1964 – 1977

Edna was heading towards the horrific age of thirty and preparing for the lunch shift when Kennedy was shot. After that it all went to shit.

The world was an insane place to be single and in a small town. Ideas came in slowly from the cities, but when they came they caught on hard. Boys were wearing their hair longer, girls weren't wearing their bras. The little boys she served chili and meatloaf to on a daily basis were being shipped off to die in a foreign country as soon as their hats went into the air. Edna was a young mother with a good figure, wore the clothes that did not hide it, and no husband to tell her what to do. Automatically she was painted with a bad brush. She dyed her ginger hair a bright red and kept it iron straight. Her head was filled with the English imports and American groove masters. Men and boys would stare as her hips swayed in her mini-skirt and go-go boots; one man even called her Ann-Margaret whenever she walked by the general store. From an early age she had her son nursing on music and irreverent culture that permeated the small world around them. And, for a time, her son was her friend.

Once upon a time Edna was shining optimism when it came to her son. She vowed to be there for him in the ways that her mother wasn't for her and she could say that up until Bud left she kept her promise. She worked at the school and at a local factory to make sure there was enough food on the table, she had holes in her clothes and made sure Steven had good ones and she even forgone liquor and pot for months just so they could have a car. It wasn't until she caught more attention from other men did she started to drift away from him. She knew that she never wanted to marry again, but the male attention really had her going. By day she was a lunch lady, getting shitted on by snotty assholes whose mothers sneered at her, but by night she was the hottest little thing in Point Place. They were turned on by her body, her loose mouth, and whatever adjectives they used while on top of her. They didn't need her and that gave her the kind of freedom a little kid could never give her. She reneged on her devotion to her son and started drinking and smoking and trying everything that was free and plentiful. And gradually those men who loved her so temporarily and the toxins that were always fleeting started to replace her son in importance.

When Steven was eight, her mother got released from the loony bin. She was a frail and old looking lady her red hair almost completely white and her entire frame prone to shivers from the shock treatments and isolation. As pitiful as she was, Edna was amazed by how much she still hated that woman even as she allowed her into her home. She still remembered the ineffective crying, the looks of horror, and the unspoken remarks about how she deserved to be raped and abused. Even as the woman begged for her forgiveness she found herself deaf and numb with each sad plea. She took in the woman who stood by during her rape into her home and promptly couldn't stand to be in the same house with her. She increased her after-school activities at a fevered pitched, even going so far as to leave for weeks at a time to go off with one new thing after another. Any time she did feel guilt all she'd have to do was go home and see her simpering face and blue idiot eyes; that cured her quick. It didn't help matters that this woman took her daughter's treatment and martyred herself to it, or that Steven adored her and vocalized that often, or that so many in town felt sorry for that old bag even though they would spit on Edna just as soon as look at her. It got worse when her mother got sick and had the whole church community gathered around her dying body with all the sympathy Edna didn't receive when she was young and pregnant or when her brother died. By the time cancer finished eating away at Francine Berman from her stomach Steven was fifteen and Edna was only ever home to sleep it off or when hotels were too expensive.

It was 1975. Watergate was all anyone could talk about, they more or less lost the war in Vietnam, and the town was filling up with soldiers who were directionless and in need of any help they could get. Edna did her patriotic duty by hosting an ever-revolving door of former Army grunts, truckers, drifters, hippies, and tight wads. She lost herself to the music, to the drugs, to the feel of something more than what she was getting. More and more she wanted to leave Point Place and began to resent the people and things that kept her there. She got into screaming matches with Steven over every little thing under the sun, not understanding how such a cute baby could turn into a loud-mouth piece of shit like Bud, or Hank, or any other man that wronged her. It got worse as he began to listen to her music, drink her beer, and sneer at her with the same judgmental eyes of the town while he placed his headphones on and ignored her. She relished the days he'd be gone with his friends, leaving her to imagine a life far away from Point Place without being anchored to a crappy job or anyone who felt the right to judge. It wasn't until she became really fed up and some guy, one in a series of lonely men, came along begging her to come with him that she actually decided to do something. And, in the latter part of 1977 just two days shy of her forty-first birthday, she left Point Place. She left only a note, her shitty house, and a sneering man-child who had no business tying her down.