Let Them Eat Cake

I have a special way that I arrange my face whenever another woman compliments my physique, which happens often after Pilates when I am in line for coffee, or at the salad station in Whole Foods.

I practice this expression seated at my bedroom vanity each night applying my serums—eyebrows up, but not enough to wrinkle my forehead, lips parted and slightly upturned, head tilted a bit to imply the novelty of this lovely little scenario.

By exception, if it’s a young woman offering the compliment and she has the audacity to add something insipid like “for your age” or “I hope I look that good when I’m older,” I give a demure chuckle and look her up and down while saying “thank you” with my words but “honey, those Frappuccinos aren’t doing your thighs any favors” with my eyes.

I do have to share some of the credit with my late husband. Had it not been for the raging infidelity that afflicted him throughout each of my pregnancies, lasting roughly from the second trimester until the day I could zip my weary body neatly back into the size 2 Chanel dress he was partial to, who knows what composition my body would have naturally chosen?

As it was, my memories of the first months of my children’s lives are marked by egg whites, grapefruit halves, and a parade of increasingly larger jogging strollers. And still, the day of my husband’s funeral found the back row of the church occupied by four of his conspicuously short-lived secretaries, and I’ll be damned if each of them weren’t cradling a limited release Louis Vuitton bag from the same year one of my four children was born.

Truthfully, when Harry died two years ago at 73, I had already begun to pack my bags, depositing them one per day in the climate-controlled storage unit where Harry kept the art he deemed too priceless to let anyone look at, but nobody—especially not my mother or, God forbid, Samantha from my We are Widows and Widowers support group— ever has to know that.

With Harry gone, my weekly habit tracker notebook keeps me disciplined. Small enough to fit in my pocketbook, each day my list anchors me to my goals with its series of fat, blank boxes awaiting check-marks. On the first day of each week, I wake up to the promise of a fresh page and an empty stomach. Maybe today, a small voice says. Maybe today you’ll finally get your cake.

For the past 27 weeks, the weekly reward I’ve selected for myself has been a slice of chocolate cake, only I’ve never checked all my boxes for a week straight and so the cake has gone into the freezer. One week I only missed by one checkmark (I was half a pound over goal on Tuesday morning), so I compromised and splurged on a luxury cake display freezer with a black marble base to house all the cake.

Every morning I feel its electric humming in the floorboards as I stand in the kitchen measuring out my cottage cheese and I hum along with it.

These aren’t just ordinary slices of chocolate cake. They come from a food truck called Patty Cake, and chocolate cake by the slice is its only offering, with a new variation each week. Calvin Woods is the chef, owner, and sole employee. He sets up shop every Wednesday and Sunday outside the church where my widow support group meets. He won’t tell anyone what each week’s secret ingredient is. If you have an allergy, he’ll let you know whether it’s unsafe for you to eat, otherwise you just have to wait for the next week when he posts the answer on a sandwich board labeled “Last Week’s Flavor.”

Calvin comes off dark and brooding, but his smile cracks his face open, like when a cloud skids away to reveal a big bright moon on a dark, cold night.

He recently revealed that he himself is widowed and we’ve tried to get him to join us in the musty church basement meeting room with the out-of-tune organ that sometimes plays itself (“That’s my Morty,” Velma says every time), but he hasn’t come yet. Just in case, I take a seat facing the door anyway, my purse on the chair next to me so I can wave him over if he does make an appearance. I notice Samantha does the same, the jealous old bitch. She’s had it out for me ever since 1996 when her husband asked mine at the country club Christmas Party what his secret to keeping me in such great shape was. Samantha, who’d had a glob of pimento cheese in the corner of her mouth at the time, stalked away and never called me for bridge again.

So every week, I buy two slices of cake. One, I take home and freeze. The other, I take to my mother at Blue Lakes, her assisted living facility.

Recently, Mother's doctors put her on a new medication with disconcerting side effects. Instead of frequent periods of distressed delirium, she is now often coherent but delusional. For example, for the past three visits she has called me Sheila, the name of my aunt-- the red-headed sister whose face my mother burned out of all of the photos in the family album with a Bic lighter after too much wine one Easter Sunday years ago.

Tonight, I have reason for needing my mother coherent. Though her memory is shit, her taste buds are still incredibly discerning and Calvin just announced a Patty Cake contest: Whoever guesses this week’s mystery ingredient first gets a $100 gift certificate to the new tapas restaurant downtown. I have plans to win and in the throes of my excitement at being awarded the prize “spontaneously” invite Calvin to join me.

It’s Bingo night at Blue Lakes, and I find my mother sitting at a table with a card in front of her but no chips.

“I’ll know if I win,” she says, but she isn’t even facing the announcer, instead gazing out the window, intermittently raising her hand to wiggle her fingers at the moths flitting around a garden lantern.

“Mom,” I say, as I crack the plastic clamshell box open and press a spork into her hand. “Can you tell me what other flavor this cake is, besides chocolate?”

***

“Avocado!” I shout out the window as I thrust my car into park, halfway up on the curb. I was planning to play it cool but Samantha is at the food truck window, and I want to get it out just in case she’s about to beat me to it.

The compressed ‘o’ her lips make is both very unflattering to her and deeply gratifying to me when Calvin awards me the winner, yanking a sheet off the sandwich board to reveal the special ingredient. I don’t even wait for Samantha to leave to invite Calvin to share my prize, to which he graciously agrees.

I spend the next five days giddy with getting ready. A fresh checklist with a pay-off that doesn’t amount to another slice of frozen cake suspended like Snow White in her glass coffin is promising in itself: Go on a date (check pending)!

Not a day this week do I stray over my allotted 1,000 calories. When the barista accidentally puts 2% milk in my latte, I send it back for skim. I refuse the toast that has already been buttered at the historical society brunch. I double-clarify that the dressing is indeed on the side. And when the Pilates studio floods, I speed-walk instead.

I arrive at my date impeccable, impressive…impatient. Because it all starts to go wrong before the first course is even cleared. Calvin is distracted from the moment we’re seated, and though his phone is face down on the maroon tablecloth, I feel its incessant vibrating. Someone is 'blowing his phone up' as the kids say, ruining our night, MY night, and I’ll bet you anything it’s---

Finally he flips the phone over and I see the name emblazoned across the screen: Sam.

CRASH!

There are dishes on the floor, and a tablecloth gripped in my hands. Everyone is looking at me but I don’t care.

“Why can’t anyone let me have ONE thing for MYSELF?” I scream. All the drawers full of journals and checked boxes, all the babies screaming outside the bathroom door as I weighed myself one more time, just to make sure it was right before I took my first sip of coffee in the morning, the perfume I pretended not to smell when Harry heaved himself into bed after a drunken cavort with someone skinnier, someone not so post-partum.

“What are you talking about?” Calvin asks, and he is surprisingly calm, for someone with marinara on his blazer and broken glass at his feet.

“Samantha,” I say, and I leave.

I’m too old to compete anymore. Too tired of pretending any goal is worth such a bland and fruitless life.

I go home and gather all the cake slices from the freezer, toss them in a giant Hefty bag and drive them to Blue Lakes. Since visiting hours are over, I cut through the courtyard and knock at my mother’s patio door. I can see her in there, staring at the unplugged television.

I unload the cake slices into the fridge. The ones that don’t fit, I take up and down the halls, dropping them on residents’ doormats, like a reverse Trick-or-Treat.

When I return to my mother, she is smiling.

“What?” I say.

“You remind me of my daughter,” she says.

Just then, my phone begins to vibrate. Expecting it to be Calvin telling me how much I owe the restaurant in damages, I’m surprised to see instead: Samantha.

Only because things can’t get any worse, I answer.

“What? Calling to gloat?” I ask.

“No, Elise,” Samantha says, and her voice is much gentler than usual. “Elise, I just ran into Calvin at the gas station. He told me what happened at the restaurant and he’s worried about you. We all are, really.”

“Well, don’t. I’m done. He’s all yours, Samantha.“

“No. Elise. That’s what I’m telling you. The Sam that was calling him, it’s Sam as in Samuel. His new boyfriend. Elise, didn’t you know? Calvin is gay.”

The fact that I hang up on her gently is an act of grace.

All of this for a slice of chocolate cake, for a man I mostly wanted because I thought my rival did. All of this for a life I jammed myself into and never even asked why.

It’s like I was an indentured servant, and then when Harry died I was freed, but instead of relief I just walled myself up behind rows and rows of check boxes and calorie counts.

I don’t even fucking LIKE chocolate. Chocolate is a scene stealer, a megaphone, a diva, a tyrant. Do you know what I like? Vanilla. Not vanilla bean, not Madagascar vanilla, none of that delicate, nuanced shit. I’m talking Twinkies. The artificial stuff, burning with sweetness, expanding in my belly like a toxic hug from the inside. Nothing special to look at, but if humanity were wiped out, decades from now Twinkies would still glisten in their cellophane sleeves, plump and unperturbed.

I stop at the Kwik Mart on the way home. I buy one bundle of firewood, two boxes of Twinkies. Once home I grab another Hefty bag, this time filling it with all of my habit tracker journals. I pick up my phone, smudging the touch-screen with my oily sponge-cake fingers but I don’t care.

Come sit with me by the fire? I text Samantha. It’s been a while, but maybe we can relearn how to be friends, without the husbands between us.

Beneath the smear of Twinkie grease, I can see the marching dots and know she’s typing.