Chez Cordelia Read Free

workbooks and chocolates.
    The horrors in the chamber were the words, our enemies—books full of them, and flash cards which Mrs. Meek could snap in our faces like a magician doing some evil card trick, and stories with questions to go with them that were designed to trip us up and humiliate us. And there was Mrs. Meek herself.
    She terrified us, though it’s hard now to say why. She was tall and broad, middle-aged, with short blond hair, and she always wore dark blazers and skirts. “She looks like a daddy,” Danny said once, shuddering, but while I saw his point—there was something of the female impersonator about her—I didn’t agree. For one thing, my daddy had a long black beard. I thought she looked like an off-duty nun, out of uniform.
    She had a way of looking swiftly stunned (eyes popping, lips parted, nostrils pinched) and then pained (eyebrows angled down, teeth bared to the canines, eyes squinted half shut) at our mistakes, before the forbearing nunlike smile appeared again and the encouraging nods commenced. She filed her nails short, in points, and painted them red. Her eyes were pale blue with brown streaks in them. She must have worn a powerful girdle under her dark straight skirts, because I once jostled her and she felt exactly like a piece of furniture—the unyielding back of our sofa, maybe, stuffed with horsehair and covered tightly with fabric. She always seemed to both of us like a fraud, a witch disguised as a nice lady. She smiled a lot, showing plenty of crimson gum line and sharp white teeth, and she always spoke gently, and she rewarded us with candy, and she was always patient, but the whole performance, no matter how well acted, reminded me of the witch in Hansel and Gretel—sweet as pie until she had the children where she wanted them, and then wham! The door slammed shut, the oven was lighted, the fiendish cackles were released at last …
    I had to hold off Mrs. Meek, and the only way to do it was to resist reading, resist the words she sent flying at me, fight the workbook with its trick questions. And I did fight; so did Danny. My weapon was inattention, his a slowness of mind I thought well feigned. Together we drove her crazy, drove her to superhuman patience and weekly more terrible smiles and bags and bags of Hershey kisses. (Even then a practical child, I used to wonder who paid for the candy, Mrs. Meek or the nuns?) She used to say, “That’s better, Cordelia, really much better, it’s coming nicely,” after I stumbled through the tale of the spotted dog and the mud puddle; translated, her words meant “You little beast, how much longer will this go on?” (I could hardly read English, but I could read Mrs. Meek.) Once—only once—when my absentminded stammerings drove her to some kind of brink, she raised her hand as if to slap me, and there was an awful pause, an eternal three seconds that lasted until she deflected her hand to the candy bag. The smile remained frozen on her face, no less grim than the creepy leer of the cat-sprouting jack-o’-lantern on the wall, and she pushed a piece of candy at me and watched me eat it, showing her sharp teeth, her sharp claws reaching for another one. I ate all she gave me, hungrily; it was not for nothing that our remedial sessions were held just before lunch. But the candy wasn’t candy: it was reading medicine, and all three of us knew it. I would have resisted that, too, along with the other witch-blandishments, but though I knew it was medicine as surely as Robitussin and Kaopectate were medicine, it tasted just like candy, and I bolted it.
    It worked. Gradually I learned to read, against my will. My will, as I said, was no match for Mrs. Meek’s. I sat at her knee and prattled off the little stories, stumbling still but, if I went slowly and kept my mind on it, getting through them passably, at least as well as Vinnie DeLuca, who was the worst reader in the