Chez Cordelia Read online

  George Frontenac, Danny’s father, never tried to make anyone love it—in fact, he did his best to turn it into a supermarket. But, short of gutting the place and starting over, the task was impossible. He tried to light it up as brightly as the Stop & Shop, but the fluorescent lights were defeated to a large degree by the sheer quantity of stuff in there and the scarcity of the space to accommodate it. The aisles were narrow, barely letting a shopping cart pass, and jammed with articles that couldn’t be made to fit on the shelves. If two shopping carts headed down the same aisle, one simply had to retreat (a feat in itself). And the shelves rose so high the light was cut off in places; this dimness made even Purina Dog Chow and Campbell’s Chicken Consommè look mysterious and appealing. Why this should be, I don’t know, but I do know that buying Campbell’s Chicken Consomm6 at Hector’s was a wholly different experience from buying it at the Stop & Shop on Route 1, and that town shoppers (who of course did their main shopping at the Stop & Shop) running into Hector’s for a can of tomatoes and a pound of butter invariably ended up buying more than that. The dark and the clutter cast a better spell than Muzak; people bought at Hector’s because it was an adventure, however much they sneered at the architecture.

  The Frontenacs lived upstairs under the pointed gables. George once had the mad idea of expanding the market upward, but Claire, his wife, talked him out of it: “Whoever heard of a supermarket with a second floor? How would people get their carts up and down?” George brooded about it for a long time: two airy, uncluttered floors, with maybe a curved ramp leading from one to another, the basics downstairs, the luxury items upstairs. (“Who’s going to decide what’s basic and what’s luxury in a town like this?”) But it never came to anything. “He’s a visionary!” Claire said (not without pride). “We would have had to move!” Danny said (not without horror).

  He loved living over Hector’s, and I envied him his abode. It was right in the middle of everything, it was noisy, it was on Main Street, where, night and day, there was always something going on. I used to hang out there, first in the store, where I bagged groceries for nothing (but I carried them home for people for tips), then upstairs when I got friendly with Snowball, the Frontenacs’ cat. Claire used to let me take Snowball upstairs and feed him when he got hungry. I’ll never forget the first time this happened; it was one of the six or seven high points in my life.

  The store was busy, late on a Friday afternoon. George and Claire were at the checkout counters (no matter how George schemed, there was room for only two), Danny was bagging along with Billy Arp, and I was petting Snowball on the floor under the cigarette display. Snowball was obviously hungry: you could tell because he was so affectionate, with a purr that vibrated above the babble of the cash registers, and he kept sidling away from me and hopping to the counter where Claire was checking out groceries. The customers didn’t like that, of course—a big, dusty white cat jumping on their broccoli and rubbing his head against their cornflake boxes.

  “Delia, honey, could you take him up and feed him?” Claire asked me at last. The scarf she tied her hair up in was askew, her face shone with sweat; she looked especially desperate. “There’s a can open upstairs in the fridge—go right up the back stairs, his dish is on the floor beside the broom closet …”

  I was thrilled. I grabbed Snowball and hurried before Danny could say, “I’ll go, Ma,” or the customers slack off suddenly and leave Claire free. The back stairs smelled of food and cat. The door at the head was unlocked, and inside was the Frontenac kitchen. I’d been there before—trick-or-treating every year, and once when I’d gone with Juliet to collect money for the United Way—but only as far as the door. This time I went right in, as if it were my own house. I released Snowball, who meowed loudly and began to rub fondly against the refrigerator, and I got out the food and scooped some into his dish, an old pink-flowered soup bowl. Then I looked around.

  The late afternoon sun was pouring through the tiny diamond panes; you wouldn’t think they’d let so much light in. There was a chrome dinette set in the middle of the floor, upholstered in red and gray plastic. I fell in love with it, though I knew it was cheap and tacky; it reminded me of the diner Aunt Phoebe sometimes took me to after the movies, called the Little Gem, where I was allowed to consume two orders of French fries, two Cokes, and a hot fudge sundae. My aunt called it the Little Germ, but that was a joke; she ate glazed doughnuts and drank cup after cup of coffee. (I think she had something on with the cook, a tall thin black man with a toothbrush moustache and a chef’s hat that said “Whit” on it. He used to call me “Cookie” and my aunt “Gloria,” I never knew why, and he used to say, “Two orders of fries à la French coming up,” in a funny accent he put on for my benefit.)

  While Snowball audibly chomped his Puss & Boots, I inspected the cookie jar set in the middle of the gray Formica table; it was a jolly monk in a brown robe. Remove his head and shoulders, and there was a monkful of Oreo cookies. It was wonderful to me, the idea of owning a store and being able to pick your cookies from the shelves, whatever you wanted. (At our house, snacks tended to be things like olives, anchovy paste on melba toast, and creamed herring.)

  I fell for the monk, and for the gritty taste of the cookie I shamelessly ate. I was enraptured by the whole room, every detail. There was a spice rack on the wall, twelve bottles with ground-glass stoppers and neat labels; I thought they were adorable. There was a row of graduated-size tin canisters, each with a large cabbage-rose decal; I admired them wholeheartedly. The sounds from the store below rose up, a muted rumble with its own rhythm; I longed to live with such a noise. There was a wooden plaque over the door that said EAST WEST, HOME is BEST, and I had to agree, if this was home. In the cupboards were all my favorite foods: Sugar Pops, Nestlé’s Chocolate Morsels, Campbell’s Pork & Beans, packs of Dentine, canned spaghetti sauce, brownie mix. There were no bookshelves, no books, not even a cookbook, that I could see.

  I began to have the oddest feeling: for the first time, I perceived—really perceived, with all my senses—the largeness and strangeness and wonderfulness of the world. (List of “Senses and What They Perceived”:

  Sight: absence of printed matter

  Hearing: store noises

  Smell: cat

  Touch: plastic upholstery

  Taste: Oreo)

  Hardly any of the things I admired in the Frontenacs’ flat were allowed in my house. Our kitchen was large and oppressively old-fashioned, with a wood stove for heat and a fireplace for atmosphere and a huge English stove called an Aga for cooking. Our cupboards contained wild rice, dried Chinese mushrooms, glacè fruit, pine nuts, soy sauce, and six kinds of olives. We couldn’t have pets because Miranda and Juliet were allergic. The trees around our house sheltered it from noise and sun. And it was crammed with books. The books would drive out the people if they could. We had books the way the Frontenacs had Oreos. But as I stood there in the Frontenac kitchen eating cookies, it came to me with the brilliance of sunlight through diamond panes that it didn’t have to be that way, the way I grew up with. I could choose something else for myself; I could take control of my own life. And for the first time I became impatient to be an adult.

  I peeked with longing in the direction of the rooms beyond the kitchen, and got a tantalizing glimpse of a sofa covered in gold brocade with a red pillow tossed in each corner; my heart lurched as if I beheld John Lennon (and I had no doubt his sofa was similar). But I dared go no further. The kitchen was enough for the moment.

  I don’t know how long I remained, looking around and poking gingerly into cupboards—long enough to eat six cookies and for Snowball to finish his meal and begin washing up in a patch of sun. I left him there, finally, and with the greatest reluctance I’d ever known went back downstairs. I’d had my vision. When Claire (momentarily respited) grinned at me, whisked the white cat hairs and the crumbs off my T-shirt, and said, “Thanks, honey—I’m glad you helped yourself to a cookie,” I was too charmed to be embarrassed.


  “I love your apartment, Mrs. Frontenac,” I breathed.

  She turned, smiling, to wait on a customer, but Danny, setting up a bag, threw me a speculative look.

  Spiritually speaking, I suppose I left my father’s house that afternoon. I know that, ever after, I looked at things differently, as if I’d acquired a pair of special glasses. I watched carefully for places and people I felt comfortable and happy with. My Aunt Phoebe was one, and after my moment of vision I inspected her more closely to find out why.

  She was my mother’s sister, and very like her: tall, fragile, frizzy-haired, blue-eyed, booky. But there were important differences, and I made a list of them in my List Notebook:

  Mom

  Aunt P.

  1. reads all day

  1. runs orchurd

  2. only likes exoctic food

  2. likes all food

  3. hates movies

  3. loves movies

  Aunt Phoebe, I understood, was a failure in my parents’ eyes because she’d once had literary ambitions and talents and had never fulfilled them. My mother, Elizabeth, and her younger sister, Phoebe, were the only children of apple farmers, Grandma and Grandpa Cole, who both died when I was little. I imagine my grandfather up on a ladder, briskly picking apples with his left hand; I feel his lively genes in me. Grandma was a poetess; she wrote verses about nature (birds, trees, and flowers, mostly; occasionally bees, cats, and clouds). She had three names—Helen Harper Cole—and she brought her daughters up to be literary women. She and my grandfather had hoped for a son to work the farm while the daughters read books and wrote poetry, but one didn’t come along.

  When my grandfather died, and Grandma became too feeble to do anything with an apple but eat it sauced, Aunt Phoebe married an apple picker named Jack Appleman, and they ran the orchard together. Grandma Cole didn’t like it, her daughter picking apples instead of writing poems about them, but what could she do? She died, with her hopes for her younger daughter blasted, and my aunt (remorsefully?) collected Grandma’s best poems and had them printed in a little volume she paid for herself. It’s called From the Orchard, by Helen Harper Cole, and it has a pale green cover decorated with golden apples, designed by my aunt. I have a copy here, and if I were ever forced at knifepoint to read a book of poems, I’d probably choose this one. They all seem to rhyme, and a couple of them sound like you could jump rope to them.

  My aunt confided to me one day at the Little Germ that she married Jack Appleman for his name and his moustache. Aunt Phoebe liked moustaches, and in those days no one had one except my father and Clark Gable and Jack Appleman. Jack shaved his off around the time President Kennedy was shot, and they got divorced, and since then my aunt has run the orchard herself. She has a Ph.D. in English literature, seven unpublished novels she’s never shown anyone, and piles of books all over the house, but you’d never have known it. To me, she was just my aunt, Phoebe Appleman, who lived in an orchard, took me to movies, and flirted with moustachioed men—a sensible woman.

  I used to complain to her about the family vice. “Isn’t there something wrong with people who read all the time?” I asked her once.

  She thought for a minute and then said, “Possibly.” That concession alone meant a lot to me (my own family wouldn’t have deigned even to answer, would probably not have looked up from their books), but she went on: “I think too many books can make people dissatisfied with life. It seems so messy by comparison.” She sighed. “I like reading a lot, Delia, but I like living, too.” (By “living,” I took it she meant the Little Germ and all its ramifications.)

  I told her that life’s messiness was one of the things that made it interesting to me. “I like the way you have to keep neatening it up.”

  She gave me a look of mild incredulity. “You like what?”

  “I like trying to make sense out of it,” I elaborated. I did. I went through life like a housewife with a neatness obsession (I have that, too), sorting and arranging and eliminating until it suited me. “You know,” I said, and hit on one of my father’s phrases: “Order out of chaos, Aunt Phoebe.”

  “Delia, honey, that’s what writers do!”

  We had a good laugh over that one. It was after this conversation that she showed me what is probably the only interesting thing about books I have ever learned: the “Note on the Type” a lot of them have in the back. I was fascinated, and I spent a wholly satisfying afternoon going through her books comparing Granjon and Electra and 12-point Romanee (my favorite).

  Aunt Phoebe changed when she got divorced. I was ten, and I remember how she was when Uncle Jack lived with her. She chain-smoked, she came over to our house and cried, she wore matching sweaters and skirts, and she wrote her seven novels while Jack managed the orchard. Then he moved back to the state of Washington (he’s still an apple picker out there, and he writes us every couple of years to say that the Washington apples make the Cole Orchard apples look like gumballs), and Aunt Phoebe pulled herself together. She still looked fragile, but her fragility had something useful about it, like that of a spiderweb, or a tissue. She got going. She put her long hair into a frizzy braid, and she took to hiking, to arguing with people, to shrugging her shoulders a lot, and to sitting on the floor with her chin sticking out and her head against the wall—a meditating posture except for her bright, expectant eyes. She went out and picked her own apples and worked at the stand. She instituted guided tours of the orchard for school groups. She got up on a ladder and painted her house—which had been stark white with black shutters since my grandfather’s day—the color of a greening, and the shutters dark red. She gave me Grandpa Cole’s coin albums for my birthday, told me (in confidence) that I was her favorite niece, and began taking me to the movies on slow winter afternoons when there was no action at the orchard.

  I doubt she ever wrote another word. My parents admitted that she seemed happier, but they said it ruefully, as though she shouldn’t be, or as though happiness wasn’t the point. “Everyone’s got one crazy relative,” my father said (making me wonder if Horatio and Miranda and Juliet would say the same thing about me when we all grew up).

  She never seemed the least bit crazy to me. There were times when I lived from movie to movie, when the postponement of an afternoon with my aunt was a tragedy even Hector’s Market couldn’t assuage. I loved my aunt and her orchard, and I loved the orchard in all its seasons: spring, all blossoms and bees; summer, when the apples blew up like balloons, it seemed overnight; fall, and the taste of the first Spartans; and even winter, when the trees went rough and black, but with tiny buds, if you looked closely. It all seemed far less crazy than sticking in the house getting endless ink transfusions.

  My aunt and I went to New Haven one Saturday afternoon, to see a revival of A Taste of Honey. (We both liked English movies—the more outlandish the accent, the better.) I cried so hard she let me have a cup of coffee, with cream and four sugars, at the Little Germ afterward. Whit brought it over to our table personally, and put his skinny dark hand on my head, and said, “She’s the spitting image of you, Gloria.”

  “Go on,” said my aunt. “She doesn’t look a bit like me.”

  “Around the eyes—look here.” He turned my head like a doorknob under his hand. “Look at those gorgeous eyes—that perky little nose—just like yours.”

  “Bull,” said my aunt.

  I went to the ladies’ room and checked my eyes in the mirror. Except for looking pinkish around the edges, they were the same as ever, narrow and brown like my father’s instead of round and blue like my aunt’s and my mother’s. My perky little nose was red and running. But I hoped, possibly even prayed, that the resemblance was there, and I toyed with the agreeable notion that I was my aunt’s secret child, born under an apple tree. When I went back Whit was still there, examining my aunt’s eyes intently.

  “Feeling better, Cookie?” he asked me. “Ready to order?” He was a handsome man, with a moustache that seemed to bristle out of his nose, and he took my order bac
k to the kitchen (the usual: fries and a sundae) with a spring in his step. My aunt watched him fondly, and so did I.

  Sometimes I stayed overnight in my aunt’s little apple-colored house. She let me watch TV, and one April she actually allowed me to sleep outside under the apple blossoms. She had a fat, playful, apple-eating hound dog named Bounce, whom I loved with a pure and joyful passion similar to my passion for John Lennon. I hugged and romped with Bounce as I would have hugged and romped with John Lennon, given the chance.

  Aunt Phoebe had the great gift of acceptance. I’m convinced it’s a gift, something you’re born with, the ability to take people as they are, to let them take whatever shape they will, and never try to change it. I can’t remember my aunt ever, ever trying to get me to read a book.

  I decided that Aunt Phoebe, and the Frontenacs, lived as close to the way I wanted to live as anyone I could think of, and some nights while I was poring over my coin albums I used to lay plans for becoming more like them. It was on one of those nights that I decided to marry Danny. What a shortcut! To marry right into the family! I was overcome with chuckles at my cleverness, but even if they hadn’t been in the middle of a game of Botticelli I couldn’t, of course, have told my family.

  I had become a regular at the Frontenacs’ by then. I loved it there, especially in their apartment, where the TV was on every night after the store closed, and where there was no one watching everything I said, ready to pounce on every grammatical error with some witty riposte, and where there didn’t seem to be any books except the Bible, TV Guide, and Modern Grocer. As I got older, my parents let me go out in the evenings, and I was always at the Frontenacs’, eating dinner and watching TV and playing poker with them, stalking Danny.