Chez Cordelia (17 page)

It wasn't only the boniness and the disorder and the cheese; my sister looked so much like my mother at first that it overwhelmed me. I felt spied on. But it passed soon enough, and she began to look like herself, the unmistakable Juliet. Even in red running shorts and a torn yellow T-shirt, she had the chic,
Vogue
-y look she was born with. She still moved with the same languid, purposeful gestures, and there was the inevitable book face down on the table, at the ready. I began to feel strangely at home, and waited with equanimity for her to boss me.

Alan came in with a string bag of fresh vegetables. He was tall and thin like Juliet, he also wore running shorts and T-shirt, and his hair was cut just like hers, giving him a Martian pinhead. I watched their graceful maneuvers around the tiny kitchen: a handsome couple, both of them thin and austere with (but I didn't see this until later) matching fanatical lights in their eyes.

Alan complained to Juliet that the health food store was out of organic artichokes, and then enfolded me in a brotherly hug. My head came to his Adam's apple, which was prominent. He fixed a penetrating stare on me. “Let me see your tongue.” I opened up obediently; after all, he was a doctor. “Bad news,” he said. “What'd you have for breakfast—Twinkies?” As a matter of fact, I had, with a root beer; it was all I'd had in the house. Alan looked at me for a while with his eyes narrowed. Then he said, “Uh-huh,” and began reflectively to make a salad.

Juliet gave a last slow stir to something on the stove and thought to show me my room. It was at the end of the short, dark hall beyond the kitchen, and it was obviously storeroom as well as guest room. Boxes were stacked in one corner, Juliet's well-traveled suitcases in another; tennis rackets up on wall hooks, coats on a rack, two chests, one atop the other. By the window was a single bed built on a platform over two drawers.

“I'm afraid that's it,” Juliet said apologetically. She pulled up the window shade: a view of a supermarket parking lot and the brick and windows of another angle of the building. “That's New Haven, what the hell.” She went to pull the shade down again, but I made her stop. It wasn't the bright, new, high-rise New Haven Danny and I had inhabited, and that pleased me.

“I like the light,” I told her.

I did like it, and I liked the way the room contained me. The sun at that hour made the walls amber, the air hazy with dust motes, like an old photograph. I saw myself becoming fond of the room. Juliet apologized for all the stuff in the way, but I didn't mind living in the midst of other people's things. I was cleaned out, empty, possessionless myself; there was something consoling about an alien mess.

I spent a lot of time there in the next few weeks, especially in the evenings, when the others were hunched over their books and manuscripts. “You're certainly snug in here,” Alan used to say, coming to lean on the doorjamb when he needed a break. His play was going badly.

Snug I was—too snug at times in that summer heat. “Leave your door open at night for cross-ventilation,” Alan suggested. I tried it, but the door, which could open only to a right angle because of a stack of boxes behind it, blocked the passage of any air that might have drifted in. Also, hearing Juliet and Alan at night, talking, toilet-flushing, love-making, made me grit my teeth with loneliness. So I kept my door shut, and lay spread out naked across my bed in the warm, gritty breeze, remembering a record Ray Royal brought over and played for us once: Bessie Smith singing “Empty Bed Blues.”

But I settled in with comparative ease, considering that I stayed lonely, and that Alan insisted on regulating what I ate. That first dinner, for example: a steaming soup of bean curd and broth which brought back to me the time I'd been sick in Billy Arp's sailboat; bean sprouts; and a loaf of brown bread with small, hard tan bits in it. I ate all of it stoutly enough while they watched me. Alan explained that I was poisoning myself with junk food. He reminded me of Malcolm Madox and his peevish strictures against my lunches: the mercury in tunafish, the rodent hairs in packaged cookies, the lethal chemicals in Coke. “Drop a tooth in a bottle of Coke, leave it overnight, and in the morning it'll be gone,” Malcolm told me. And potato chips stay plastered to your stomach wall forever, stuck there in layers like papier-mâché”. And the preservatives in Wonder Bread are made of the same stuff oven cleaner is.

I was willing to go along with Alan's nuttiness because he took me seriously. His bright eyes were as full of kindness as Jake the dog's, and he and Juliet bent their thin faces toward me, looking like twin missionaries determined to convert a particularly stubborn but lovable heathen. According to them, stress plus Twinkies had made me steal, and it was Coca-Cola and canned vegetables as much as anything else that had put me in such a funk when Danny left me.

“On the right food supplements you would have bounced right back,” Alan said. “I'll put you on a regimen and within a week you'll be back to normal.”

He helped me make a list of “Absolutely Forbidden Foods,” which I still have in my List Notebook. It reads:

1. candy bars

2. potato chips

3. Twinkies

4. Coke

5. white bread

“It could go on forever,” Alan said. “But let's start with those five.”

“Five of my favorite foods,” I mourned.

“Just try it, Cordelia,” Juliet urged me. “You won't know yourself.”

I told her I barely knew myself any more as it was. Juliet looked at Alan, who studied me in slit-eyed silence. “Brewer's yeast,” he said finally. “Bone meal. Vitamin C. Selenium.”

Juliet smiled brilliantly, as if a party menu had just been decided.

It was only logical that I take over the cooking. I was, after all, home all day with nothing to do. I was considered a domestic type because I had, for a year, been married and “run a household” (as Alan grandiosely put it, while I thought guiltily of the cans of baked beans and chocolate pudding and Spaghetti-O's with which I had run my household). So I began right away to cook up our soybean and wheatberry messes, and strangely enough I came to enjoy it. God knows, it was something to do: the all-natural meals Juliet and Alan smacked their lips over required hours of soaking and grinding and steaming and mashing and chopping to make the stuff edible. I found I could follow recipes with ease (it's all math), and that I enjoyed translating a printed recipe (from
The Vegetable Life
, the only cookbook Juliet and Alan would allow in the house) and a pile of unpromising legumes and herbs into … well, edibility is all I'll claim for my labors, but that was the cookbook's fault, not mine. (And what I consumed alone in my room and what wrappers I flushed down the toilet were nobody's business but my own.)

I also did the cleaning. No one ever suggested it, but Juliet must have known the mess would drive me to it. I don't know what Alan's apartment looked like before Juliet moved in, but her habits were no neater than they had been when she was a teenager, and her bedroom was ankle-deep in clothes and books. Cleaning the place up became my obsession. While the soybeans were soaking or the cracked wheat bread was rising, I took on major projects, organizing and reorganizing, putting books on their shelves and clothes in their closets. I scrubbed the kitchen floor on my knees, and bought roach powder and ant traps. “If you think these are bad,” Juliet boasted, “you should see the bugs in Greece. This is nothing! Forget it!” But I persisted. I had to keep busy. I washed windows that hadn't been washed since World War II. I lined shelves and bleached the toilet. I rented a carpet shampooer and did the rugs.

Once I began, it was silently assumed I would perform these chores regularly. I was reminded of my childhood, when I was forced into housework because the others were reading. I knew Juliet and Alan were pushing me around, and had acquired a live-in maid and cook who paid them for the privilege, but I let it happen. I needed a family; more than that, I needed an occupation.

In return, I got Alan's counseling. We discussed my problems after dinner; he and Juliet drank herb teas, I drank a chicory-and-beetroot coffee substitute and tried not to think of coffee and dessert. Alan talked to me about my basic conflicts. There were times I thought I would pour my beet-root-and-chicory on him if he said the word
basic
once more, and it seemed to me that my most basic conflict was with Alan: he wanted to talk about my eating habits, I wanted to talk about my marriage.

“It's all in the balance of B vitamins,” he sometimes said. At other times the secret lay in the oxygenating properties of vitamin E and selenium. Whichever, I didn't think it was very instructive to view my relationship with Danny as a simple vitamin deficiency.

“That can't be
all?
If I'd eaten more sunflower seeds I wouldn't have married him?”

“Oh well,” Alan conceded wearily, “that and the usual basic adolescent rebellion.”

“Some rebellion,” I said. “Marriage. Why didn't I go out to the West Coast and drop acid?”

“Ah, you're subtler than that. Cordelia,” he said, warming to it. “You chose the route they couldn't really reproach you for: bourgeois respectability.” He chewed the skin around his thumb, which he had gnawed raw, and smiled. “A brilliant maneuver.”

“And there's a lot more of Mother and Daddy in you than you're willing to admit, Cordelia,” Juliet added, looking up from her rose hip tea and speaking in the schoolteacher voice she'd been using on me for twenty years. “In a way, you got brainwashed just as thoroughly as we did.”

“You're not respectable, though—you're living in sin,” I pointed out, because I knew she was proud of it.

“Yes, but I write poetry.”

“But you
like
writing poetry.”

She gave me the old exasperated look. “
Liking
has nothing to do with it.”

It would be at points like this that she would get up and float in her graceful way off to the bathroom; difficult though it was to imagine in anyone so ethereal, she was always constipated.

Along with everyone else, Alan and Juliet didn't say much about Danny. Alan dismissed him as a symbol. Once he said, “The important thing is not the worth of the loved one but the depth of the love, and what you learn from it about yourself.”

“Proust,” said Juliet.

“Bull,” I said, and went on to protest, “Besides, Danny had a lot of worth!”—although I had passed from hurt through anger to indifference and no longer remembered the worthy details. Mostly, I remembered his red hair and his striped pajamas. “Danny's a real person, you know, Alan. It was a real person I fell in love with, not a symbol of rebellion.”

“That's not the point,” Alan said gently, but it certainly seemed like the point to me, and if it wasn't, what was? Alan didn't tell me. I married Danny because of my parents and a B-vitamin deficiency. I stole from Mr. Madox because my life was empty and I lacked selenium. Alan and Juliet drained their mugs and got up from the table and went to their books, leaving me with the dishes.

I didn't find it as thrilling as I'd expected to discuss things with Alan and Juliet. But an outburst of Juliet's fascinates me yet. “You were always the baby,” she said suddenly one night over dinner, in a fit of impatience. I think she was tired of hearing Alan talk about me. She may even have been just plain tired of me: Juliet and I, for all our renewed sisterliness, were not exactly soul mates, and never would be. “You were always the little pet,” she went on. “God, the things they let you get away with! Hanging around in town—and your rotten grades! Me they took for granted, good old Julie, following in the family footsteps. You they kept poking and prodding like some rare species. You were the different one, the challenge!”

She made a face at me—eyes bulging, teeth bared. I stared in amazement, chewing and chewing on the same tough hunk of endive. Alan said mildly, “Well, it probably worked both ways, Juliet. It usually does.”

Unappeased, she tore a piece of bread in two, then in four. I sat there mechanically eating, with the sensation that the earth had opened before me and shown me some crazy new world in which Juliet was Cinderella and I a wicked stepsister. I watched, bemused, as she crumbled her bread into brown crumbs. How was it possible for two such separate, secret views of the same thing to exist side by side? I asked Alan, and he laughed. “Not only two, but—how many? Ask Miranda, ask Horatio, ask your mother and your father and the family dog—”

“Alan, we never had a family dog, you're forgetting my allergy,” Juliet said irritably.

“Every one of them will have a different story. And they're all true.”

“This is not something I can take in all at once,” I said.

Alan drummed softly with his fork on the table, oblivious. “If only I could get that multiplicity into my play,” he said to himself. His small eyes crossed slightly when he was concentrating, and he chewed his thumb.

“It was always Cordelia, Cordelia, Cordelia,” Juliet muttered.

I felt I must speak to her so she'd eat. She was painfully thin, and she always took the tiniest portions and ate only half of them. “I'd say I'm sorry, Jule, but I don't know what to be sorry for.”

“Oh, the hell with it,” she said, but she pulled her salad toward her and took a forkful of sprouts.

Juliet's outburst, which occurred when I had been there about a month, marked the end of the honeymoon. I had run out of big cleaning projects, and I felt I had exhausted the possibilities of tofu and brown rice.

I was beginning to worry, during those hot late August days, that I might become a hard and solitary spinster. I couldn't get along with anyone. Juliet and her constipated digs at me, Alan's nutritional evangelism, my mother's subtly reproachful letters from California—all of them irritated me to the point of frenzy. I'd had high hopes for a new, mature relationship with my sister, but now all my ancient grudges were coming back: the hamster incident, the paint on the sweater, the borrowed binoculars, the tattling. I saw she was suffering—perhaps she saw I was—but we were unable to approach each other. The old walls between us, dissolved by time and distance, went up brick by brick the closer we got. Daily life, with its opposition of habits and tastes, had thickened between us until we could hardly see each other. I saw a snappish, egotistical tyrant; she saw—most likely—a pesky, moody loser. And Alan … I had sensed he was uneasy at my being alone in the apartment all day, and one night before I shut my door I heard him say to Juliet, “It's not good for her to mope around here.”