Eat Cake: A Novel (19 page)

“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 envelopes 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.

“We’re going out,” my mother said.

“Both of you?” My mother hated to drive and my father couldn’t drive and they couldn’t stand one another’s company. Now they were going out.

“She wants to make the boxes herself. Make a cardboard box? Stupidest damn thing I’ve ever heard of.”

“You want one that’s exactly the right size. We’re making a quality product from the best ingredients. You don’t see Ruth using margarine, do you? We aren’t going to stuff a piece of newspaper in the side of the box if it’s too big. I’m going to take one of each of the pans for now so that I know what I’m dealing with.”

“Sure,” I said. My father seemed grumpy and my mother seemed insane and I was perfectly happy to see them taking up each other’s energy.

“You’d think there weren’t enough cardboard boxes in the world already. These are
modern times
, Hollis. You don’t have to
make everything yourself. Look at Ruthie here. You don’t see her building a mill in the backyard to grind down her own flour. Where are the chickens? Where is the cow? I thought you said everything has to be from scratch.”

“Shut up and get in the car,” my mother said. “Do you have to go to the bathroom again before we leave?”

“I went to the bathroom five minutes ago and you know it. Stop showing so much interest in my bathroom habits.”

My mother shook her car keys to indicate that the wagon train was pulling out and then they were gone.

As completely overwhelming as my parents were, it was a real novelty for me to see them like this: together. Before my father came I had looked forward to getting to see my father. Despite the viciousness of their fighting, I hadn’t thought that there might be some very peculiar pleasure in seeing the two of them together.

By the time Camille came home from school I had amassed ten cakes in different stages of readiness. Every one of them was perfect except for one that seemed to have lost its spring when touched. I held it back for our dinner.

“What’s going on?” Camille said. She put down her backpack and made one slow circle around the kitchen. Her pink lips parted in disbelief. “Have you completely lost your mind? Do you really think we’re going to eat all of these?”

I turned off the KitchenAid. If I had it to do over again I would have assembled my entire family together and told them about my plans all at once. “I’m trying to start a little business. I thought that maybe I could sell cakes.”

Camille leaned over and inhaled deeply from an almond apricot loaf. “You want to be a baker?”

“Bad idea,” I said. I was tired.

“I think it’s genius,” she said.

I wiped my hands off on the dish towel tied around my waist. I never was one for aprons. “You really think so?”

“Well, face it, you have all this, like, cooking energy, and you are always unleashing it on your family but it’s too much for us. It’s just too
big
. So if you could take that energy and put it off on some other people, things might be easier on everyone.”

It was the greatest number of sentences Camille had spoken directly to me without shouting for years. I felt timid and hopeful. “I hadn’t thought of it that way.”

“So are you going to incorporate? What’s your company called?”

“Called?”

“Well, you have to have a name, don’t you? I mean, you’re going to have business cards, right?”

“I don’t have business cards.”

“You can’t just write your number on the bottom of the box. Oh my God, you do have boxes, don’t you?”

“Grandma is doing that.”

“Good, then I’ll make the cards on the computer. You need a great name. Something catchy and to the point.”

I mulled it over. I looked around the kitchen for inspiration. “Cakes by Ruth?”

Camille rolled her eyes. “Didn’t you ever take a marketing class in school?”

“You take marketing?”

“You need something that just hits you, bang! And then everybody will remember you. It’s like the Taco Bell Chihuahua. What is it you want to say?”

“Please buy these cakes.”

I was making a joke but she shook her head with great
seriousness. “Not buy. You don’t want to ask people to buy something so up-front like that. It’s too, I don’t know, desperate.”

“Please eat these cakes.”

“That’s closer. That’s on the right track.” Camille bent down until her nose was parallel with a cake. She looked at it very hard. She seemed to be in conversation with the cake, then suddenly she yelped and clapped her hands together. “Eat Cake!” she cried. “That’s what the company will be called. It’s very classical, its got the whole Marie Antoinette thing, except of course you know she never actually said that. It’s hip, it’s funny, it’s memorable, it’s in your face. Eat Cake.”

“Eat Cake,” I said. I might have wanted something a little fancier but that certainly summed up the goals of the project.

“Mom, it’s great. You’ll make so much money you can rent some kitchen someplace and stop cooking at home all the time. You can get out on your own.”

“Do you think I’m ready?”

“It’s time,” she said solemnly.

How I wished I had an ounce of Camille’s confidence and bravado. She so rarely showed any enthusiasm about anything that when she did she practically lit up the room.

“I have to say, I find these cakes much more attractive now that I know they’re leaving home.”

“Sort of like the way boys get better looking when they’re going off to war.”

“Or junior year abroad.”

“Exactly. I have a slightly bum cake here, if you want a piece.”

She peered over to the cake in the corner, the one that had been shunned by the more perfect cakes. She was thinking it over. “Sure,” she said finally. “A little piece.”

I was cutting two little pieces when the phone rang. It was my mother.

“I wanted to tell you, we’re eating out.”

There was an enormous amount of racket in the background, music, laughing. “Are you in a bar?”

“We’re in the mall, we’re going to get some dinner. There’s a Friday’s in the mall. If you need us you can call the Friday’s.”

“For Christ’s sake, we are not fifteen years old,” I heard my father say in the background. “We do not have to tell her where we are and where we’re going.”

“She makes us dinner every night, Guy. Have you not noticed that? Do you think it’s fair to let her set two places for us at the table and then just not show up?” My mother had obviously turned her face away from the phone but the conversation was remarkably clear, along with all the screaming children and high-pitched laughs, the call and reply of shopping teenagers.

“Who is that?” Camille said. She could hear the noise in the background but she couldn’t make out the voices.

“Your grandparents,” I said.

She pointed her fork at me. “Your parents.”

“So you called her. Great. Hang up the phone.” My father.

“Thanks for calling, Mom.”

“We should be in by eight.”

“Give me the phone!” he said.

“Here, take it. What’s wrong? Can’t hold the phone?”

“We have no idea what time we’ll be in! We’re adults. Adults go out to dinner.” I could hear him shouting but I knew that the phone was nowhere near his mouth.

“Cakes going okay?” my mother asked.

“Oh sure, everything’s fine. You two have fun.”

“Did you get a chance to see Oprah? I walked right out and missed her today.”

“Mom, you’re just doing this to make him crazy. Say good-bye and hang up the phone.”

“Hang up the goddamn phone or I’m going to go to dinner without you.”

“I don’t care if you go to dinner without me,” I heard my mother say. And then the line went dead. I was grateful. I couldn’t stand the thought of hanging up on someone.

“So none of this is genetic, right?” Camille said.

“My parents adopted me and then your father and I adopted you. I was just waiting for the right time to tell you.”

“Thanks,” Camille said. “It’s a relief.”