Even Now (15 page)

Like other outlaws—Ceel and her liquor forays— they’d driven to South Carolina, a “no tell” motel, it was reported. Boldly,
brazenly, in the student driver car, no less. Play practice indeed. In a town the size of Cullen, as conservative as Cullen,
a student’s affair with a married teacher was the white-hot stuff of scandal.

The gossip reached me hours away at Wyndham Hall. As I tried to concentrate in a study hall basement where the only white-hot
excitement was the classmate who dropped a lit match into an overflowing trash can, vivid images reeled through my brain.
Steinbeck’s implied sex in
East of Eden,
open on the desk before me, couldn’t compare to the explicit sex I created mentally. Daintry’s long legs wrapped around Mike
Simpson’s back. Her black hair caught in his mouth, his hands clutching breasts and buttocks in a scenario I concocted, sequestered
in study hall and, indeed, a long way from being anything but a virgin. Visions that thrilled me. Of course I believed it.
Of course it would be Daintry. Who else?

I might have asked her outright for the truth. But whether fact or falsehood, it somehow parted us further. That she’d progressed
so far beyond me, capable of an affair. Capable of secrets. Capable of a life that didn’t include me. I didn’t care about
the rumor. I cared that I couldn’t trace the moment of separation, how we’d moved from roller skates to Barbie wedding dresses
to minor vandalism to two different people.

“Can I drive home?” Mark asked. I nodded and gave him the keys.

Daintry drew her fingers down the surface of the scarred wooden desks where we sat like classmates. “Hannah. . . do you still
have the desk?”

“Yes,” I said. “I brought it to Rural Ridge.”

“Is it still white?”

“The drawer pulls are blue.”

“Yes,” she murmured. “They were blue then, too.”

She didn’t need to explain. The desk was a gift from Santa the Christmas I was ten. It had been splendidly, abundantly arrayed
with stapler and brads and construction paper, blotter and pencil cup. I adored the fabulous newness of it all, as had Daintry.

“Remember how we left it, didn’t touch a thing, pick up a single pencil the whole Christmas vacation?” she asked.

I nodded. For we’d been reluctant to disturb its tidy, ordered appearance and arrangement. Intuiting, bound by an unspoken
understanding that once the box of gold stars or the jar of sweet-tasting paste—just as at school—was opened, once the pencils
were marred with toothmark dents or the plastic wrapper was removed from the solid bulk of college-ruled paper, the desk,
the tableau of perfection, would vanish into something ordinary and old and used.

“Do you still have the lazy Susan?” I asked. For I’d loved that, the broad wooden turntable laden with sugar bowl, salt and
pepper shakers, vinegar, in the middle of the O’Connors’ kitchen table. I loved its slow, silent spinning, the cozy jumble
of jars, the ease of reach, when my own kitchen table was cleared after every meal. “Do you?” I asked. It was so easy, too,
lured back like filings to a magnet, to recall how I’d loved her.

But Daintry only laughed, as though ridiculing the idea that my desk and her lazy Susan were comparable. “Congratulations,
Mark,” she said, slipping a twenty-dollar bill from her wallet. “This is for your first tank of gas.” Mark whooped and took
off down the corridor.

“Thank you,” I said, “but that was too much. More than his allowance. I hate for my children to be so enthralled with money.”

Daintry’s gaze was pure assessment. “Don’t you know anything, Hannah? That’s what everything’s about.”

“It wasn’t for us.”

“Sure it was. Don’t you remember making Creepy Crawlers and selling them at school? And don’t forget Saturdays at the factory,
the vending machines.” Often my father took us along when he went to the plant on weekends, emptied of seamstresses and cutters.
Daintry and I would wrap ourselves in belts, hundreds of identical lengths, snitch gum from open packs left on sewing tables
decorated with pictures of children grinning before studio backdrops of gushing waterfalls. Stomachs against the cold cement
floor, we slid yardsticks back and forth beneath the row of crackers and candy and soda machines, hoping to find dropped coins.

Until we’d aged sufficiently to earn a paycheck, when the summer before our high school senior year we’d worked on those belts
and buttons as employees in the plant’s discount outlet. For eight hours a day we rebut-toned and rebelted and rehung dresses
women had driven from around the state to try on and discard in the changing rooms. On breaks we ate barbecue potato chips
from the same vending machines we’d once searched beneath and mourned the amount of our hourly wage.

Daddy had finagled the drudge jobs for us. Because I’d asked him to. Because I’d sensed my widening separation from Daintry
and believed proximity alone could restore our indivisibility.

Mark buckled his seat belt. “Did you check out her car? A Lexus. She’s cool.”

A Lexus. How far we’d come from our mothers’ cars that summer of driver’s education. Both were old, clunky station wagons.
My mother’s was faded blue, Kathleen O’Connor’s had fake wood panels peeling away in strips. Those, at least, were comparable.
“Cool because of her car?”

“Sure.” Revving the accelerator, he grinned and said, “Gross show of power.”

From Hannah’s quote book:

Not happiness, but intensity, was what she craved.

—Mary Stewart

A
t ten that evening I moved through the house collecting the multiplying clutter of daytime: pencils, glasses, stray shoes.
The television was tuned to the sports channel. The mail was scattered on the kitchen table. The coffeemaker was prepped for
morning. Hal had come home earlier than I for a change; it was obvious in the mundane domestic details of our semisepa-rate
lives.

“Breakfast is the only time you’re here anymore,” I’d said to him that morning. “What time did you come home last night?”
I’d gone to bed leaving only the hall light burning.

“Late, after eleven. I stayed afterward to talk with another board member,” Hal said. “And I have a curriculum meeting Thursday
night.”

Beyond the window, spooked doves fluttered clumsily away from a pie plate of bread heels, leaving an aggressive bluejay selfishly
and wastefully scattering crumbs. “How many committees are you on?”

He swiveled, piqued. “I’m good at this, Hannah. Can’t I have a creative outlet? You have your colum-barium.” I was silent.
“Bring home the flathead shovel,” he said. “I’m starting a new section of your wall.”

Not
my
wall,
I’d thought. Hal had ordered three containers of Tennessee fieldstone, declaring his intention to build a walled garden in
our yard near a stand of rhododendron. Walling me in as Daintry walled me out.

Now I put glasses in the dishwasher while Hal ate ice cream from the carton. “Where was Mark until nine tonight?” he asked.

“At the mall with Wendy Howard.” Doesy had poked her face through the hemlock hedge.
“Haaayyy! Mark and Wendy sure are spending a lot of time together. Maybe they’re having a little thing! Isn’t that cute?”
“Wendy’s supposedly grounded, but Doesy’s definition of grounding is to not let her use the phone between four and six in
the afternoon.”

“How do you know?”

“She told me.”

“Humor her. She loved Asheville Academy and she’s loaded.”

“What does that have to do with the Academy?”

“Hannah,” Hal said wearily. “Private schools always need money. And if Peter Whicker has his way, we’ll need more. For someone
who’s a nonvoting board member, he’s a nuisance.”

“Why?”

“He wants to personally appoint a new member to the scholarships committee.
And
he wants a significant portion of scholarship funds to go to students based strictly on race.”

“So?”

“So St. Martin’s gives several thousand dollars to the school annually, and Peter. . . well, the rector controls that money,
indirectly. It’s a delicate situation. He’s controversial.”

I might have contradicted him, suggesting Peter Whicker wasn’t controversial but committed, dedicated. But I said nothing,
unwilling to be drawn into a discussion of Peter’s traits and protecting something I wasn’t sure of. Our conversations, our
companionship. Our privacy. “Use a bowl, Hal. You’re dropping ice cream on the floor.” I pointed to the melting droplets with
my new sandal—comfortable contraptions that looked as if they’d been made of old tires and that I suspected I’d bought precisely
for their unapologetic ugliness.

Hal studied the shoes. “Hannah,” he said with amusement, “what
moved
you?”

I sponged away the mess myself and began undressing on the way to our bedroom. Tossing a flannel shirt over a chair, knowing
I’d wear it again tomorrow, I remembered those years—years!—I chose a shirt in the morning simply because Hal hadn’t seen
me wear it recently. Incredible the lengths one went to, that early and undeviating desire to please.

“Hal,” I asked as he turned back the sheets, “do you ever wonder about certain couples, how they wind up together?”

“Such as whom?” His words were drawn and distorted by a deep yawn.

“You know who I mean. The ones you watch saying ‘I do’ at the altar, thinking all the while:
Never. It’ll never last.
For no particular reason, a hunch. Couples you meet later, too, already marrieds who seem complete opposites. Like . . .
well, like Peter and Daintry. They seem so”—I groped—“unsuited,” regretting my prim choice of words. “Maybe she’s hell in
bed.”

Hal frowned. “How do you come up with these things? Your train of thought is astonishing.”

“I was joking.” I opened the mystery Ceel had recommended and turned automatically to page one hundred.
“The sex scenes are
always
on page one hundred,”
Daintry had said. The soft-core porn we scavenged from Geoff’s room proved her correct more often than not. I scanned the
page, and though it didn’t exactly qualify as sex, a male character was stripping to skinny-dip.
Hanging hog,
the author described the lawyer who was looking for a playmate for his
meat puppet.

“Ever heard this expression for penis?” I asked Hal, and repeated the phrases aloud. “Why is it that the female body is tagged
with all the foul words and men get all the hilarious ones?”

Hal didn’t take his eyes from his own book. His fingers moved unconsciously over his chest, playing with the frizz of sprouting
hair, then traveled to his navel and circled its fleshy cavity.

I propped the book’s spine solidly on my rib cage and tried to concentrate. But it was happening again: my heart slipping
out of patterned sync. As I’d once watched my belly undulate with the restless movements of my unborn children, I watched
my chest, convinced it was lurching with extra beats, urgent irregular pulses. “Hal. Look at that.”

Still he didn’t turn his head. “At what?”

“The way my heart’s beating. Look, the book moves. Should I worry?”

“Mmm.” No verbal violence marks a marital drift. There is only that slow segue into indifference.

My heart banged again, captive in its rib cage prison. When Daintry and I were eleven, a science assignment required us to
memorize the path of blood through the heart, a complicated journey through atriums and ventricles. Right, left, upper, lower,
entrance, exit. Though Daintry mastered it quickly, my brain refused to cooperate. I couldn’t picture the convoluted route
or grasp the terms. “Listen,” she’d said, “just learn it this one time and you’ll never have to know it again.”

“Is it the moon between the sun or the sun between the earth?” Ellen had recently, similarly fretted, frustrated with the
difference between solar and lunar eclipses. “Which is in the middle and what makes the shadow? I don’t understand how it
works, and the test is tomorrow.”

“You don’t have to understand it,” I told her. “You just have to memorize it. Learn about eclipses just this one time and
you’ll never need to know it again.” Hal had shot me a disapproving look. And I, who didn’t understand the workings of my
heart, should have known better, too.

Hal yawned deeply, then again. And again. He idly scraped a paper bookmark down his jaw, once, twice. The rough stubble rasped.
Who can chart the moment when a habit or tic or fault moves from endearing to unnoticed to infuriating? It’s as unremarked
and unobvious as the transition from mentor to nemesis.

“I saw her the other day.”

“Who?”

“Daintry.”

“Mmm.”

“She offered outrageous things to Ellen for her birthday, gave Mark twenty dollars. And all the while she’s cat-and-mousing
me.”

“’Cat-and-mousing’? I repeat: Your trains of thought are astonishing.”

“She told Ellen that Wyndham Hall had hair dryers in the bathrooms.”

“Probably to avoid blowing fuses.”

“There weren’t hair dryers at all, and you’ve missed the point. Don’t be so logical.”

“What do you want me to be?”

“I want you to be. . . on my side.”

His eyebrows lifted. “Is this about sides?”

“No, it’s . . .” What was it? “Daintry made Wyndham Hall sound as though it were some exclusive rich-girl school. You know
what I mean.”

“What is it between you and Daintry? Some kind of love/hate thing?”

I shook my head. Love/hate was for summer or siblings or holidays. What was between Daintry and me had too many components,
too many nuances. Too much history. “You can’t package a relationship like that. It’s not that simple. It’s not that black
and white.”

Hal merely sighed, content with his calm rationale. He snapped the elastic of his boxers, wormed his hand inside, and rearranged
his genitals. The blankets moved as though moles were tunneling.

Stop that!
I wanted to shout, struggled against reach- ing out to grab his hand.
Oh, you don’t know,
I pleaded silently to some invisible entity who might contradict me.
You just cannot know. There comes a night you think you will scream from the sheer flat line of predictability. If he does
it once more, picks at his chest or navel or chin one more time. Or if he does nothing at all. Simply scream.