Daughters Will Love Like You Do
Lorelai Gilmore is clearly having some kind of a nervous breakdown. Or, possibly, there's a mad scientist living in her basement who lobotomized her in her sleep last night.
Hey. It's an option. And considering she's standing in front of her parent's door with only a tupperware box full of peach cobbler and a pleasing personality on Wednesday afternoon to shield her from the madness that is Emily Gilmore, it seems like a fairly reasonable one at that.
The door opens. "Hi," she smiles at the maid. "I'm the daughter," she adds. "I'm not usually here except for Friday nights, but I think the scary men in the white coats visited me last night and… is my Mom around?"
The maid gapes at her. "On the patio," she manages, and it's probably dawning on her that she's working for a family full of people who lost a fairly large percentage of their marbles a long time ago.
Lorelai opens the screen doors and steps on the patio. Her mother's standing with her back to her, bent over a flower bed, picking weeds out of it with sharp, graceful movements. Lorelai clears her throat. "Hey, Mom."
Emily whips around with a movement like lightening. "What are you doing here?"
"Hey, Mom, nice to see you, I'm great, thanks, glad Dad is doing okay, it's nice weather we're having," she attempts to joke, sitting down on patio table.
"You're hilarious," Emily declares flatly, straightening up and eyeing her daughter critically. "Once again, what are you doing here?"
"Well," she holds out the Tupperware, "I had some errands to run in Hartford, and Sookie made this amazing peach cobbler this morning, and since I know how much you love cobblers, I thought I'd stop by and we could hang out and have some peach cobbler."
"Peach cobbler?!" Emily raises her eyebrows.
"You like peach cobbler."
"Well, I suppose I do -it's not like I'm particularly partial about it, and I'm sure you've never heard me say that I love peach cobbler-. but that was very nice of you, nevertheless. Teresa!"
The maid shuffles onto the patio, eyeing both women with a terrified look on her face. "Yes, Mrs. Gilmore?"
"Make us some coffee, please, and take this" -pointing to the tupperware in her daughter's hands- "to the kitchen and out of its plastic habitat, would you?"
Teresa approaches Lorelai as though she's about to lash out, and when she hands her the tupperware with a smile, the poor girl jumps about a foot and practically runs off into the kitchen.
"Well," Emily smirks, watching her go. "I'm glad she's as scared of you as she is of me."
"She is not."
"Oh, I don't think we've had a maid this entertaining since the Swiss one that used to yodel while she was cleaning," Emily remarks, casually. "Lorelai, please, for the love of everything holy, at least pretend I managed to instill a shred of propriety inside you and sit down on the chair, won't you?"
Deciding not to push it, she slides down from the table and into one of the chairs (but she slouches, and puts her feet on the garden wall. So there.) Emily continues to weed her rose beds in silence, and they sit there, Lorelai wondering what having an aneurism feels like, exactly.
The maid reappears, practically dropping the tray on the table before retreating at a nervous run. Emily giggles.
"Mom!"
"I'm paying her for this," Emily protests, pouring her daughter a cup of coffee with a savage grin. "Lorelai, honestly, why are you really here?"
"Have some cobbler, Mom. It's good."
"I'm sure it is." She spears a piece of cobbler on her fork and eyes her daughter beadily. "Talk."
"Okay." Lorelai shrugs, defeated. "Basically, everywhere in Stars Hollow-"
"Oh, my goodness, this is the best thing I've ever tasted," Emily interrupts, actually speaking with her mouth full. Lorelai gapes at her. "This is delicious. This is like going to heaven and being served cobbler by a little angel or something. Tell Sookie how delicious this is, oh, and I must have her cater our next DAR function."
"I'm glad you like it so much," Lorelai beams hopefully. "Do you want to talk about how delicious the cobbler is a little longer?"
"You were saying something about everyone in Stars Hollow doing something?" Emily interjects. "I swear, I've never had cobbler this good." She glares at Lorelai. "Well, well, keep talking."
"Well, in town, everywhere I go, people talk to me about Rory. They want to know how she's doing, they want to know what she's doing, they ask where they can her articles online, they tell me how great she is, how much they miss her, how much they love her, and I just couldn't stand it, because I miss her so much and every time I have to talk about her I miss her even more, and so…"
"...so you came here, because we don't care about Rory and therefore weren't going to talk to you about her?" Emily interrupts, archly.
"Mom!"
"What?"
"Stop it!"
"Stop what?"
"You're… you know perfectly well I didn't mean that! Rory talks to you, she calls you and she emails Dad, and you know how she's doing, so you don't have to ask me to tell you. You know that's what I meant."
"I did," Emily smiles. "Have some cobbler, Lorelai."
"No wonder you frighten the living daylight out of the maid," Lorelai grumbles, helping herself to cobbler. "And even if not a single member of the Stars Hollow population would stop me and ask how Rory's doing, it'd still be awful because every place in that town reminds me of her, and I really don't need that right now. I mean-" she looks around the pristine patio helplessly- "you've had this patio redone about sixteen times since she was a baby, but when I look around here, all I can remember is when she right after she was born, she and I used to sit out here with her and and I'd show her the stars."
Emily sighs, "Yes, I remember that. She was tiny."
"Miniscule," Lorelai sighs. "I miss her. God, I miss her. And she's all officially grown up now and I hate that."
"Yes," Emily says mildly, "it's hard for a mother when you wake up one morning and your children suddenly aren't children anymore."
"Oh, Mom."
They sit in silence. Lorelai mushes some cobbler with her fork and looks at her mother's lined hands, her elegant raw silk blouse, the pearls, the hair so stiff and proper, the soft smile on her mother's lips as she enjoys a second slice of cobbler.
"I slept with Luke." The words are out of her mouth before she can help herself. Emily, predictably, chokes on a peach and coughs a few times, which gives her daughter room to conclude that she's definitely having an aneurism of some kind.
"You what?"
"I, uh,… theft with a fluke? Committed?" Lorelai attempts, hopefully.
"When?"
"This morning, when I tried to rob Doose's," she deadpans. And with a sigh, hanging her head and avoiding her mother's glance at all cost, "Last night."
"Well, I suppose it was about time," Emily says, matter-of-factly. "Are you two going to get it together this time?"
"Mom!"
"What? I've watched the two of you dancing around each other ever since Rory started Chilton. She's a fully-fledged journalist by now, so I'd think it wouldn't be unreasonable for me to vocalize my amazement that the two of you still haven't figured out what you want from each other."
"That," Lorelai snaps, violently turning her peach cobbler into an unrecognizable mush and refusing to meet her mother's eyes, "is so incredibly unfair."
"Is it?" Emily shoot back. "What am I missing? Which secret obstruction, which maddening plot-twist have you been hiding for me that would explain this. You love him, I know you do, and Lord knows he's been crazy about you for the past decade, so why is this not working?"
"Oh, I don't know, Mom!" Lorelai exaggeratedly shrugs her shoulders in mock confusion. "Let's think. Hm, it's couldn't possibly be that you were intriguing against us and trying to get Christopher to break us up; or possibly that you and Dad made him feel worthless whenever you saw him? Oh, or here's a crazy thought: he never told me he had a daughter, and when he did tell me, he tried to keep me away from the kid with a ten-foot pole, and he refused to marry me? No, that can't be it. It's my fault. It's ALL. MY. FAULT. Isn't it, Mother? Isn't that what you were going to say?"
"No, actually, I wasn't," Emily answers, her voice still calm, though shaking slightly. "Though running off and marrying Christopher was probably not your finest-"
"Okay, you know what?" Lorelai flies to her feet angrily. "I don't need this. I'm sorry I even came here and thought we could have a nice conversation. Clearly, I'm having some kind of brain damage, because you and I, we cannot have a conversation at all!"
"Lorelai, sit back down!" Emily yells, and when her daughter turns to crass through the hall, she follows her. "Lorelai, wait. You're being incredibly childish, you know!" She snaps at her daughter's back. When the other doesn't stop, when her hand reaches for the doorknob, she swallows and manages: "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said that."
Lorelai freezes, fingers still curling around the doorknob. "Shouldn't have said what?"
"What I said about you and Luke. I apologize," her mother repeats with a sigh. "Come back out and have some more cobbler."
After a second's hesitation, she turns to face her. "You need to stop doing that," she sniffs, and Emily is stunned to find tears sparkling in her eyes. "I try so, so hard to have a good relationship with you, especially now that Rory isn't around to give me a hard time about it, but you need to help me out a little, Mom. You need to make it a little easier, and you really need to stop doing that."
"I know," Emily replies, in a low voice.
"Don't you think that I ask myself that question all the time?" Lorelai presses on. "Don't you think I walk around asking myself why on earth this hasn't come together by now, because I really do love him, and… after… well…" She stops herself, looks up at her mother tearfully. "He organized the party for Rory, the going away party, he called Sookie and organized a town meeting and sowed everyone's stuff together to make that big tent thing, did you know that?"
"I'm not at all surprised to hear it," Emily replies, with a smile.
"So you would think, really, that maybe he still loves me, even after all the crappy crappy things I've done to him over the past eight years, but-"
"No "but" at the end of that," her mother interjects sharply. "Don't be silly, Lorelai, of course he loves you. Come and have some cobbler."
Meekly, she follows her mother back onto the patio. "Is that really why you're not in Stars Hollow? You're avoiding Luke?"
"Mhm." Lorelai mumbles. "Not that the part about missing Rory like my right arm wasn't true, but… yeah."
"Fair enough," Emily resumes her matter-of-fact tone as she sips her coffee. "That ends tonight."
"What?"
"I didn't raise you to go around sulking around your mother's patio just because you're afraid to tell a man you love him."
"You didn't raise me to get pregnant, drop out of high school and move out at sixteen either," Lorelai points out. When her mother's expression freezes, she snorts into her coffee. "What, Mom, too soon?"
"Make another joke about that when I'm eighty, maybe I'll think it's funny then," Emily sighs, drily. She spears another piece of cobbler on her fork and examines it critically. "I'm right about this, you know." She smiles. "Don't worry, I'm not about force you to admit it."
"I appreciate that," Lorelai laughs. "Mom, are you serious about this?"
"Why on earth wouldn't I be?"
Lorelai sighs, massages her temples. "You've… never really warmed to Luke, or to the idea of me and Luke, as a, you know, as a couple, so I'm just surprised, that you're being, you know… supportive. I mean, for your standards."
"Lorelai, it's been nearly 40 years since you were born-"
"Oh my goodness, do not say that! I'm old!"
"-and it's taken me nearly that long, but I've come around to this: I want you to be happy. I know it usually doesn't feel that way to you, but I do. And unfortunately, we disagree about what happy means and what would make you happy almost every time the subject comes up, but nevertheless, I do want you to do be happy." She smiles. "And Luke makes you happy. He does. I may not understand it, I may not even like it very much, but he makes you happy, and I have learned my lesson."
"Wow. I think something just shifted in the space-time continuum." Lorelai smiles at her mother, a genuine smile. "Thanks, Mom. That means a lot."
"And now," Emily says, straightening up, immediately all- business, "thank you for the lovely cobbler, give Sookie my expressed compliments, and now get out of here and go talk to him."
"Um."
"Lorelai, do you want me to go over there in person and do it for you?!"
"NO!" Lorelai jumps up and gathers up her purse. "I'm going, I'm going."
"Good girl," Emily smiles. "I'll see you on Friday."
"Yeah, Mom. And… thanks."
"You're very welcome."