After the Reunion

by Rona Jaffe

  “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 flow
ers. 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.

  Every hour one of the kids from the store (Peter called them The Couriers) would come by with freshly baked replacements. There was a courier assigned to every mall. “Are they selling anything?” Emily would ask.

  “No.”

  “Oh God.”

  At the end of the day she was exhausted, and although she had long before lost count of how many cookies she’d given away she knew there had been a lot. She drove back to the store to meet with Peter and Jared.

  “They loved them at the school cafeteria,” Peter said.

  “They seemed to love them at my mall,” Emily reported. “I looked in the trashcans before I left and nobody had thrown any away. I think people thought I was a bag lady.” She tried to sound cheerful, but the truth was when she had seen all those empty paper napkins crumpled there she had wanted to cry, and she didn’t know why. Perhaps a combination of pride and frustration.

  “If things aren’t better tomorrow we can go out in the street and give them away here,” Jared said.

  “We can’t give them away forever,” Emily said, frightened again. How could they be a failure before they’d even begun? How long could they afford this? She didn’t even want to ask. To cheer the boys up she took them to dinner in a restaurant.

  That night she couldn’t sleep. She had allowed herself to think all this could be possible, and now real life had intervened. Real life, for most other people, was hard work followed by success. For her, it seemed, it was her college advisor all over again, telling her she had been improperly prepared. If you’re so interested in medicine, Emily, you marry a doctor. If you think you can sell cookies … What was that awful old joke? “If you want bread, go fuck a baker.” She felt miserable.

  The next morning the radio weather report said it would be just as hot. Emily drove to Westwood with dread, her car air conditioner already on. When she got to her block she saw people in the street. What was happening? Then she saw that they were standing in line.

  They were standing in line waiting for her to open the store.

  They were standing in line for Emily’s Cookies.

  Emily held back the tears of joy, excited and happy and unbelieving. She wanted to laugh, to sing, to hug all of them. Peter was already there, inside the locked store, supervising the kids who were doing the baking. Even with the door closed you could smell the delicious aroma. He came to the door when he saw Emily get out of her car, and he held out his hand in a gracious gesture. She had a key too. She mimed “Me?” and he nodded. She took the key out of her handbag with a flourish and opened the door to the shop to let the long line of customers in.

  She felt as if she were a celebrity cutting the ribbon.

  Chapter Eighteen

  By the beginning of summer Kit realized her relationship with Tip was going nowhere but down, at least as far as she was concerned. He still thought they were “in love.” But she was bored and restless and lonely because he was hardly ever there. It was bad enough to be going with a cop, who was working all the time, but a cop who was going to law school on the side … He might as well be just another date, but his clothes were there, and he kept bringing food, and he showed up faithfully to sleep, as if this were his home too. He had started talking about the future. Where they might go for a vacation, how if they kept on getting along so well maybe one day they might get married. He said he had a great career ahead of him.

  The whole thing made her feel like she was choking.

  She would be starting her movie soon and she wanted to be free. She tried to tell him that once and he got really upset. He said he’d never found a girl as wonderful as she was and he didn’t want to lose her. He said that even though she’d been patient enough not to mention it he realized being his girl friend at this time in his life wasn’t the easiest thing in the world for her, or for anybody, but when she was making the movie she wouldn’t mind that he kept long hours because so would she, and it would be so nice to spend their time off together. It sounded as if they were already married.

  One thing Kit didn’t want to be was married. Sometimes in conversation she would say: “When I get married,” but it was a phrase that just popped out of her and had no relationship to how she actually felt. Oh, maybe sometime eventually she would try it. Marriage was probably something you had to try along with all the other experiences in life, particularly if you wanted to enrich yourself as an actress. But she certainly never wanted to have kids.

  She thought of her mother, already married at her age. And then going crazy … Nobody had ever sat down and tried to explain it to her and Peter—it was always that her mother had gotten sick, period. But her mother had been alone all day with two little kids, their father away most of the time becoming successful; and even though no one ever told her, Kit understood that part of it, intellectually at least. Being locked up with two kids, as active as they had been, must have been hard. But emotionally Kit could not condone her mother’s behavior at all. She was the child her mother would have let drown, not some abstract person you read about in a case history. She thought of herself as having been adorable; nice little Kate, lively and curious. How could you kill your little Kate? You shouldn’t scare her. You should love her.

  It was a lucky thing Kit had no feelings at all about either of her parents. Otherwise she would really feel hurt at the way they had betrayed her.

  Her mother was going to start a cookie business with Peter. He was all excited about it, already planning how to spend the money he was going to make. Kit thought there was a good chance he would do well. Peter was very clever. Their father wasn’t being too gracious. He called her mother “The Cookie Monster” behind her back, but he said at least she wasn’t trying to produce movies like those other rich Bev
erly Hills wives. He was also trying to get her to come back. Ah, domestic harmony.

  Kit’s script had arrived. It wasn’t a huge part, but it was a good one, with some good lines, and she actually got to be funny. She played a kind of tough, wise-talking teenager—yecch, a teenager again!—but she also had a scene where she was emotional and cried. A range of emotions to show off what she could do. She knew there would be lots of rewrites coming, but she had already memorized her part anyway. God knows she had enough free time.

  Emma’s movie was being shot in California and New York. She came by one afternoon on her day off. Tip was there, but he was asleep because he’d worked all night. Emma had never seen him, so Kate opened the bedroom door and they tiptoed in, Emma looked at him sleeping, and they tiptoed out.

  “Cute,” Emma said.

  “Not bad.” Kate grinned because Tip really was good-looking and she knew it.

  They sat in the living room and drank coffee. “He leaves his gun right there in the bedroom?” Emma said.

  “He has to take it home. He’s a cop.”

  “Doesn’t it make you nervous?”

  “I’m used to it.”

  “So is it looove, or what?” Emma asked cheerfully.

  Kit shrugged. “He loves me.”

  “As usual. And you?”

  “I’d like to start seeing other people.”

  “What’s wrong with him?”

  “Bad timing I guess.”

  “You always say that,” Emma said.

  “When do I say that?”

  “Always. Ever since I met you.”

  “I think I’m in for about ten more years of bad timing,” Kit said. “Why do men get so serious?”

  “Lots of men don’t.”

  She thought about it. “Yeah,” she agreed. “How’s the movie going?”

  “It’s terrific. Zack Shepard is a genius. I’m right by his side all the time learning a lot.”

  “And …?”

  “And nothing. He’s not interested in me. All he does is work. He doesn’t even have a girl friend on the set. He might still have that one at home, but she didn’t come to New York with us. Or maybe she did but she was shopping or something.”