Even Now (20 page)

Needles pricked my arms and dug under my nails as I pulled light strands from the tree. Daintry O’Connor agreed to be a protective
watchdog in a bargain between daughter’s mother and daughter’s friend. My fingers shook with both anger and shame.

As roommates that freshman fall something was restored between us. Together we’d shopped for bedspreads and hot plates, navigated
the perilous waters of drop-add, ate wormy ramen, endured a suitemate who played Bette Midler day and night. Had it all been
only a purchased facade?

I coiled the cord tightly, yard upon yard of light bulbs dulled with daylight and streaked with silver tinsel, then moved
around the room swiftly and methodically clearing decorations—wire reindeer, angel candlesticks, porcelain Santa basket empty
of peppermints. From the mantel I unhooked stockings, homely St. Francis bazaar offerings from decades earlier, all glued
rickrack and irregularly sewn appliqués. The O’Connor stockings, products of their mother’s time and talent, were beautifully
needleworked with elves and Santas and angels sprouting downy wisps of angora yarn as hair and beards, gilt thread trimming
wings and slippers, jet beads for eyes.

Without a glance at gay greetings grown stale, I emptied a basket of cards.
“Look at this,”
Mother had said one Christmas, holding out the O’Connor card.
“She put apostrophe s on their name.”

“Look at this,”
Daintry had said to me in South Building. We’d gone to check our class files, count required courses. She’d pointed.
“My projected QP is 3.2. Yours is 2.3.”

From the fireside tin bucket I plucked Christmas matches from splinters of fatwood: Daintry’s gift. Searing, unexpected grief
buckled me to the hearth. Grief for what once was: an uncomplicated friendship.

After that single semester as initiated sorority sisters, Daintry simply exited. She went inactive and moved into an apartment
alone. It was said she’d taken a job in the alumni office. Now and then her name would appear in the campus newspaper or on
a poster tacked to the Student Union bulletin board, connected to some campus activity or movement, running for Student Council
office, an organizer of some panel discussion. I’d glimpse her strolling Franklin Street on a balmy Saturday, hurrying across
the Pit toward the Student Store, even on one frigid March night among hundreds of spectators massed outside Greenlaw Hall
during the streaking craze. As she’d done at Cullen High, Daintry pursued what she wanted with remarkable single-mindedness,
making a life for herself and moving beyond me, out of reach. Until that afternoon in the graduate library, when she’d found
me and taunted me with lines from my own book of quotes.

“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
tsk
ing 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.”

“Some
one’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

D
aintry 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 always 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?”