Chez Cordelia by Kitty Burns Florey

overnight; fall, and the taste of the first Spartans; and even winter, when the trees went rough and black, but with tiny buds, if you looked closely. It all seemed far less crazy than sticking in the house getting endless ink transfusions.
    My aunt and I went to New Haven one Saturday afternoon, to see a revival of A Taste of Honey . (We both liked English movies—the more outlandish the accent, the better.) I cried so hard she let me have a cup of coffee, with cream and four sugars, at the Little Germ afterward. Whit brought it over to our table personally, and put his skinny dark hand on my head, and said, “She’s the spitting image of you, Gloria.”
    â€œGo on,” said my aunt. “She doesn’t look a bit like me.”
    â€œAround the eyes—look here.” He turned my head like a doorknob under his hand. “Look at those gorgeous eyes—that perky little nose—just like yours.”
    â€œBull,” said my aunt.
    I went to the ladies’ room and checked my eyes in the mirror. Except for looking pinkish around the edges, they were the same as ever, narrow and brown like my father’s instead of round and blue like my aunt’s and my mother’s. My perky little nose was red and running. But I hoped, possibly even prayed, that the resemblance was there, and I toyed with the agreeable notion that I was my aunt’s secret child, born under an apple tree. When I went back Whit was still there, examining my aunt’s eyes intently.
    â€œFeeling better, Cookie?” he asked me. “Ready to order?” He was a handsome man, with a moustache that seemed to bristle out of his nose, and he took my order back to the kitchen (the usual: fries and a sundae) with a spring in his step. My aunt watched him fondly, and so did I.
    Sometimes I stayed overnight in my aunt’s little apple-colored house. She let me watch TV, and one April she actually allowed me to sleep outside under the apple blossoms. She had a fat, playful, apple-eating hound dog named Bounce, whom I loved with a pure and joyful passion similar to my passion for John Lennon. I hugged and romped with Bounce as I would have hugged and romped with John Lennon, given the chance.
    Aunt Phoebe had the great gift of acceptance. I’m convinced it’s a gift, something you’re born with, the ability to take people as they are, to let them take whatever shape they will, and never try to change it. I can’t remember my aunt ever, ever trying to get me to read a book.
    I decided that Aunt Phoebe, and the Frontenacs, lived as close to the way I wanted to live as anyone I could think of, and some nights while I was poring over my coin albums I used to lay plans for becoming more like them. It was on one of those nights that I decided to marry Danny. What a shortcut! To marry right into the family! I was overcome with chuckles at my cleverness, but even if they hadn’t been in the middle of a game of Botticelli I couldn’t, of course, have told my family.
    I had become a regular at the Frontenacs’ by then. I loved it there, especially in their apartment, where the TV was on every night after the store closed, and where there was no one watching everything I said, ready to pounce on every grammatical error with some witty riposte, and where there didn’t seem to be any books except the Bible, TV Guide , and Modern Grocer . As I got older, my parents let me go out in the evenings, and I was always at the Frontenacs’, eating dinner and watching TV and playing poker with them, stalking Danny.
    He and I used to stretch out on the floor on our stomachs, leaning on our elbows, and watch Star Trek and The Dick Van Dyke Show and The Wonderful World of Disney . There was always a bag of Cheez-Its or Fig Newtons between us. His parents didn’t care what we ate, or how much we ate, as long as we didn’t get crumbs on the gold wall-to-wall. We munched with paper napkins spread out