Christmas Cookies

FICTION

by Vincent E. Monroe

          Their French Provincial bedroom furniture, a somewhat champagne color when originally purchased, two weeks ago had been repainted a creamy white.
          On top of Eleanor’s long dresser were three slender glass vases empty of flowers, her jewelry box she had not opened since that one evening ten years ago she chose to wear the mother-of-pearl necklace and matching earrings with the purple chiffon dress which, like all her other dresses, had showed off her legs, and two large framed photographs; one was of her daughter Madelyn at nineteen modeling a swimsuit for a little shop that had gone out of business eleven years ago, the other was of her son Jarrod at twenty-one in his army uniform.
          Madelyn always readily admitted to anyone who may have inquired that she had been much more interested in boys than school; she was, however, sheepish about her report cards, which were kept hidden away in a shoebox somewhere.
          Now, at fifty-six years old, she was a wife, mother, and recently she became a grandmother.
          On a summer Sunday afternoon seventeen years ago, she came with her husband and two children for a visit and drank too much and got into it with her mother—how Eleanor had been strident and overbearing and scoffed at happiness that was not her own.
          “You mean that bum you were running around with!” screamed Eleanor. “That greasy newspaper photographer! I’m glad I put my foot down! You were making a slut out of yourself! A goddamn slut!”
          Madelyn smacked her.
          When Eleanor was a child of seven or eight years old a bully on the playground, a girl around her age, scratched and kicked her, leaving her bruised, and when she got home her mother looked at her and beat her, screaming at her that no goddam kid of hers was going to be a doormat and ordering her to find that girl and take care of her and not to come home until she did, and Eleanor, having expected sympathy but not getting it, full of rage, hunted the girl down and beat her into pretty much a dangling, twisted puppet. 
          Ever since then, Eleanor was not about to take anything from anybody, including her own daughter, so she punched Madelyn sending her down to the blue carpeted living room floor where she lay crying and then she got up and she and her husband and the two children marched out of the house and she and Eleanor neither spoke to nor saw each other for almost four months.

          Despite all this, Eleanor and Madelyn were more like girlfriends than mother and daughter; besides, Eleanor came to understand what had really been going on with her daughter on that afternoon—Madelyn was afraid of turning forty; Eleanor would have told her that turning forty was nothing to be afraid of.
          And so they spoke on the phone two or three times a month and when Madelyn and her family moved to California Eleanor visited every few years because they would miss each other and also because, as Jarrod once remarked to his wife Samantha, “They like being miserable together.”
          Jarrod was a man who was not a neanderthal in his outlook on life or the world, though twenty-nine years ago, on an evening a month or two before they got married, Samantha was eighteen, Jarrod was twenty-three, they were standing on her parents’ front porch smoking cigarettes and deep in conversation while they waited for the rain to let up so that they could walk to the movies a block away, and Samantha, incredulous, looked at Jarrod and said, “You mean to tell me that while you were on leave in Paris you didn’t go the Louvre?” She married him, anyway, and he was glad, for he married a woman who was sharp and lovely and became successful in her own career and she was also—most important to him—not just his wife but his lover and best friend.
          Their two children, both girls, knew that they were loved, and that they were liked just as much, so they were comfortable enough to be able to kid around at the dinner table without fear of being snapped at.
          As for Jarrod and Eleanor, he was able to admit that she had been a good mother and very often loving and kind, and he understood, or thought he did, that her sporadic need to sneer arose from having lived poor with a drunk for a mother and a callous stepfather and the always elusive daydreams about her father who had died when she was a toddler.
          Understanding was one thing; accepting it as something easy to take was something else.
          And so, fifteen years ago, Jarrod and Samantha and the two girls came by train a little over six hundred miles for a visit and several days later during lunch Eleanor started in on him for the umpteenth time in his life about his wayward goofball high school friends.
          “Knock it off, Mom, or we’ll pack up and stay at a hotel,” Jarrod said. “Is that what you want?”
          Of course, that was not what Eleanor wanted. So, she stopped, but made no apology, and a pall lay over the remaining days of their visit.
          Not anymore did Eleanor before bed sit at her vanity table to brush her hair, the vanity table with its array of perfumes she no longer wore, and the powder puff she no longer used.
          On top of Bob’s chest of drawers sat the television.
          On the nightstand beside Eleanor’s bed were a lamp and her carton of cigarettes and lighter and an ashtray and the remote to the television and her bottle of high blood pressure pills.
          On the nightstand beside Bob’s bed were a lamp and his bottle of arthritis pills and a large framed photograph of Eleanor taken thirty years ago when she was forty-five:
          Her hair is upswept. She is wearing a pleated dress and high-heeled shoes and a simple wristwatch. She has on hardly any makeup. She is sitting on a sofa. Her legs are crossed. She is smiling. She is smiling because she is a widow who has found love again, with Bob, a fireman who weeps over Madama Butterfly, and a widower, a widower with a daughter, Gwen (who is now forty-one years old and lives with her invalid husband and two cats in Connecticut).
          Bob and Eleanor got up. They trudged to the kitchen, and neither looked at the Christmas tree in the living room.
          As they were decorating the tree, Bob kept fumbling with the beads, beads Eleanor painstakingly had strung together fifty years ago, she snapped at him, he snapped back, there arose a crescendo of recrimination, then, as had often happened, Bob left and took a long, long walk around the block. Later that night, they sat together on the sofa making an effort to admire the tree. The tree was so pretty, and they succumbed to admiration. Eleanor went to hold Bob’s hand. He pulled his hand away.
          Eleanor sat in her chair at the kitchen table. Bob, as always, made her a cup of coffee (cream, two sugars) and brought it over to her and kissed her on the cheek. Then he turned to go.
          “Bob, where are you going?”
          “The leaves. In the yard. I’m going to rake the leaves. Eleanor, didn’t I rake last week?”
          “Yes. You did. I watched you.”
          “Well, there are even more of them.”
          “Remember, we need to call Gwen to wish her a happy birthday.”
          “Later. What are you going to do?”
          “I am going to bake Christmas cookies.”
          “What for?”
          “Because you like them.”
          “You don’t have to.”
          She went out of the kitchen sobbing to their bedroom.
          “You never let me do anything for you anymore!”
          He stared after her, then went outside. While he raked the leaves, he found himself remembering:
          During the first seven or eight years of their marriage, on Saturday winter evenings she was lovely in the fur coat he had saved up for and bought her. She would stand at the edge of the driveway waiting for him to take her hand and together they would walk over to the Riveras or the Murphys and all their crowd would be there, including the Myersons and the Knapps, and there would be gallons of gin and whisky it always seemed like, and dancing, and often Eleanor would be standing in a corner or at the bar sitting on a stool, her legs crossed, enveloped in cigarette smoke, her fur coat off, her cocktail dress diaphanous and off the shoulder, and she would regale those nearby and there would be guffaws of laughter and exclamations of “Eleanor!” and Bob would call over to her, “Hon, you having a good time?” To which she would reply, “Sure, baby, and don’t worry, I’m behaving,” and everybody would crack up.
          And there she was twenty years ago at his forty-sixth birthday party with her shoes kicked off and shooting everyone with a toy machine gun or, as Jarrod put it, “There goes Mom letting out her hostilities again.”

          Bob was done raking. He went inside the house and sat in the living room and watched television. Eleanor was in the kitchen sitting at the table smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee. After a little while, Bob came into the kitchen and poured himself a cup of coffee and sat at the table.
          They called Gwen and wished her a happy birthday. They spoke for quite a while and had a delightful conversation. Afterwards, Eleanor started to cry.
          “Eleanor?”
          “Oh, Bob, Gwen sounded so hopeful.”
          “Of course. She told us what the doctor said. Maybe this time Hank will really get better.”
          “You know what this means?”
          “What?”
          “They can come stay with us for a visit. That would be nice.”
          “Yes.”
          “We will have to do something about the guest room.”
          “Why? What’s wrong with it?”
          “Everything has to be rearranged. And the walls have become drab. We have to repaint them, but with a fresher color.”
          “We can do all that later. Have you heard from Jarrod and Samantha? The package hasn’t arrived yet.”
          “Maybe it will come Monday. Bob, will you take me to the store tomorrow? I want to get a new outfit to wear on the plane.”
          “You leave next month.”
          “I don’t want to be in a rush.”
          “You think Madelyn will be in one of her moods?”
          “She better not be.”
          “Just don’t bicker.”
          “We didn’t last time. Besides, she still makes me laugh.”
          “That’s good. Now, I thought you were going to bake Christmas cookies.”
          So, Eleanor went about baking Christmas cookies and Bob tried to be unobtrusive and help. They were together in their warm kitchen, and it did not have to matter that they had not called each other darling in years.