Dying for Cake, page 22
I study my reflection, taking a minute to form an objective opinion as I turn about and crane my neck to look at myself from every angle. Okay, I’m no supermodel. But the outfit is flattering, the hair is well cut, the face is attractive and the skin is strangely luminous, almost transparent. A smile wider and whiter than a crescent moon shines out of the mirror at me. Hell, I actually look good. Better than good. I look gorgeous! Not surprised gorgeous like I looked that time in the mirror at Vivianne’s saloon. That was like looking at someone more attractive trying to be me. No, this time I’m just looking at me and I like what I see. I really do! I like the ash blonde bob and the voluptuous boobs under the gauzy purple flowers. I like the denim skirt and the way it hugs my big bottom at the back. I like the bare legs and feet in the black sandals and I like the way my skin glows.
As I spin around in front of the mirror, Tom wakes up and winks at me in the glass. He wolf whistles. ‘Come here, big babe!’ he says, real low and drawling like an American movie star. He throws off the sheet and flings his arms out wide so that the black hairs in his armpits fan out. The sight of him there, the naked fleshiness of him, sets me off laughing again and I pick up a pillow and throw it right at the Tower of Pisa. ‘Not now,’ I giggle as Pisa subsides. ‘I’m going to make some breakfast for me and the kids.’
I stand out in the kitchen and turn on the radio I keep on the bench. Some soppy song from the eighties is playing and I hum along while I stir the porridge. I don’t feel like cake, even though the freezer is full of it. Full of mud cakes, orange cakes, syrup cakes, fruit cakes, and all the other midnight cakes I’ve made. Even I don’t know exactly how many cakes I’ve jammed in there and I decide to do a stock-take after breakfast.
Jake and Sam shuffle out of their bedroom in their blue pyjamas, sleep still crusty in their eyes. They haul themselves onto chairs and lean their elbows on the kitchen table, holding their heavy heads in their hands. I ladle out the porridge, thick and creamy, from the pot, sprinkle it with brown sugar, pour in milk and place it in front of them. Jake pouts his lips at the porridge. He doesn’t really want to eat it and he keeps reminding me that porridge is for cold days. Sam is happy enough though. ‘Is this what Goldilocks eats?’ he asks.
When the boys have eaten, they run into the backyard with a football and then I hear Tom in the shower. I sit down in the kitchen and eat my porridge while I read the Saturday paper. Gee, it tastes good to eat something other than dry cereal with skim milk. My stomach feels warm and comfortable and after one bowl I’m full.
Sometime later that morning, Tom goes out to do the shopping. He kisses me and takes the list I have stuck on the fridge with the purple dinosaur magnet that Jake made at preschool. Jake made that magnet out of salt dough, painted it himself and gave it to me for Mother’s Day. It’s getting a bit mouldy now. Salt dough doesn’t last forever, especially in this humidity. I like to keep it there on the fridge anyway. It makes me happy, looking at it, because I remember how happy Jake was when he gave it to me. I remember the way the smile spread across his face and joined his two dimples together like a dot-to-dot.
By the time Tom goes to the shops, Jake and Sam are playing with their Duplo in the lounge room. They’re making a city and they’ve piled up all the cushions from the couch on the floor to make a mountain. I watch them crawl along the floor, making wet truck noises, with their little blue pyjama bottoms in the air. They’re absorbed in their own world so I go back to the kitchen and clear off the benches to make room for my cakes.
The cakes are stored in the deep freeze. Tom invested in the huge freezer years ago so that we could buy bulk meat but I’ve never bought much meat to put in it. I could never bring myself to store half a frozen cow or pig in my tiny kitchen. When Susan comes over she always says that the freezer is bad feng shui. It takes up a lot of space and it needs an ugly black extension cord to connect it with the power supply.
As I open the freezer, a cloud of cold air blows in my face. I can’t see. I feel a bit like that character in Jake’s story-book who stands at the entrance of a mysterious cave and peers inside, holding a candle up to the darkness. For an instant, he can’t see anything and then … Abracadabra! The treasure is revealed. When the fog clears, I admire my hoard of cakes, each one tightly wrapped in Glad wrap so it glistens. Then I haul the cakes out of the freezer and sort them on the bench into three magnificent piles.
In the first pile I put all the morning-tea cakes. Light, wholesome creations, perfect for a semi-virtuous midmorning snack: banana bars, carrot cakes, blueberry muffins, date rolls and light fruitcakes. In the second pile I stack the afternoon-tea cakes. These cakes are made from slightly richer batters with stronger flavours to tempt a jaded palate. There are chocolate cakes, coffee cakes, syrup cakes and butter cakes flavoured with lemon peel, orange peel or pure vanilla essence. In the last pile are the special-occasion cakes. These are the kind of cakes I used to dream about — rich, decadent and seductive. Most of these cakes are stored in separate pieces and tightly wrapped in several layers of plastic and aluminium foil. Three tiers of chocolate fudge cake wrapped and ready to be drenched with port, sandwiched with cherries and cream and drizzled with melted chocolate. Two layers of hazelnut meringue, languishing for poached pears and Tasmanian double cream. A rich shortcake base in a tart tin waiting to be filled with lemon curd and topped with blueberries …
I call in the boys. When they see my stash piled up on the bench they just stand there with their tongues dangling and their eyes wide. ‘Are we going to eat all of those?’ Jake asks, pointing towards the great stacks of frozen cake. I’m quiet. I don’t know how to answer him. I guess I’ve never thought about what I’m going to do with my cakes. I’ve hoarded them desperately for months but now … Now, I don’t need them any more.
I smile sheepishly at Jake and feel like a greedy child caught with a fistful of lollies. While I think about what to do next, I ask the boys to choose one cake for morning tea. Of course they pick a chocolate cake. I zap it in the microwave to defrost it and whip up some chocolate butter icing to spread over the top. Then I make myself a cup of tea, get the boys some milk and we sit at the table together, eating cake. It feels good, the three of us sitting together in the kitchen. I watch the boys devour their cake and I smile at the crumbs that stick in the corners of their mouths and the icing that smears across their cheeks. They guzzle down piece after piece while I eat my cake slowly, as if I’ve already had enough.
Habitually, I pick up the last crumbs of cake with the tip of my finger. ‘Would you like to earn a bit of pocket money?’ I ask my boys before I put the crumbs into my mouth.
They nod and the cake billows in their cheeks as they grin.
‘I’d like to,’ says Jake.
‘Me too!’ yells Sam, sending cake and spittle all over the table.
‘Right then, you two,’ I say, standing up, ‘go and get dressed. We’ve got some work to do.’
The boys slide off their chairs, race each other down the hall and dive into their bedroom. I hear their drawers thump open as they pull out their clothes. While they are busy, I get organised.
Half an hour later we set off up the street. Outside, the air is blazing hot and the sun is still climbing high into the blue. Jake pushes his little wheelbarrow, stuffed full of cakes, in front of him and Sam rides along the footpath with more cakes in the trailer behind his plastic tractor. I walk behind them, a purse slung over my shoulder, pushing the laundry trolley in front of me. The wicker clothes basket in the trolley is loaded high with cakes. It doesn’t take Jake and Sam long to sell my cakes to the people who live on our street. Soon they have pockets lumpy with coins. By the time we get to the end of our street, we’ve sold twenty-five cakes and made over sixty dollars.
I’m on such a high, walking outside in the sun with Jake and Sam, that I don’t feel at all self-conscious pushing the cake-laden laundry trolley up the street. I just laugh when a mob of young blokes in a hotted-up Falcon drag past, hanging out the windows, hooting and yahooing.
We walk around the block and the cakes are selling well. After two blocks, the boys have so much money weighing down their pockets that their pants begin to drift down their backsides and they have to keep hitching them up. Because it is such a hot day, other people’s garden sprinklers seem inviting. Once, after I check that the grass on the footpath is free of bindi prickles, we stop our procession to get wet. We take off our sandals and run through the edge of a sprinkler watering someone’s front lawn. We must look a bit odd, I suppose, the three of us, but the boys are screaming with laughter and I don’t care.
By the time we get to the Easterns’ street, there is only one cake left, a coffee cake with caramel icing. We all stand at the corner on the dry grass under the street sign while I think of reasons not to give the last cake to Evelyn. There’s a moving van down the road parked in the driveway of Wendy’s old house. The boys, who are truck crazy, spot it and plead with me to take them down there.
We abandon the little wheelbarrow, the laundry trolley and the tractor and walk down the hill. Jake and Sam walk hand in hand and I carry the cake. Two stocky men with broad shoulders and big thighs are carrying a piano into Wendy’s old house. They waver on the stairs and the piano hits the step and roars. All the while, the kids belonging to the new family are running up and down Wendy’s old verandah playing tag among the packing boxes. Jake and Sam look done in and they sit on the footpath and watch. I’m exhausted too and I sit on the grass with the coffee cake in my lap.
Midday sun pounds down through my white canvas hat and I feel the icing on the last cake getting soft and sticky. It seems a shame to waste it. Jake and Sam look too exhausted to sell any more cakes, and in this heat, the icing won’t survive the walk home.
‘Come on, boys!’ I say, standing up and brushing the grass off my denim skirt.
‘Are we going home now?’ Jake asks, looking hopeful.
‘In a little while. I just want to give this cake to William’s mummy first.’
I like to think now that I decided to give the last cake to Evelyn as a token of my enduring friendship, but that wasn’t it. I simply couldn’t bear to waste my baking. So I lead the boys through the gate, dragging their feet and with pockets weighed down with booty. Then I tell Jake to look after Sam as I sit them in the shade of a crooked lemon tree near the rose garden.
I feel awkward as I climb the front steps. Though the house is all shut up, when I knock on the brown door I hear a little rustling noise that tells me Evelyn is moving about. The sound she makes is barely perceptible and, if I did not know that Steve had taken the cat with him, I would have thought she was the cat, pattering across the floor. I hold my breath while she undoes the deadlock. The door opens the width of the safety chain and I see half of Evelyn’s pale face peer outside. It takes her a moment to see me through the midday glare and she squints through one green eye to cut the sun.
‘Joanna?’ she whispers.
‘I thought you might like this.’ My voice seems loud and booming. I hold up the cake so that she can see it through the crack.
She looks puzzled but she opens the door and stands in front of me in her old towelling dressing gown. She seems embarrassed and tries to smooth down her hair but the auburn locks coil under her small hands and burst free like wire springs.
I try to speak softly. She looks pathetic and kind of small. ‘It’s a cake,’ I say. ‘The boys and I were selling them. We’ve only got one left. You can have it if you like. A gift.’
Her lips twitch nervously on one side, trying to make a smile.
‘I made it myself.’ She doesn’t move. ‘Something to have with your afternoon tea.’ I nod encouragingly as her too-thin, too-white hands reach out and take the cake.
‘Thank you,’ she says, bringing the cake across in front of her chest. ‘Would you like to come in?’ There’s a pause. ‘I could put the kettle on?’
I step backwards, stumbling down the top two steps. ‘Oh no! The boys are with me …’
She nods and retreats back into the darkness. ‘Maybe another time …’ she says. ‘Thanks again.’ The door closes between us and I’m still standing on the steps. My heart is thumping as I turn and begin to walk down to the boys, and then I stop, on the middle stair, turn around and walk up to the door and knock again.
She opens the door and I stammer, before I can change my mind, ‘I’ll come back by myself. At three.’ Something about the way she looks at me makes me feel like I’m talking to a child. ‘You have a shower and get dressed. We’ll share the cake for afternoon tea. Okay?’
She nods and smiles and there’s an emotion on her face I can’t read. Relief?
As I walk home with the boys, I’m shaking my head. Why did I say that? It will be torture! Evelyn and me sitting in her dark house, staring into our teacups and not knowing what to say to each other. Am I out of my mind?
Perhaps not. As I gaze at my boys my anxiety fades. Sam’s chubby little legs pummel the pedals on his plastic tractor and the front wheel scratches noisily along the pavement. Jake trundles along behind his wheelbarrow. His ears stick out under his cap, glowing pink as the sun shines through them. They look like the insides of the pipi shells I held up to the sky as a child. I’m sublimely happy this afternoon, just being with my boys. The satisfaction I feel is hard to articulate but I have a kind of revelation, as I’m walking home, that it’s got something to do with Evelyn.
Don’t get me wrong, I still think the choice she made was crazy. Yet, deep down, in the pit of my stomach, I know she did that crazy thing for the right reasons. She wanted to find someone who would do what she wasn’t able to do. She wanted to find someone who could mother her child. Evelyn’s going to be okay. She really is. And so am I.
I’m the lucky one, really. I’m a mum. I used to qualify that phrase with the word ‘just’. Whenever anyone asked what I did, I would say, ‘I’m just a mum.’ It was like an apology for not being someone more important, more intelligent or more sexy. Being a mother’s not easy. Sometimes it’s like being at the very bottom of the heap. Susan knows that. Clare knows that too. But hell! Evelyn gave away her own child, her precious blood, because she wanted to secure for Amy the love that she, herself, had been denied — the love of a devoted mother. Strange though it may seem, now I know this, I feel better about myself. And the best part is that I can eat my cake but not crave it. I’m not dying for it any more.
BREAKING THE WEB
The sun is soaking the curtains. It is seeping through the loose cotton weave and making tiny squares of pure gold. The gold dances on the edge of my darkness. I kick away the sheet and stand in the darkness, in my cotton nightdress, with bare feet pressed against a warm floor. I move over to the window and find the centre, where the curtains meet, and pull them apart. I hear the metal rings rip across the track as the blue day washes in.
The blue sky washes through all my days but William is the one who brings other colours into the house. When he comes to visit with Clare, his red shoes run up the front steps and splatter across the floor like disappearing paint. He jumps into my arms and I swirl his colours, green and red and gold, as I spin him around myself. He is a fluid rainbow and he pulls me outside into the garden where the sun paints away the shadows and puts a splash of yellow behind every blade of grass.
Clare sets up her easel and poises her brush in readiness and we run through the grass, William and I. I am a child with him, bare feet sinking into coolness, hand held in his as we climb the jacaranda. Skin on rough bark, toes curled against gravity, heartbeats rushing through our ears. It is January and the leaves on the tree are unfolding, filling spaces vacated by purple with luminous green. We reach out to the lower bough and pull against it, scattering the last purple blossoms to the ground. They spill over the grass and we jump down into a sea of purple and laugh. We laugh as we throw the soft petals over our faces and feel splashes of coolness where they fall.
Then we lie down. We lie on the ground and the sun trickles like honey into our mouths and we taste its sweetness. We fill ourselves up with it and somewhere we can hear bees. We are full of honey and the bees think we are flowers and frisk in sharp circles around us. We are still. We are so still that we can see through their brittle wings and marvel at their perfect bands of yellow and black as they dart in and out of the flowers that have fallen on us. William squeezes my hand and we jump up and are off again. Running.
Running so fast our chests ache and heave with our breath. We are running to get to the hose and William gets there first and sprays ribbons of water everywhere. I dart in and out of the ribbons, soaking my clothes, my hair, and I laugh. And he laughs as I pull the hose from him and put my thumb against the spray and make a million tiny droplets in the air which arc into a rainbow. William runs through the rainbow and then there are two rainbows dancing before me, dancing colours of green and purple and blue.
Clare sees the colours and captures them on her canvas, dipping her brush again and again into the liquid tones to paint William and me together. She paints William dancing through the water across the grass and he is vivid and full of brightness. And she paints me. She paints me small on the canvas, like him, in watery colours, reflecting his joy.
When we are wet, the colours run and pour through us and I am happy. I am happy because I know that, one blue day, when I don’t see William, if I close my eyes, I will still see a rainbow arcing behind my eyelids. Then I will remember how my world is coloured in different hues when we are together.
