After Edna

The Literary Hatchet/November 2024

 Edna told Hank about the marbles, how she could fit many all at once in her accommodating mouth, when they first met at the church breakfast, the two of them awkward thirty-somethings still living at home with their parents. She’d even won a prize for the skill, at some county fair or some such.

 “That’s why you can fit all that pancake in,” he said, immediately regretting it.

She finished chewing and smiled, sexily, he thought.

Her mouth and how it could stretch so willingly to allow so much became a joke running like a bowling ball down the alley of their marriage. When they fought, a reference to her big marble-filled mouth would make them laugh and forget what they were fighting about in the first place. In the bedroom, Hank whispering about her capacity for his marbles would cause her to roll over in the darkness to face him, her warm breath colluding with his.

 

But the bowling ball veered into the gutter and Edna had died, leaving Hank alone, weighed down by grief.
Hank felt the logical way to deal with Edna’s loss was to make a New Edna, an avatar. Work on New Edna began even before Old Edna died, Hank typing code into his laptop under the dim hospital lights while Old Edna’s empty-of-marbles mouth hung in endless sleep.

Obviously, New Edna wasn’t warm or snuggly, but she looked like Old Edna and sounded like Old Edna and said many things Old Edna said. They fell into a new/old routine. He said his usual good morning to her on his bedside phone to which she responded with her well- worn: Wakey wakey eggs and and bacey! In the kitchen he fixed coffee and turned on the news which they watched with morbid satisfaction across from one another at their circular table.

New Edna knew all the important stories of their meeting, elopement, and long marriage. She knew she’d been a school nurse and Hank a computer- fix-it guy. But she didn’t know about all the miscarriages they’d suffered or that time when Hank was out of work and had a moment of unfaithfulness, okay a month of unfaithfulness. She didn’t know about that time he grabbed her arm after one too many beers on Super Bowl Sunday. Old Edna never forgot those things and never let Hank forget she never forgot. Naturally, New Edna never mentioned them, which Hank felt was his prerogative as a widower, and her creator.

 “How’s the coffee? What will you have for breakfast? Lunch? Dinner? How’s work?”

She asked all those wifey questions Old Edna was so good at asking. When he answered, she stared at him, her younger- than- Old- Edna face open, eyes unblinking, all ears.

She bestowed copious compliments on Hank that he knew Old Edna thought and even said once and a while, but he’d wished she’d said a bit more.

“You are one handsome man, hon,” she said often, because Hank had coded her to do so.

And of course, New Edna said the thing about the marbles and he teased her back about how many she could fit, and she’d tell him some ridiculous number and he’d say how wonderful it was to have a wife with such a capacity and she’d laugh on repeat.

Hank realized with New Edna there he no longer missed Old Edna.

He ate healthier, sweated on the old stationary bike for thirty minutes each morning. He bought new clothing, shaved his raggedy beard, spritzed cologne just under his left ear.

On their morning constitutional Hank chatted to New Edna on his phone. He told her about the weather, the neighbors’ houses and their changes. Old Edna loved to go on walks, back in the day. They used to hold hands, sometimes kiss and hug midway. Obviously, things changed after 40 years of marriage.

Ironically, it was on one of these walks he first saw the new neighbor, whom he soon learned from another neighbor was a contortionist named Lucille.

“A contortionist, of all things,” Hank said to New Edna, her steady smile beaming forth from the screen.

In the spring, Hank spied Lucille through her big bay window. The sight of  her neck looped under her torso, her head appearing to pop out from her behind, caused him to cease conversation with New Edna, whom he’d just told about the lilacs blooming in the side yard (signifying she’d been dead a whole year). He stopped in his tracks, continued to enjoy Lucille’s smooth moves.

“I’ll see you later,” Hank told New Edna, fingering her home button.

 “Okay, Hon! Naptime,” she said, shutting down.

Lucille appeared in her front yard, said, “Howdy do.”

She actually said, “Howdy do,” which Hank found surprising, charming.

The trouble with New Edna, Hank was beginning to think, was her lack of spontaneity, variation. In that moment he admitted to himself she was growing a little burdensome.

“Boy, you can sure, uh, twist,” he said to Lucille, relieved to note the wrinkles on her still pretty face. He didn’t want to be accused of robbing the cradle. Her body looked quite young, but her face looked more, well, realistic. Sitting at her messy kitchen table (she’d invited him in!), his fingers itched to run across her form-fitting ribbed top, her shiny yoga pants. He reveled in her three-dimensionality.

“Guess how many marbles I can fit in my big, luscious mouth?” New Edna asked that evening over dinner. Hank had programmed her to say that dirtier version of the old line.

Sadly, for the very first time the marble thing fell flat.

Hank wanted much more to guess if Lucille’s wonderous legs could loop around his waist, grasp his aging body, hold him up, steady and strong, swing him around, like a kite freed from its string, rippling in the wind, weightless, free.

He pressed the escape button, closed the computer, went to bed without saying goodnight.

 

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