Eat Cake: A Novel

by Jeanne Ray

  “Hello, Lenny?” my mother said, her pen up and ready to go.

  “Rub my head,” my father said to me. “Right there in the middle where she hit me. It hurts like hell.”

  “You’re telling people I’m a drug addict?” I said to my father.

  “Hush,” my mother said. “No, Lenny, not you, I’m sorry. Would you give me that number again?”

  I motioned for my father to follow me out into the mud room.

  “I didn’t tell him you were a drug addict,” my father said.

  “No, you said I was in Los Angeles, worked for movie stars, and was coming to the Midwest to try and clean up my act. Excuse me if I’ve misinterpreted you.”

  My father shook his sore head at my ignorance. “Everybody’s got a problem. Certainly everybody in the restaurant business. If I tell the concierge at a ritzy hotel that my daughter is a middle-aged housewife who likes to bake, he isn’t going to set us up at Aquavit.”

  “I could do without the middle-aged part too, if you’re trying to make amends.”

  “I’m trying to help you. I’m not trying to make amends.”

  Then my mother was in the mud room. “If you ever refer to me as your wife or your girl again, I’m going to take your teeth out with the handset of the telephone, is that perfectly clear?”

  “She hit me!” my father said to me in a plaintive voice.

  “ ‘She hit me’? Are you serious? My children are grown and I’m back to dealing with ‘She hit me’?”

  “Why do you always take her side?” my father said. “Somebody rub my head. I really think she broke something.”

  “I don’t take her side,” I said. “If I took Mother’s side you’d be in a convalescent home in Des Moines.”

  “You’re impossible. How am I supposed to work with the two of you?” My father walked away from us and back into the kitchen.

  “Stop acting like you’re Louis B. Mayer for starters,” my mother said, following him.

  “Look, I never told you how to teach school,” he said to my mother. “And you, I never told you how to raise your kids. We’ve all got our own areas of expertise. Well, I’ve spent the last sixty years of my life on the working end of fancy hotels and good restaurants. I know something about the way things operate. I might not be able to bail you out financially, but don’t underestimate what I’m bringing to the table here. I’m the guy who can get you in the door, or at least I can connect you to the guy who can get you in the door.”

  My mother sighed in defeat and held up her piece of paper. “Lenny gave me a list, all top-notch places. He said he’d call ahead and put in a good word. His list more or less coincides with the lists of the other two men we talked to this morning, who also said they’d put in a good word.”

  “See?” my father said.

  “Did Dad tell them I was a drug addict?”

  “He implied that you were an alcoholic the first time but I kicked him pretty hard under the table. He’s been a little more vague since then.”

  “She damn near broke my leg.”

  “Speaking of which,” my mother said. “You told that guy you fell down the stairs.”

  “So what? I fell down the stairs.”

  “I thought you said you slipped on the floor.”

  “I slipped on the floor, then I fell down the stairs. There was a real nice order to it. You would have been pleased.”

  “I don’t believe you.” My mother crossed her arms in front of her chest.

  “You don’t believe me?” He held up his caged arms. “You think I pounded these little pins into the bone myself?”

  “I don’t know what you did,” she said.

  “Okay, Hollis.” My father suddenly looked pale. He shoulders slumped forward. “You want to hear it? I opened the door to go to the men’s room. I was talking to the guy standing behind me at the bar. I was making a joke and then I stepped forward. I thought I’d gone right into the mouth of hell. It was pitch-black dark. I had no idea what was going on. I just fell and fell and fell and I thought there were guys kicking me but they turned out to be the stairs. Is this what you want to hear? The whole story? I kept trying to catch myself and I could feel my arms smashing up like glass. The whole thing felt like it took a half an hour. When I was at the bottom of the stairs my left arm was through the banister. I couldn’t pull it out. I thought I must have broken my neck. I could hear all the people upstairs, the music, everybody having a good time. You don’t believe me? Is there some part of this you think I’m not telling you?”

  The room was so quiet I could hear the hum of the electric clock on the oven. My mother looked stricken. She put her hand on my father’s good shoulder. “I’m sorry.”

  “You don’t have to be sorry,” my father said. “Just don’t think I did this for fun.”

  I realized then what a good job my father had done making sure we didn’t worry about him. We all stood there looking at each other for a minute. I couldn’t stop thinking about him falling.

  “Okay,” my father said. “Snap out of it. This is why I didn’t tell you two this story in the first place.”

  “Did I miss the funeral?” Sam came in the kitchen with a copy of the want ads folded under his arm. My heart nearly leapt into my throat. Maybe he was finally looking for a job. Maybe I wouldn’t have to go through with this cake thing after all. “Are you two finished with the phone?” he asked my parents.

  “They’re finished,” I said.

  “We still have two more guys to call,” my father said defensively.

  Sam shrugged. “This can wait. I don’t believe you’ll make it through two more calls anyway. You should have heard them when you were at the store,” he said to me. “It was a regular bloodbath around here. I had to come in and break it up a couple of times.”

  “You did not,” my mother said sullenly.

  “Well, I thought about it,” Sam said, smiling.

  “They don’t have to use the phone now,” I said. “They’re just doing a favor for me. You use the phone. We’ll all be quiet. Do you want to use the phone in the kitchen? We could go in the other room.”

  Sam tilted his head and looked at me. “It doesn’t matter which phone I use.”

  “I thought you might want to spread your paper out on the table. Maybe you’d like to have some privacy.” I made “privacy” sound like a very cheerful word, something that I was happy to give.

  “There are only a couple of ads I’m interested in,” Sam said. “I’ve got them all marked. It isn’t going to take that long unless I get some really rabid broker on the phone. Some of these guys are not going to let you off the line until you’ve sworn to buy a boat. I’ll tell you, I used to think I could be a boat broker, but the whole sales thing seems a little desperate to me.”

  “Boat ads?” I said. I put my hand on the back of a chair for support.

  “Don’t worry. I’m just getting some prices, making up a few lists. I’m still just thinking about things.”

  “You have to think things through,” my father said in his knee-jerk support of Sam.

  Camille buzzed through the kitchen dressed in black jeans, blacks boots, a black sweater and jacket. Her pale hair shone like a Roman candle knotted on top of her head. “Going out,” she said.

  “Going out!” Sam said. “What is she doing home? It’s past ten o’clock! Why aren’t you in school, young lady?”

  Camille turned, her hand on the door. I had a brief flash of insight into how hard it must be for someone as cool as she was to be trapped in a house with her insane grandparents and her insane parents. Everyone around her was aging, nutty, bickering. “Hello? It’s Sunday. I’m going to the mall with Tricia. Somebody in this house needs to get a job or buy a calendar or something.” She did not wait for the satisfaction of a reply. She simply hit her palm against the back screen door and was gone.

  “Sunday?” Sam said as he watched her go. He looked at the tiny date on his watch. “I wonder if yacht brokers are even open on
Sunday.”

  “I have no idea,” I said, and went outside to unload the rest of the groceries from the car. I was no longer whistling.

  That night I used my insomnia to weigh out my options. I did my very best to put the boats and my parents and everything in the world that wasn’t dessert out of my mind. Standing at the kitchen counter, I reviewed my options: I could make a series of test cakes and try them out with Florence and my family and pick which ones seemed best for the restaurants; I could make thirty different cakes and send out a completely unique combination to every restaurant on the list, making careful notes of what cake went where to track their success or failure; or I could pick three cakes, make them each ten times, and just go with it. In short, I could, for the first time in maybe thirty years, make my own decision, trust it, and move forward. After a great deal of culinary soul-searching I picked the almond apricot pound cake with Amaretto, a black chocolate espresso cake with a burnt-orange frosting, and the beloved sweet potato cake with rum-soaked raisins. I could either make it in a Bundt pan with a spiked glaze or I could make it in three layers with a cream-cheese frosting. In the end I settled on the latter because I knew my cream cheese was one of my greatest strengths (the secret being to substitute fiori di Sicilia for the vanilla). It made me slightly crazy to think of leaving out the lemon cake with lemon-curd frosting—everyone died over that cake—but the frosting was very wet and the layers had a tendency to slide when transported. I loved the little lime-soaked coconut cakes but so many people took issue with coconut. A genoise was perfect for showing off, but if I wasn’t there to serve it myself, I couldn’t trust that it would be completely understood and I didn’t think there would be any point in sending a container of syrup on the side with written instructions. And what about the sticky toffee pudding with its stewed dates and caramel sauce? That was as much a cake as anything else if you were willing to expand your boundaries a little. I wasn’t sure about the chocolate. It was my best chocolate cake but I didn’t absolutely love chocolate. Still, I knew other people did. I felt I needed an almond cake and this one worked in the apricots, but I wasn’t so sure about not having a frosting. Would it seem too plain? And the sweet potato cake, I had to have that. That was the cake from which everything had started. I had to make a commitment. I had to bake.

  The next day I started early. I put Chet Baker on the little tape player in the kitchen to help me remember to keep the cakes soulful and individual. Every cake must stand alone. No mass production. I took out the butter and the eggs to come to room temperature. My mother was in her room starting plans for the boxes. My father had followed her to oversee her work despite her loud protestations. Chet was singing “Let’s Get Lost.” I was ready.

  The doorbell rang as I tore open my first bag of flour. I waited for a minute, fooling myself into thinking I wasn’t the only one who was capable of opening a door, and then I went to open it.

  “Big day for you,” the handsome FedEx man said. He was tan, which seemed so exotic in Minnesota in the spring, even though I knew there was a tanning bed on every corner. He handed me four large envelopes and I signed four times. “You starting a business or something?”

  “I am,” I said. Could he tell? Would people be FedExing me so soon?

  “Have a good one,” he said as he swung up into his truck. Everything felt like an omen, even his generic good wishes. Why not have a good one?

  But the envelopes were all for Sam. They were from Newport, Fort Lauderdale, New York, and, perhaps most troubling, Italy. They were all from yacht brokerage houses.

  “Sam?” I said in a weak voice.

  He came to the door. “Was that FedEx?” he said nervously. “I should have answered the door. I didn’t think they came until afternoon.”

  “We must be well situated on the route. These are all for you.”

  He took them quickly without looking at the return addresses, which made it clear he knew what they were. “Thanks.”

  “Sam, are you buying a boat?”

  Was this jealousy I was feeling? How could I be jealous of boats? Why did I feel as if he had sent off to Singapore for information about mail-order brides? Inside these envelopes would be four pretty young Asian women who wanted a chance at a life in America and in return would take care of his every need.

  “I’m looking at a lot of things. You know that. We’ve talked about that. I’m looking at jobs and I’m looking at boats. You said you thought it was a good idea for me to look around.”

  I had said that. I had also said he should take some time off and go sailing. I had practically pushed him into the arms of some gorgeous sloop.

  “Ruth, there’s a boat here that is worth three hundred fifty thousand dollars and they’re asking a hundred thirty. The broker says that absolutely means I can get it for ninety-five.”

  “If he’s absolutely sure they’ll sell it for ninety-five, then why are they asking one-thirty?”

  Sam smiled as if I were making a joke. Then, what I found most unnerving was he picked out the envelope that contained pictures of the boat in question without looking down at the stack. He tore it open and walked into the kitchen. “Here, look at this. Isn’t she a beautiful boat? That’s a fifty-three-foot Nevins-built Sparkman & Stephens yawl. That is not a boat you’re going to see every day.”

  “It’s in a shed,” I said, holding up the first picture. It was more a picture of a giant shed than the boat. Was the shed included in the price? “Is it supposed to be in a shed?”

  “That’s where they’re storing her. See, there she is in the water.” He handed me another picture. It was a good-looking boat, something that Aristotle Onassis might have used on the weekends when he wanted to get away from the Christina. It was not, to my way of thinking, an appropriate boat for working people in Minnesota. “That picture is a couple of years old, but isn’t she gorgeous? Will you take a look at those lines?”

  “So why can you buy a three-hundred-fifty-thousand-dollar boat for ninety-five thousand dollars?” If a person had an extra ninety-five thousand dollars in the first place.

  “Because she needs some work. It’s the same thing as buying a house and fixing it up and selling it. You remember the Hobarts used to do that. They made a fortune. He quit his job. They had a wonderful time.”

  “He quit his job as a contractor to remodel old houses. He didn’t quit his job as a hospital administrator to fix old boats.”

  “I didn’t quit my job,” Sam said darkly.

  I put down the pictures. “Oh, Sam, I’m sorry. I want to be with you on this. I really do. But we can’t afford to buy a boat. Even if it’s the thing that would help you more than anything else in the world, we just don’t have the money for it.”

  “I’m not saying I’m going to buy this, I’m saying I’m thinking about it. There are a lot of boats here.” He held up the other FedEx packages as an example. “Some of them are very inexpensive. Look at this one.” He tore open another envelope, again without appearing to know which one it was. It was like a magic trick. “Here’s a thirty-six-foot Hinckley sloop. They’re asking fifty but I know I can get it for thirty-five or forty.”

  “Doesn’t anyone ask a price they plan to get?”

  “This is a much more practical boat. It’s much smaller. You could single-hand this boat.”

  “I could single-hand a thirty-six-foot sailboat?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “So you could fix this one up and sell it for fifty?”

  Sam checked the papers that were clipped onto the back of the picture. “No, actually, it looks like this one is in pretty good shape.”

  “So what would the point of buying it be?”

  Sam looked like he didn’t understand where I was going with the question. “To sail it.”

  “So the forty-thousand-dollar thirty-six-foot sailboat is just for our personal use. The first one is the moneymaker and this one is for fun?”

  Sam stuffed all the pictures back in the envelope
s and I immediately felt like a shrew. I was a shrew. Why couldn’t we just talk to one another? How had everything become so tense? I felt like I was keeping him from his dream, but what about our bank account? Wasn’t that keeping him from his dream too? “Listen, I’m sorry I said that.”

  “I’m just thinking, Ruth. You can’t tell me I shouldn’t even be able to think about something.”

  I nodded and sat down in a chair. “Okay,” I said. “You’re right.”

  “I know it must not seem this way to you but I do know a lot about boats. I was working in a boatyard every summer when I was in college.”

  “It’s not that I don’t think you understand anything about boats, I don’t understand anything about boats. I need to stick with what I know. I’m just going to work on my cakes for a while. You look at your boats and I’ll bake my cakes.”

  “Are you making a cake for dinner?”

  Do you want to leave me? I wanted to ask him. Or have you so completely forgotten that I’m here that you don’t even realize what you’re doing? But instead of saying what was in my heart I only nodded and told him I was making a cake for dinner.

  In the stress-reduction class I learned to go to the cake inside my mind, but these were darker days. To escape the level of stress in my house, I had to go inside a much more literal cake. I had to surround myself with cake, build a foxhole out of cake in which I could hide. Whether or not it was healthy no longer concerned me. It was all I was capable of doing. I pretended I was Martha Stewart. I put all the ingredients into glass bowls of different sizes and poured them in as needed. It gave me a feeling that life had a tremendous sense of order. Because the pans were small I could make two cakes out of one recipe, but I only mixed up one batch at a time for reasons of quality control. Maybe in the future when business was booming and I was making a hundred cakes a day I would come up with a different system, but for the time being I thought I would be better off sticking with what I knew. I had started with the sweet potato cakes. I was running my sweet potatoes through a ricer when my parents came in.