Misery Loves Cabernet (26 page)

Oh no. Not the farmer’s market. “As I said, I’m really not much of a morning person,” I force myself to admit. “Though if you want to pick up some eggs, I’ll be happy to give you money—”

Liam laughs. “No, no. I thought we might try to catch ‘The Taming of the Shrew’ this weekend if you’re free.”

I frown. “Oh,” I say sadly. “I’m kind of busy.”

I can’t read his face as he says, “Oh. Well, maybe next weekend . . .”

I wince. “Actually, next weekend I have my friend Kate’s engagement party.”

Liam gives a quick nod. “Okay. Another time then.”

“It’s kind of a girls’ night,” I stammer out. “The Saturday thing, I mean. It’s um . . . well, how would I put this?”

Liam’s eyes widen as he waits for me to explain.

“We’re going to a
Charlie’s Angels
drag show.”

Liam’s eyes widen further, so I rush to explain. “It’s called
Chico’s Angels
. It’s an episode of the TV show
Charlie’s Angels
, performed as a musical by a bunch of Latin drag queens.” I’m not sure if saying that out loud makes me sound weird or cool. “My cousin Jenn is a big fan, and we always go with her when a new episode comes out. So, um, that’s why I’m busy.”

Liam nods. “So, girls’ night. No men allowed unless they wear dresses.”

“Well, no. Actually, I guess guys can come . . .” I say, letting the sentence peter out. “Would you like to go with us?” I ask, in my head already coming up with a myriad of reasons for why he’ll say no.

Liam smiles. “I’d be delighted.”

I smile back, almost sheepishly. I don’t know why, but I almost feel like I may have a date.

With my roommate.

And several of my closest female friends.

And some very fabulous and funky ladies.

Okay, so maybe I don’t have a date. I still get to spend Saturday night with a hot guy.

“Oh, would it trouble you too much if I made a copy of your key today?” Liam asks me. “I have a date tonight, and I don’t want you to have to wait up.”

And the plot sickens.

That night, I head out to Kate’s apartment in Santa Monica to help her pick a wedding cake. Just what I want to be doing when I’m doing such a bang-up job with my own love life, right? Although I try to remember:

If you can’t be with the cake you love, love the cake you’re with
.

“I’m so glad you’re here,” Kate says to me as she opens the door that night. “We have so much to cover tonight, and not a lot of time.”

As I walk into Kate’s large living-room/dining-room area, I can see Dawn leafing through a self-help book called
You and Improved
.

“Listen to this one,” Dawn says, laughing. “Places to meet men: the line at the DMV. Right, because we’re all so in the dating mood then. Oh, and an Al-Anon meeting. Yeah, that doesn’t scream codependent or anything.”

Dawn throws down the book, then picks up a pink hardcover entitled,
Good Women: Poor Choices
. She flips through the book. “Manhating chapter . . .” She turns another few pages. “Manhating chapter . . .” Dawn opens the back cover to check out the author’s photo. “Yikes! If I looked like that, I’d be bitter, too. Hey, Charlie, I got something for your book of advice.”

“Shoot,” I say.

Just because you can perm, doesn’t mean you should
.

“Trust,” Dawn says, putting up her hand to indicate the words
Trust me
. “Much like blind dates, and Jim Carrey in dramatic roles, it never ends well.”

Kate opens her coat closet, and pulls out an open box of self-help books. “Okay, I’m getting rid of all of these. Anyone need a diet book? I have South Beach, Weight Watchers, the Cake Diet . . .”

“There’s a cake diet?” I ask, taking the book and leafing through it with the false (yet eternal) hope that I can find a way to stuff myself with Twinkies, and still lose weight.

“Yeah, but it wasn’t what I thought,” Kate admits. “It told me how to make things like carrot cake with fake sugar, and zucchini bread. Life is too short not to eat real cake. And, with that in mind”—Kate stands in front of her dining room table like a
Price is Right
girl, and demonstrates—“I present to you . . . your dinner.”

Kate’s table can only be described as Wedding Central: every available surface is littered with plates and bowls filled with wedding-cake paraphernalia. Each plate has a different type of cake on it: chocolate, white, marble, lemon, mocha (which looked like chocolate, but Kate had stuck a pink Post-it on the plate saying it was mocha), a few other flavors I couldn’t recognize by sight, and carrot.

Next to the plates were bowls of potential fillings: cream-cheese filling, chocolate ganache, chocolate mousse (again, another Post-it), vanilla cream with chocolate chips—I could go on. Total, there were about a dozen fillings.

Finally, there were four plates of potential frostings, each plate with three scoops of frosting (a scoop from each of the three bakeries Kate was considering).

This is where Kate asks us to begin.

“Now, I want you to taste the frostings by themselves first,” Kate says. “The first priority is to make sure they don’t taste like Crisco. That’s my first way to eliminate potential bakeries—crappy frosting means a crappy wedding cake. While you taste, I’m going to show you pictures I’ve cut out of various wedding cakes that I like.”

Dawn is still fascinated with her book. “Here’s another bit of advice I like: Give yourself a timetable: you will be engaged within the year, and married within two. Don’t be halfhearted about it.” She looks up from the book. “Because nothing eases a guy into a relationship faster than a woman with a biological clock and a deadline.”

Kate turns to Dawn. “Hey! Maid of honor! I got at least twelve thousand calories with your name on it. Help me out here.”

“Sorry,” Dawn says, tossing the book down, and standing up to meet us in the dining room.

“Okay, ladies, stay with me,” Kate says with a look of determination as she looks over her sea of wedding cake. “The next few hours won’t be pretty. But we have a mission to accomplish, and we take no prisoners. What are we?”

“Women of action,” Dawn and I say in unison.

“I said, What are we?!”

“Women of action!” Dawn and I yell like privates addressing a sergeant.

“Excellent,” Kate says, grinning widely as she gives us a thumbs-up.

Kate hands us each a fork, then takes the first magazine cutout from a pile of cutouts, and hands it to us. The wedding cake in the photo looks like a big lamp shade. “This is a rolled fondant cake. The ruffles are made of white chocolate—”

“Let me stop you right there,” I say, in all seriousness. “White chocolate is a lie perpetuated by the candy-making industry. It’s waxy, gross, and not even real chocolate. You can’t have a cake made with that stuff.”

Kate shrugs her shoulders. “Okay.” She crumples up her cutout picture, and throws it into the trash. “Moving on . . .”

Dawn decides to follow my lead. “As long as we’re on the subject of cakes not to be considered until hell freezes over,” she says, pointing to one of the plates, “is that carrot cake I see on your wedding-cake table?”

Kate examines the plates, trying to figure out which one is the carrot. “Oh, that. Yeah, Will likes carrot cake, so I . . .” She lets her sentence peter out after she looks back up to see Dawn and me slowly shaking our heads “no” in unison. “All right,” Kate says, slightly exasperated. “No need to get snippy.”

Kate shows us another picture she cut out of a magazine, this time of a four-tiered confection of square shaped cakes, with little white flowers all over. It is beautiful.

“Now this is also a rolled fondant cake . . .” Kate begins.

Dawn takes her fork, and prepares to dig in to a white scoop of heaven. “Which of these frostings is the rolled fondant?”

“The off-white one,” Kate tells her.

Dawn is about to dip her fork into one of the white frostings to officially begin the tasting, but Kate stops her.

“No,” Kate says. “That’s the royal icing. It’s white white.”

“I thought you said the white was the fondant,” Dawn says.

“I said the off-white. But you put your fork in the white white, not the off-white. The white white is royal icing.”

Dawn bugs her eyes out at me in a mild panic, and I am so enjoying not being the maid of honor. Dawn moves her fork over a different plate, then lets it dangle in midair.

“No,” says Kate. “That’s pale yellow. That’s the buttercream.”

Dawn glares at Kate, but she is determined to be on her best behavior. She moves her fork over the next plate, and leaves it hanging in midair, waiting for approval.

“That’s cream-colored,” Kate says.

“Oh, for God’s sake!” Dawn says, dropping her fork and starting to lose it. “How the hell do you know that’s cream-colored, and not off-white?”

“Because that’s whipped cream,” Kate answers.

I suppress a giggle. Kate writes the numbers one through four on Post-its, then sticks them on the four plates of frosting. “Start with plate number four,” she instructs us.

Number four is the rolled fondant, and Dawn and I take a taste as Kate moves on to show us the four-squared cake in the picture. “Now this cake is made of a pale, pale green rolled fondant,” she begins cheerfully, “with what they call ‘embroidered’ flowers, made of royal icing all around . . .” She turns to us, and her face drops. “Why are you both making that face?”

Because this is the most disgusting food I’ve ever eaten
, I think to myself.

But I’m not going to say it. I am determined to be a good bridesmaid.

Dawn daintily dabs the corner of her mouth with a paper napkin, clearly trying to suppress her gagging reflex. “Sweetie,” she asks, her mouth still full, “do you happen to know what rolled fondant is?”

“Umm . . .” Kate grabs a dictionary, and looks it up. “Sugar paste.”

Dawn and I spit the rolled fondant into our napkins. Then we wipe our tongues with the napkins for good measure. Ick.

“Okay,” Kate says cheerfully. “No cakes with rolled fondant. How about the next one . . .” Kate hands us a picture of an all white, three-layered circular cake with red flowers decorating the top and bottom. “This is a white buttercream cake with red flowers made of royal icing.”

“Which one’s the royal icing?” I ask.

“Plate number one,” Kate says, grabbing the dictionary again as Dawn and I each take a forkful from plate number one. “According to this, royal icing is,” she reads, “a viscous substance secreted from the pharyngeal gland of honeybees . . .”

Dawn and I spit that one out into our napkins even quicker as Kate continues reading. “Wait, no, that’s royal jelly. Royal icing’s not in here.”

“Why don’t we think ‘buttercream?’ Dawn suggests. “After all, everyone loves buttercream.”

“Okay,” Kate says, flipping through her pile of magazine clippings. Flip, flip, flip. “Oh, here’s one I like.”

She shows us a three-layer cake with buttercream lace and buttercream flowers over a white buttercream canvas.

“Now, see, that’s nice,” I say.

“You like that?” Kate says, “I also like this one.”

She hands us another picture, and it is stunning: a three-tiered white cake with green and white flowers piled on top, then cascading down the white cake.

“The flowers are made of sugar,” Kate explains. “But you don’t have to eat them.”

“It’s gorgeous,” Dawn says, and I tell Kate I agree wholeheartedly.

“Well, we’ve got a finalist,” Kate says happily.

She made us look at more than thirty other cake pictures, but we all knew: that was the one.

Now it was on to my favorite part: the cake tasting!

We spent the next hour sampling the cakes. It wasn’t hard to decide on the baker. The problem was agreeing on which kind of cake to have for each layer, as well as which fillings.

Heated debates ensued (I’ll admit, initially as an excuse to eat more cake). We tried every possible combination of cake and filling possible: chocolate with chocolate, chocolate with cream cheese, lemon with cream cheese, lemon with strawberries and cream, white with strawberries and cream—you name it, we ate it. By the time we were done eating, I think we were all about ten pounds heavier, and in dire need of a cup of black coffee.

Finally, we agreed on a chocolate-bottom layer with a cream-cheese filling, a white middle layer with a chocolate ganache filling, and a top layer of whatever Kate wanted, even though:

The tradition of saving the top layer of your wedding cake for your first anniversary leads to stale, frostbitten cake. Eat it on your wedding night
.

After another hour of helping pick flower arrangements, Dawn and I said our good-byes to Kate, and called it a night.

After I got into my car, I made the mistake of checking my iPhone.

Jordan had texted me:

Hey. I’m sorry I hung up last night when I called. I miss you.

How are you doing?

I sit in my car, staring at the text for a good three or four minutes.

What is it about men that they seem to instinctively know when you’re okay with them going away, and then they come back to pursue you?

I hit reply, and begin texting back:

I’m OK.

I stare at the screen. There are so many things I want to say, but I don’t know how he’ll react: I’m not okay, I miss you. I’m better than okay, I’m pissed at you. There’s someone new. There’s no one else. I hate you for treating me like this. I ache for you.

I stick with ‘I’m OK.’

But, instead of sending it, I turn off my phone.

Half an hour later, I unlock my door to my lit-up, though empty, living room. Hoping Liam is back from his date early, I yell, “Honey, I’m home!”

“Be right down!” Liam yells from upstairs. “I have wine for you in the kitchen!”

Still reeling from Jordan’s message, I go into my kitchen to see a bottle of Clos du Val Chardonnay, opened and breathing, and an empty glass next to it. Next to the wine is a cheese platter consisting of what looks like a triangle of Brie and a triangle of blue, accompanied by some crackers and fruit. “What’s all this?” I yell from the kitchen as I pour myself a glass of wine.