After the Reunion (21 page)

If she did divorce him, she could find a permanent place to live, and fill it with her own things: a concrete admission at last that she had a new life. She didn’t know … All she knew was that she wasn’t lonely, and that was a surprise for someone who had never been alone before and had always dreaded it. And yet hadn’t she been totally alone so often while she supposedly had a family?

Kate had landed a part in a movie—a theatrical she called it, as opposed to a television movie, and seemed excited about it. Peter was looking for a summer project, preferably a job that would pay more than a pittance, but there seemed to be nothing for college students, even one who had gotten an A for his paper on “Starting a Small Business.” Adeline showed up once a week to clean Emily’s apartment, but Emily would not let her cook, saying she was hardly ever home lately anyway. When the children came for dinner Emily cooked, usually something simple, always followed by her famous cookies, and when she was alone she ate whatever and wherever she pleased, at whatever time suited her, and felt free.

Before, when she had been living with Ken, she had been in limbo much of the time, waiting for him to come home. Now that she wasn’t responsible to anyone (except the children at the hospital) she found there were a lot of things she wanted to do: go to the movies, to a new play, to lunch or dinner with a friend. She was no longer either waiting for something or waited for. She wasn’t unhappy but she wasn’t really happy either—it was more as if she were on vacation, letting her bruised ego heal.

Her son was being unusually attentive lately, and Emily wondered why. Peter never did anything without a well thought out reason. One day he called and asked if he could bring a friend to dinner that week, and if Emily would be sure to bake her butterscotch chip cookies. She was so surprised and flattered that she made enough cookies for both Peter
and
the friend to take home afterward. His friend was a polite, clean-cut boy from Peter’s class, who obviously had rich parents: he drove the same kind of little two-seater Mercedes convertible that Emily owned, but his was new. Peter always chose rich friends.

Three days later Peter called and asked if he could come over again. “You don’t have to go to any trouble cooking, Mom. I’ll bring a barbecued chicken. I want to talk to you about an idea I have.”

He wanted something; she should have known. Oh well, she could always say no. She had become much better at saying no lately.

He arrived at six, handsome, sleek, and charming, carrying not only the barbecued chicken, hot in its paper bag, but a chilled bottle of Dom Perignon (from his father’s refrigerator she supposed) and a folder filled with papers. When she kissed him hello he actually put his arm around her.

“I am about to change our lives,” he announced triumphantly.

“Oh?”

“
I
have a terrific summer job, with the possibility of it becoming a permanent job, and
you
have a career.”

“I do?” Emily said, amused. He was virtually glowing. “And what is my career to be?”

“You remember my friend Jared who was here the other night. Have you ever heard of the Mills Tool Company?”

“Not unless I play tennis with the wife,” Emily said.

“Well, that’s his father,” Peter went on. “His father invented something, some little thing you can’t send up a plane without. He’s got millions. Anyway, I wrote a prospectus and took it to his father, and I brought your cookies, and we now have a loan to start our own business.”

“What business and who’s ‘we’?” Emily asked. “You and I?”

“You, me, Jared, about a dozen kids from school …” Peter sat on the couch and put the folder of papers on the coffee table in front of him. “Sit down, Mom.”

She sat.

“This is the prospectus and some papers you have to sign,” he said. “You can look them over tonight after I leave, but I’m coming back to get them early in the morning. Meanwhile I’ll explain everything to you simply, because this is written in language that may be a little confusing—it’s got charts and stuff, and lots of figures. Number one: You make the best butterscotch chip cookies in the world. Everybody says so. Number two: You have a genius for a son.” He smiled. “I found us a location for a small cookie factory …”

“Factory!” Emily cried, concerned.

“That’s just a term for a place with an oven and mixing machines, so don’t panic. We’ll sell right out of the store while they’re nice and hot and gooey. This is not a shelf product. We will also have kids handing them out in shopping malls, and we’re going to sell them in the school cafeteria during summer session to start. All my friends who need summer jobs are going to work for us.” He gave a grin that was downright wolfish. “Everywhere they go they get offered crummy wages. Well, now you and I are going to pay crummy wages and my friends are thrilled.”

If I don’t sign anything
, Emily thought,
he can’t get involved in this crazy thing
. But Peter’s excitement was contagious, and he seemed to know about business—at least his school thought so. And that millionaire person seemed to think so too. “I don’t want to sound like a spoilsport,” she said, “but why can’t you and Jared just work for his father?”

“Mom!” If Peter hadn’t been twenty his voice would have cracked, such was his outrage. “Haven’t you heard of free enterprise? The American way? We want to do this on our own.”

“Jared’s father has no jobs.”

“Oh, we could do something dumb that he invented for us, but he’s very impressed that we’re doing this. He’s lending us the money. You don’t even want to hear about it.”

“I do so,” Emily said.

“Okay. Now you may have the idea that the market is saturated, but people will always eat cookies. All you have to do is write down your recipe, and then I’ll adjust it on the computer for our huge machines. The kids who are doing the baking will have to follow the recipe
exactly
. Naturally I will have copyrighted it so nobody can steal it.”

“Naturally,” Emily said. She felt a little numb, but also quite pleased. Maybe it would be possible after all.… She didn’t know anything about business, but she knew how good her cookies were. She’d always known that. “But Peter … what’s going to happen in the fall when you have to go back to college? Who’s going to run this thing?”

“Maybe I won’t go back to college,” he said calmly. “We’ll see. I might take a leave of absence. The only reason I’m going to college anyway is to learn how to be a success in business, and who knows, maybe this will be my success.”

“But the other kids will have to go back …”

“Mom, why do you always worry about everything? There are always kids who need jobs. Not everybody in the world goes to college, you know.”

No, that was true; and as she thought about it she wondered what college had ever done for her except overeducate her for the life she had been told to want. “Peter, do you really think we can do this and make it work?”

“Of course I do.”

She knew now, she knew exactly what she wanted and why she wanted it. “I’d like to name the company myself,” she said, with a firmness she could not remember ever having mustered before.

Peter’s face lit up again. “You’re saying yes!”

“I’m saying yes if I get to name the company.”

“Of course you can. You’re a partner. You’re the creative one.”

Emily took a deep breath. “I want to call it ‘Emily’s Cookies.’”

“Perfect!” Peter said. “It sounds like home. It sounds real.”

“It
is
real,” she said, mildly insulted. “I’m real. And we have to have a cute tin to put the cookies in. In case somebody wants to buy more than just one to eat on the spot.”

“Riiight.”

She was thinking fast now, the adrenaline flowing. “They’re butterscotch chip cookies, so it should be a butterscotch and white tin. Gingham. Little checks. With ‘Emily’s Cookies’ written on top of it. Maybe in orange, maybe brown. We’ll try both and see what we think. We’ll look at different styles of lettering too.”

Peter grinned and held up his hand; thumb and index finger making a circle of approval. “Perfect!”

Emily smiled back, feeling close to him, the way she had for that brief happy time so long ago, when she had come home from her class reunion thinking how much they all loved one another.

“Let’s open the champagne,” she said.

It was hot that summer; ninety-five almost every day, day after day of blindingly sunny unremitting heat. Emily worried that when Emily’s Cookies opened no one would want to go out into the street and therefore wouldn’t know about her store and her cookies. She was thinking of it as hers now, even though it was a group project. The place they had rented was in Westwood Village, where things were always lively. There were first-run movie theatres, record stores, bookstores, a big department store, and lots of restaurants for the students from nearby UCLA and other young people who lived in the area or came there because there were things to do. There were actual streets you could walk on, and people who used them. It wasn’t like Beverly Hills, where she could never afford to rent anyway, but which was so dead on a hot day it looked like an unused movie set.

The analysts were away for the month of August, so by some ironic coincidence Dr. Page was going to disappear just when Emily was about to face her first step toward real independence. “You’re ready,” Dr. Page kept telling her. “You can do it. You’ve always wanted a career.”

“This isn’t exactly a career,” Emily would say one minute, and the next minute she would be terrified again, because it could become one, and she wanted it to be.

She told all her friends to come on opening day and bring their friends. She had quit her volunteer work at the hospital with some regrets, but before she left she promised that if the store was a success she would send someone by with hot cookies once a week for all the sick children.

“Great gimmick, Mom,” Peter said when she mentioned it to him.

“I didn’t mean it to be a gimmick,” Emily said.

She had decided on the orange lettering for the cookie tin, and had also chosen their slogan: “Cookies Are Love.” It was something she had often thought when Adeline had refused to let her make the cookies at home. Adeline pretended to be pleased about the new turn in Emily’s life, but Emily could tell she felt ambivalent about it.

“I could have done that with my cookies,” Adeline said. “Gone into business. Just never thought of it.”

Mine are better, Emily thought, but said nothing.

She had suddenly become extremely competitive. She sampled all the major brands of freshly baked cookies and found something to criticize about every one of them. They were too dry, too greasy, too small, too sweet, too salty …

Workmen were working overtime to finish the store. It was to be a simple, utilitarian place, with the ovens in full view of the customers, emitting their mouth-watering cookies-baking smell; the rest of the machinery in view too behind a glass wall, the kids who were doing the baking dressed in white T-shirts, butterscotch-colored jeans, and white aprons. Best of all, you could see the cookies rising and starting to bubble and turn golden, just the way they had in Emily’s own kitchen. It was the part she had always liked best, and she wanted it for the child in everyone.

She waited for some reaction from Ken. He had accused her of being a useless woman. Now what would he think? Did she care? No. Well, yes, she did care a little. She supposed he would say that she couldn’t have done it without Peter, that Peter was a man, again a male taking care of her—that she was just a figurehead. Sometimes Emily worried it was almost true. But she had invented the recipe, and the packaging; the tin and the little butterscotch and white gingham paper bags, and the slogan; and she had thought of the idea of giving away the cookies at the hospital, and she was Emily, after all, THE Emily. The hell with what Ken thought.

On opening day it was blazing hot. Emily lettered a sign and put it in the window: Take some cookies to the beach. There was also a banner that said: Grand Opening. On the window was lettered,
Emily’s Cookies
, and underneath in smaller letters,
Cookies Are Love
. The store was sparkling clean … and empty.

Ken had sent flowers. He had even written Good Luck on the card. The flowers and card were for all of them, his son included, so while Emily was pleased she was not touched. Besides, she was too busy worrying. Where were the customers? The new ovens were baking like mad anyway. By lunchtime Peter had to deliver an order to the UCLA cafeteria, but they couldn’t live on that alone, and after lunch the cookies would continue to be baked in hope someone would buy them, and if no one came they would all be wasted. Emily pictured hundreds of love-filled cookies, all just lying there getting cold and hard.

Around noon her friends started drifting in. They looked around, spread compliments, bought cookies, wished her luck, and went away. She waited.

At the end of the first day of business they had sold cookies to exactly four people.

“Tomorrow I’m going out to a mall too,” Emily said. “I can’t just sit here, I’ll be too nervous. I’ll take Century City.”

“You have to be quick, Mom,” Peter said. He had been debriefing his troops. “There are other cookie stores there and if they catch you they chase you away.”

“I’ll be quick.”

So here she was, walking around the huge outdoor shopping center in the heavy heat, carrying a basket full of her cookies, approaching total strangers as they hurried from one air-conditioned store to another, or from their air-conditioned offices to an air-conditioned restaurant or take-out place at lunchtime, smiling sweetly and forcing cookies on them. She was too desperate to be frightened or even embarrassed.

“Have a nice fresh cookie,” she would say brightly, as if they were the children at the hospital. “They’re good. Try one. They’re free.”

There was a sign on her basket with the name and address of her store, and she handed each person a cookie wrapped in a paper napkin with the name and address of the store printed on it too. There were lots of those napkins back in Westwood, still unused. She moved around a lot, watching out for anyone who would chase her away. She knew the Century City mall well; she’d shopped there for ages, and she knew where people liked to buy food to eat outdoors. Even on a day like today there were a few sun-loving diehards, mostly young tourists, scantily dressed. She knew they would appreciate something free. “Here’s dessert,” she would say, with her mommy smile.