Chez Cordelia (13 page)

“I don't want you to cut yourself off from the family,” she would say.

“It's only temporary,” I assured her. “I'm pulling myself together.”

At which she would frown delicately, as she always did whenever I alluded, however obliquely, to my position as abandoned woman. “Still …” she would murmur.

I finally figured out that my mother was coming to see me because she missed me. She was lonely, with her children gone and my father writing poetry all day. She was very tender and loving with me, just as she used to be at intervals when I was younger. But now, visiting me on my own turf, she didn't have a book to go back to when she had had enough of mothering (though I fancied I saw her eyes foam the bare walls of my room restlessly), so the mothering was constant. She was prodigal with her quick bony embraces and her unexpected confidences. She confessed to me that her own work was going badly, that she had in fact lost the desire to write exquisite lives of the obscure. What she really wanted to do (and she told me this with a blush that made her look astonishingly young and pretty) was write a cookbook, and she was working on the project—in secret, I understood. (Though it was a proper literary cookbook, with recipes for famous meals from novels, I could see that she would want to spring it on my father gradually, a cookbook being in the same class as Horatio's murder mysteries: parasites on the body of literature.) The dinners she brought over were taste tests. I suppose she wanted the philistine opinion of her daringly seasoned, eccentrically combined dishes. I ate them greedily, whether I liked them or not. They tasted of mother love, and I was hungry. My mother sat across from me, not eating much herself but beaming at me the smile of a madonna. For the first time in years (since the blessed days before I learned my letters, when my mother read me a chapter of
Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle
every night before bed), I spent time alone with my mother without feeling guilty or inadequate, without a stomachache.

But she wouldn't talk about me, not with anything like seriousness. Incredibly, after her first sympathetic reaction, she treated Danny's desertion of me as a mild joke. One of her speculations on his departure was “Maybe he went to a pajama party?” My father, of course, was even worse. It was obvious he was glad that Danny was gone. His attitude made me feel sick—like the day I was hanging out at Hector's after school, the day after Bobby Kennedy's assassination, and one of the customers said, “He deserved it.” Three men and Claire had to hold George back, and that's how it was when I saw my father smirk over Danny. “I've got my baby back,” he liked to say, hugging me with undisguised satisfaction.

I knew my father was writing a poem about his abandoned daughter: I knew without anyone telling me because he wrote a poem about my first menstrual period and about Miranda's wedding night and about my mother's miscarriage between Miranda and Juliet. He had no feelings. He fed off his family gluttonously, never once wondering if we could take it. Not a broken arm, not a bicycle or vacation or family crisis could be allowed to go by without his memorializing it—telling lies about us with words. Through it all, my mother stood by, abetting him with her pride and approval. Tennyson! I'll bet Tennyson never wrote a poem about his daughter's uterus, never immortalized her broken heart with smirking symbols. Oh, he loved us: that's nearly all he talked and wrote about, and it was this noisy father-love that brought home to me the profound meaning of the old warning that actions speak louder than words.

But my mother was nearly as bad. She didn't write poems about me, but she never thought of my feelings. If she had, she could not have talked blithely about how Danny “flew the coop,” or implied that such irresponsible behavior was only to be expected from a nobody, a nothing, a nonperson like Danny, someone who used double negatives and watched too much television. She was relieved that it happened, and she—like my aunt—seemed to feel that Danny's departure annulled the marriage. It had never been real to her anyway. How could her daughter be in love with a nonperson?

I tried to understand my mother's callousness. I supposed motherhood must be difficult—to see your hopes for your child repeatedly dashed by the child's own orneriness. But I gave up trying to make her understand me. I never told her my heart was broken, or that I aspired to become a stone. She wouldn't have listened. She would have smiled, made a little joke, and compared the situation, unprofitably, to Horatio's for the purpose of cheering me up. Once I was properly cheered up we could get somewhere. To my mother, Danny's bizarre exit put me back where I'd started. Removed from this pernicious influence, I was transformed into pure possibility again—virgin soil in which the seeds of culture could still be planted.

My mother began this agricultral task slowly—so gently and tactfully, in fact, that I couldn't help but suspect that her visits, her empty-nest syndrome, her confidences, her mother love were designed as part of a gradual buildup of obligation. Behind every kindness there began to be a demand. For Christmas she gave me a quilt for my bed—the puffy nylon kind, not a motheaten antique patchwork like the quilts I grew up with. Was I wrong to distrust this uncharacteristic capitulation to my taste when it was accompanied by a book called
The Secret Agent
, which she said was a mystery but wasn't? Along with food and gossip, she brought me her old
New Yorkers
and
Atlantics
, the former for the cartoons (to cheer me up), the latter because it once featured an article on coin collecting, which I had actually read. And along with the little domestic gifts, she planted my apartment with college catalogues intended to produce her lushest crop: my college education.

I resisted. (“Who cares?” didn't apply to college any more than to howling dogs.) She patiently pressed on: colleges are different nowadays, they're fun (here I saw her suppress a grimace), the requirements are so loose you can go through four years taking only what interests you, there are all kinds of unbookish areas to major in, business for example, you did so well in your business courses at Shoreline, or counseling you like working with people, math you could be a math teacher you'd spend most of your time student-teaching instead of studying, you like children Cordelia you have a way with them, or phys. ed. Cordelia honey didn't you always like kickball or was it soccer …

The effort made her sweat. Her glasses misted over with her ambition for me. Total resistance was clearly impossible; it would have been the Shoreline High girls' softball team versus the Yankees. But I saw a way out, and I pursued it shamelessly. I was scheduled to take the college boards in January; I would simply mark as many wrong answers as I could.

I was no novice at such reverse cheating. All through high school I had deliberately kept my math grades down below Danny's. This took some doing, because math was not, to say the least, his best subject. (Religion was, once he figured out that you could get away with just about anything on exams if it sounded pious enough.) I became adept at fudging math answers so that I seemed not merely careless (you were sometimes given credit if the answer was wrong so long as the process was right) but dimwitted. Compared with my labors to this end in algebra and trigonometry, the college board examination would be a piece of cake.

And, on the math section, it was. While a roomful of callow high school seniors sweated and groaned all about me, the right answers came to me almost instantly. All I had to do was fill in the wrong boxes. I actually enjoyed it; some of the problems were interesting, and it was an odd exhilaration to see my old math prowess, so long suppressed, come when it was called. The fact that I couldn't advertise it, that I had to find the right answer only so I could mark down the wrong, didn't bother me at all. My performance, as far as I was concerned, was brilliant.

But the English half was another story. It wasn't easy to mark the wrong answer when I didn't know the right one. The funny thing was that half the time I thought I did have the right answer, but I could never be sure. The right answer would wobble toward me, then away, and another answer would surface, just as right in its way as the first. The imprecision drove me wild: why couldn't letters be more like numbers? They reminded me of my father, who tended to answer a question with a question.

It was almost all guesswork. I considered leaving the answer sheet blank, but I was afraid the examiners would think I'd misunderstood, and make me take it again. I would have marked the answer sheet at random, but I remembered hearing once that such a system resulted in a high percentage of right answers. So I struggled over each question. I did my best to screw up. And the result was that, thanks to my vacillations and uncertainties, I got a respectable English score, well within the entrance requirements of the kind of third-rate school my mother (realistic, for once) was trying to talk me into.

My math score, however, was almost as low as it's possible to get, far too low for admission to anywhere but the sleaziest community college. To be honest, I felt a mild attraction toward one such institution, which offered a para-veterinary program, but the requirements incomprehensibly included Freshman Composition, a course Sandy Schutz had described to me in horrifying detail when she had been forced to take it as part of the nursing program. I knew I couldn't endure a course that was all reading and writing to order (“Define love,” one of Sandy's assignments had been), and I never so much as hinted to my mother that the veterinary program interested me. It would only have pained her, anyway. She was of the opinion that community colleges were for juvenile delinquents and retarded people. They weren't on her list of schools to push, however debased that list became in her efforts to find fun colleges.

So the idea was abandoned at last. By this time, my father had finagled a term as writer-in-residence at Berkeley, and he and my mother were spending the spring and summer in California. She gave up her cookbook idea (I think now it was only part of the plot to get me into college) and went to work on a biography of an eighth-century Anglo-Saxon poet who wrote a series of verse riddles which may or may not have been an allegory of Christ's life and death. Her letters to me dealt almost exclusively with this dreary-sounding book, and with my father's progress on a book of sea poems. Her tone was self-absorbed and detached. I know I disappointed her grievously—so we were even.

Soon after Christmas, I encountered Mr. Madox's magnificently handsome lout of a son, Malcolm, a student in hotel management at one of the undiscriminating colleges my mother had pushed. Malcolm Madox was a specimen of the kind of perfectly constructed young man said to drive women wild. He left me unmoved. There was something inhuman about his perfection. His blue eyes were heavy-lidded and intense, but they were cold eyes all the same. His sensual mouth and small, straight teeth could have been man-made, of plastic and rubber; his yellow hair, of polyester filament. He wasn't very tall—it was his one defect—and he reminded me of a boy doll, of the little groom on a wedding cake. Malcolm worked at the store during his winter vacation, his version of work being to sit on the high stool behind the counter and watch me wait on customers. He was willing to do the macho stuff, like hauling down gallon cans of paint from the shelves. Otherwise, he observed, waiting for a chance to impress me. When I wasn't waiting on customers, he liked to talk to me so that I would look at him; he liked to be looked at. He smiled a lot, a lavish repertoire of smiles that had obviously been perfected in a mirror. He went all the way to Hartford to get his hair cut and styled, and he wore skin-tight, penis-glorifying jeans.

He was as boring as he was handsome—the Mr. America of boredom. He talked endlessly about school. I heard all about his courses (things like Advanced Catering and The Economics of Tourism). And about his teachers, who were stupid, aesthetically unappealing, and unappreciative of his finer qualities, whatever they were. And about his physical-fitness program: his hundred push-ups and hundred sit-ups and five-mile run every morning. And about his girl friend Diane who worked in a bank and studied sociology at night. Malcolm was in all the theatrical offerings at the college, and he told me how he'd have had the part of Hamlet if Claude Kratzer didn't give Mr. Charnik, the director, a blow job every night in the men's room, and how he'd considered playing Laertes to be a gross humiliation at first but how he'd found a way to make it work for him by playing it shirtless and got a standing ovation opening night.

Mr. Madox inevitably heard of this (though Malcolm saved the blow-job story for when his father went up to the Blue Bell for his coffee break—also the description of what he called “pussy exercises,” which Diane did to improve her grip), and used to stand beaming at his handsome by-product. He bristled at the insensitive teachers, commiserated over the academic difficulties, chuckled at the nasty cracks which, with Malcolm, passed for wit. He was infatuated with his son. Worse, he loved him. Malcolm was the great joy in his life, more wonderful to Mr. Madox than tomatoes, or hardware, or the memory of his dead wife.

Malcolm gave me a pain. I admit to some jealousy. Mr. Madox was obviously satisfied with his obnoxious offspring, and entertained no fantasies of foster-fatherhood on my behalf. But I also found Malcolm personally loathsome. He might have been deformed and leprous for all I cared. My smiles at his dull and and/or spiteful anecdotes were solely to hide my yawns. I knew I had to be nice to him, as I used to have to be nice to the sullen, snotty offspring of my parents' poet friends—because if I wasn't I'd catch it later. For the sake of my friendship with Mr. Madox, I put up with Malcolm passively and painfully. His vacation went on so long I wondered if he'd been thrown out of school. Everyday he hoisted his rippling muscles onto the stool and let me bask in his presence. But finally, at the end of January, he was gone, and Mr. Madox and I were left to our dusty routines.