Even Now (27 page)

I willed a neutral expression to my face. Never have I been quick on my feet, never able to fling the cunning, impaling phrase.
I lack killer instincts, a capacity for conflict Daintry had learned somewhere.

“Churches are sexy places. Having women throw themselves at you is an occupational hazard.” She raised her chin. “You’d be
surprised what female parishioners believe falls under the term ‘pastoral care.‘”

I pressed my fingers into the cold earth. Though perhaps Daintry had rehearsed this revenge, envisioning an elegant rationality
in her every utterance. “It usually happens in counseling sessions, not”—she dismissed the area with an airy wave—“cemeteries.”

I sought truisms: Rise above it. Kill her with kindness. All the tattered, fraudulent advice.

“Good thing the Episcopal faith is such a forgiving religion.” Daintry raised a foot and frowned at the grime that rimmed
it. “Fortunately, there are bonds other than sex. Peter and I need each other. Something beyond, you know”—her gaze was steady—“lust.”

I stood then, still silent and unprotected and defenseless as the spikes of new foliage at my feet. “Daintry, nothing—”

“Don’t tell me nothing happened. I know what happened. You crossed a line, but not
the
line.” I gasped, but she took no notice. “Just like I did with Mike Simpson. Poor Mike. I look back now and realize he was
just another way I was trying to get out. Away from Cullen.” She knocked her knuckles against the bench. “Are we even now?”

“Even?”

“Tit for tat. Clean slate. Even steven.”

Within my coat I shrank from the seasonal chill and Daintry’s hostility. “Were we competing?”

“Oh, I think we were. Don’t be daft. Remember that? The year we decided to talk like books. ‘Ever so much,’ and ‘awfully decent
of you.’ Ever so much,” she said again, softly. “It was ever so much fun.”

I remembered. Seventh grade.

“Except there’s no such thing as equal,” she went on. “Not even in pairs of eyes or thumbs. One heel is more worn, one arm
or leg is stronger than the other. There’s nothing equal in marriage or in families, either, and there was nothing equal between
us. Our mothers understood that. After you left for Wyndham and I moped around, know what my mother said? ‘Leave Hannah alone,’
she said. ‘She’s gone to find her own.’ ‘Her own.’ Talk about your tough lessons.”

“That’s not true. My mother was trying to get me away from you. It didn’t work. I loved you too much.”

“Oh, I think it worked fine.”

It hurt to say it. “But I was always weaker. You knew it and you used it.”

“Until you went away. Until you left me.”

She craned her neck, pulled a sleek length of hair caught in her coat collar. I watched her, intimately acquainted with that
habitual action. A hundred times, a thousand, I’d observed the identical gesture, as this ally, mentor, savior, and competitor
had freed her hair from a sailor middy blouse, a T-shirt, a poor-boy jersey. Even a paper dress with a newsprint cat face.

“Did you like the recessional ‘Jerusalem’?” she went on. “I picked it for you, suggested it to Peter. I remember how much
you liked it. A big boarding school favorite, right? While I stayed home at good old Cullen High with the rest of the”—she
laughed—“Trojans. An unfortunate mascot choice. The marching rubbers.” She leaned forward, tweaked a fragile stem. “I know
a few things about gardening. Isn’t it time to put in pansies?”

What could I do but answer? I told the truth. “Fall’s better. So they can harden off over the winter.”

“Harden off, yes. Like people, who get stronger while no one’s noticing. Like you did. That first Thanksgiving you came home
with a shoeboxful of grosgrain ribbons. Pretty striped things,” she said in the low tone of reverie. “You got a corduroy backrest
for Christmas that year. A ‘husband,’ you called it. Your new friends called it.”

“I wasn’t trying to be different. You began hardening off, too.”

“I know it. That’s the whole goddamn tragedy of it.” She sat on the bench. “We were blindsided, Hannah. Blindsided for the
simple reason that we were young. What happened was that we got old enough to realize it was never going to go any further.
Any further than sidewalks and bunk beds and matching garter belts and sex ed and roller-skating together on Sunday afternoons.
We realized that the world was bigger and the avenues were wider.”

“I never thought that, never.”

Her expression was pitying. “Of course you didn’t. I had everything you wanted up to then, didn’t I? Tell me.”

A pair of robins scuffled several yards away, fiercely yet soundlessly fighting, and I thought of how they fly into windows,
breaking their necks out of jealousy for their own reflection. “Yes,” I murmured. Brothers and sisters and house and mother
and possessions. Everything.

Daintry’s lips were a narrow slash. “Like always, I saw it coming before you did. The scales began to balance and we began
to equal. You no longer wanted what I had, and I began wanting what you had. Everything you’d done to me our entire childhood—the
needing, the imitating, the listening—I suddenly found myself doing to you. I needed
you.
I wanted to copy
you.
I wanted to know the things
you
knew. But the stakes were higher. It was more desperate and dangerous then.”

“But you deliberately hurt me. I never consciously hurt you.”

“No, you’re not capable of it.” She made it sound like a deficiency. “So, yes,” she said. “I started punishing you then.”
She gripped the bench armrest. “I’ll tell you what else I know about gardening. It takes a long time for a plant to die, doesn’t
it, really die? Even if I stomped on it, the roots would live, wouldn’t they?”

“Daintry, what—”

“Don’t you see, Hannah,” she said in a voice gone from badgering to insistent to querulous, “I
needed
to hate you. It was the only way I could let you go.” She painfully mimicked my question posed months earlier. “ ’What happened
to us, Daintry?’ But just like with flowers and with affairs and with dying, it happens by degree. When a plane crashes it’s
never
only
an engine malfunction,
only
an electrical failure,
only
a broken propeller or inclement weather or pilot error. It has to be all of these. It’s never
one thing.
No single, pivotal event.” Her voice was raw with sarcasm. “No, and friendships don’t die for one reason.”

There was nothing in the wreckage of our relationship left to hide or salvage. “Why didn’t you tell me what my mother did
for you?” I said. “The sorority. . . deal.”

“What, and have you gloat?”

“Gloat? Do you know how hearing that hurt me?”

“Hurt
you?
Do you know what it’s like to take something and despise yourself for taking it? Hannah, I
wanted
it. I wanted what you had. And I left because I couldn’t
afford
to stay in the sorority.”

“I didn’t know Mother had. . . done that.”

“I suspected as much on Christmas Eve. Jean was as nervous as a”—Daintry laughed—“as a whore in church.” She examined a fingernail.
“I like the way you put it: ‘deal.’ Believe it or not, I admired your mother. The arrangement had a certain . . . tooth-and-nail
quality.”

I believed it. “Would you have gone tooth and nail for me without an ‘arrangement’?”

Daintry’s expression served as answer, contempt naked in the slant of her eyes. She squared her shoulders, stretching as though
she were vastly weary. “My God, but you and Peter are alike. I told Peter all about your quotes.” My stomach contracted. “Idealists,
both of you. That’s what you have in common. His idealism gets him in trouble. Does yours?” She swiveled her plain wedding
band. “It’s why we’re leaving Rural Ridge early.”

“Because of—”

“Don’t imagine you have anything to do with it, mind you.”
Mind you,
Kathleen O’Connor’s old Irish expression. “I wouldn’t want you to enjoy any kind of martyrdom. A blue-haired parishioner
doesn’t approve of all the changes Peter’s made at St. Martin’s. So she withheld her usually generous pledge. It’s the time-honored
way of protesting a ministry. Peter went to her and suggested that she find another parish if she couldn’t support this one.”

Daintry shook her head. “So biddy blue-hair and Ultrasuede contacted the bishop. The good bishop doesn’t mind so much about
the changes; change has become the battle cry of the Episcopal Church. Oh yes, I know all about how it pains you—Peter told
me that, too. But the bishop minded like hell about Peter’s un-Christ-like suggestion. Didn’t I tell you it was all about
money?

“So we’re leaving. Fortunately I can take my career on the road. This time I get to leave you. But there’s a benefit to moving
you taught me your first Thanksgiving home from Wyndham. With moving, you get to reinvent yourself.”

Reeling with a dizzying suspension of time and a pain I couldn’t place, I began walking through the woods. Away from the soggy
columbarium and into the weak sunlight toward the cemetery. Away from a past I couldn’t change and a present I couldn’t escape.

Though Daintry followed step for step, I kept going. Through the graveyard, across flat and buckling graves, old acquaintances
of mine. I touched an obelisk here, a listing, squared monument there. I knew where I was going.

But as I neared, something looked . . . not right. Something had changed since I’d last visited the rocking horse rider. And
reaching it, I discovered what.

The chubby angel’s body was headless, severed at the neck. Vandals, perhaps, though I hoped some invisible crack in the concrete
had finally succumbed to the elements, unable to withstand the freezing force of the snowstorm, the dramatically plunging
temperatures. Despite the age of the grave the break itself was jagged, raw, rough, the pale gray color of new cement. The
head, its curls and cheeks and parted lips intact, lay on the ground. The lovely perfection of the marker had been forever
altered, its sweet innocence irretrievably ruined. I knelt beside it, my eyes welling as they had two seasons earlier, with
Peter.

“Take it. Go ahead and take it,” Daintry said. “Can’t be fixed.” As though we were childhood partners in some harmless conspiracy
again, she continued, “Looks like there wouldn’t be any living relatives anyway.” I picked up the cherub head, surprised by
its heft and weight.

“You always were a saver,” Daintry said. “You had an ad tacked to your bulletin board, a photograph of a snowy little farmhouse.
Remember?”

I did remember the picture, the squares of warm window light winking onto a violet-tinted farmyard iced with snow, the promise
of comfort within the cottage. That photograph was what the lit rectory had reminded me of the night I’d come for Mark.

“I wanted to use it on a collage,” she said. “When we glued all those headlines from
Seventeen,
pictures of the baby oil hunks to cardboard, and hung them on our walls.” Daintry tapped her chin. “What did that damn ad
say. . . something. . . ”

“’When you think that nothing can go wrong, that is called security,‘” I answered softly.

“That’s right. Couldn’t remember the line, but I remember it was a stock market ad. Some symmetry there, huh?” She cocked
her head. “What I do remember is that you weren’t allowed to hang
your
collages on your walls, couldn’t mar the paint. So you had to come to my house, where things were always a little slacker.
Where rules were broken.”

“There’s something I want to know.”

“Be my guest.”

“The afternoon at the pool when you sent me down, twelve feet down, to get the money, or locket, or button. You already knew
the silver circle was just a patch of paint. You’d already checked, hadn’t you?”

“I don’t remember that afternoon.”

I had my answer. “I apologize, Daintry. No, it’s more than that. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry. I know nothing happened between you and Peter. You don’t have it in you. You’re too pure, goody-goody to
the end. But I can hate you with good conscience now.”

The words couldn’t hurt me, because I was sorry. Because I was never pure. Not even at seven and eight and nine. I looked
at Daintry and remembered the private measurements, my running list of self-comforting comparisons.
She has stilts, but I have a unicycle. Her hair is prettier, but I’m thinner. Her house has an elevator, but my house has
a basement.
I’d been dishonest with myself. I didn’t like competing, yet it was all about competing, a dark swift current running invisibly
below our friendship.
She has bunk beds, but I have a pool table. Her cursive is better, but my printing is. She’s tall, but I’m cute. She’s adopted,
and I’m not.
So worthless— jealousy, envy—yet exacting such a high price.

“I’m sorry because I never meant to be. . . callous, or exclude you. I’m sorry I didn’t try to change the way things were,
sorry I didn’t know how. Sorry we’re grown. Sorry we can’t have it back, still share something.”

“There’s nothing left for us to share.”

I cradled the head. “Yes, there is. Guilt. Guilt that we let it happen.” I looked at the sightless eyes. “I moved to Rural
Ridge thinking—hoping—to find something uncomplicated. Then you appeared, the . . . embodiment of all that was perfect about
my past. Our past. I thought it would all be so simple. And look at us, Daintry, look at us.”

The church bell began to peal. Long and loud from up the hill it reached us, Easter’s glad chimes. “It was never simple, Hannah,”
Daintry said. “The only thing that was simple was you.”

Then she turned and left me. And though I stood still, I left her, too. We let each other go again, and for the final time.

From Hannah’s quote book:

. . . for as the self bends over the past it identifies what it responds to, vibrates with—what it recognizes; the rest is
worth little. That is what memory teaches us—the discovery of the essential.

—Catharine Savage Brosman

I
n the plots of movies or books or hammock-hatched fantasies, the characters you’re meant to hate get their just fate. It’s
traditional. The beauty queen or the bully or the cheerleader or the football star become alcoholic, addicted, get pregnant.
They grow fat, ugly, are divorced, beaten, left in the dust. Havoc is wreaked, revenge is sweet. You know the drill: comeuppance
all around.