Black Cake: A Novel (20 page)

T
he year before her mother
died, Benedetta Bennett found herself standing at a lectern in a Midtown Manhattan meeting hall saying, “Hello, my name is Benny.” As soon as the words came out, she knew that she had made a colossal mistake. Benny stood there trembling, the electronic fizz of the microphone teasing the pause. A dampness spread across the small of her back. Her waistband itched. She looked up again at her audience, cringing at their open faces.

Thirty pairs of eyes. In those soft, warm seconds of brotherly love, they had no idea, did they? Those eyes would soon will her out of the room as she hurried down the aisle toward the door. They couldn’t know what a state she was in. They couldn’t know that half an hour earlier, she had nearly dropped to the icy sidewalk next to the doggy base of a tree, overwhelmed by despair.

Benny had gotten off the bus from one of her jobs and had been walking, walking, walking. Unable to shake off the leaden feeling inside, she felt her knees willing her to the ground. Just then, a man walked by and she caught the look in his eyes as he headed up a set of stairs to the entrance of a building. His forty-something face, though framed in a movie-star haircut and buffered about the chin by a cashmere scarf, seemed to mirror Benny’s own bruised interior, only with something else, a look that bordered on relief. The man pulled open a huge door, paused, and looked back at Benny. The door was forest
green, and forest green was Benny’s favorite color. So she followed the man inside.

Benny passed through a dimly lit foyer smelling of dusty paper and school days and entered a large, warm room with rows of fold-up chairs and a table covered with snacks and flyers. She nodded her thanks when someone handed her a paper cup of coffee and a gluten-free cookie. She basked in the murmured welcomes, the sanctuary of unknown faces, the heat of the cup on her fingers. She was already feeling better. She could have stopped herself right there, but she didn’t. Instead, she took a seat between a young man in a pilly blue sweater and a woman in a scarlet skirt and allowed the tide of goodwill and the need for catharsis to pull her up to the head of the room.

Until then, no one had wanted to know who she was, where she had come from, or why she was there, because, after all, everyone was there for the same basic reason and the
why, exactly?
of their presence on that particular evening, and the
who, exactly?
they had been, or hoped to be, would not require elaboration unless and until they took the floor. And now, she was holding on to the edge of the lectern with one hand and clasping a half-eaten cookie with the other.

“My name is Benny and I’m an alcoholic.”

With those few words, Benny had officially crashed a meeting for recovering alcoholics for want of a place where people would say
Come in,
no matter what. Where they would support her even when she told them that she hadn’t attended her own father’s funeral service. Where they would listen without a trace of shock in their faces when she told them why. Where she could say, to people who might not understand but who would listen to her, anyway, that she was tired of having her authenticity as a person called into question simply because she did not fit the roles that others wanted her to play, or because she wanted to play roles that others seemed to feel were beyond her.

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.

B
enny 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.

And this was something that Ma had passed down to Byron, that unquestioning loyalty to Bert Bennett. Benny had loved her father and admired him and she, too, had been loyal to him, until the day that he stopped being loyal to her. He was the one who had drawn the line in the sand.

Wasn’t he?

Ma was right about one thing. It was true that Benny’s relationships had been complicated. People had a tendency to relate to only one thing or another, not to people like her, not to in-betweeners, not to
neither-nors.
This had been true in politics, it had been true in religion, it had been true in culture, and it sure as hell was true when it came to the laws of attraction.

Benny had to watch herself, she was overmixing the batter. She was getting agitated. She was thinking of how she had been called a flake, called confused, called insincere. In trying to live with an open heart, Benny had set herself up to be perpetually mistrusted. Thank goodness times had changed since her difficult college days. But there was still a lot of misunderstanding to go around.

And when people didn’t understand something, they often felt threatened.

And when people felt threatened, they often turned to violence.

T
he cake-baking photos were ready
and tucked into a padded envelope. Benny pulled a stool over to the kitchen counter and picked up a pen.

Dear Ma,
Benny began.

Benny’s first mistake was to write the note by hand. She’d always been a slow writer. Her second mistake was to think that she could explain herself in a handwritten note, not only because there was so much to say, but also because some things were too ugly to be written down. Still, she wanted to try, even though five years had gone by since her father’s death.

I know it’s been a long time since we’ve talked. I heard your messages. I just wanted you to know that I appreciated them and I think about you all the time. I’m really sorry about Dad’s funeral. I’m sorry I wasn’t there. Actually, I was there that day, I just didn’t let you know it. I saw you in that peach-colored dress that Dad always loved and I am so glad you wore that instead of the conventional black. I could just imagine a couple of those ladies (you know who I mean) seeing the widow of the esteemed Bert Bennett wearing such a bright dress at her husband’s funeral! Daddy would have found that funny.

There’s a reason why I didn’t go up to you and Byron. I know this is a long time coming but I want to explain….

Benny wrote about Steve, about college, about the things she’d been trying to accomplish, about her disappointments. She was sorry,
she said, that so much time had gone by but she would not apologize for being who she was, even if being who she was hadn’t brought her a whole lot of comfort of late. Benny finished the letter and sealed it but it would be a while before she could bring herself to slip it into a mailbox. By the time she did, it was already autumn 2018, and Benny sees now that her mother had run out of time.

B and B, I know your father could be strict with you children. He had such high expectations for you two. We both did. And I see, now, that this put a lot of pressure on you. But your father was my love and he gave me a beautiful boy and girl and he loved you two more than you will ever know. Maybe one day, you’ll have children of your own and then you’ll see.

Benedetta, I’m thinking of you right now. Surely, you must know that your father cared for you deeply. You were his baby girl. But you had grown up to become such a different kind of woman from what we had expected. This does not mean that we didn’t love you. And it does not mean that we didn’t believe in you. But, yes, we had our own views and we expected you to hear us out. We were worried about how you were going to make your way in the world.

I realize that times have changed. It used to be that a solid education could make a difference in this country, especially for people like us, with all the prejudices that could get in the way. No one seems to know anymore what it takes for a young person to make a career or to have a stable home life. You young people have so much more freedom now, even in terms of who to love. But it also seems as though you have less guidance, despite all those how-to lists on the Internet. It’s as if there are so many choices that it’s no
longer possible to know which path is right for you. And the prejudices are still there. Less formal, in some cases, but still present.

In any case, we felt that a college degree couldn’t hurt, not to mention one from a prestigious university. When you dropped out of college and refused to go back, it just felt like the beginning of an unraveling of something that we had worked so hard to create for you, a kind of safety net that we thought you could carry with you for the rest of your life. And I hate to admit it, but we were a little offended, too, after everything that we had done for you.

I don’t think you realize, Benny, how lucky you were to do so well in school. How could you? Except for that one dip in your grades in high school, all you had to do was show up and you were at the top of your class. It became evident that you had some kind of a gift, Benny, and we felt like you were throwing it away.

About that Thanksgiving Day. I know, your father and I had always taught you that love and loyalty counted for more than anything else. But what happens when love and loyalty are in conflict with each other? I love you children more than anything, but my loyalty to your father was the bedrock of our family. I needed to be there for your dad, just as he had always been there for me. For us. Without him, none of us would have made it this far. Your dad needed a little time to get his head around what you were trying to tell us about your social life. But then you walked out and his pride got in the way. Yours, too, I suspect.

I didn’t think we’d end up going eight years without seeing each other. First, you ran off and never called again. Then your father became sick. And I figured I’d let you know once he was better, tell you to come back home to see us, but before we knew it, he was gone. And then we didn’t see you at the funeral and that was just too much, even for me. It’s true, I didn’t feel like talking to you after that. I felt I needed to keep my distance to stay healthy in the head. What a fool I was, Benny. Once again, I had wasted time that was never mine to squander.

Once in a while, I’d leave a voice message on your cellphone but you never responded. But now I have your letter, the one with the photos of the cake. The photos you said you meant to mail to me months before. I called
you when I saw them. I left you a message. I love those pictures! And now I know. About your reasons for leaving college. About Steve. Why didn’t you tell me any of this before? Why didn’t you ask for help? Why do we women let shame get in the way of our well-being? I thought that times had changed since I was a girl, but apparently, not enough.