“Oh, any subject,” says Cordelia. “Physics, Latin. Any of it.” She sounds a little ashamed of herself, but proud and excited too. It’s like the time when she used to pinch things. This is her accomplishment these days: deluding the tutor. “I don’t know why they all think I spend the days studying,” she says. “I sleep a lot. Or else I drink coffee and smoke and listen to records. Sometimes I have a little nip out of Daddy’s whisky decanter. I fill it up with water. He hasn’t found out!”
“But, Cordelia,” I say. “You have to do
“Why?” she says, with a little of her old belligerence. She isn’t only joking. And I have no reason to give her. I can’t say, “Because everyone does.” I can’t even say, “You have to earn a living,” because she obviously doesn’t, she’s here in this large house and she isn’t earning a living at all. She could just go on like this, like a woman from old-fashioned times, a maiden aunt, some aging perennial girl who never leaves home. It isn’t likely that her parents would kick her out. So I say, “You’ll get bored.”
Cordelia laughs, too loudly. “So what if I study?” she says. “I pass my exams. I go to university. I learn it all. I turn into Miss Dingle. No thanks.”
“Don’t be a cretin,” I say. “Who says you have to be Miss Dingle?”
“Maybe I am a cretin,” she says. “I can’t concentrate on that stuff, I can hardly look at the page, it all turns into little black dots.”
“Maybe you could go to secretarial school,” I say. I feel like a traitor as soon as I’ve said it. She knows what we both think of girls who would go to secretarial school, with their spidery plucked eyebrows and pink nylon blouses.
“Thanks a bundle.” There’s a pause. “But let’s not talk about all that,” she says, returning to her ultrabright voice. “Let’s talk about fun things. Remember that cabbage? The bouncy one?”
“Yes,” I say. It occurs to me that she could be pregnant, or that she might have been. It’s natural to wonder that about girls who drop out of school. But I decide this is unlikely.
“I was so mortified,” she says. “Remember when we used to go downtown and take our pictures at Union Station? We thought we were so sharp!”
“Right before the subway was built,” I say.
“We used to throw snowballs at old ladies. We used to sing those silly songs.”
“Leprosy,” I say.
“Part of your heart,” she says. “We thought we were the cat’s ass. I see kids that age now and I think:
She’s looking back on that time as if it was her golden age; or maybe it seems that way to her because it’s better than now. But I don’t want her to remember any more. I want to protect myself from any further, darker memories of hers, get myself out of here gracefully before something embarrassing happens. She’s balanced on the edge of an artificial hilarity that could topple over at any moment into its opposite, into tears and desperation. I don’t want to see her crumple up like that, because I have nothing to offer her in the way of solace.
I harden toward her. She’s acting like a jerk. She doesn’t have to stay locked into place, into this mournful, drawn-out, low-grade misery. She has all kinds of choices and possibilities, and the only thing that’s keeping her away from them is lack of willpower.
I say I have to get back, that I’m going out later. This isn’t true and she suspects it. Although she’s a mess, her instinct for social fraud has sharpened. “Of course,” she says. “That’s entirely understandable.”
It’s her distant, grown-up voice.
Now that I’m hurrying, making a show of bustle, it strikes me that one of my reasons for escape is that I don’t want to meet her mother coming back, from wherever she’s been. Her mother would look at me with reproach, as if I am responsible for Cordelia in her present shape, as if she’s disappointed, not in Cordelia, but in me. Why should I have to undergo such a look, for something that is not my fault?
“Goodbye, Cordelia,” I say in the front hall. I squeeze her arm briefly, move back before she can kiss me on the cheek. Kissing on the cheek is what they do in her family. I know she has expected something from me, some connection to her old life, or to herself. I know I have failed to provide it. I am dismayed by myself, by my cruelty and indifference, my lack of kindness. But also I feel relief.
“Call you soon,” I say. I’m lying, but she chooses not to acknowledge this.
“That would be nice,” she says, shielding us both with politeness.
I go down the walk toward the street, turn to look back. There’s her face again, a blurred reflection of a moon, behind the front window.
Ten – Life Drawing
Chapter 47