“What happened?” My fingers turned cold around my fork.
She shrugged. “He left. He was gone for about six months.” She paused, as if she were counting up the days in her head. “Then it took another six months after that for me to let him back in the house. But we got over it. That was a long time ago. I like to keep the past in the past. We’ve got a good marriage. He doesn’t talk about going anyplace now except maybe the grocery store.”
I couldn’t eat the cake. I felt like the room was spinning. I could see my husband untying the line from the dock, using a slender oar to push himself away. It was a bright blue day, a few puffy clouds in the eastern corner of the sky for decoration. Everywhere there was the slap of waves and the plangent cry of seagulls. “I don’t want to lose Sam.”
Florence took another bite of cake. “You know, this cake is every bit as good as the other one. It’s just not as flashy. That other one took my breath away, but now that I’m really getting through this slice, I can see that it has a lot of character. That lemon glaze, it just has so much lemon to it. Usually a lemon glaze is just a sugar icing that a lemon has passed over.”
“I always use three times as much lemon juice as the recipes call for,” I said. I could barely make the words. There went Sam’s little boat. The sail was swelling up with wind. The sun was shining in his hair. “You just have to cook it down longer.” Why were we talking about the glaze? I was going to lose my husband, and while he was what I really cared about, I would have been lying if I said that the attending issues did not cross my mind, such as how I was going to pay for things, school and the house and the health insurance.
“So what if your father is right?” Florence said.
“And he shouldn’t be forced to feed himself?”
She sighed and started over again, using her most patient tone of voice. “What if your father is right and the answer to your problems is sitting on that plate in front of you?”
I looked down at my plate. My slice of lemon poppy seed cake was untouched.
“You think I should bake cakes for a living?”
“You have a whole lot of things you’re worried about, emotional things like who’s happy and who’s fulfilled, and practical things, like how to make money and who’s supposed to work. So maybe you should try to find an answer for yourself instead of waiting around to see what Sam’s going to do. Doing something is always easier than waiting. Besides, what if it worked out? Then Sam wouldn’t have to worry about finding a job. You could give him a job working for you, sifting flour or something. You could give him such a good salary he could buy himself a boat.”
“It’s a lovely thought, but it’s crazy. So I can bake. Everybody can bake.”
She tapped her fork against my plate. “Not like this, they can’t. I may not know you very well, but you seem to spend a lot of your
energy holding things together. Why not put that energy into doing something big?”
“Cake isn’t big enough to pull us out of this mess.”
Florence smiled at me. She had absolute confidence in what she was saying. “Take a bite of that cake and tell me that everyone in this country wouldn’t like to have a piece of it.”
She looked at me hard until I realized that she was not being rhetorical. I took a bite of my own cake. I had to admit, she had a point. The cake was crunchy and sweet and all pulled together by the tart edge of lemon.
It was good.
MY FIRST MEMORY OF CAKE IS NOT OF EATING ONE
, although in this memory I am five or nearly five and so certainly I must have had plenty of cake by this time just from birthdays alone. In my first memory of a cake it is summer and my mother is standing in the kitchen of our apartment with the windows open and the sun shining off the side of her metal mixing bowl. She is young and straight-backed and beautiful in a serious sort of way. She is measuring the flour she had sifted, holding the cup up to the abundant light to make sure she has exactly the right amount. My mother did not believe in cake mixes, not because she was a purist, but because she was poor, and the cake mix was a relatively new invention of luxury meant to free up more time for the modern homemaker. My mother, who always had tests to grade and rehearsals to attend, didn’t see herself as much of a homemaker.
On the morning of the cake, I am standing on a stool beside her, which puts me at a comfortable height to see everything that is going on. My mother pours the flour into a fine-mesh colander that sits over her mixing bowl, and into that colander she adds one tablespoon plus one teaspoon of baking powder from a bright red tin with an Indian on the label, and three quarters of a teaspoon of salt. The precision of it all appeals to me, and I love the teaspoons,
but especially the quarter teaspoon, as children love things that are small. They are held together by a single silver ring and the ones that aren’t being used at the moment make a music like bells when she picks up the one that she wants. My mother was a teacher, and when I say that, I don’t simply mean it was the way she made her living. She was a teacher in her soul and found that inside every action there was the opportunity for instruction. I used to wonder if she would have talked the same way if I wasn’t there, if she would have tried to teach the cat how to bake a cake instead.
“Always take the time to double-check your measurements. I read one teaspoon, I measure one teaspoon, and then I go back to the book and check again. It’s easy enough to beat an egg into the batter but it’s a lot harder to pull one out.” She runs her fork inside the colander and then shakes it gently into the bowl until the flour and salt and leavening all fall together like a light snow. “This resifts it.” She shakes again and the last of the powder wafts down. “There. All the dry ingredients are ready to go.” Next she unwraps the butter and scrapes a stick and a half from the paper into another bowl. “Always soften the butter. I put it out this morning first thing when I woke up. If you try to beat sugar into cold butter, you’re not going to get anywhere. You have to follow the rules, Ruth. It’s all in the book. If a person can read, they can cook.”
I find that I am taking in every word of what she is saying. Even as a small child I didn’t always listen to my mother, but everything she has to say about cake is something I want to hear.
She pours a cup of bright sugar on top of the butter and hands me the bowl with a wooden spoon. “Mix,” she says. “Put your back into it.”
And so I begin to beat the butter and sugar together. My mother stops me a couple of times to help me get a better grasp on
the spoon or to demonstrate the vigor she is expecting. I love the work. Maybe that’s what I’m remembering: It was the first time I ever had a real job that was more than setting the table. Then my mother shows me how to separate an egg so that the whites slide out into a bowl and the bright yellow yolk stays nestled in a half shell. She drops the yolk onto a waiting saucer. The whole thing seems like a brilliant magic act to me, so when she hands me a whole egg and suggests I do it by myself, you would have thought she was letting me drive the car.
“Someday, when you’re very good at this, you can break them directly into the bowl, but for now you have to check yourself and make sure that none of the shell falls in. Nobody wants a cake with shell in it,” she says with sharp authority.
“What about the whites?” I want to know.
“We’ll think of something later,” my mother says. And she will. She is not a woman to let a perfectly good egg white go down the drain.
I crack each egg into the saucer and then slide the yolk carefully into the batter one at a time, beating in every trace of yellow before going on to the next. Six eggs in all! It seems inconceivable that one cake could take in so many eggs yolks. I beat and beat until I feel like my arm might disengage from my shoulder. My mother looks into the bowl from time to time but she never says, I think that’s about got it. She just nods at me and smiles. “We’ve got to get the air to stay in there,” she says. “It’s no trouble at all to make a cake that tastes like a brick, but no one will enjoy it. Making a light cake takes a lot of work, and that’s the kind we make because that’s the kind people like.”
She goes to the highest shelf of the pantry and brings down a brown bottle so small I would have given it to my dolls to play with
had I ever been able to reach it myself. “Vanilla,” she says. She unscrews the cap and holds it down to nose level so that I can take a sniff. “This is the secret ingredient and it’s very expensive. This is what makes a cake a cake.” She measures out a careful teaspoon, going all the way to the top without spending a drop more than she has to. It is a skill she would use when making screwdrivers years later. She pours it into my batter and I continue to beat. Now with every stroke there is a soft wave of vanilla in the air, and I can for the first time imagine how the cake will taste. In the most fundamental way I have my first glimpse of how ingredients come together, how each is nothing in particular by itself but once they are joined they can make something miraculous. My mother adds part of the flour and then some milk, taking those two ingredients back and forth while I work. She butters the pans using her fingers and then sprinkles in some flour and knocks it from side to side until the pans are evenly coated. Then she pours the batter into each pan in a way that strikes me as completely even and therefore fair. There is a system, an order to everything she does, in much the same way there is order to the notes she plays on the piano. The light on our oven is broken and so to see the cakes I have to open the door a crack to peek inside.
My mother tells me to cut it out. I am compromising the temperature with my curiosity.
The measuring cups, the round pans, the wire cooling racks that looked like a section of delicate fencing—all of these things amaze me. While the cakes are cooling, my mother beats up a pan of dark and glossy frosting, her wooden spoon attacking the mixture with such ferocity that I realize I’ve been doing next to nothing all this time. Once the cakes are completely, unquestionably cool, she lets me help her spread the frosting on, sweet and stiff
across the layers. When we stack one cake on top of the other, we have made something miraculous, a building, a piece of art. She lets me smooth down the top with a wide spatula and does nothing to correct my work when I’m finished.
“You made a cake,” my mother says, and gives me a kiss on the top of my head.
I ask her if we can have a piece. I imagine the two of us sitting at the little table in the kitchen and eating the entire thing, slice by slice. “It’s for the school,” she says, and tells me to go and get my jacket. The cake that we have made is bigger than the two of us. It has places to go.
Do I remember any other day from my childhood so clearly? Maybe a minute, a particular dress, some praise or punishment in class, a girlfriend with whom I traded sandwiches, but I don’t remember any of it with the detail, the breathing Technicolor with which I remember that day. The cake, as it turns out, was to be taken to the school, where the band was raising money for new instruments at a carnival. My mother and I go to the same school. I am in preschool and she is a teacher in the high school. At this particular carnival there is an event called a Cake Walk, in which people buy tickets for the right to walk in circles over numbers written in chalk on the ground. They go around and around while someone plays a song, and when the song is over, the person who is standing on the lucky number (called out by a man wearing a red-striped coat) gets to go to the cake booth and pick out any cake he or she wants.
The cake booth has as much to do with my education as helping my mother bake the cake. When we come to the carnival I believe that the cake my mother carries in is as beautiful and perfect as anything I have ever seen. But when we set our cake down on
the long wooden table, I know it is only in the middle of the pack. There are towering white cakes buried beneath an avalanche of coconut, delicate golden cakes rimmed in strawberries. There are cakes with roses the size of hens’ eggs made out of frosting and a sculpted Bundt cake that looks like the base of an elaborate fountain. There must be fifty cakes on the table when the Cake Walk begins and I stand in front of each one of them for a minute and wonder about their ingredients. Did they all have vanilla? One smells like oranges. My mother talks to her students who cluster around her, wanting her attention. Other parents come and put their cakes down on the table. I judge each one against ours, deciding if it is lesser or greater. While our cake doesn’t look particularly special, I know that the six egg yolks are our secret strength.
Every trip around the ring costs a dime, which means that if you win you can have one of these beauties for ten cents. My mother lets me go around twice and then says enough is enough, and while it is thrilling to be out there in the game, stepping from number to number and wondering when the song might finish up, I don’t mind not winning. I don’t want to have to choose. I want them all, not to eat but to study. I want to take them apart, unmake them until I understand every component. There is a cake at the end of the row that has four layers.
Looking over my life, I can remember certain cakes the way other people remember particularly happy birthdays. When I was eleven my mother let me go to Chicago to see my father for a weekend. He was playing at the Drake, an impossibly fancy hotel with heavy carpets over polished floors. There were flower arrangements throughout the hotel that were twice as tall as I was. I could only imagine they were put together by people standing on ladders. I sat at a little table in the lobby so small it could barely hold
the slice of golden genoise and the glass of milk the waitress brought me out from the kitchen. She leaned over the piano and whispered to my father, who laughed and whispered something back to her, all the while playing a song he wasn’t even thinking about. I ate my cake, which was light and dry and wouldn’t have been sweet at all except for the gorgeous puddle of syrup that surrounded it. I could barely stand to swallow each bite, I was trying so hard to figure out what had gone into it. It was a very special and rare occasion that I was allowed to visit my father alone, and he had solemnly promised my mother that I would be asleep by nine, but it was a quarter till eleven before he took a break and walked me up to the room. By that time I’d had two petits fours and a flourless chocolate torte and called it dinner. He said good-night and left me alone to go back to his work. I was alone in a hotel room, something that I knew would have sent my mother into an uncontrollable frenzy. I slept on a roll-away cot at the foot of my father’s bed. He didn’t come in until after four in the morning. When he flipped on the light switch he absolutely gasped to see me there. I had no idea if he was playing a joke or not. When he got up the next afternoon (I spent the morning in the bathroom reading magazines from the stack on the dresser, mostly things about where to eat in Chicago) he took me to the bus station, gave me a kiss, and sent me home a day early with a book of matches and a bottle of shampoo that said “The Drake” on the front. I kept them for years.