,” she said with an audible sigh. But I knew. “Tell me something good,” she said.

  “Here’s what I learned this week: If your teenager calls past nine o’clock and asks to spend the night out, always say no. It means they’re drinking and don’t want to come home because you’ll know.”

  “Oh yeah,” Ceel said. “I can really use that advice.”

  The sarcasm was unlike her. Ceel knew about the wretched night at the rectory, Mark’s vomiting on Daintry’s doorstep. “I can’t shake the feeling that Daintry was enjoying my humiliation. Whenever I’m around her I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop.”

  “Maybe it’s already dropped.”

  I looked at her, wrapped to her chin, circles beneath her eyes, and tried again. “Worrying about Mark takes up most of my time.”

  “Is that what’s taking your time?” Unsure where my sister’s questions were leading, I said nothing. But she only pulled her face from the swaddle of striped wool and cocked her head inquiringly. “How’s the columbarium?”

  “The bulbs are beginning to come up. Doesy brought me all of her dead forced flowers to replant.”

  “It won’t work.”

  “I know.”

  “They’ve shot their wad. Like me.” She reached for a mug of tea, and though I waited for an explanation she said, “I stopped by to get the altar vases last week. Maude Burleigh mentioned that you were in Peter Whicker’s office. I didn’t interrupt you. The door was closed.”

  I made my voice steady. “What were you doing with the vases?”

  “I do flowers for the altar when no one else volunteers. In Daddy’s memory.” She paused. “What were you doing with Peter?”

  “I don’t remember. Discussing plans for the project. Nothing.”

  “Doing nothing or just haven’t done it yet?”

  Both. Neither. “What’s going on here, Ceel? What’s happened?”

  She barked a bitter laugh. “Nothing. Absolutely nothing. I thought you’d never notice. SOS. Same old shit. Been there, done that. Quick, give me another cliché.” She snapped her fingers, tossed her head. “I’ll tell you what’s happened. They turned us down. She turned us down. We were next in line and she didn’t want us.”

  “Who didn’t want you?”

  “The mother. She was eighteen. Ancient.”

  “Why?”

  “A very simple reasonless reason. Because she herself was an only child, so she wanted her baby to go to a couple who already had a child. Wait, I have another good one: The rich get richer.”

  “Oh, Ceel. Ceel, I’m sorry. I know how disappointed you must be.”

  “Know?” She glared. “Disappointed?”

  “But there are other mothers. What about another try with the infertility specialists? Surely there’s something, some treatment you haven’t—”

  “Stop right there.” She cut me off. “Do you have any idea what I’ve been through? The time, the pain, the years of fucking on schedule?” She tossed her head with disgust. “Do you even know the names of the drugs or the procedures? Spell hysterosalpingerigram, go ahead. Or laparoscopy. Seven hours of Fallopian tube surgery. For something that might, only might succeed?” Her voice was gravelly with both rage and anguish. “How would you like to hear some, some stranger suggest in presurgery counseling that possibly you’ve never reconciled your infertility?”

  Instantly I was beside her, kneeling on the rug. “You’re right. I can never know. Forgive me.”

  “No. But you know enough to tell Peter Whicker all about it, right? Because that’s what you were doing behind closed doors, right? Isn’t it? Weren’t you? Telling him my pro
blems? What’s the trendy word—sharing confidences with him?”

  “I . . .” Relief and guilt fused. Her accusations were true, untrue. “I have, yes. But not like you think, Ceel. I didn’t go to him with that, not purposely, it just. . . came out when we were talking. About Daintry, and her, their, choice not to. . . ”

  “Tell me more,” Ceel said evenly. “Did the two of you arrange a circle prayer for me? Announce it in the Sunday bulletin?”

  “Listen, Peter could be a real ally for you and Ben.”

  “Oh, I see. A go-between with God?”

  “Stop, Ceel. You can shriek as loudly as you want, and I’m not going to sit here and talk about some pay-back God. It’s because he’s going on the board of the state adoption agency.”

  “God?”

  “Shut up. Peter.”

  “How do you know?”

  “He told me. It isn’t public yet because his term doesn’t begin until next fall.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Why would he tell you?”

  “Because . . .” I floundered. “Because we’re friends. Peter knows about Jack O’Connor’s history, finding homes for babies all those years, thinks it was a good, decent thing to do, a kind of Christian mission no matter what the rest of Cullen thought, and. . . if Peter can influence an adoption decision on your behalf, wouldn’t you want him to? He’d do that for you, for me. He knows how close Daintry and I . . . were, and—” I meant to say it comically, but humor failed me: “I ought to get something out of all those years of . . .” I heard my mother: You were in thrall to that child.