The School of Essential Ingredients (8 page)

“NOW it’s time to add the flour.” Lillian took the lid off the container. “The way I see it,” she remarked, lifting out a scoopful and letting it fall through the sifter in a fluttering snow shower into the large measuring cup. “Flour is like the guy in the movie who you don’t realize is sexy until the very end. I mean, be honest, when you are dividing up duties in the kitchen, who wants to be in charge of the flour? Butter is so much more alluring. But the thing is, flour is what holds a cake together.”

Lillian began adding some of the flour to the batter, then milk.

“There is a trick, though,” she commented, as she alternated adding flour and milk one more time, ending with a last portion of flour by hand. “If you mix the flour with the other ingredients for too long you will have a flat, hard cake. If you are careful, however, you’ll have a cake as seductive as a whisper in your ear.

“And now, one last step,” she said. Lillian beat the egg whites into a foam, adding just a bit of sugar at the end, as the class watched it turn into soft, then stiff peaks. When it was done, Lillian carefully folded the frothy cumulus clouds into the batter, a third at a time. She looked up and gazed out at the class. “Always save a bit of magic for the end.”

Carl had Been forty-four when Helen had told him she had had an affair—over by that point, but she just couldn’t keep it from him anymore, she had said. It was the most stunning thing that had ever happened to him, a rogue wave when he thought he understood the elements about him. Helen sat across from him at their kitchen table, crying, and he realized he had no idea whose life he had suddenly walked into. He remembered odd things at that moment—not the first time he had kissed Helen, but the time soon after, when he had walked up behind her as she was standing in her small dormitory kitchen and he touched his lips to the back of her neck.

She didn’t want to leave him, she said, and she didn’t want him to leave her. She loved him, always had; she just needed for him to know. He found himself wishing that she, who could keep a Christmas secret from their children for months without wavering, could have kept this one for herself—not forever, but for a while, as if in recognition that some announcements need anticipation to ease their transitions into our lives, a chance to feel the wavering doubts, to note the passenger seat of the car set to measurements not our own, the last cup of coffee taken from the pot without an offer to share.

It was, as Carl would later say, a spectacular failure of imagination on his part. He, who inhabited the future every day in his job, who helped people prepare for disaster of any magnitude, hadn’t seen any signs. Helen insisted that was because she had never changed how she felt about him, but he couldn’t believe that was strictly true. He wondered how he hadn’t known and if he hadn’t—as was so obviously the case—how he would ever know anything again. He lay in bed at night next to Helen, and thought.

Carl knew the statistics for divorce, of course. It was part of his job. In fact, statistics predicted a far greater chance of divorce than automobile accident, death by violence, or the all-too-graphic possibility of “dismemberment”—which was perhaps why insurance companies didn’t sell policies for marital stability. In the weeks after his conversation with Helen, Carl found himself observing the young couples who came to his office, fascinated that people would spend hundreds of dollars a year insuring against the chance that someone might slip on their front steps in ice that rarely made an appearance in the coastal Northwest, yet go to bed each night uninsured against the possibility that their marriage might be stolen the next day. Perhaps, he thought, imagination fails when the possibilities are so obvious.

Carl said Years later that it was his very lack of imagination that had caused his marriage to continue. As easy as it was, after Helen told him, to imagine his wife with someone else—he knew, after all, which drink she would order if she wanted courage (scotch, straight up), which stories were her favorites to tell about the children (Mark and the bunny, Laurie learning how to swim), how she might touch the tip of her nose and dip her chin if she found one of his (the other his) jokes funny—as easy as it was to imagine all that, to realize how neatly all his knowledge of his wife could be spun out into a continually rolling film he had no desire to see, he could not imagine the next forty years without her.

What would he do with his long legs if he could no longer stretch them across the bed to warm her side while she brushed her teeth in the bathroom (thirty seconds each side, up and down, her toe tapping out the time)? Who would leave the kitchen cupboards open if she left, or catch the fragments of his sentences as they traveled across a dining room table littered with the unending commentary of their children? What would be the point of changing gears in their old we-ought-to-get-rid-of-it car, if not to touch her hand, which always rested on the gearshift as if (it was a family joke) to claim ownership?

He couldn’t imagine, couldn’t see, a failure of comprehension on the smallest, and thus largest, of levels. He waited for illumination and with it a direction that would lead him away from his home, his wife, but it didn’t come. He tried to think forward, and simply couldn’t. He and Helen lay, night after night, in bed, not touching, sat at the table and swapped plans for the day over coffee in the morning, told stories about the office or the children in the evening. And slowly, as he waited for illumination, what had happened each day—a fight with a daughter or son, the first crocuses in the garden, Helen’s embarrassment over a haircut—began to pile up against what he could not imagine, until the secret she couldn’t keep became one more part of their lives, one more stick in the nest they had built of moments and promises, the first time he had seen her, the second time they had fought, his hand touching her hair as she nursed a baby. Carl was a bird-watcher; he knew that not all sticks in a nest are straight.

Carl’s older sister didn’t understand. She had noticed something was wrong and badgered him until he told her. Months later, at Thanksgiving, she found him in the kitchen as he was cleaning the carcass of the turkey after dinner.

“How long can you live like this?” she asked him.

“We made a promise, a long time ago.” Carl’s fingers moved among the bones of the turkey, pulling out the pieces of meat and stacking them on the plate beside him. Helen would be making them into sandwiches, turkey hash, and pot pie for the next two weeks, until the children would come down to the dinner table making gobbling noises, declaring they were the ghosts of turkeys past.

“She broke the promise, Carl.” But her tone was gentle.

“We are keeping as much of it as we can.” Carl looked down at the dog waiting patiently at his feet, and dropped a small piece of turkey to the floor. “Marriage is a leap of faith. You are each other’s safety net.”

“People change.”

Carl stopped, and let his fingers rest on the counter in front of him. “I think that’s what we’re both counting on.”

Lillian lifted the cake pans from the oven and rested them on metal racks on the counter. The layers rose level and smooth from the pans; the scent, tinged with vanilla, traveled across the room in soft, heavy waves, filling the space with whispers of other kitchens, other loves. The students found themselves leaning forward in their chairs to greet the smells and the memories that came with them. Breakfast cake baking on a snow day off from school, all the world on holiday. The sound of cookie sheets clanging against the metal oven racks. The bakery that was the reason to get up on cold, dark mornings; a croissant placed warm in a young woman’s hand on her way to the job she never meant to have. Christmas, Valentine’s, birthdays, flowing together, one cake after another, lit by eyes bright with love.

With a deft, quick motion, Lillian poked the golden surface of one of the layers with a toothpick and pulled it out, clean.

“Perfect,” she said. “While it cools we can make the frosting.”

Lillian paused, gathering her ideas.

“When we were making the body of the cake,” she began, “everything was about keeping a balance between air and structure. Now we are putting the cake and the frosting together and it is the contrast that’s important, that will make you take the second bite, and the one after.

“That’s why an all-white cake is especially tricky. We can’t get our contrast from flavor, not in any obvious way. We have no options for chocolate in our frosting, or raspberry preserve filling. No strawberries or lemon zest scattered across the top or hiding between the layers—although any of those could be fun another time.

“A white cake is the opposite of fireworks and fanfare—it’s subtle, the difference in texture between the cake and the frosting as they cross your tongue. It’s a little harder to accomplish”—she smiled at Helen and Carl—“but I have to say, when it works, it is sublime.”

IT WAS A SATURDAY AFTERNOON, almost two years after Helen first told Carl about the affair. The kids were off preparing for Mark’s high school graduation. Carl came up the basement stairs and heard a voice in French, with Helen’s halting repetition afterward. He reached the door of the kitchen and looked in. Helen was standing with her back to him, a tape player balanced precariously on the window ledge, ingredients for a chocolate cake laid out on the counter around her. Helen had never been a particularly tidy cook, and the evidence was everywhere, flour dusting down to the floor, in wide streaks on her apron, melted chocolate dripping across the counter.

The tape stopped and Helen, deep in concentration, didn’t notice. Cakes had always been an elusive prey for Helen. Diligently she had made them for every birthday and celebration—flat, misshapen, rock-hard, molten; Laurie still talked about what she called the volcano cake from her fifth birthday. And yet Carl knew Mark had begged for one; his graduation was that evening and it wouldn’t be a celebration without a cake from Helen.

Carl stood at the door to the kitchen, not moving, watching the late afternoon light filtering through the window and across Helen, coming to rest on the black and white tiles of the floor beneath her feet. He looked at the flour print on her hip where she had placed her hand while reading the next step in the recipe, at the white that was beginning to slip into her hair, strands that he loved and thus didn’t tell her about, as he knew she would pull them out. He looked at her, without speaking, and as he looked, he felt something shift and come to rest inside him, a movement as small and quiet as the tick of a watch.

He walked up behind her and softly touched his lips to the back of her neck. Helen turned to face him, meeting his eyes for a long moment, as if measuring the weight of something within them. Then she smiled.

“You’re home,” she said, and reached up to kiss him.

The class stood companionably around the wooden counter, trying to navigate forkfuls of cake into their mouths without losing a crumb to the floor. The frosting was a thick butter-cream, rich as a satin dress laid against the firm, fragile texture of the cake. With each bite, the cake melted first, then the frosting, one after another, like lovers tumbling into bed.

“Oh, this is delicious!” Claire looked across the table to Carl and Helen. “I can’t believe I made James choose chocolate for our wedding.”

“Definitely beats lamb cake,” Ian commented with a grin.

The fragile-looking older woman stood quietly, savoring the bite in her mouth. Lillian leaned over to her. “Penny for the memory, Isabelle,” she said.

“Oh, my memories cost more than that these days—supply and demand, you know,” Isabelle said with a chuckle, then continued. “I was thinking of Edward, my husband, when I was younger. He was so handsome on our wedding day, so solicitous. It didn’t last—but it was nice remembering.”

While the others continued talking, Carl and Helen stood next to each other, eating quietly. She was left-handed and he was right; as they ate, their free hands would find each other and let go, while their shoulders brushed against each other gently.

One piece of cake lay on the plate at the end of class; Lillian wrapped it in foil and handed it to Carl and Helen as they left the class.

“For you to take home,” she said. “A symbol of a long and happy marriage.”

“Or maybe . . .” Helen looked at Carl, who smiled and nodded. Helen took the foil package and went quickly out the door. Lillian and Carl watched as she caught up with Claire at the front gate. The two women talked for a few moments, then Helen leaned in and kissed Claire on the cheek. When Helen walked back to the kitchen, her face was radiant, her hands empty.