by Jeanne Ray
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 sen
t 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.
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 talk
ing 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.