Free Chez Cordelia by Kitty Burns Florey

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?
    â€œI 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.
    â€œCordelia, you’re throwing your life away!”
    â€œMom! Daddy! I love him!” I said this over and over again, earnestly and sincerely.
    â€œIt’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.)
    â€œI 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.
    â€œIt’s the juices of youth!” he said to me. “Cordelia—think! Do you want to spend your life as a grocer’s wife?”
    â€œI don’t see why not,” I said.
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