Chez Cordelia (25 page)

Mr. Oliver was just as I'd left him, but he'd drunk most of his beer. “You're right,” I said grabbing his hand on the tabletop. I seemed to need to clutch somebody's hand. He clutched mine back; we sat looking anxiously at each other. “I'm going to call my mother. Is there a pay phone in here?”

“In front, I believe,” he said, “near the door.”

“What's wrong with her?” I asked him. “What should I tell my mother?”

“I don't know what it is, Cordelia. Alan, for one thing.” We let go our hands; they were soggy with sweat. He fingered his little beard, I played with my scallop ear, both of us uneasy, neither wanting—out of loyalty to poor Juliet—to speak ill of Alan. “He seems a little fanatical to me,” Mr. Oliver said finally.

“You said you think he's crazy.” I wouldn't let him off. I had to know these things.

“Yes,” he said, looking me straight in the eye. His face was rosy with his quickly downed beer. “Don't let her go all the way to Greece with him. I don't think she eats at all, Cordelia. I believe she needs professional help.”

“I'd better call right now,” I said, before he was through—hoping that, on some cosmic balance sheet, my urgency would make up for the months of neglect.

I called collect, and had an irrational fear that whichever parent answered wouldn't accept the charges, but it was my mother, and she did.

“Cordelia! Such a surprise! How are you, honey?”

Her voice was strange, it was so long since I'd heard it, and at the same time it was the most familiar thing in my life. I broke down into shaky little sobs. The people at the bar turned and looked at me, and I turned my back to them, leaning my head against the greasy wall, and said, “I's not me, it's Juliet, Mom, she's sick.”

I told her what Mr. Oliver had said, and I asked her to come and get Juliet and take her away.

She didn't speak for a moment, then she said, “She's supposed to go to Greece.”

“Mr. Oliver says not to let her go. He says to get her away from Alan.”

Another pause. “I never liked Alan,” she said finally. Another pause, a sniff—I realized the pauses signified tears. Juliet was my mother's favorite, we all knew that. “I'll get a plane out as soon as I can. We were coming home next week anyway.”

“Is Daddy there?” I had such a hunger to hear my father's voice as well as my mother's that I sobbed again as I asked, like a little kid in trouble.

“He's at a reading.”

“At this hour?”

“It's earlier here,” she said, and then, as if she'd been thinking throughout this exchange, “I'll call the airlines and call you right back.”

“I'm not at the apartment,” I said. “I'm at a pay phone.”

“Well, what's the number?” she asked impatiently, not giving me any credit for my cleverness in sneaking out to make the call in secret. “Don't move, I'll call right back,” she said when I gave her the number, and hung up, cutting off my good-bye.

Mr. Oliver stood beside me. “She's going to call back after she calls the airlines,” I said, the tears still spilling down my cheeks. Mr. Oliver put one arm around me. I wept on the shoulder of his limp white shirt. The TV was on in the bar, and I listened to the local news, which was reporting an armed robbery in New Haven. I raised my head, thinking of Malcolm Madox, and saw the police pushing two handcuffed black men into a patrol car. Everyone at the bar was watching me, not the television. I looked fixedly at the screen, at a fire in Meriden (two children dead of smoke inhalation) and the sports scores.

“The Yankees lost a doubleheader,” I said to Mr. Oliver. He patted my shoulder.

The phone rang during the weather, and I picked it up. “I'll be there tomorrow about noon, Cordelia,” said my mother, her tears cleared away and her voice quick and efficient. “I don't think Daddy can come with me, he still has obligations here. But I'll come and take Juliet out to the house. Can you come with us, honey?”

“I have to work.”

Her voice sharpened just a bit. “You still have that job?” I admitted it. “Well.” The old exasperation. “I'll get Phoebe to come out and help. I have to open up the house, all that.”

“I'll come on my day off, Mom. Besides, I may be quitting soon.”

“Ah. Good,” she said vaguely, already—I could tell—focusing on clean sheets, mail delivery, groceries. “Is it hot there?”

I wanted to say: Oh, Mom, I miss you, but I said, “Very hot.”

“Does she still look like a convict? With that haircut?”

“Yes.”

“Well.” Another pause. “I'll be flying into Hartford and from there I can link up with that little shuttle plane to New Haven, and then I'll get a cab.”

I realized that, California time, she'd have to be up at dawn to accomplish all this. “I'll get off work early,” I said.

“Cordelia, it would really help if you could take the day off tomorrow and
be there
till I come. Can't you do that? Just this one time? Call in sick?” I said I would, and she sighed. “Well, that's something anyway. Keep an eye on her. All right?”

“All right.”

“I'll see you tomorrow, honey,” she said, and we said goodbye, but her last words before she hung up were “Try to get her to eat something.”

Mr. Oliver walked me back to Juliet's and said something as we parted that I didn't catch. It may have been Greek or some other foreign language, or maybe just a form of “goodbye” in his singsong Pakistani voice. We pressed each other's sweaty hands again, and then I ran up the four flights to see if Juliet was okay.

She seemed to be. She and Alan were both asleep, breathing in harmony. I wandered into the stripped living room and sat in Juliet's chair by the window with a handful of the peanut butter crackers (not, technically, on my list of forbidden foods) I kept hidden in my room. The apartment was a mess again, the corners full of dust-kittens and the windows filthy—all my hard work undone. The only rooms I bothered to clean any more were my bedroom and the bathroom. Once, I'd come upon a used Tampax, Juliet's, in the unflushed toilet, the blood a dark, purply-brown, wrong-looking color. Was that a sign of something? Should I have known? I went and got my List Notebook, and wrote:

Things Bothering Me

Juliet

Monarky of Humph

Paul?

Thret of Danny coming back

“    “   parents   ”    ”

How will I learn to cook?

Juliet

The crackers made me thirsty, and I got a drink of water in the kitchen. I considered calling Nina, but I knew she'd be at her typewriter and crabby about interruptions. I thought I ought to call Humphrey and tell him I was sick. With what? I asked myself, and could think of nothing except Juliet's ailment, whatever it was, so I put off the call until morning. I had been thinking of giving Humphrey my notice tomorrow; now I wouldn't be able to. The resentment, and the Oh-poor-me feeling that had leaped to the edge of my mind while I talked to my mother, came back in a flash. I beat it down—I was used to beating it down, had done it instinctively as a kid, over and over when it threatened, knowing it wasn't good for me. But the effort got me depressed and tired, and I went to bed.

But first I looked in at Juliet again. Her breathing sounded the same. Alan was a dark lump, way over on his side of the bed. All safe, I thought, looking at Juliet's dimly lit face. My heart lurched. I remembered Jake the dog. I imagined myself—something I'd never done, hardly ever—with a child, looking in on it, never being able to rest until I knew it was safe, asleep. Then I got into bed, and in the drowning moments just before sleep I had a quick vision of Paul, and briefly, furiously, persuasively, the conviction returned to me in force—and secret, like a golden egg I was hatching—that he would be the love of my life.

I forgot to set my alarm, and I was awakened by the sound of the apartment door slamming: Juliet and Alan gone jogging. I got up and showered and rummaged in the kitchen for something to eat. There was some sesame butter. I spread it on a piece of stale brown bread and washed it down with apple cider. Then I had a few more peanut butter crackers from my cache.

It was already very hot. I imagined Juliet out running. She and Alan did two miles a day before breakfast. I pictured her in her red shorts with her bony knees going up and down and her tiny claw-hands clenched, and wondered how she did it, why she did it—Juliet, who'd always hated physical exertion, who thought sports were stupid, who made fun of Miranda, the basketball player. In high school, Juliet managed to get herself excused permanently from gym simply because she was so smart. “I told the nuns I was too intelligent for volleyball,” I remember her saying to my parents. I remember their delighted faces as they looked pridefully at each other and back at Juliet. And my disgust—I recall that, too. I loved volleyball.

Before they returned, I called Humphrey and told him I wouldn't be in because of family troubles. “My sister is cracking up,” I said. I couldn't lie. Since my last encounter with Danny, I felt impelled to honesty. I would not be like him, I would not be dragged down to that level again, where you steal and tell lies. “My mother's coming from California to get her, but I have to stay until she comes.”

“Oh, man, that's awful,” Humph said. “You stay there. Don't you let that girl out of your sight. This is the tofu sister? You stay right by her side, hear? It's a crazy world, Delia. I can get Archie to help with the salads. I can cut down the menu. It's a crazy world. Get her to eat. Lay a croissant or something on her. You got any croissants stashed away? Let me send Archie up later with a couple croissants.”

I told him Juliet wouldn't eat a croissant unless you sat on her and forced it between her teeth, and then, because he was being so kind, I said, “Humph, there's something else I wanted to talk about. I'm going to leave the restaurant. Can I give you two weeks notice? Is that enough? I want to move on—take some cooking lessons or something. I know you don't agree, but I think I could be a really good cook, and I want to learn how.”

His warm, fat voice broke in; Humphrey Ebbets was never at a loss for words. “Honey, you gotta do what you gotta do. I'm gonna hate to lose a salad maker with your kind of skills, you are A-1 terrific, Delia, left-handed or not left-handed. I'd give you a reference anywhere. I really think you've found your gift. I like the way you fit in at the restaurant, I like having you in my kitchen, and I'm gonna miss hell out of you, but I know where you're coming from, I've been there myself, you're an ambitious kid, it's written all over you, and smart as a whip, that's you.”

I waited for him to offer to teach me, but he didn't, of course. He said, “You're probably thinking of going up to the Culinary Institute upstate, and I'm not saying they don't turn out a decent chef up there. Decent—you know what I mean.” I'd never heard of the Culinary Institute. “But my advice is to latch on to some lessons from somebody really good.”
You
, Humphrey, I pleaded silently, but to no avail. “I could make a few suggestions. You might even want to go to New York to take some lessons. And then get yourself a place with a nice little kitchen—I'm talking apartments now—and just cook, just keep the old stove going. And then, see, you get yourself a
sous-chef
job. Now, this operation is too small for more than one chef, but maybe I could help you there, I know a lot of people in this business.”

He wasn't through, but I quit listening closely. It sounded hopeless, hopeless. It would take more money than I had. I imagined asking my parents for some cash for cooking lessons. Maybe my mother, distracted over Juliet, would write me out a fat check, but I doubted it.

“Two weeks will be fine, Delia, I'll put out my sign and I'll spread the word. But I'm gonna miss you, honey. Now take care of that sister of yours, and I'll see you tomorrow.”

I thanked him and hung up, just as Juliet and Alan came in. Juliet looked like death and headed for the shower. Alan poured himself a glass of cider, drank it, poured another, and drank it while I watched his Adam's apple go up and down. Alan was pretty thin himself, but healthily thin. As I watched him in the kitchen, it came to me who he reminded me of: Anthony Perkins in
Psycho
.

“How come Juliet's so skinny, Alan?” I asked him.

“You can never be too thin or too rich,” he said with a smirk.

“Yes, you can. She looks like a famine victim.”

“Bullshit.”

“She looks like she's going to die. You shouldn't have her out jogging, Alan.”

“Listen,” he said, slamming down his juice glass. “She feels good, right? She feels good and she looks great and she's happy, so you can stop worrying about her. Basically, she's a strong, healthy girl.”

“She's not happy, and she doesn't look good.”

“Well,
I
think she looks good,” he said, but he wouldn't look at me. He looked guiltily at his empty glass, and his voice became edgy. “Isn't that what counts? I think she is one gorgeous hunk of woman.”

I hated him then, his long dumb face and furry hair and pointed ears. I knew that he did good deeds at the clinic where he rescued addicts from the skids. But isn't it true that psychiatrists always have screwed-up private lives? Seeing what Juliet had become, I decided Alan was either a dope or a devil or crazy, and whichever one it was, I hated him and his false bravado.

“She looks like hell,” I persisted. “My mother is flying in from California today. She'll be here any minute.” (Not really a lie—an exaggeration.) “Juliet is sick. She needs help.”

Alan's response to this astonished me. He collapsed suddenly on a chair, squeezed his eyes shut, and began to cry. “I know,” he said. He covered his eyes with the fingers of one hand, but the tears slipped past them and down his cheeks. “I know she's sick, Cordelia. I've tried to help her, but I can't.” He looked up at me—his face was red and wet—and then covered up his eyes again. “I've failed with her, she's gone beyond me. I don't know what to do with her.”