Edna in the Desert

by Maddy Lederman

  Edna knew he was older, but she was intimidated by that number. She would have felt better if he was fifteen or even sixteen, but she didn’t know why it made such a difference.

  10

  PINEAPPLE UPSIDE-DOWN CAKE

  Edna would never admit it to her parents, but the pioneer women she read about every evening blew her mind. The logistics of their migrations across the country in the mid-1800s ranged from arduous to impossible. These young women often made the trip alone or with children in covered wagons pulled by oxen, traveling thousands of miles at a pace of ten miles a day. Some traveled on foot, pushing handcarts that carried the only supplies they’d have for many months. Edna couldn’t imagine the afternoon she was lost in the desert going on for any longer than it did, let alone having to push a heavy cart in the dirt for thousands of miles, cooking and feeding children while doing it and tending to oxen in all kinds of weather. She might as likely think she could walk to the moon.

  Her favorite pioneer was Mrs. Anderson. At nineteen years old, she had already become a “Mrs.” and she and her husband provided a window into history because they saved their letters in a metal box. The letters were found and eventually published. Edna thought it would be romantic if their lives hadn’t been so difficult. Mr. Anderson had gone West years (yes, years) before Mrs. Anderson in search of gold. He finally found some and could afford for her to join him. A photograph of his handwritten letter was in a sidebar of one of the books, which were all a little too textbook-like to get completely lost in. In any case, Mrs. Anderson’s trip, one she would make across the continent in a covered wagon, was two thousand miles. The list of things to do for the trip was extensive, including engineering a way to haul an eighty-pound sack of flour and keeping writing paper safe and dry from Kentucky to California. There were nearly a hundred tasks on the list. Edna wasn’t sure if it was outrageous that a young woman be expected to acquire and pack so many things for such a rugged journey or if this was normal and expected. If it was normal and expected, Edna was glad she was alive now instead of then. Getting lost and sleeping in Grandma’s pantry was rugged enough, and Edna wasn’t sure any amount of gold could change that. Although being with Johnny might. Edna imagined that most of the pioneer women didn’t make the trip for gold, but for love. Nothing else could explain it. Grandma had a lot in common with these pioneer women. Her whole life was like being on a cross-country wagon trail, except she never went anywhere.

  Edna dozed off reading the Andersons’ letters, until she was disturbed by pans rattling around on the shelves above her cot. The whole cabin shook. An earthquake. In the big room, Grandma’s rainbow crochet pillows bounced around her ugly couch. Edna stepped onto the porch. She must have overslept because the sun was high and strong. It was hard to keep her footing with the sudden, jerking motions. The cabin was moving under her, but strangely, it wasn’t an earthquake after all. Or maybe the earthquake was over. The cabin cut through a choppy sea. The distant hills moved past at a clip. The cool ocean wind was heaven. Ahead blue oxen charged through the water up to their shoulders, pulling chains attached to the cabin. Grandma commanded all three of them on a leash. Grandpa stayed in his chair as usual, though it tipped back and forth as the porch hit rough water. When he fell too far back, Edna rushed to him, but she was distracted by a shark’s fin breaking through the water’s surface. She turned around for Grandpa, but he was gone. So was his chair. She had no time to figure out where he went because the shark’s fin emerged as Johnny, speeding along the porch on his dirt bike. Dust kicked up behind him. Edna waved, but he didn’t notice her. The porch seemed longer than it could be as she ran, keeping pace with him. He veered away from the cabin, and Edna tried, like a Hollywood stuntman, to jump from the railing onto his bike. She soared, confident she could make it, but she missed and was left choking in dust.

  Edna woke up spitting flour out of her mouth. A sack sat on the floor, most of its contents on her head and pillow. A mouse rummaging the shelves must have knocked it over. The little guy cowered and escaped. If anyone saw a mouse at home, Jill would call the exterminator and they would all go to a hotel for a few days, but here no one was going to do anything about it. Edna swept the floor and changed her sheets.

  She still had a flour in her hair when she stepped onto the porch. It was the time of night it was supposed to be, though it was nearly bright enough to read a book. The full moon cast shadows that were almost as hard as the sun’s and displayed a different desert, with a palette of dark greens, browns, and blacks. Night had an even more profound stillness, and Edna let it seep into her as she sat in her chair. There was no chance of falling asleep again.

  She was glad her embarrassing jump off the porch wasn’t real. She’d try to have a better dream about Johnny next time. She’d try not to throw herself at him or imagine he was so far away and totally unattainable. He had said “see you next week,” hadn’t he? Edna thought so, but she couldn’t be completely sure she had heard right. His back had been to her, and he had been walking toward the truck.

  In any case, Edna couldn’t wait an entire week to see Johnny again. So far she’d given 100% of what was required of her; she shouldn’t be held at the cabin like a prisoner. Nothing outlined in the rules of this punishment should conflict with a trip to a store, if Grandma really could drive. Why shouldn’t she and Grandma go out? The plan was to get Grandma to take her to Bishop’s General, even though Grandma had everything she thought she needed brought to her.

  A good way to get her mother to go out was to create a need for baking ingredients. Jill loved doing anything domestic because she could blog about it, so Edna would find recipes for desserts with obscure ingredients and then suggest a shopping trip. On the way, Edna would mention what she really wanted in the first place as if it were an afterthought. If Jill was as distracted as she usually was, Edna could convince her to stop for a phone upgrade or new jeans. It was just so much faster to upgrade a phone than to fight with Edna.

  The major downside of the plot was having to do research and actually make desserts, otherwise it wouldn’t work the next time. And Edna hated being a recurring character in videos on Shimmer, but that part mattered less and less. No one remembered anything about anyone’s videos anymore unless they were famous or the videos had sex in them. The other downside was that Edna was becoming a dessert expert, and Jill was so happy about it. Edna would never be able to tell her mother that it was all an act. Baking had become a permanent part of her personality, and Edna had no idea how to stop it.

  She found a cookbook in Grandma’s pantry. It had sat in the same spot for years, evident from the mark left on the shelf when Edna took it down that evening. She liked the cracking sound that the book’s dried out spine made when she opened it, and she loved the faded paper’s smell.

  Edna had already decided to make her father’s favorite dessert, Pineapple Upside-Down Cake, an esoteric offering that Grandma was unlikely to have all the ingredients for. She was going to give the cake to Johnny eventually, so it had to be something out of this world. Edna knew she could make a good one. She didn’t need a recipe; she’d made it with her mother a hundred times. The recipe was a visual aid in getting her trip to the store for ingredients. Better it was written in a book and not just on her say-so. Edna was confident in her plan to get to Bishop’s. A girl baking a cake was the most natural thing in the world.

  She turned to the recipe for Pineapple Upside-Down Cake. A yellowed newspaper clipping was saved there, from the San Diego Gazette, dated September 16, 1964. The headline read: San Diego Sweetie Takes Top Pineapple Prize. Grandma, practically unrecognizable as a young woman named Mary Miller, had won a blue ribbon for what was described as her “knock-out delicious” Pineapple Upside-Down Cake. The article went on to say that Mrs. Miller was the wife of Lt. Ezekiel Miller, a Marine serving in Vietnam. Mary smiled sweetly behind her creation, the most robust Pineapple Upside-Down Cake that Edna had ever seen. Each pineapple ring was bursting with clusters of che
rries and surrounded by flowers of chopped walnuts. The details were shown, but they were grainy in the old newspaper’s close-ups.

  What felt like an uncanny coincidence was, in fact, no coincidence at all. Edna had thought of making Pineapple Upside-Down Cake because her father loved it, only she never knew that he loved it because his mother, this stranger named Mary Miller, made the best one in San Diego County in 1964.

  Edna looked in the cookbook, where the clipping was kept. It read: Pineapple Upside-Down Cake, a recipe by Mary Miller of San Diego, California. Grandma was published.

  For the first time Edna understood that her life was probably influenced in many ways by Mary Miller, and that her grandmother was a real person who had done more than subsist in this depressing desert all her life. It was an obvious point. It shouldn’t have surprised her, but it came as quite a shock. She had trouble sleeping that night, trying to picture her young grandmother. Nothing she came up with fit the person she knew.

  The next morning, Edna brought her new curiosity about her grandparents and the cookbook into the kitchen. She’d never really tried being friendly to Grandma before. She’d been too devastated after being abandoned here to think about being nice. This morning, friendliness was the plan. She sincerely wanted to get to know Grandma better, but she had to be careful. It could look suspicious if she was suddenly too cheerful, as if she had an ulterior motive—which, even with her new interest, she did.

  Grandma didn’t say anything to her about the cookbook she was holding when she came out of the pantry. Any other adult in her life would have said something if she walked into a room with a book, something like, “What are you reading?” In that case she would have told Grandma about how she found this book in the pantry and how she really loved making desserts. She’d talk about a few different recipes before even mentioning that they should a bake a cake, or which one. She would pretend they were picking out a recipe together. Edna was good at manipulating most of the adults she knew and harnessing their need to be liked by children, but she was still making too many assumptions about Grandma based on her other life.

  “So, today, Grandma, I was thinking…I was feeling homesick, and I…”

  Grandma didn’t soften her expression at Edna’s mention of being homesick.

  “Sometimes, at home, I bake cakes or cookies with Mom, and Dad eats them mostly, but I was wondering if we could bake something and if you liked cake at all…or if Grandpa does.”

  Did that make sense? Edna waited as though it was perfectly normal for Grandma to take so long to think about baking a cake.

  “I guess we could.”

  Normally Edna would smile and there would be a bonding moment, but there was no point in pushing for that. Edna opened the cookbook. She told Grandma how she hadn’t been this happy about baking a cake in a long time and that it was going to be fun. She didn’t have the patience to go through her usual twists before getting to the Pineapple Upside-Down Cake; it would probably be wasted on Grandma anyway. Edna was intrigued by what made Grandma tick, but she was way more interested in trying to get to Bishop’s.

  “I read somewhere that you’re an expert at my favorite cake, which is Pineapple Upside-Down,” she announced.

  She took out the old newspaper clipping and held it for Grandma to see. Grandma took it. Her hand went over her mouth, and her eyes welled up with tears. Without a word she went into the bedroom.

  It was not the reaction Edna was expecting. She’d planned for Grandma to be tickled by her interest. Seeing the old article and Edna’s improved friendliness, Grandma would drop everything and tell her all about winning the first-prize ribbon at the San Diego County Fair. Then they would go shopping for Pineapple Upside-Down Cake ingredients and see Johnny, and Edna hadn’t even begun to imagine how amazing that was going to be.

  Instead, Edna sat alone in one of those long desert silences while she tried to figure out what had just happened. Grandma seemed truly upset. Edna was pretty sure she hadn’t done anything wrong, but she felt guilty.

  She was tempted to call home and ask her father if some horrible incident occurred involving Pineapple Upside-Down Cake or the San Diego County Fair. She might ask her mother what to do about a crying grandmother you didn’t really know all that well. But Edna reminded herself that she didn’t want to give those tyrants the satisfaction of helping her and that she’d hoped to go the rest of the summer without speaking to them. Getting a trip to the store might be more difficult than she’d thought, for reasons she didn’t even know existed. Concerned and not sure what to do next, Edna didn’t know if Grandma was all right. She wanted to apologize, if only for bringing up something that made her react so strongly. Edna listened at the door. If Grandma was crying in the bedroom, she was doing it quietly. Grandpa, in there with her, was silent as usual.

  Edna gently tapped the door. Even if Grandma said, “Go away,” at least she would know that Edna cared about her. A few moments passed, but Grandma didn’t come and there wasn’t any sound. Edna knocked again, trying to sound a little louder but even kinder than before. Again, no answer. There was nothing to do. Edna swept the porch hoping that Grandma would come out. In a few minutes, she did. She went directly to the phone. Edna watched through an open window, too curious to interrupt her.

  Grandma looked up a number on a handwritten list and dialed it, a few numbers at a time. She spoke into the phone like it was a foreign object.

  “Hello, is that Jenny? This is Mary Miller. Will you please add, uh…four cans of Dole pineapples, the sliced rings in juice, two fresh pineapples, a pound of butter, a pound of white flour, a bag of walnuts, and, uh, two jars of maraschino cherries and a pound and a half of fresh cherries. Add that to my order next week, please. Thank you.”

  She hung up the phone and set up Grandpa’s breakfast like she always did. She looked fine. Another silence. Grandma was standing exactly where she had been and doing the same exact thing as before she went into the bedroom. Edna wondered if Grandma knew the ingredients for Pineapple Upside-Down Cake by heart, or maybe she was looking them up. Grandma’s reaction to the newspaper clipping was still a mystery, but Edna saw a bigger issue emerging: the next grocery order would be coming next week—that was, in five days. The entire point of baking a cake was that Edna was hoping to hop in the car and be off to town in a few minutes.

  She leaned on the windowsill.

  “Thanks, Grandma,” she said, without meaning it much.

  Grandma nodded, which meant, “You’re welcome.”

  Grandma had done what she thought Edna wanted, and right away. Edna couldn’t think of a good enough reason to need to bake a cake now rather than next week, and she’d read enough Shimmer to know that she should leave things the way they were. Etiquette dictates that you never get what you want, and you have to pretend you’re happy with it. Etiquette meant waiting another five entire days to see Johnny, if he was the one delivering the groceries next week and it wasn’t someone else. She had no idea what had happened with Grandma, but she’d think of another reason to go to town. She had all day to think of one.

  While it was tempting, Edna couldn’t share with Grandma why she wanted to go to Bishop’s, even though Grandma might know things about Johnny. She might be able to tell Edna what his house was like, if he was smart, or what he liked to do besides dirt biking. While Grandma had become slightly more human, Edna wouldn’t count her as an ally yet. She didn’t want some grandmother tapping her foot while she tried to charm Johnny in the grocery store or letting on that she’d been asking questions about him. Worse, if Edna divulged her new secret about liking Johnny, Grandma could have too much power over the outcome of any number of situations involving him. She thought about what to do next while she swept for a few more minutes.

  “Grandma, do you ever go to Desert Palms?”

  “Not much.”

  “Grandma, I’d like to…see some things around here. Would you show me around town, maybe? Tomorrow? Please?”

  Mary d
idn’t exactly remember the last time she went anywhere, but it could have been about a year ago, when Zeke went to the doctor. She reflected on that day, when she’d decided he’d have no more doctor visits. Edward had agreed. He wasn’t improving with any of them, not anymore.

  While waiting for Grandma to answer her question, Edna wondered what Grandma’s opinion of Desert Palms was, why she never went there and how she could stand this dreary life.

  “I’ll try the car tomorrow,” Grandma said, and then she added, “It must be boring for a girl your age around here.”

  “Yes, a little.”

  Edna was relieved. Grandma finally understood something about her. Edna understood very little about Grandma.

  11

  TOWN

  Edna put together the cutest outfit she possibly could. Her clothes, secretly packed by her mother, were too juvenile and sporty. She took out the appalling salmon dress she had been convinced to visit her grandparents in and decided to bury it in a hole later, so there’d be no chance of it coming back to Brentwood. The best look she could come up with was a fitted green vest that looked better with nothing underneath it and her jean skirt. She hated her modified ballet slippers, and sneakers were out, so she put on flip-flops. Her mother refused to let her have heels, claiming thirteen was too young wear them, even though celebrities’ five-year-olds wore them in magazines. Jill had Shimmer to think about and she couldn’t set a bad example, or so she always said. Every milestone in Edna’s life had to be age-appropriate for the house dullards of Shimmer, and as a result, Edna could not wear a wedge or a pair of cute platforms.