Eat Cake: A Novel Page 17

  I went and sat down beside him on the bed. “I don’t want to talk you out of anything. If you want to feel lousy, then be my guest.”

  “Is this the pep talk then? ‘Don’t worry, Dad, I know it looks bleak now but in time things are going to be a whole lot better’?”

  I tilted my head to one side and then the other. “That sounds pretty good.” I reached over and took a Kleenex out of the box on the nightstand. “I don’t know that I’d use the word ‘bleak’ in a pep talk, though. ‘Bleak’ is a very depressing word.” I dabbed at his eyes and then held it up and told him to blow. He blew.

  “You know what I am, Ruthie? I’m a one-trick pony. In all my life I have known how to do exactly one thing. I was a crappy husband. I was a rotten father. I never owned a home. And none of that bothered me because I was a really good piano player. I may not have been Glenn Gould, but for a guy in a bar, you weren’t going to find any better. I guess I thought that I’d just keep playing and then one night I’d have a couple of drinks and be going to the men’s room but instead I would fall down the basement stairs and break my neck and that would be that.”

  For a minute I thought my father was saying this was all some sort of botched attempt at taking his life. “Are you telling me you threw yourself down the stairs?”

  At least that got a laugh out of him. “I’m not that inept. What I’m saying is I didn’t think about the past and I didn’t think about the future. All I ever cared about was the night I was living, the piano that was in front of me and whether or not it was in tune. And now I can’t play and the strangest thing is I’m not sitting around feeling all chewed up over that. I’m feeling all chewed up over all the other stuff. I mean, I feel good about all the pianos I played, it’s the other things I’m feeling bad about.”

  “You’re feeling bad about Mom?”

  “About your mother, about you, about these kids of yours that I never saw. What kind of insane man would miss his own kid growing up and then miss his grandkids growing up on top of that?”

  “Maybe one who was a great piano player?”

  My father rubbed his slipper against my ankle in lieu of squeezing my arm. “Yeah, but I’m not a great piano player anymore. That means I’ve got to face up to everything.”

  “You’re on the injured list, that’s all. Florence thinks you’re coming back and I’d take Florence’s word on anything.”

  “She does seem to know what she’s talking about. Something tells me if I had known her when I was younger I wouldn’t have made so many mistakes. That’s a woman who could have kept a fellow on the right path.” He tapped my foot. “Enough of this. See, you did cheer me up. Now you need to go back out there and bake your cakes.”

  “Sure,” I said. I kissed his head and went to the door. “You know, Dad, everything is changing around here. I wasn’t crazy about it at first, but maybe it’s all going to turn out okay. Maybe there are certain times in a person’s life when everything can suddenly be different. Maybe this is one of those times, so if you want to be different, you can be.”

  “It’s a sweet thought,” he said.

  “No,” I said. “I think it really might be true.”

  At one o’clock my mother emerged from her room looking exhausted and triumphant. In her hands she held a box the likes of which I had never seen before.

  “You made that?”

  “I made it ten times.” She set it down on the kitchen table. It was somehow lightly padded and covered in a pale green silk organza on the bottom with a darker green tapestry on the lid. It looked artistic, professional, and extremely important. There was a covered button on the top and the inside was lined in pale pink silk.

  “Did you use all your remnants?”

  “What was I saving them for? I had to use them for something eventually.”

  My mother’s remnant collection right there in my hands. I sat down and turned the box over. It was perfect and I told her so.

  “Good,” she said. “Because I’m planning on making about a hundred more. We need to take a cake to all the hotel concierges we talked to, and I want to make a box for Florence, and there are some people at church I’d like to give cakes to if you wouldn’t mind making a few extra.”

  “Of course. And look at the cards Camille made.”

  My mother took a card and smiled, then she went back into her room and returned with a pearl-studded hat pin. She pinned the card on top of the box. “All it needs now are some cakes.”

  The cakes were ready, and together my mother and I nestled three inside each box. We added a few berries, a couple of tiny marzipan birds. My father came out of his room and looked at the production. “It couldn’t be nicer,” he said appreciatively. “It tastes good, it looks good, and it has the right connections. If these cakes don’t fly, then this town just doesn’t eat cake.”

  It was done. All of the measuring and sifting and frosting, the creaming and dusting. It was behind me now. I had made something that I loved. I had put my name on them. It was the best work I had ever done. I hugged both of my parents. They had helped me, really helped me, at exactly the moment I had needed them. Nothing could have made me prouder.

  The birds, so recently returned from their long southern vacations, were back in Minnesota and singing up a storm in my yard. The sky was blue and the grass had turned a shade of bright green I hadn’t seen since before the first snow last autumn. I loaded the cakes in the back of the station wagon and pulled out of the driveway feeling like a woman with a product. I had taken control of the situation. I had potentially saved my family from disaster and ruin. I was ready. I drove away from my house with a list in my hand and a heart full of confidence. I was going to distribute the cakes.

  Then I got lost.

  Not terribly lost, but I missed the turn for parking and fell into a maze of one-way streets that took me farther and farther away from my destination. Once I got myself back on track, I was feeling less certain. Were my cakes any good anyway? Were they better than anybody else’s cakes? Were they really any better than a mix cake? Suddenly I was seized with doubt. I had picked the wrong recipes, the wrong outfit. I no longer liked my hair. Maybe what I told my father was wrong. Maybe things don’t change. I pulled up to the restaurant and got a good parking place. It was three in the afternoon. It was the quiet time in between the lunch and dinner crowd, when a handful of people sat at the bar and smoked cigarettes and talked. The manager, whose name was Bill, would be expecting me. All I had to do was walk the cake inside. Easy. I opened up the hatchback and slid out a box. I closed the hatchback. I stood there. I stood there for a long time. The sky had clouded over and it started to sprinkle a little. Then the sprinkling turned to snow. It was light at first and then it came down in wet clumps. The box was getting wet and so I got back in the car to think things through. My name was on the box. It was a beautiful box. Inside there were three beautiful cakes. All I needed to do now was to walk it inside. A short trip. I found that I was clutching the box too hard, wrinkling the fabric a little bit, and so I put it beside me on the passenger seat. I could go in and not speak to the manager. I could just ask the bartender to give it to the manager for me, unless the manager was behind the bar, in which case I could tell him I was not Ruth Hopson but a friend of Ruth Hopson’s who had volunteered to drop off the cakes because she was at home, very busy baking or kicking her drug habit or whatever. My hands started to shake. I was ten years old and being forced to play “Clair de Lune” on a small stage in the auditorium of my grade school for an audience of people I knew. I sat on my hands. I felt sweaty and vaguely nauseated. I put my head down on the steering wheel. What if the manager was just coming in now? What if he saw me, sweating and half-collapsed in his parking lot? Those drug addicts from Los Angeles, he would think. They never change. You give them a chance and they blow it every time. I put my seat belt back on. I put the car in reverse.

  All the way home I cried. Cried because I had wasted all that money on ingredients and all m
y time and, more important, my mother’s time and my father’s connections and Florence’s good advice and Camille’s beautiful cards, which now I would never be able to use. “That’s my name and phone number,” I would say, giving my pretty card to another parent at school who asked me to drive hook-up for swim practice. “Just scratch out the part about the cake. I don’t do that anymore.” I thought that if I had tried to just get a regular job, if I had put in for substitute teaching and had an anxiety attack before going into the classroom and wound up on a cot in the nurse’s office, it wouldn’t be so bad. I did not love substitute teaching. But the worst of it was that on some essential level I felt I’d let the cakes down. And I loved the cakes. I was so proud of them.

  When I turned into the driveway I just stayed in the car. I couldn’t pull it together and I didn’t know what I was going to say anyway. My mother would give me that awful concerned expression she gave me when I failed at playing the piano in public after having done so well in practice. They would be so sad for me, all the while saying to themselves that they never really thought I would come through. They would tell me I could try again tomorrow. But there wasn’t going to be a tomorrow. Tomorrow the cakes would not be exactly stale but they would no longer be perfect. I had had a chance and I had missed it.

  After ten minutes or so Camille tapped on my window. When I looked up I saw the snow had stopped. “Mom?” She opened the door. She looked at the cake box sitting next to me and then she looked into the back of the station wagon and quickly tallied up the full load.

  “You didn’t do it.”

  I shook my head.

  She sighed, her old exhausted sigh of disbelief that she could have been saddled with such a ridiculous parent. “Okay,” she said. “Wait here a minute.”

  Five minutes later she came back to the car wearing low fitted gray pants, high-heeled black boots, a white T-shirt, and a long black nylon coat that flapped behind her like a graceful set of wings. She had on eyeliner and her hair was pulled back into a severe ponytail. She looked like a rock star or a publicist for rock stars. She opened my door again. “You’d better let me drive.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Go get in on the other side. We need to get moving. We’re going to hit traffic as it is.”

  Being despondent can bring out a sense of obedience. I got out of the car and got back in on the passenger side, holding the box of cakes in my lap.

  “You’re going to have to navigate,” she said. “I hate driving downtown.”

  Camille had had her license for less than six months and I had a hard time remembering that she drove at all, or I should say, I knew perfectly well that she drove, but I tried to block it out as much as possible because the thought of it made me a nervous wreck. There was not a stop sign or a streetlight that did not involve the slamming on of brakes, and when she started up again the car leapt forward like a greyhound at a freshly opened gate. I held on to the box tightly. I was glad I hadn’t made the lemon cakes with lemon curd frosting that were so inclined to slide. Another time I might have mentioned these errors in Camille’s driving, but I knew instinctively that now was not the time.

  “So you didn’t go in anywhere?”

  “No. Turn left at the next light.”

  “Well, that’s probably better. They didn’t see you. It would be strange if the cakes came in, went out, and then came back in again later.”

  “I can’t go in there.”

  “Why do you think I’m here?”

  “Left again. You’re going to take the cakes inside?”

  Camille nodded. “We should have thought about it in the first place. I don’t think you’re cut out for sales. Speaking of which, what are you charging for the cakes?”

  I looked at her. She was such a beautiful girl. I never ceased to be amazed by it. She had a profile that would have done very nicely on a cameo. “I never thought about it.”

  “You don’t have a price sheet?”

  I shook my head again. Wouldn’t it have been sensible to think this over? It occurred to me that there had been a scant forty-eight hours between the idea of cakes and the cakes themselves

  “Mom, Mom, Mom,” she said. She sighed. “Okay, how much do they cost you to make? I’m talking about a full-size cake.”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Ballpark?”

  “Well, I already have a lot of flour and sugar. The chocolate is kind of expensive, but per cake?”

  She shook her head. She started again, speaking slowly, as if I had recently immigrated from Paraguay. “Let’s go at this from another direction. How many people would the chocolate cake serve, restaurant-size slices?”

  “Twelve.”

  “Good, so let’s say the house charges six dollars a slice. That’s seventy-two dollars.”

  “They wouldn’t charge six. That’s too much.”

  “Stop sounding like Grandma. Six is shooting for rock-bottom low. It could easily be nine. So, out of seventy-two dollars, what do you think your take is worth, figuring in ingredients and a profit?”

  “Twenty?” I said. It could not possibly cost more than eight dollars to make a cake.

  Camille smiled, keeping her eyes on the road. “You want twenty dollars a cake?”

  “It’s right here. I missed the parking lot last time. Do you think that’s too much?”

  “No,” she said. “I think that’s perfect.”

  We pulled up to the same restaurant, the same parking place. Camille glanced at my list for the name of the manager. “Bill,” she said. “Okay, give me the box.”

  “You’re just going in there?”

  She sighed one more time for good measure, this time dropping her head back slightly and closing her eyes. “Give. Me. The. Box.”

  I gave it to her and she was gone.

  I sat in the car and waited for my daughter to come back. I was nervous but nowhere near as nervous as I had been the last time I sat in this space. Nobody likes to think they need to be rescued and everybody is grateful when it happens. I got out and got back into the driver’s seat. Even if I wasn’t ready to meet the public, I was ready to resume my role as the principal driver. After about ten minutes Camille came back. All smiles.

  She pulled on her seat belt. I started the car up and put it in reverse. I waited and waited but she said nothing. She was not used to talking things over with me, even when the information was actually about me. “So you’re not going to tell?”

  She looked out the window and gently bit her thumb. “Bill was very nice. He liked the way the cakes looked. He was impressed with the packaging. He said he’d give them a try and then he’d call.” She pulled down the visor and checked her lipstick in the little mirror. “Actually, he said he’d call anyway. He said he’d like to take me out to dinner.”

  “Did you mention that you were a high school junior whose mother was waiting in the car?”

  “I told him I was seeing someone.”

  “Are you seeing someone?”

  Camille glanced over in my direction and made it clear that that was not a conversation we would be having.

  “What did he say about the price?”

  “He said he thought it was high.”

  “I knew twenty was too high.”

  “I told him the cakes were forty.”

  “Forty dollars! Are you kidding me? That’s robbery! No one is going to pay forty dollars for a cake.”

  “They will if they can turn around and sell it for seventy-two. Anyway, forty is where we started. I’d do it for thirty-five.”

  “So you’re the accountant now too?”

  “I’m the booking agent. You’re never going to get what you’re worth if you don’t shoot high.”

  “Where did you get all this confidence? Really, I couldn’t even walk in the place. Where did you come from?”

  “You forget,” Camille said. “I’m adopted.”

  We delivered the cakes. Toward the end I got up enough nerve to stand at
the side of the window just so I could see her walk in. She kept her shoulders back, her head up. There was no one in the world she was afraid to talk to. I wondered if I had been self-confident at sixteen and then somehow life had taken it out of me, but it wasn’t true. I was never like Camille. She knew she was special and she had no problem at all with that. I was crazy about her.

  Well after dark we returned home in triumph. Everyone was waiting for us in the kitchen. “How did it go?” my father said. “Did you kill them?”

  “We killed them,” Camille said.

  Sam was back in his jeans and a sweatshirt, looking like his best true self. “I knew you’d kill them,” he said proudly.

  “You should have seen Camille. She handled all the business. She just walked in there, gave them the cakes, and told them what she wanted.”

  “Everybody in the family has a job in Mom’s business except for Dad,” Camille said. “You’re going to have to give Dad a job.”

  Her heart was in the right place but I felt terrible that she’d said it. The only person who didn’t seem to mind was Sam. “I’m trying to get on the payroll,” he said.

  That night in bed I asked Sam about the job interview.

  “It wasn’t really an interview,” he said. “I just met with another administrator I know. I was putting some feelers out. I didn’t think there was going to be a job for me.”

  “Did he say if anything looked good?”

  “There are a lot of people in the same boat I’m in right now.” Sam waited for a minute. In the darkness he reached out and held my hand. “He said it wasn’t such a good time to be looking.”

  “You’re going to find something,” I said.

  “And you’ve already found something. I’m so proud of you, Ruth.”

  As happy as I was about how the cakes had turned out, I didn’t like the idea that Sam was now in one boat and I was in another. I liked it better when we were both in the water, swimming.