12. Two women sit, with red-rimmed eyes, stinging with salt, in a Denny’s rest stop diner, which are always in close proximity to the dead. The cemetery spans the whole stretch of a highway and yet still the newspapers spout the poetry of overcrowding. How even in death, real estate is such a nightmare and you’re lucky to get a plot with high ceilings and no neighbours.
Another woman, not in the Denny’s but in the ground, is dead, and if she were here right now, she’d probably want her daughters to be as miserable as they are, but she’d never tell them that. If she could, she’d tell them to think of all the ways she brought joy to life, to think of how she loved the color green, how she had her own graveyard of the same knitted slippers she never threw out in her closet that spanned thirty years of purchase, how she would sing Look at Me, I’m Sandra Dee from Grease, loudly and obnoxiously, to get them to bed when they refused on late nights when they were little. Not the times she wasn’t there. The times she skipped the recitals and plays because she didn’t want to sit through them, or the times she didn’t hug them when they cried, when she knew she should have. She’d hope they didn’t remember the times she fucked up, as she’d fucked up considerably less as they got older, as if fucking up as a mom is singular and not an ongoing mosaic.
The problem is they do remember all of these things. They say grief comes in stages of five, like how eggs come in a dozen. How is grieving so quantifiable? The two women would deny, if their mother were to ask, their grieving. They would say they went to the Denny’s out of tradition, out of convenience with the proximity from one short part of this morbid highway to another. But the truth is it’s the only place that serves eggs, no matter how powdery, no matter what day of the week, and they feel fine consistently ruining with their stages of overwhelming grief.
11. Before she dies, the daughters shave her head when her bleached curls begin to unfurl from her scalp like petals from a bud. The mother bounces her granddaughter on her lap as her daughters work, and when they are done and the sound of buzzing cuts, the mother looks into the mirror and laughs.
“Two eggs in a basket,” she says, and bounces the bald peach of a baby girl on her knee.
10. The mother watches one of her daughters get married in a supermarket off the same highway. Her youngest. It started off as a joke seven years ago – her youngest daughter became obsessed with a barn wedding when they became trendy. She loved the idea of mismatched chairs and heavy boots for mud beneath her layers of wedding dress.
The mother would tell her daughter to think not of trends but of what is special, that is if she thought to in time. She never thinks to say the right thing, at the right time.
The daughter didn’t find her own guy before they jacked up the prices of these barns to twenty grand for the day. The mother and her daughter must have toured over fifty within a twelve-hour drive, up and down this highway, cracking open barns like breaking bones for marrow.
So, the daughter chose the next best thing, the supermarket off the end of the highway, which looks sort of like a barn if you clear out the displays of keychains, beef jerky, and saltwater taffy, and lit enough candles. You have to walk past the egg displays in the refrigerated section to get to the bathroom.
The linoleum floor glints against the light above the couple as they have their first dance, her wedding dress catching the odd cluster of lint from the emptied metal shelving. The mother meets the eyes of her eldest beside her and smiles. This eldest daughter puts her hand to her stomach and rubs it gently. Beneath the daughter’s pale chiffon dress, a pink rosebud of belly. A sight that brings hope and terror in equal measures, for so many reasons. But today is a happy day.
This is the first daughter the mother gives away, and as she watches her dance, she feels the niggle of some other kind of growth in her own body, some other kind of life, deep in the diagnosis of her dormant belly.
Time plays tricks on you – when you’re in your teens or twenties and you hear someone dies at sixty-five, it doesn’t sound so bad. You think, old age. You think, a nice, long life. The mother isn’t sure when that changed.
Nine months span many things – the transition of a daughter dating to a daughter engaged and then married. The plans and hope of creation of another life. The prognosis of how it will end.
When her oldest daughter told her mother she was pregnant again, she did it over breakfast. The mother was terrified. She wasn’t ready to be a grandmother. She wasn’t even ready to have mothered children of her own, and she’d been one for a long time. They hugged for so long that their fried eggs congealed over their pancakes, and none of it mattered.
9. The mother’s oldest daughter’s first job is as a school teacher, and the mother accompanies her to the school’s spring hunt the year it happened. She counts heads, she hushes excited voices, she feels uncomfortable around all the children. She marvels at how she raised a daughter who loves young humans so much she wants to spend her days with them when she doesn’t even have to.
The spring hunt means that, among a variety of hedges and sheds in a field, children are challenged to find all the Easter eggs hidden within their designated area. It happens every year. First team to find their dozen wins.
The hunt whistle blows. A storm of pastel streamers wave from tall beams that reach toward the blinding sky. The day starts out this kind of sunny that smears everything with a tinge of white. The daughter leads a group of children through the maze of hiding spots, and tiny hands emerge triumphant from wooden barrels and dark thickets of leaves. Eggs that are blue, yellow, spotted, purple, striped, zigzagged. Each child places their egg inside a wicker basket and runs to find another. They get to eleven eggs before they’re stuck. The mother and daughter help the kids, they dig through taller grass, through shelves and dirt in the shed. The sky begins to turn and clouds gather like swirls of ink against all this blue. The mother and daughter joke about the pathetic fallacy of it; they teach the kids what pathetic fallacy means. The kids are bored and just want the egg. Despite the mother and her daughter’s efforts, the four other groups find their dozen before them. The children are upset and simper sadly to their designated bench for the spring feast.
As the mother helps the kids with their juice boxes, she notices her daughter has disappeared. She asks another teacher to watch the group and moves to find her. She checks the yellow buses, the dark port-a-potties. Fat drops of rain begin to plop at odd angles, catching her by surprise each time. The kids line up in the distance, grabbing their snack bags and baskets, running toward the buses and nearer sheds.
She finds her daughter when she returns to their designated shed for the hunt, the furthest from the buses. As she approaches it, she hears what at first she thinks is the whine of an animal. She rounds the alcove of the shed entrance and sees her. Her daughter is crouched beneath the shelves in the mud. She is bent over her hands, something cupped within, and when she lifts her head to her mother, she sees that her daughter is crying. The mother kneels and crawls to her. She places her fingers over her daughter’s tight-closed fists and coaxes out what she holds. A little pink egg – the mother holds it up as the daughter crumples against her, against the light of the grey sky. The shell is cracked, gently, down its side.
The mother worries for her daughters. If they’ll make better choices than her, if she’ll be around to even see them do so – one daughter obsessed with barn weddings without even a date in two years, and another crying over eggs in a shed. She reaches to hug her daughter, to fold her and her little pink egg into her arms and whisper to her like when she was a small girl, and even though it feels a little awkward, it feels nice and they sit like that for a long time.
Following this daughter’s miscarriage last year, the mother wonders if she finds it hard to be around these small humans. To wipe clean their sticky hands, to dry their salty tears, to fill their brains with her words and reason and love, and then send them home at the end of each day. But she doesn’t ask her. She only whispers it will be okay, how everything will be okay, in the end.
8. The mother thinks she will resent her empty nest when the girls go to college, when she is the mother all alone after all those years, but she only really resents the idea she’s like a bird, and that the eggs she birthed come home most weekends to do laundry.
7. Following the divorce, when the girls are still too small to know the nuance of your parent’s making the bad decision to make you, they make eggs on Monday mornings. The mother’s logic is why make Mondays the bad day? Why make eggs on the days that are already so good, like Saturdays and Sundays? Which has nothing to do with the fact she doesn’t get the girls on Saturdays and Sundays, and that her ex-husband has already decided on another mother to replace her. A probably normal, sensible mother, who is warm and completely available in all the right ways. But will that mother make them breakfast on a day that doesn’t typically require it? Probably not.
At first, this delights the girls. The way their mother coaxes them from sleep before school and places the steaming, fluffy yellow piles before them. Always different – chives, ham, turkey, hot sauce, gouda. The mother doesn’t tell them what to do in these moments – doesn’t discipline them or fix their hair. She is there, watching them eat, holding her mug of coffee and present.
As the girls get older, they resent the early rise. They think their thighs are too fat for eggs – they’re bad for your heart, they take too much time. One Monday was the last Monday they make the eggs, and none of them can remember when that was. They remember it years later when they’re all back in the house on the weeks the girls visit from college. They try to rekindle it, try to capture the special innocence of it, and it’s never quite the same.
6. The mother puts a possibly bad egg in her husband’s omelette when he brings up the first notion of divorce, and never tells a soul. The girls bring him the breakfast in bed. He eats it, even though it tastes funny, to appease his smiling girls’ faces. He vomits his guts out the whole of Father’s Day. The girls are upset they won’t get to go to the water park like he promised, so the mother takes them instead. The father, years later, cannot eat eggs. The girls think this is a sign of the father’s inability to move on.
5. When the girls were each born, the mother thought about leaving them both in a forest. She dreamed about a world of fables where babies were adopted by powerful, feminine wolves or mighty witches and their lives turned out much better than if they’d had an average mother. But in reality, she knew that when you left babies outside they typically died from the elements or got sold on the internet, so she fought the urge. This feeling soon passed and turned into overwhelming love, but the grief of her freedom and passivity of her motherhood role was always prerequisite for it.
She thought often of this when she read the girls their favorite book, about the giant egg Humpty who would sit on a great wall of possibility and hope and, inevitably, fall from it. It was, in all honesty, the truest tragedy of children’s books. The first time we learn that sometimes we can’t undo things in life, whether or not we’d want to, whether or not we could have help to make it so. Maybe that’s where the term comes from: you have to crack a few eggs. You have to make a few mistakes to get it right.
The mother never felt more like a mother than when she read to them. They read the book so many times, over so many years, that the mother could recite it all by heart to her last day if she wanted to.
4. When the mother was pregnant, she would crave everything vinegary, everything that smelled of sulphur, of rotten eggs. Her husband joked both times, as he brought brown paper bags of disgusting foods home – smelly tofu, sulphur salts, spicy pickles – that perhaps she was birthing a demon.
At the time, she thought this wasn’t out of the question. She didn’t tell him this – not because she thought he’d worry, but because she didn’t tell him anything.
3. When the mother was just barely a mother, with just that first tiny egg that nestled inside the lining of her belly, she realized she didn’t love the man she lied next to every night. They had a big, beautiful wedding, with the very cliché pink roses his own mother liked and she hated. It took place in a big, beautiful church and the reception was in a grand hall with golden fixtures. For all intents and purposes, it was the sort of wedding mothers tell their daughters about.
She pretended to love roses for another decade and two children later, and so they often appeared for apologies, birthdays, anniversaries.
She lied awake at night, when she first became pregnant. She took her first test in the bathroom of a Walgreens. She watched the stick turn pink, like a lacerated cross against pale skin, like a crucifiable symbol of damnation, and thought only for the first time if this was really what she wanted. It’s funny how when people are jealous of you, you find yourself going along with things you maybe didn’t want in the first place. She’d said yes to her husband only with the image of what the look on everyone’s face would be when she told them.
Before she’d been married, before the baby plans, before everything, what had she been? She could almost feel it.
She left the Walgreens and felt some woman flowing through her, like a stranger saying hello. It felt unwelcome, disarming, but she followed it. She followed it into the stationary aisle, where she bought an enormous pair of red scissors. Into the wealthiest neighbourhoods in town, where in the shadow of night, she crept to their front lawns. She hacked all the biggest, fattest, pinkest roses from their stems and bushes. She piled them on the backseat of her new minivan, which they’d bought in preparation for the bouncing life to come. She stalked the streets slowly until she found another bush, and another, another. By the time it was light, the backseat was so full of roses they kissed the bottoms of the windows.
She returned home to find her husband up waiting for her. She sat down next to him, and at his worried face, she folded. “I’m pregnant,” she told him. He hugged her, and he marvelled at how his wife glowed, how she seemed so different suddenly, how she smelled of roses.
2. When the mother was just a woman, and she went on her first date with the man she would marry, he asked her, “How do you like your eggs in the morning?” And she laughed, because he was cute and she was bored, and honestly it seemed kind of funny at the time.
1. When she was set to leave the place she’d grown up, or even before that and she was born, she had all the eggs she’d ever need to make the little girls she’d eventually have. And in those eggs were all the little possibilities, the little imperfections and smooth surfaces that would make another person not whole, not entirely what they could or should be, all the empty parts of yourself you pass onto another.
But today, she is not a mother, and she simply hates her own.
Her mother divorced her father and moved across the town. The young woman tried her best to keep a good relationship, but inevitably felt she had to choose who she lived with. Her father did his best, but he was a quiet, birdlike man who read more than he loved. She was growing up without the knowledge of what being a woman meant to the one who created her, and she grieved this privately. But the reality was the young woman hadn’t seen her mother in a year, despite her letters and calls. When she stopped to think about it, she got angry. Who even sends a letter to a fucking woman who lives not a thirty-minute walk from her? Maybe that’s why she’s not answering, you dumb shit.
One evening, her father asked her to pick up some groceries on her way home from her summer job before college. She walked the aisles with a green basket, and plucked the essentials from their displays: bread, milk, oil, eggs. When she reached for a carton, she felt a flutter, and looked down to see a tiny hand over her own. She looked over her shoulder to see a tiny girl, with two sprigs of curly pigtails popping out either side of her cherub head. “You’re it!” the girl shouted, and ran down the aisles towards her mother, who shushed her, without heart or intent, and smiled when the girl squealed into giggles and did not.
Maybe it was the little girl and her mother, maybe it was the unseasonably warm end of summer nights. The young woman found herself, as she walked the streets home, walking down the street toward her own mother’s house. The groceries heaved in her arms, the paper bag bulging. She came to the corner where her mother’s house was and crept to the edge of the lawn. She stopped when she spotted her, in the sudden flicker of yellow light from the window. Her mother, with her back to the window, moved from side table to side table, switching on the lights. The young woman watched her, the way her hands were soft and dainty, the way she moved with a slight angular lope, the trait of coldness she could never shake. A man moved into the room and smiled at her, and when she turned, the young woman saw her mother’s swollen belly . The man embraced her mother, and they kissed. She looked so happy.
Without thought, the young woman reached into her bag of groceries, creaking open the cardboard of the egg carton with her pinkie finger. She lifted a perfect, white egg from the depths, and reached her arm back, before releasing it. The egg curled in a wide, whirling arc, before slapping the glass of the window.
The mother came to the glass and saw her daughter there, in her Dairy Queen uniform, clutching the paper of a bag from the market blocks away. She placed one hand against the glass, the other against her belly. The daughter hurled another egg, and another, another. The man opened the front door, and shouted something at her, but she couldn’t hear it, could only see her mother in the frame of yellow light through the glass, marled with yolk.
The young woman dropped her groceries and ran down the street, the milk splashing open and gushing across the concrete of the sidewalk. She felt the sting in her eyes, in her heart, and she felt some kind of humpty dumpty crack. I’ll never be a mother like her, she thought. Never.
