I thought spring might bring Danny back, but as the weather warmed up I stopped wanting him so furiously. I quit worrying if he was all right, if he was happy, if his ear infection had come back. I began to wonder what I would say to him if he did show up. For the first time, reproaches sprang to my lips, and sometimes I thought if I ever saw him again I would fly at him and tear him to bits with my fingernails. I began, slowly, to want no part of the past. It beckoned to me (the look of our balcony from the street, Ray Royal scattering poker chips, the cookie jar, Danny and I giggling over TV in our vast bed), it called, wanting to draw me back, but I went resolutely forward into the new, blank life I’d become fond of. I went from agnostic to atheist: I would never go back now, any more than the tulips in the park would shrink back down into their bulbs in the earth.
The hardware store was my life. I began to work Monday and Wednesday nights for a few hours, and my bank account grew. Occasionally, in the evenings, I assisted Dr. Epstein in his surgery, helping him give shots to and extract urine from the sick dogs and cats in his care. I loved the trembling, whimpering animals and could never cultivate the proper detachment: a good thing I’d never tried the para-veterinary course. A bulldog’s ripped and broken leg hurt me, too. A cat with a tumor in its throat raised a lump in mine. But the yowlings and growlings no longer seemed reflections of my own anguish. I no longer moaned on my cot. And my sympathy with the sick animals was simple sentimental humanitarianism aggravated by loneliness.
For I was still lonely. I remained friendless, though I was on joking terms with the inhabitants of every Main Street establishment. People talked to me, sensing need. Greta told me about her boyfriends, Mr. Mulhauser about inflation, Dr. Epstein about the clinic he hoped to start in Hoskins, Mr. Madox about the decline of Western civilization. I didn’t talk much in return, I’d lost my gift of gab. Always a good listener, I became pure ear: it became my function to take in other people’s opinions and experiences. I did so gladly; it was better than nothing. When Greta told me she was engaged to Bert D’Amato, Chuck’s oldest son, my heart leaped as if it were I who had found true love at last, and I realized with that sympathetic jolt that love was what I wanted, still. I had simply been sidetracked from it temporarily. I began to think of Danny, optimistically, as my first husband.
Then, at the end of May, Malcolm Madox returned for the summer. He would spend three days a week at the store, three days at Blackstone Pond, where he was a lifeguard.
Mr. Madox’s excitement was depressing. He liked to talk about Malcolm almost as much as Malcolm liked to talk about himself, hashing over his son’s final-exam woes, his swimming prowess, his acting ability, with bottomless enthusiasm. His heart must have snapped when his heir chose hotel management over hardware store management, but he gave no sign. There was a hardware chain panting to buy him out for a while, and he intended to capitulate one day—“but not yet,” he cackled, looking hale and indestructible. When the chain lost patience and built a place out on the highway, Mr. Madox remained confident that he would find a successor in the business. And it was true that Chuck D’Amato (“the Howard Hughes of Hoskins,” Mr. Madox called him, not without respect) occasionally showed an interest on behalf of his son, Bert.
“Wheels within wheels,” Mr. Madox would say, relishing big-business intrigue which only he, perhaps, took seriously. Personally, I saw the future of Madox Hardware as identical with the future of Hector’s Market.
I don’t doubt that Malcolm disappointed Mr. Madox as grievously as Nixon had. But his devotion to his son never flagged. (Nixon he loathed profoundly and implacably, and he enjoyed dwelling on his infamies as much as he did on Malcolm’s virtues.) His inability to see Malcolm as the epitome of all he despised eventually ceased to confound me. That was parenthood, that blind love—except in the case of my own parents, whose love was blind to everything but my failures. Eventually I stopped resenting Mr. Madox’s love for his foul son, even stopped being jealous of it, and began to see it as pathetic. I didn’t want my devotion to Mr. Madox to turn to pity, but what other proper emotion could I feel for a good and decent man who rested all his earthly hopes on an evil twerp like Malcolm?
I viewed Malcolm’s summer advent with equanimity. He and I were square. I need have nothing more to do with him. I would avoid him, work hard, encourage him to leave early to go to the beach. He wouldn’t need much prodding: “Work? I love it, I could watch it all day”—that, among other things, was Malcolm Madox.
He walked into the store on a May morning while I was taking my break (a cup of coffee and a Scooter Pie) in the stockroom. Mr. Madox was down at the diner. I heard the bell and knew it was Malcolm. He’d been expected all morning, and the jangle of the bell was uniquely insolent, Malcolmish. I heard him putter around for a bit, and then he came in. I began gulping my coffee, the sooner to get away from him and back to the batch of orders I was working on.
“Oh, it’s you,” he greeted me, and displayed himself in the armchair. “Don’t you know that every cup of that stuff kills off like ten million brain cells?”
“I can spare them,” I said—a mistake. This was the sort of remark Malcolm considered brilliant wit, and he looked at me admiringly. I finished my coffee and prepared to depart.
“Did you know Rice-a-Roni is twelve percent weevils?” he asked. He got up and picked my Scooter Pie wrapper out of the trash can. “The number of insect parts and rodent hairs in this crap is unbelievable.” He waited for a smart rejoinder, and when I simply stood waiting for him to get out of the way, he looked at me with the old tarty smolder. “But you don’t care, do you? Little Delia doesn’t care if she’s poisoning her little self.” His gaze dropped to the writing on my T-shirt (“Animals are People Too—Support Your Local Humane Society”), then back (leering) to my face. He said, “Get any good stuff lately?”
The look, the double meaning, the menace brought back all the fear and disgust, and the coffee and Scooter Pie churned in my stomach. I pushed past him to the safety of bug sprays and garden hose.
For a while I warded it off—the evil. There was a flurry of customers, and when Mr. Madox returned I chattered at him, taking advantage of his joy in Malcolm’s presence to vamp him a bit. “Tell Malcolm about Mrs. Waller’s latest,” I prodded, gagging on his son’s name, knowing the story was a long one. (Mrs. Waller, at the bakery, had her cap set—as he put it—for Mr. Madox, but in vain, and her efforts were one of the few jokes the three of us had in common.) I played that story and others for far more than they were worth, but as the hot afternoon doldrums wore on Mr. Madox yawned, stretched, and announced that he’d take the rest of the day off to tend to his tomato plants. My heart sank. I stared into his bright blue eyes (so like Malcolm’s except for the look in them) with naked desperation: “What about those orders?”
Mr. Madox took it as zeal, and chuckled. “In the morning,” he said. “Take it easy, girl. Don’t work so hard, it’s siesta weather.” He gave Malcolm a wink. “Not that I want my employees to sleep on the job. You watch this young lady, Mal.”
“Oh, I will,” bleated his son, and I couldn’t prevent the old man from going out the door (jangling keys, whistling “Mañana”) and leaving me to my fate.
Which was the stockroom. “I want to talk to you,” said Malcolm, herding me back there. I went. He pushed me gently into the chair so that I had to look up at him or straight ahead at his zipper. I closed my eyes. “Look at me.” I did. “I think we can come to an arrangement,” he said.
“I thought we already came to an arrangement.”
“Mm-hmm.” His eyes narrowed and his tongue came briefly between his lips. “We did. I just want to see that it like continues.”
“Oh, no.” I got up. “No, thanks. I’ve got better things to do.”
“You think I won’t still tell him?” I sat down again: the old humiliating fear. “Oh, I’m sure you’ve mended your ways,” he went on. “I’m sure you’ve been a good girl.”
“I’ve paid back
every penny into the till,” I forced myself to say.
“Oh! Good!” said Malcolm, watching me. “Then when I tell the old man he won’t mind at all. I mean, you’ve like paid your dues, man. Right? He’ll think that’s really great.”
“Shut up.” I rose again and made for the door. “You’re not going to tell him, you have nothing to tell, you make me sick, get out of my way.”
“Oh, but I am going to tell him,” he said softly, taking my arm. “And if you don’t think he’ll believe me, you don’t know my dad.” He backed me into a corner.
It was a repeat of the first time—the warm, stiff flesh, the clutchings at my nipple, the high panting culminating quickly in a yelp—except that I didn’t throw up. I ran into the bathroom and cried instead, on my knees, laying my head against the cool sink and letting the tears drop through my fingers to the floor. I stayed in there until he knocked on the door. “I’m gonna split, babes. See you Wednesday.”
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—”
Chez Cordelia Page 12