Essay

A Simple Cookie

My Grandma always knew what to say.  Always.  The first time I realized this was the first time I heard the words, “I love you,” spoken to me by someone not in my family.  Those words were from a girl in the eighth grade, right before spring break, a girl with glasses and white-striped San Francisco blue jeans and feathered hair.  I remember holding hands with her in the hallways at school and thinking that my Grandma, with all certainty, told me this would happen.  It’s not like I expected to hear these words from this girl, and that’s the funny thing, because, you see, on the third of November 1982, towards the beginning of my eighth grade year, I woke up with a zit.  I don’t mean one zit though, I mean my face was one giant field of acne.  Blackheads, whiteheads, cysts, big ones, little ones, all kinds.  Overnight.  Whatever troubles I had with hormones, and curveballs, and math--they were all meaningless now.  I had acne.  And for a boy who liked to read, who was shy and nervous because he had just discovered that girls might “like” him, that made life just a little bit more impossible.  I watched the girls I was friends with stare at my face, and as I stared back at them I watched the remaining warmth--because it was fading fast, so fast--leave their eyes.  I wasn’t me anymore, the guy who helped them with their essays.  I was the guy with acne.  I lasted until Thanksgiving, watching the cold set in, until I’d had all I could stand, and I cried to my Grandma when everyone else was in the other room eating, “Why don’t the girls at school like me anymore, Grandma?  Why?”  She put the last of the rolls in a basket, smiled, and said, “They will.”  It wasn’t much, and it didn’t help at the time, but I heard it.  And I remembered it.  Then, by the time spring break rolled around, it came true.  This girl said those three words to me and my acne, which I thought would never happen for the rest of my life even though the acne had really just sprung up.  But I remembered my Grandma’s words.  I turns out that this girl didn’t really love me, we were eighth graders, and she was more in love with the idea of being in love, but that didn’t matter.  She said it and my Grandma had been right.  She always said the right things, like “Vienna Fingers are the best cookies because the creme and vanilla wafers are simple--but delicious.”  We’d sit and eat them day after day at her kitchen table every summer, and talk about the tomatoes she was growing and baseball and how nothing compares to a simple cookie dunked in milk.  “It’s the best thing you can hope for,” she’d say.  “A simple cookie.”  Sometimes we’d talk about Grandpa.  Parkinson’s had set in the last year of his life, and he had become more stubborn with each day he’d held on.  I remember during Perry Mason he’d try to get out of his chair, even though his legs would fail him, and he would make my grandma so mad she’d move his walker just out of his reach so he couldn’t get up.  But she’d never say anything when she was angry.  Or when she was sad.  On his last day, she told me, right before he died, he smiled up at her and then he was gone.  She didn’t say anything, and she didn’t cry.  She never cried.  I thought maybe she was mad at him, he’d cheated on her for most of their marriage, and she didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of knowing she’d still for some reason miss him.  But that wasn’t it.  When her son, my Dad, had a massive heart attack and died, a “blowout” the doctor said--she didn’t cry.  She just sat there and let me put my head on her shoulder while I did.  Then her brother died of cancer, and a week later at the memorial she ate celery sticks and listened to people offer condolences, but she didn’t cry.  Her next door neighbor, quite possibly her only friend that I knew of, went soon after, and she and I watched them all go.  I was looking for a tear, just one tear, but none ever came.  I got to wondering how it was that she couldn’t cry.  I had, many times. I still did.  It usually helped when nothing else would, which seemed to be often at eighteen.  But alone.  I cried alone because I didn’t have anyone to share it with.  I was still trying to figure her out, where were the tears, if there were any?  I found out one day.  I called to let her know I was coming over for a visit, but I just told her it would be “sometime” that day.  I drove up and didn’t see her sitting in the window in her favorite chair.  I parked and walked around to the back door, and as I passed her kitchen window, I stopped because she was standing almost in front of it.  I reached up to knock on the glass, but I stopped short, my arm in the air.  She was hunched over a bag of Vienna Fingers, trying to open it.  This was right after the new resealable packaging was introduced, and she never could open it very well.  She looked frustrated, like she’d been trying to open the package for awhile.  At first I thought this was funny, her bent over, face turning red with the exertion of a cookie bag that wouldn’t come apart.  But all of the sudden she stood straight up, all four foot eight of her, and threw the bag as hard as her eighty-three-year-old arm could against the wall.  She stormed over to the bag where it lay and stepped on it.  She stared down at it for a moment.  Then she stepped on it again, and again, until she was stomping on it as hard and as fast as her little leg could raise and lower itself, all the while laughing and laughing, until her face turned purple, and I feared she would pass out.  Then she stopped.  She stopped and stared at the dead cookies--chunks, powder by now--and started to cry.  I didn’t realize it at first, I just saw her shoulders hitch a few times and I thought she was still laughing.  But as I saw the tears on her cheeks, I knew.  The tears turned to sobs, and the sound of them rose from a place I never knew existed, swirled up from the pit of a sorrow I’d never seen, flowed towards me through the closed window, then through me, and out to the garden.  I could do nothing as I watched the strongest woman I knew, the woman who had the ability to make the world right one smile at a time, stare at a pile of cookies she had stomped to death as she sobbed out what seemed to be every pain and wrong and fear she’d ever felt.  I lowered my arm, it had been in the air the whole time, and turned and crept away.  I didn’t know what to say to the woman who always knew what to say to make it all better.  So I drove away.  I drove to the nearest store and bought another pack of Vienna Fingers.  Then I sat in the car and listened to the radio for an hour.  I figured that would be enough time for her to clean up and sit down to wait for me.  When it had been long enough, I drove back to her house, and she was sitting in her chair like usual, waiting for me.  I went in and we sat at the table and had some of the cookies I brought and there was not one crumb on the floor to give away the fact that she had finally let loose all that she had been holding inside.  We talked about many things that day, before the light turned to shadows and I finally kissed her on her cheek and drove away--we talked about tomatoes and baseball and how nothing compares to a simple cookie dunked in milk.