Eat Cake: A Novel (16 page)

In high school I saved up my baby-sitting money and sent away to a cooking supply store in New York City to buy a madeleine pan and a bottle of lemon flower water so that I could make the little shell-shaped tea cakes for my French teacher. She was a tremendously kind woman from a small town on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan who was patient with my mistakes. She told me it
was very important to keep up with my studies because the French were the best cooks in the world. I asked her what she had eaten when she was in France and she confided in me (and none of the other students) that she had never actually had the chance to go, but she still hoped that someday she might. The idea of a French teacher who hadn’t been to France struck me as the saddest thing in the world when I was fifteen, and that’s when I set out to make madeleines. When I gave them to her, tears welled up in her eyes. “Everything began with a madeleine in Proust,” she said to me. Further proof that cake could take you places you might not be able to get to on your own.

All my life, cakes have won me affection. I baked them for boyfriends and for boyfriends’ mothers. Early on, my mother told me I was running up too much of a bill and would be expected to buy my own ingredients. “I’m not saying you have to buy your
food
,” she said. “But five pounds of sugar a week? I can’t be responsible for that.”

I baked cakes for church sales and the volleyball team and the birthday of anyone I was even slightly fond of. I baked for the families I baby-sat for, often using their sugar while I was at their house. I taught their children how to neatly crack an egg and let them lick the beaters and scrape out the bowls with their fingers. I left them the cake and always got an extra dollar for my efforts.

I baked a cake for Sam, of course, a gingerbread cake cut into thin layers and stacked with applesauce I had made. It was on our second date, because on our first date he bought me dinner in a nice restaurant. I was living in my own apartment then, a tiny studio whose kitchen floor consisted in total of twelve ten-inch tiles. The oven was smaller than the play oven I had as a child and I had
to cook every layer of the cake separately. I kept my pots and pans in a box under my bed. There was a little courtyard in back of the building that residents were allowed to use, so I served dinner outside on some old lawn furniture that someone had mercifully left behind and prayed for good weather. Otherwise we would have had to have eaten the way I ate, sitting on the end of my bed. Sam told me later he was ready to marry me on the second bite of cake. “It wasn’t that I wanted to marry you for your cooking,” he said on our honeymoon. “I mean, I thought it was wonderful that you could cook, but it was more than that. It was just such a smart cake. I’d never tasted anything like it. I thought, The person who made this cake has a soul. Have you ever thought that a cake could convey soul?”

I, in fact, believed that a cake was the best way to convey soul. I was also sure at that moment I had married the right man because I knew not everyone could see the soul in a cake.

Our wedding cake, like our wedding, was modest but lovely. I covered it in generous flowers, blues and pinks and yellows, a fistful of spring-green leaves spiraling down the sides. The photographer thought it was the most interesting thing at the party, and so there are many more pictures of the cake than there are of Sam and me on our wedding day.

The cakes I made for my children, especially before they were old enough to ask me to tone it down a little, were tributes to the architectural abilities of frosting. Any mother who brought her child to one of our parties must have left our house shaking her head. Poor, bored woman, they must have thought. That was the height of my frosting phase. I made trains and pine trees, tracks that spelled out
Happy Birthday, Wyatt
. Ballerinas pirouetted over
Happy Birthday,
Camille
. The bigger the sheet cake, the bigger the canvas. Mine were enormous. I would work on them for days, tucking them into the freezer at night to hold my place.

This is not to say that my life consisted of nothing but cakes. I had a full life. I raised a family, had a good marriage, volunteered at the Red Cross, played the piano. But it’s true that if I were watching my life flash in front of my eyes, there would have been a lot of people holding up empty plates and asking for seconds in the really good parts. Which leads me to wonder why it never even registered with me that what my father was saying might be a good idea, or why, when Florence pointed out the logic of it all, my first impulse was to laugh.

“Really,” Florence said on the phone later that night. “I’ve been thinking about it.”

“I don’t know anything about business.”

“Don’t worry about business right now. If you get into so much money that you have to start worrying about business, then you can hire someone to do the books for you.”

“So what do I do, put a sign up in my yard that says ‘Cakes Sold Here’?”

“You’re going to have to start thinking, Ruth. You spend all your time putting out fires. That’s a different way of going at life. Now you have to make something happen. You have to start a fire.”

“With a cake?”

“Listen, there are a lot of highbrow restaurants in this town. Make up a dozen of your best cakes and give them to the owners as gifts. If they don’t like them, they don’t call you back.”

“And what if they do call me back?”

“Then we go on to the next phase.”

“Which is?”

Florence sighed. “Stop getting ahead of me. What’s the worst you’ll be out? A hundred dollars for ingredients if you make something really fancy. Probably not even that. I bet you’ve already got just about everything you need in the house. It’s not like I’m telling you to go out and spend money on pans.”

I thought about some candied orange peel I’d ordered from a specialty store in Luxembourg a few months ago. I hadn’t been exactly sure what to do with it, I only knew that sooner or later it would be exactly what I needed. “I don’t know,” I said. I felt that old familiar queasiness, like I was going to have to play the piano in front of people.

“Somebody is going to have to save your family,” Florence said in a serious voice. “Maybe your father is right. Maybe it’s just going to have to be you.”

It was impossible not to take Florence seriously. I think it had something to do with her height. “Can you save a family with cake?”

“That cake you sent home with me today, the scarlet empress? That’s a cake that can save people. That’s a cake that could lift up the country on its shoulders and redeem it.”

After I hung up the phone I sat and stared at it for a long time. Maybe it would ring again and it would be Florence or a telemarketer or anybody who would give me more advice. Sam came into the kitchen with a copy of
Classic Yachting
in his hand. Since we had our talk he didn’t try to hide them anymore. “Who was that?”

“Florence,” I said, not looking up.

“Tell her she doesn’t need to drive all the way over here to see Guy. I can take him to the hospital.”

“It wasn’t about Dad.” I could hear the weight in my voice but I had no idea how to get rid of it. Suddenly it felt as though the responsibility for everything was about to move onto my shoulders. I would go from worrying about Sam finding a job to actually having to find a job myself. Maybe my father was right. Maybe I was a total prefeminist wimp who expected to be taken care of by a man. But how could I have come to feel that way? I certainly never had role models who said the man worked and the woman stayed home.

“Are you talking to yourself?” Sam sat down in the chair across from me. He looked concerned.

“Am I?” I put my head in my hands. “There’s a horrifying thought.”

“What did Florence say?”

I would just tell him, put it right out on the table. He had told me about the boats after all. “She said I should bake cakes.”

“Aren’t you always baking cakes?”

Sam didn’t look like a man who was folding under the weight of stress. In fact, Sam looked more relaxed than I had seen him in a while. I was the one who was folding. “Florence thinks I should sell cakes.”

Sam seemed puzzled. “Is she having a fund-raiser for something?”

I shook my head, took a deep breath, and started over from the top. “No, we’re having a fund-raiser. We need to make some money. I don’t mean to harp on this but we’re going broke. She thought I should sell cakes as like, you know, a job.”

Sam shrugged. “Sure, if you want to. I don’t see how it could hurt anything to try.”

“No, I’m really serious.”

He stood up and stretched, came up to the balls of his toes and bounced a couple of times. “If you can sell some cakes, that’s great,” he said. He rolled up his magazine and tapped me lightly on the head. “Nobody makes better cakes than you. Is your dad back in his room? The Timberwolves are playing.”

I nodded. “He’d like nothing better.”

“Call us when dinner’s ready,” he said, and then he was gone. I sat there feeling completely stunned. Sam didn’t think I could do it. Maybe that’s what I deserved for thinking that he couldn’t make a living working on boats, but as soon as I saw that he thought the cakes were a lark, I knew I was going to take them seriously. I was going to save my family through the sheer force of my mixer. In the other room I heard the television click on and then came the roar of the happy basketball crowd. I got up and went to my cookbooks.

There was a lot I didn’t know: which restaurants to go to, who to ask for, how much to charge if in fact they wanted to buy. When I thought about those aspects I wanted to just forget about it and go take a nap. But I kept Florence’s voice in my head. I was to take things one at a time, stick to what I knew. I knew how to bake. The first thing I was sure of was that this was all about cake. Pies, tarts and tartlets, a dozen different kinds of gorgeous cookies, soufflés—they all spun through my head and I dismissed them all. I was going to specialize. It also seemed to me that there was no single cake that could really represent what I could do. I got on my hands and knees and emptied out a low cupboard until I found a set of six-inch cake pans. With these it would be reasonable to take every restaurant three different kinds of cakes, one chocolate, one fruit, and one wild card, like the sweet potato cake or the scarlet empress.
I had a Bundt pan that held about three cups of batter, and I thought of an almond cake surrounded by little marzipan birds, tiny yellow buntings asleep at the base. I was a fool for marzipan.

“Sam and your father are going to be deaf within a month if they don’t learn to keep the volume down.” My mother was standing over me in the kitchen.

“I don’t even hear it anymore.”

“That could be a bad sign. Maybe you’re going deaf too. Why are you cleaning out the cabinets before dinner?” After all, I was sitting on the floor with pans going out in every direction.

“I was just looking for something.” I held up the pretty little Bundt pan to show her. I had had this pan for years. Camille used to love to balance it on her head like a crown.

“Dear God, Ruth, you aren’t going to bake another cake, are you?” My mother had changed since my father had moved home. She had gone from someone who seemed scattered and a little foggy to someone who was, well, overly sharp. I wasn’t sure which way I liked her better.

“I am going to bake another cake,” I said. “In fact, I’m going to bake a lot of cakes. I’m going to bake until every surface of this kitchen is covered in cakes.”

My mother looked at me as if she thought I had lost my mind. “We’re supposed to eat that much cake?”

I crawled back into the cabinet and pulled out a few more pans. It was shocking to see how many of them I had. They not only represented a lifetime of what I had bought for myself, they represented years of gifts, from Sam, from the children, from my mother, from anyone who had no idea what to buy me for Christmas or my birthday or an anniversary. I found five springform pans. I was like
one of those people who collected salt and pepper shakers and snow globes so that all they ever got were salt and pepper shakers and snow globes, except now I was going to need all these things, the cookbooks and the nutmeg graters and the industrial-size Cuisinart. I was going to be able to use them all.

“Ruth, get out from under there.”

There they were, all the way in the back. Four-inch pans. Six of them. “Do you have any idea how difficult it was to find a set of heavy four-inch pans?” There was dust in the bottom and I blew in them. I hadn’t made a really small cake in years.

“I’m glad you found them. You’re worrying me.”

Having tried the idea out on Sam, I wasn’t so inclined to tell anyone else in my family about my plan. It was very new and felt about as vulnerable as a day-old mouse, its eyelids still sealed shut. On the other hand, people tended to congregate in the kitchen and I didn’t know how long I was going to be able to keep it from them, either. “I’ve decided to try and sell some cakes to restaurants. It’s just an experiment. I want to see if I can make some money.”

My mother studied the scene and thought this over. She looked at the little four-inch pans in my lap. “You’re going to sell them little cakes?”