Chez Cordelia (6 page)

I doubt she ever wrote another word. My parents admitted that she seemed happier, but they said it ruefully, as though she shouldn't be, or as though happiness wasn't the point. “Everyone's got one crazy relative,” my father said (making me wonder if Horatio and Miranda and Juliet would say the same thing about me when we all grew up).

She never seemed the least bit crazy to me. There were times when I lived from movie to movie, when the postponement of an afternoon with my aunt was a tragedy even Hector's Market couldn't assuage. I loved my aunt and her orchard, and I loved the orchard in all its seasons: spring, all blossoms and bees; summer, when the apples blew up like balloons, it seemed overnight; fall, and the taste of the first Spartans; and even winter, when the trees went rough and black, but with tiny buds, if you looked closely. It all seemed far less crazy than sticking in the house getting endless ink transfusions.

My aunt and I went to New Haven one Saturday afternoon, to see a revival of A
Taste of Honey
. (We both liked English movies—the more outlandish the accent, the better.) I cried so hard she let me have a cup of coffee, with cream and four sugars, at the Little Germ afterward. Whit brought it over to our table personally, and put his skinny dark hand on my head, and said, “She's the spitting image of you, Gloria.”

“Go on,” said my aunt. “She doesn't look a bit like me.”

“Around the eyes—look here.” He turned my head like a doorknob under his hand. “Look at those gorgeous eyes—that perky little nose—just like yours.”

“Bull,” said my aunt.

I went to the ladies' room and checked my eyes in the mirror. Except for looking pinkish around the edges, they were the same as ever, narrow and brown like my father's instead of round and blue like my aunt's and my mother's. My perky little nose was red and running. But I hoped, possibly even prayed, that the resemblance was there, and I toyed with the agreeable notion that I was my aunt's secret child, born under an apple tree. When I went back Whit was still there, examining my aunt's eyes intently.

“Feeling better, Cookie?” he asked me. “Ready to order?” He was a handsome man, with a moustache that seemed to bristle out of his nose, and he took my order back to the kitchen (the usual: fries and a sundae) with a spring in his step. My aunt watched him fondly, and so did I.

Sometimes I stayed overnight in my aunt's little apple-colored house. She let me watch TV, and one April she actually allowed me to sleep outside under the apple blossoms. She had a fat, playful, apple-eating hound dog named Bounce, whom I loved with a pure and joyful passion similar to my passion for John Lennon. I hugged and romped with Bounce as I would have hugged and romped with John Lennon, given the chance.

Aunt Phoebe had the great gift of acceptance. I'm convinced it's a gift, something you're born with, the ability to take people as they are, to let them take whatever shape they will, and never try to change it. I can't remember my aunt ever,
ever
trying to get me to read a book.

I decided that Aunt Phoebe, and the Frontenacs, lived as close to the way I wanted to live as anyone I could think of, and some nights while I was poring over my coin albums I used to lay plans for becoming more like them. It was on one of those nights that I decided to marry Danny. What a shortcut! To marry right into the family! I was overcome with chuckles at my cleverness, but even if they hadn't been in the middle of a game of Botticelli I couldn't, of course, have told my family.

I had become a regular at the Frontenacs' by then. I loved it there, especially in their apartment, where the TV was on every night after the store closed, and where there was no one watching everything I said, ready to pounce on every grammatical error with some witty riposte, and where there didn't seem to be any books except the Bible,
TV Guide
, and
Modern Grocer
. As I got older, my parents let me go out in the evenings, and I was always at the Frontenacs', eating dinner and watching TV and playing poker with them, stalking Danny.

He and I used to stretch out on the floor on our stomachs, leaning on our elbows, and watch
Star Trek
and
The Dick Van Dyke Show
and
The Wonderful World of Disney
. There was always a bag of Cheez-Its or Fig Newtons between us. His parents didn't care what we ate, or how much we ate, as long as we didn't get crumbs on the gold wall-to-wall. We munched with paper napkins spread out under our chins. We used to feed Cheez-Its to Snowball, who crunched obediently over his own napkin. Claire and George would often sit on the sofa behind us; they seemed endlessly amiable, boundlessly kind, superhumanly patient with Danny and me and our lame adolescent jokes, uncomplaining when our raucous teasing of each other drowned out the TV—for that was the form our friendship took when it first got off the ground: teasing and insults. Claire would ask Danny to pass her a couple of Cheez-Its, Danny would reply yeah if I can get them away from El Piggo here, I would say who's calling who a pig, look at him, his mouth is full and both hands too, Danny would interrupt oh yeah Fatty? well all I can say is when we were out in Billy's boat the other day it wasn't
my
end that sank down like a rock, and I'd give him a punch on the arm, and he'd say my father always told me never to hit a lady but that doesn't apply to you, and he'd punch me back, and Claire would say where's my Cheez-Its? and we'd hand her the bag and start giggling and punching each other again while Starship Enterprise shot through space toward impossible dangers.

I had watched Danny's attitude toward me slowly change. We still didn't talk much, except to fool around. I could see in the punches we exchanged, in the teasing, and in his broody brown eyes the dawn of something even I didn't fully comprehend (though I comprehended it better than he did). I thought he was the handsomest boy in town, like a tree in autumn (a red maple!), with his flaming hair and brown wrists and long bones. Sandy Schutz didn't agree; she didn't like his freckles. “I'll bet he's even got freckles—you know—all over,” she said with a simulated shiver. I hadn't thought of that, but I began to, often. By this time I was over John Lennon. I was fourteen or so, about the age Miranda got over Byron. I was ready for a more local, less speculative and pure passion.

Danny was it. It took a couple of more years of following him around and letting him punch me, but by the time we were sixteen we were going steady. I don't know what finally did it—hormones, probably—and I can't recall how I advanced from silent companion to girlfriend. I do remember the first time he kissed me. We were fishing off the pier down by Billy Arp's, and Billy went inside for something to eat, and I baited Danny's hook for him (I always did; he was squeamish), and he flung his line out and then he kissed me—crookedly, without preamble or embrace, and fast, before Billy came back. It wasn't so much a kiss as a coded message: things will be different between us now, there's more to come. Then a fish tugged on his line, and Billy returned, and the shock and thrill of being kissed became irrelevant, and disappeared. There was just the fish and the sea and Billy with a bag of pretzels. But the message lingered on, and from then on things
were
different between us; and there
was
more to come.

It was the typical adolescent pilgrimage along the paths of love and sex, starting with kisses, then better kisses, gropings, then better gropings, and all the rest of it. We made love the first time in Danny's living room, in front of the TV, while George and Claire were at a bowling banquet. It was late spring, the windows were wide open, and there was a warm breeze bringing in all the Saturday-night sounds of Main Street. On the TV, the Yankees were creaming the Red Sox. And when Danny and I rolled apart at last, and he told me over and over again that he loved me, the secure, serene happiness I felt was something new to me. I had never been happy in quite that miraculous way before, and in spite of all my years of practical dreaming I had never expected—not really—that my long dream would, quite precisely and literally, come true.

After that, besides making love every chance we got, we began to talk to each other, telling each other what we had never told anyone, even Sandy Schutz and Billy Arp. Danny was a talker. That's one of the things I liked about him, he talked about things instead of reading about them. But Danny (unlike me) was naturally reticent about himself. By diligent attention during my years of being his silent shadow, I had learned certain things about him. I knew he wanted eventually to fit into the slot his father had designed for him, the takeover of Hector's, and a wonderful thing I thought that, the passing on from parent to child of something as vital and tangible as Hector's. It was like Aunt Phoebe and her orchard, and I pictured Danny and me growing strong and wise among the cans and boxes the way my aunt had among the apple trees.

But I knew, too, that Danny wanted to do something on his own first. He and Billy had talked a little about that, letting me humbly listen. Billy wanted nothing more than to go right from high school to the navy, and he talked about basic training the way most seventeen-year-olds talk about the senior prom. He was a boat nut, and he figured on a hitch in the navy followed by college on the GI Bill and a degree in naval architecture, and then he'd go out to the West Coast and build boats. Danny and I listened respectfully to these hopes, but it was a relief to me when Danny let me drag it out of him, once our relationship had progressed to that stage, that he didn't share them. Billy looked forward to going to Vietnam; Danny spent his whole senior year sweating over the prospect of his number coming up, and I sweated with him. We talked of escaping to Canada; the Frontenacs had relatives in Quebec. I began to wonder if, after all, I should learn French. We carried signs to Hartford during Anti-Draft Week in March and lugged them around the capitol buildings, chanting.

The day it was discovered that Danny had a small heart murmur, he cried from relief with his head in my lap. He said he'd rather drop dead of a heart attack in the middle of a basketball game than have to shoot at people and drop bombs. I loved it that he was afraid to go to war and that he had confessed it to me, and as I stroked his bright hair I dropped my own joyful tears on it. It seemed to me that anyone in his right mind should be afraid to go to war, and I couldn't see why there were so many wars, when so many people were afraid to fight in them. I had to blame it on the generals and the presidents and the Billy Arps, but Billy was such a nice, amiable, extroverted kid, who liked messing around in boats and whacking fish on the head, that it made me wonder about the other warmongers. But I picketed with Danny, and wept with him when his own scare was over.

Freed from it, he decided he'd get a job in New Haven and live there for a year or two before he committed himself to me or to Hector's—to see the world a bit, but on his own modest terms. New Haven was enough of the world for him, at least at that point. This minuscule ambition, too, was something he confessed only to me, keeping it from Billy (who wanted someday to hitchhike to Alaska) and from his parents (who would have preferred that he stay in the village, gliding smoothly from the graduation ceremonies to Hector's produce department). I understood it perfectly, the funny mix of claustrophobia and affection a small town can generate when you've lived in it all your life. We both wanted to live out our days in the village; we were both small-town people; but we wanted to stand back for a while and get a new perspective on it.

At least, that's the way Danny saw it; to be honest, I didn't want a perspective any different from the one I had. Hadn't I, all these years, been standing back from my family and what they represented? Hadn't I been born distanced? School was the only blight on my life. Once I was out, the town would be my oyster. And someday I'd be mistress of Hector's Market, the rock that anchored the town. It seemed the ideal combination: to live in the town I'd always lived in, but on my own, in my own way, with sunshine and fresh air coming in through diamond-paned windows, with my husband. I liked the place, I was comfortable there.

Danny, of course, was part of my comfort. I understood his need for some breathing space, away from the town, Hector's, his parents, me. But I worried about losing him. I was, after all, the initiator of our romance; I was his pursuer, and I'd caught him, and now that I had him it seemed the way to keep him was to let him go. He was beginning to snap at me for bossing him. “Quit nagging me,” he sometimes said. He sounded like a disillusioned husband, and it frightened me.

So I agreed, with my old calculated humility, playing him like a fish, that a separation from each other would be only practical. We would wait a year or two—see other people—get away on our own—blah blah blah. Then we'd get married and pitch in at Hector's as planned. “After all,” Danny said, “we were childhood sweethearts, we've been together practically all our lives!” This touched and charmed me; it threw a veil of such romantic and dogged devotion over the long, vague, tentative friendship that began with our hands linked against Mrs. Meek and her books.

My parents had never said much about our courtship. I'm sure they didn't know that was what it was. They liked Danny, and they knew he was a “nice boy” (which he was, though not in the way they thought). They liked and respected his parents, who represented small-town virtues and old-fashioned values and special-ordered bean curd and Jackson's Coronation Tea for my mother. So they didn't mind my hanging around the Frontenacs', though they were puzzled sometimes that I didn't bring Danny home more often—forgetting, once I became a determinedly social teenager, the long tradition of discouraging me from having my low, noisy friends over. But I could just see it—everyone sitting around reading after dinner, and Danny with his boxing magazine.