I have other dreams as well.
I dream that I can't move. I can't talk, I can't even breathe. I'm in an iron lung. The iron is clenched around my body like a hard cylindrical skin. It's this iron skin that is doing my breathing for me, in and out. I'm dense and heavy, I feel nothing other than this heaviness. My head sticks out the end of the iron lung. I'm looking up at the ceiling, on which there is a light fixture like yellowish cloudy ice.
I dream that I'm trying on a fur collar, in front of the mirror on my bureau. There's someone standing behind me. If I move so that I can see into the mirror, I'll be able to look over my own shoulder without turning around. I'll be able to see who it is.
I dream that I've found a red plastic purse, hidden in a drawer or trunk. I know there is treasure inside it, but I can't get it open. I try and try and finally it bursts, like a balloon. It's full of dead frogs.
I dream that I've been given a head wrapped up in a white tea towel. I can see the outlines of the nose, the chin, the lips through the white cloth. I could unwrap the cloth to see whose head it is, but I don't want to, because I know that if I do the head will come alive.
45
Cordelia tells me that when she was younger she broke a thermometer and ate some of the mercury in it to make herself sick so she wouldn't have to go to school. Or she'd stick her finger down her throat and throw up, or she'd hold the thermometer near a light bulb to make it look as if she had a temperature. Her mother caught her doing that because she left it near the light bulb too long and the mercury shot up to a hundred and ten. After that her other deceptions were harder to pull off.
"How old were you then?" I ask her.
"Oh, I don't know. Before high school," she tells me. "You know, the age when you do those things."
It's Tuesday, in the middle of May. We're sitting in a booth at Sunnysides. Sunnysides has a soda fountain counter, which is speckled bloodstone red with chrome trim and has a row of round swivel-seat stools screwed to the floor along beside it. The black tops of the seats, which may not be leather, make a gentle farting sound when you sit down on them, so Cordelia and I and all girls prefer the booths. They're dark wood, and the tabletop between the two facing benches is red like the soda fountain counter. This is where the Burnham students go after school to smoke and to drink glasses of Coca-Cola with maraschino cherries in them. If you drink a Coke and mix two aspirins in with it, it's supposed to make you drunk. Cordelia says she has tried this; she says it's nothing like being really drunk.
Instead of Cokes, we're drinking vanilla milkshakes, with two straws each. We ease the paper covers off the straws so that they pleat up into short caterpillars of paper. Then we drop water onto them out of our water glasses, and the paper caterpillars expand and look as if they're crawling. The tables at Sunnysides are littered with strips of soggy paper.
"What did the chickens say when the hen laid an orange?" Cordelia says, because there is a wave of corny chicken jokes sweeping the school. Chicken jokes, and moron jokes. Why did the moron throw the clock out the window? To see time fly.
"Look at the orange marmalade," I say in a bored voice. "What did the moron say when he saw the three holes in the ground?"
"What?" says Cordelia, who has trouble remembering jokes even when she's heard them.
"Well, well, well," I say.
"Ha ha," says Cordelia. Part of this ritual is mild derision, of other people's jokes.
Cordelia doodles on the table, using our spilled water. "Remember those holes I used to dig?" she says.
"What holes?" I say. I don't remember any holes.
"Those holes in my backyard. Boy, did I want a hole out there. I started one, but the ground was too hard, it was full of rocks. So I dug another one. I used to work away at it after school, day after day. I got blisters on my hands from the shovel." She smiles a pensive, reminiscent smile.
"What did you want it for?" I ask.
"I wanted to put a chair in it and sit down there. By myself."
I laugh. "What for?"
"I don't know. I guess I wanted someplace that was all mine, where nobody could bug me. When I was little, I used to sit on a chair in the front hall. I used to think that if I kept very still and out of the way and didn't say anything, I would be safe."
"Safe from what?" I say.
"Just safe," she says. "When I was really little, I guess I used to get into trouble a lot, with Daddy. When he would lose his temper. You never knew when he was going to do it. 'Wipe that smirk off your face,' he would say. I used to stand up to him." She squashes out her cigarette, which has been smoldering in the ashtray. "You know, I hated moving to that house. I hated the kids at Queen Mary's, and those boring things like skipping. I didn't really have any good friends there, except for you."
Cordelia's face dissolves, re-forms: I can see her nine-year-old face taking shape beneath it. This happens in an eyeblink. It's as if I've been standing outside in the dark and a shade has snapped up, over a lighted window, revealing the life that's been going on inside in all its clarity and detail. There is that glimpse, during which I can see. And then not.
A wave of blood goes up to my head, my stomach shrinks together, as if something dangerous has just missed hitting me. It's as if I've been caught stealing, or telling a lie; or as if I've heard other people talking about me, saying bad things about me, behind my back. There's the same flush of shame, of guilt and terror, and of cold disgust with myself. But I don't know where these feelings have come from, what I've done.
I don't want to know. Whatever it is, it's nothing I need or want. I want to be here, on Tuesday, in May, sitting in the red-topped booth at Sunnysides, watching Cordelia as she delicately slurps the last of her milkshake up through the straws. She's noticed nothing.
"I've got one," I say. "Why did the unwashed chicken cross the road twice?"
"Why?" says Cordelia.
"Because it was a dirty double-crosser," I say.
Cordelia rolls her eyes, like Perdie. "Very funny," she says.
I close my eyes. In my head there's a square of darkness, and of purple flowers.
46
I begin to avoid Cordelia. I don't know why.
I no longer arrange double dates with her. I tell her that the boy I'm going out with doesn't have any suitable friends. I say I have to stay after school, which is true: I'm painting the decorations for the next dance, palm trees and girls in hula skirts.
Some days Cordelia waits for me, so I have to walk home with her anyway. She talks and talks as if there's nothing wrong, and I say little; but then I've never said a lot anyway. After a while she'll say, overly brightly, "But here I've been going on and on about me. What's doing with you?" and I smile and say "Nothing much." Sometimes she makes a joke of it and says, "But that's enough about me. What do you think of me?" and I add to the joke by saying, "Nothing much."
*
Cordelia is failing more and more tests. It doesn't seem to bother her, or at any rate she doesn't want to talk about it. I no longer help her with her homework, because I know she won't pay attention even if I do. She has trouble concentrating on anything. Even when she's just talking, on the way home, she changes the subject in the middle of a sentence so it's hard to follow what she's saying. She's slipping up on the grooming too, reverting to her old sloppy ways of years ago. She's let her bleached strip grow out, so it's disconcertingly two-toned. There are runs in her nylons, buttons popped off her blouses. Her lipstick doesn't seem to fit her mouth.
It is decided that it would be best for Cordelia to change schools again, so she does. After this she phones me frequently, but then less frequently. She says we should get together soon. I never deny this, but I never set a time either. After a while I say, "I have to go now."
Cordelia's family moves to a different, larger house, in a ritzier neighborhood farther north. Some Dutch people move into her old house. They plant a lot of tulips. That seems to be the end of her.
I write the final Grade Thirt
een exams, subject after subject, day after day, sitting at a desk in the gymnasium. The leaves are fully out, the irises are in bloom, there's a heat wave; the gymnasium heats up like an oven and we all sit in there, superheated, writing away, while the gymnasium exudes its smell of bygone athletes. The teachers police the aisles. Several girls faint. One boy keels over and is found afterward to have drunk a pitcher of tomato juice out of the refrigerator which was really Bloody Marys for his mother's bridge club. As the bodies are carried out I scarcely look up from the page.
I know I'll do well in the two Biology exams. I can draw anything: the insides of crayfish ears, the human eye, frogs' genitalia, the blossom of the snapdragon (Antirrhinum majus) in cross section. I know the difference between a raceme and a rhizome, I explicate photosynthesis, I can spell Scrofulariaciae. But in the middle of the Botany examination it comes to me, like a sudden epileptic fit, that I'm not going to be a biologist, as I have thought. I am going to be a painter. I look at the page, where the life cycle of the mushroom from spore to fruiting body is taking shape, and I know this with absolute certainty. My life has been changed, soundlessly, instantaneously. I continue my explication of tubers, bulbs, and legumes, as if nothing has happened.
One night, just after the exams have finished, the phone rings. It's Cordelia. I realize I've been expecting this.
"I'd like to see you," she says. I don't want to see her, but I know I will. What I hear is not like but need.
The next afternoon I take the subway and then the bus, northward through the heated city, to where Cordelia now lives. I've never been up here before. The streets wind in and around, the houses are large, ponderous, Georgian, set off with weighty shrubbery. I see or think I see Cordelia's face, pale and indistinct, behind the front window as I come up the walk. She opens the door before I have time to ring.
"Well, hi there," she says. "Long time no see." This is false heartiness and we both know it, because Cordelia is a wreck. Her hair is lusterless, the flesh of her face pasty. She's gained a lot of weight, not solid-muscled weight, but limp weight, bloated and watery. She's gone back to the too-vivid orange-red lipstick, which turns her yellowish. "I know," she says. "I look like Haggis McBaggis."
The house is cool inside. The front hall floor is white and black squares; there's a graceful central staircase. A flower arrangement with gladioli sits on a polished table beside it. The house is silent, except for a clock chiming in the living room. Nobody else seems to be home.
We don't go into the living room but back past the stairs and through a door into the kitchen, where Cordelia makes me a cup of instant coffee. The kitchen is beautiful, perfectly arranged, pale-colored and peaceful. The refrigerator and stove are white. Some people now have colored refrigerators, pale-green or pink, but I don't like these colors and I'm pleased that Cordelia's mother doesn't either. There's a lined school notebook open on the kitchen table, which I recognize as the dining table from their other house with the two middle leaves taken out. That means they must have a new dining table. It appals me to discover that I want to see this new dining table more than I want to see Cordelia.
Cordelia rummages in the fridge and brings out an opened package of store doughnuts. "I've been waiting for an excuse to eat the rest of these," she says. But as soon as she's taken her first bite she lights a cigarette.
"So," she says. "What are you up to these days?" It's her too-bright voice, the one she used to use on boys. Right now it frightens me.
"Oh, just the usual," I say. "You know. Finishing exams." We look at each other. Things are bad for her, that much is clear. I don't know whether she wants me to ignore this or not. "What about you?" I say.
"I have a tutor," she says. "I'm supposed to be studying. For summer courses." We both know without mentioning it that she must have failed her year, despite the new school. She must have failed badly. Unless she passes whatever subjects she failed, at the next set of exams or sometime or other, she'll be locked out of university forever.
"Is the tutor nice?" I say, as if I'm asking about a new dress.
"I guess so," says Cordelia. "Her name is Miss Dingle. It really is. She blinks all the time, she has watery eyes. She lives in this squalid apartment. She has salmon-colored lingerie, I see it hanging over the shower curtain rod in her squalid bathroom. I can always get her off the subject by asking about her health."
"Off what subject?" I ask.
"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 something!"
"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: Brats!"
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. Smarten up, I want to tell her. Pull up your socks.
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 m
other 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.
PART
TEN
LIFE
DRAWING
47
There are several diseases of the memory. Forgetfulness of nouns, for instance, or of numbers. Or there are more complex amnesias. With one, you can lose your entire past; you start afresh, learning how to tie your shoelaces, how to eat with a fork, how to read and sing. You are introduced to your relatives, your oldest friends, as if you've never met them before; you get a second chance with them, better than forgiveness because you can begin innocent. With another form, you keep the distant past but lose the present. You can't remember what happened five minutes ago. When someone you've known all your life goes out of the room and then comes back in, you greet them as if they've been gone for twenty years; you weep and weep, with joy and relief, as if at a reunion with the dead.
I sometimes wonder which of these will afflict me, later; because I know one of them will.
For years I wanted to be older, and now I am.
*
I sit in the harsh ultrablack of the Quasi, drinking red wine, staring out the window. On the other side of the glass, Cordelia drifts past; then melts and reassembles, changing into someone else. Another mistaken identity.