I didn’t tell anyone else Danny had gone. Ray half suggested I report his disappearance to the police, but I felt I had no right. I’d seen him leave, he’d gone freely. My husband had left me: that was the plain fact. The incomprehensibility of it turned me around. I’d never wanted anything more than for life to be open and undisguised and honest. That was the kind of life I had created for myself—that, at least, was how I saw it—fighting my way out of the jungle of verbiage and ambiguity and downright falsehood in which I’d been raised, to the clean air where I could breathe. And here I was, with the vines closing over me again. Nothing made any sense. Life was as crazy as a dream or a poem. Unable to make a pattern out of it, my mind wandered random paths, conjuring these disjointed images: Danny and I in the mirror, the sounds Danny made in bed, the freckled skin on the backs of his hands, his blue eyes against blue sky on Billy Arp’s pier, the precise look of his feet, his wrists, his pained face when he had the ear infection, his mouth pursed over the leavings of Hector’s … Puzzle pieces. He had gone and left me with them. It was the mystery that disturbed me most. I can’t stand mysteries, except in books like Horatio’s. I can’t stand not knowing.
It was as if Danny wanted to get at me and knew me well enough to pick out the most effective way—knew me, finally, better than I ever, ever knew him. “Puzzle her, mystify her,” I imagined him cackling to himself, rubbing his hands. But why? The Danny I knew would not torment me that way. Therefore, the Danny who left me was not the Danny I knew. Therefore, why mourn him?
This was the way I instructed myself, but it didn’t keep me from mourning. Nor did it erase that horrifying final impression of a carefree Danny jumping lightheartedly into a strange car and driving off without a backward glance. He hadn’t been light of heart for months. In my last glimpse of him, he had looked—no doubt about it—like a man who’d just been released.
I told this to Ray. He couldn’t figure it out. I’d stopped expecting him to, but his failure seemed to surprise him. “I’d put old Dan down as a model husband out of the Reader’s Digest,” he said. “I can’t understand it.” He thought maybe Danny had indeed gone to Florida to have it out with his parents, but he couldn’t explain the secrecy or the pajamas. I thought privately that Danny had gone to Florida to murder his parents. It was hard for me to see Danny as a murderer, recalling his despair over the war and having to kill, but the loss of Hector’s could have unhinged his mind—and those mass murderers were always described as gentle, kindly people, the last ones on earth you’d expect to—
This theory got hold of me so hard that I became afraid for George and Claire and wondered if I should call them in Sarasota to warn them Danny was on his way with a gun in a paper bag. I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I called my Aunt Phoebe, instead, on the fourth day, and poured everything out. She came and got me and took me up to her house in Middle-town.
I stayed there a month, moping around and helping with the apple picking. There was no word of Danny. The police were informed. And my parents. I wouldn’t talk to them on the phone, anticipating satisfaction in their voices. Finally my mother came to see me, and though I scrutinized her sympathy closely, I found it pure. The delicate lines around her eyes were wet with tears. I collapsed weeping in her arms, and then I pulled myself together, and my poor life, too, as well as I was able.
I couldn’t go back to Colonial Towers. My mother closed up the apartment for me and disposed of my things. I imagined—again, maybe unjustly—the glee with which she turned our furniture over to the Salvation Army. I pictured her hurling the cookie jar down the incinerator, tossing the cat clock from the balcony, breaking the mirror with a can of Dinty Moore stew. I wept for my treasures, but I had stopped by the time my mother returned. She brought me my clothes and my coins and my list notebook and the bookcase full of books. She stored the silver wedding presents in the attic. The rest—neighbors, furniture, rituals, all my loves—disappeared into a void just as Danny did.
My mother called Claire and George, who were alive and thrown into a panic by Danny’s disappearance. I believe they hired a private detective, but nothing ever came of it, or of anything. I became, eventually, an official Abandoned Woman, and though I didn’t do it then, I’ll make my list now.
How an Abandoned Woman Feels
1. lonesome
2. bored
3. depressed
4. pissed off
That just about covers the weeks I spent at my aunt’s. My parents wanted me to try college. My aunt wanted me to stay on and work at the orchard. Various modes of therapy were suggested. The trip abroad was revived. What I wanted was to stay by myself in my aunt’s little white guest room looking out the window at the apples on the trees. I felt that all my energy must go into my anger and puzzlement and anxiety. There was nothing left over for ordinary life—which had proved so unreliable and uncontrollable anyway that I wanted no part of it.
I was forced back into it, though, by my kind aunt’s kindness. She couldn’t help it. I looked like the same old Cordelia—how can I blame her for treating me like the old Cordelia? She cosseted me. She tried to jolly me out of it. She was always trying to get me to go places, to abandon my nice cold quiet bedroom. It was her busiest season, but she even took me to the movies. We saw Paper Moon and The Sting and A New Leaf. (She thought only cheerful movies were suitable.) After The Sting, we went to the Little Germ. Whit was gone by then—out of my aunt’s life too, as far as I knew—and we were served our coffee and doughnuts by a blond woman who reminded me immediately of Claire. I sat across from my aunt and tried to look happier, but she said, “You’ll be back on your feet in no time if you just work at it a little bit,” so I knew I must still look as detached from earth as I felt—unable to put my feet firmly down and get going.
She began to talk about her dearest scheme, that I stay on as her helper at the orchard: what fun we could have, going to movies, working the new cider press; she wanted me to help her shingle the roof in the spring, she’d learned to tap-dance out of a book and she’d teach me. I smiled and made suitable faces, as if she were a child. Her trump card was the nice college boys who picked apples for her during the season. She pimped for them shamelessly. I’d met the current pickers, a shifty-eyed boy named Mike who looked as if what he wanted to do was get off in a corner somewhere and masturbate, and a plump-hipped boy named Johnny who, presumably to impress me, had chug-a-lugged the contents of a pint jar of honey.
“I know Johnny would like to take you out,” said my aunt, and I almost gagged on my coffee, thinking of the honey dribbling down his jowls. My aunt put her hand over mine; she had tiny pink fingernails, clipped short, and she wore a garnet ring. (The ring was new, probably a gift from her new Whit.)
“What’s wrong, Delia?” she asked me in her gentle voice.
“I’m still married, you know.” It seemed incredible that Danny was gone, forgotten, discounted in such a short time.
“Oh—married,” she said. “Technically, I suppose you are.”
There she would have left it, but I wouldn’t. “It’s only been six weeks.”
“How long do you plan to give him?”
I didn’t know. A year? Another week? Forever? Would I be any more inclined to accept a date with some Johnny in six years than in six weeks? I had no answer.
“You can’t carry the torch forever, honey,” my aunt answered for me.
“I’m not carrying the torch!” I burst out angrily. “I just—don’t—know—what’s—happened to him!” The words came out choked. For once, there was something I didn’t want to talk about. Why couldn’t my good, perceptive aunt see that? “He could be in trouble, he could be dead, he could be anything. I can’t just abandon him!”
She took that up, of course. “Even though he abandoned you.”
“I don’t know that.” It was the not knowing, the mystery, the puzzle. I had no desire to explain this to my aunt, and for the first time in my life I saw her as part of them, the other sid
e, a branch of the family conspiracy that not only didn’t understand me but didn’t want to.
“Aren’t you even angry with him? Conditionally?” she pursued.
I hate him, I said to myself in surprise, but aloud I said rudely, “That’s not your business.”
“I know. I’m sorry,” she said after a pause, and withdrew her hand after a last soft squeeze.
“Oh, don’t listen to me,” I said with contrition, wishing for her hand back. My poor right hand lay there useless, fiddling with a sugar packet. “I don’t know what I’m saying,” I went on. “I don’t know how I feel.” I hate him, I said to myself, trying it out; but I didn’t cry, and I suspect my aunt thought me cold. She kept her hands wrapped around her coffee cup. Her garnet ring looked reproachful.
We went home, and that night I started reading the help-wanted ads, which is how I got the job at Madox Hardware, in the town of Hoskins. They wanted a counter girl and cashier, with experience: that was me. The store was halfway between my father’s house and my aunt’s, so that I could have lived at either one—and after they got used to what was considered yet another bizarre act on my part (Why a hardware store instead of the orchard? instead of college? instead of England?), they tried to get me to board with one or the other. But I wanted to get off on my own, and finally I persuaded my aunt that it would be for the best, and she convinced my parents. She compared it to the way she felt after she split up with Jack Appleman. There were some superficial similarities, I suppose; items 1 and 2 on my Abandoned Woman list would apply equally well to a woman who has kicked her husband out and one whose husband has taken off, at dawn, in his pajamas. But it wasn’t an apt comparison. I let it stand, of course, since it served as well as anything as my passport to a one-room apartment in Hoskins.
This time I didn’t even try. I accepted castoffs from my parents’ attic—an iron cot, an old gateleg table, a couple of press-back chairs that had been my grandmother’s. I dragged my bookcase and books and coins along. I cooked on a hot plate and an electric skillet, the latter a retrieved wedding present. I let the stained and peeling walls stain and peel. And I kept cookies in the bags they came in. I didn’t care. I ate and slept and watched TV and went to work.
My job was supposed to be temporary, for the Christmas season, but that was okay with me. I didn’t suppose I wanted to spend my life in a hardware store—it didn’t rhyme, for one thing. But since I had no idea how I did want to spend it, it was okay with me, too, when Mr. Madox said the job could become permanent. He said “could” with such sly caginess that I knew the point was that I’d be on probation until after Christmas. That was also okay. All I wanted was to be left alone to find peace among the brooms, bolts, and buckets.
Chapter Five
Madox Hardware
The winter I went to work at Madox Hardware was a particularly dreary, snowless winter made of gray light with a cold, dead look to it that exactly suited my mood. The hardware store was on a windy corner on the main street of Hoskins. I had to walk there every morning from the corner of Main and Woodlawn, where, over the veterinarian’s offices, my room was located; and I had to walk back every evening after work. So I became a reluctant expert on the weather, especially the wind, which, no matter in which direction I was walking, always blew in my face.
I used to wake up around 6:30, without benefit of alarm clock, when the first hint of light appeared around the edges of the cold green windowshades. I would get out of bed into the cold (Dr. Epstein, the vet downstairs, turned on the heat when he arrived) and shuffle in my bed socks over to the back window, the one that looked out on the dog runs. Snow, bits of browned grass, my plastic garbage can, and beyond the parking lot Woodlawn Street, with its shabby frame houses where I imagined people waking up, cursing, to wet babies, burnt toast, morning cartoon shows. Life: bleak outside, bleak inside, whatever the weather. I would crawl back into bed and get dressed under the covers.
It was the only messy period of my life. My cot remained a jumble of blankets all day; just before bed I pulled them smooth. Whole platoons of dust kittens assembled around the room’s perimeter, and there were webs of dust from ceiling to wall. The trash basket overflowed, the toilet bowl went from white to deep beige, the dirty dishes stayed stacked up for days. It wasn’t that I was too depressed to notice: I noticed all right, and took perverted pleasure in the muddle. I, who had always prided myself on keeping disorder at bay—I surveyed my household anarchies with satisfaction: all right (I said silently to whatever god of chaos was listening), all right, if that’s the way you want it …
I slept on the cot my parents donated, hidden behind a folding screen from the same source—hidden from whom, I don’t know, since I hardly ever had visitors, but my genteel mother insisted I couldn’t have an undisguised bed in my living room. (I suppose she thought I would be entertaining gentlemen callers who would, at the sight of a bed, be overcome with lust and insist on having their way with me.)
The building was pre–World War I, two-story, red brick, corniced, gloomy, high-ceilinged. My upstairs room was large, and easily accommodated my screened-off “bedroom” in one of its drafty corners. In another, my mother improvised a wee kitchen around a three-foot fridge and a metal cabinet with a hot plate on it. The toilet and shower stall were indecently housed behind a single fiberboard partition without a door. My mother put up a heavy curtain on brass rings over the opening, and from somewhere a draft jangled it at intervals, so that I lived with the wind-chime music of the rings. But I took for my text “Who cares?” and quickly got used to the noise, as I got used to the drafts and the drabness.
But there was worse: the plangent howls of the dogs downstairs in Dr. Epstein’s kennel. One dog in particular, a big spotted spaniel named Jake who boarded there a whole month while his owners were in Florida, used to howl a most unspaniely howl, like a soul in torment. I think he was afraid of the dark (perhaps at home he’d slept with a night-light), for at dusk his howls began. The worst of the noise was that it was irregular. If the poor thing had howled steadily all night I might have hardened myself to it, but his horrible protests came at erratic intervals—a good strong one, inevitably, for openers, then perhaps two in a row, a bout of whimpering, then tense silence, in which I feared he’d died of grief, then an agonized, prolonged scream and a couple of indignant yelps before the unreliable quiet again briefly descended. It never failed to disconcert me if I was awake, and wake me up if I was asleep. “Who cares?” wasn’t convincing; I cared, that’s who. My heart overflowed with it: poor doggie, poor thing, poor old Jakey. There were times I mingled my own moans (I had taken to moaning in earnest, at night on my cold cot) with Jake’s. Though I could never match his volume and variety, I felt we were kindred damned souls, exiled from our proper kingdoms, pining for the heaven of home.
I stopped in to see Dr. Epstein one day with a bright idea. He always seemed glad to see me. In fact, he offered me a job when Dee, his receptionist and kennel cleaner, quit to get married, but by then I was hooked on the hardware store. I’d come up with my bright idea after several nights of listening to Jake’s laments: why didn’t the dog come up and sleep in my apartment at night? He might be less homesick and quiet down—and so might I, I didn’t tell Dr. Epstein, with a nice floppy pup snoring on the floor by my bed.
It took me a whole week to persuade him, a week of stopping by after work and helping him hose out cages and wash water bowls. He was reluctant: it wasn’t orthodox, it probably wasn’t even legal, he couldn’t take the responsibility. Blah, blah, he fingered his moustache and avoided my eyes. I finally blew up at him. “It’s easy for you! You go home every night to your quiet little house! You don’t have to listen to that poor animal suffer!” And so on and so on (or “ect., ect.,” as Danny used to write it). I was not really angry. I knew Dr. Epstein wasn’t heartless or inhuman—he was such a good vet that I wished sometimes I were a sick pup so he would care for me. I was only playing my cards. I wanted that dog.
I
got him. Dr. Epstein must have seen that it was for my benefit as much as Jake’s—and, vet or no vet, it was human suffering, not canine, that finally moved him. That night he delivered a waggy, bouncing Jake to my door. Before I delivered him back on my way to work the next morning, Jake drank the water in the toilet, chewed up a leather belt and part of the rug, and piddled in all four corners of the room. But he didn’t howl once and neither did I.
Three days later his owners returned early from Florida and took him home. I missed him sorely. I kept finding white dog hairs around the place, and felt lonesomer than ever. I couldn’t help seeing the loss of Jake as an omen: all I loved would be taken from me, even a homesick dog.
In an attempt to forestall the workings of fate, I asked Chuck D’Amato, who ran the Blue Bell Diner and rented me the apartment, if I could get a dog. For answer, he dug out a copy of my lease and pointed silently to the “no pets” clause. No, he couldn’t make an exception. No, not even a tiny cat. No, not even a budgie, whatever that was. I gave up. Who cares? Let fate take its course. I was destined to be a loner. The signs had always been there: my isolation in my own family, and then the loss of Hector’s, of Danny, of my possessions. You’d think I would have learned, and I thought I had. I brooded alone in my room. I avoided my family. I didn’t even have a phone. I resolved to give up hope, to want for nothing, no one. It seemed to me I worked hard and profitably at this new life, and became as cold and hard as a stone.
But I never did learn. Every dog on the street, every cat and squirrel, drew me. I yearned toward half-heard bits of conversation, toward people’s worn, interesting faces, toward the lighted windows I passed on my way home in the wind. I became friendly with Dr. Epstein and his dogs, with Greta the counter woman at the Blue Bell, with the regular customers at the store—not intimate, but friendly, so that I looked forward to these human encounters no matter how often I instructed myself in the habits of stones. When Dr. Epstein talked to me about heartworm, or Greta told me to have a nice day, or I managed to locate in a carton in the storeroom just the outdated plumbing gizmo someone needed, I felt myself warming and softening, nourished back to life. But the process was slow, and I was weary.
Chez Cordelia Page 9