Eat Cake: A Novel

by Jeanne Ray

  “I don’t get my nose out of shape.”

  “You do too. Listen, Ruthie, your mother and I both played piano. We had everything in the world in common, but when I stopped teaching school and started playing in clubs, it was a big change for us. Somehow, I don’t know why, we never really talked about it. We had this nice new baby and I thought I could make more money if I traveled and she thought I was gone too much and the next thing you know we’d had some terrible fights and then we weren’t together anymore. I look back on that now and I think, What, were we crazy? All we had to do was try and work it out. If we had each said what we wanted to do, what we wanted the other one to do, I think we could have sailed right through it. When you get older you see what real trouble is. You look back on what you thought was trouble before and it all seems so small. You’ve just got to give it a little bit of effort.”

  “I’m just so afraid of hurting Sam’s feelings. I don’t want him to think he can’t get a job and everything’s going great for me.”

  “You’d hurt Sam’s feelings a lot more if you wound up divorcing him down the line. He’s a good guy. You know he’s happy for you. But don’t forget all that’s happened: He lost his job, you have these crazy old people living with you, his wife turns out to be some kind of superstar cake baker. It’s a lot for a fellow to digest.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “I just need to talk to him when he gets home.”

  “That’s not what I’m saying at all. I think you should get on a plane and go to Newport. Talk things over with him now.”

  “He’s coming back in a day or two.”

  “Yeah, well, I was going to come back from Chicago in a day or two and then I was going to come back from New York in a week and then the next thing I knew I was back out in California.”

  “I can’t leave now. You forget that I have a couple hundred cakes to bake.”

  The phone rang again.

  “You’re starting a new job. If you start today or if you start three days from now, it isn’t going to make any difference, the good people of Minneapolis will still have food. You took a big chance sending those cakes out there. Take another chance. You were the one who told me that this was the time that everything could change.”

  “What about all those phone calls?”

  “Your mother and I will call everyone back. We’ll take the orders and set up a schedule. You can be home by tomorrow. What’s going to happen before tomorrow?”

  “I have no idea.”

  My father came over and kissed the top of my head. “Do as I say, daughter, not as I did. Now I’m going to go talk to your mother. We’re going to come up with a plan. You go and get yourself on an airplane.”

  In my life I had never gone on a trip that hadn’t been planned at least three months in advance. Buying tickets the day of travel to express your love for someone who already knows you love them was something that people did in movies. Then again, the people in movies had bigger lives than I did, and suddenly my life had become a whole lot bigger.

  Sam had left me the name of the hotel where he’d be staying. I went back to our bedroom and looked through the trash can. I found the empty FedEx envelopes. Now I had the name of a hotel and the name of the yacht broker in Newport. I had as much information as anyone needed to get something done.

  I called the airport and booked myself on the four o’clock flight to Providence, then I put a couple of things in a bag. When I came back out I found both of my parents in the kitchen listening to messages on the answering machine.

  “All three of the hotels called!” my father said. “It’s a jackpot!”

  “He tells me you’re going to see Sam,” my mother said.

  “Dad thought it was a good idea.”

  My mother put her hands on my shoulders and squeezed. “Always listen to your father,” she said to me. “Isn’t that what I told you when you were growing up?”

  I kissed my parents good-bye. I told them to take good care of Camille.

  I still had an hour before I had to be at the airport and so I decided to stop by the hospital and see Florence. I gave one of my cards to the receptionist in the rehab unit and told her I was there for Mrs. Allen.

  “Let me guess. Everybody loved their cakes,” Florence said when she came down the hall dressed in white. “You wanted to tell me so in person.”

  “Something like that.”

  She took me into an office that was full of big-handled spoons and various cups and balls. The sign on the door said OCCUPATIONAL THERAPY.

  “If it’s occupational therapy it seems like you should be finding people occupations.”

  “I found you an occupation,” she said. “After a fashion.”

  “So maybe I can return the favor. Listen to me, I have no idea if this is something you could do or something you’d want to do, but how would you feel about taking a leave of absence and coming to work for me?”

  “The cake business?”

  “It’s booming. It’s more than I’m going to be able to handle. I think I’m going to have to rent a kitchen, if such a thing is even possible, either that or put stoves in all the bedrooms.”

  “How many cakes are we talking about?”

  “Right now, probably two hundred a week, but I have a feeling that if we could figure out a way to really move them, we could do even more business than that.”

  “But I wouldn’t know what I was doing.” Florence picked up a red rubber ball and squeezed it.

  “You’d know as much as I know. I’m not saying this is what I think you should do with your life, but if you just wanted a little switch, who knows? At the end of a couple of weeks you might feel really great about occupational therapy again. Plus, there’s no one else I’d rather spend a day in the kitchen with.”

  Florence looked around the room; posters of hands in different positions lined the walls. “It would be nice to take a break.”

  “Think it over. I’m on my way to Newport now. I’ll probably be back tomorrow. We can talk then.”

  “Newport?”

  “I’m going to go and see Sam.”

  “Sam went to Newport?”

  I nodded my head.

  “He’s fallen for some boat, hasn’t he?”

  “It’s not just about the boats. I just realized that I really wanted to be married to my husband. I thought I should go and tell him that.”

  There was a tap on the door and then a nurse stuck her head inside. “Florence, you’re backing up out here.”

  “I need to go anyway,” I said.

  Florence stood up and gave me a hug. “Cake sounds pretty good right about now. We’ll talk tomorrow,” she said. “You tell Sam I said hi.”

  Everything changes. Sometimes when your life has been going along the same way for a long time you can forget that. You think that every day is going to be the same, that everyone will come home for dinner, that we will be safe, that life will roll along. Sometimes the changes are the kind you can’t do anything about: Someone gets sick, someone dies, and you look back on the past and think, Those were the days of my happy life. But other times things change and all you have to do is find a way to change with them. It’s when you stay in exactly the same spot when everything around you is moving that you really get into trouble. You still have a chance if you’re willing to run fast enough, if you’re willing to forget everything that you were absolutely positive was true and learn to see the world in a different way. So I was not the kind of person who would start a business or fly halfway across the country to declare my love for the man I had been in love with since I was twenty-five. I did not rent cars and find my way alone to seaside towns, but now I did, because I was someone else, because the circumstances changed and I decided to follow my father’s advice and try to change with them.

  I had never before set foot in the state of Rhode Island, but Newport is not such a big town. I only had to ask at one gas station to find out where I was going. It was after dark when I got in and the hot
el was lit up bright, as if every guest had gone to turn on the lights in their room just to help me find them. It was nowhere near as grand as the hotels I had been to with my parents the day before, but in a way it was better, more romantic. I went to the young man at the front desk and told him I was Mrs. Hopson looking for Mr. Hopson. I held up my bag as if it were proof that I was who I said I was.

  “Room three fifty-seven,” he said, and smiled at me. He looked like a college student. He probably decided to go to school here so he could sail in his spare time. “Do you need a key?”

  “That would be nice,” I said, though what I wanted to say was, Is that all it takes to get a key to someone else’s room? People seemed to me to be very trusting in Rhode Island.

  I went up to 357 feeling oddly nervous. I stood in the hall and tapped a few times on the door. When no one answered I slipped the key in the lock. There was a double bed with a striped bedspread and a couple of old prints of sailboats on the walls. Sam’s bag was sitting on the dresser and his extra pair of pants was hanging in the closet, the same pants that had been hanging in our closet this morning. I ran my hand along the leg and felt the broken-in smoothness of the fabric.

  I called the yacht broker’s office, but it was after six o’clock. A friendly voice on the answering machine encouraged me to leave a message and my number but I didn’t do it. Sam was probably coming back soon, unless he was going out to dinner. If he was going out to dinner he could be a couple of hours. I sat down on the edge of the bed and it occurred to me how little I had slept in the past few days. I kicked off my shoes and turned off the light on the bedside table. It had been my intention to just close my eyes for a minute but instead I fell into a deep sleep. For the first time in a while I slept without dreaming of cakes.

  When Sam told me the story later he said he thought he had opened the door to the wrong room. He glanced inside, saw a woman asleep on the bed, and shut the door. After he checked the room number and the number on the key, he went downstairs to tell the desk clerk that they had put another guest in his room and that that guest was now asleep in his bed.

  “It’s your wife,” the college boy said, and gave Sam the kind of smile one guy gives to another in those circumstances.

  So Sam came back upstairs and looked again. He had to say my name three times and shake my shoulder before I woke up.

  “Ruth,” he said. “What happened?” He was panicked, because why would I fly all that way unless something terrible had happened, something I couldn’t tell him about on the phone?

  “I missed you,” I said, and as soon as I said it I knew that missing Sam was exactly what I had been doing. I had been missing him for a long time.

  “You saw me this morning.”

  I yawned and shook my head. I couldn’t believe how deeply I had slept. “No,” I said. “It’s bigger than that. I mean I’ve really been missing you. I love you.”

  “You flew to Newport to tell me that?” He looked somewhere between pleased and confused.

  “There are so many things I’ve been wanting to tell you,” I said. “Things about working and not working and family. A million crazy little things that I haven’t been saying. I feel like we’ve been right next to each other this whole time but we haven’t really been together. I want us to be together. I want to hear everything you’ve been thinking about or worrying about. I want to hear all about the boats. I want to get up in the morning and see the boats that you’re interested in.”

  “I can show you the boats, but I don’t want you to worry about them. I’ve been a little crazy myself lately. I walked around the docks all day and wondered what I was thinking.”

  “You were thinking you loved boats. You probably do love boats. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

  “Do you really want to see them?”

  “I just want to be together.”

  “Don’t you have a lot of cakes to bake?”

  I reached up and kissed his left eyebrow. “I have so many cakes to bake I think that I’m in serious trouble, but we can talk about cakes another time.”

  “While we’re looking at boats maybe?”

  “Maybe we could take turns. You could show me a boat, I could tell you about some cakes. I need your help, Sam. If the whole thought of the cake business leaves you cold, I understand it, but I’m asking you, at least for a little while, please help me.”

  “What are you talking about? You know I’d do anything in the world for you. I want to be helpful. I just didn’t want you to feel like you had to give me a job.”

  “I’m dying to give you a job!” It would seem to me that administrating cakes would be pretty simple after administrating a hospital.

  Sam kissed me. We kissed. “That would mean I was in bed with my boss.”

  “You’re in bed with your partner,” I said, and even though there was still so much more we had to say, we decided at that point to stop talking for a while. I fell back onto the bed with my partner of twenty-six years.

  Epilogue

  AFTER SIX MONTHS IN THE RESTAURANT BUSINESS it became clear to everyone at Eat Cake that the real money was in cakes as gifts. The corporate offices of the Marquette Hotel had shown us the tip of the iceberg when they ordered seventy-five cakes in boxes and mailed them to people who all wanted to send cakes in boxes to other people. My father said it was a regular pyramid scheme. Camille doubled the price for mailed cakes. We said she was insane, but she explained that by cutting out the middleman, we could essentially charge restaurant prices. Then she said this was her part of the business and so we should leave her alone. She hired a boy in her class who she said was not her boyfriend and together they designed a website that gave buyers everything they needed to place an order except for an actual bite of cake. My mother wound up having to make her own cardboard boxes after all. Every time we thought she had perfected the art of the covered box, she came up with something new. The boxes were round now, satin, padded, and beaded until they looked like throw pillows in the Taj Mahal. Eat the cake, keep the box—that was the principle we operated on.

  But Mom wound up passing the box division onto Florence, who was as good with a bolt of fabric and some scissors as she was at the ovens. After spending her life working on other people’s hands, she discovered there was nothing she couldn’t do with her own. Dad’s hands were getting better all the time. He worked on his piano every day, but he was still tentative, slow. He said the best part of being out of the braces was being able to wear cuff shirts again. Still, he thought it would probably be another year before he was playing in public, which is where my mother stepped in.

  “It’s not that I’m bailing out on you,” she told me. “Florence makes better boxes than I do and we both know it. Your father really needs me now. I can’t play the piano all night and then get up and go to work in the morning. Plus there’s all the rehearsing. I’m too old for that. I’ve got to pick one or the other.”

  I told her I understood.

  And so my mother played the piano and my father sang. That way, she reasoned, when he was ready to go back to playing again, people wouldn’t have forgotten about him. “It’s a very fickle business,” she said. But if the business was fickle, they were the flavor of the month. They appeared almost every weekend at a club or hotel and turned down more offers to sing than I turned down cakes to bake. They were putting together quite a following. My father wanted them to start traveling. He said they could make more money if they took their act out on the road. But my mother said that’s how they got into trouble in the first place.

  “Except maybe we’ll do a couple of cruise ships. Your father wants to book us on cruise ships.”

  My parents got their own apartment in the summer when Wyatt came home from college. My father said, and it was true, there were just too many of us in the house. Of course, they still had terrible fights, and one or the other of them would wind up in what was once again the guest room sometimes, but never for more than a night.

  “Why
don’t the two of you just give up and get married?” Sam said to them last week when my father came by to pick up my mother. “You have an act now. You have to stay together.”

  “We are married,” my mother said.

  I was with Sam on this one. “Well then, remarried. Why not get married again?”

  “We never got divorced,” my father said.

  I squinted at them, my parents standing side by side, looking like an advertisement for happy senior living. “What do you mean, you never got divorced?”

  “That’s not such a hard sentence to figure out, is it?” my father said.

  “We certainly meant to divorce,” my mother said. “It was on the top of my to-do list for years. But there was never any money for the lawyer and we didn’t have anything to split up anyway. Divorce was so much more complicated back then. You had to come up with a reason. None of this irreconcilable differences nonsense.”

  “I always thought we’d get divorced when one of us decided to remarry,” my father said. “And then, I don’t know …”

  “I just sort of forgot about it,” my mother said.

  My parents were married?

  “But you always said you were divorced,” Sam said.

  “Well, what are you going to say? It’s easier than explaining the whole thing to everyone.”

  “You could have explained it to me,” I said.

  “You were two,” my mother said. “What can you explain to a two-year-old?”

  Contrary to what I may have believed, I was not a child of divorce after all. I was merely a child of a long estrangement that was now almost completely patched over.

  “Maybe you’d want to have a little ceremony anyway,” I said. “It’s been a long time.”

  “What?” my father said. “Like a commitment ceremony? People only do that on soap operas. You just want an excuse to bake a wedding cake.”

  “The last thing we need around here is another cake,” my mother said, and patted her stomach.