He appeared above me. “I thought I’d lost you.”
“Oh, Peter, look, a pitcher plant.” I ran fingers down the fragile stem of a single-leaved wildflower no taller than my palm, searching, hoping. It was there. Seemingly separate from the plant itself was a tiny fleshy jug springing upright from the moist ground. I gently touched the rubbery curves, the slight opening at its tip. “When I was little, this was the greatest find in the woods. We pretended these were fairy milk bottles. But if you pick it, it’s ruined, shrivels into nothing. Because this is the root.”
Peter’s fingers grazed mine as he touched the little bottle. An erratic spiral of falling leaves died nearby, floating soundlessly to earth. Exaggerated, mingling scents of decay and dryness stung my nose. I thought of Daintry, the other half of we. “I’ve changed my mind about transplanting it. It might die if I move it. Two more weeks and it’ll be killed by a hard frost anyway.” Somehow September had become November.
“And will you still come to the columbarium when the snake days are over?” Peter asked. “Will you still be here?”
I looked at him, the dark eyes, the disobedient hair. This hopeful, playful, compassionate man.
How would I have answered the question that I’d asked of others: What is it that draws you, appeals, attracts? Boyish but earnest, I could have said. Vulnerable. Funny. Gentle. Ordinary. And though adjectives were enough, they weren’t all.
The way someone listens, I’d have told Ceel if she’d pressed. Intensely, so that when you’re with him he’s completely with you. How he tilts his head to talk, leans to listen. Interest, I’d have said, interest is more erotic than anything else.
A single sunlit shaft behind Peter’s head blinded me. I didn’t think, This man is a priest. I didn’t think, How sorry will I be? “Yes,” I answered him. “I’ll still be here.”
From Hannah’s quote book:
People change and forget to tell each other.
—Lillian Hellman
Chapter 8
See, El?” We were watching the weather channel. “What did I tell you about that thunder?” Snow was predicted, and the forecast thrilled me. At breakfast I’d said it even smelled like snow outside, an assertion Hal had ridiculed.
“Those guys are always wrong,” Mark said. “You said we could go today, Mom.”
“It’s only your permit.”
“You promised.”
I’d planned an afternoon of games and fires and making soup. Cozy, nesting activities. But I had, I’d promised. “Okay, let’s go.”
Mark zeroed in on the driver’s license office in Asheville like a guided missile, leaving me to navigate the triple-story maze of county administration departments alone. When I finally located it, he was waiting to borrow a pen from a woman who was filling out her own form at the imposingly high counter. “Mom,” he said, “this is—”
“Have at it,” Daintry said, handing him her pen.
“Thanks,” Mark said, and sat down at one of half a dozen desks.
“They all look alike, don’t they?” Daintry said. “Dingy linoleum, no windows, and a Lion’s Club chewing gum machine. Peter and I are on the lam, license-wise. He seems to think getting them changed to North Carolina is on my job description.” She rummaged through her pocketbook for change. Purse, Kathleen O’Connor had said. Pocketbook, my own mother said.
“Price of gum has gone up, though.” She inserted a dime into the glass bubble’s slot and held her palm open beneath the dispenser mouth. “Our lucky day,” she said, checking the assortment of multicolored squares and offering me one. “No licorice, right?”
Daintry pointed to a large appliance on a wobbly card table. “And of course an avocado green coffee percolator straight from the fifties.” She took a Styrofoam cup from the stack. “I never had an avocado before I ate one at your house. Your mother put them in salads.” She flicked a sugar packet. “You and I fought over those chunks.”
“And I’d never had shepherd’s pie before yours.” O’Connor meals were noisy gatherings, interrupted constantly by phone calls from patients since Jack O’Connor worked alone, had no partner to be on call. “What color are the stools?” he’d ask nonchalantly into the receiver, chewing all the while. He’d hang up, fork another mouthful, and say to anyone who was listening, “If only I didn’t have to deal with the parents. If only the clinic were drive-through, and the babies were just handed through the window.” An attitude that might have predicted his later downfall. Though perhaps the opinion demonstrated just the opposite: that he cared so.
Daintry wrinkled her nose. “I’m not much of a chef.”
I was wrong, then. While I cooked kid-friendly suppers of chicken, spaghetti, tacos, I’d pictured suppers— no, dinners—at the rectory as something either glamorous or romantic: risotto with asparagus, peasant soup and chunks of bread.
Daintry filled the cup. “Now’s our chance for coffee.”
It wasn’t the meeting I’d imagined, a musty office basement. But it was Daintry, after all, and we were together. I sat beside her. Mark’s head was bent in concentration.
“So he’s old enough for his permit?” she said.
I only nodded, attempting no jokes about staying off the road. Somehow I couldn’t see Daintry, this new and different version, finding humor in comments I’d heard from other women whose children were beginning to drive. “I hoped he might be satisfied with cruising around with Wendy Howard for a while.”
“That decorator’s daughter? With the boobs?”
I laughed, lowered my voice. “That’s the one. Have you ever seen anyone exude sex the way that girl does? Even the way she stands is provocative. I suggested to Mark one day last week that maybe Wendy’s breasts were almost too big.”
“What did he say?”
“He said, ‘I wouldn’t go that far, Mom.‘”
“It’s the McDonald’s,” Daintry said.
“Who?”
“In twenty years some scientist will discover a breast-enlarging chemical in McDonald’s hamburgers.”
“Could be. We never looked like that.”
“Don’t be jealous. It’s her time to be sexy.”
The accusation stung. Was I jealous? Daintry made me feel like a pinched-face disapproving matron. I watched Mark erase an answer and changed the subject. “The last time I was in a driver’s license office was to get a blood test before my wedding. Only in Cullen are the marriage license and driver’s license office one and the same. The needle sank into the crook of my arm, and I cooled out right in the chair. There really is such a thing as smelling salts. They used them on me.”
“Did you faint because you were afraid your corpuscles might give you away?”
“VD? Come on.”
“Nonvirginal status.”
“Hush.” I cocked my head toward Mark. “I’m not ready to fall off my perfect parent pedestal yet.”
“Please. What is he, fifteen and a half? Mark’s probably not a virgin himself. Or maybe he takes after you?” Both suggestions chilled me, but Daintry was grinning.
“What are you doing in here? Alan is waiting out there on the dance floor!”
What I was doing was hiding in the harsh fluorescence of the girls’ bathroom.
“He. . . ”
“He what?” She was wearing a pink-and-white-striped knit dress and pink fishnet stockings clipped to a yellow gingham garter belt. I knew; I had the identical garter belt.
“He kept putting his face against my neck. Here. . . ” I gestured, placing my palm between ear and collarbone. “Sort of, I don’t know . . .” I drew my shoulder to my ear as though wiping away the warm dampness of Alan’s mouth against my skin. “Nuzzling me.”
“He wants you to turn your head,” Daintry explained patiently. Not scornfully, not derisively, simply imparting information. “He wants you to turn your head so you can kiss. So you can make out.”
“While we’re dancing?” Diane Walker glanced at me from the mirror where she was applyi
ng eye shadow to a lid already bruised with blue.
“It’s the last dance,” Daintry said, as if that explained everything. “He won’t get another chance.”
So I’d turned my head and, with Alan’s hand at my back, let myself be led to a darkened corner crowded with folding chairs. To make out.
“Don’t you read the papers?” Daintry said now. “You’re as bad as Peter. Or as innocent. I keep pushing him to lead some sex seminars for parish teens. It ain’t all about God.”
I thought of Peter. I knew what it felt like to be pushed by Daintry O’Connor. Go on, chicken. “Go on,” she’d said. In our roamings far beyond the neighborhood, we’d come upon an abandoned house, derelict and condemned, one spring afternoon.
I didn’t want to be there. I wanted to be at home forcing Ceel and her after-school playmate to turn a frazzled length of tow rope against the driveway so I could learn to run into the circling rope instead of beginning like a novice, a baby, with the rope held lightly at my ankles. But Daintry wanted to play Lewis and Clark and explore. Daintry won.
At the house’s foundation I poked around wild jonquils bent beneath soda and beer bottles hurled into the lot by passersby. I couldn’t decide whether to use my hands to pick flowers—I’d already cashed in my daffodil allotment at home—or take the bottles to trade in for nickels. Daintry and I were saving to buy one of the blue Easter chicks baking under a light bulb at the five-and-ten. We were always saving something—Blue Horse seals and Icee points carefully scissored from sticky, empty cups, even our mothers’ Green Stamps, complaining that they never fit the squares of the S&H books.
Daintry called to me from the rotting porch, and I looked up, hoping she was ready to go. She’d already mastered jumping into a circling jump rope; had demonstrated it on the playground that day at school. “Cinderella, dressed in yellow, went upstairs to meet her fellow,” she’d chanted, black hair flying in perfect Pocahontas braids. When had she learned to jump in like that? And where was I when she did?
“Look, Hannah.” The door to the weathered house was intact and locked, but above the handle was a mosaic of stained glass. I had to admit it was wondrous. We’d never seen stained glass anywhere but at St. Francis.
“Let’s take some home,” Daintry said.
“How?”
“Break it, dumbo.”
“But—”
“Nobody lives here anymore. Nobody wants it. Quit following the rules. I’ll do the blue,” Daintry directed. “You do the red.” She handed me a broken board; there were plenty lying around. “One, two . . .” She saw me falter. “Go on,” she said. “Go on! Three!” I struck the pane, shattering it with a sickening twinkle. I looked up from the shards at my sneakered feet, horrified to discover that Daintry had held back. “Gotcha last,” she said, laughing, and smashed her board into the blue glass.
“Look what Daintry and I found.” I showed my father that night.
“Where did you get that?” he asked.
“That old house nobody lives in near the Freeman place.”
“That house belongs to Mr. Freeman, too,” my father had said sternly, and made me call up the owner, confess what I’d destroyed, and offer to replace the window.
The gum coating had melted in my hand, green as the glass. “Did you get punished for breaking that window on the Freeman property?” I asked her. “The stained glass?” I was sure she didn’t remember making me; people don’t recall traits and gestures that are second nature.
“Hunh,” Daintry said. “You made me help pay for it.”
I laughed.
“What?”
“You made me, I made you. Even steven.”
Her eyes flickered over the cup’s rim. “But tell me about Hal. He wasn’t the first, was he. Who was? One of those cookie-cutter khaki-clad frat boys?”
I thought of Hal in those days, when I was crazy for him, craved touching him, threading my fingers through his coarse-textured hair, the color of tallow. How, knowing his class schedule, I’d take an indirect route to my own class just to cross his path. Whatever Hal was, he wasn’t Daintry’s to denigrate. “I married one of those cookies, and he was a cute cookie, too. We couldn’t all date the editor of the newspaper. Why, is this a lemon squeeze? Was Ford your first?”
“No,” she said, snapping the wooden stirrer in pieces. “So what’s Hal like? I was gone by his era.”
“Not gone. Just. . . inactive.”
“No, Hannah.” I heard pity in her voice, yet something else: regret? Wistfulness? “I was definitely gone by then.”
Mark was giving his best gangster expression to the instant photo machine. “Why did you?” I said. “You left me. Again.”
Daintry’s eyes hardened. “That TTF stuff, true tried friend,” she mimicked the sorority password. “Such crap.”
Her derision, the swift change of tone, was startling. “I know it was crap. Everybody knew it was crap. We howled about it. We howled that the Tri Delts got into coffins during initiation to be born again, or that Chi Os had to recite the Greek alphabet. But who cares? It was just someplace to hang your hat, to give you a sense of—”
But Daintry finished my sentence—“Identity”—and I wondered whether only I was aware of the irony, that for so long my sense of self had been linked to her.
“Do I look like a thug?” Mark interrupted, waving his newly minted permit beneath my nose.
Daintry smiled up at him. “Your mother and I took driver’s ed together.”
Of course we had. Our birthdays were close enough to place us with the same schedule and teacher and car with its STUDENT DRIVER rooftop warning. Daintry’s birthday was in May and mine wasn’t until July, but then again, there wasn’t much she didn’t do before me, from cussing to kissing to starting her period. Whether it was nookie or fuck, it was Daintry who knew it.
“Do they still have teachers from the high school as instructors?” she asked Mark.
He murmured a response, but I was watching Daintry. She sensed it, she knew it. The whole town had known it. The class president and the teacher. The vale-dictorian and the teacher. Black-haired Liat and Mr. Simpson, the copper-haired drama coach.
Mike Simpson taught drama at the high school and moonlighted as a driver’s ed instructor. He was in his early thirties, slight, with springy auburn hair and blue eyes that took in both road hazards and our reactions to his risqué double entendres and innuendos. “Any space for me in your mutual admiration society?” he asked us. He was funny, high-spirited, full of theater anecdotes and inquiring glances. He was also married, with a toddling child.
Teachers were normally feared or ridiculed and scarcely considered outside the classroom. Freshmen weren’t permitted to try out for plays, so Daintry and I had no classes with Mr. Simpson. Navigating three-point turns on the Cullen streets, its four stoplights, the one venture all the way to the interstate, had been odd, wonderful, and not simply due to the novelty of driving or the hope and dread that Mr. Simpson might slam his foot to the famed passenger brake the cars were equipped with. He was charming and candid with us, joking and talking as if we were equals. “Call me Mike,” he said.
I admired Mr. Simpson, appreciated his driving tips and his ease with us, though I could never bring myself to call him Mike. But Daintry called him that, and more. Daintry O’Connor had loved Mike Simpson, and he’d loved her. Or so the rumor went. Not then, but later, during and after he directed her in South Pacific.
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 throu
gh 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.
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