100 Days of Cake (5 page)

Shrugging, I tell him, “I'm a driver's ed dropout.”

He chuckles and asks if he can give me a ride home. “If you died of heat stroke, it would probably reflect poorly on my skills as a healer.”

We put my bike into the trunk of his Honda Accord and slide into our seats. It's a little weird, and I'm kind of jumpy, being alone with him in such a small space, but when he starts the engine, of course the nineties radio station starts blaring, which makes me laugh.

And we talk about how he used to listen to all these songs on CDs and (gasp!) cassette tapes.

“Those rectangles with the two holes in the middle?” I joke. “I think I saw one in a museum once.”

“I'm telling you, Molly, you're missing out.” Dr. B. shakes
his head. “Making a mix tape for the girl you had a crush on was like a rite of passage in junior high.”

“Did you make one for your fiancée?”

“I
might
have burned her a CD when we first met.”

We're having such a good time, I almost forget to tell him when to turn onto my street of new houses, and into the circular driveway of the biggest one. It was the model home for the subdivision—the one builders show to potential home buyers, to demonstrate how great their house could be—and it has all these crazy upgrades, like a huge door and a three-car garage.

“Now, that's a house,” Dr. B. says, which is funny, since he's the doctor and Mom is a single mother who cuts hair.

“Thanks,” I say, even though I had absolutely nothing to do with it.

After my dad died, Mom moved V and me back to Coral Cove so my grandma could help out (weird, considering most of what Mom and Gram do is bicker). We stayed with her for a while, and then got a little house on the same street as Gram's while Mom worked at someone else's salon. Eventually Mom started her own place—Dye Another Day (yeah, I know). Despite the cornball name, it really took off, and she moved to a larger, shinier location, hired more stylists, and added spa stuff like mani-pedis and massages. She even started a product line. Then she read something about needing your home to outwardly “reflect your inner
success” or whatever. So she bought
this
five-bedroom monstrosity a few years ago.

I thank Dr. B. for the ride, and he helps me lug my bike out of the car.

“Good work today, Molly,” he says, and I smile, even though I realize that I didn't even mention all the stuff with T.J. “I'll see you next week.”

“It's a date,” I say, and then feel weird because I used the word “date.”

Giving me a wave, he drives off, and I head in through the garage.

Even after two years the house still feels strange. Since it was the model, the developers had it staged with custom furniture and decorations, a lot of it specific to the house. Most of the furniture in our old place was the type of semi-disposable stuff from Ikea that you assemble with that L-shaped wrench, so Mom got the developers to throw in all the furniture with the house.

Now it's like we're living on a movie set or in a glossy add in a lifestyle magazine. Everything is beautiful and well coordinated, but clearly designed for people not us. Curved couches with mounds of throw pillows, sleek tables with brightly colored vases or bowls as “accent pieces,” neutral artwork that we don't have any stories for. One of the extra bedrooms is set up as a sewing room, with a fancy Singer machine built into a table. (None of us would even know
how to thread it.) Another bedroom is a really whimsical playroom for little kids, with murals from classic children's books painted on the walls. There are giant stuffed animals and a cute wood dollhouse. Great stuff for some model other family.

The second I park my bike next to Mom's Audi and come in through the laundry room, I'm bombarded with the overwhelming smell of confectionary sugar, and I have to fight back the need to hurl. Apparently my mom is baking again . . . for the thirteenth day in a row.

Our model-home kitchen appears to have been the loser in a confrontation with Chef Godzilla: cracked eggshells in the farm-style sink, a dusting of flour on the granite counters and hardwood floor; something that might be butter congealing against the subway-tile backsplash between the cabinets (a pricey upgrade). All of it tastefully illuminated by the recessed lighting in the ceiling (another upgrade).

“Oh, sweetie, you're just in time!” Mom hands me a giant slice of some golden-yellow cake that looks paradoxically burned and undercooked.

“Hey, Mom. This is . . . interesting.”

As much of a mess as her surroundings are, my mom is in the middle looking absolutely beautiful, because she's always absolutely beautiful. Perfect shiny hair like V's that somehow isn't curling up in the humidity, perfect barely there makeup, perfect boobs—even the smudge of sugar on
her high cheekbone is perfect. She looks like someone in a commercial who is supposed to sell you cake—not necessarily the defeated-looking cake she's holding up, but some Hollywood version of it. If we didn't have the same blue-green eyes and full lips, I would seriously question whether or not I was adopted.

Forcing a smile, I ask, “So what's on the menu today?”

Up until thirteen days ago, the extent of my mom's “cooking” was picking up sandwiches from Chubby Joe's Sub Shop or sliding a frozen pizza into the oven. But she's a big fan of self-help books and empowerment message boards. She has learned all seven steps of those highly effective people, she knows all about the different planets men and women are from, and she's mastered the life-changing magic of tidying up—well, maybe she could use some help with that one right now.

About two weeks ago, the wormhole that is the Internet led her to a website about spreading happiness with desserts. This lady in the English countryside blogged about baking a different cake every day for one hundred days and how much joy that brought people. Naturally, she got a book deal—
How to Bake Friends and Ice People
. (Okay, I made that up.) I suspect that the blogger was probably taking the cakes to nursing homes or hospital waiting rooms and not trying to fix a teenage daughter with depression, but Mom really latched on to this idea and decided to “put her mind to it” and recreate
A Baker's Journey: 100 Days of Cake
(the
real title
)
. My mom is kind of like a one-woman cult.

Today's cake is Ooey-Gooey Butter Cake. It does not smell good, and I wonder if the blogger used another English expression that didn't translate quite right for an American baker. (This led to an indelibly salty Caramel Sass Cake last week.)

“Now, I know you thought the double chocolate was too rich, and the pineapple upside-down thing was too sweet, but I think that we might have a winner here.” Mom is talking in that singsongy voice she started using when my guidance counselor first uttered the
D
word. “It's supposed to have some savory notes to it. I went ahead and tasted it, and I thought it was really different.”

“Sounds great,” I say, and make a show of taking a bite.

She just looks at me, eyes wide.

And waits.

You know those moments when you realize you're going to spectacularly disappoint someone who's trying really hard? Welcome to my life.

It tastes like a heart attack on a fork—undercooked butter with a side of more butter, and burned butter on top for kicks. I try to move my mouth into something happy or at the very least not disgusted, but I'm a crappy actor, and Mom's whole face sags in defeat.

“No good?” she asks.

“It's great.” We both know that is a huge lie. I mean, she did taste it, after all.

“Should we even bother saving it for Elle and Jimmy?” she asks.

“Yeah, I'm sure they'll love it.”

“Well, I'm really excited about carrot cake tomorrow. Maybe a little bit of spice is what we need.” She is sort of talking to herself as she spins around to start cleaning.

Sure, there is a part of me that wants to scream, “Explain it to me again how I am the crazy one in therapy?” But I don't, because she's my mom and she's only trying to help. And honestly, there's a part of me that wants so, so much—maybe more than she does—for her to be right about this. All those self-help books and empowering websites worked for her—they helped her get serious about the hair salon and find a dweeby boyfriend with a good job, and live in a house that outwardly reflects her inner success—so maybe this could work for me too? Maybe there
is
some combination of sugar, eggs, and flour that can make me care about school dances and four-hundred-meter relay times and college applications. If there is, I will gladly eat piece after piece every day for the rest of my short type-2-diabetic life.

E
lle wants ice cream, but it can't be just any old Mister Softee truck; don't be ridiculous. No, it has to be locally sourced ice cream with no GMOs. She'd prefer vegan, but that's not a deal breaker. (Also, we don't have that in Coral Cove.)

For as long as I've known Elle, which has pretty much been forever, she's always been into various causes. I'm really hoping this environmental crusade ends soon, so she'll use her car when it's another million-degree day like today.

We bike past the original downtown with its Baskin-Robbins (“An eco nightmare!”), and then by a Dairy Queen (“Warren Buffett doesn't need any more of our money!”) to this crunchy little food stand in the park, where all the employees always reek of pot and nothing ever looks remotely clean. It's hot enough that none of this matters.
There's a line wrapped halfway around the baseball diamond. Elle and I lock our bikes and get into the end of the queue.

“Okay.” Elle looks sort of pained, but it might just be the heat. “I don't want to upset you, but I saw Gina from English at the library yesterday.”

“That doesn't upset me.”

“Obviously I wasn't finished.” Elle threads a still-perfect curl behind her ear. “Anyway, they stayed at Chris's party a little longer than we did, and she said that Meredith Hoffman was all over this guy from Maxwell. It had to be your Alex.”

Meredith Hoffman? She isn't artsy or into music or anything other than the latest issue of
Us Weekly
. What would Alex possibly do with her?

“He's not ‘my Alex.' ” I try to sound nonchalant. “And Meredith's okay.”

“Dude, Meredith's life ambition is to become a Hooters girl.”

“At least she has an ambition. I can't even bring myself to shower most days,” I say. Elle doesn't laugh.

“Stop beating yourself up like tha—” Elle stops midsentence.

A few feet from the line a little girl—maybe eight or nine—is licking a cone of free-trade chocolate ice cream, and drops a clump of dirty napkins on the ground. The man
with her, who hasn't stopped yakking away on a cell phone the whole time we've been here, looks directly at them and walks away. The girl bounces after him.

Uh-oh.

Before I can stop her, Elle scoops up the offensive napkins and pounces on the girl and her dad.

“Excuse me, sir,” she says, thrusting the paper into his face, “but I noticed you left these.”

Cell Phone Dad doesn't respond. His daughter, utterly confused, reaches out to take the napkins from Elle, but her father swats the girl's hands down. The girl looks to him, even more baffled than before. I can almost hear Elle boiling over internally.

“I guess it's safe to assume that you meant to drop these and just leave them there,” Elle continues, with this growing mania in her wide-set eyes. “So while you and your daughter are out enjoying this lovely day, you're carelessly poisoning the earth so her children and their children won't ever have that opportunity and will have to live in a dome.”

Cell Phone Dad gives Elle a dismissive once-over and then turns away. “Just some bat-shit hippie,” he mumbles into his phone.

“Yeah, a hippie who is trying to keep the world beautiful for your grandchildren!” Elle fires back.

By this point everyone in line or at the picnic tables is
staring at us; even the stoned employees have snapped into focus and are sizing up the situation.

I'd like to hop onto Old Montee and ride away before someone calls the 5-O on Elle for disturbing the peace, but we've been best friends since the third day of kindergarten, when she shared her crayons with me after Jeffrey Meyers murderously broke mine in half. She's a good person like that.

“Let's just go.” I grab her arm and pull her away. “We have to save room for Mom's latest misadventure in baking.”

“Yeah, the ice cream's not certified organic, anyway.”

Unlocking our bikes, we make the most graceful exit we can under the circumstances.