Chez Cordelia

by Kitty Burns Florey

  All this, once so familiar, became something abstract that I had to believe in, like the God of the nuns at St. Agatha’s. I remembered from religion class that the chief torment of the damned was their separation from the Divine Presence of God. My separation from all I had loved was my hellfire, and making it fiercer was my perpetual puzzle: why was I condemned? Why was I here shivering alone in my cold hell on a lumpy cot? My memories, my visions of Paradise, were my only hope of survival. I clutched them to my poor soul.

  I dwell on these torments as extenuating circumstances. What I am about to write pains and humiliates me. But I’ve filled these pages with the crimes of others against me—why not my own?

  I began to steal. From my dear old Mr. Madox, among others. But first from Mr. Madox, first a ceramic flowerpot.

  I coveted this pot unreasonably, without even a plant to put in it. It was painted with yellow flowers and green leaves, bright and crude, and reminiscent of the large pot that had held Horatio’s rubber plant. This was a small pot, six inches across, and it cost eight dollars. I wanted it, but even with my employee discount of 20 percent it cost too much. (I was trying to rebuild my old savings account, which Danny and I had diminished somewhat on furniture and entertaining.) But I wanted the pot. I saw it brightening up my apartment like sunshine. Spring was coming. I would get a cutting from my aunt for the pot—something flowering: begonia, impatiens, African violet.

  I see now that my savings account was unhealthy, that it was absurd for a twenty-one-year-old hardware store clerk working for minimum wage to bank a third of her take-home pay every week. And I see that someone with over two thousand dollars in the bank doesn’t need to steal an eight-dollar flower pot. But it wasn’t only that I didn’t feel I could afford it (this is the humiliating part), it wasn’t only the money: I wanted to steal it. I wanted to get away with it, in secret, to spirit that pot off to my dingy room, which it would brighten better than any beam of sunshine. To steal it would be to make it more mine, more a part of me, than merely purchasing it. I wanted it directly—does that make sense?—without the intervention of money. Money was for the bank; the pot was for me.

  For weeks, I watched it, stalking it as I used to stalk Danny. There were three of the pots on display near the potting soil and plant food: small, medium, and large, with three more of each size in the stockroom. It was the medium-size pot (I considered this carefully) that seemed to me most well proportioned, that glowed with the most perfect yellow and green radiance. I lived with it in the store all that time, sold it twice over and replaced it from stock, eyeing it, fondling it, imagining it filled with the shiny leaves and succulent stems of impatiens. I took my time, I wanted to be sure. And one day I walked out with it, in a bag under my arm.

  This method came naturally to me. A thief must be bold, must act with matter-of-fact confidence, as if she has a right to her spoils. It’s even better if she believes she does have a right—as I did.

  And I had the advantage that Mr. Madox was a little slow, a little shuffling, vague, out of it. I’d have had to walk out with the cash register for him to notice my theft.

  I stole the pot on the last day of February; and I was right, it did bring spring into my apartment. It even inspired me to dust and sweep, so bright and homey did it look on my window-sill. My mother had given me yellow curtains with a ruffle; the yellow leaped from curtain to pot and back again with a liveliness that filled me with, if not joy, then a memory of joy, maybe even a belief in its continued possibility. And the secretiveness with which I had taken the pot unto myself was part of the joy.

  The pot stayed empty, though. I kept forgetting to ask my aunt for a cutting. When I did see her, maybe once a month, we went to the movies, but it wasn’t the same. We saw a string of terrible movies, for one thing; and the old talks were strained because of Danny. He hovered over us like the germs of a dread disease neither of us dared speak of. Our afternoons began to depress us both, I think. Something we had valued was slowly dying. I felt very, very old, older than my aunt or my mother or Mr. Madox, old as a coin. Maybe my long, affectionate friendship with my aunt depended on my being a child who needed a substitute for a mother who loved books more than me. One thing was sure, the child in me was fluttering away, finding life in a nest scratchy and confining. Aunt Phoebe talked a lot about fat Johnny, who continued to work for her on weekends. Maybe he became her child. I didn’t know and almost didn’t care. I only knew I didn’t want to be anyone’s child; even my Mr. Madox fantasy was fading away.

  So the pot became a repository for old rubber bands, stamps, safety pins, bottle stoppers. Gradually it lost its radiance, and in March I stole, one by one, a glass juice carafe, a roll basket, a Teflon-lined egg poacher, and a dish towel with cardinals on it. And I stole a loofah from Mulhauser’s drugstore, also a bottle of hand lotion. I bought a melon at the supermarket and stole a melon baller to go with it. And from the 5 & 10 I stole a card of six buttons shaped like daisies, a package of green grosgrain ribbon, and a tiny gold windup alarm clock.

  That makes my confession complete, I think. I never made a list of my thefts, but each one, and the circumstances surrounding its taking, is burned into me somewhere. That’s all of them, except for the trivet. The trivet was the last. Up to the trivet, my spoils gave me great pleasure. I felt no apprehension or guilt or shame. I saw the things I stole as mine. I became obsessed with them before I stole them.

  I browsed through the stores on Main Street for the purpose of becoming obsessed, waiting for something to strike me just right, and when it did the imaginative leap would come at once: I would see it as mine, in my apartment, where it brightened my life like an indestructible ray of sun. The three-yard length of ribbon, for example: I saw it draped over my mirror, its emerald green looped down on either side when I looked at my blank face. I saw it as a life bringer, as nourishing to me as the groceries I used to bring to Mr. Blenka. It made me happy to see my face framed in green—and to pour orange juice from a handsome glass carafe, to live by the cheery ticks of my gold clock, to eat my melons globe by globe, to sew a daisy button to each curtain tieback. Each bit of brightness wore off and had to be superseded, but each one did its bit. Gradually the longing for the old days—my religion—was wearing off. I was becoming an agnostic who no longer believed so surely in the value of the past.

  It must have been around this time that I removed my wedding ring. It went into my all-purpose pot with the rubber bands. It has since been lost—transmuted to that limbo where all the relics go: the things that seem important for a time, lose their luster, disappear. Without the ring, my right hand felt bereft and naked, shocked as if by an amputation, and then one morning—the process didn’t take long—I woke up feeling freed, as if what had been amputated was a superfluous digit: a deformity.

  April arrived, and I had my eye on a trivet. I wasn’t sure about it, it wasn’t love at first sight, but it interested me. Mr. Madox had ordered a dozen for Christmas, but they came late. The one I liked was a square tile set into a wrought-iron rack with handles, and painted in the center of the tile was the head of a collie dog. The trouble was that I didn’t care for the metal rack it sat in. I just wanted the tile with the dog. But if I stole the tile and left the holder, it would look odd and might even give me away. If I took the whole thing I’d have to throw away the holder, and that struck me as sinful. But the two parts of the thing clashed. I saw the tile easily enough on my little old table, ready for a hot dish (my favorite tuna casserole, made with cream of celery soup and crushed potato chips), but the metal holder was superfluous, and it made me uneasy. I pondered it. (It would sound absurd to tell how important the whole question was to me, so I’ll write merely that I pondered it.) I tried to reconcile myself to the holder, I tried to talk myself out of the tile, and the more I pondered the brighter the spark leaped between the painted tile and me. I was at this impasse when Malcolm Madox came to work in the store again during his spring vacation.

  I didn’t li
ke him any better in the spring than I had in the winter. But he liked me, that became immediately clear. He had broken up with Diane, and he was visibly horny. He sent me smoldering looks from the corners of his blue eyes, and he stared at me with the blue half-hidden by oval lids; he arranged a deliberating smile on his full red lips. He was coquettish, like a little tart, brushing up against me every chance he got (and in that crowded store there were plenty of chances). If I spoke to him he raised one eyebrow and let his gaze roam absently to my breasts.

  His performance was both boring and amusing. I would have enjoyed his ludicrous vanity more if I’d had someone to giggle about it with. But all I had was Mr. Madox, who gazed appreciatively at his son while his son leered lecherously at me. When Malcolm was in residence, Mr. Madox came in late and took long lunch hours and left early, so that Malcolm and I were thrown together. Malcolm used to get takeout from the Blue Bell at noon, but to save money I brought my lunch and ate it in the stockroom. Malcolm would join me there and talk, loving his own voice, trusting to the bell on the front door to herald customers. (Though when it sounded it was I, in the middle of my sandwich, who had to run out to wait on them—never Prince Malcolm.)

  He got on my nerves and in my way, but I tried to overcome my dislike for Mr. Madox’s sake. On Malcolm’s last day, I came to work in a good mood, elated by the imminent return of the bland, cozy, Malcolmless days when Mr. Madox and I could bustle around the store together like an old married couple. After I ate my lunch, I decided it was the right day to steal the trivet. I’d made my decision: yes, I wanted it, I’d use the tile and put the metal holder in my junk box under the bed until I could think of a use for it.

  While Mr. Madox was out to lunch and Malcolm at the bank, I carried my handbag (a large canvas thief’s handbag) from its hook in the stockroom to the pile of trivets in the front of the store. I remember smiling with relief at the end of my long debate, with delight at the realism of the collie painting—and popping the trivet into my purse. And there was Malcolm Madox smiling at me over a display of flower seeds.

  I know that I blushed scarlet. Confronted by that blue-eyed leer, I lost all my professional pirate’s calm.

  “I suppose you were going to pay for it,” said Malcolm, coming out from behind the flower seeds.

  “Of course,” I sputtered, and actually felt gratitude to him for giving me the out. “I just wanted to put it aside before someone bought it.”

  “Mm-hmm,” said Malcolm, sweeping away my gratitude with the tone of his voice. We walked together to the counter, where, watched by the menace of Malcolm, I took my wallet from my purse and extracted a five-dollar bill (the trivet was $3.50). I’d brazen it out. No matter what he thought, he could never prove I intended to steal it.

  He took the five from me and tucked it back into my wallet. “Here. Keep it. After all, you didn’t pay for that juice thingie, did you? Or the basket?”

  I looked at him in horror. “How did you know?” I whispered, giving myself away. Isn’t that what criminals always do?

  His triumphant smirk dropped to my chest and back up. “Two plus two makes four, in my book.” He paused, just perfectly long enough that I suspected he might, after all, be a passable actor. “My dad said there were some things missing.” He inspected me, calculating what kind of knife to use for the twist. Then he thrust it in: “He said you were the one person he’d never suspect.” He turned it: “He loves you like a daughter, he told me that.”

  I moaned. Malcolm held out his hand. “Let’s have it, baby.” I reached into my purse and took out the trivet. While he walked jauntily, like a policeman on the beat, to the front of the store with it, I went back to the storeroom. I felt sick—literally, I wanted to throw up. I sat down in the old easy chair where I always ate lunch and put my head in my hands. I could still get away with it, there was no proof—only my apartment full of plunder. Ah, my little flowerpot, glowing in the window. What if Malcolm insisted I take his father to my place right now, to prove my innocence? What could I do? My stomach heaved, and I gagged; I could taste my tuna sandwich in the back of my throat.

  Malcolm came in and stood before me. “I’m not planning to tell him,” he said. I raised my head, unable to believe it, but it looked true. My eyes filled, and for the second time gratitude consumed me. I felt a momentary impulse to grovel, sniveling, at his feet.

  “If,” he said. “If. If. If.”

  When I just looked puzzled, he said, “Stand up.” I stood. He pulled me closer to him, put one arm around me, and unzipped his jeans with the other hand. “Come on,” he said, and guided my hand to his crotch. “Come on.” He spoke in an urgent whisper. “Gimme a hand job.”

  “What?” I pulled away. I thought I had misunderstood him, it had all happened so fast. But there it was, pink and stiff, hanging out of his open jeans. He smiled at me and pulled me back. “Come on, it’ll only take a minute.” He put my hand back among the golden hairs, and closed it around the smooth pink flesh, sighing. “Ah, that’s it. Now come on, baby.” He reached under my T-shirt, grabbed breast, and caressed my nipple with his thumb. “Come on, don’t be shy, that’s it, nice, nice …”

  I did it. While he panted harder and harder, in high-pitched gulps, I pumped his penis. He pulled at my nipple convulsively, matching the rhythm, and I felt it in my own crotch, but I gritted my teeth and set myself against the sensation: no, not Malcolm Madox the pig, the loathsome swine …

  A cry, and slimy semen all over my hand. He was right, it hadn’t taken long, I broke away and ran to the bathroom behind the Shoe Repair, pulling down my T-shirt with my clean hand. In the bathroom I threw up.

  I heard the bell ring as I was washing my hands. Let Malcolm wait on them, the pig, the stupid bastard. But the voices came over the transom: it was Mr. Madox. I had to go see if Malcolm told him. I looked at my face in the mirror over the sink: waxy and still, like a dead person’s.

  Malcolm and his father were chattering about Greta at the Blue Bell. “Second prettiest girl in Hoskins,” said Mr. Madox, who loved me like a daughter, and winked in my direction. Malcolm looked at me and slowly licked his lips back and forth with his fat pink tongue.

  “I don’t feel very well, Mr. Madox,” I said. “I wonder if I could go home early today.”

  Mr. Madox bustled and brooded around me like a hen with a sick chick, but he finally let me go. “Get right to bed,” he said. “Take some aspirin. You got aspirin? Take two. Take some juice.” Malcolm silently smirked. “Don’t eat, let your stomach settle. If you don’t feel better Monday, stay on home. Hear me, Delia? Take care, now.”

  I walked home slowly. I had never been so tired. The wind blew at me all the way, drying the sweat on my forehead. When I got home I moaned on my cot, and then I slept. I spent the weekend alone, tramping the streets of Hoskins until it got dark, staring blankly at the TV at night. I expected the police any minute, or at least Mr. Madox (his kind old eyes misted with disappointment: “You were the one person I never suspected, Delia”). I wouldn’t let myself dispose of the evidence. I left everything where it was. I even made myself shower with the loofah, mix up a batch of orange juice, poach myself an egg, wind my clock before bed, as usual. And I waited for the heavy boots on the stairs, the bam-bam at the door.

  Nothing happened. Trembling, I confronted Mr. Madox on Monday morning. He inquired after my health. He reported Malcolm’s uneventful return to his classes. He showed me how he wanted to rearrange the light bulb display. He deplored violence in the local junior high school. Incredibly, Malcolm hadn’t told. This didn’t make me hate him less, but it calmed me. My heart still dropped like a rock when I thought of my narrow escape, but by the next day it seemed dreamlike: the nausea and fear, Malcolm behind the flower seeds, his fingers at my breast—the vague stuff of a horrible but long-ago nightmare. And my impulse to steal disappeared. I went up on purpose and forced myself to look at the trivet. I saw immediately that it was cheap and tacky, the tile chipped around the edges, the grin
of the collie a grimace, the metal rack worse even than I’d thought. I was glad I hadn’t been able to steal it after all (here my heart dropped like a rock), and I was relieved the whole thing was over, I was cured. No harm done—and gradually, a dollar or two a week, unobtrusively, I put money in the till to make up for what I’d taken. This act of compensation filled me with a joy more profound than any of my spoils had given.

  I became fond of Mr. Madox to the point of idolatry. We began to play Monopoly on the card table in the stockroom, an ongoing game we played all through May when there were a few minutes free. I listened patiently to all Mr. Madox’s yarns about the good old days and laments for the decline of conservatism, murmuring and nodding like a wife. And I marveled at the making of Malcolm from the genes of this good man.

  Spring flourished. I bought myself a little impatiens plant from Hoskins Nursery. I cleaned out my stolen pot, and the plant grew rapidly toward the sun. The display of flower seeds dwindled, as did the boxes of grass seed, the rakes and trowels, the weedkiller, the fertilizer. We were kept busy reordering. Every morning I wheeled a couple of power mowers out to the front of the store, under the awning, and set up the small display of tomato and pepper flats. Sometimes I took my lunch to the park, where a circle of tulips surrounded a plaque listing the Hoskins war dead. My aunt was busy with tree spraying, but I had a phone put in, and we talked once in a while about Johnny (who had grown a moustache), or apples, or Mr. Madox, or family gossip. My mother’s communications dwindled to pretty postcards, of orange groves and pounding surf, urging me to visit in California. Every couple of weeks she telephoned. Miranda and Gilbert were there, Horatio was expected, I could go surfing and pick oranges. I decided my father must be running out of material. The ocean hadn’t been enough. The clan was gathering. But not me, no thanks. I ignored the postcards, and told my mother over the phone that I was a working woman, and that I certainly couldn’t just take off for California when I pleased. My mother’s exasperated little sighs reached clear across the continent.