100 Days of Cake

by Shari Goldhagen

  “So, how do you know Dr. B.—uh, Dr. Brooks?” I ask. Doesn’t really seem like they’d be traveling in the same circles or, you know, on the same planet.

  “Glen Brooks and I have worked together with several patients. As a psychiatrist, I can prescribe medication, so sometimes he’ll send someone to me if he feels they could benefit from that.”

  “But you do this, the talking part, too?”

  “Yes. I believe that is a crucial part of any therapy; I wouldn’t prescribe a drug for a patient who wasn’t in some type of psychotherapy too.”

  “Good to know.”

  “Should we start with that, then?” She smiles. It’s a good smile, a million times warmer than anything else in the room, and I relax the tiniest bit. She asks who has been writing the scripts for my meds, and when I tell her it’s my pediatrician and that he’s had me on the same stuff I’ve been on since ADF, she smiles the warm smile again. “It might be time to review that, figure out what’s working and what isn’t.”

  “But . . .” I explain about Dr. B. telling me that meds weren’t really recommended for people under twenty-one.

  “The drugs are tools. They’re helpful for some people; other people don’t need them. And your needs can and do change. It’s about finding the right balance for the individual. Some people find it useful to think of it like cooking. Have you ever made a cake, Molly?”

  Is she shitting me? “Um, yeah.”

  “You know how some recipes call for a little more of one ingredient, some a little less? Sometimes you discover it’s best to bake the cake on a lower temperature for longer; other times you’ll want to use a higher temperature for less time. The basic ingredients might always be the same, but it’s about tweaking until you find out what works.”

  I nod; I still can’t believe she used a cake metaphor.

  “With your permission, I’d like to have your pediatric records faxed over so I can take a look. If you’d like, you can also have Dr. Brooks’s notes sent to me so we can try picking up where you left off with him.”

  What would be in Dr. B.’s notes? All the stuff about my dad I made up? That he suspected I had a thing for him? That he maybe had a thing for me, too?

  “But sometimes,” she continues, “I find it’s best to begin anew with a different therapist, to make a fresh start.”

  “I think I’d like that,” I tell her. “A fresh start.”

  The nuclear fusion smile again, and she asks me to explain what brought me to therapy in the first place. So I start with the end of sophomore year, how I stopped caring about everything and how Mom and I went to the counselor’s office and Mom got so upset when the counselor suggested I was depressed . . . which all makes so much more sense now than it did at the time. Half the kids at school are on some type of meds, half of Mom’s clients and their kids are depressed, so I couldn’t figure out why Mom was code-red alert about it. But of course it was because of Dad. Dr. B. was right about one thing; therapy is easier when you have all the information.

  “I actually recently found out that my father killed himself,” I tell Dr. Frankel. “My mom had always told my sister and me that it was a car accident, but it turns out the car crash was intentional.”

  “That’s a very big revelation. How did that make you feel?”

  “A lot of stuff. Mad that no one had ever told me, kind of betrayed because I’d thought one thing forever and it wasn’t true,” I say, and then I admit the thing that I haven’t been able to say since V hurled the truth at me in the kitchen. “And honestly kind of scared.”

  Dr. Frankel asks me to go on.

  So I tell her how even when I’ve been at my worst, I’ve never thought about killing myself in any real way. “But knowing about Dad makes me wonder, like, is that the next phase of this? Is it that kind of progression? I graduate from running away from swim meets to running in front of trains?”

  “No, Molly, it doesn’t mean you’re going to commit suicide too.” She explains that while there are some genetic links to mental health conditions, Dad and I are two separate people. “If your father had been an Olympic sprinter, he might have passed on some natural talent, but obviously that wouldn’t mean you’d have the same career, not even if you tried to do everything the exact way that he did.”

  Deep down I guess I knew this, but it’s still a relief to hear it.

  “And that’s one of the reasons why you and I are working together,” Dr. Frankel continues. “We want to make sure that nothing like that ever happens to you.”

  Maybe it’s the authority in the way she says it, or maybe it’s simply that she looks so much like Bea Arthur, and Dorothy rarely lies about anything important, but I believe her.

  By the time I leave, I’m legit tired. I’m still not sure if I’ll ever go back to Dr. Frankel, but I can tell that if I do it’s going to be a shit-ton of work.

  Of course I can’t help but think about how different it is from when I used to leave Dr. B’s office. Then I was practically giddy replaying over and over again each time he’d smiled or laughed at one of my jokes. It made feel so special . . . and wrong.

  My stomach flops over at the word. Wrong.

  Me crushing on Dr. B might have been what made it wrong at first, but at some point he started making it wrong too. And he had to know that—he went to freaking Penn! Suddenly I’m all rage-y thinking about him running away and happily starting over in PA. He’s probably already picking up a pretty new reporter at the DMV . . . or maybe not.

  Maybe he’s sitting in a session with a new depressed girl with a dead dad. And maybe she’s noticing that amazing jawline and the little temple depressions.

  Fuck. Maybe Elle is right and I need to report him to the cops or some board of something or other. Maybe I will. Or maybe I will talk to V about it . . . or even Mom, someday.

  All I really know is that for the first time, I’m glad Glen Brooks is out of the great state of Florida. As I pedal home on Old Montee, I feel . . . free.

  DAY 90

  Scrumptious Carrot-and-Apple Cake

  Her hair twisted up in another impossible braid, Mom is peeling roughly seven hundred apples in the model-home kitchen.

  Plopping down at one of the bar stools at the island, I pick up an apple and a peeler and start adding to the pound of red skins. That nervous don’t-scare-the-woodland-creature look from Mom again.

  “So why didn’t you tell me?” I say, out of nowhere, picking up the conversation where I left it eleven days ago. “About Dad, I mean.”

  Mom puts down her apple and wipes her hands on her apron.

  “Maybe I should have told you. My mother always said I need to let you girls know ‘exactly what kind of man he was.’ ” Mom imitates Gram’s little old lady tone, and suddenly all those conversations I remember hearing when we were staying at my grandmother’s make more sense. You can tell Mom is thinking about those, too, and it clearly still bothers her.

  She takes a breath. “I love my mother, Molly, but she has no clue what kind of man your father was. She was always furious that we eloped, and she saw him maybe ten times total. To her he’s just some guy who drove his car into a tree and screwed her daughter out of life insurance. I didn’t want him to be that to you girls.”

  How perfectly fake.

  Perfect for V and Mom and me, ambling around this huge house decorated by stagers for some aspirational family, where people cook and sew and give their kids the most amazing toys. Where a giant portrait of the four of us hangs in the dining room, even though it’s a giant lie and we never really were that family.

  “So, what, it’s better to mislead us?” Even as I’m asking it, I realize that’s exactly what I did to Dr. B. and Gina and Tina, and everyone, mostly to me. I built a dad—two parts family sitcoms, one part old photographs. Much easier than the truth.

  “Molly, your father was sooo much more than the way he died—more than some screwup in his brain that made him do what he did. He loved us very much.”


  “How can you say that?” I ask, frustrated that Mom is still protecting him. If I can’t have my Family Ties/Growing Pains fantasy father, let’s do this no-holds-barred. “You don’t show your family how much you love them by choosing not to be with them. That’s a dick move.”

  “I felt that way for years.” Mom exhales. “I was so angry that I would sometimes turn up the volume on the TV and scream. But then I finally realized that one really bad thing didn’t invalidate everything else.”

  No, it shouldn’t. But this is a pretty monumentally bad thing. And . . .

  “It wasn’t one bad thing, though, was it?” I ask. “People don’t just wake up and decide to drive into a tree. You had to suspect something.”

  “Yes, and no,” she says. “I knew he wasn’t happy all the time, but neither was I—we had two young kids and no money. After it happened, I sifted through everything over and over, trying to find the evidence. That day when he didn’t want to go out to dinner with our friends, was that a sign? Or how we talked about Kurt Cobain the night we met—should I have known then? It’s impossible not to apply hindsight to history. Finally I just realized I’d never get to know exactly what he was thinking.

  “But then when things started going bad for you, it brought back all that craziness. I just kept thinking, How could I have missed this again? So when V found me going over the accident report, I got this idea that she could be my ally. That maybe if Bill and I hadn’t been so far away from our families, someone else would have noticed. And if I told V, we could keep an eye on you together.”

  Being the big sister: my job.

  “But she was barely fourteen, and it was probably too much to ask,” Mom says.

  After saying so much, we don’t say anything for a while.

  My sister, who’s beautiful and popular and talented, and my mother, who’s perfect and independent and successful—the kind of people other people assume have it so easy. Heck, I’ve assumed they have it so easy—have been living with this big stupid secret that was eating away at them.

  “And the cakes?”

  Mom utters a bittersweet semi-laugh. “I know that it sounds really dumb, but I did want you to have that cake you never had. The week before your birthday, we went to the bakery to pick it out—you wanted one with the fish from Finding Nemo—and for days you stopped total strangers to tell them about it. I’m sure you don’t remember this, but after the accident—you had no idea what was going on—people kept bringing over food, and every time you’d ask if that was your ‘berday’ cake.”

  “But I do remember there being a cake.”

  “At some point I had Gram run to the corner store, but all they had left was this stale Entenmann’s crumb cake two days past the sell-by date. And we could only find two candles, but you were turning three.

  “So,” Mom continues, “when I saw that 100 Days of Cake challenge, I figured maybe I could give you some great cakes to make up for that cruddy one, and that it might give you something to look forward to every day.”

  “Mom.” I’m going to cry . . . again. Because it is so sad and sweet that a day after her husband up and killed himself, my mom loved me enough to worry that I had only two candles on my cake. Because that is a kind of love that I can only hope to one day comprehend. A love that I am beyond lucky to have. So many people—people with both parents living—never get anything close to that.

  And I remember that dream episode of Golden Girls where Blanche found out her husband had faked his death. With all those commercials in syndication and the time to resolve the dream plot at the end, it probably really only took Blanche fifteen minutes to forgive him. I’m not sure I can ever forgive my father for doing what he did, for giving me fucked-up genes and crappy hair. For putting Mom through this. Putting V through this. But I can easily forgive my mom for doing what she thought was best. And I can try to understand.

  “Do you think sometime you could tell me about Dad? Like, what he was actually like? Not the Disney version.”

  “I’d like that.”

  So I ask her to tell me about the night they met in Miami.

  And while we bake, she does.

  DAY 92

  Mocha Madness Cake

  The picture of our family in the dining room looks the same as it always has. Mom is still so impossibly luminous that she almost doesn’t seem real but like some goddess slumming it down on earth with us. V is still all eyes peeking from a blanket. I’m still wearing my jumper, still holding the doll the photographer gave me to make me smile. And Dad is the same too. His hands are still ginormous and one of them is still holding my shoulder.

  For some reason I thought that he might have changed since I found out the truth. That he might have morphed into something sinister or that I’d suddenly be able to detect something that I never noticed before. A can’t-keep-your-shoelaces-tied sadness in his eyes. Some pain or longing in Dad’s smile. But no, he looks the same.

  Maybe Mom is right and he really did love us even if he chose to leave us. Maybe, at least in this moment forever frozen in time, Dad wanted nothing more than to protect me.

  DAY 95

  Hummingbird Cake (No Hummingbirds Are Harmed in the Making of This Cake)

  Elle, Jimmy, V, Mom, and I are baking together in the model-home kitchen, because this is apparently something we do now.

  Okay, it’s pretty awesome. Even if Elle does require that everything we use must come in containers that don’t leave a carbon footprint, and Jimmy sometimes feels compelled to turn the bowls and spoons into a drum kit.

  “This next song is for Veronica my love,” he announces before an impromptu performance.

  “Sorry, kid,” says V. “The whole rocker thing is the way to your sister’s heart, not mine.”

  “And Mom’s,” I add. Toupee Thom told Mom he was so impressed with Alex’s band at the FishTopia event that he decided to re-form his law school group—the Legal Eagles. Oh yeah, Mom and Thom are back on.

  Curling up his lip, Jimmy proclaims, “You guys are weird.”

  The glossy picture in A Baker’s Journey shows a brown spice cake, topped with a white frosting and chopped nuts, so it makes perfect sense that Jimmy asks if we can make it purple.

  “Jimmy,” Elle whines.

  “You know.” Mom has her magical-idea look again. “I bet we could do that with food coloring.”

  The suggestion seems highly suspect, but it actually turns out pretty badass—I mean, as much as any baked good can be badass.

  “Is it okay if I take some over to Mark’s later?” Elle asks, and Mom assures her there is plenty to go around. “His band is practicing tonight, and they’re always starving afterward.”

  His band . . . Alex. Elle’s eyes nervously flick to me. Because she is sooo ooey-gooey The Fault in Our Stars in love, for a second she forgot about the whole me-Alex debacle—and that makes me happy. I don’t want the people I love keeping their good news from me.

  “How is the band?” I ask. I do not ask if Alex is with one of the Hot Topic girls or Meredith Hoffman. “Did they come up with a name yet?”

  “They did, actually.” Elle looks at me as if I’m the world’s most delicate blown-glass figurine. “They decided to call themselves FishTopia.”

  “For serious?”

  “Yeah, the drummer couldn’t believe that was the name of the store and thought it was really cool.”

  V rolls her eyes. “What is it with you people and that place?”

  “That’s awesome!” I say.

  “I wasn’t sure how you’d feel about it,” says Elle. “But I thought it was kind of nice.”

  “Jimmy”—V nods at him—“would you please tell Elle and Molly what they are?”

  Throwing off sun rays from V’s attention, Jimmy says, “You guys are weird!”

  “Thank you.” V gives him a high five and comes away with a hand full of purple icing.

  “You know, V,” Mom says, “there should be plenty left if you want to invite your boyf
riend over for a piece tonight.”

  At the mention of Chris, Jimmy scrunches up into an angry emoji.

  “Does this mean I’m no longer grounded?” V asks hopefully.

  “It means I’d like to meet this guy,” says Mom. “I’ve heard some good things.”

  Everybody’s paired off, but it’s okay.

  I wonder if Dr. B. is in Philly yet. And then it occurs to me that this is the first time I’ve thought of him today. Maybe a few days. And I haven’t had any desire to watch Say Anything . . . even though Dr. B. gave it to me as kind of a grand romantic gesture. In fact, hearing Elle and V talk about their boyfriends, I realize just how ridiculous my crush on Dr. B. really was, and I chuckle under my breath. Yeah, and he was telling me Alex was the one with maturity issues.

  So I guess it’s just Jimmy and me forever. He thinks I’m weird, and I think he’s a rabid possum. We could both do a lot worse.

  DAY 99

  New Day Cake (with Optional Icing Drizzle)

  FishTopia isn’t really on the way home from Dr. Frankel’s, but it’s not that out of the way, so I bike past it sometimes. Today is one of those days. Slowing down, I notice two things. First, there’s a bunch of balloons and a sign that says GRAND OPENING. Second, Alex is there. Leaning his back against the side of his car, staring at the building. In his jeans and that really faded Doors T-shirt that used to be his uncle’s, he just looks familiar.

  Almost without thinking about it, I ride over. For a fractured second I’m so excited to see him that I momentarily forget all the stuff that happened, forget that he told me he was through with me and that the best part of Charlie closing the store was that I’d be out of his life forever.

  Apparently he forgot all that too, because when I pull up next to him, he gets this lottery-winner glow. “Molly!”