Chez Cordelia (34 page)

“I guess I've just been searching around,” I said lamely, and then revised. “What I mean is that I think I'm progressing all the time, toward—” I got my vision again, and I put down my teacup and caught my mother's two hands in my hands. If it was time to be frank, I would be frank. “I want to have my own restaurant, Mom. Own it, and be the chef. Not now, not even soon—maybe when I'm thirty or so. When I've learned more. I want a place, a very small place, where everything I serve is perfect, just perfect, but not, you know, the kind of food that scares people. Not a lot of fancy stuff. Good, nourishing, delicious, sensible, gorgeous food. The kind of place where people go on their lunch hour but where they go at night, too, if they want a special meal. And I'd set up my kitchen just the way I like it, maybe I'd have just one helper, and I'd cook in small quantities, and every day have something really interesting, really special on the menu—”

My mother had been listening patiently, nodding and smiling, but finally she interrupted. “That's a very nice ambition,” she said. “A little restaurant. Maybe unrealistic—well, who knows? But, Cordelia, who you are isn't what you do. You can't define yourself by what you decide to cook for dinner.”

“No, but …” I let go her hands and thought for a minute while my mother picked up a cookie and munched on it.

“Did you make these?”

“No. I haven't gotten to pastry yet, really.”

She seemed willing to drop the subject of Cordelia, but I wanted to finish. “I thought I could. I mean, I thought Cordelia the chef would be enough.”

“Oh, Cordelia.”

“Well, I mean, the part that shows, the part you can talk about. I'm all right inside, I've just had to get my outside straight.”

She gave a sigh, and smiled fondly at me. “Honey, let's drop it.” Then the smile faded, though the fondness remained. “Oh, Cordelia, I wish you read more. There are so many areas we can't communicate about.” She was really distressed. I thought what a shame it was, her dependence on books. I suppose she was thinking of some poem or something about finding the real you, and that if she could only quote it to me, and I recognized it, all would be well.

“I read cookbooks,” I said.

Her eyes brightened. “You do?” she said, with such hope that I had to laugh, seeing behind her question a sort of domino theory: first cookbooks, then …???… until I was slumped in a chair like Juliet, reading Greek.

To give her credit, she laughed, too, and we began to talk about something else—Juliet. In fact, my mother had an astonishing piece of news. My father's prophetic wish had come true: Juliet was seeing a lot of Professor Oliver—Ivan, my mother called him.

“But he's married!” I said. I was shocked, but my mother explained that he had left his wife—or his wife had left him, she wasn't sure. A divorce was in the works. I was still shocked. Every dissolved marriage I hear about grieves me, the way news of any upheaval—war, earthquake, death—grieves me. And at the same time, somewhere in my head was the flip side of that grief: I imagined myself telling Paul about Mr. Oliver and his wife. I would drop it casually, drawing no moral, but it would be another assault on the wall of his marriage, and a hefty one.

“It's so wonderful,” my mother said. “We can trust her with Ivan—such a good man. He takes her to the movies, they go to concerts at Yale. Being with him seems to calm her. Of course, she has a long way to go,” my mother added cautiously, as if too much confidence would break the spell. She also told me that she'd seen in the
Times
that Alan was having a play produced off-Broadway. “I don't want Juliet to know,” my mother said. “I don't want her ever to think about that awful man again.”

I thought how unfair it was, that awful Alan had managed not only to finish his play after walking out on Juliet, but to get someone to put it on. “Just like him,” I said to my mother. “To write plays. So he can push people around and get away with it.”

“Why, that's a good point,” she said warmly, and looked at me the same way she did when I said I read cookbooks, as if there might be hope for me after all.

On an impulse, I invited the whole crew of them to Christmas dinner. It was Martha's idea, really. She and Paul and the kids were going to Greenwich for the holidays. Her mother put on an awesome spread at Christmas that included not only roast goose and a case of champagne and three kinds of pie, but a huge tree lit with candles, and presents for the grandchildren that tended toward life-size rocking horses and eight-room dollhouses with electric lights. She expected her three daughters and their families to be on hand.

“Why don't you invite your family here for the day?” Martha suggested. “Show them what you can do. Or a friend? Whatever you like, Cordelia. I'd love to see you have a little social life.” She was beginning to worry about me, just as Juliet and Alan had. No girlfriends, no boyfriends, solitary Cordelia …

There was no question of my going to Greenwich with them, however.

I invited the whole family, and in a few days it was all arranged. On Christmas Day, the family would assemble at Lamb House Books: my parents and Juliet, Miranda, Horatio, and Aunt Phoebe. Gradually, the list expanded to include Mr. Oliver, Miranda's friend Annamay, and my aunt's new beau, whose name was Preston Maguire.

I had missed Aunt Phoebe. Recently, we had taken to telephoning each other, both of us determined to ease the mild estrangement that had grown up when Danny abandoned me and my aunt kept trying to fix me up. Every time I heard her soft, precise, sympathetic voice on the phone, I felt like telling her about Paul, but I controlled the impulse, seeing it as a childish ploy to get my aunt to mother me—to pour all my troubles into her narrow but receptive lap.

But I also resisted it because the situation between Paul and me was still so half-baked. I knew the triangular setup at Lamb House Books would sound bizarre and unhealthy, even to my liberal aunt, and I wanted to be able to say something like “His divorce will be final April thirteenth …”

Failing that, I talked to my aunt about apples, about Juliet and Miranda, about resuming our moviegoing, about cooking.

“Are you still skinny, Cordelia?” she asked me. “Or is all that French cuisine going straight to your hips?”

“Still a skinny little runt,” I told her. “And it's not cuisine, Aunt Phoebe. It's just good home cooking.”

I had had an idea one day, while I was concocting my own version of Julia Child's soupe au pistou, with grated zucchini and a purée of garbanzo beans. I had imagined my little restaurant (humble but fabulous: that's how I described it to myself) and the lit-up sign over the door:

CHEZ CORDELIA

HOME COOKING

That really appealed to me, and when I told it to my aunt, she liked it, too.

“You don't think it's a dumb idea?” I asked, her. “Me opening a restaurant?”

“Frankly, Cordelia, I've never tasted your cooking, except for the tuna salad sandwiches you used to make me. And I think you fried me an egg once or twice. But I hear you're pretty good.”

“I
am,
” I assured her fervently. “I'm very good, and I'm getting better every minute. Wait till you taste my Christmas dinner.”

“Humble but fabulous?”

“Well, for Christmas we'll skip humble.”

We reminisced about past Christmas dinners at my mother's. She served Rock Cornish game hens every year, stuffed with wild rice, garnished with mandarin orange segments, and served with an odd, orange-and-sherry flavored sauce—a sauce so time-honored and invariable that the taste of sherry always means Christmas to me. The hens were usually overcooked, because my mother would become engrossed in one of the new books she got for Christmas, and she always forgot vegetables. Once we had canned water chestnuts and a big bowl of prunes with dinner.

“But there was always plum pudding for dessert. Imported from England and flaming.”

“We won't be having plum pudding, Aunt Phoebe,” I warned her. “And I promise not to overcook anything.”

“Oh, drat,” she said cheerfully. “All these family traditions going down the drain.”

The Lambertis left for Greenwich the day before Christmas. It looked as if Paul wouldn't be able to kiss me good-bye, but after breakfast Martha took the children out to cut holly boughs to take to Grandma, and Paul and I met in Chez Cordelia.

He pressed a tiny, wrapped-up box into my hands. “I'll miss you, Delia,” he said after he kissed me, and there was real pain in his voice. We had been separated before, of course. He and Martha had gone away for a weekend to an antiquarian book fair (leaving me with the kids and with tortured visions of him and Martha alone in a hotel room). And once he went to Boston, by himself, on a buying trip; Martha and the kids spent that weekend in Greenwich, and I had two blissful days of experimentation in the kitchen. (It was then that Cordelia's Apple Cider Pie came into being.) When Paul returned from these trips, he had been almost incoherent with the joy of our reunion.

“I can't get along without you, Delia,” he said, holding me tight. “I need to see you every day. Just
see
you.” It was one of the things I loved about him, that intensity—the determination to grab and hold, to
experience
things. His love for me was an active, vital part of his life; he felt it, he said, every second—making me ashamed of the long hours in the kitchen when I forgot him.

It also made me ashamed of the fact that I really wasn't sorry to see them all, with Vicky and the holly, pile into the green Volvo and drive away. When they were at Martha's mother's, I knew I didn't need to worry about Paul and Martha renewing their old bonds of affection. It wasn't like being in a hotel room in New York. If nothing else, I knew his mother-in-law's company put Paul in a state of self-absorbed, unaffectionate irritation. (I gathered that Martha's sisters affected him similarly, though all he could tell me about them was that Jeanne was always trying to get all of them to roll up the rugs and dance, and Cassie pronounced “Paul” as “Pole.”)

So I could enjoy, with some guilt but no jealousy, my short respite from the responsibility of feeding the Lamberti family (I sometimes felt like Jay Block with his cows) and from the kids' small bedtime tyrannies and from the strain of my double life—of having Martha, after an especially good dinner, squeeze my hand and say, “You're so
dear
, Cordelia,” and the next day getting down on the floor of the shop with Paul.

There were going to be ten of us for Christmas dinner. I boned another turkey—child's play, after you've done it once—and rolled it up with a mushroom-sausage filling. On the side, buttered green beans, an onion tarte, and a cranberry-pear relish I invented, plus two desserts: Cordelia's Apple Cider Pie and a cold lemon soufflé.

Christmas began with a fresh snowfall. I shoveled the front walk and the driveway, and the plow rumbled past around noon. I was glad the roads were clear and the family would be able to get there, but after that I must admit I thought a lot more about the meal to come—the preparations, the timing, and the spookiness of being hostess in Martha's house—than the family who would eat it. I changed out of my moccasins and ragged jeans into stockings, heels, perfume, and a gray dress with a white collar and cuffs (about which Juliet would comment, from out of the depths of her depression, “Oh God, another one of Cordelia's artless little neutrals”). I was putting on Paul's present—tiny star-shaped gold earrings—when I looked out the window, and there was Miranda coming up the path with her friend Annamay. As I ran down to let them in, apprehension and excitement mingled in me like a potent before-dinner drink, making me stumble on the stairs.

Miranda and I greeted each other with screams. We hadn't met in a year. Miranda seemed to have grown, and had to bend way over to hug me. Her long, biscuit-colored hair was caught at the top of her head into a bun, and she wore a purple leotard and a wool skirt. She looked like a dancer, and had, in fact, taken up ballet.

“Too late, of course, like Zelda Fitzgerald,” she laughed. “But it gives me enormous personal satisfaction, Cordelia.” She beamed at me and then at Annamay. Annamay was nearly as tall as Miranda, but more solid; her legs were tight with muscles, where Miranda's tended to be twiggy. She was exotic-looking, with long, fish-shaped eyes and heavy lids. She was dressed like Miranda, except that her leotard was black.

“Annamay is a professional,” Miranda said, and took her friend's hand and squeezed it. Annamay looked modest, and explained that she danced with a small troupe in Cambridge.

“Small but superb,” Miranda said, and squeezed Annamay's hand again. I realized that they must be lovers; this registered in me with a surprisingly small jolt.

“You look terrific, Miranda,” I told her, and it was true. I remembered the change in Aunt Phoebe after her divorce; something like the same process seemed to have taken place in Miranda. I was glad to see how becoming divorce could be.

My parents and Horatio and Juliet and Mr. Oliver came next, crowded into my father's beat-up Dodge. Horatio was visiting my parents down on the shore for a week. “Between orgies,” he said, kissing my cheek and snorting out his old, evil chuckle:
hn, hn, hn
, through his nose. Horatio is tall and fair like the rest of them; he had grown a beard which, except for its color, was exactly like my father's. It seemed too big and bushy for his small features, and made him look younger, as if he'd put it on for a joke. He had brought six bottles of wine and a Bloomingdale's shopping bag crammed with gifts.

“Cordelia, this house smells like Lutèce,” he said. “Who's your caterer?” He took off his snowy cowboy boots, exposing bright red socks, recited some lines in French, and, looking pleased with himself, went over to the china cupboard to inspect Martha's collection of spongeware.