Black Cake(55)

Benny knew that she should run out of the room without saying another word, but the cookie was homemade and she could taste a hint of ginger. And for the first time in a long time, someone was listening. So she spoke. She told them everything. Once she had finished talking about her father’s rejection, about her mother’s disappointment, about the brother who wouldn’t talk to her, about the lover who had hurt her, she came right out and admitted that she’d attended the meeting under false pretenses because she hadn’t known what else to do. She hadn’t meant any disrespect, she said, she was going to be leaving right then. She stepped away from the microphone and headed straight for the exit, shaking her head and muttering, “I’m so sorry….”

As she rushed past the chairs, a woman raised her voice and said, “There are support groups for that sort of thing, you know?” and a second person said, “At least you were honest,” while Mister Movie-Hair, who had unwittingly led Benny there to begin with, said, “Good luck to you.” Benny’s face was burning but she had the feeling that somehow, her first and only AA meeting had been of some help to her after all.

Benny walked down the steps of the building and kept going for forty minutes until she reached her apartment. She sank into the couch and pulled a blanket around her, grateful for the warmth and the smell of last night’s garlic still clinging to its fibers. Enough, enough, enough. Benny turned on her cellphone and called home but there was no answer. Later she would do the math, and she would figure out that her mother had been in the hospital after her surfing accident and that Byron hadn’t bothered to call Benny to let her know. This was the kind of thing that could happen when you’d stayed away for too long.





Cake





Benny lay awake for hours, thinking of what she might have said, had her mother picked up the phone. At four in the morning, she got out of bed and wiped down the kitchen counter. She emptied the oven of the pots and pans that she kept stored there, took some eggs out of the refrigerator, and reached into a lower cupboard for the most important ingredient, the jar of dried fruits that had been soaking in rum and port. She poured the mixture into a bowl and added dates and maraschino cherries. No citron, though. She had never liked citron. Nor had her mother.

Benny had just enough time to go through the whole routine and set two black cakes on top of the stove to cool before getting ready for her morning job. She still felt the need to talk to her ma but she didn’t have the courage to try calling her again. This would have to be her message, the cakes. She had taken some photos of the preparation. She would send them to her mother along with a letter.

Benny would let her mother see what she had learned from her, how closely she had been paying attention, how well she had improved her technique. Because baking a black cake was like handling a relationship. The recipe, on paper, was simple enough. Its success depended on the quality of the ingredients, but mostly on how well you handled them, on the timing of the various processes, on how you responded to variables like the humidity in the air or the functioning of the oven thermostat.

Benny hadn’t been very good at relationships but she knew how to make a cake work.

Photo number one: the jar of fruits sitting next to a group of eggs. One day, Benny would develop an eggless version of this recipe, because times had changed and food was going to have to change with them, but that would take some experimentation and, probably, leave her mother appalled.

Snap.

Photo number two: the blacking of the sugar. Smoke rising gently out of the pot, the fire turned off just in time, the wooden spoon sticking out of the saucepan. Snap.

Photo number three: two cake tins filled with batter, each tin sitting in a pan of water in the oven. Snap.

“This is the only thing that I had left when I lost my family,” Benny’s mother once told her, tapping a finger on the side of her head. “I carried it all in here. The black cake recipe, my schooling, my pride.”

Photo number four: a closeup of one black cake cooling on the counter. The color of moist earth, the smell of heaven. Snap.

Preparing the icing would take another full day’s work, after which Benny would take a photo of her signature decoration, the one large hibiscus flower, orangey red and couched in deep green leaves on a simple white base. She was willing to bet her ma had never seen anything like that. She’d be proud of Benny. On those rare occasions when her mother telephoned Benny, there was usually a specific reason, like a birthday, but one day, Ma simply called and talked into Benny’s voicemail.

“Remember our baking?” her mother said. “Used to drive your father and Byron mad whenever we blocked off the kitchen.” Benny could hear her ma smiling. Then her mother fell silent for a moment before saying that Byron was doing well, often traveling, always on TV. Her mother left these messages on Benny’s mobile phone in the middle of the night, East Coast time, when she must have known that Benny would have had the phone turned off. It’s as if her mother had wanted to reach out, only not all the way.

Her ma always called from home. Benny assumed her mother had some kind of cellphone by now, but Benny had no idea what the number was.

In her most recent message, her ma said, “I’ve been doing some reading and thinking. About people like you. People with complicated relationships.” Benny’s mother still couldn’t bring herself to name Benny’s differences, but she was trying. She suspected that her ma would have come around long before, if it hadn’t been for her father’s resistance. Her ma had always done things her way. Except when it came to Benny’s dad.