Free Chez Cordelia by Kitty Burns Florey Page A

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.
    My father’s way was to hand me over to Danny officially at a nuptial mass, but not without the recital of an epithalamium he wrote for us, comparing us to (I think) emerging butterflies. (“We might as well do it gracefully, since it looks like we’ve got to do it,” I heard him say grimly to my mother a few days before the wedding.) My mother’s way was to give us the $2,127 matching funds for a wedding present, to show no grudge was held. At the wedding reception, she ran her hand through Danny’s bright hair and sighed, “At least you’ll have beautiful children.”
    Both my parents cried, and my mother and Claire Frontenac sniffled noisily together over the loss of, respectively, their youngest and their only. George and my father got drunk together. Sandy Schutz and Miranda and Juliet were bridesmaids. Juliet, back from Greece with her hair in braids, tried to look tragic and world-weary, but the champagne got to her, and she danced all evening with one of Danny’s Quebec cousins, dazzling him with her French. Miranda retired into a corner with her husband, Gilbert Sullivan, and our uncle, Oliver Miller, who is a professor of philology, and they had an animated discussion of structural linguistics. Sandy Schutz caught my bouquet and, sure enough, got engaged a couple of months later to a medical student she met during her nurse’s training. Danny and I went to Boston for a honeymoon and spent the weekend going to movies and eating huge meals, and plotting our future.
    And little did any of us know that within two years Hector’s Market would be transformed into Uncle Jody’s Country Crackerbarrel, and our future …
    Enough of these hints! Enough whipping-up of interest! Out with it, Delia! Danny’s in Sommers State Prison, serving a life sentence for murder, and I—? I’ve found, I think, my proper task, which is to get it all straight in my mind, reduce it to mere words, and so be finished with it. And go on from there.

Chapter Four
    Colonial Towers
    For one year, Danny and I lived together in perfect happiness. All my life, whenever I