Chez Cordelia (16 page)

I didn't answer; he didn't wait. I heard the bell, but I hesitated in case he had tricked me and was still lurking in the store. But when I came out he was gone.

All the next day, blissfully Malcolm-free, I tried to make myself confess to Mr. Madox. I would tell him, he would forgive, Malcom's power would be broken. I must have looked distraught (though the mirror showed me only that waxen, dead face), because Mr. Madox twice asked me gently what was wrong. Both times I almost told him, and failed. Malcolm apparently could let his father down without a qualm; I couldn't. And he was beginning to give me greater responsibilities. I often went to the bank for him now, and I had access to the petty cash. My confession, however nice about it he might be (and I never doubted his niceness), would change everything. The Mr. Madox who hired me on a probationary basis would be the only Mr. Madox I would henceforth know—the suspicious, disillusioned Mr. Madox who believed the world was going to the dogs, who had loved me like a daughter until I betrayed his trust. I had no choice but to continue my personal cover-up, my Watergate. I hated myself and suffered, but better my hate and suffering than Mr. Madox's.

On Wednesday Malcolm grabbed me as soon as his father left for his coffee break. The bell rang while I was jerking him off. “Ignore it,” he hissed through clenched teeth. I worked him harder than ever to get it quickly over, imagining someone coming in on us, but it seemed to take hours of his panting and my pumping, while the pair of customers poked around the store discussing paint colors. At last he gave his satisfied “Ah,” like a belch after a monstrous meal, and zipped up. “I'll go, sweetie pie,” he said, rolling his eyes at me and smirking worse than usual, and swaggered out front while I ran to the bathroom.

It may seem incredible that Malcolm relished a rapid, reluctant hand job every couple of days from someone who clearly loathed him, but he did. He couldn't get enough. He was always ready. One frightful day we did it twice (the second time I fumbled through my tears, and it took forever). He never let me off. On every one of his so-called workdays, sooner or later the moment came when we were alone and he would leer and beckon.

The worst of our slimy, degrading backroom encounters was that I began to—there must be a word, there is no word, words fail me again and again—I began to enjoy them. No, not enjoy: they began to excite me. I hated Malcolm. I despised him, too. But after a while when he pulled me into the stockroom and pushed up my T-shirt and unzipped, I began to throb with lust. I stopped resisting it. Disgust and lust, I felt them both; one enhanced the other, and their duet had a sordid fascination.

He knew what was happening to me, and began to do little things to turn me on. Occasionally he dipped his mouth to my breasts and put his tongue to work; if I couldn't hold back a small moan of pleasure he instantly stopped. Now and then he treated me to a long French kiss. On one memorable occasion (which I try not to remember), he put his hand under my skirt, between my thighs: I thought I would faint. But his penis and my hand were his major interests, and he was stingy with his gifts. Once when I rubbed against him and nuzzled a little (begging for a kiss, a feel, anything), he held me off and said, “Slow down, babes—you're forgetting the point of all this.”

It was shortly after that day when, during one of our frustrating embraces, I felt myself detach from myself—my soul from my body? again, there are no words—and I looked down at us as at a scene in hell, at Delia, me, my only self, with her hand plunged into the pubic hair of a sweating swine like Malcolm Madox—I couldn't look. I fled in revulsion, leaving with his zipper gaping, leaving him in his own hands. I went into the bathroom, locked the door, and cried and cried for poor Delia.

I stayed in there for an hour and a quarter, impervious to Malcolm's threats and to the bell, until I heard the voice of Mr. Madox, returned from lunch. At which I ran out and confessed my crimes. I made no excuses, I didn't reveal my recompenses, I didn't mention Malcolm (who stood by with smirk frozen on). I just let my thefts pour out of me one by one before the horrified face of my employer. Horrified, yes, and disgusted, disappointed, all I had predicted. He tried to be kind, but his face stayed hurt and angry. In the eyes of Mr. Madox I acquired jowls and a business suit, I turned into Richard Nixon. He fired me.

Chapter Six

Grand'mère

I'm always at my best in small spaces, but at that time in particular one room just suited me. So I made the transition easily enough from my one big room at Main and Woodlawn in Hoskins, to one small room in Juliet's apartment in New Haven.

I turned to Juliet almost by accident. On the night of the day Mr. Madox kicked me out, when I was cowering on my cot, afraid to show my face on the streets of Hoskins and wondering where on earth to go and what to do, Juliet called me up.

“Mother says you never write,” she dutifully began. “And when she talks to you on the phone you answer in monosyllables. She's very upset about it. Now what in hell's the matter, Cordelia?”

“Nothing's the matter,” I snapped automatically, and then my eyes lit on my little impatiens plant in its purloined pot: it was drooping, dead, unwatered all those miserable Malcolm-weeks. I burst into tears—not exactly against my will, but out of some well of reserve that made the sobbing hurt my throat.

“Oh, Juliet, I've been fired from my job for shoplifting.”

She either didn't hear me or couldn't believe it, because she made me repeat it twice. By the time she understood, I was back in control. “Shoplifting,” I enunciated clearly.

“You poor thing!” Juliet said. She put her hand partly over the receiver and I heard her muffled voice tell someone what I'd said. “Alan says it's no wonder, after what happened,” she said into the phone. “He says it's a perfectly normal adaptive reaction.”

Alan was (as my mother put it, sweetly sighing) Juliet's “latest.” She was living in New Haven for the summer, with a grant to study Greek metrics at Yale, and she had moved in with Alan. He was a former psychoanalyst who had dropped out of his profession to do volunteer counseling at a clinic and write plays in his spare time. Between his unproduced plays and Juliet's unpublished verse epic, the two of them were barely making ends meet. They lived on Juliet's tiny grant. This I had heard from my mother, long-distance from California; my monosyllabic comments on the situation were directly prompted by her implication that, however hard up Juliet might be, her failures were respectable ones, infinitely preferable to my squalid bit of respectability, my job as a clerk, my dogged little bank account.

“Alan says
what?
”

“Honey, you've got problems. Listen, you got married at nineteen and a year later the bastard walked out on you. What kind of history is that for a twenty-one-year-old kid?”

You don't know the half of it, I thought, but I kept quiet because Juliet was continuing: how can I convey the pleasure I felt in hearing a member of my own family take my sorrows seriously?

“You ought to get right down here and talk to Alan,” she went on. “Cordelia, he is the most insightful person. He's helped me put the damned family into perspective in a way I never—”

The damned family? Was Juliet then my ally? I closed my eyes and pressed the receiver to my ear, taking in her voice like music.

“—can see what Daddy's crazy expectations have done to you, Cordelia. I mean, we've all spent our lives trying to escape, but your way was the only one Daddy couldn't rationalize into his scheme of things. Alan says—”

“Juliet,” I broke in urgently. “Can I come and see you? I'd like to stay for a while if I could. I can pay room and board, I've got money saved. I really need to get out of here.”

The muffled voice had a lengthy consultation with Alan, whose distant tones began to sound to me like those of a savior.
Daddy's crazy expectations
—the phrase lit up my life, and I blinked in the light. And the idea of all of us trying to escape—I was staggered by the possibilities of it. Oh, I needed Alan, I needed Juliet …

“Cordelia? Alan wants to know what you had to eat today.”

“
What?
”

“Breakfast—what'd you eat for breakfast? Don't argue, this is long-distance, just tell.”

I decided Alan was vaguely loony, like Mr. Blenka (who used to ask me such things), but I obligingly laid out my menus: coffee for breakfast with a raspberry pop-up toastie; coffee and a Scooter Pie on my break; a baloney sandwich, a handful of Chiparoos, and an orange soda for lunch; and I'd been too sick and depressed to eat dinner.

Juliet repeated this to Alan, and then said to me, “He's dying to meet you. And, Cordelia? I'll tell you, honey, we really could use a little help with the rent. It's killing us!” (In the background I heard Alan's saintly, apologetic laugh.) “We'd love to have you just come visit, but we're so hard up at this point—”

I repeated my willingness to pay my way. “Twenty-five a week, Jule? Would that be enough?”

“It would be terrific,” Juliet breathed out.

“Make it thirty,” I said, reckless with gratitude.

“I can't wait till you get here!” Juliet cried, out of the same impulse.

Now what do I do? Do I describe the further travels of my shop-project bookcase and its unread books? Do I explain that Aunt Phoebe's newly moustached Johnny backed the apple truck up to my door and transported my possessions back to the ancestral home? And do I reveal that carting the cot and the table and the bookcase and the cardboard boxes full of my things, stolen and otherwise, through my parents' silent, dusty, echoing, surprisingly shabby house—where the rows of books for once didn't glower down at me from the shelves but managed to look merely dull and impersonal, like books in a public library—moved me to a bewildered compassion for my absent parents, who had lived their lives so much between those stiff covers, and whose children had, according to my amazing sister, put all their energy into escape? Or am I letting these floods of words drown me in their tyranny and lead me out of control, into irrelevance? But is anything irrelevant in the story of a life? The trick, I suppose, is to decide what
isn't
. Order out of chaos: my father's words, my goal.

But does it contribute to order or chaos to add that Johnny tried to kiss me up in the attic after we had dragged in the last cartons, tickling my neck with his silly moustache? And that I performed one of the few—I hope—cruel acts of my life: I laughed at him and told him to cut it out.

Well, I press on—not knowing what else to do—trusting to my brain, famous for its orderliness, to sort things out right.

The next morning, I slunk down to Main Street to the bank and took out my money. I met none of my old cronies, though through the window of the Blue Bell Diner I saw Greta sail by with a tray. Madox Hardware looked smaller, ordinary, as if I'd been away a year instead of a day. I hurried by, on the other side of the street, with my head down. And later that day, I packed my suitcase and crept down the stairs so Dr. Epstein wouldn't catch me. A dog whimpered behind his door, then quieted. I walked the half mile to the bus terminal and got on the afternoon bus to New Haven.

I was grateful that Juliet's address was nowhere near Colonial Towers—scene of the crime, I kept thinking, though whose crime, or what crime, I wasn't sure. I knew I wasn't ready yet to face my old neighborhood; I'd rather confront Danny himself, I thought, with all his menacing mysteries, than the dear face of Colonial Towers, and our tenth-floor balcony, crowded now with alien hibachi, bicycles, flowerpots. Facing Juliet with my failures would be trauma enough.

Though Juliet was the sibling I was closest to (she was five years older than I, Miranda seven, Horatio almost ten), I hadn't seen her since my wedding. All my life I had had her beautiful, brilliant, scholarly image before me, speeding off ahead to some new triumph. She had always been kindest to me, aside from a tendency to lecture and to correct my grammar. (Once, describing Danny's performance in a softball game, I said that he flied out, and Juliet looked at me sternly and said, “
Flew
out, surely?”) She also, from her five-year head start, assumed she knew far better than I what was best for me, and had recommended books, suggested courses of action, and opposed my marriage with the familial disregard for my preferences that was intensified by a reverent regard for her own. I hadn't missed her all this time, and had made no effort to see her. I was fond of her, I was glad to go to her, but as I rode in a taxi through the streets of New Haven there was room among the various dreads I felt for a fear of Juliet's scorn.

She and Alan lived out on the west side, on the top floor of an aged brick apartment house with a dried-up fountain and a few dead azalea bushes in its shabby courtyard. Going up the four flights to their apartment, I was so apprehensive I hardly noticed the climb; only when I reached the fifth floor did I realize I was hot and panting and my suitcase was filled with concrete blocks. Juliet appeared in a doorway. “Cordeeeelia!” she squealed, and ran toward me with a hug ready. Her braids were gone, and she wore her hair short, as boys did when I was in grade school. It felt like dog fur against my cheek.

“God, you're sweaty,” Juliet said, and let me into 5-B. “Alan will be home in a minute, dinner's almost ready, you look as if you need a glass of something cold.”

I let her overwhelm me with fuss—Juliet had always fussed—and accepted some cold herb tea, a chair at the table, and a platter of carrots and feta cheese that reminded me of my mother. Juliet bustled around the overheated kitchen while I watched, munching. The kitchen was painted all over with big stenciled labels:
DOOR
on the pantry, and
OUT
on the door to the fire escape, and
FRIDGE
in a row of letters forming an arch around the refrigerator, stabs at order that were undercut by the grubby linoleum, the jumble of utensils I glimpsed in half-open drawers, a roach corpse Juliet crushed under her sandal.