Chez Cordelia (12 page)

“Aren't you even angry with him? Conditionally?” she pursued.

I hate him, I said to myself in surprise, but aloud I said rudely, “That's not your business.”

“I know. I'm sorry,” she said after a pause, and withdrew her hand after a last soft squeeze.

“Oh, don't listen to me,” I said with contrition, wishing for her hand back. My poor right hand lay there useless, fiddling with a sugar packet. “I don't know what I'm saying,” I went on. “I don't know how I feel.” I hate him, I said to myself, trying it out; but I didn't cry, and I suspect my aunt thought me cold. She kept her hands wrapped around her coffee cup. Her garnet ring looked reproachful.

We went home, and that night I started reading the help-wanted ads, which is how I got the job at Madox Hardware, in the town of Hoskins. They wanted a counter girl and cashier, with experience: that was me. The store was halfway between my father's house and my aunt's, so that I could have lived at either one—and after they got used to what was considered yet another bizarre act on my part (Why a hardware store instead of the orchard? instead of college? instead of England?), they tried to get me to board with one or the other. But I wanted to get off on my own, and finally I persuaded my aunt that it would be for the best, and she convinced my parents. She compared it to the way she felt after she split up with Jack Appleman. There were some superficial similarities, I suppose; items 1 and 2 on my Abandoned Woman list would apply equally well to a woman who has kicked her husband out and one whose husband has taken off, at dawn, in his pajamas. But it wasn't an apt comparison. I let it stand, of course, since it served as well as anything as my passport to a one-room apartment in Hoskins.

This time I didn't even try. I accepted castoffs from my parents' attic—an iron cot, an old gateleg table, a couple of press-back chairs that had been my grandmother's. I dragged my bookcase and books and coins along. I cooked on a hot plate and an electric skillet, the latter a retrieved wedding present. I let the stained and peeling walls stain and peel. And I kept cookies in the bags they came in. I didn't care. I ate and slept and watched TV and went to work.

My job was supposed to be temporary, for the Christmas season, but that was okay with me. I didn't suppose I wanted to spend my life in a hardware store—it didn't rhyme, for one thing. But since I had no idea how I did want to spend it, it was okay with me, too, when Mr. Madox said the job could become permanent. He said “could” with such sly caginess that I knew the point was that I'd be on probation until after Christmas. That was also okay. All I wanted was to be left alone to find peace among the brooms, bolts, and buckets.

Chapter Five

Madox Hardware

The winter I went to work at Madox Hardware was a particularly dreary, snowless winter made of gray light with a cold, dead look to it that exactly suited my mood. The hardware store was on a windy corner on the main street of Hoskins. I had to walk there every morning from the corner of Main and Woodlawn, where, over the veterinarian's offices, my room was located; and I had to walk back every evening after work. So I became a reluctant expert on the weather, especially the wind, which, no matter in which direction I was walking, always blew in my face.

I used to wake up around 6:30, without benefit of alarm clock, when the first hint of light appeared around the edges of the cold green windowshades. I would get out of bed into the cold (Dr. Epstein, the vet downstairs, turned on the heat when he arrived) and shuffle in my bed socks over to the back window, the one that looked out on the dog runs. Snow, bits of browned grass, my plastic garbage can, and beyond the parking lot Woodlawn Street, with its shabby frame houses where I imagined people waking up, cursing, to wet babies, burnt toast, morning cartoon shows. Life: bleak outside, bleak inside, whatever the weather. I would crawl back into bed and get dressed under the covers.

It was the only messy period of my life. My cot remained a jumble of blankets all day; just before bed I pulled them smooth. Whole platoons of dust kittens assembled around the room's perimeter, and there were webs of dust from ceiling to wall. The trash basket overflowed, the toilet bowl went from white to deep beige, the dirty dishes stayed stacked up for days. It wasn't that I was too depressed to notice: I noticed all right, and took perverted pleasure in the muddle. I, who had always prided myself on keeping disorder at bay—I surveyed my household anarchies with satisfaction: all right (I said silently to whatever god of chaos was listening), all right, if that's the way you want it …

I slept on the cot my parents donated, hidden behind a folding screen from the same source—hidden from whom, I don't know, since I hardly ever had visitors, but my genteel mother insisted I couldn't have an undisguised bed in my living room. (I suppose she thought I would be entertaining gentlemen callers who would, at the sight of a bed, be overcome with lust and insist on having their way with me.)

The building was pre–World War I, two-story, red brick, corniced, gloomy, high-ceilinged. My upstairs room was large, and easily accommodated my screened-off “bedroom” in one of its drafty corners. In another, my mother improvised a wee kitchen around a three-foot fridge and a metal cabinet with a hot plate on it. The toilet and shower stall were indecently housed behind a single fiberboard partition without a door. My mother put up a heavy curtain on brass rings over the opening, and from somewhere a draft jangled it at intervals, so that I lived with the wind-chime music of the rings. But I took for my text “Who cares?” and quickly got used to the noise, as I got used to the drafts and the drabness.

But there was worse: the plangent howls of the dogs downstairs in Dr. Epstein's kennel. One dog in particular, a big spotted spaniel named Jake who boarded there a whole month while his owners were in Florida, used to howl a most unspaniely howl, like a soul in torment. I think he was afraid of the dark (perhaps at home he'd slept with a night-light), for at dusk his howls began. The worst of the noise was that it was irregular. If the poor thing had howled steadily all night I might have hardened myself to it, but his horrible protests came at erratic intervals—a good strong one, inevitably, for openers, then perhaps two in a row, a bout of whimpering, then tense silence, in which I feared he'd died of grief, then an agonized, prolonged scream and a couple of indignant yelps before the unreliable quiet again briefly descended. It never failed to disconcert me if I was awake, and wake me up if I was asleep. “Who cares?” wasn't convincing;
I
cared, that's who. My heart overflowed with it: poor doggie, poor thing, poor old Jakey. There were times I mingled my own moans (I had taken to moaning in earnest, at night on my cold cot) with Jake's. Though I could never match his volume and variety, I felt we were kindred damned souls, exiled from our proper kingdoms, pining for the heaven of home.

I stopped in to see Dr. Epstein one day with a bright idea. He always seemed glad to see me. In fact, he offered me a job when Dee, his receptionist and kennel cleaner, quit to get married, but by then I was hooked on the hardware store. I'd come up with my bright idea after several nights of listening to Jake's laments: why didn't the dog come up and sleep in my apartment at night? He might be less homesick and quiet down—and so might I, I didn't tell Dr. Epstein, with a nice floppy pup snoring on the floor by my bed.

It took me a whole week to persuade him, a week of stopping by after work and helping him hose out cages and wash water bowls. He was reluctant: it wasn't orthodox, it probably wasn't even legal, he couldn't take the responsibility. Blah, blah, he fingered his moustache and avoided my eyes. I finally blew up at him. “It's easy for you! You go home every night to your quiet little house! You don't have to listen to that poor animal suffer!” And so on and so on (or “ect., ect.,” as Danny used to write it). I was not really angry. I knew Dr. Epstein wasn't heartless or inhuman—he was such a good vet that I wished sometimes I were a sick pup so he would care for me. I was only playing my cards. I wanted that dog.

I got him. Dr. Epstein must have seen that it was for my benefit as much as Jake's—and, vet or no vet, it was human suffering, not canine, that finally moved him. That night he delivered a waggy, bouncing Jake to my door. Before I delivered him back on my way to work the next morning, Jake drank the water in the toilet, chewed up a leather belt and part of the rug, and piddled in all four corners of the room. But he didn't howl once and neither did I.

Three days later his owners returned early from Florida and took him home. I missed him sorely. I kept finding white dog hairs around the place, and felt lonesomer than ever. I couldn't help seeing the loss of Jake as an omen: all I loved would be taken from me, even a homesick dog.

In an attempt to forestall the workings of fate, I asked Chuck D'Amato, who ran the Blue Bell Diner and rented me the apartment, if I could get a dog. For answer, he dug out a copy of my lease and pointed silently to the “no pets” clause. No, he couldn't make an exception. No, not even a tiny cat. No, not even a budgie, whatever that was. I gave up. Who cares? Let fate take its course. I was destined to be a loner. The signs had always been there: my isolation in my own family, and then the loss of Hector's, of Danny, of my possessions. You'd think I would have learned, and I thought I had. I brooded alone in my room. I avoided my family. I didn't even have a phone. I resolved to give up hope, to want for nothing, no one. It seemed to me I worked hard and profitably at this new life, and became as cold and hard as a stone.

But I never did learn. Every dog on the street, every cat and squirrel, drew me. I yearned toward half-heard bits of conversation, toward people's worn, interesting faces, toward the lighted windows I passed on my way home in the wind. I became friendly with Dr. Epstein and his dogs, with Greta the counter woman at the Blue Bell, with the regular customers at the store—not intimate, but friendly, so that I looked forward to these human encounters no matter how often I instructed myself in the habits of stones. When Dr. Epstein talked to me about heartworm, or Greta told me to have a nice day, or I managed to locate in a carton in the storeroom just the outdated plumbing gizmo someone needed, I felt myself warming and softening, nourished back to life. But the process was slow, and I was weary.

I threw myself into the job at the store. Against my will, I became fond of the place, the way I had been of Hector's Market. It reminded me of Hector's; it was badly lit and overcrowded, its ancient shelves stocked with items which, in that atmosphere, seemed exotic and special. Best of all was the tiny Shoe Repair Shop tucked into a corner at the back: a half-door with a linoleum counter set into it, a venerable sewing machine with its ice-pick needle, a shelf full of spicy leather shoes. Only good shoes were brought in for repair. As Mr. Madox said, “Most of today's shoes, you might as well throw 'em out as get 'em repaired. That's all they're good for.” He had a similar disdain for Timex watches, paperback books, Bic pens, and Kleenex. “Look at these shoes,” he'd say, picking up a pair of brown-and-white ladies' spectators or old men's shoes with a fringed vamp. “Made to last a hundred years.” (They looked as if they'd already lasted at least half that.) “Now that's what I call workmanship,” he'd say, and make me inspect the soles, the uppers, the pungent arch supports, the stitching. He always intended to teach me to repair shoes, but he never got beyond his instructive chats, which could be grouped under the general heading “Things were better in the old days.”

I got to love Mr. Madox. After a couple of weeks, he quit watching me to see that I didn't waste time, rob the till, or chew gum on the job, and we got along fine. He was a handsome, courtly man of about sixty, with a dust allergy. He was always honking into one of his spotless white handkerchiefs. His wife was dead; he ironed them himself. He lived a mile outside of town in a split-level, with his son who was away at college. He told me his whole back yard was planted with flowers and vegetables in the summer; he spent every Labor Day weekend canning his own tomatoes. He loved Italian food, and lived all winter on pasta and homemade tomato sauce. He used to bring me pint jars of it, heavy on the oregano.

I found myself wishing he were my father. He was exactly the kind of father I would have liked, a simple man who was really simple—not pretending to be. Mr. Madox told me that when his wife was alive they used to play a lot of Monopoly; sometimes the games would last a week, his wife would do anything for Park Place and Boardwalk, he himself craved railroads and utilities, his wife always used the cannon while he liked the dog. He related these details misty-eyed, and they gripped me. Why couldn't I have been their daughter? How could I have sprung from two such alien beings as my parents, and not from Monopoly players like the Madoxes? My old theory that I was adopted came back to haunt me, a possibility which I had loved as a child but which in my maturity I recognized as absurd, terrifying, unacceptable—but no less haunting, for all that.

Oddly enough, it was at this period—isolated as I was, resolved to go it alone, inviting my old foster-child fantasies—that my mother drew closer to me than she had been in years. She used to come and see me, perhaps twice a week, on the pretext of bringing me a little gift—a new shower curtain, a jar of chutney, some homey touch, or a little hint, like a dust mop or Windex. Sometimes she brought only family gossip (the tale, for instance, as it developed between Horatio and that woman novelist who let herself get pregnant because she wanted to experience motherhood so she could write about it, and then hit Horatio with outrageous child support—which he gladly paid, making her accuse him of condescending to her, rubbing it in that his trashy thrillers sold millions while her novels barely sold at all, so that she had to move to the south of France to escape his insults—where she still lives on Horatio's money with the child, my only nephew, whose name is Tacitus). Sometimes she brought dinner, or a letter from Miranda or Juliet, or a clipping about my father.