Even Now

by Susan S. Kelly

  “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

  Chapter 9

  At 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 f
or 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.

  “Obliquity,” he murmured. “Know the definition?”

  Yet there was the time I’d have taken his hand, said, “Let me help you,” with invitation. Now there was only that lackadaisical reach of hand to hip as one or the other of us tried to decide whether we felt sufficiently sexy to screw. There was no gauging the sexual shifts from furtive and frantic, to tender and easy, to social joking about Halley’s comet frequency and getting lucky. Now there was only Hal closing his book, cutting off the bedside lamp.

  “Watch what you put the electric blanket on,” he said. “I got hot last night.” Now there was only bedtime appliance instructions. It comes to this.

  “Love you,” he said.

  “Me too,” I said, automatic as the sex scene check. It’s no one’s fault. Of course I loved him, too. I loved his patience, his serenity, his logic, his steadfastness. No, I admired them, as I admired much about him. But admiration is a distant cousin to love.

  Love. “I absolutely love your husband,” an Asheville Academy teacher had told me recently. “Don’t you?”

  Love. “Did you notice how Ed Jordan couldn’t keep his hands off his new wife?” I’d asked Hal after a party in Durham. “He didn’t let her out of his sight. Talk about true love.”

  “That’s infatuation,” Hal had returned noncommittally, “not love. Which would you rather have?”

  Love. “Mark loves Wendy,” Ellen had whispered to me through rubber-gloved fingers while we scrubbed terra-cotta pots with bleach before winter storage. In the driveway the two teenagers were washing the car, and I looked up in time to see Mark flick a soapy rat-tailed rag at Wendy in shameless, timeless flirtation. “Mark needs a Wendy fix,” Ellen said, and giggled.

  “That’s not the same thing as a you fix,” I said as Wendy squealed obligingly and lunged for Mark, equally shameless. Don’t be jealous. It’s her turn to be sexy. “It’s different.”

  “How?”

  “A you fix is about love. That’s. . . ”

  Ellen had stripped off the gloves, on to other matters. “My hands stink.”

  Love. “They get along well,” Mark had observed of a classmate’s parents as we drove away from their house. I knew what prompted my son’s comment. As the couple chatted with us they’d stood with arms en-twined, hands in each other’s back pockets, smiling at each other more than at us. There’d been a kind of wistful envy in Mark’s tone of voice. I reached across the seat and patted his thigh, for which small affection I was rewarded with a scowl. I also knew that the pair was in marriage counseling. That twining and touching and smiling was therapist-prescribed behavior. I knew the look of a couple making a concerted, demonstrative effort at reloving. You had to be married to recognize it.

  Hal’s leg jerked without warning, a nightly routine of twitching with slumber’s unwinding. I braced for the next nocturnal jolt, his limbs bolting with inconsistent spasms. I’d tried speaking aloud to him, even laying my leg heavily over his. Nothing worked. How did it happen, the slide into same-house separation?

  “How do you know if you love someone enough to marry them?” I’d asked my father once, at Mark’s age, perhaps. Asked with all the sincerity I’d once asked how he could sleep every night, wasn’t he afraid our house would burn down? I’d sat on the stoop in the velvet dampness of a summer night, chin upon my nightgowned knees.

  “When you can’t stand to be without someone for a single day, when it hurts your heart to be away from them even for an hour, then you know,” my father had said, equally sincere. He hadn’t lived long enough for me to ask him how you kept it that way.

  Unable to sleep, I rose, fumbled through the blackened house, and switched on the outside floods. Checking, scanning, hoping for the first flake. Nothing. My old wives’ prediction for Ellen had come to nothing, like my attempts with Daintry. The spotlit glare illuminated only the sad battered bird feeder lying on the ground where it had drop
ped unnoticed, as if finally yielding to the invisible weight of neglect. The cedar shake roof had fallen off, the glass side panels shattered.

  Hal’s corduroy pants were crumpled before the louvered doors of the washing machine. Apparently he couldn’t be bothered to put them in the hamper like everyone else. The dull olive nap of the fabric was dotted with burrs and tiny seed pod triangles. My husband was constructing his rock wall with the same thorough perfection he brought to any task. At the sight of the stubborn hitchhikers I felt a sudden spasm myself, a lurch of love. Of course I loved Hal. Surely. Inadequate, inarticulate, mis- and overused word with no definition, but the right word all the same.

  “What do you tell them?” I’d asked Peter when he’d come to the woods after a marriage counseling session. He’d looked tired, beaten. I couldn’t touch him, but I could talk to him. “ ’Don’t go to bed mad’?”

  “That old shopworn dictum.” He laced his fingers. “There’s a scientific reason people in the throes of romance are dreamy, think life is perfect. Our bodies literally release a chemical when we fall in love. The euphoria hormone. It only lasts six months.”

  I sat beside him, grubby hands tucked inside my folded knees. “But what do you tell them,” I asked again, “later? Afterward?”

  Peter creased a leaf along its spine and folded it neatly as a letter. “They don’t want to hear what I say. That after a certain time, loving is an act of will. It’s . . . work.” We were both silent a moment. “The truth is, people don’t need marital counseling before they’re married. They need it when they’re married.” He’d sailed the leaf away. “Do you suppose I could change that rule, too?” Since then we hadn’t spoken of marriage, or of Daintry, or Hal.

  I brushed at the clinging pods on Hal’s pants and thought of another pair, Peter’s. He’d wanted to help plant the bulbs.

  “No,” I’d told him. “You’re not dressed right. It’s dirty work.”

  “I won’t get dirty. No one will know.” The reference was innocent, but the words rang between us, fraught. “Because I’ll do the shoveling,” he said quickly, stooping, moving with that restless energy, “and you’ll put in the bulbs.” But his trouser cuffs had gotten soiled, and I’d worried over them, kneeling to scrub the stains with my shirttails as Peter stood above me. Like other physical gestures—his hand at my waist or elbow, the touch of fingers when I gave him an apple, my palm over the small welt of his bee-stung finger—it had felt an intimate act.