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 onlysecondarilyabout 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.
Edie looked up at the dripping canopy of trees. “Tell that tomy family and friends and their helpful unsolicited feedback. ‘If you hate it here so much, why don’t you leave?’ ‘You can’t make cheese out of nuts and mushrooms and vegetables.’ ‘I don’t get it. It’s not cheese.’ ‘Forty-five dollars a pound! For what, a salad compressed into a cube?’ ‘What do you pair with the cheese, no-booze wine?’” Edie kicked an acorn. “And yes. I did. I didn’t have a liquor license.”
“It exists, right? Fauxmage? You found a bank and made the sign. You told me what you sell. So who cares about the critics? Or your so-called friends and family? They can stuff their heckling mouths with Kraft singles.” Cosima was starting to worry Edie would win this game.
“That’s the thing. They were right.” Edie smiled. It was her first obviously, identifiably not-real smile. “Four months. That was how long I had my dream. It started coming apart after the first quarter. The amount of money I needed to make in that fourth month to stay open was more than I’d made in the three months prior. I tried so many different kinds of things—social media ads, newspaper coverage, interviews with the Chamber, bids to serve the lactose intolerant—for it all to end with a sad closing party and an article in the paper headlined ‘No Mo Faux.’” Edie gave Cosima another two-dimensional smile. “Did the cloud come? Is it weird now between us?”
Cosima pressed her hand against her tight stomach. “No. You don’t win. The pool party wasn’t my worst. I just haven’t said it myself because you already know my worst.”
Edie’s brows furrowed. “I do?”
Cosima looked into Edie’s face and realized she was perfectly serious. How could that be?
Except Edie had just told her how—working hard, trying to revive a failing business, then being here. She hadn’t caught upto the news. Or she didn’t want the news, in the aftermath of what had happened to her, and was avoiding it.
They were both here, after all—strangers on a damp lane, thousands of miles from home—on the promise of seeing a hedgehog.
“My mother died.”
“Fuck me, Phoebe Frankdied?” Edie’s eyes were wide with shock.
No one had believed Phoebe was mortal. No one seemed to have contemplated any possibility other than Phoebe on earth forever, taking audiences far beyond it in film after film, appearing in interviews with only the smallest of character creases around her famous eyes and glamorous threads of silver snaking through her curls.
