Chez Cordelia Read online

  He and I used to stretch out on the floor on our stomachs, leaning on our elbows, and watch Star Trek and The Dick Van Dyke Show and The Wonderful World of Disney. There was always a bag of Cheez-Its or Fig Newtons between us. His parents didn’t care what we ate, or how much we ate, as long as we didn’t get crumbs on the gold wall-to-wall. We munched with paper napkins spread out under our chins. We used to feed Cheez-Its to Snowball, who crunched obediently over his own napkin. Claire and George would often sit on the sofa behind us; they seemed endlessly amiable, boundlessly kind, superhumanly patient with Danny and me and our lame adolescent jokes, uncomplaining when our raucous teasing of each other drowned out the TV—for that was the form our friendship took when it first got off the ground: teasing and insults. Claire would ask Danny to pass her a couple of Cheez-Its, Danny would reply yeah if I can get them away from El Piggo here, I would say who’s calling who a pig, look at him, his mouth is full and both hands too, Danny would interrupt oh yeah Fatty? well all I can say is when we were out in Billy’s boat the other day it wasn’t my end that sank down like a rock, and I’d give him a punch on the arm, and he’d say my father always told me never to hit a lady but that doesn’t apply to you, and he’d punch me back, and Claire would say where’s my Cheez-Its? and we’d hand her the bag and start giggling and punching each other again while Starship Enterprise shot through space toward impossible dangers.

  I had watched Danny’s attitude toward me slowly change. We still didn’t talk much, except to fool around. I could see in the punches we exchanged, in the teasing, and in his broody brown eyes the dawn of something even I didn’t fully comprehend (though I comprehended it better than he did). I thought he was the handsomest boy in town, like a tree in autumn (a red maple!), with his flaming hair and brown wrists and long bones. Sandy Schutz didn’t agree; she didn’t like his freckles. “I’ll bet he’s even got freckles—you know—all over,” she said with a simulated shiver. I hadn’t thought of that, but I began to, often. By this time I was over John Lennon. I was fourteen or so, about the age Miranda got over Byron. I was ready for a more local, less speculative and pure passion.

  Danny was it. It took a couple of more years of following him around and letting him punch me, but by the time we were sixteen we were going steady. I don’t know what finally did it—hormones, probably—and I can’t recall how I advanced from silent companion to girlfriend. I do remember the first time he kissed me. We were fishing off the pier down by Billy Arp’s, and Billy went inside for something to eat, and I baited Danny’s hook for him (I always did; he was squeamish), and he flung his line out and then he kissed me—crookedly, without preamble or embrace, and fast, before Billy came back. It wasn’t so much a kiss as a coded message: things will be different between us now, there’s more to come. Then a fish tugged on his line, and Billy returned, and the shock and thrill of being kissed became irrelevant, and disappeared. There was just the fish and the sea and Billy with a bag of pretzels. But the message lingered on, and from then on things were different between us; and there was more to come.

  It was the typical adolescent pilgrimage along the paths of love and sex, starting with kisses, then better kisses, gropings, then better gropings, and all the rest of it. We made love the first time in Danny’s living room, in front of the TV, while George and Claire were at a bowling banquet. It was late spring, the windows were wide open, and there was a warm breeze bringing in all the Saturday-night sounds of Main Street. On the TV, the Yankees were creaming the Red Sox. And when Danny and I rolled apart at last, and he told me over and over again that he loved me, the secure, serene happiness I felt was something new to me. I had never been happy in quite that miraculous way before, and in spite of all my years of practical dreaming I had never expected—not really—that my long dream would, quite precisely and literally, come true.

  After that, besides making love every chance we got, we began to talk to each other, telling each other what we had never told anyone, even Sandy Schutz and Billy Arp. Danny was a talker. That’s one of the things I liked about him, he talked about things instead of reading about them. But Danny (unlike me) was naturally reticent about himself. By diligent attention during my years of being his silent shadow, I had learned certain things about him. I knew he wanted eventually to fit into the slot his father had designed for him, the takeover of Hector’s, and a wonderful thing I thought that, the passing on from parent to child of something as vital and tangible as Hector’s. It was like Aunt Phoebe and her orchard, and I pictured Danny and me growing strong and wise among the cans and boxes the way my aunt had among the apple trees.

  But I knew, too, that Danny wanted to do something on his own first. He and Billy had talked a little about that, letting me humbly listen. Billy wanted nothing more than to go right from high school to the navy, and he talked about basic training the way most seventeen-year-olds talk about the senior prom. He was a boat nut, and he figured on a hitch in the navy followed by college on the GI Bill and a degree in naval architecture, and then he’d go out to the West Coast and build boats. Danny and I listened respectfully to these hopes, but it was a relief to me when Danny let me drag it out of him, once our relationship had progressed to that stage, that he didn’t share them. Billy looked forward to going to Vietnam; Danny spent his whole senior year sweating over the prospect of his number coming up, and I sweated with him. We talked of escaping to Canada; the Frontenacs had relatives in Quebec. I began to wonder if, after all, I should learn French. We carried signs to Hartford during Anti-Draft Week in March and lugged them around the capitol buildings, chanting.

  The day it was discovered that Danny had a small heart murmur, he cried from relief with his head in my lap. He said he’d rather drop dead of a heart attack in the middle of a basketball game than have to shoot at people and drop bombs. I loved it that he was afraid to go to war and that he had confessed it to me, and as I stroked his bright hair I dropped my own joyful tears on it. It seemed to me that anyone in his right mind should be afraid to go to war, and I couldn’t see why there were so many wars, when so many people were afraid to fight in them. I had to blame it on the generals and the presidents and the Billy Arps, but Billy was such a nice, amiable, extroverted kid, who liked messing around in boats and whacking fish on the head, that it made me wonder about the other warmongers. But I picketed with Danny, and wept with him when his own scare was over.

  Freed from it, he decided he’d get a job in New Haven and live there for a year or two before he committed himself to me or to Hector’s—to see the world a bit, but on his own modest terms. New Haven was enough of the world for him, at least at that point. This minuscule ambition, too, was something he confessed only to me, keeping it from Billy (who wanted someday to hitchhike to Alaska) and from his parents (who would have preferred that he stay in the village, gliding smoothly from the graduation ceremonies to Hector’s produce department). I understood it perfectly, the funny mix of claustrophobia and affection a small town can generate when you’ve lived in it all your life. We both wanted to live out our days in the village; we were both small-town people; but we wanted to stand back for a while and get a new perspective on it.

  At least, that’s the way Danny saw it; to be honest, I didn’t want a perspective any different from the one I had. Hadn’t I, all these years, been standing back from my family and what they represented? Hadn’t I been born distanced? School was the only blight on my life. Once I was out, the town would be my oyster. And someday I’d be mistress of Hector’s Market, the rock that anchored the town. It seemed the ideal combination: to live in the town I’d always lived in, but on my own, in my own way, with sunshine and fresh air coming in through diamond-paned windows, with my husband. I liked the place, I was comfortable there.

  Danny, of course, was part of my comfort. I understood his need for some breathing space, away from the town, Hector’s, his parents, me. But I worried about losing him. I was, after all, the initiator of our romance; I was his pursuer, and
I’d caught him, and now that I had him it seemed the way to keep him was to let him go. He was beginning to snap at me for bossing him. “Quit nagging me,” he sometimes said. He sounded like a disillusioned husband, and it frightened me.

  So I agreed, with my old calculated humility, playing him like a fish, that a separation from each other would be only practical. We would wait a year or two—see other people—get away on our own—blah blah blah. Then we’d get married and pitch in at Hector’s as planned. “After all,” Danny said, “we were childhood sweethearts, we’ve been together practically all our lives!” This touched and charmed me; it threw a veil of such romantic and dogged devotion over the long, vague, tentative friendship that began with our hands linked against Mrs. Meek and her books.

  My parents had never said much about our courtship. I’m sure they didn’t know that was what it was. They liked Danny, and they knew he was a “nice boy” (which he was, though not in the way they thought). They liked and respected his parents, who represented small-town virtues and old-fashioned values and special-ordered bean curd and Jackson’s Coronation Tea for my mother. So they didn’t mind my hanging around the Frontenacs’, though they were puzzled sometimes that I didn’t bring Danny home more often—forgetting, once I became a determinedly social teenager, the long tradition of discouraging me from having my low, noisy friends over. But I could just see it—everyone sitting around reading after dinner, and Danny with his boxing magazine.

  Danny’s parents liked me, and encouraged me to come around, even if I did snitch cookies. I was, in fact, given carte blanche with the cookie jar, and when I was sixteen I became a paid, part-time bagger and stock girl at Hector’s. I worked after school and got a dollar fifty an hour. I never spent a dime of it. I opened a savings account and faithfully made a deposit every week. “Save it for college,” my parents said hopefully. They were proud of my resourcefulness. None of my siblings had ever had a job; they were too busy reading. But I wasn’t saving up for college; I wouldn’t have gone to college even if I’d been able to get into one. I was getting my dowry together. By the time I graduated from high school, I had over two thousand dollars saved.

  I didn’t graduate until I was nineteen. I flunked senior English. Even I was humiliated by this. I had never flunked anything before. I’d always prided myself on getting through St. Agatha’s on the strength of my natural intelligence and gift of bull, without cracking many books. But I was tripped up, finally, by Shakespeare.

  I couldn’t read Macbeth. It wasn’t true, as Sister Charles Ann insisted, that I wasn’t trying. I tried, dozens of times, but I never got beyond the witches. My mind closed up at that point, it refused to function, it ground to a halt, and the words on the page turned into mere squiggles, mere designs, and not very interesting ones. It was like being back in elementary school, pre-Meek. I tried reading it aloud, I tried getting Danny and Billy and Sandy to read it to me, I even tried rewarding myself with candy. But nothing helped. I couldn’t make it out, or make out what I was supposed to do with it. Every time I went near that paperback book, with Lady Macbeth looking gory and sinister on the cover, little teeth of pain began to nibble at the insides of my head.

  I tried to get through the final exam, which featured large helpings of Macbeth, on the strength of the class discussions, but my mind had closed up on those, too, and I couldn’t even get the plot right. I could hardly tell Macbeth from Macduff, and I was never sure who killed the king, Mr. or Mrs. I wrote one sentence (which I would reproduce here to illustrate my helplessness had it not passed mercifully from my memory) and went home.

  “Of course, we can’t pass this,” Sister Charles said to my parents. There was a special conference the afternoon of reportcard day. I wasn’t present, but I can imagine their reactions. By the time they got home, they were pretty well under control, but my father’s eyes were more dolefully Tennysonian than ever, and there were new pouches under my mother’s eyes, perhaps from crying. I’d hoped they could talk Sister Charles into passing me. I was revolted at the idea of repeating a course that had been agony the first time around. Besides, I wanted to get out into the real world. I’d been half promised a job at the animal shelter in Madison, and I had dreams of my own little studio apartment full of cute things I liked. I had my eye on a huge cookie jar at Bradlee’s that looked just like Bounce—take off his hound-dog head and inside find a million Oreos.

  “You’ll have to repeat twelfth grade,” my father said, more in sorrow than in anger. Horatio was a professor at Harvard, Miranda had started up her little press, Juliet was working on her Ph.D. in Greek literature, and I had flunked twelfth grade because I couldn’t get through Macbeth.

  It takes a lot to get me down. It took that, my first tragedy, my first setback. I saw myself as a practical and determined person set firmly upon a certain kind of course in life (still blurry as to details but with powerfully distinct general outlines), and here I was brought up short by Literature, downed by the enemy, as much a victim of the Macbeths as old Duncan.

  My parents were very kind. Neither of them read a book or wrote a line that day. We sat in the kitchen eating macadamia nuts and drinking sherry (mine cut drastically with orange juice) while they listened to me talk about myself. I can’t recall this ever happening before, but it did that day. They listened with something like respect. It was, in a way, a feat to have flunked English. For the first time they woke up to the extent of my difference from them, and they listened with the flattering attention they might pay to a European visitor talking of life in a remote Alpine village.

  My first, practical reaction was that I should take the course over again in summer school. But my parents didn’t think I should simply repeat senior English. It wasn’t only my failing grade on the final exam in English that got to them. I had a 75 in religion, 78 in trigonometry, and 89 in typing (my best subject), but I had barely scraped through history (66) and biology (67). Better to repeat the whole mess, they felt, hoping (though they wouldn’t say so) I’d raise my grades high enough to get into college.

  “Why didn’t you take courses that were—well—easier?” my father asked.

  “More suited to your talents?” my mother reworded it.

  “There are no easy courses at St. Agatha’s,” I told them. I worked up resentment, and wailed, “Why couldn’t I have gone to public school? At Shoreline High I could have taken art and shop and business math—” I saw my parents shudder delicately, or maybe I only imagined it. They were trying to be open-minded. “I don’t see that I got anything much out of twelve years at St. Agatha’s that I wouldn’t get at Shoreline. A lot less, if you ask me.”

  Nobody ever had, but it was true. My parents, lapsed Catholics, had sent the four of us to parochial school for the “old-fashioned values” and for the “culture.” They seemed to think it was important for us to say “Yes, ma’am,” and to know how to sing the “Dies Irae” and what Rogation Days were and St. Anselm’s argument, for the existence of God and what Cain said to Abel. Horatio and Miranda and Juliet picked up all this stuff effortlessly, of course. I didn’t. For one thing, the Church reformed when I was in the fourth grade. The “Dies Irae” was out and “Amazing Grace” was in. By the time I was in high school, the religion course consisted mainly of debates about birth control and acted-out stories from the New Bible, complete with costumes and props and music. Independent thinking and creative self-expression instead of the Baltimore Catechism and inflexible dogmas and the long fasts of my parents’ (and siblings’) day. In fact, I liked the religion course, and considering that I didn’t do much of the reading, I considered my final grade of 75 brilliant.

  “If I’d gone to Shoreline, I wouldn’t have had any trouble graduating,” I whimpered. I realized I had a grievance. I had asked them, once or twice, if I could transfer to the public high school. The requests had been halfhearted—I really hadn’t wanted to leave Danny and my friends, even for shop and business courses—but none of us remembered that. “I’m just
not cut out for Shakespeare and foreign languages and that stuff,” I pressed on. “I can’t help it. Why couldn’t I have gone someplace that would teach me something useful?”

  My parents were visibly chagrined. They looked guiltily at each other. I rubbed it in. “I might have been really good at something if I’d had the training.” I wept with indignation. I drained my sherry and o.j. at a gulp and slammed down the glass.

  “What do you want to do, Cordelia?” my father asked me at last.

  I clammed up. I couldn’t say it: marry Danny Frontenac and run the cash register at Hector’s. Not yet. “I really don’t know,” I said. I lost a bit of ground there. I should have had a secret passion for carpentry or lobstering up my sleeve. “Something practical,” I fumbled on. I was feeling the sherry. “Something …” I had to resort to gestures—sweeps of my hand that took in the dim corners of Hector’s, the village, the great world—flapping gestures that tumbled away the bookcases and elevated me up over the trees to I know not what. Possibly toward where I am now. Possibly there was something inevitable in all this: if I hadn’t flunked twelfth grade, Danny might not have gotten around to marrying me, and if I hadn’t married Danny I might never etc. etc. etc. Who knows? Who wants to? I leave inevitability to the Macbeths.

  Well, we compromised. I repeated twelfth grade at Shoreline High. I got into the English course for subliterates and didn’t have to read Macbeth. I did have to read some of Shakespeare’s sonnets (my father helped me make my painful way through them), but we were never tested on them. I got a 74 in English! I also got 93 in business math, 92 in advanced typing, 90 in art and design. And in shop I made—of all things—a bookcase. It was that or a revolving TV table (an interesting choice, I thought). I would have preferred, naturally, to make the table, but since we didn’t have a TV, it seemed pointless. And as it turned out, the bookcase has been useful; it’s before me now, between the windows, containing all the books my father has optimistically bestowed on me over the years, along with Horatio’s murder mysteries and my grandmother’s poetry book. I keep my TV on top. In a place as small as this one, the last thing I need is a revolving TV table.