Chez Cordelia (33 page)

When Martha said no, they hadn't really discussed it much, the children hadn't seemed to want to quite yet Mrs. Lambert said, “Well, don't you think you should, darling? You can't just
encourage
them to repress their feelings.”

It was somehow obvious, from the loud deliberateness of her voice and the tense set of Martha's shoulders, that this kind of talk was new to Mrs. Lambert, and had been adopted as a harmless way to make herself seem younger and modern. Martha had obviously been brought up to repress her feelings. It also became clear to me why Martha had married the son of an Italian butcher instead of the lawyer or stockbroker her mother would certainly have preferred. (Martha's long-dead father had, I knew, been a stockbroker, and both her sisters were married to corporation lawyers.) When I met Mrs. Lambert, I felt an immediate increase in sympathy with Martha. In her own way, she had defied her parents just as I had defied mine. Paul was her Danny.

Mrs. Lambert got Megan on her lap and began to talk about what a good dog Albert had been, and how much they would all miss him. She talked about the death of her old dog Roger, a golden retriever, when she had been just Megan's age, and how she had cried. Megan listened miserably, overflowing with silent tears, and, when she could, she slipped down and ran upstairs. “There,” her grandmother said, resuming the sipping of her sherry. She had apparently given up on Ian, who was in his room listening to records. “I do think it's better to bring these things out in the open.”

Martha just sat there, tight-lipped, smoothing the skirt of her beige wool dress and tapping her matching shoes together, until Mrs. Lambert changed the subject to the vagaries of her gardener, and Martha joined in gladly, with relief that she could stop disapproving. She liked her mother, I could tell, and would rather please her than fight. At sixty, she would be her exact replica.

I excused myself—though I would have liked to hear their discussion—and returned to the kitchen. The turkey wasn't getting done fast enough, and I kept basting it and checking the thermometer, and then worrying that all the opening of the oven door was slowing it down. Paul wandered in and out, from football games to family. He had to pass through the kitchen to do so.

“I
am
sorry, Delia,” he said to me a couple of times, and once he came close to me and whispered, “I need to be alone with you. I need to put my arms around you.” I don't know if this was part of his apology for crying on Martha. “We've got to talk.”

“Well, I don't really know how we're going to manage that!” I said in a voice that was probably too loud and certainly too snappish. But I was frazzled. Martha's elaborate menu had me insecurely tackling things I'd never attempted before. While Martha was sipping sherry and talking about the servant problem with her mother, I was trying to get everything to be done at the same time, and worrying about unmolding the oeufs en gelée—my first aspic—without melting the top and ruining the turkey design I'd made with egg yolk and truffles and pimento and carrot strips. I kept feeling like crying; my head hurt; I thought I might be coming down with something; and I was afraid everything was over between Paul and me.

He retreated from me, looking hurt. I brooded about him, and our conversation that morning, through the rest of my dinner preparations. “These things take time,” he had said. But he had also said it wouldn't take forever. Where, between
time
and
forever
, was the point at which he would leave Martha? I considered giving him an ultimatum. I considered giving Martha notice. I even considered just giving up, and made a short mental list of the two ways of giving up that were open to me:

1. calling off our affair

2. leaving things exactly as they were

At it turned out, I didn't do any of these things. But all during that dreadful day, I thought I would have to choose one of them, and they whirled in my head. If I could, I would have abandoned the aspic and turkey and potatoes and green beans and artichoke hearts and tarte normande and gone up to Chez Cordelia and made feverish lists. I headed them mentally:

What's Wrong with This Situation?

What Did I Ever See in Him?

Where Can I Go from Here?

All questions, all uncertainty. And poor Albert dead and in his grave.

Vicky stayed with Paul, following him from room to room and, at dinner, by special dispensation, lying under his chair. Her occasional human-sounding whinnies of pain punctuated our meal—always with that pathetic question mark at the end, as if she hadn't quite grasped it yet, or still had hope that Albert would return. Every time she did it I had to blink back tears.

The meal, in spite of everything, came out pretty well. The pommes Anna were browned a little too much on top. One corner of the aspic stuck to the mold, but the children clapped their hands at the turkey decoration on top; it seemed to cheer them up. Mrs. Lambert was full of enthusiasm for the food. For a fashionably thin woman, she had an enormous appetite—or perhaps she was trying to set us all a healthy-minded example. Paul was silent, but he ate a lot, endearing himself to me all over again, but not enough for me to send him a smile or a word. Martha and her mother did all the talking, discussing in detail this dinner, past dinners, restaurants they'd been to, and restaurants they planned to go to. I heard more stories about Mrs. Lambert's cooks, and she asked me polite questions about my illustrious parents. She had all my father's books.

“They must be missing you on a family holiday like Thanksgiving,” Mrs. Lambert said. She had a large smile that always looked ready for the photographer, and her teeth were either false or fabulous.

“Well, I wanted to do the dinner,” I said.

“It's her midterm exam, Mother,” Martha laughed. “Aminus, Cordelia. You did very nicely.” She had left a little pile of overbrowned potato on her plate, I noticed when I cleaned up.

Over dessert and coffee, the conversation turned to my restaurant ambitions.

“Your own little place, Cordelia!” cried Mrs. Lambert. “Why, what a delightful idea. You remember Elsa Rolfe, Martha. She opened up that place in New York. Oh, it was a wonderful little restaurant, Cordelia. Very, very chic. And her lemon tart with almonds—do you remember that, Martha? Of course, the critics ruined her, by discovering her. She couldn't handle it, just hordes of people, and terrible pressure on her to expand. So many people …” Mrs. Lambert shuddered, as if people were roaches. “Of course, in New York, what can you expect? And then the overhead. You see, it was a temptation, to give in to the crowds.” That's the way she told a story, in shreds. “Well, she went under. The critics found her, and then the people found her, and she accommodated herself to the demand, and then the critics came back and decided she'd slipped, and the people went away, and—” She spread out her hands and rolled up her eyes and shrugged, as her French cook probably used to. “Back to Connecticut. And now she's dead, poor woman.”

I imagined her dying of grief at the failure of her restaurant. “She's dead?”

Megan and Ian looked up with interest.

“Oh, yes, she got that dreadful disease—what was it, Martha?” Martha didn't recall. “Well, it killed her in a matter of months. Oh, what was it? Something to do with the lower bowel? Well—” Briskly. “It doesn't matter. Eat your tarte, children. The moral of the story, Cordelia, is—” She shrugged again, and smiled vaguely. “Well …”

“That death comes to us all,” said Paul, and Vicky whined, and Mrs. Lambert asked for another cup of coffee.

When the dishes were washed (“Why don't you leave them for the cleaning woman, Cordelia?” Mrs. Lambert asked me), I excused myself and went up to my room. Martha and her mother were preparing to call Martha's two sisters (Cassie in Cincinnati, Jeanne in Toronto). Paul was back in front of the television, with Vicky at his feet. The kids were squabbling. Martha said she'd see them into bed, I looked as if I'd had a long day. Mrs. Lambert kissed me and thanked me for the delicious meal. “Welcome to our family, Cordelia,” she said, pressing her soft, loose cheek to mine.

Up in Chez Cordelia, I got into red longjohns—a present from my mother, who worried (rightly) that my rooms might be drafty—and sat in bed, brooding. I almost got my coin albums out, those ancient comforts, but I felt too tired to sit with the heavy things on my lap, so I took my List Notebook from my underwear drawer and read over all my old lists. It was like seeing the story of my life, neatly labeled and numbered. I felt very sad, and it was in that mood (sad, nostalgic, weary, coming down with the flu) that I made this list:

Paul & Me

1. lonely nights

2. cold sheets

3. waiting

4. risk

5. stuck in the quicksand of love

It sounded like a country-and-western song, something wailed to a mournful tune by a whiskey-voiced lady with a lurid past. It sounded hopeless and despairing. I read it over and over, waiting for the words to tell me something I didn't already know. Eventually, I just inked a big X over the list, it made me so depressed, and picked up Julia Child. But another miserable list—oh, that was a terrible day, really it was—another list kept creating itself in my head, and I picked up my notebook again and wrote:

Lost

1. Danny

2. Albert

3. Paul

4.

It seemed to me there was plenty more I could have added to that list, but just then I heard Paul and Vicky coming up the stairs—I would have known Paul's step anywhere, and the fast skittering of Vicky's big paws. I felt my cheeks burn hot—or had they been burning all the time? I hid my notebook under the bed, and when Paul came in, I held out my arms to him.

He got into bed with me and we held each other. Vicky lay with a sigh across the bed at our feet.

“I'm going to leave her, Delia,” Paul said. “Soon. This can't go on. I can't stand it, I want to be with you, I don't want to lose you, I love you …”

The words clicked neatly into my brain. I felt I could support myself on their strong webbing, I felt that if I were falling they would hold me up, I imagined myself falling …

“Delia, you're burning up with fever,” Paul said, releasing me. He sat beside me and put his cool hand on my forehead. I smiled drowsily at him, and then I leaned over the side of the bed and threw up my Thanksgiving dinner.

It was flu, of course—some bug that was chic just then in the New England area. I lay in a hot, dry haze of happiness for two days. My knees ached, and I couldn't eat, and my skin felt bruised and ticklish all over. After the fever broke, I sweated for the next two days; Martha and Paul brought me ginger ale and bendable straws, and laid cold, wet cloths on my head. I was so happy the whole time that I was almost sorry when, on the fifth day, I woke up feeling recovered.

But the happiness remained. I threw myself into my cooking, into my love for Paul, into life itself. Paul and I didn't refer to his leaving Martha. We didn't need to. I knew it would come, that he was plotting his way, and I waited with a new, confident, loving patience that found its way into our lovemaking: it became slow and secure and lazy, and we spent huge chunks of time entwined on my bed, smiling into each other's eyes.

Winter came, harsher than it had been down on the shore, and the stretch of snow out the kitchen window, sloping back to the silvery woods, seemed to me magnificently beautiful. And, with a space heater installed to take the chill off, my two rooms were a ceaseless pleasure. I felt pleasantly enclosed up there, and safe. I didn't need to dread Danny's return. He would never find me, never think to look for me in such a setting. (
Cordelia
in a
bookshop?)
I was happy in Chez Cordelia—happiest when I had Paul to warm my bed, but happy on my own, too. I had my old shop bookcase back again; I'd missed it, and had my mother bring it to me. It sat beside my bed, with cookbooks piled on top. I read them at night before sleep, the way I know some people read their Bibles.

I saw my parents off and on. They drove up to visit, crossing the state south to north to check up on their youngest—always separately because one had to stay home with Juliet, and always with a strange shyness in their manner that I found endearing. It meant they were both beginning to comprehend my apartness from them after all these years. With comprehension would come, I hoped, acceptance. For the moment, at least, they stopped nagging me.

Usually, my mother took me out somewhere for lunch if she came on my day off, but on one of her visits she and I had tea up in my sitting room. She looked in a bewildered way at the tray when I set it down (china pot, two delicate cups, silver spoons, a little plate of cookies), and then she looked at me. “I never would have expected this of you, Cordelia,” she said, and, trying to elaborate, she became oddly incoherent: “Linen napkins, tea leaves, this wallpaper, that nice shop downstairs …”

“Oh, it's all the Lambertis', Mom,” I said cheerfully. I knew she was contrasting this tea-serving Cordelia with the one who drank beer and entertained poker players in a tacky high rise. “It's not really
me.
”

“Well, what
is
you, Cordelia?” she asked me. It was a sincere question. I suppose it was partly Juliet's illness and Miranda's commune and Horatio's irresponsibility; I could see her wondering if she had ever really known any of her children. “What
is
really you?” she repeated, and the confused look on her face meant that she knew she was starting from nothing, and that whatever I said would be something she didn't expect.

“I can get along anywhere,” I said, trying to give her something solid and true to latch on to. It wasn't easy. I like to figure other people out, but I'm not really an expert on myself. Also, I felt the basic untruth behind my words: the one place I hadn't been able to get along very well was at home. But I went ahead, doing my best. “It doesn't really have a lot to do with
me
, where I settle in. I was happy eating canned beans with Danny, and I'm happy doing French cooking here. Not that I could ever go back to canned beans,” I added hastily. Or Danny, I thought but didn't say. “I mean, I've learned to make a really good cassoulet—actually, it's my own version, crossed with Boston baked beans. I put in just a hint of molasses and I leave out the sausage—” I saw my mother getting irritated, so I went back to the subject, but it was difficult for me.