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

wouldn’t get at Shoreline. A lot less, if you ask me.”
    Nobody ever had, but it was true. My parents, lapsed Catholics, had sent the four of us to parochial school for the “old-fashioned values” and for the “culture.” They seemed to think it was important for us to say “Yes, ma’am,” and to know how to sing the “Dies Irae” and what Rogation Days were and St. Anselm’s argument, for the existence of God and what Cain said to Abel. Horatio and Miranda and Juliet picked up all this stuff effortlessly, of course. I didn’t. For one thing, the Church reformed when I was in the fourth grade. The “Dies Irae” was out and “Amazing Grace” was in. By the time I was in high school, the religion course consisted mainly of debates about birth control and acted-out stories from the New Bible, complete with costumes and props and music. Independent thinking and creative self-expression instead of the Baltimore Catechism and inflexible dogmas and the long fasts of my parents’ (and siblings’) day. In fact, I liked the religion course, and considering that I didn’t do much of the reading, I considered my final grade of 75 brilliant.
    â€œIf I’d gone to Shoreline, I wouldn’t have had any trouble graduating,” I whimpered. I realized I had a grievance. I had asked them, once or twice, if I could transfer to the public high school. The requests had been halfhearted—I really hadn’t wanted to leave Danny and my friends, even for shop and business courses—but none of us remembered that. “I’m just not cut out for Shakespeare and foreign languages and that stuff,” I pressed on. “I can’t help it. Why couldn’t I have gone someplace that would teach me something useful?”
    My parents were visibly chagrined. They looked guiltily at each other. I rubbed it in. “I might have been really good at something if I’d had the training.” I wept with indignation. I drained my sherry and o.j. at a gulp and slammed down the glass.
    â€œWhat do you want to do, Cordelia?” my father asked me at last.
    I clammed up. I couldn’t say it: marry Danny Frontenac and run the cash register at Hector’s. Not yet. “I really don’t know,” I said. I lost a bit of ground there. I should have had a secret passion for carpentry or lobstering up my sleeve. “Something practical,” I fumbled on. I was feeling the sherry. “Something …” I had to resort to gestures—sweeps of my hand that took in the dim corners of Hector’s, the village, the great world—flapping gestures that tumbled away the bookcases and elevated me up over the trees to I know not what. Possibly toward where I am now. Possibly there was something inevitable in all this: if I hadn’t flunked twelfth grade, Danny might not have gotten around to marrying me, and if I hadn’t married Danny I might never etc. etc. etc. Who knows? Who wants to? I leave inevitability to the Macbeths.
    Well, we compromised. I repeated twelfth grade at Shoreline High. I got into the English course for subliterates and didn’t have to read Macbeth . I did have to read some of Shakespeare’s sonnets (my father helped me make my painful way through them), but we were never tested on them. I got a 74 in English! I also got 93 in business math, 92 in advanced typing, 90 in art and design. And in shop I made—of all things—a bookcase. It was that or a revolving TV table (an interesting choice, I thought). I would have preferred, naturally, to make the table, but since we didn’t have a TV, it seemed pointless. And as it turned out, the bookcase has been useful; it’s before me now, between the windows, containing all the books my father has optimistically bestowed on me over the years, along with Horatio’s murder mysteries and my grandmother’s poetry book. I keep my TV on