Chez Cordelia

by Kitty Burns Florey

  I told her, and I also told her Paul wasn’t much of a reader. “He just buys them and sells them. Never opens them.”

  “Oh, thanks,” Nina said. “I like that. That’s cute.”

  “Did you get the kids?”

  “I met them just before they were hustled off to bed. They shook my hand. Little beasts.”

  “Nice furniture, though,” I said, with a smile over at her. I was glad to hear the kids were beasts. “But I didn’t see any flannel shirts or cornmeal mush.”

  “Well, this isn’t the country after all,” Nina said as we passed the darkened cow barn. “This is fake country.”

  We were silent after that, Nina worrying about driving at night, me thinking about Paul. I tried to recall the moment when he’d taken off his glasses and then put them back on again and I’d known he and his wife weren’t a real couple at all and my heart had lifted. In the car, as we sped down Route 7, the moment got away from me, and I thought to myself: I must be crazy. And then, just before we hit New Haven, it all came back, the precise look of his face, his eyes, his gesture, and I was filled with overwhelming happiness. I’m in love with that man, I thought, and with equal sureness knew he was in love with me.

  It should have been a staggering thought, but it didn’t stagger me. It seemed delightful and appropriate that, after Danny and my long, gradual, doomed courtship, this love should come so suddenly—practically at first sight. I’m in love with a forty-year-old gray-haired bookseller, I thought. With a wife and kids. Still it didn’t stagger me. It seemed absolutely right. We’ll work it out, I thought with serene vagueness, and when Nina dropped me off I smiled at her gratefully, benevolently.

  “I can’t wait to read your article, Nina.” I thought of how I would clip it, treasure it, keep it always.

  “Did you say German short-hair pointers?”

  “Wirehair.”

  “Right,” she said, and sped away with a wave. I watched her IM NINA license plate turn the corner, thinking Good old Nina in a bemused way, as if I were drunk.

  “Cordelia?”

  Professor Oliver came toward me from the apartment house courtyard and stood in front of me with his hands in his pockets. I said hi, and he said, “I’ve just been dropping some books off for Juliet, Cordelia, and I’d like to talk to you about her, if you have a minute.”

  I said I did, of course, though I wanted badly to go upstairs and get into bed and think of Paul. “Do you want to walk around the block?”

  “Maybe we could find a coffee shop …”

  “There’s a bar at the corner,” I told him. “I could buy you a beer.” That appealed to me, having a beer with my sister’s professor of Greek.

  “Are you old enough to drink?”

  “I’m twenty-two,” I said indignantly, thinking: I’m in love with a forty-year-old man.

  “Then I’ll buy you a beer,” he said, and took my arm in a courtly way.

  I smiled up at Mr. Oliver, and he gave me a paternal smile and said, in his Pakistani accent, “You look happy. Were you coming from a date?”

  “Sort of.”

  “I suppose that question makes me old-fashioned,” he said in his regular voice. “I suppose young people do things differently nowadays, and dating as we used to know it is quite passé.”

  I looked closely at him as we passed into Dutch’s Shamrock Tavern and tried to imagine him out on a date, younger, necking at a drive-in or something. I failed. He must be about Paul’s age, maybe even less. Was the gap between forty and twenty-two that huge? Was it just that Mr. Oliver was a stodgy professor of Greek? I imagined him in some grimy, book-cluttered office downtown in one of those massive Yale buildings, poring over his books and losing touch with the real world. Then I remembered that Paul must spend a lot of his time doing the same thing, and I began to get depressed. Would books forever blight my life in some way? He’s too old for me, I thought. I don’t even know him. He has a wife and two kids. I resolved to forget the sunlit moments on the lawn with the dogs, the spark that leaped through my Coke glass, his last fierce stare at me in the doorway … and while I resolved all this, I knew it was nonsense, I knew I loved him and he loved me, and our ages and our tastes didn’t matter a bit.

  “What did you want to talk to me about?” I asked, since Mr. Oliver simply continued to look at me, a little mournfully, stroking his goat beard. The waitress came with our beers, and when she was gone he said, “I think you should get your sister out of here.”

  “What do you mean? Out of where? She and Alan are going to Greece.” I thought he meant she’d been working too hard and needed a vacation.

  “I don’t mean to Greece, and I think you should get her away from Alan. I think you should call your parents and make them come get her. I’d call them myself—I met your father once when he was at Yale—but I don’t want to interfere directly. And you seem a sensible girl, Cordelia. Call your parents. Call your mother, and get her to come take a look at Juliet. In my opinion, Alan is crazy, and Juliet is seriously ill.”

  Nonsense, was my first thought. I tried to get a mental picture of Juliet. I hadn’t seen her much since I started eating all my meals out. I hadn’t, in fact, seen her at all that day. I’d left while she and Alan were out jogging, as usual, and hadn’t been home since. But except for her chronic bowel troubles and her thinness, she seemed healthy. She’d always been healthy. No one in our family was ever sick; our parents had taught us to despise illness.

  “Ill with what?”

  “Mentally ill, Cordelia.”

  I was filled all of a sudden with foreboding. Mentally ill: that was a different cut of meat entirely. I thought of the glint in her eyes, and Alan’s. I always told funny food stories at work about Juliet and Alan. “Juliet, my nutty sister.” You’d have to be nuts, I’d often thought, to live on tofu and seaweed; what if it was true? I remembered how I’d suspected it, and had put it out of my mind. I was seized with a need to see her, to look at her up close and test Mr. Oliver’s opinion.

  “Excuse me for a minute,” I said to him. I got up and walked quickly through the bar and out the door. I ran around the corner to our apartment building and up the four flights. I burst panting into 5-B and there was Juliet, sitting in a rocking chair by the window—just sitting there. The apartment seemed curiously bare; the bookcases were empty. Juliet stood out with peculiar distinctness against the stark walls, and I remembered that she and Alan had been going to pack up their stuff that day and farm it out to friends in preparation for their trip to Greece. “I don’t know when we’ll be back—if ever,” Juliet always said dramatically when asked about their plans. It was a well-known fact that Greece was her spiritual home.

  I looked at Juliet, trying to get a fast, objective view. She had a book in her hand, but it was closed. She was emaciated, I realized with a shock. Her body was like a child’s, or an old woman’s. Her face was ravaged. She took up hardly any room on the chair, and on that hot night (I had to go and get a towel to wipe the sweat off my face) she looked cool—chilled.

  “I’ve just come to get something,” I said to her, throwing down my towel, and went to the phone for the address book, not yet packed, which contained my parents’ California phone number. “Where’s Alan?” I asked, hoping I sounded casual. Juliet just sat there rocking and looking out the window down into the filthy courtyard; it came to me suddenly that she had been doing that a lot lately. I wondered if she had watched Mr. Oliver leave, seen him stop me and talk. It wouldn’t be good for her, probably, to feel spied on.

  “Alan’s gone to bed,” Juliet said, and her voice sounded sepulchral, like a voice coming through a tiny window in a padded cell. Why hadn’t I noticed all this? How could I have dismissed her eccentricities as harmless? Joked about her? I was filled with dismay at my summer of self-absorption.

  “Oh, Juliet!” I said, and knelt next to her chair. I took one of her cool little hands. “Are you okay?”

  She looked down calmly into my face and gave my hand
a slight squeeze. I could feel all her bones; even her palm felt bony. Then she let me go and opened her book. “Of course I’m okay, dopey. Don’t be out too late.”

  I could have cried. I don’t know when she’d spoken to me with such affection. I took one more look at her, said good night, and ran out and down the stairs again.

  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 befor
e 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.”