Even Now (10 page)

Yet everything I wanted was here in the unsold, unseasonal inventory priced for quick riddance. Lacking that early, enticing
florist-perfect glory, the drooping, stalky, bloomless flowers were forgotten, abandoned. I saw their invisible promise, though,
knew that with pruning and a winter’s dormancy the faded specimens of coreopsis, echinacea, and platycodon would be hardier,
tougher, come spring rains and summer sun. The promise of the future is the only reason to garden.

A bright burst of pinks and yellows wedged beside a flat of monkey grass caught my eye. Someone had crammed a Mason jar with
the last of summer’s snapdragons.

“Ellen,” I called. “Over here.” I pulled a stem from the jar and plucked off a single blossom. “Look.” With thumb and forefinger
I gently pressed the end of the delicate flower. The odd-shaped bloom obligingly yawned open and shut, exposing a furry tongue
of pistils. “Grr,” I growled. “See? It’s a dragon’s jaw. Snapdragon.”

“Let me try,” Ellen said.

“Careful. It’s fragile.”

“If you do it too much, it’ll break,” someone finished my warning. I turned, took in the red sweater draped across her shoulders,
the starch-creased shirt. Black hair escaped a toothed clip, spilling over in soft spikes. “Know what I’m talking about?”

I knew instantly what Daintry referred to: Mrs. Payne’s gliding electric chair rising along the stair banister in the O’Connors’
house. With children’s innocent disregard for mortality, we’d dubbed it “the Heart Attack Ride.” The family had inherited
the wondrous machine, and we’d ridden it up and down for hours at a time. Or until Kathleen O’Connor shooed us away with the
warning Daintry had just delivered.

“Peter asked me to buy a pumpkin for the church entrance.” She looked around at a row of painted plywood cutouts meant to
be stuck in hay bales: witches on broomsticks, snaggle-toothed pumpkins. “But I don’t know. This stuff is
awfully
enticing.” She drilled an index finger in her cheek. “But what’ll I do next August, when there are no wooden Easter eggs
or wooden hearts or wooden Uncle Sams or wooden turkeys?”

I laughed. “Still cutting to the chase, I see.”

Daintry looked down. “You’re. . . ”

“Ellen,” I supplied. “This is Ms. O’Connor. She’s married to Pe—Mr. Whicker, from church.”

“Call me Daintry,” she said, and smiled. Though I called Kathleen O’Connor by her first name, my mother had never granted
the same privilege to Daintry.

Ellen’s eyes brightened. “The one who said I can take communion.”

Peter had announced the previous Sunday that a child of any age, whether or not confirmed, could receive communion. A parent
might even dip the bread into the chalice wine and guide it into a toothless infant’s mouth.

“Ellen brought her wafer back to the pew,” I said. “It finally disintegrated. How can a ten-year-old comprehend communion?”

“The Eucharist is essentially a mystery to everyone.” Daintry looked at me with a mild, frank expression. “Unless you can
explain it.”

I picked up the box of my pathetic plants. “I don’t think I’ll argue with a master’s in theology.”

And then she rescued me, as she’d done in countless situations decades earlier, asking Ellen, “What are you going to be for
Halloween?”

“A rock star,” Ellen answered from the side of a caramel apple.

“Has your mother ever told you that the two of us dressed up in identical costumes every year? Twin hoboes, twin Gypsies.”
Daintry turned to me. “I think our least successful costume was the mummies. I came undone because you didn’t roll the toilet
paper tight enough.”

“It wasn’t my fault. You had to go to the bathroom.”

“With the toilet paper!” Ellen giggled.

“Convenient revisionist history,” Daintry said. “Remember when we went as the Kennedys? We had a fight about who got to be
Jackie.”

“You won,” I said with mock glumness.

“Moot point,” Daintry returned. “JFK was assassinated the next week.”

Kennedy’s assassination had as much significance for Ellen as Illya Kuryakin had had for Mark. She was recalling a more recent
reference. “Can you talk like Mary Poppins?”

A smile spread across Daintry’s face. “Is that what your mother told you?” she returned in a lilting English accent. Ellen
nodded, delighted. “What else did she tell you?” Daintry asked. As though I were invisible.

“That you were her best friend.”

“Did she?”

“Yep.” Ellen dragged her sleeve across her taffygummed mouth. “Are you now?”

“Ellen—”

“Grown-ups don’t have best friends,” Daintry interrupted me. “Their husbands are their best friends.”

Ellen looked dubious. She’d eaten breakfast that morning in uncustomary silence, her face closed with the worry spawned by
subtle parental warring, a tense morning exchange.

About Daintry.

“You should call her,” Hal had said, “get together for lunch or something.”

“She works.”

“Seems you’d want to see her after spending half your life as friends,” he persisted.

Half a life? What constitutes half a life? “We were apart after ninth grade.”

“For three years. Didn’t she go to Carolina with you?”

“She didn’t go with me. We went together. So did twenty thousand other students, including you. Daintry and I aren’t. . .
not friends, but we’re not . . .” I’d hesitated, unable to categorize, to portray for Hal the uneasy ambivalent limbo of our
recent relationship, if it was even that.

“What’s the problem, then? What happened between you two? A man, I bet. Isn’t that the classic wedge that splits apart women
friends?”

“Give me a break. Leave it to men to think they’re the reason for everything.”

“Whoa. Back off.”

“Are y’all having a fight?” Ellen asked.

“Oh, El,” Hal said, immediately congenial. “If Mommy and I ever fight, heaven will open and the angels will cry. Time for
school.”

Now Ellen said, “I like your hair. Mommy—Mom, I mean—won’t let me grow my hair long.”

“Neither would her mother,” Daintry answered, but she was looking at me. “Right?”

Not that the ruling had stopped me from trying to imitate Daintry’s smooth braids. My short stumps were brushy, more pigtail
than plait. “Until Wyndham Hall,” Daintry said.

“What’s that?” Ellen asked.

“Your mother hasn’t told you about where she went to school?” Daintry bent to Ellen’s height and said earnestly, “There were
hair dryers on the bathroom walls, like in hotels.”

“There were not!” I denied, and changed the subject. “We’re on a double mission, for flowers and birthday favors. Those seed
bells are nice, El, for the birds.” Ellen curled her lip with distaste.

“Is it your birthday?” Daintry asked.

“Right after Halloween. See, here’s my list.” She held up the piece of paper, numbered like Mark’s, with fervently desired
items in an elaborate, curlicued font.

“’Hang-head baby,‘” Daintry read aloud. “What’s that?”

I loved Ellen’s term, the apt description. “A life-size doll, limp like a real newborn.” No sleek, plastic-limbed Barbie,
no stiff, unyielding body of a bright and fake-eyed pseudoinfant.

“I’ve changed my mind,” Ellen said. “I’m too old for hang-head babies.” I was stricken, and not only because I’d already purchased
the doll.

“Turn around, turn around . . .” Daintry hummed for my benefit, the refrain to an ancient Kodak ad. Not even old enough to
know the meaning of poignancy, we’d nevertheless adored the mournful lyrics and melody and choreographed a halting ballet
we danced whenever the advertisement aired. One of the many performances we staged solely for ourselves.

“Mom, come pay.”

As we walked toward the store’s entrance, Daintry said, “When I think of birthdays, I always remember yours.”

“Why? Yours were the best.” Because of their stint in Mexico, O’Connor birthdays were celebrated with piñatas, and I’d been
among the blindfolded, bat-wielding participants scrambling for candy when the papier-mâché burro or sombrero burst.

“No,” Daintry said. “No, I mean your sixteenth.”

“Oh.” I made a deliberate effort not to slow my stride. “That surprise party. I hated it.”

“Because you don’t like surprises?”

“Because. . . ”

Because it was hard. Under the guise of a dentist appointment in Charlotte, Mother had secretly picked up four classmates
from Wyndham Hall, springing them on me for an afternoon of sunbathing and gabbing and spending the night. Daintry was there,
too, of course. So hard, watching my old life mesh uneasily with my new. And painful. Painful trying to include and translate
for Daintry the subjects and incidents and names and situations she had no knowledge of or link to. The wretchedness of that
afternoon reached across the years to engulf me.

“I still remember their names,” Daintry said. “Meg and Amelia and Charlotte and. . . Sissy?”

“Yes.”

“They were. . . ”

I knew what they were. Giggly and twittery with girly excitement and gossip and information: where they’d been, whom they’d
seen, what they’d bought, who was in love with whom. “We hadn’t seen each other in a while,” I offered. But I knew what Daintry
meant.

“
I
hadn’t seen you for the whole school year,” Daintry said.

And I saw it all, too, standing there among baskets of apples and onions, autumn’s bounty. Saw the six of us that hot afternoon
sprawled in the backyard where Daintry and I had spent our childhoods. Saw Meg’s legs slowly scissoring above her monogrammed
towel while Daintry tried to draw up her long legs that hung off her own shabby towel. Cheap and short and thin enough to
have fit, years earlier, in a box of detergent. I’d envied that free gift once, envied that Kathleen O’Connor purchased such
commercial wonders: flexible straws and jelly jars you could keep as drinking glasses, while the products at my house were
so dull, so ordinary. Not advertised.

I heard the peals of laughter as a bottle of Sun-In was passed around—Daintry silently demurring with a shake of her ebony
head—and a crumpled tube of bronzing gel, Ban de Soleil, where baby oil had always sufficed for Daintry and me. I heard the
fizz of popped sodas and saw the bright tin rings slid down fingers against gold signet rings. Saw Daintry’s wide-eyed amazement
as Charlotte sat up to do breast exercises, then dropped her bikini top.

“What do you think?” Charlotte had said, grinning, “Can you tell a difference or should I order Mark Eden?”

“One of them had a. . . weight belt,” Daintry said, wonder tingeing her voice the way it hadn’t twenty years ago. Twenty years
ago she’d hardly spoken at all.

“Sissy,” I said, remembering the sandbag contraption secured around her waist with Velcro. “Sissy was always dieting.”

Tourists milled about us in the narrow aisle, but I was sitting cross-legged under a cloudless sky again, grass warm and prickly
against my thighs as I watched my Wyndham Hall friends squint at their split ends, bite them away with perfect teeth, chattering
all the while. They wore bright purple-and-gold embroidered dresses as cover-ups, with tiny round mirrors stitched into the
fabric, hippie garb. But Daintry wore a shirt of her father’s, the same shirt she’d shown me two years earlier before we packed
for a classmate’s sleep-over, advising me not to bring my nightgown, that everyone wore their father’s shirt to sleep in now,
just
everyone.
I’d wondered, watching her, sensing her acute discomfort, whether she still had the fake alpaca V-neck cardigan we’d searched
for so diligently every week in Cullen’s lone clothing store the previous summer.
Everyone
at Cullen Central wore fake alpaca V-neck cardigans.

Oh, those girls, with their big-city upbringing, their wealthy fathers. “Your mother stopped the car in the driveway of this
ungodly awful house to play a joke on us,” Amelia said. “She announced, ‘We’re here!’ and waited to see what we’d do. You
should have
seen
this place!”

Over the ring of the cash register I heard it all. “What do you
do
around here? There’s not even a mall! Do they roll up the sidewalks at night? Let’s go to the
Putt-Putt!
No wonder you went away to school!”

I saw the whole painful scene. Painful then, painful now. Heard the peals of laughter and teasing and ribbed disbelief. Oh,
those girls. They weren’t especially pretty. They weren’t especially thin. They were soft with the obligatory dormitory pounds
of consoling late night sweets and care package binges. But as they carried the extra weight they also carried assurance.
They were fat with their supremacy, careless with their confidence. They knew who they were. Gifted, privileged, secure, and
oblivious of their cruelty. To Daintry and her feelings as she looked for four-leaf clovers.

I had hated it. I was miserable for Daintry, because I’d encountered it myself. For though I might have escaped the social
intricacies and unwritten requirements of Cullen Central, the first few months at Wyndham Hall were an equally frightening
initiation. While prepared for the academics, I was unprepared for the minute scrutiny bred in girls who live every moment
together. Girls who are judging one another, assessing and comparing their possessions and personalities and talents. Who
got more phone calls from boys, more letters in their mailbox, who had more shoes, for God’s sake. Who was cuter, skinnier,
funnier, richer, smarter. Ratings never spoken aloud, but ceaselessly, silently tallied. And through that initiation, I’d
ceaselessly, silently longed for Daintry, my cuter, skinnier, funnier, smarter, small-town friend.

I imagined how it must have felt to be Daintry that afternoon: outnumbered by these girls as sleek and groomed and petted
as cats. And outranked. She must surely have assumed I’d aligned myself with them, shifted away from her. Believed that she
was no longer the one I would turn to, listen to, imitate.

“Daintry,” I said. “They didn’t mean it. They . . .” What could I tell her with some belated apology, some tardy explanation?
That there is nothing like boarding school to make you tough. You adapt and survive or are flattened and die. They didn’t
mean it. It was just the way it was.