Diana nodded. “She invaded your space.”
“With dead rodents!”
“I get it,” said Diana. She was smiling, which made her look younger. “I had a boyfriend once who was a fisherman. He’d leave his worms in my fridge, in a mayonnaise jar with holes punched in the top. I remember once when I went to get the orange juice they were all there, wriggling around. That was traumatizing.”
Daisy was wiping off the mushrooms, gathering Parmesan cheese and white wine. “Was this a serious boyfriend?”
Diana frowned. “He was,” she said, but she didn’t seem inclined to offer details. “You told me your husband went to boarding school with your brother. Did you meet him then? When you were a little girl?”
“Hal says he remembers meeting me when I was six. I don’t remember this at all.” Daisy couldn’t recall many specifics of the occasions when her brothers had brought friends home from boarding school or college. It was more of a remembered sense of how busy the house got, her mother’s mood of mingled excitement and exasperation. She could picture Judy bustling around with tablecloths and armloads of sheets for the guest-room beds; and how their cleaning lady would come for an extra day that week to help get ready. She could recall the roar of the vacuum cleaner while she and her dad worked in the kitchen, the smells of roasting turkey and pumpkin pie; the feel of powdered sugar on her fingertips as she snuck the almond cookies her bubbe would bring. In her memory, the boys themselves were an undifferentiated mass of loud voices, tall bodies, winter coats and hats and boat-sized sneakers left unlaced by the door. When she and Hal had started dating, she’d asked her brother. Danny had just shrugged, saying, “Must’ve been senior year. I brought—let’s see—Hal and Tim Pelletier and Roger McEwan.” He’d looked abashed as he’d said, “I had a crush on Roger.” She’d wanted to push for more details—about the Thanksgiving visit, about what Hal had been like back then—but Danny’s face was shuttered… and the next morning, Jesse had called.
“Hey, Daisy, I want to ask you for a favor.”
“Sure,” she’d said.
Jesse sighed, and said, “Your brother really doesn’t like talking about Emlen. The Happy Land, or Happy Place, or whatever they call it in the school song—it wasn’t very happy for him, you know?”
“I can imagine,” Daisy said.
“No,” Jesse had said, his voice not unkind, but very firm, “I don’t think you can. Being in the closet back then, knowing your classmates would beat the shit out of you, or worse, if they found out…”
Daisy had apologized. She’d reassured Jesse, that, of course, she wouldn’t pester Danny for any more Emlen reminiscence, or stories about Hal. Which meant she’d had to take Hal’s word for it when he said that she might not have remembered him from that Thanksgiving visit, but that he remembered her: a round-faced girl in a flannel nightgown who’d stared at him and said, “You’re tall.”
Diana seemed charmed by that story. At least, she seemed interested. Head tilted, she said, “So he remembered you, for all those years.”
“Ew, I hope not!” Daisy said, laughing. “No, I don’t think he ever thought of me again until sixteen years later when his mom had died and his widowed father was living on pizza and lo mein. But, once we started dating, we both knew pretty quickly.”
“So was Hal a close friend of your brother’s?”
Daisy considered while she washed the cutting board and the knives. “There were only forty-two boys in Danny and Hal’s class at Emlen. I think that all the boys ended up knowing each other to some degree. Danny and Hal were roommates for their last two years, and Hal was the stroke of the boys’ eight—the rower who sits facing the coxswain. Which was Danny. So they definitely spent a lot of time together, but I really couldn’t say how close they were. I don’t think Emlen was a very happy experience for Danny. David loved it, but Danny…” Daisy pressed her lips together, aware of the other woman’s gaze. “I don’t think that prep school in the 1980s was a picnic.”
“Was he out then?” Diana asked calmly. “Did Hal know?”
“Oh, Lord no. Danny didn’t tell any of us until after college, after my father died. And even then…” Her voice trailed off. Danny had made his announcement in the mid-1990s, right after David’s wedding. David and Elyse had just gotten into the limousine, which would take them to the hotel, when Judy, a little tipsy and resplendent in her mother-of-the-groom beige gown, had turned to him. “Why didn’t you bring a date?” she asked.