She gives a cheery laugh, as if this is a joke.
I take Cordelia out. The Dorothy Lyndwick Rest Home is in High Park, a suburb where I’ve never been before and don’t know my way around, but there’s a corner café a few blocks along. Cordelia knows it, and her way there. I don’t know whether I should take her arm or not, and so I don’t; I walk along beside her, watchful at crossings as if she’s blind, slowing my pace to hers.
“I don’t have any money,” says Cordelia. “They won’t let me have any. They even get my cigarettes for me.”
“That’s all right,” I say.
We ease into a booth, order coffee and two toasted Danishes. I give the order: I don’t want the waitress staring. Cordelia fumbles, produces a cigarette. Her hand, lighting it, is shaky. “Great flaming blue-headed balls of Jesus,” she says, making an effort with the syllables. “It’s good to be out of there.”
She tries a laugh, and I laugh with her, feeling culpable and accused. I should ask her things: what has she been doing, for these years we’ve skipped? What about her acting, what became of that? Did she get married, have children? What exactly has been going on, to bring her where she is? But all of this is beside the point. It’s detachable, it’s been added on. The main thing is Cordelia, the fact of her now.
“What the shit have they got you on?” I say.
“Some sort of tranquilizers,” she says. “I hate them. They make me drool.”
“What for?” I say. “How did you end up in that nuthatch anyway? You aren’t any crazier than I am.”
Cordelia looks at me, blowing out smoke. “Things weren’t working out very well,” she says after a while.
“So?” I say.
“So. I tried pills.”
“Oh, Cordelia.” Something goes through me with a slice, like watching a child fall, mouth down on rock.
“Why?”
“I don’t know. It just came over me. I was tired,” she says.
There is no point telling her she shouldn’t have done such a thing, I do what I’d do in high schooclass="underline" I ask for the details. “So did you conk out?”
“Yes,” she said. “I checked into a hotel, to do it. But they figured it out—the manager or someone. I had to get my stomach pumped. That was revolting. Vomit-making, you could say.”
She does what would be a laugh, except that her face is so rigid. I think I may cry. At the same time I’m angry with her, though I don’t know why. It’s as if Cordelia has placed herself beyond me, out of my reach, where I can’t get at her. She has let go of her idea of herself. She is lost.
“Elaine,” she says, “get me out.”
“What?” I say, brought up short.
“Help me get out of there. You don’t know what it’s like. You have no privacy.” This is the closest to pleading she’s ever come.
A phrase comes to me, a remnant left over from boys, from Saturday afternoons, reading the comics: Pick on somebody your own size. “How could I do that?” I say.
“Visit me tomorrow and we’ll go in a taxi.” She sees me hesitate. “Or just lend me the money. That’s all you have to do. I can hide the pills in the morning, I won’t take them. Then I’ll be all right. I know it’s those pills that’re keeping me like this. Just twenty-five dollars is all I need.”
“I don’t have a lot of money with me,” I say, which is true enough, but an evasion. “They’d catch you. They’d know you were off the pills. They could tell.”
“I can fool them any day,” Cordelia says, with a flicker of her old cunning. Of course, I think, she’s an actress. Or was. She can counterfeit anything. “Anyway, those doctors are so dumb. They ask all these questions, they believe anything I tell them, they write it all down.”
There are doctors, then. More than one. “Cordelia, how can I take the responsibility? I haven’t even talked, I haven’t talked to anyone.”
“They’re all assholes,” she says. “There’s nothing wrong with me. You know, you said yourself.” There’s a frantic child in there, behind that locked, sagging face.
I have an image of spiriting Cordelia away, rescuing her. I could do it, or something like it; but then where would she end up? Hiding out in our apartment, sleeping on an improvised bed like the draft dodgers, a refugee, a displaced person, smoking up the kitchen with Jon wondering who the hell she is and why she’s there. Things are uneven between us as it is; I’m not sure I can afford Cordelia. She’d be one more sin of mine, to be chalked up to the account he’s keeping in his head. Also I am not feeling totally glued together myself.
And there’s Sarah to think of. Would she take to this Auntie Cordelia? How is Cordelia with small children? And exactly how sick in the head is she, anyway? How long before I’d come back and find her out cold on the bathroom floor, or worse? In the middle of a bright red sunset. Jon’s work table is an arsenal, there are little saws lying around, little chisels. Maybe it would just be melodrama, a skin-deep slash or two, her old theatricality; though perhaps theatrical people are not less risky, but more. In the interests of the role they’ll sacrifice anything.
“I can’t, Cordelia,” I say gently. But I don’t feel gentle toward her. I am seething, with a fury I can neither explain nor express. How dare you ask me? I want to twist her arm, rub her face in the snow. The waitress brings the bill. “Are you sufficiently sophonsified?” I say to Cordelia, trying for lightness, and a change of subject. But Cordelia has never been stupid.
“So you won’t,” she says. And then, forlornly: “I guess you’ve always hated me.”
“No,” I say. “Why would I? No!” I am shocked. Why would she say such a thing? I can’t remember ever hating Cordelia.
“I’ll get out anyway,” she says. Her voice is not thick now, or hesitant. She has that stubborn, defiant look, the one I remember from years ago. So?
I walk her back, deposit her. “I’ll come to visit you,” I say. I intend to, but know at the same time that the chances are slim. She’ll be all right, I tell myself. She was like this at the end of high school, and then things got better. They could again.
On the streetcar going back, I read the advertisements: a beer, a chocolate bar, a brassiere turning into a bird. I imitate relief. I feel free, and weightless.
But I am not free, of Cordelia.
I dream Cordelia falling, from a cliff or bridge, against a background of twilight, her arms outspread, her skirt open like a bell, making a snow angel in the empty air. She never hits or lands; she falls and falls, and I wake with my heart pounding and gravity cut from under me, as in an elevator plummeting out of control.
I dream her standing in the old Queen Mary schoolyard. The school is gone, there is nothing but a field, and the hill behind with the scrawny evergreen trees. She is wearing her snowsuit jacket, but she is not a child, she’s the age she is now. She knows I have deserted her, and she is angry. After a month, two months, three, I write Cordelia a note, on flowered notepaper of the sort that doesn’t leave much space for words. I purchase this notepaper specially. My note is written with such false cheerfulness I can barely stand to lick the flap of the envelope. In it I propose another visit. But my note comes back in the mail, with address unknown scrawled across it. I examine this writing from every angle, trying to figure out if it could be Cordelia’s, disguised. If it isn’t, if she’s no longer at the rest home, where has she gone? She could ring the doorbell at any minute, call on the phone. She could be anywhere.
I dream a mannequin statue, like one of Jody’s in the show, hacked apart and glued back together. It’s wearing nothing but a gauze costume, covered with spangles. It ends at the neck. Underneath its arm, wrapped in a white cloth, is Cordelia’s head.