Even Now (17 page)

Mother peered over my shoulder. “That reminds me. I brought your baby book. I cleaned closets and thought you might like to
have it.”

Her easy indifference surprised me. “You don’t want it anymore?”

“Where is it, where?” Ellen asked. “I want to see how Mommy looked.”

“In your room with my things,” Mother said. “I’ll check on the soup. Who’s hungry?”

“I think we’re about finished here,” Ben said.

“Don’t plug in the lights or put the presents out until I get back,” Ellen said.

“. . . is my two front teeth,” a kiddie voice croaked and lisped from the speaker.

“Was that the doorbell?” Ceel asked.

“I’ll get it,” Hal said. But he didn’t need to. Our door opened with no more introduction or hesitation than it had three
decades earlier.
You and me are going to be best friends.

“Anybody home?” Daintry said.

“All of us,” Hal said. “Come in. We’ve just finished decorating the tree. Let me have your coat.”

“I just wanted to drop off a Christmas present for you and Hannah.” She unwrapped a fringed black shawl, revealing the red
tin bucket filled with heart-pine fatwood she held. “I can’t stay.”

“Thank you,” I said, summoning gratitude to cover my embarrassment. Because though I’d debated buying a gift for Peter and
Daintry, I worried the gesture would look odd, suspicious. Now the lack of reciprocity seemed worse. “You shouldn’t have.”

But with her next sentence, Daintry eliminated any pretense of personal selection. “Peter likes to give presents to parishioners.”
She set the bucket on the hearth. “So many people have gas logs these days. I knew somehow you’d be purists.”

Hal was delighted with her prescience. “We always need kindling.”

Daintry looked carefully around the room. “But you don’t have a fire tonight.”

The observation struck a chord with Ellen. “Yeah, Mom,” she said, a new refrain of reproach. “And you didn’t make popcorn
for us to string.”

“It’s been so warm. . . ,” I began.

“Thanks so much for the narcissus, Ceel,” Daintry said. “I usually burn a gardenia candle in our bedroom at night, but don’t
need to with that divine fragrance.”

“Do you like our tree?” Ellen asked.

“It’s wonderful. Maybe you could come help decorate mine and Peter’s. We always wait until Christmas Eve to put it up.”

I knew that. Knew he’d already picked it out himself. He’d asked me which tree lot had the freshest trees, the lowest prices.
I’d met him in the church courtyard as I was making one of several trips back and forth from the columbarium to my car, loading
tools—buckets, rakes, shovels, clippers—no longer needed. He’d been shopping in Asheville, fruitlessly.

“Can I be you and you be me?”
he asked, cramming a wicker basket in the corner of my trunk.
“If you’ll buy my presents, I’ll clean your columbarium. The only gift I came home with was an idea for a sermon. A cosmetics
clerk asked me if I’d like a whiff of ‘Eternity.’ I think I can do something with that.”

“No ‘Gift of the Magi’?”
I said, helplessly thinking of his pocket watch and Daintry’s possible gift to him. Hating my vulnerability.

“Overdone.”

“Peter,”
I said from the dim recesses of the trunk, where he couldn’t see my face,
“I was kidding.”

He was silent, and then I felt a tug on the hem of my sweater. I straightened slowly, so as not to bump my head.
“I’m sorry,”
he said.
“I was thinking of myself.”

“No, no, it’s my fault. It’s that—”
I thought of the Christmas cheer raging away everywhere else, canned carols and artificial garlands and festooned storefronts.
“I put everything to bed today.”

“What?”

“For the winter. Heaped mulch around every little shrub and perennial. It made me, I don’t know, melancholy. That’s all.”

He looked at me, and for a moment I thought— feared, hoped—he might take my chin in his hand.
“Hey,”
he said quietly,
“There’s a sermon there, too. A better one. You’ve given me a Christmas present.”

“No, no, you can’t—”

“Hannah,”
he stopped me softly,
“I know.”

“Soup’s on,” Mother called from the kitchen. “Come now while it’s—” Framed in the doorway, she stopped as if tethered when
she saw Daintry. A single drip from the ladle she held fell soundlessly to the floor.

“Hello, Jean,” Daintry said. My mother’s first name from Daintry’s lips was shocking. As if they were equals. As if Daintry
were challenging her to correct the presumed informality.

“Daintry,” Mother said. Then again, softly: “Daintry.”

“You didn’t know I was living in Rural Ridge?” There was something knowing in Daintry’s tone and smile. Triumph? “Hannah didn’t
tell you?”

Whatever it was that had halted my mother vanished. She straightened. “I believe she did, come to think of it. I simply wasn’t
expecting to see you.”

Daintry nodded, granting her that. “No doubt. I just stopped by with a gift.”

“How nice,” Mother said, Emily Post herself. “Why don’t you stay and have dinner with us? I’d love to hear about. . . your
family.”

Daintry twirled an earring. “I’m sure Hannah can tell you.” Neither woman moved to shorten the ten feet between them where
I stood, the midpoint between two poles in my life—and polar opposites—pulling and pushing and molding me. In the charged
air I smelled fear and antagonism and secrets withheld.

“Tell me,” I begged. “Tell me how.” Twelve magazines lay on the carpet in three rows of four, a stepping-stone square in the
middle of the O’Connor living room. We were playing Black Magic, a reasonless, ruleless game I didn’t understand.

“You have to be in cahoots,” Daintry said, “then you know the secret.” The secret was driving me wild. She stood, arms across
her chest, impassive and immovable. I stared at
Reader’s Digest, Southern Living, Life, Good Housekeeping,
Heather’s
Seventeen, Time:
politician and celebrity faces, an ocean liner, a soldier in uniform, a steaming casserole.

“You can do it, you’re smart,” Daintry said with that tone of encouragement and challenge and absolute authority. “Figure
it out.” She stepped on a magazine. “This one has it, but this one doesn’t.”

“Doesn’t have what?”

“It. Black Magic.”

“But what’s ‘it’?” I nearly shrieked with frustration and exclusion. Daintry’s expression was serene. “Somebody had to tell
you
the secret!”

“No,” she contradicted calmly. “I figured it out.” She kicked a
Highlights
, my contribution. “This one doesn’t.”

“This is boring. I quit.”

“Boring because you don’t know the secret. You don’t know how to play.”

“It’s not even a game unless you have someone who doesn’t know how,” I said. I’d witnessed enough of these matches to figure
out that much. “I’m leaving.”

“Go on then, baby.”

“. . . kissing Santa Claus!” a chorus of juvenile voices screeched from the speakers.

Mother winced. “Isn’t that side over yet?”

“I like this music,” Ellen objected.

“You know, Ellen, your granny used to object to me and your mommy playing just that kind of Christmas music,” Daintry said.
Your granny.
Had the words not seemed so purposely cutting, I’d have laughed. It was there again, that striking assumption of intimacy
and connection. “I was admiring your handiwork on the tree,” Daintry said. Would she never leave?

“Ellen loaded the midsection with her favorites,” Hal said.

“Daddy! Besides, after I go to bed Mommy J changes all of them.” Daintry smiled as if unsurprised.

Ellen pawed through the box of ornaments. “Nothing’s left but the duds.”

“The rejects,” Daintry said.

“Yeah,” Ellen agreed.

Daintry bent over the box. “Who cares about shiny balls, right?”

“Right. Bo-ring.”

Like an anthropologist observing mankind of another era, a mummy being unfurled, I watched with objective fascination as Daintry
turned the full force of her charm on my daughter. Then she plucked something small and dark from the castoffs and the ignored;
extracted something from the jumble of armless Santas and wingless angels. “But here’s one.”

Ellen waved it away. “That ugly thing. It’s Mom’s.” “Yes,” Daintry said, “I know.” She held out the ornament, dangling by
thin sewing thread from her index finger. It was a crèche, chipped and cheap and plastic. Mary and Joseph were poorly painted
vertical blobs, the manger was a veed cradle on spindly X legs, the shed’s slanted roof was grooved to look like wood. Derided
or ignored, the ornament was nonetheless priceless to me. It had been a gift to St. Francis Junior Choir members, and I’d
preserved it since girlhood.

“How did you know?” Ellen asked.

Daintry walked to the tree and carefully hung the crèche on an upper branch. “Because I had one exactly like it.”

“Plug in the lights,” Hal said. “Let’s see how the finished product looks.”

The tree snapped with sudden illumination, a polka-dotted burst of bright red bulbs.

Daintry clapped, laughed. “Surprise!” Ellen crowed at her reaction. “I bet you don’t know anyone else in the whole wide world
who uses all red lights.”

“You’d lose the bet,” Daintry said. She swept her shawl about her shoulders, then paused. “But aren’t you going to turn out
the rest of the lights in the room? See how it looks with just that red red?”

Ellen gaped. “That’s what I do before I go to bed. How did you know?”

“Some things you just know.”

“It’s the double letters,” she said six months later. We were making a topographical map of North Carolina for school.

I looked up from the cardboard I was cutting. “What?”

Daintry squeezed two droplets of green food coloring into the doughy mixture of flour and water. “Black Magic.
Good Housekeeping
has it,
Life
doesn’t.
Seventeen
has it, but
Time
doesn’t. And headlines count, too.” She screwed the cap carefully on the green bottle. “Would you have ever guessed?”

“Give me that mixing bowl. The Piedmont isn’t all green. Add some brown.”

She laughed.

I walked to Ellen and wrapped my arms around her shoulders as though my embrace could protect her from this intrusion. The
night had been marred.

“Perhaps we’ll see you at the five o’clock service Christmas Eve,” Mother said.

But it was Daintry who would have the last word. “No, I don’t expect you will. I’ve always thought that family service is
like a circus.”

I watched my mother’s mouth tighten.
Can I go to the midnight service with the O’Connors? Please, please, please? They invited me. Why can’t we go to the late
service?

“Oh, and Hannah,” Daintry said, hand on the door, “I was wondering if you’d be in charge of organizing appointments for the
pictorial directory.”

“What?”

“It was my idea, to have parishioners’ photographs taken for a pictorial directory. So we can all have names to go with faces.”

“I . . .” I hated the idea.

“Since the columbarium is finished.”

“It. . . ”

“You have plenty of time now, don’t you?”

Mother spoke up definitively, answering for me. “I’m sure Hannah will do a wonderful job. Whatever she does, she does well.”

Daintry tapped her chin with one finger. “I’m sure of it, too.” She looked at me. “I’ll call with the details after Christmas.”
The door closed behind her.

“Can I put the presents under now?” Ellen asked.

“Let’s eat,” Hal said. “I’ll have soup
and
a ham sandwich.”

But Mother hadn’t moved. “Why didn’t you tell me the O’Connor girl was living here?”

“Her name is Daintry, Mother. And she’s doing a little more than just ‘living here.‘”

“She didn’t take her husband’s name? Or one of those slash names?”

Ceel laughed. “No.”

“What does she do?”

“Manages an Asheville stockbroking office.”

Mother wasn’t impressed. “A pictorial directory,” she mused, Daintry dismissed. “Dreadful.”

After dinner was eaten and cleared; after Ceel and Ben departed; after Hal and Ellen and Mother had gone to bed, I sat on
the sofa before the tree. Sat in the silent room darkened but for the eerie glow of red against the black branches and held
the baby book Ellen had forgotten in her trimming glee. The baby book Mother no longer, seemingly, had any need to keep.

I might have flipped through its pages. Might have looked at the pictures cataloging all those events of childhood. But pictures
hold only moments, fractions of seconds preserved in toothy smiles and flashbulbed eyes made feral with pinpoints of red.
Within the stained satin cover were snapshots of birthday cakes and Christmas mornings and beach vacations. There were before
and after grins of braces and haircuts, glasses and contacts. Yet as a photograph of an impulsive hug isn’t evidence of intimacy,
a relationship can’t be documented in a split-second, freeze-framed rectangle. The album I held couldn’t capture the unguarded,
guileless, myriad moments of a childhood friendship. There were no pictures of chalked hopscotch grids or giggled telephone
pranks or backyard forts.

Nor were there sounds within its pages. Of banged “Heart and Soul” on the organ, or arguments over whose turn it was to play
the right-hand melody. No
one potato two potato three potato, four.
No tuneless plinking accompaniment to the jerkily twirling ballerina that sprung up when I opened the lid of her jewelry
box, or tinny “Edelweiss” when she opened the lid to my music box from Switzerland. No churning of the rock tumbler we left
grinding night and day for a month, waiting to unplug and silence it and discover ordinary rocks transformed to smoothly patinaed
jewels. There was no coin, the first sandwich quarter made of copper and silver that we saved as if it might be the only one
minted, taped to the pages. No pictures of our private industries, damming the creek behind our houses as if we might actually
control its ceaseless flow. Playing— and cheating—on a Ouija board in a dark closet. Scissoring a stack of homemade thousand-dollar
bills for a week-long Monopoly marathon. There was no room on its pages for jars filled with grass and earth, our earnest
efforts to make lightning bugs and caterpillars and June bugs and earthworms feel cozy in captivity.