Edna was the fastest cookie roller in the Snatch Up bakery. She was still working at 72, long past her promised retirement date. Instead of investing in a costly new piece of equipment for mass produced cookies, the company offered her annual bonuses to keep rolling those Oatmeal Snappies and Choco-Hummers. Edna's were each precisely the same size with not one choco-chip extra in any. Her palms were genetically engineered to roll a perfect ball in record time. Edna's mother had worked for Snatch Up too until she was caught licking dough from her fingers and was escorted out by aproned line supervisors. Edna had worked especially hard to overcome the shame of that event since she had hired on at age 15. She dared to wonder, in her darkest moments, if that was the reason the entire food industry was shackled with disposable gloves now. The simple integrity of hand washing and respect for food to be offered to others was no longer to be trusted.
With little help from a drunken husband named Lucky, who had died suddenly at 55 years of age, she had raised her seven children on her Snatch Up wages. The kids were scattered now, married, not married, working, not working, having kids, getting kicked around by life like everyone. None were in jail and she was proud of that. They were an okay looking bunch if they all cleaned up at the same time. Some of them liked some of the others, none of them liked all of the others but they were too big a group to gather all at once anyway so small clusters of those that were speaking to each other would collect themselves around her kitchen table now and then. That was enough.
As Edna sculpted the last pan of Cocanutties for the day, she was creating a script for the much needed conversation with her middle daughter, Jeanne. She tried not to dabble too much in her kids' affairs; they were all so willing to tell her about each others' issues that she had a head full of he said/she said chatter all the time. Mostly she remembered the pack of liars they had been as kids and tried to ignore all the babble they brought to her table now. But, Jeanne was behaving like a perfect twit and it was clear to Edna, even discounting the editorial buzz from the other kids, that this girl was making a mess of what looked like a pretty sweet life.
Jeanne's husband was boring, nobody argued about that. He wasn't too ugly, though, and his drinking habits weren't awful, just normal, like most of the boys. Their two sons had now landed at unfortunate ages, sprouting legs too long and noses somewhat outsized. The oldest was sixteen and had turned sullen but he didn't misbehave much. The youngest was eleven and still had fading remnants of cuteness to him but he was loud and wild and not cute enough to compensate. He was on every list in the school office except for the honor roll, a frequent visitor on the counselors bench, and Jeanne was there fighting with the teachers weekly. Jeanne called him "special" and "spirited". The school called him a bully. Edna had no illusions about her grandkids. The folks at the school were probably right.
Now Jeanne had announced some brainstorm about leaving her husband and her kids to go and Find Herself. Edna thought a good sit down was in order. She had no deep philosophical issues with divorce; she functioned more on a needs- based system than a philosophical one. It just seemed to her that to divorce a husband who still had some miles on him was a mistake, and though her own kids were a mixed result in the end, she did believe mothers were meant to go the distance unless they got crippled or died before the job was done.
Edna drove her ten-year-old Ford to Jeanne's suburban home and arrived there at 5:00 p.m., pulled the car over to where a curb would be if she had the good sense to live in the city, and surprised Jeanne and the boys when she knocked on the back door. Jeanne was in the bathroom, redesigning her thinning, colored hair into something restless and carefree. Jake, the oldest boy, shuffled to the door, bored with the television program that he wasn't really watching and about to indulge in his third can of pop since he got home from school. "Hey Gram," he greeted as he opened the door and then walked away. His jeans, Edna thought, must belong to a much larger boy. Perhaps there was a mix up in the gym locker room. The legs sang like a cricket as he walked back to the television. He wore a hooded sweatshirt with the hood pulled over his ears as if the wind were howling through the sails on high seas.
Jeff, the younger son, was bouncing a large ball off the siding at the back of the house in a frenetic kathump kathump that left faint dents and artistic black smudges. It sounded like a house with a migraine.
Edna called, "Jeanne! I'm making some coffee out here." It was a call to confer.
As Jeanne came from the bathroom the sticky smell of cheap hairspray trailed behind her and her hair stood in spikes, more contrived than carefree. Edna measured the coffee and paused to notice the new look. She asked, "Is that how you wanted it to look?" and then turned back to the coffee making. The kitchen was a tribute to stainless steel. It looked like a carnival funhouse with distorted images in every appliance. The counters were not Formica so Edna was not certain what they were made of, but they showed little evidence of having ever been a workstation for food preparation. The microwave, however, was finger smudged and sauce splattered. A calendar with a washable surface was the main piece of art on the walls and it was Sharpie-marked in every box with dates and meetings. None looked interesting but Edna was sure they were all terribly important. What in the world was a "Rolfing" appointment? Could be a mistake. Jeanne's husband had maybe taken up golf.
With the coffee assembled and beginning drip Edna went into her purse and handed Jake a twenty-dollar bill and her car keys. "Here, get your brother and take my car. Go down and get yourselves a pizza for supper."
Car keys can make a pouting teen almost smile, and Jake took the bait without hesitation. The door slammed, some profanity was heard between the brothers before the ball stopped thumping, and then the old car squealed down the gracelessly curved street toward the nearest graceless strip mall.
Edna watched for the taillights to turn out of sight and spun to her forty-year-old child and said, "What the hell is in your head?"
Jeanne should have known the twenty bucks was buying something. Ass chewing used to be free, now it required pay offs but was ass chewing, nonetheless. "What?" Jeanne responded, trying for an innocent look but only getting as far as stupid in her theatrical repertoire. She looked every inch a fourteen year old caught climbing out her bedroom window at midnight.
"Divorce? An apartment? Leaving your damn kids?!" Edna's voice did not rise above a conversational timbre until 'kids,' then a rank authority entered her tone.
Jeanne tossed herself dramatically into a chair, "You don't know what I've been through and you can't come and tell me what to do."
Edna let Jeanne assume her victim-of-torture posture and poured herself coffee before it was finished by taking advantage of the pause feature. She made a mental note that when that twelve-year-old pot of hers ever quit she'd like to have one like this.
"What have you been through exactly besides some high school and the Mall of America?" Edna inquired.
"My therapist says I have to get negative energy out of my life or I'll get sick. I can't find my true self when others keep defining me--" Jeanne was clearly ready to spew clichés all evening so Edna held her hand up in a T for time-out gesture.
Jeanne became scarlet and tears filled her tinted contact lens-covered eyes. Edna noted that nobody in her family, or maybe in human history, had eyes quite that color.
Jeanne thought she would play a familiar card, "My therapist said that Dad's drinking impacted my--"
Edna tossed her gray head back and croaked out one succinct "HA," then launched anew, "Don't you talk to me about your dad. I lived with that fool longer than you did and never needed a damn therapist. The world is full of people who were raised by drunks and fools. Get past it."
"See how you are? Denial. You never validate my feelings."
"That's because your feelings are asinine and I don't know how to 'validate' idiotic. Do the boys get free passes to a therapist to explain about how their feelings get "validated" when they have a brand new mom running around town looking for validation like a damn parking ramp ticket? And, just how dumb is that husband of yours that you think he'll just raise your kids here and send you money there, or wherever it is you think you might be?"
Jeanne wrinkled her brow; uncertain what portion of that run on mess she was to answer. "Mother. I'm not like you. I need to find myself."
"Find yourself," Edna repeated, stirring her coffee even though she drank it black."Just where in the hell do you think you will be found? I hadn't heard you were missing although your brain is in question."
"I have physical pain, Mother, that cannot be defined by medicine. It is a direct result of my psychic pain and emotional struggle with internal need and external pressure." This was punctuated by a dramatic sob.
"You pay people, don't you, for words like that?" Edna was truly impressed at the things for sale in the world.
"There were so many of us at home. Too many. One bathroom and no privacy. You never had time to notice us as individuals. Do you know how crowded my childhood was, Mother?"
"Maybe you're right. I should have noticed about that shared bathroom being so damaging. Seven kids were too many. Perhaps I ought to have sold a few of you. Which ones, I wonder?" Edna sipped her coffee and looked thoughtful. "The cute ones? The smart ones?"
Jeanne rose and clenched her fists at her side. "See how you are? All sarcastic all the time. You know, your sarcasm is a form of anger. You should get some help."
"One of us getting help is enough, I think."
It didn't get better and no resolution was in sight. Edna concluded, by the time the car came back and the kathumping resumed on a new side of the house, that her daughter was crazed and could not be redeemed. Like wiping their butts when they were tots, she knew anything she offered was just a gesture but that the real issue was theirs to work out over time.
"You don't understand my life. It was different for you. I have pressures you can't imagine."
Edna rinsed her cup and turned it to drain on a towel on the counter. She picked up her purse when Jake passed through on his way back to the television. "Thanks Gram, there might be a little ding in the front from the dumb parking lot. It's nothing really. My ma can call the insurance."
Jeanne pulled her hands through her already chaotic hair, "God! Do you see what I mean? It's just too much!"
"Never mind. It's clear you have much larger concerns." Edna straightened the rug that was kicked into a hazardous lump by the door and took her leave.
She waved at Jeff as she drove away. She knew she was too old and tired to take those kids on as a project and hoped they wouldn't get lost in the shuffle. They were too big and too plain for a Hollywood ending. She hoped that their plain ordinariness would serve them in some ordinary way.
Edna went to work the next day and rolled cookies with pride, efficiency and a deep sorrow that her child might be the sort of woman who would lick cookie dough from her hands at work.
© 2005 by Beadrin Youngdahl.