Dress Rehearsal

by Jennifer O'Connell

  I quickly dipped my fingers in the tub and splashed water on my face, replacing the vivid images with the white tiled wall of my bathroom. I needed to get some sleep. If I was going to start juggling Charlie and Neil, I needed all the energy I could muster.

  Chapter 13

  “Some lady called for you on Saturday.”

  “Did you get a name?” I asked, going over the packing slip of a delivery we’d just received.

  Maria put down the bag of gum paste she was squeezing and slowly repeated her conversation with the caller as if I had the reasoning capacity of a four year old. “I asked if she wanted to make an appointment for a tasting and she said no. I asked if she was calling about a cake, she said not exactly. She wasn’t buying a cake, and I’m not an answering service. She said she’d stop by today to see you.”

  I probably should have pulled rank and told Maria that taking messages was her job when I wasn’t around. But as I watched her gently cradle the pastry bag in her hand and form perfect clusters of cornflower blue hyacinth petals to complement a pink tulip and chartreuse viburnum bouquet topper, I stayed silent. It would be one thing if I thought Maria’s ornery manner was actually directed at me personally, but I knew that her irascible temperament had nothing to do with me or the boutique. Her sudden interest in my love life even made me think that maybe she really did care about me as more than the signature on her paycheck. I swear, sometimes I didn’t know if Maria was an example to me, or a warning. Besides, after experiencing what it’d be like without Maria in the kitchen, I was suitably humbled. Of course, there was no reason Maria should know that.

  “So then everything went smoothly in my absence?”

  “We managed just fine without your superior supervisory skills. I put the mail on your desk.”

  The boutique was always quiet in the beginning of the week, when business slowly simmered, building up day by day until the full boil of activity bubbled over into the weekend. On Mondays and Tuesdays, we recuperated from the flurry of Saturday’s activity. The kitchen staff alternated days off, and without Hector and Benita on Mondays and Georgina and Dominique on Tuesdays, the kitchen was almost serene. Maria usually took Tuesdays off, so Mondays were spent compiling our supply list and receiving deliveries for the week’s orders. Cakes were baked on Wednesdays and Thursdays, after which we wrapped the spongy circles and squares in plastic and placed them into the refrigerator to rise and firm up before beginning the icing and decoration. While Lauren’s Luscious Licks wasn’t a cake factory, after eight years in business we were a fine-tuned machine.

  As Maria promised, on my desk I found a stack of white windowed envelopes from our suppliers and several handwritten envelopes. I bypassed the invoices and the personal letters that undoubtedly contained deposits from clients, and pulled out the Pottery Barn catalog that waited for me at the bottom of the pile like a four color, eight by ten invitation to dream. As the other mail sat unopened, I slowly turned pages and studied the catalog photos in detail. The Bordeaux table stood in a faux dining room, its top set with linen napkins, wide shallow plates and wine glasses as if just beyond the seam in the catalog a French country kitchen waited with coq au vin steaming on the stove.

  “Look at you circling pictures like a kid with her nose in the Sears Christmas Wish Book,” Maria scoffed.

  “Nothing wrong with a little wish list,” I told her, and circled the Brittany chandelier hanging over the table.

  “Sure, as long as you’re willing to wait twelve months for Santa to slide down your chimney carrying your wishes in his sack.”

  For some reason the image of Maria and Santa in the sack popped into my mind, her dark hair tucked into Mrs. Claus’ kerchief as they rolled around like two balls under the sheets, never quite able to wrap their arms around one another. It wasn’t an image I wanted to hold in my head for very long, lest it become indelible.

  “Are you telling me you never believed in Santa Claus?”

  “Oh, I believed in Santa, all right. I was the one who insisted on making macaroons and Italian wedding cookies for him just like my Nonni did, I even stuffed the pastry shells with preserves all by myself.”

  Of course Maria was a regular pastry prodigy. I could picture her as a child, standing on a milk crate so she could reach the kitchen counter, already a red bandana keeping her pig tails from falling into the mixing bowl. I once asked Maria why a bandana and not a chef’s hat or hair net. “Please,” she’d answered, as if the reasons were self-evident. “I’m working, not walking a runway.”

  Even as a young child with cookie dough between her pudgy fingers, Maria knew she’d found a place where she belonged. The kitchen wasn’t just the room where her mother served dinner and her brothers started food fights. It was where she could experiment with different ingredients and surprise her family with new creations. She knew she didn’t want to do anything else.

  When I prepared that first chocolate almond torte from the Martha Stewart cook book, I never thought I’d end up doing this for a living. I didn’t even know what almond paste was, but because I was out of a job, I had the time to figure it out. Now, not only did I know that almond paste is a mixture of ground almonds, sugar, and glucose, I used to have a favorite brand imported from Denmark.

  Unlike Maria, who seemed to be born with a wooden spoon in her hand, I stumbled into the kitchen – or was given a very firm shove in the form of a pink slip that arrived two days after Neil left for DC. My ego wasn’t merely bruised, it was checked into intensive care, placed on life support and given a fifty-fifty chance of survival. The uncertainty, the feeling like I was flailing about for any life raft willing to throw me a line and reel me in, drove me to consider a job in any field that I could remotely be qualified for as a recent college graduate with a major in history.

  I had no illusions that my bank balance would be able to sustain me, and so I registered with every temp agency that would let me fill out an application and prayed my phone would ring with daily assignments until I was able to find another job. In our little world of independent over achieving women, I’d been prepared for much, but not failure.

  Robin and Paige made their daily rounds, showing up at my apartment to check on my progress. I even offered to provide them with a clip board to hang from the foot of my bed so they didn’t have to duplicate questions – Have you looked in the want ads? Did you go through your Rolodex for possible networking contacts? Is there a another temp agency you can call in the meantime?

  But not once did either of them suggest I pack it in and follow Neil to DC, and they never asked the one question that now seemed to be begging for an answer – did I make a mistake letting Neil go without me?

  If I hadn’t had Paige’s party to take my mind off the fact that I was about one month’s rent away from having to call my parents and ask for money, I would have been a goner. In the days after Paige’s birthday party, my meager galley kitchen, with its two foot wide linoleum floor designed to distinguish it from the rest of my sprawling four hundred square foot studio, provided me with welcomed distractions. After the success of Paige’s birthday torte, I was asked to make a going away cake for a woman in her office, an anniversary cake for another agent’s daughter and dessert for a brunch. Without hesitating I happily, and gratefully, accepted the requests and set off for the book store in search of more instruction. When I wasn’t pouring over cook books, I conducted my own form of field research, visiting local bakeries and patisseries to check out what I was up against. And I was up against a lot.

  There was no way I could compete with the elaborate sugar roses and chocolate drapings that were propped up and displayed behind glass like precious jewels. Instead I decided to attempt desserts that were long on elegance and short on artistry.

  For the going away party, I settled on an apricot ginger pound cake with rum glaze. I was scrupulously following the directions, making sure that all the ingredients were at room temperature and that I gently folded the apricots and ginger into the b
atter, when Paige called to see how things were going. I checked to see if the preheat light on the oven was still lit, before telling Paige about my going away party selection.

  “Pound cake?” Paige had repeated, like I’d said I was making mud pies with sprinkles on top.

  “Not normal pound cake,” I started to explain, even as I was beginning to doubt my choice. “I splurged on a cake pan with a decorative Fleur-de-Lis relief so it’ll look elegant.”

  “Why a pound cake?” she asked again, obviously beginning to have second thoughts herself.

  “Because you’re having the party at the office, so you don’t want lots of crumbs and pound cakes are moist.”

  “Okay,” she agreed, and continued to listen.

  “I didn’t want anything with too much icing, that can get messy and it didn’t seem very professional to have everyone licking whipped cream off their lips. Besides, everyone in your office is addicted to coffee, and what goes better with coffee than pound cake?”

  Paige was silent for a minute. “You know, you’re right. You really know what you’re doing, don’t you?”

  “Absolutely,” I assured her, eyeing the paintbrush I’d bought at the hardware store as a substitute for the pastry brush the recipe called for. “I know exactly what I’m doing.”

  I had a small problem with the vanilla bean cheesecake I’d planned for the intimate anniversary gathering. I figured any old cake pan would work in place of a springform pan, but when I tried to remove the forty ounces of cream cheese held together precariously by five eggs, I learned my lesson and ran out for the pan the recipe specified. I also learned a second lesson during that fiasco – there’s a reason chefs tend to be generously proportioned, and if I was going to cook I couldn’t eat my mistakes without paying a hefty price for it later.

  After buying another five packages of cream cheese and making a second attempt, my cheesecake emerged from the pan looking just like the cook book’s glossy photo – its velvety golden top meeting the edges of a firm shortbread crumb crust. I brushed some fresh violets with egg whites, sprinkled them with a light coating of sugar, and placed the candied flowers on the center of my cheesecake. It was gorgeous.

  I stood back and marveled at my creation. It could easily have been placed in the glass case of one of the bakeries I’d visited – it was that lovely. But what I really looked forward to, even more than the anniversary couple’s delight at the candied pansies, was when my cake would be served to six people and they’d discover that my cheesecake was more than just a pretty face.

  After the vanilla bean cheesecake, word spread quickly – the colonial army wouldn’t have had to rely on Paul Revere if they’d had realtors. The agents in Paige’s office told nearly every client about my desserts, and they in turn told their friends. Within a few months I was up to my elbows in flour and sugar and vanilla, and I’d run out of room in my kitchen for all the new gadgets I was buying on a daily basis.

  Although I made a lot of mistakes in the beginning, an especially gruesome bittersweet chocolate cake comes to mind, I learned and kept moving forward. I started depending on recipes less and less, and relying more on my own tastes. And coming from someone whose sweet tooth once tended to lean more toward Devil Dogs than strawberry mascarpone trifle, that was saying a lot.

  The kitchen counter quickly became overrun with my supplies, and every day another rectangular cake pan or copper cooling bowl crept toward the living area of my studio. A second hand bookshelf held Tupperware containers filled with cake flour and confectioners sugar, and I hung a make shift utensil rack for my measuring cups and spoons.

  The day I realized that I was sharing my night table with a twelve pound KitchenAid paddle mixer, I knew it was time to acknowledge that I wasn’t just making some extra money until I got a real job – I’d found a career. I decided it was time to find some retail space. Looking back, that decision was the start of Lauren’s Luscious Licks and, in a way, the beginning of the end for me.

  Before I moved to the boutique on Newbury and hired Maria, I loved the feel of flour, so fine after sifting it was almost slippery in my hands. Watching a solid mass of butter thaw until it gave up its glistening shape and succumbed to the paddle mixer was almost surreal. I’d kept my nails short, clipped square so ingredients didn’t get packed under – even though the flour that sometimes found its way under my nails did result in a quick French manicure.

  I used to love getting my hands dirty, watching cakes rise and egg whites stiffen, how somehow it all came together, all the ingredients mixing together to make something entirely different yet something that was completely reliant upon every component (as I learned when I thought that there couldn’t be much difference between baking powder and baking soda, and soon discovered that no matter how similar ingredients may seem, they each had their purpose).

  When the open sign was officially hung on the front door of Lauren’s Luscious Licks, I’d willingly handed it over to Maria, maybe a little too easily, to focus on the big picture until I knew how many tastings I could schedule each day and where the delivery entrances to Boston’s finest hotels were located, but not how each perfectly formed sugar rose was created, one petal at a time.

  “Hello,” Maria called out to me, taking my attention away from the navy Manhattan leather arm chair that would look so good in a study. “Can I get a little help over here?”

  I closed the catalog, placed it on top of the pile in my desk drawer, and went to help Maria with the deliveries.

  That afternoon I had appointments with three brides – four if you counted the two women getting married to one another. The first bride, a woman who brought me a swatch of material from her wedding dress and wanted to replicate the alencon lace on a six tier red velvet cake, was a lay up. She seemed surprised that I wasn’t even a little concerned about the intricate pattern, but I told her that I’d seen worse. When I pulled out the portfolio and showed her the different laces we’ve managed to etch into the sides of cakes, she called her mom on a credit card-sized cell phone and squealed with delight.

  My next appointment was with our best repeat customer, a dubious distinction for most people, but one that Alexandra Cassidy almost seemed to wear with pride.

  “Last time we went dark and rich with the white chocolate mousse filling and chocolate fudge cake,” she reminded me. “And even though Howard was as rich as the cake, unfortunately he was also just as dense.” Alexandra paused as if waiting for me to agree before she continued. “But Spencer is so amazing, I have a feeling that this is it.”

  “I hope you’re right.” I smiled and Alexandra beamed back.

  “This time I was thinking something light, something a little fun. After all, Spencer is only thirty seven.”

  Did I mention that Alexandra was about sixty, although her lids had been lifted so often she easily passed for forty, even if her eyebrows seemed to be stretched taut in the center of her forehead like blonde McDonald’s arches.

  I suggested a yellow cake with passion fruit and orange cream filling, and cream cheese icing. Alexandra was a pro, and less than five minutes later we’d decided on the shape and decoration as well.

  Alexandra clapped her hands together and held them that way, like a TV evangelist. “That’s it! I knew you’d come up with exactly what I wanted. You are so good.” Alexandra took out her checkbook and started to fill in the deposit amount. She tore the check out with a flourish but held on to it before placing it in my hand. “You know, if this does work out, I’m going to miss you. We had some good years together.”

  She wasn’t kidding. Our relationship had lasted longer than her last two husbands combined.

  Amanda and Allison were planning their August wedding, and were my last appointment of the day.

  The two women knew exactly what they were looking for. Even though they politely sampled each of the cake slices displayed on the table, when I asked which piece they preferred, neither wasted any time before pointing to the same plate and decl
aring, “This one.”

  I loved it when couples were so in tune with one another. It renewed my faith in marriage, even if in this case the couple was destined for almost half a year’s worth of PMS.

  I laid the portfolio on the tasting table and we went through the pages slowly, allowing Amanda and Allison to point out what they liked and didn’t like about each of the cakes.

  “How about using fresh flowers instead?” Amanda suggested when Allison pointed out a few sugar flowers she liked.

  “That’d be pretty,” Allison agreed. “Maybe we could use the same flowers we’re having in the bouquets?”

  “Sure, I could have the florist make a smaller version for a topper.” I flipped through the pages of the portfolio and showed them a similar design.

  Allison reached for Amanda’s hand and squeezed it. They looked at each other for a second before nodding in agreement.

  Amanda leaned in closer to the picture and scrutinized the photo of the lavender phlox, cream-colored vendela and spray roses and blue curiosa cake topper. “You know, my mom actually asked me if we were going to have two plastic brides on top of the cake.”

  Allison laughed. “And my dad asked which one of us would be addressed as Mister after we’re married.”

  “When she registered she put me down as the groom,” Amanda pointed out.

  “I didn’t have a choice!”

  “Then why weren’t you the groom?” Amanda let go of Allison’s hand with feigned irritation before winking at me and breaking out into a smile.

  Allison laid her arm over Amanda’s shoulder and pulled her closer before planting a kiss on Amanda’s head and telling me, “I couldn’t pull off a tux.”

  The boutique’s front door opened and a cold whisper of air invaded the warm gallery, followed by a khaki-clad man. “Hello, ladies.”

  Amanda and Allison had been expecting him. “Lauren, this is my brother, Hugh.”