Chez Cordelia (31 page)

Once we ran upstairs while the plumber banged on pipes in the cellar. Another time, we had our clothes half off and our legs wrapped around each other halfway up my steep, narrow staircase before we realized, laughing, the impossibility of making love there and dragged each other to the top and did it on the floor. When the opportunity came, we took it. I won't say the urgency that always hung over us spoiled our lovemaking. Sometimes it was part of the fun. We were perfectly happy together, every time—at least, that's how I remember it. But the shadow of Martha was there. We were like prisoners given time off for recreation—for the time was given to us, it wasn't ours to take. If Martha hadn't gone out lunching or running, we couldn't have met. The amount of time we had, whether we would be able to lie in bed and talk or be forced to rush into our clothes and get back to work—the quality, duration, and frequency of our lovemaking—all depended on Martha.

He talked about her, too, more and more. “Did you ever think she might have a lover?” I asked Paul once, hesitantly, when Martha had gone out, all dressed up, for a day in Hartford.

“I wish she did, but she doesn't.”

“How do you know?”

“Martha wouldn't want a lover.”

I didn't press him to explain. I didn't want to seem nosy about his private life with Martha. Eventually, I learned that this discretion was a mistake: he longed to talk about it. As soon as I caught on to this, I listened. I even probed. I can't say I didn't want to know; I did, and though I dreaded his revelations, I ached to hear them. I had to know what I was up against.

“Martha thinks sex is messy,” he told me during one of these confessional sessions. “She's told me that plenty of times. She says even taking a shower afterward doesn't make her feel clean. The stuff pours out of her for two days—that's what she said.”

It was impossible to imagine the immaculate Martha reveling in sex the way Paul and I did, and I couldn't help feeling superior to her because of this, though I could easily imagine what a slut she would have thought me for enjoying it so easily and so gladly. I poured out my soul for Paul in our lovemaking, to make it up to him for all those cold years with Martha, and part of the joy I felt in the happiness I brought him was my triumph over her.

Paul told me I was his savior. I asked him what I'd saved him from.

“A living death,” he said dramatically. “I wish I could tell you how I felt, Delia, when I looked out my front door and saw you on the grass with the dogs, and the sunset behind you. You looked—you looked—”

“Like Jesus?” I laughed, remembering my image of him.

“Don't laugh,” he said.

Sometimes, in the evenings, Martha would be weaving (whuffle,
wham
, whuffle,
wham
—I'd hear the faint beat of her loom), and Paul would be working down in the shop, and upstairs from him, in my sitting room, where I pored over my coin albums or re-read Julia Child, I could sense the force of his feeling mounting up through the floorboards with the heat from his little wood stove.

“You're like a loaf of fresh-baked bread,” he told me once. He used to push back my bangs from my face and hold my head between his hands or stroke my skin with his fingertips while he came up with his outrageous similes. “You're like the luscious little grapes that used to grow in our back yard when I was a kid.”

“You're like a truffle,” I teased him. I told him how my father used to compare me to trees and things.

“I wish I were a poet,” he said, with his beautiful, sly smile.

“God forbid!” I exclaimed, as he knew I would.

I was happy with him, always, but in a suspended, temporary kind of way. I never believed for a minute that what we were living was real life. That would come eventually, and I had no trouble seeing it: the big bed we would share, the rack with both our toothbrushes on it, his kids visiting on weekends, the memories and snapshots. I had vague dreams of a restaurant/ bookshop combo.

I could hardly wait.

And yet the waiting had its own excitements. I loved, for example, to take him his lunch at the shop when he was working, and watch him turn over fragile old pages with his strong fingers, or go reverently through the cartons of junk people were always bringing him. I never knew how profitable Paul's business was, and whether it was more of a money-making proposition or a hobby, but he did know his stuff. This impressed me, as competence always does. I used to sit (on his lap, if Martha and the kids were safely out) and listen to him talk on the phone to his endless, avid list of book fanciers, snuggling into his shoulder while he amorously, absently caressed my thigh. Learning as I was how Martha commanded him, every masterful deal, every brilliant and lucrative find was a relief to me as well as a pleasure to him.

I got to like the bookshop. Paul's shelves of books didn't weigh me down as my parents' houseful did. I didn't consider them my persecutors. They were merely scenery, a backdrop for my beloved Paul, who opened them only to make a living, and whose chosen recreation was the same as mine: a TV set, someone to watch it with, and a platter of cheese and crackers.

The three of us, in fact, used to watch television together in the evenings if there was nothing else to do. Nina was wrong about the armoire—the set was placed quite openly on a pine chest—but she was right about the back room, a little nook off the dining room where the TV, the newspapers, the Monopoly game, and Martha's basket of needlework were kept. Martha was snobbish about what we watched; she preferred BBC imports on public TV. I have no objection to them myself, but they often didn't come in very well, and it was one of Paul and Martha's running arguments: would you rather watch a dim and hazy
Masterpiece Theater
or a crystal-clear
Kojak?
Paul preferred clarity, Martha culture. Culture usually won, and we watched thirteen episodes of
Upstairs/ Downstairs
without ever being sure who in the large, fuzzy cast was who.

Paul and I sat, invariably, on the small and aptly named loveseat together, tingling with the forbidden nearness, while Martha embroidered in the wing chair, her wools and canvas a statement of her superiority to mere TV. It was a seating arrangement she herself dictated. I wondered sometimes, I wonder still, how much she knew. It seems impossible to me that the heat Paul and I generated wasn't perceptible to as seasoned an observer as a wife, but she never gave a sign. That was Martha's strength, though—her ability not to let on. (It was also, I believe, her weakness.) It seemed at times that she threw us together. I occasionally had the unsavory notion that she had hired me as Paul's mistress first and cook second. And yet she seemed, genuinely, to like me. Flashes of real comradeship penetrated that Amy Vanderbilt personality. I could swear she liked me—
almost
swear it … no, I would never swear it, or anything about Martha. I just don't know. Somewhere inside Martha was a closed-up little nut of truth that no one will ever get at, and inside it is—among other things—the real reason why she chose the wing chair, leaving the loveseat to Paul and me.

I think Mrs. Frutchey, the cleaning woman, knew about us. She and I used to have a cup of coffee together most mornings while she told me about her car troubles, husband troubles, sister-in-law troubles, stomach troubles. Mrs. Frutchey seemed to sail her whole life on a sea of troubles, and they never rocked her. She told them to me always in the same competent, unperturbable way, whether they involved her husband's drinking or the muffler on her Valiant. She had lovely, mild brown eyes and a thin face without wrinkles, and she always put six heaping spoonfuls of sugar in her coffee.

We usually talked about her concerns—my life, God knows, compared with hers, was like a cup of chicken broth compared to a six-course meal at Troisgros. But one day she looked me straight in the eye and said, “Delia, there's a lot going on in this house, isn't there?” I looked as vacant as I could. “You know what I mean,” she said. I felt a blush coming on, and I gave an ill-at-ease, deprecating snicker. “I'm not here to approve or disapprove,” Mrs. Frutchey said. “But I warn you, she's not a woman I'd want to tangle with, myself.”

She never said any more about it, but every time I saw her after that, I wondered: how did she know? I wished I had asked her, but to ask would have been to admit. But what did we do or leave undone, I asked myself, that Mrs. Frutchey cottoned to? I had to conclude, finally, that because Mrs. Frutchey was black, and poor, and genuine, she picked up vibes that were closed to anyone as white and rich and phony as Martha.

I've said very little about the children or the dogs, and yet Megan and Ian, Albert and Victoria were large presences in my life. Megan and Ian were graceless, nervous children, accustomed to their mother's formal semi-neglect but not well adjusted to it, by which I mean that they didn't complain but they weren't happy. Megan was prone to sullenness, Ian to fits of temper, and both of them could be vicious when they thought they were unobserved—kicking each other, snatching toys, teasing. Once I caught Megan making a horrible face at me when I told her it was hair-washing night (Megan had long, thick, snarly hair), and twice she bit me. Ian had a tendency to wet the bed. I was with the children a lot, though my duties with them didn't actually amount to much—just the baths, really, and rounding up Ian's various stuffed animals before bed.

And telling Megan stories. I tried reading to her at first because that's what Martha told me to do, but I found out quickly that she hated being read to as much as I hated reading. The books, she said—indicating with disdain her full shelves—were too full of people. She liked books about
only children
, she told me, with a disgusted look toward Ian's room, where we could hear the
Sesame Street
records he preferred to fall asleep to. Megan also liked concocting her own ingredients for stories; like her mother, she needed to run things.

“I wish there was a book about a beautiful princess who lives all by herself on a desert island with only her puppy,” she said to me one night after our usual halfhearted tussle with Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle. So I told her a story about a beautiful shipwrecked princess and her puppy. It became a ritual with us: she gave me the recipe and I cooked up the tale. I feel silly admitting what a pleasure these stories were to me, and that I grew fond of Megan the way an actress is fond of her audience—the way my father loves his public. I never much liked Ian; he struck me as a mean, solitary little boy, and he didn't like me, either. But I was flattered by Megan's respect for my storytelling, and it formed a good-enough basis for our friendship.

“Delia tells the best stories,” she said smugly to her mother one day.

“Delia does?” Martha asked in undisguised surprise. I shrugged and tried to look modest. “Stories about what?” She seemed really to want to know—I suppose to be sure I wasn't corrupting Megan or teaching her bad manners.

“Everything,” Megan said with her know-it-all air that I found so irritating when it was directed at me. “Beautiful princesses, and witches, and creepy monsters.”

“My goodness,” Martha murmured, visibly losing interest. She was separating eggs. Megan gave her a look that would have meant no dessert and an early bedtime if Martha had seen it.

Actually, all our stories gradually fell into one pattern: the beautiful, persecuted princess is forced by her cruel tormentors into solitude of one sort or another, where—though she is sad and lonely at first—she gets to like her banishment and meets up with an animal who becomes her loyal friend. The persecutors ranged from witches and creepy monsters to cruel queens and mean stepmothers, and she was driven to a series of isolated castles, humble huts, desert islands, and enchanted woods, where she found happiness with (in order of preference) puppies, cats, cows, ponies, and butterflies. My stories were brisk and simple, each about fifteen minutes long. I would wind up at 8:30 sharp, tuck in the covers, and say good night—deliberately not kissing her. She never asked me to, merely said, “Good night, Delia—don't let the bedbugs bite” (a line she found ceaselessly, quietly humorous). I would say we had a strange but mutually satisfying relationship. Will she grow up to think of me, I wonder, as a sort of Mary Poppins? More likely, she won't remember me at all.

Megan and I both liked Jay Block's dairy farm down the road. If I had dinner under control, we often took a walk there in the late afternoon at milking time, past the little woods, over the creek, up the Blocks' driveway to the old red barn (now used as a garage) and beyond it to the new concrete structure Nina had objected to. There we could watch Mr. Block's beautiful Holsteins hooked up to the milking machines—and Mr. Block himself, along with his two thuggish, restless sons, supervising the operation and talking, endlessly, milk yields and feed prices.

Mr. Block used to say things like: “There was a time when a cow could get by producing two thousand quarts a year—say twenty-five hundred. Back when I first got into this business, after the war. Now she's got to produce fifteen, eighteen thousand.”

Mr. Block was a tall, bald, weathered man who loved cows. He knew every one of his herd by name, and he claimed every cow he'd ever owned had a unique personality.

“There's a cow out in Nebraska,” Mr. Block told us once. “She produces over twenty thousand quarts a year, regular. Now
there's
a cow. You see,” he said to Megan, “the whole point is fewer cows making more milk. That way you get fewer farmers. You understand that?”

Megan nodded sagely.

“Well, I'm damned if I do!” he cried, slapping the nearest cow on the rump. The cow turned and looked at him—fondly or balefully, it was hard to tell. “But I'm not getting out of this business,” he said with decision. “Knock wood”—but there was none to knock. “You won't find a nicer animal than a cow.” His sons stood by with dubious, embarrassed looks on their faces. Mr. Block looked me in the eye challengingly. “They'll have to carry me out of here with my toes turned up.”