Chez Cordelia (15 page)

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.

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.”