Even Now

by Susan S. Kelly

  He’d remembered. I’d known he would. I slid down the slick chintz of the bedspread to the floor, knees to chin, cradling the phone. “Remember me telling you at Ceel’s, and later in the columbarium, about wanting something new all the while you’re fighting for the old? Or trying to tell you.”

  Wanting to be outside and beyond Cullen, yet wanting the security of returning. The good girl longing for the outlaw boy. And wasn’t part of Daintry O’Connor’s appeal—her house and her family and Daintry herself— the fact that I could always leave her, walk across the street to home?

  “The paradox,” Peter said. “The old conundrum.”

  “Is it? Or is it just wanting your cake and eating it, too. It’s wrong.”

  “No,” he said. “People grow when they’re pulled between poles. Children want to be gone, then want to be home. So do couples, friendships. Even religion. People need to belong to something or someone, then they resent it. Finding a balance is hard. It isn’t wrong to look for it.”

  He couldn’t see me, but I smiled. Smiled at that sweet, insistent sincerity. The essential reverence beneath it all.

  “Hannah, we—” His voice grew distant. “What is it, Maude?”

  “Take care,” I whispered, and hung up.

  Instead of Sunday school I went to the columbarium, a sodden mess after the snowstorm and winter weeks of absence. The soil, so carefully prepared, had sunk. Puddles dotted the plot, the water staining my shoes. Moss had taken root in one quadrant, seeded perhaps from droppings the afternoon Peter had helped me gather it. A few lonely daffodils were blooming, February golds meant to withstand the cold. But they couldn’t withstand the snow, whose weight had cowed them, matting the buttery heads to the dirt.

  Mindless of my dress and stockings, I knelt to examine every inch of a plot that had looked desolate and barren from a distance. Still, I found millimetered darts that would become Virginia bluebells, thin burgundy stalks that were the beginnings of peonies. Though frost-heaved, the campanula had lived, enduring the winter, and the ridged leaves of primroses safely hugged the earth. I’d done my autumn raking well; no crackle of leaves announced her approach.

  “Hello, Hannah.”

  I looked at her across the columbarium, a chasm between us. “Daintry.”

  “You were expecting . . .” She paused as if I might volunteer an answer. “I know, the Easter bunny.”

  There’s a formula for Easter’s date, Peter explained to me, established two thousand years ago. That formula hasn’t stuck with me, either. Memory is selective, and my memory selected Daintry. “Remember sitting on the doghouse that Easter, eating dyed eggs until we hiccuped?” Brittle pastel bits of eggshells had drifted down our legs like confetti as we straddled the metal S&H Green Stamps sign bent to form a roof.

  “I’ll tell you what I remember about Easter,” Daintry answered. “The O’Connor kids always had to borrow flowers from your yard for the cross at church, because we didn’t have any flowers in our yard.”

  She strolled around the columbarium’s perimeter, more careful with her shoes than I’d been with mine. “I came to see what the great attraction—or inspiration— is. Doesn’t look like much.”

  “No, not yet.”

  She toed the flimsy foliage of a jonquil. “These the bulbs you bought at the pumpkin place? Looks like the snow ruined them.”

  My knees were wet. “They’ll come back. That’s the thing about bulbs.”

  “I heard your mother planted tulips for your wedding. A hundred tulips. Did they come back?”

  They hadn’t. “You didn’t come,” I said. “Every minute of my wedding I kept thinking I’d look up and you’d be there.”

  Daintry picked up a sweetgum ball, slowly touched each prickle as though she were counting the barbs. “My mother planted daffodils in Nashville when I got married. Daffodils are cheaper than tulips, aren’t they.” She tossed the pod away, shoved her hands in her coat pockets, and exhaled noisily. “He’s good, isn’t he, my husband?” She rested her foot on the stump where I ate lunches all fall, sharing them with her husband. “And fatally charming, as well.” Daintry had inspired any number of emotions in me throughout the years. But never this. Never naked fear. “Yes . . .” She sighed noisily. “A good preacher. Jean would hate that word, wouldn’t she, your mother? So. . . déclassé: ‘preacher.‘”

  My mother. Who’d manipulated Daintry’s dominance by acknowledging my dependence. Something I’d always known, after all.

  “Peter’s never bad. He’s just. . . flawed. And what’s more attractive than a flawed priest?” She moved closer, towering above me; I smelled her perfume. “He means so well. It’s hard not to love someone who means so well. Isn’t it.”

  I willed a neutral expression to my face. Never have I been quick on my feet, never able to fling the cunning, impaling phrase. I lack killer instincts, a capacity for conflict Daintry had learned somewhere.

  “Churches are sexy places. Having women throw themselves at you is an occupational hazard.” She raised her chin. “You’d be surprised what female parishioners believe falls under the term ‘pastoral care.‘”

  I pressed my fingers into the cold earth. Though perhaps Daintry had rehearsed this revenge, envisioning an elegant rationality in her every utterance. “It usually happens in counseling sessions, not”—she dismissed the area with an airy wave—“cemeteries.”

  I sought truisms: Rise above it. Kill her with kindness. All the tattered, fraudulent advice.

  “Good thing the Episcopal faith is such a forgiving religion.” Daintry raised a foot and frowned at the grime that rimmed it. “Fortunately, there are bonds other than sex. Peter and I need each other. Something beyond, you know”—her gaze was steady—“lust.”

  I stood then, still silent and unprotected and defenseless as the spikes of new foliage at my feet. “Daintry, nothing—”

  “Don’t tell me nothing happened. I know what happened. You crossed a line, but not the line.” I gasped, but she took no notice. “Just like I did with Mike Simpson. Poor Mike. I look back now and realize he was just another way I was trying to get out. Away from Cullen.” She knocked her knuckles against the bench. “Are we even now?”

  “Even?”

  “Tit for tat. Clean slate. Even steven.”

  Within my coat I shrank from the seasonal chill and Daintry’s hostility. “Were we competing?”

  “Oh, I think we were. Don’t be daft. Remember that? The year we decided to talk like books. ‘Ever so much,’ and ‘awfully decent of you.’ Ever so much,” she said again, softly. “It was ever so much fun.”

  I remembered. Seventh grade.

  “Except there’s no such thing as equal,” she went on. “Not even in pairs of eyes or thumbs. One heel is more worn, one arm or leg is stronger than the other. There’s nothing equal in marriage or in families, either, and there was nothing equal between us. Our mothers understood that. After you left for Wyndham and I moped around, know what my mother said? ‘Leave Hannah alone,’ she said. ‘She’s gone to find her own.’ ‘Her own.’ Talk about your tough lessons.”

  “That’s not true. My mother was trying to get me away from you. It didn’t work. I loved you too much.”

  “Oh, I think it worked fine.”

  It hurt to say it. “But I was always weaker. You knew it and you used it.”

  “Until you went away. Until you left me.”

  She craned her neck, pulled a sleek length of hair caught in her coat collar. I watched her, intimately acquainted with that habitual action. A hundred times, a thousand, I’d observed the identical gesture, as this ally, mentor, savior, and competitor had freed her hair from a sailor middy blouse, a T-shirt, a poor-boy jersey. Even a paper dress with a newsprint cat face.

  “Did you like the recessional ‘Jerusalem’?” she went on. “I picked it for you, suggested it to Peter. I remember how much you liked it. A big boarding school favorite, right? While I stayed home at good old Cullen High with the rest of th
e”—she laughed—“Trojans. An unfortunate mascot choice. The marching rubbers.” She leaned forward, tweaked a fragile stem. “I know a few things about gardening. Isn’t it time to put in pansies?”

  What could I do but answer? I told the truth. “Fall’s better. So they can harden off over the winter.”

  “Harden off, yes. Like people, who get stronger while no one’s noticing. Like you did. That first Thanksgiving you came home with a shoeboxful of grosgrain ribbons. Pretty striped things,” she said in the low tone of reverie. “You got a corduroy backrest for Christmas that year. A ‘husband,’ you called it. Your new friends called it.”

  “I wasn’t trying to be different. You began hardening off, too.”

  “I know it. That’s the whole goddamn tragedy of it.” She sat on the bench. “We were blindsided, Hannah. Blindsided for the simple reason that we were young. What happened was that we got old enough to realize it was never going to go any further. Any further than sidewalks and bunk beds and matching garter belts and sex ed and roller-skating together on Sunday afternoons. We realized that the world was bigger and the avenues were wider.”

  “I never thought that, never.”

  Her expression was pitying. “Of course you didn’t. I had everything you wanted up to then, didn’t I? Tell me.”

  A pair of robins scuffled several yards away, fiercely yet soundlessly fighting, and I thought of how they fly into windows, breaking their necks out of jealousy for their own reflection. “Yes,” I murmured. Brothers and sisters and house and mother and possessions. Everything.

  Daintry’s lips were a narrow slash. “Like always, I saw it coming before you did. The scales began to balance and we began to equal. You no longer wanted what I had, and I began wanting what you had. Everything you’d done to me our entire childhood—the needing, the imitating, the listening—I suddenly found myself doing to you. I needed you. I wanted to copy you. I wanted to know the things you knew. But the stakes were higher. It was more desperate and dangerous then.”

  “But you deliberately hurt me. I never consciously hurt you.”

  “No, you’re not capable of it.” She made it sound like a deficiency. “So, yes,” she said. “I started punishing you then.” She gripped the bench armrest. “I’ll tell you what else I know about gardening. It takes a long time for a plant to die, doesn’t it, really die? Even if I stomped on it, the roots would live, wouldn’t they?”

  “Daintry, what—”

  “Don’t you see, Hannah,” she said in a voice gone from badgering to insistent to querulous, “I needed to hate you. It was the only way I could let you go.” She painfully mimicked my question posed months earlier. “ ’What happened to us, Daintry?’ But just like with flowers and with affairs and with dying, it happens by degree. When a plane crashes it’s never only an engine malfunction, only an electrical failure, only a broken propeller or inclement weather or pilot error. It has to be all of these. It’s never one thing. No single, pivotal event.” Her voice was raw with sarcasm. “No, and friendships don’t die for one reason.”

  There was nothing in the wreckage of our relationship left to hide or salvage. “Why didn’t you tell me what my mother did for you?” I said. “The sorority. . . deal.”

  “What, and have you gloat?”

  “Gloat? Do you know how hearing that hurt me?”

  “Hurt you? Do you know what it’s like to take something and despise yourself for taking it? Hannah, I wanted it. I wanted what you had. And I left because I couldn’t afford to stay in the sorority.”

  “I didn’t know Mother had. . . done that.”

  “I suspected as much on Christmas Eve. Jean was as nervous as a”—Daintry laughed—“as a whore in church.” She examined a fingernail. “I like the way you put it: ‘deal.’ Believe it or not, I admired your mother. The arrangement had a certain . . . tooth-and-nail quality.”

  I believed it. “Would you have gone tooth and nail for me without an ‘arrangement’?”

  Daintry’s expression served as answer, contempt naked in the slant of her eyes. She squared her shoulders, stretching as though she were vastly weary. “My God, but you and Peter are alike. I told Peter all about your quotes.” My stomach contracted. “Idealists, both of you. That’s what you have in common. His idealism gets him in trouble. Does yours?” She swiveled her plain wedding band. “It’s why we’re leaving Rural Ridge early.”

  “Because of—”

  “Don’t imagine you have anything to do with it, mind you.” Mind you, Kathleen O’Connor’s old Irish expression. “I wouldn’t want you to enjoy any kind of martyrdom. A blue-haired parishioner doesn’t approve of all the changes Peter’s made at St. Martin’s. So she withheld her usually generous pledge. It’s the time-honored way of protesting a ministry. Peter went to her and suggested that she find another parish if she couldn’t support this one.”

  Daintry shook her head. “So biddy blue-hair and Ultrasuede contacted the bishop. The good bishop doesn’t mind so much about the changes; change has become the battle cry of the Episcopal Church. Oh yes, I know all about how it pains you—Peter told me that, too. But the bishop minded like hell about Peter’s un-Christ-like suggestion. Didn’t I tell you it was all about money?

  “So we’re leaving. Fortunately I can take my career on the road. This time I get to leave you. But there’s a benefit to moving you taught me your first Thanksgiving home from Wyndham. With moving, you get to reinvent yourself.”

  Reeling with a dizzying suspension of time and a pain I couldn’t place, I began walking through the woods. Away from the soggy columbarium and into the weak sunlight toward the cemetery. Away from a past I couldn’t change and a present I couldn’t escape.

  Though Daintry followed step for step, I kept going. Through the graveyard, across flat and buckling graves, old acquaintances of mine. I touched an obelisk here, a listing, squared monument there. I knew where I was going.

  But as I neared, something looked . . . not right. Something had changed since I’d last visited the rocking horse rider. And reaching it, I discovered what.

  The chubby angel’s body was headless, severed at the neck. Vandals, perhaps, though I hoped some invisible crack in the concrete had finally succumbed to the elements, unable to withstand the freezing force of the snowstorm, the dramatically plunging temperatures. Despite the age of the grave the break itself was jagged, raw, rough, the pale gray color of new cement. The head, its curls and cheeks and parted lips intact, lay on the ground. The lovely perfection of the marker had been forever altered, its sweet innocence irretrievably ruined. I knelt beside it, my eyes welling as they had two seasons earlier, with Peter.

  “Take it. Go ahead and take it,” Daintry said. “Can’t be fixed.” As though we were childhood partners in some harmless conspiracy again, she continued, “Looks like there wouldn’t be any living relatives anyway.” I picked up the cherub head, surprised by its heft and weight.

  “You always were a saver,” Daintry said. “You had an ad tacked to your bulletin board, a photograph of a snowy little farmhouse. Remember?”

  I did remember the picture, the squares of warm window light winking onto a violet-tinted farmyard iced with snow, the promise of comfort within the cottage. That photograph was what the lit rectory had reminded me of the night I’d come for Mark.

  “I wanted to use it on a collage,” she said. “When we glued all those headlines from Seventeen, pictures of the baby oil hunks to cardboard, and hung them on our walls.” Daintry tapped her chin. “What did that damn ad say. . . something. . . ”

  “’When you think that nothing can go wrong, that is called security,‘” I answered softly.

  “That’s right. Couldn’t remember the line, but I remember it was a stock market ad. Some symmetry there, huh?” She cocked her head. “What I do remember is that you weren’t allowed to hang your collages on your walls, couldn’t mar the paint. So you had to come to my house, where things were always a little slacker. Where rules were b
roken.”

  “There’s something I want to know.”

  “Be my guest.”

  “The afternoon at the pool when you sent me down, twelve feet down, to get the money, or locket, or button. You already knew the silver circle was just a patch of paint. You’d already checked, hadn’t you?”

  “I don’t remember that afternoon.”

  I had my answer. “I apologize, Daintry. No, it’s more than that. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry. I know nothing happened between you and Peter. You don’t have it in you. You’re too pure, goody-goody to the end. But I can hate you with good conscience now.”

  The words couldn’t hurt me, because I was sorry. Because I was never pure. Not even at seven and eight and nine. I looked at Daintry and remembered the private measurements, my running list of self-comforting comparisons. She has stilts, but I have a unicycle. Her hair is prettier, but I’m thinner. Her house has an elevator, but my house has a basement. I’d been dishonest with myself. I didn’t like competing, yet it was all about competing, a dark swift current running invisibly below our friendship. She has bunk beds, but I have a pool table. Her cursive is better, but my printing is. She’s tall, but I’m cute. She’s adopted, and I’m not. So worthless— jealousy, envy—yet exacting such a high price.

  “I’m sorry because I never meant to be. . . callous, or exclude you. I’m sorry I didn’t try to change the way things were, sorry I didn’t know how. Sorry we’re grown. Sorry we can’t have it back, still share something.”

  “There’s nothing left for us to share.”

  I cradled the head. “Yes, there is. Guilt. Guilt that we let it happen.” I looked at the sightless eyes. “I moved to Rural Ridge thinking—hoping—to find something uncomplicated. Then you appeared, the . . . embodiment of all that was perfect about my past. Our past. I thought it would all be so simple. And look at us, Daintry, look at us.”

  The church bell began to peal. Long and loud from up the hill it reached us, Easter’s glad chimes. “It was never simple, Hannah,” Daintry said. “The only thing that was simple was you.”