Friendship Cake

by Lynne Hinton

  Since then, I’ve buried my grandmother, my mother, and two siblings. You might say that I have developed the reputation for being the deathwatch angel around these parts. I’ve sat in many a hospital room with dying people because their family couldn’t deal with the final hours. I don’t mind having this reputation; I consider it a gift. Just like there are some people who can cook and others who weave cloth or build birdhouses, I can sit in a room, watch as death approaches, gently take the hand of the dying person, and lift them in its arms. It’s the one thing in my life that I’m sure of.

  The rest is a huge question mark. Ambiguous and watery, just like Beatrice’s boundaries. And I’m not stupid. I know people are curious about my sexuality. Hell, I’m curious about my sexuality. But I’m sixty-three, and I still do not know what or how it is that I love.

  I never married, left home when I was eighteen. I followed my sisters and went to work in a cotton mill just to get away from the farm. There in town I met women whose lives were more cruel than I would ever imagine and men whose hearts were full of greed and malice. I made my home in a boardinghouse with six other young women mill-workers, and it was the most of family I have ever really known.

  Roxie Ann Barnette and I were roommates. And as well as I can guess, I believe that I fell in love with her. In those days, however, Oprah wasn’t around to help you name your relationship. There wasn’t any support group to encourage the child within. There were no women running with wolves. Hell, there wasn’t even an advice column for girls who had any feelings other than those of desire to raise a family and win a blue ribbon at the state fair. I was confused and lacking in any guidance. So, without complaining, I took the most that I could get, friendship as rich and deep as intimacy can go without touching and a paycheck once a month.

  Roxie would set us up on double dates. God bless her for trying. I was even engaged for a brief period. Some man who had his eye on Roxie but settled for her best friend. I can’t remember the fellow’s name. Anyway, they were lovely, agonizing years of hating myself while trying to fit into somebody else’s clothes. Years of not knowing what was wrong with me but feeling certain that I would never be happy. At least once a month I would swear that I was going to move out. It was killing me to be faced with such strange and inappropriate feelings.

  To this day, I’m not sure Roxie knows how much I care for her. Never in the four years that we lived together did she seem to know. I could always tell when someone would question her about me; they’d look at me hard while I clung to Roxie’s every word. But she never hesitated, never held back. She brushed the accusations and the suspicions aside. She never turned me away. I get the feeling that George, her husband of forty years, knows. There’s a bristle to him that apparently only shows up when I’m around. Roxie acts like she doesn’t see it. I think I kind of like that, though, that he knows that I could take Roxie to a place just beyond his reach. And she, without hurting either one of us, finds room in her life for us both.

  They live in Maryland. I go up to see her every couple of months, and she has frequently come down to see me. We meet at silly motels along the interstate. George prefers that she stay near the highway when she travels. I guess it makes him feel like he can get to her more easily.

  She’s as beautiful as she was forty-five years ago. Tall and raw-boned, she’s a long drink of clear, still water. Dark hair, solid smile. She has eyes like a child. Open, honest. Like her conversations. She’s as innocent as rain. The answer to a lonely man’s prayers. She believes what you tell her, and she takes everyone at their word.

  I’m exactly her antithesis. Short and dumpy and as muddy as the Mississippi River. And I’m hardly innocent. The only man’s prayer I can answer has to do with being able to tote bags of cement twice my body weight and knowing which wrench is used to take off square-headed bolts. And don’t expect me to believe anything you say until you prove yourself worthy of my trust. I’m as cynical as I am stubborn, so I rarely get taken advantage of, except by this woman who holds up my heart.

  We’re about as different as two women can be. But we can finish one another’s sentences and wake up with the same dreams. I light the fire and she keeps it going. She tests the ice and I skate behind her. There is nothing I wouldn’t do for Roxie. No place I wouldn’t travel to find her. No silence I wouldn’t hold. I was even her maid of honor, something I swore would never happen on this side of heaven.

  When she got married, however, I honored her vows. I respected her relationship with George. But God help me, on their wedding day, hearing the promises, knowing the love that was there and not there, I thought my heart would split. The healing was a long time in coming, and I doubt I’ll ever be whole. But I’ve managed to keep my head about me and not be lost to the emptiness. I’ve resorted to severe Bible reading, like punishment I suppose, and bonsai gardening. And somehow I find that the two taken in daily doses ease the pain and sharpen my focus. So that the years have passed and I have managed a life, a living, and a livelihood.

  I’m the godmother of her two children, been like another grandmother to Ruby’s littlest one. So that in some odd sort of old-maid sister kind of role, I’ve become a part of the family. And much to old George’s chagrin, I’ve found my place in everybody’s heart but his.

  Recently, I have noticed a change in the way Roxie remembers a story or tries to make a decision. There’s a look in her eye that reminds me of the distant daydreaming I used to lose myself in while spinning spools of yarn along big silver bobbins. A step just beyond reality. A pulling of the mind. It’s just that it seems she has a harder time getting back.

  I was surprised when George called me a month ago to ask if she had written. It seems she was convinced that we were supposed to meet in Virginia the weekend of July Fourth. I knew nothing of these plans but worried that I might spoil some necessary charade she had arranged for herself. So I made up some lie that some of my mail had been missing for a few weeks and could I please speak to her?

  “She’s not here,” he said. There was a long pause, and I knew there was more to be spoken.

  “Lou, Roxie isn’t well. There was an incident.” I remember waiting for more.

  “An incident? What the hell does that mean, George?”

  He cleared his throat, and I remember thinking it was one of his arrogant but typical gestures. “I’ve been seeing someone else. For about a year. Rox found out.”

  I believe my reply was something like “Yeah, that’s an incident all right, you son of a bitch. Why is she still with you?”

  And he said, “I told you. She isn’t well.”

  I asked him what he meant, and he said that the doctors think she is in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. About two years ago they said this.

  That’s all I remember of that conversation. That and the question of how she could keep such a thing from me. That and the attempt to grasp how I was stupid enough not to see it. All of it, including knowing about the two-timing bastard that she married. I drove up the next day. Roxie seemed surprised and actually quite focused. I asked her if she wanted to come back with me, and she politely refused. We did not speak of the incident.

  For three weeks I have called her every day. She will never stay on the phone long enough for me to get a true sense of how she’s doing. At least four times she has claimed it’s a bad time to talk. And in between phone calls, I find myself vacillating between driving up to Maryland, packing her stuff, and moving her back home with me and staying the hell out of it and letting her handle her own life. I feel like I’m running from Margaret’s house to Beatrice’s. Ms. Cement-Wall Boundaries to Ms. Floating Borders. I do not know how to be.

  I realize that this lifelong struggle, however, is wearing this old heart thin. I know that I cannot tell anyone about this. I understand that it’s a secret I do not even know how to tell. I’ve kept quiet for so long I’m not even sure how to give it words. All I know is that the burden is getting heavier. But it’s highly unlikely anybody has a
ny counsel for me now. Too much water beneath the bridge. Too many pages in this chapter.

  I suppose I should just keep to the path I’ve made for myself, fill my time with gardening and the reading of the prophets, the quarterly treat of my bonsai books that come from California, and now this stupid cookbook. Distraction has steadied me this long. Perhaps it will level my thinking a little bit longer.

  *

  Beatrice’s Prune Cake

  1 cup salad oil

  2 cups sugar

  3 eggs

  1 teaspoon baking soda

  1 cup buttermilk

  2 cups plain flour

  1 teaspoon cinnamon

  1 teaspoon baking powder

  ½ teaspoon salt

  1 cup prunes, cut up

  ½ cup prune juice

  1 teaspoon vanilla

  SAUCE

  1 cup margarine

  1½ cups brown sugar

  1 cup condensed milk

  1 box confectioners’ sugar

  1 teaspoon vanilla

  Combine oil and sugar. Add eggs one at a time. Add soda to buttermilk. Sift dry ingredients together. Add flour mixture alternately with buttermilk. Fold in prunes and juice, add vanilla. Bake at 350°F for 30 to 35 minutes in a greased and floured broiler pan.

  When cake has baked for 30 minutes, begin to prepare sauce. Cook first three sauce ingredients over low heat. Cool and add confectioners’ sugar and vanilla. Pour sauce over cooled cake.

  —BEATRICE NEWGARDEN

  *

  I don’t understand why everybody’s so mad at me. I was only trying to help. I figured a cookbook would help us raise some money, get us involved in a task together, create more love among the women at Hope Springs. But I just got off the phone with Louise, and she talked to me like I suggested we donate our kidneys, for goodness’ sake. My mother always told me I was too good for that church, those women. I’m forever having to be the one to smooth things over, get people to talk to each other. And I just hope they realize that if I hadn’t come in with this idea about the cookbook, our Women’s Guild would not last another year.

  The Good Lord knows that I have tried to breathe new life into that church by bringing in some younger women. But these girls today…they have aerobics classes and their careers in management. They have their children in everything there is imaginable. Why I even heard Rev. Stewart was planning to have some Chinese karate man using our fellowship hall to teach karate or kung fu or some Asian exercise that probably isn’t Christian.

  Things are just so complicated these days. Everybody’s trying to do everything and getting nothing done. Nobody wants to pitch in and help at the church. I feel like it’s all I can do to keep that little church up and running. Nobody has any sense of loyalty or responsibility anymore. And I don’t see it any more clearly than I do in my own family. Robin has an important job at some bank in Charlotte. She’ll probably never marry. Teddy keeps going to school for one thing and then another. And Jenny, bless her heart, the twins and that lazy husband of hers are all that she can handle.

  In the beginning I tried to busy myself in their lives, be a real mother to them, but I was told in a hurry to mind my own business. And after Paul died I just assumed I could live with them throughout the year, especially during the winter, since the homeplace gets so cold. It’s a daughter’s duty, after all, to care for an aging mother. But that idea went nowhere.

  Oh, I admit it hurt my feelings for a while, but I realized that they’ve got their own lives to lead. So I moved back home. And even though it took a while to adjust to living alone, I managed. I stayed busy with visiting the sick, taking cassette tapes of the Bible to the shut-ins, teaching crafts at the nursing home. I was home for about a year when Dick Witherspoon asked me if I would like to help over at the funeral home. Well, I never thought I would be one to do such a job, but it turns out to suit me very well.

  I always did know how to put clothes together, and I’ve fixed hair since I was a little girl twirling strands of cotton. The makeup wasn’t hard to learn. Pinks and rose mostly. Mr. Witherspoon says I’m the best funeral beautician he’s ever seen. He says you would hardly know that those corpses are dead the way I fix them up. I like to think of it as my little ministry for the community and for those who suffer.

  I know most of the dead. It’s a small community after all. So I can usually remember how they flip their hair and how much lipstick they wear. I’ve got a good memory for how people look. And I am also very clear about what they could have done to look better. On occasion, it’s this desire to better someone’s appearance that has gotten me into trouble.

  I almost got in a fight with Delores Wade over her mama. Delores claimed her mother had never had color in her hair and that I should leave the gray showing in the front. I knew perfectly well that Elsie Wade needed Clairol Number 83, natural black shade.

  I had tried to tell Elsie while she was living in a loving, gentle way, like the Scriptures tell us to do, but you’d have thought I was telling her she needed a feminine hygiene spray. We were in the Wal-Mart at Burlington, standing at the shampoo aisle, just chatting, and I said, “Why, Elsie, I believe that if you tried this Clairol Number Eighty-three, you’d be very pleased with the results.” She turned a funny shade of red, made a huffing kind of sound, and wheeled her buggy around so fast she knocked over the toothpaste display.

  You know, thinking about that now, I remember that happened only a few weeks before she died. So that when they brought her into Witherspoon’s, I figured here was my chance to lend Elsie some of the dignity she would never claim while she lived here on earth. But once again my good deed got punished.

  Delores, the meddlesome daughter who moved up north after school, claimed her mama looked too young. The black hair wasn’t natural. I said to her just as tenderly as I could, “Now, Delores, isn’t that the point for women in life and in death?” I was only speaking the truth, but after I said it I was afraid the woman was going to hit me!

  Dick, Mr. Witherspoon, said that even though he could see that I had done an excellent job with Elsie, the bereaved family needed to be pleased. Delores had apparently made things difficult for him. So I gave Elsie back that white chunk in the front and even streaked the back.

  After that Mr. Witherspoon preferred that I let the family choose how to fix up their loved one. He agreed that I had a real eye for that sort of thing, but that in the funeral business, just like at Kmart, the customer is always right. So now I fix them up the way I remember they looked or the way they could have looked with a little help, take a picture, and then let the family tell me what they want to change. There’s always something they want different, since I’ve learned there’s nothing worse than a person in mourning having to make wardrobe decisions. I keep the picture as a sort of legacy to my work. Mr. Witherspoon said he used to do the same thing, but now he doesn’t care to remember how many people he’s buried.

  I shouldn’t complain about the families, since I know all about what grief can do to your memories. For the longest time after Paul died, I pretended we never had an argument. I’d have long conversations with the other women about how Paul never raised his voice and how we never let the sun go down on our anger. They would all smile and nod, pat me on my arm like I was so fortunate.

  But in the more recent years, I’ve remembered things a little differently. Like how Paul never raised his voice because he rarely used it around me. And that we never had any arguments because we never talked. I realized that I had grown so accustomed to the silence that I began to invent reasons for it. Like he had too many things on his mind to speak about my new dress. Or he was all talked out from the last auction he called. I pretended over the years that we were comfortable and that the mediocrity that we both settled for was really happiness.

  It never occurred to me that we didn’t have anything to say to one another. That the silence was simply reflective of our marriage. Now don’t hear me wrong; I’m not saying that Paul Newgarden wa
s a bad husband or even that he was a bad man. He wasn’t. He provided for his family. He bought the children toys on holidays, took us to the beach every summer, and even set me up my own savings account. He helped out around the house and did as much driving for the children as I did. He just didn’t know how to love me. Not in the way I wanted.

  There was always a gift for my birthday. Weekends there would be some little knickknack he would pick up from an auction and bring home after the sale. He never missed taking me out to eat for our anniversary. All things that other women claim not to get from their husbands. But even these women, when they make this claim, make it with a depth of humor, some slapstick comment that makes me realize that there’s some balance for what they do get that I’d never understand.

  Like, for instance, maybe he doesn’t bring her flowers but he can say her name in a way that reminds her of pure sweetness. Or maybe he forgets their anniversary but makes up for it by rubbing her feet and singing her some silly love song that makes her blush. So that even though a woman would complain about what her husband did or forgot to do, there would always be a lift to her voice when she remembered how he made it up to her.

  Paul never forgot anything, leaving me with no grounds to complain and no memory of clever romance he used to win back my affections. He was sturdy and dependable, solid as Gibraltar, but the thing is that he never, not in the thirty-seven years that we were married, ever surprised me.

  I’ve learned that some people like predictability, say that they need it. I know that I thought I did. But I wish Paul would have done at least one thing that I could remember with a smile and a shake of my head. Some story that I could think about and, even with twenty years having passed, still laugh at the thought, and know that it was so intimate that no one could understand.