Chez Cordelia (7 page)

Danny's parents liked me, and encouraged me to come around, even if I did snitch cookies. I was, in fact, given carte blanche with the cookie jar, and when I was sixteen I became a paid, part-time bagger and stock girl at Hector's. I worked after school and got a dollar fifty an hour. I never spent a dime of it. I opened a savings account and faithfully made a deposit every week. “Save it for college,” my parents said hopefully. They were proud of my resourcefulness. None of my siblings had ever had a job; they were too busy reading. But I wasn't saving up for college; I wouldn't have gone to college even if I'd been able to get into one. I was getting my dowry together. By the time I graduated from high school, I had over two thousand dollars saved.

I didn't graduate until I was nineteen. I flunked senior English. Even I was humiliated by this. I had never flunked anything before. I'd always prided myself on getting through St. Agatha's on the strength of my natural intelligence and gift of bull, without cracking many books. But I was tripped up, finally, by Shakespeare.

I couldn't read
Macbeth
. It wasn't true, as Sister Charles Ann insisted, that I wasn't trying. I tried, dozens of times, but I never got beyond the witches. My mind closed up at that point, it refused to function, it ground to a halt, and the words on the page turned into mere squiggles, mere designs, and not very interesting ones. It was like being back in elementary school, pre-Meek. I tried reading it aloud, I tried getting Danny and Billy and Sandy to read it to me, I even tried rewarding myself with candy. But nothing helped. I couldn't make it out, or make out what I was supposed to do with it. Every time I went near that paperback book, with Lady Macbeth looking gory and sinister on the cover, little teeth of pain began to nibble at the insides of my head.

I tried to get through the final exam, which featured large helpings of
Macbeth
, on the strength of the class discussions, but my mind had closed up on those, too, and I couldn't even get the plot right. I could hardly tell Macbeth from Macduff, and I was never sure who killed the king, Mr. or Mrs. I wrote one sentence (which I would reproduce here to illustrate my helplessness had it not passed mercifully from my memory) and went home.

“Of course, we can't pass this,” Sister Charles said to my parents. There was a special conference the afternoon of reportcard day. I wasn't present, but I can imagine their reactions. By the time they got home, they were pretty well under control, but my father's eyes were more dolefully Tennysonian than ever, and there were new pouches under my mother's eyes, perhaps from crying. I'd hoped they could talk Sister Charles into passing me. I was revolted at the idea of repeating a course that had been agony the first time around. Besides, I wanted to get out into the real world. I'd been half promised a job at the animal shelter in Madison, and I had dreams of my own little studio apartment full of cute things I liked. I had my eye on a huge cookie jar at Bradlee's that looked just like Bounce—take off his hound-dog head and inside find a million Oreos.

“You'll have to repeat twelfth grade,” my father said, more in sorrow than in anger. Horatio was a professor at Harvard, Miranda had started up her little press, Juliet was working on her Ph.D. in Greek literature, and I had flunked twelfth grade because I couldn't get through
Macbeth
.

It takes a lot to get me down. It took
that
, my first tragedy, my first setback. I saw myself as a practical and determined person set firmly upon a certain kind of course in life (still blurry as to details but with powerfully distinct general outlines), and here I was brought up short by Literature, downed by the enemy, as much a victim of the Macbeths as old Duncan.

My parents were very kind. Neither of them read a book or wrote a line that day. We sat in the kitchen eating macadamia nuts and drinking sherry (mine cut drastically with orange juice) while they listened to me talk about myself. I can't recall this ever happening before, but it did that day. They listened with something like respect. It was, in a way, a feat to have flunked English. For the first time they woke up to the extent of my difference from them, and they listened with the flattering attention they might pay to a European visitor talking of life in a remote Alpine village.

My first, practical reaction was that I should take the course over again in summer school. But my parents didn't think I should simply repeat senior English. It wasn't only my failing grade on the final exam in English that got to them. I had a 75 in religion, 78 in trigonometry, and 89 in typing (my best subject), but I had barely scraped through history (66) and biology (67). Better to repeat the whole mess, they felt, hoping (though they wouldn't say so) I'd raise my grades high enough to get into college.

“Why didn't you take courses that were—well—easier?” my father asked.

“More suited to your talents?” my mother reworded it.

“There are no easy courses at St. Agatha's,” I told them. I worked up resentment, and wailed, “Why couldn't I have gone to public school? At Shoreline High I could have taken art and shop and business math—” I saw my parents shudder delicately, or maybe I only imagined it. They were trying to be open-minded. “I don't see that I got anything much out of twelve years at St. Agatha's that I wouldn't get at Shoreline. A lot less, if you ask me.”

Nobody ever had, but it was true. My parents, lapsed Catholics, had sent the four of us to parochial school for the “old-fashioned values” and for the “culture.” They seemed to think it was important for us to say “Yes, ma'am,” and to know how to sing the “Dies Irae” and what Rogation Days were and St. Anselm's argument, for the existence of God and what Cain said to Abel. Horatio and Miranda and Juliet picked up all this stuff effortlessly, of course. I didn't. For one thing, the Church reformed when I was in the fourth grade. The “Dies Irae” was out and “Amazing Grace” was in. By the time I was in high school, the religion course consisted mainly of debates about birth control and acted-out stories from the New Bible, complete with costumes and props and music. Independent thinking and creative self-expression instead of the Baltimore Catechism and inflexible dogmas and the long fasts of my parents' (and siblings') day. In fact, I liked the religion course, and considering that I didn't do much of the reading, I considered my final grade of 75 brilliant.

“If I'd gone to Shoreline, I wouldn't have had any trouble graduating,” I whimpered. I realized I had a grievance. I had asked them, once or twice, if I could transfer to the public high school. The requests had been halfhearted—I really hadn't wanted to leave Danny and my friends, even for shop and business courses—but none of us remembered that. “I'm just not cut out for Shakespeare and foreign languages and that stuff,” I pressed on. “I can't help it. Why couldn't I have gone someplace that would teach me something useful?”

My parents were visibly chagrined. They looked guiltily at each other. I rubbed it in. “I might have been really good at something if I'd had the training.” I wept with indignation. I drained my sherry and o.j. at a gulp and slammed down the glass.

“What do you want to do, Cordelia?” my father asked me at last.

I clammed up. I couldn't say it: marry Danny Frontenac and run the cash register at Hector's. Not yet. “I really don't know,” I said. I lost a bit of ground there. I should have had a secret passion for carpentry or lobstering up my sleeve. “Something practical,” I fumbled on. I was feeling the sherry. “Something …” I had to resort to gestures—sweeps of my hand that took in the dim corners of Hector's, the village, the great world—flapping gestures that tumbled away the bookcases and elevated me up over the trees to I know not what. Possibly toward where I am now. Possibly there was something inevitable in all this: if I hadn't flunked twelfth grade, Danny might not have gotten around to marrying me, and if I hadn't married Danny I might never etc. etc. etc. Who knows? Who wants to? I leave inevitability to the Macbeths.

Well, we compromised. I repeated twelfth grade at Shoreline High. I got into the English course for subliterates and didn't have to read
Macbeth
. I did have to read some of Shakespeare's sonnets (my father helped me make my painful way through them), but we were never tested on them. I got a 74 in English! I also got 93 in business math, 92 in advanced typing, 90 in art and design. And in shop I made—of all things—a bookcase. It was that or a revolving TV table (an interesting choice, I thought). I would have preferred, naturally, to make the table, but since we didn't have a TV, it seemed pointless. And as it turned out, the bookcase has been useful; it's before me now, between the windows, containing all the books my father has optimistically bestowed on me over the years, along with Horatio's murder mysteries and my grandmother's poetry book. I keep my TV on top. In a place as small as this one, the last thing I need is a revolving TV table.

My repeating the twelfth grade gave my romance with Danny a huge boost. Danny had a job in New Haven, and an apartment. He was lonesome. All of a sudden a year or two on his own seemed too long. Danny wanted us to get married the day after my graduation from Shoreline, as people did in rock ‘n' roll songs of the fifties. I think my failure in school made it clear that he was the leader, not me. True, I'd pursued him, I'd baited his hooks (and my own), I'd let him cry in my arms. I think maybe all this had unmanned him in some way, even though I always kept my math grades low to match his. But my flunking English changed things. There I was, a schoolgirl sweating over homework, while he was pulling down $4.72 an hour at the shirt factory in New Haven. The Macbeths brought us together.

It was a funny thing, but those Macbeths and their strange, bloody deeds hadn't thrown Danny at all; he got an 81 on the final exam, an achievement that continues to amaze me. (“
Macbeth
is not a smiple play,” I imagine him writing.) I sprang Danny's final-exam grade on my parents as one of the arguments in favor of marrying him. They were not impressed by it any more than they were by his shirt-factory job or the prospect of his inheriting Hector's.

When I graduated from Shoreline High, I was nineteen years old and I had $2,127 in the bank. My parents thought I should take a year to think it over. Going steady with a nice boy like Danny was okay; marrying him was something else. They offered to double my savings so I could take a long jaunt to Europe. A walking tour through England with some wholesome youth group, they suggested, thinking back to their honeymoon. Or a couple of months in Greece with Juliet?

“I don't speak Greek!” I said. “I don't know any wholesome youth groups!” They thought I should be more like Miranda, who had lived with a French family for a year. Or Juliet, my mother's pride, who could speak six languages at the age of twenty-four. By the family standards, I barely knew English, and my idea of traveling was to drive down I-95 and see the West Haven Yankees. I didn't want to see the world or sow any oats. I just wanted to live with Danny and stave off life's messiness by arranging it in patterns that pleased me. If I was the black sheep of the family, I wanted my own cozy pen, and my red-headed shepherd.

“Cordelia, you're throwing your life away!”

“Mom! Daddy! I love him!” I said this over and over again, earnestly and sincerely.

“It's not love,” my mother patiently explained. “It's physical attraction and habit.”

Juliet, obviously urged, wrote me a silly letter from Greece advising me to have my “fling” with Danny to get him out of my system. She wrote, “You don't have to make an honest husband out of every man you sleep with.” (She was going through her brittle, sophisticated phase.)

“I love him,” I kept insisting. It was so unfair! All my father's poem-writing and my mother's vast reading and Juliet's studying, all the books and poems and ideas they'd filled their heads with, should have told them the difference between true love and having a fling. “I love him,” I kept saying, and they acted as if I'd just learned an obscure language which, incredibly, none of them spoke. Love: those sonnets of Shakespeare's had been riddled with it, and my father had painstakingly picked it out for me; it was as clear as diamonds to him as long as it was centuries old. In this nineteen-year-old daughter it was something else.

“It's the juices of youth!” he said to me. “Cordelia—think! Do you want to spend your life as a grocer's wife?”

“I don't see why not,” I said.

To spend my life

As a grocer's wife …

It was the only poem of my father's I ever liked. I thought he and my mother were insensitive snobs, and I refused to say what I'd been about to say—my trump card—when Danny's English-exam grade had failed to move them: that Danny was in line to become supervisor of the night shift—after working there only one year! “He has great leadership potential,” I was going to point out with pride, figuring the phrase
leadership potential
would get to them. But when I saw how they felt, I said not a word. Danny's promotion would provoke only more veiled sneers. I was ashamed for them. What did they think I should marry, a college professor? The mind boggles, as Miranda used to say before she found out everyone else said it.

My parents had glimpsed their daughter Cordelia briefly that afternoon in the kitchen (a thin, brown-eyed girl with a scalloped earlobe who drank her sherry and o.j. left-handed and didn't understand Shakespeare), but the vision hadn't lasted. When the question of marriage came up, I became again their dream-daughter, the late bloomer, the one who'd surprise us all yet—and marrying Danny Frontenac would put the lid on that lovely surprise for good. Clang! And I'd be stuck with the rabble.

I married him anyway, of course. Thanks to Shakespeare, I had spent my year seeing the world not from my own little apartment but from Shoreline High, but it had been plenty. I'd seen life long enough without Danny, and I knew I preferred it with him. And the longer I slogged through that wasted year at Shoreline, the stubborner I got. And finally, after a summer of arguing, my parents gave in. What else could they do? As I've said, they tried to be good parents; they honestly loved me in their way.