Read Online Chez Cordelia by Kitty Burns Florey - Free Book Online

would be my oyster. And someday I’d be mistress of Hector’s Market, the rock that anchored the town. It seemed the ideal combination: to live in the town I’d always lived in, but on my own, in my own way, with sunshine and fresh air coming in through diamond-paned windows, with my husband. I liked the place, I was comfortable there.
    Danny, of course, was part of my comfort. I understood his need for some breathing space, away from the town, Hector’s, his parents, me. But I worried about losing him. I was, after all, the initiator of our romance; I was his pursuer, and I’d caught him, and now that I had him it seemed the way to keep him was to let him go. He was beginning to snap at me for bossing him. “Quit nagging me,” he sometimes said. He sounded like a disillusioned husband, and it frightened me.
    So I agreed, with my old calculated humility, playing him like a fish, that a separation from each other would be only practical. We would wait a year or two—see other people—get away on our own—blah blah blah. Then we’d get married and pitch in at Hector’s as planned. “After all,” Danny said, “we were childhood sweethearts, we’ve been together practically all our lives!” This touched and charmed me; it threw a veil of such romantic and dogged devotion over the long, vague, tentative friendship that began with our hands linked against Mrs. Meek and her books.
    My parents had never said much about our courtship. I’m sure they didn’t know that was what it was. They liked Danny, and they knew he was a “nice boy” (which he was, though not in the way they thought). They liked and respected his parents, who represented small-town virtues and old-fashioned values and special-ordered bean curd and Jackson’s Coronation Tea for my mother. So they didn’t mind my hanging around the Frontenacs’, though they were puzzled sometimes that I didn’t bring Danny home more often—forgetting, once I became a determinedly social teenager, the long tradition of discouraging me from having my low, noisy friends over. But I could just see it—everyone sitting around reading after dinner, and Danny with his boxing magazine.
    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