Chapter Three #2
“Then don’t have fun,” Edie said. “It was only a suggestion. My game can be played with the intention to lance psychic boils. Plus, I’ll go back to Wisconsin at the end of the month, and you’ll go back to…?”
“Los Angeles.”
“Los Angeles. Which is far, far away from Green Bay, in more ways than one. I didn’t mean to come at you by recognizing you like that, I’m sorry, but also, it’s proof our lives couldn’t be more different.”
“How do I know that? You could be the heiress of some kind of Midwest dairy conglomerate.”
“We have those! Dairy money, department store money, paper money, cannery money. Green Bay Packers money. But I am not one of those. I am the daughter of a single mother with two younger brothers who I shared a room with. My mom’s got a three-bedroom now, but she had to be pretty crafty when I was growing up. ”
“So what’s your game?” Cosima stepped toward the cat cautiously, and when Edie drew her hand away, she gave it an experimental stroke down its back.
The cat’s fur was soft, its body hot underneath the fur.
The cat pushed up into her fingers and surprised Cosima with its positive reaction to her touch.
It was purring so loud, it sounded like it might hurt something inside of itself.
“We figure out whose life is worse,” Edie said.
“Don’t call it a game, call it an ice-breaking activity.
We already started. I told you I can’t wear real pants and that I grew up in Green Bay, which, depending on which polls you’re looking at, is either one of the nicest places to live in America or the most racist and the drunkest.”
“I can’t tell you about myself. You could call any tabloid, especially right now, and they would pay you for the information.”
Edie grinned. “See? That sucks. You’re already great at this game. What the hell do you even talk about if you can never talk about yourself or anyone you care about? The weather?” The orange cat bumped his head into Edie’s bright green too-big coat, and she scratched beneath its chin.
“Money,” Cosima said. “Mostly. There are a lot of ways to talk about money.”
Edie laughed. Her laugh came so readily. “I’ll bet. Here’s mine. Back home, I’m called by my nickname more than my actual name.”
“Which is?” Cosima watched as Edie picked up the cat and snuggled him against her chest. It made her throat tight.
The sun had come out from behind a cloud, and shafts of improbable golden light made the ordinary stone and brick buildings of the village seem to glow.
She felt restless without the weather matching her mood.
“Frog.” Edie raised an eyebrow at Cosima.
Cosima could admit that Edie, in her green coat, hat, and boots, seemed to be leaning into the name, but she couldn’t think of a less fair thing to call this woman. “Why?”
“Because I’m short and round, and my face is covered in multicolored polka dots.
” Edie indicated her freckles. “Also, my eyes are green, and when I was in middle school I had to wear headgear to move my teeth and jaw.” Edie mimed an apparatus around her head and pulled her mouth into a grimace in a way that did recall a frog.
“Freckles are chic right now. And green eyes are the most rare. Almost no one has green eyes. There is, I’m sure you’re aware, nothing wrong with your body.”
Edie set the cat back onto the wall. It started on its way as though it were late for an important appointment.
“Well. Thank you. To be clear, I’m not hung up on how I look.
It was always obvious how much smarter I was than my brothers, who are ding-dongs, so it didn’t get in too deep.
But the nickname persists. One of my brothers has kids who call me ‘Auntie Frog.’”
“Auntie Frog is objectively charming. No points for you. How does one win this game?”
Edie glanced over at Cosima with an expression so drawn and tired, it slowed Cosima’s stride in surprise. “Oh, we’ll know when one of us wins.” Now Edie’s laugh was dark. “The discomfort and social embarrassment will come over us like a black cloud.”
Cosima pulled her hands out of the pocket of her shooting coat and shook out her hands.
She stretched her arms over her head. It was as if her body had already decided to tell Edie whatever she wanted to know, and so it needed to warm up first. “Here’s mine.
I got my period in front of Harry Styles at a pool party. ”
“Jesus Christ.”
“I was sixteen. I had just gotten home for the summer from boarding school with a few of my classmates, and—”
“Wait. Boarding school?”
She hadn’t expected that to be the part of her story that tripped Edie up, but she should have. Edie was right. Their lives were different. Phoebe had made sure Cosima’s life was safe. Exclusive.
“Yes. Ecole d’Humanité, in Switzerland. For high school only. My mother couldn’t stand having me gone before then.”
“Obviously. Carry on.”
Cosima did not linger on that obviously. She had told this story before, at brunches or in VIP lounges with cocktails, but this time, she decided to tell it straight, without euphemisms or edits. “My mother had a pool party to celebrate the summer vacation. She got somewhat carried away.”
Edie snorted. “Don’t spare the details on my account.”
She walked faster in retaliation. “There was a tent with a facialist and hot stone massage. Of course, One Direction performed.”
“Of course,” Edie said, breathing hard but keeping up with squishy stomps of her ill-fitting boots. “It would’ve been embarrassing to have someone like Maroon 5, my god.”
“I wore a bikini. It was—”
“—white,” Edie interrupted. “It was white, wasn’t it?”
“Yes. It was.” Cosima could feel her cheeks burning, even now. “And I was sitting on a cabana chair that was upholstered in white canvas, and Duncan—”
“Who’s Duncan?”
Just like that, Cosima felt the ground slip under her boots. Like when the plane’s cabin had opened up beneath her.
“No one. Duncan is no one.”
As soon as she said this, the knives came back, sinking into her middle, sharp and deep. The road in front of them had a slight uphill grade. She tried stomping her way up it to feel the pain of her feet against the earth instead. Here, here, here.
But she couldn’t get the ground back underneath her. She didn’t want to play this game anymore.
Edie didn’t ask her to finish her story. Why would she? It was a foolish story, a story Cosima told because almost one hundred percent of the anecdotes she could tell at a brunch or in a VIP room were about her mother, and this one was only secondarily about her mother.
And it was humiliating. A humiliation impossible without her mother’s fame.
“I’ve had eight jobs in ten years,” Edie said in the silence. Her voice was still cheerful in its husky, laughing way, but there was something else there, too. Something that hurt.
She stopped at an intersection, looked around, and made a turn.
“I’ll tell you about the last, worst job,” Edie continued. “But I’m going to warn you, this is where the discomfiting cloud of doom settles over us, and it becomes clear we’ve shared too much.”
“It won’t. That would mean you’ve won, and I won’t let you.” Maybe it wasn’t healthy to want to win at who was the most fucked-up, but Cosima did. She wanted someone else to see it and acknowledge it and back away from her like she was terrifying.
Then maybe the knives would go away.
“My training is in culinary arts. When I was twelve, I became a vegetarian after a teacher showed our class one of those slaughterhouse videos about the horrors of factory farming.” Edie shrugged at Cosima’s shocked look.
“Wisconsin is very hardcore in very uneven ways. It affected me deeply, and my mom was someone who thought chicken was vegetarian, so I got into cooking. Like, really into it. I wasn’t great at school.
I was never diagnosed with anything—my mom is apparently ‘not into labels,’ either—but I struggled with putting concepts together, staying organized, knowing when and how to start something. ”
“Executive function.”
“Yes! That’s it. But when I was cooking, I didn’t have any problems. I could keep in my head all the prep and how everything would come together and what had to be finished when.
My sophomore year, I started a vocational path at my high school.
I graduated with a diploma and a culinary arts certificate, went on for more training at the technical college, and then there were the years marked by the sorts of failure I think a person is supposed to learn from, and then there was Fauxmage. ”
The trees pressed in on a narrow lane that separated the front gardens of much bigger homes made of stone with Victorian flourishes and wrought iron gates.
“It was a vegan creamery. I made fine plant-based cheeses, hard cheese, soft cheese, aged, blue. I sold it by the pound or on bespoke cheese boards. Plus pastries, crackers, and breads to serve with cheese—I bought those—and shortbread I made. I had a storefront on Broadway on the west side of Green Bay. Even though my real estate agent told me the lease was a steal for a commercial space with a permitted kitchen, I was terrified. I did everything myself.”
Cosima didn’t understand the flat, heavy tone in Edie’s voice. “My favorite vegan creamery in LA is Su Lin’s. She makes a smoked vegan gouda that apples should be grown to eat with.”
“Mm-hmm.” Edie crossed her arms, even though the sun shafting onto the lane had chased the chill out of the air.
“Su Lin’s was one of my exemplars in the deck I presented to my banker for the business loan.
Well, I should say, to my banker, and then to loan officers at six other banks before I found one gullible enough to take me on. ”
Cosima wasn’t getting something. “Why gullible?”
“A cheese store that doesn’t sell cheese? What’s next, a butcher shop that makes everything out of tofu?”
The bitterness in her voice was unmistakable. “I’m a fan of the Knifeless Butcher in Culver City,” Cosima said.