Chez Cordelia Read online

  My repeating the twelfth grade gave my romance with Danny a huge boost. Danny had a job in New Haven, and an apartment. He was lonesome. All of a sudden a year or two on his own seemed too long. Danny wanted us to get married the day after my graduation from Shoreline, as people did in rock ‘n’ roll songs of the fifties. I think my failure in school made it clear that he was the leader, not me. True, I’d pursued him, I’d baited his hooks (and my own), I’d let him cry in my arms. I think maybe all this had unmanned him in some way, even though I always kept my math grades low to match his. But my flunking English changed things. There I was, a schoolgirl sweating over homework, while he was pulling down $4.72 an hour at the shirt factory in New Haven. The Macbeths brought us together.

  It was a funny thing, but those Macbeths and their strange, bloody deeds hadn’t thrown Danny at all; he got an 81 on the final exam, an achievement that continues to amaze me. (“Macbeth is not a smiple play,” I imagine him writing.) I sprang Danny’s final-exam grade on my parents as one of the arguments in favor of marrying him. They were not impressed by it any more than they were by his shirt-factory job or the prospect of his inheriting Hector’s.

  When I graduated from Shoreline High, I was nineteen years old and I had $2,127 in the bank. My parents thought I should take a year to think it over. Going steady with a nice boy like Danny was okay; marrying him was something else. They offered to double my savings so I could take a long jaunt to Europe. A walking tour through England with some wholesome youth group, they suggested, thinking back to their honeymoon. Or a couple of months in Greece with Juliet?

  “I don’t speak Greek!” I said. “I don’t know any wholesome youth groups!” They thought I should be more like Miranda, who had lived with a French family for a year. Or Juliet, my mother’s pride, who could speak six languages at the age of twenty-four. By the family standards, I barely knew English, and my idea of traveling was to drive down I-95 and see the West Haven Yankees. I didn’t want to see the world or sow any oats. I just wanted to live with Danny and stave off life’s messiness by arranging it in patterns that pleased me. If I was the black sheep of the family, I wanted my own cozy pen, and my red-headed shepherd.

  “Cordelia, you’re throwing your life away!”

  “Mom! Daddy! I love him!” I said this over and over again, earnestly and sincerely.

  “It’s not love,” my mother patiently explained. “It’s physical attraction and habit.”

  Juliet, obviously urged, wrote me a silly letter from Greece advising me to have my “fling” with Danny to get him out of my system. She wrote, “You don’t have to make an honest husband out of every man you sleep with.” (She was going through her brittle, sophisticated phase.)

  “I love him,” I kept insisting. It was so unfair! All my father’s poem-writing and my mother’s vast reading and Juliet’s studying, all the books and poems and ideas they’d filled their heads with, should have told them the difference between true love and having a fling. “I love him,” I kept saying, and they acted as if I’d just learned an obscure language which, incredibly, none of them spoke. Love: those sonnets of Shakespeare’s had been riddled with it, and my father had painstakingly picked it out for me; it was as clear as diamonds to him as long as it was centuries old. In this nineteen-year-old daughter it was something else.

  “It’s the juices of youth!” he said to me. “Cordelia—think! Do you want to spend your life as a grocer’s wife?”

  “I don’t see why not,” I said.

  To spend my life

  As a grocer’s wife …

  It was the only poem of my father’s I ever liked. I thought he and my mother were insensitive snobs, and I refused to say what I’d been about to say—my trump card—when Danny’s English-exam grade had failed to move them: that Danny was in line to become supervisor of the night shift—after working there only one year! “He has great leadership potential,” I was going to point out with pride, figuring the phrase leadership potential would get to them. But when I saw how they felt, I said not a word. Danny’s promotion would provoke only more veiled sneers. I was ashamed for them. What did they think I should marry, a college professor? The mind boggles, as Miranda used to say before she found out everyone else said it.

  My parents had glimpsed their daughter Cordelia briefly that afternoon in the kitchen (a thin, brown-eyed girl with a scalloped earlobe who drank her sherry and o.j. left-handed and didn’t understand Shakespeare), but the vision hadn’t lasted. When the question of marriage came up, I became again their dream-daughter, the late bloomer, the one who’d surprise us all yet—and marrying Danny Frontenac would put the lid on that lovely surprise for good. Clang! And I’d be stuck with the rabble.

  I married him anyway, of course. Thanks to Shakespeare, I had spent my year seeing the world not from my own little apartment but from Shoreline High, but it had been plenty. I’d seen life long enough without Danny, and I knew I preferred it with him. And the longer I slogged through that wasted year at Shoreline, the stubborner I got. And finally, after a summer of arguing, my parents gave in. What else could they do? As I’ve said, they tried to be good parents; they honestly loved me in their way.

  My father’s way was to hand me over to Danny officially at a nuptial mass, but not without the recital of an epithalamium he wrote for us, comparing us to (I think) emerging butterflies. (“We might as well do it gracefully, since it looks like we’ve got to do it,” I heard him say grimly to my mother a few days before the wedding.) My mother’s way was to give us the $2,127 matching funds for a wedding present, to show no grudge was held. At the wedding reception, she ran her hand through Danny’s bright hair and sighed, “At least you’ll have beautiful children.”

  Both my parents cried, and my mother and Claire Frontenac sniffled noisily together over the loss of, respectively, their youngest and their only. George and my father got drunk together. Sandy Schutz and Miranda and Juliet were bridesmaids. Juliet, back from Greece with her hair in braids, tried to look tragic and world-weary, but the champagne got to her, and she danced all evening with one of Danny’s Quebec cousins, dazzling him with her French. Miranda retired into a corner with her husband, Gilbert Sullivan, and our uncle, Oliver Miller, who is a professor of philology, and they had an animated discussion of structural linguistics. Sandy Schutz caught my bouquet and, sure enough, got engaged a couple of months later to a medical student she met during her nurse’s training. Danny and I went to Boston for a honeymoon and spent the weekend going to movies and eating huge meals, and plotting our future.

  And little did any of us know that within two years Hector’s Market would be transformed into Uncle Jody’s Country Crackerbarrel, and our future …

  Enough of these hints! Enough whipping-up of interest! Out with it, Delia! Danny’s in Sommers State Prison, serving a life sentence for murder, and I—? I’ve found, I think, my proper task, which is to get it all straight in my mind, reduce it to mere words, and so be finished with it. And go on from there.

  Chapter Four

  Colonial Towers

  For one year, Danny and I lived together in perfect happiness. All my life, whenever I inspect my existence and rate it, I’ll hold up those months with Danny as my happiness standard, and when I make lists of my satisfactions I’ll make that time number one.

  It was, I suppose, the happiness of adolescents freed from the restrictions of family. But there was nothing wanton, or wild, or even rebellious about Danny and me. We were as sober and respectable as fifty-year-olds—as our parents. Our lives were blameless, pure, even regular. But the regulation of them was our own doing. That was the happiness—that and the fusing of our two fussy, meticulous lives. Released from the enchantment of childhood, we cast spells on each other, on our apartment, on everything we owned.

  We moved into a three-room apartment on the tenth floor of a New Haven high rise, the kind of building that is usually called faceless, impersonal, dehumanizing. It wasn’t like that; it was downright home
y, and we approved of it all, from the stainless-steel elevator whose buttons lit at a touch (our “10” with a special, intimate glow) to the grove of striated snake plants which flourished in the lobby (fed and watered by Mrs. Smolover, the super’s wife).

  Our apartment was perfect. In the month before our wedding we had devoted our free time to fixing it up. Mr. Smolover gave us the paint, and we colored each room a different pastel, painting meticulously, with love. In the blue bedroom was our king-size bed and nothing else. Nothing else would fit, so that we had to keep our big dresser in the living room. But neither of us minded that. In fact, we liked the polished cherry wood of that dresser so much that it seemed only sensible to keep it out where people could see it. It was the color of Danny’s hair, and it had fancy brass drawer pulls that thudded like door knockers when you let them go. It had four drawers—two little, two big—and a giant mirror as clear and silvery as all the mirrors in my parents’ house were murky and old. I felt I never saw myself properly until I stood with Danny, his arm around my waist, before the new mirror we had bought and paid for ourselves. We stood like that often, admiring ourselves as a couple: tall, bright Danny, small, dark Delia, each smiling at the other’s image in the mirror.

  There was a tiny kitchenette, all-electric, all-Formica. It wasn’t big enough for a table, so we ate in the living room. The table was a round one topped with fake marble, and we had four white-wire ice cream parlor chairs with red seats. We set these up just outside the kitchenette on their own area rug, to create a little dining nook. We used to keep the dog cookie jar precisely in the middle, and I filled it with cookies just as the Frontenacs used to. When I looked at this grouping—table, chairs, rug, cookie jar—I felt a pang of perfect joy, and the thought would come to me: this is just right.

  The rest of the living-room space was taken by our tweed sofa and the two matching chairs and the TV. My little bookcase, stuffed with its undefiled books, stood by the front door and held the phone. Here and there we displayed a wedding present. Our gifts had been mostly silver, which we stored in boxes under the bed, but we hung up the kitchen clock from Sandy, a cat with a pendulum tail. Miranda actually gave us a blender, which I used to make pudding. Horatio gave us a large rubber plant in a ceramic tub; we kept it in the sun, in front of the double balcony doors, where it was dreadfully in the way, but it thrived and we became fond of it. On one wall hung our best coins framed against velvet, including the double eagles Aunt Phoebe gave us for a wedding present. On the dresser was what Juliet had brought us from Greece, the plaster head of a woman with braids bound up with leaves. We got to like it, as we did the rubber plant, though Danny sometimes hung his ski cap on it, tilted over one of its staring eyes.

  Danny and I loved our cozy apartment, and I tended it faithfully. After living in my parents’ messy house all those years—only my bedroom was neat—I took a special pleasure in cleaning. My mother never used to clean; she was always reading. Once every couple of months she’d have Mrs. Fox from the village come in and vacuum and wash the floors and do the huge pile of ironing that had accumulated. But our house was generally a wreck—and everyone in the family took pride in it except me: it meant we were intellectuals and artists with other things on our mind than dust and bathtub rings.

  But the bringing of order out of chaos was what I took pride in, and I was a rabid cleaner. I could clean the whole kitchen with a sponge and a few squirts of spray cleaner. I did that every couple of days, and I vacuumed the rugs with our new Hoover, and mopped the square of kitchen floor with Mop & Glo. And I put bleach in the toilet. And twice a week I took all the stale crumbs out of the dog cookie jar and refilled it. I loved to see Danny head straight for it when he got home from work and have a couple of cookies with a glass of chocolate milk—the way some men would have martinis. I loved rituals—any kind except the bookish ones my family favored—and so did Danny. We loved doing the same things over and over, in the same way: going to the laundromat on Saturday mornings, having bagels at the deli while the clothes washed, picking up groceries while the clothes dried, and then, together, folding our warm underwear and towels. We had our special TV shows, our favorite meals, an unvarying place for everything. The apartment took shape around us, and accommodated itself to us, finally, like an old and beloved garment. I suppose it was largely my creation—Danny, I think, could have lived anywhere—but he said that after his dreary bachelor place (one room, furnished with junky, dusty old castoffs) moving into our apartment was like moving into heaven.

  Whenever I was outside our building, my eyes, if I looked up, went instantly to our small balcony with its green chairs and Danny’s old bike and the hibachi—unmistakably our own. We thought it was a handsome building, not impersonal at all. Each apartment, in fact, was utterly unique. I found it wonderfully exciting to enter anyone else’s apartment for the first time—so like ours (kitchenette, living room with glass doors to the balcony, corridor with bedroom and bathroom off it) yet so utterly different. True, to passersby it was just that urban blight, Colonial Towers, an offensive high rise stuck with identical windows and 6’ x 9’ balconies, but to those of us who lived in it it was our village. It didn’t feel much different, to Danny and me, from the village we had left behind.

  There was, on the first floor, the deli where we used to get bagels, and our dentist, and the doctor who treated Danny’s ear infection, and the drugstore where we bought rubbers and beer and soda. When “EW & PD—tru luv 4-ever” was scratched on the stairwell by our incinerator, we knew that EW was Elisa Wandrel from down the hall, and PD was her boyfriend, Peter Davies. We met Elisa through Mr. Blenka, the agoraphobe at the end of the hall, who needed to have his groceries brought to him; Elisa and I and Jeff Thalman, the paperboy, were his chief suppliers. We got to know Miss Harper, the aged ex-flutist across the hall, during an elevator failure, when we helped her down the nine flights of stairs to the front door. And when the Liebermanns asked me, through Elisa, to baby-sit for Jennifer and Joey, our list was complete: we knew everyone on our floor.

  Most of all, we got to know each other. We found that all our years of school-fellowship, our years of courting, countless hours spent together watching TV, talking, eating, making love, hadn’t been nearly enough. What a risk we took (we said to each other, scared), embarking on the awesome dailiness of marriage with no more preparation than that! We returned from our weekend honeymoon, unpacked our suitcases, stared at each other across our new king-size bed, and let it hit us: we’re married.

  We clung to each other all that evening—forgetting Gunsmoke—and confessed all our fears. The fact of marriage was, suddenly, frightful. We were only nineteen, too young. We were homesick, he for his drab bachelor pad, I for my father’s house; though I’d left it in spirit years before, I’d never actually been away from home. We were scared to death.

  Gradually, we grew calm. The sound of our voices was a comfort, that night and on future nights. So was the order of our apartment, the familiar objects we had arranged with so much care. The cookie jar soothed us, and the rug, the green-and-gold towels, the fruit magnets on the refrigerator. We grew calm, we settled down, we took each other’s quirks for granted like regular married people.

  But it was funny in some ways, being married to Danny. I had assumed I knew him thoroughly. Certainly, we had spent those long hours and years together. Certainly, we had talked. But sometimes it seemed to me, after we moved into our apartment together, that I must have done most of the talking. If the subject was baseball or fishing or the sociological pros and cons of small-town life or the oddities of our teachers, Danny was voluble. But it must have been I who did the heavy critical analyses of our families, our relationship, ourselves. It must have been, because in some ways I obviously didn’t know Danny at all, had never tried to know him, had assumed I must know him well because I’d known him so long.

  I hate to admit this, it makes me sound like one of my sisters, but I truly didn’t think there was much to know. I didn’t
love Danny for his complexity or his brilliance or his brains, I loved him because he was steady, predictable, sincere, kind, good-looking, and the inheritor of a way of life that appealed to me. That’s the bald, unpleasant truth.

  What made me wonder about this was that now and then Danny surprised me. Each surprise was double: the surprise itself, and the fact that it was happening. For instance, I assumed he never read a book, but one day he came home with a bag from the drugstore downstairs, and inside it was the second volume of the Lord of the Rings books. He’d read the first one in high school, he said, and thought he’d try the second. “I like to read in bed sometimes,” he told me. I’d never seen him read anything but sports magazines and textbooks. I was stunned, and the fact that he read only about a third of the book made no difference. And then one day he referred to Hector’s, with a sigh, as “the old trapdoor,” and he didn’t laugh when he said it. And Spiro Agnew—I would have expected Danny to approve Agnew’s sneers against intellectuals and agitators. Danny had hated the war, but chiefly (as Agnew always implied) because he was afraid to fight in it. Now he was calling Nixon and Agnew fascists and killers, sometimes even tuning in the news to feed his disgust.

  I don’t mean to say they weren’t all right, these surprises. I don’t mean they put any dents in my happiness. I see now that they should have, of course. I should have paid attention to them, and probably to other things as well: those complex doodles of his, and the need to get off by himself for that year, and the tears he shed over the war, even the babyish, resentful look he threw at me back in third grade when I graduated out of the remedial class before he did … O God, I was condescending in my way, as bad as the rest of the family. I deserved everything I got.