Even Now (9 page)

“But what?”

“There’s something sly about cats. They’re stealthy and secretive. They . . .” I tried, “
Withhold
things.” Peter laughed. “You know what I mean,” I insisted. “No matter their gender, cats seem female. Females. . . turn
on each other. They’re predatory.”

“I should probably have her neutered, but she doesn’t really seem mine.”

“There you are, that’s another thing. No ownership. No loyalty. It’s like . . .” I gave up. “If you don’t know what I mean,
I can’t explain it.”
“If you don’t understand why Thursday’s the best day of the week, I can’t explain it,”
she’d said in sixth grade. And later:
“You can’t define ‘sexy.’ You know it when you see it.”

“But I do understand,” he said. “The way they play with things, torture their victims for fun.”

Years before he was to torture Ceel with more lasting effects, Geoff O’Connor had invented spit tortures. Occasionally he
deigned to play Monster with us on summer evenings. Insane with suspense, Daintry and I invariably ventured from our hiding
places and were trapped as easily as the wild mustangs in my
Misty of Chincoteague
books. A mute spectator, I watched Daintry pinned to the ground by her older brother, his head a foot above hers. He worked
his lips to form a bubble of saliva. The bubble became a bead, and the bead grew into a dangling glutinous worm that Geoff
sucked quickly back inside his mouth at the crisis moment when Daintry shrieked and writhed, and I was certain the glob would
splat on her face. The spit torture became one in our repertoire of playful cruelties that escalated from roughhousing on
the grass, immune to my mother’s warnings: “Don’t blame me if you get itchy!” But with its opposing elements of pleasure and
fear, it wasn’t so different after all from Daintry’s appeal to me.

A rumble and blossom of dust signaled a truck’s passage along the unpaved service road no wider than a cart path that wound
through the graveyard. I squinted at a barely visible, curiously shaped statue and swung my legs over the fence. September
sunshine was hot on my back as I made my way down the hill toward the headstone, Peter just behind me.

Except that it wasn’t a headstone, but a concrete rocking horse no higher than my knees. Astride it sat an angel, a plump
cherub whose stocky thighs were clamped round the pony’s girth. But the child’s moss-mottled fingers held no reins; they were
forever clasped in prayer. Or entreaty.

Nearly hidden by brambles, a porous stone was embedded in the earth just beneath the little statue. I lifted the thorny branches
gingerly and read the plain and plaintive dates etched there. “Isobel. A little girl. Only seven. She’d be. . . eighty.” I
blinked back sudden tears in my eyes. “Every now and then you’re reminded of how much you take your children for granted.”
Stalling to collect myself, I touched the grainy chubby cheek of the angel child and stood.

Peter, though, had seen. “Need my handkerchief?”

A handkerchief. My father had always carried two items in his pocket, a Chap Stick and a handkerchief.
Snot rag,
Daintry had called it.
Gross.
I shook my head. “Little hay fever.”

He held out the limp white flag. “Hannah—”

“It’s okay, really. For a minute there my heart was puncturated.”

“Translate?” he said, and I loved that single-word question, implying it was all he needed to say.

“Once after soccer practice, Mark’s chest hurt from all the running and he told me his heart felt
puncturated
. He was about Isobel’s age.”

Peter’s hand closed over my forearm. “Everyone does it. We’re all guilty.”

“Does what? Of what?”

“Taking people for granted, like you said.”

So he’d listened, not turned away in embarrassment from my emotional moment.
Of course he did,
I told myself,
he’s a
minister.

Now he tugged gently on my sleeve. “This way, in the woods.”

Within the forest ten minutes later, Peter halted, pointed. A plot of ground barely fifteen feet in diameter was outlined
with cinder blocks. Some persevering soul had planted fall pansies in the hollows of the rough bricks, and the purple-petaled
faces bloomed valiantly.

“This is the columbarium?”

“So-called,” Peter said. “Not terribly hallowed, is it?” It wasn’t. It was perfectly square, perfectly plain, perfectly terrible.
Invasive wild strawberry vines competed with airier but no less determined honeysuckle tendrils for dominance of a tree stump
in one quadrant. The spreading, palm-shaped leaves of violets matted and overlapped another corner, and above a thatch of
grass gone wild, dandelions sprouted. Peter leaned to pick one of the tempting downy spheres.

“Careful,” I said. “That’s poison ivy beside your foot.”

He pointed to a two-foot-high tree. “At least there’s a magnolia.”

“See how spindly the trunk is? Just a volunteer seedling. It’ll probably never bloom, and we don’t want a magnolia. It drops
leaves, and the shade kills anything under it eventually. The three smaller trees are keepers, dogwoods.” I stepped within
the enclosure and knelt to read the few markers. They, at least, were lovely: small, simple plaques of black marble inscribed
with no more than dates and names. “Only four?”

“Can you blame anyone? Ninety-nine percent of the world can’t bear the idea of cremation, and this place would hardly change
anyone’s mind.”

I brushed away nut hulls and stroked the marble’s cool surface, thinking of the mahogany box that had held Daddy’s studs and
cuff links, now holding his ashes. It had rained for five full days before Mother and Ceel and I accompanied the minister
to the Cullen cemetery for a private interment beneath still gloomy skies. Coffee-colored runoff had pooled in our footsteps
on the marshy earth, and the hem of the rector’s vestment quickly grew sodden and discolored with wet. Through the fog of
my grief I’d sadly marveled at how little of the red Carolina clay required unearthing to accommodate a container smaller
than a shoebox.

“Hannah?”

I looked over my shoulder into his sun-speckled face. “My father was a one percent.”

“Was he?” He squatted beside me. “Will you help me, then?”

“You’re very persuasive.”

“Persuasion was my best subject at seminary.” His eyes fixed on mine. “Shake their hand hard and look them in the eye,” I
was constantly advised by my father. Common advice, yet I’ve found that truly
looking someone in the eye
—not briefly, fleetingly, but direct and unglazed—is one of the most difficult physical things for people to do. Did he learn
that at seminary, too?

I stood, moving away. “What was Daintry’s best subject?”

He lifted his shoulders. “Daintry made straight As in everything.”

Of course she did.
“I’m gonna flunk our English test for sure,”
she’d say as we waited for the school bus.
“I didn’t study a bit.”

“Me either,”
I’d say, an immediate partner in disingenuousness. Because we both had studied and we both were lying.

“Daintry gets a dollar for every A,”
I’d report to Mother, hoping for equal treatment.

“It’s poor practice to pay for grades,”
she’d answer, unmoved.

I roused myself from childhood’s far corners. “I ought to go,” I told Peter, and together we climbed the hill. Again he opened
the car door for me.

“What’s a fair wage for your services?”

“I’m not a landscape designer. You can’t do that.” “Hannah,” he said with easy reproval as I ducked inside. “The choir’s paid.”

Another surprise. “Are they?”

“I wish I didn’t have to be the one to tell you that the church is as much about illusion as anything else.”

I knew about illusion. Daintry had taught me that, too.

We spent our summer afternoons at the town pool, the public swimming pool down the steep, rooty incline from the Kiwanis cabin.
Playing Keep Away, Marco Polo, or Sharks and Minnows—the O’Connor version, with different, tougher rules. The pool lay behind
a chain-link fence and beneath top-heavy pines that cast the deep end in chilly, shifting shadows. The painted-plaster, false-blue
depths scared me, and I avoided them as instinctively as I avoided the dank basement bathroom of the cabin, where teenagers
sought the airless gray isolation to grind against one another.

“Go for it,” she’d prodded me. Something shiny and silvery and round—a button? a dropped locket? a quarter or half-dollar?—was
lying on the bottom. “Go on.”

“I can’t hold my breath that long.”

“Yes, you can. Then we’ll be able to get a Coke and nabs.”

I looked again. It had to be money: The circular shape never moved but wavered back and forth invitingly, shrinking and enlarging
with the constant motion of the water.

“You,” I said, and toed the wet concrete lip that read
12 FEET.

“Don’t be a baby,” Daintry said. We were eleven. “Besides, I brought the money for a snack yesterday.”

Frightened but commanded, I summoned courage, stamina, and the lungful of air needed for a plunge past thrashing bodies, past
the lifeguard’s unalert eyes, to the overchlorinated, high-pitched pressure of the silent, sunless bottom.

“Go on,” she said, and I dove, arrow straight, for the cold, ear-pounding deep.

Kicking, blinking, I raked my hand over and over on the scratchy surface of the pool floor, groping at the spot where the
treasure had to be. Had to be, I’d seen it, Daintry had seen it. But nothing was there. No medallion, no locket, no coin.
Until, lungs and ears and eyes afire, I kicked frantically back to the surface toward the slimy runoff gutter littered with
pine needles and paper scraps. “Daintry,” I gasped, prepared for commiseration.

For we’d been tricked, fooled by nothing more than the peeling blue paint of the swimming pool floor; deluded by a circular
patch of ordinary gray concrete laid bare by negligent maintenance.

Or only I’d been tricked. Because Daintry hadn’t waited to congratulate or commiserate, to pull me out or buy a treat or play
a game. Far up the hill I saw the flag of the towel around her waist disappear into the squalid wet-walled cave of the changing
rooms. She’d sent me down deep and left me.

Peter Whicker’s arms stretched on either side of the car door as if safely enclosing me within the opening. Outlined by the
sun, his silhouette was like that of Sunday’s Eucharist, when I’d glimpsed that brief bodily shudder. I remembered something
I’d meant to tell him, to test him, to see his response. “ ’To make favorably inclined,‘” I quoted from the heavy
Webster’s
Hal and I used to arbitrate our casual challenge of definitions. Routinely stumped by the words in my husband’s unparagraphed,
undialogued tomes of history and philosophy, I never guessed correctly. “ ’To appease,‘” I went on, “ ’conciliate.‘”

Peter looked at me a long moment, amusement and admiration playing across his features. “Say it,” he said. “Say you will.”

“All right, I will. I’ll do it.”

He smiled broadly, knocked on the windshield, and began walking toward the parish hall. I watched his dark figure—trousers
and shirt and head—in the rearview mirror. Suddenly he whipped round, never breaking his stride in a backward walk. “Propitiation!”
he called, laughing.

Peter Whicker had remembered something from the party, too.

“ ’Solipsism,‘” Hal said from behind the newspaper.

“A figure of speech? Sounds like ‘soliloquy,‘” I guessed. “Maybe something related to a Freudian slip?”

“Impossible—doesn’t fit in this sentence.” He riffled through the dictionary and read aloud. “ ’The theory that only the self
exists.‘”

“Foiled again,” I said, looking over the school list of teacher workdays and holidays that had come home in Ellen’s bookbag.
I opened my calendar and began marking the dates. “Easter’s early this year, mid-March.”

Hal turned on a floor lamp. “And six months away. I can’t believe you’re entering those dates already. Is there a single spontaneous
bone in your body?”

I thought of the magazine quizzes—
Teen, Young Miss, Seventeen
—Daintry and I had taken, reading aloud the coy questions and advice.
Keep him guessing! Mysteriousness is interesting! Don’t be predictable! I spontaneously took a job today,
I could have said. I curled my hair forward over my forehead, creating a ragged fringe. “Maybe I’ll cut bangs. How’s that
for spontaneous?”

“Unh-hunh. You self-destruct every time you go into a beauty parlor.”

I flicked a finger against the newsprint hiding his face. “How was the mad mommy?”

“Placated.”

“Is that it? No tantrums, no threats to withdraw her child, no bargains for behavior?”

Hal was silent. Finally from behind the paper he said, “I can’t discuss it with you. It’s confidential.”

“What?” The answer was stunning. “Confidential to me? Your wife?”

Wordlessly he folded the section, rose, and stretched. “So how was your day? What did you do?”

I thought of my day, the church and the columbarium. Of Peter with his handkerchief and tennis shoes and mean mother manners.
The way he’d looked at me, listened to me, surprised me. “I didn’t do anything today,” I said to Hal, and slit open the electric
bill. “Nothing at all.”

From Hannah’s quote book:

It’s a shock . . . growing old—suddenly finding yourself on unremembered corners surrounded by a flood of forgotten association.

—Zelda Fitzgerald

T
he flat-roofed roadside emporium looked afloat on a bubbling orange sea, the parking lot teeming with pumpkins. In a gaudy
Halloween hallucination, late afternoon sun glinted off the slick rinds.

Searching for the big, bigger, biggest, Ellen scrambled nimbly among the pumpkins. But I headed to the rear in search of a
different kind of treasure and discovered it behind decorative tepees of dried cornstalks: a jumble of potted plants left
to their own survival on brick-and-board shelves. The plastic pots were crowded one against the other, the soil within them
crumbly, the perennials uprooted from some backyard garden grown leggy and brown edged. I touched a black-eyed Susan bloom
dried crisp as paper.