Even Now (23 page)

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

W
hen 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
problems? 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?”