Don't Kill the Birthday Girl (20 page)

“Maybe I'm just allergic to weddings,” I said to one girl.

Then one of my best friends from college became engaged to a vegetarian. Stephanie was bound and determined that I not just have a complete meal after their ceremony, but that I have dessert. She sent me an email with a list of cake batter ingredients that ranged from the commonplace (salt and vanilla) to the quirky (oat flour and Florida Crystals Evaporated Cane Juice). When it became clear that the only deal breaker in her wedding cake was the frosting's soy, she negotiated with the baker, asking if they could do an unfrosted cupcake on the side. The baker one-upped by offering to make a dairy-free, soy-free ganache with vegan dark chocolate.

“Can you have any of those things?” Steph wrote to me. “Or would it be too scary to have this stuff?”

I thought about admitting that, yes, it was too scary. Did I even have a taste for chocolate? But she seemed so excited, and she had gone to all that trouble.

“Let's give it a shot,” I wrote back.

On the big day, the bride found me minutes after the cake cutting. This was usually right around the time I start edging toward the exit. At first I assumed she was coming to apologize, empty-handed, but instead (as if she'd had it hidden in the folds of her wedding gown), with a flourish Steph materialized my very own cupcake, swirled in dark-brown frosting.

I waited until she'd left to take a tiny bite, sure that something would go wrong. But my
Hmmm
turned into an
Mmmm
.
The cake's interior was sweet, moist, and 100 percent Sandra-friendly. Good lord.

The next morning, I called my mother. Skipping over the weather, the guests, how beautiful Steph had looked, blahblahblah—I cut to the chase. “I have to tell you about this cupcake,” I said.

“It worries me,” my mother admitted the other day, thinking of the wedding she'd like for me to be able to have. I don't have a fiancé lined up, but my mother is already clipping articles on vegan bakeries that might be able to replicate Steph's cupcake. She brainstorms substitutes for mini-quiches and deviled eggs. “After all,” she says, “it's not like someone with your allergies can just send out pigs in a blanket.”

This is not a woman who has ever romanticized being the mother of the bride. She married my father in the chapel of Vinson Hall, a retirement community close to her parents' home in McLean, Virginia. Afterward, they served punch and cookies in the community's recreation room, right next to the pool tables. This was after her sister's wedding, which was held in the family garage, papered over and painted to look like a garden. When
their
mother had gotten married, the thing my grandmother always talked about was not the hors d'oeuvres, or the dress, but rather the months it took beforehand for Carl, my grandfather, to save up the gas to drive them to their honeymoon.

I ask my mother what kind of cake she had at Vinson Hall.

“Yellow sheet … something,” she says. “What I really remember is being starved and never getting the chance to eat anything.”

With no inherited wedding-diva streak, it's hard to come to terms with the fact that unless I want the official wedding portrait to show the bride on a stretcher, the day really will have to revolve around my needs. I will have to choose a venue that is not handling any other catered events that day, to avoid the risk of cross-contamination in the kitchen. I will have to find the caterer who doesn't blink when I ask them to list every single cooking oil they will use. I will need to see every recipe, every label. I will hunt down either my friend's baker or another one who knows how to make the base of ganache with coconut milk. The guy can have his choice of groom's cake—but only to the extent of selecting from groom's cakes that also happen to be Sandra-friendly. Maybe we won't even serve cream with the coffee.

I'm probably setting myself up for a high-stakes disaster. I should trade it in for a city hall ceremony and some really amazing sushi afterward. Yet part of me dreams of having an evening when all my loved ones eat the way I eat every day—and everyone eats well, and everyone leaves full, and there's not one moment of pity.

Just once, I want to fight someone for that last bite of cake.

CHAPTER EIGHT

On the Road

W
hen my sister first moved off campus during her college years, she found a group apartment in New York City's East Village, down the street from the KGB Bar. Her apartment was perfumed in the distilled essence of cigarettes and had Christmas lights strung up year-round, couches upholstered in stained 1920s velvet, and jug bottles of merlot. Someone had transformed the chandelier into an installation piece, complete with birds' nests and a steady swarm of gnats.

It was the perfect space for artistic Manhattanites who—used to the pendulum swing between windfall gigs and unemployment—could champion two-hundred-dollar shoes and bedside stands salvaged from the curb with equal enthusiasm. One morning, my sister opened her bedroom door to find a three-model
Playboy
shoot being staged in the living room.
Most mornings, she opened the door to a dog urine puddle between the living room couch and the sideboard she used as a dresser.

On a visit to New York, I went with Christina and her boyfriend to her favorite neighborhood restaurant for dinner before catching the 9 p.m. train back to D.C. The Asian-deco bistro offered design-your-own rice bowls and seven-dollar
aguas frescas
. Like many places in the Village, it favored vegetarians, meaning that it wasn't easy to avoid soy. When my throat protested after the third or fourth bite of my rice bowl, I figured it was the whole edamame I'd tried to pick around in the veggie slaw, or maybe soy mayo providing the creamy base to garlic-ginger “sauce.” I switched my attention to the rainbow of rice to choose from—coconut, Bhutanese red, Forbidden black—and took a long swig of my ginger-laced juice. The reaction subsided.

If I'd known that shrimp had been listed among the half dozen ingredients of the dumplings we'd shared as an appetizer (as Christina's boyfriend later remembered it), I might have been more alarmed. Or I might have shrugged it off. I'd had only one dumpling, and as far as I knew, it was not a potent allergy. As a child I'd enjoyed shrimp tempura. Only a few nights of suspicious mouth-tingling responses, beginning around the age of twelve, plus a natural wariness of shellfish, had led me to deem shrimp off-limits.

After dinner I cabbed it to Penn Station, grabbed a window seat on the Northeast Regional, and was asleep within minutes. Around 11 p.m. I jolted awake, my eyes struggling to open despite sore and gluey contact lenses. Where was I? My throat hurt.

I was in the grip of a biphasic reaction, my mast cells
responding with renewed vigor hours after the initial allergen exposure. These reactions are an unwelcome novelty that began occurring in my late twenties. They are triggered by cashews, mango, and (as I was now learning) shrimp. There was a possibility of vomiting, diarrhea, even anaphylaxis. And I was stuck on an Amtrak train, with an hour between me and D.C.

I got my phone out and dialed home, hoping to connect with Adam to see if he could meet me at the train station. No answer. I was too jittery to compose a sensible text message. I dialed again. When it went to voice mail, the words poured out.

“Adam it's me and I'm having a really bad reaction and if you can—”

In my hunched-over position, sprawled across two seats, a uniformed waist filled my field of vision. I looked up to find the conductor leaning down intently.

“Excuse me, miss.”

I kept talking into the phone. “… someone just came up, maybe …” I thought he'd seen my distress and was asking if I needed a doctor's assistance.

“Miss.”

“Yes.” Maybe they would stop the train?

“Hang up that phone.” Huh?

“Hang up
right now
. You are in the Quiet Car.”

I snapped my phone shut. “Sir, I'm in the middle of a medical emergency. An allergic reaction.”

He narrowed his eyes. “To what?”

“To … my dinner,” I said, knowing it sounded like a lie. Hours earlier, when I handed him my ticket, I'd seemed fine. I
had
been fine. He shook his head.

“Miss, I'm not going to ask you again. If you need to call
someone, then you step out of my car. I'll be watching you.” He continued down the aisle, as a passenger two rows away gave me a cool stare over the top of his newspaper. Everyone in the seats around me had heard our conversation. No one asked if I needed help.

Sorry. Will call
, I texted Adam. It would be another ten minutes before I felt up to walking to the next car. For now I got out my inhaler, shook it, puffed, shook it, puffed again—one part necessity, one part a desire to prove I wasn't faking. I dry swallowed a Benadryl. Then I doubled over in the seat and pressed my fists against my eyes. If there is an upside to tears, it's that they return moisture to dried-out contacts.

After years of being on the road with food allergies, I've come to expect exchanges with personnel who are at best puzzled, at worst surly. Case in point: for years, my mother would send me off on any trip longer than two days with a whole loaf of Giant-brand Italian bread in my suitcase, as insurance that I would never risk eating something contaminated because I had no other option.

Try explaining that to the airport security guard who found an eight-inch serrated knife in my bag as my high school choir waited to board our flight for Disney World. You know, for cutting the bread. She held it up in the air, calling out for its owner. Even now I can picture my mother's careful packing, folding a paper towel eight times over to serve as a sheath for the blade, securing it at top and bottom with a rubber band. Toothbrush, pajamas, underwear, big knife; wasn't this how everyone packed?

On vacations, my family would pay extra for a fridge and microwave, and travel by car whenever possible. My father was
always the one behind the wheel. My mother liked to fill an entire suitcase with Sandra-friendly food, right down to her own dish detergent, sponges, salt and pepper shakers, and a small water bottle filled with cooking oil. (They would also tuck in a small water bottle filled with vodka, but I didn't figure this out until years later.)

When packing our food was not possible, she'd insist that a grocery store be our first stop, sometimes even before we had checked into our hotel. My father would keep the rental car running in the parking lot, rolling the window down so he could drum his fingers impatiently on the door. She'd come back with “just the essentials,” e.g., orange juice, a box of Corn Pops, peanut butter, pretzels, frozen peas or lima beans, a pack of bacon, dried linguine, a roll of paper towels, a box of Kleenex, and a tin of cashews or macadamias. I couldn't eat the nuts. They were for my father—a peace offering.

For years, my dad, in his civilian life as a lawyer, has counseled a Hawaiian nonprofit that protects the interests of native Pacific islanders. This meant periodic weeks of meetings in Oahu; for several years, we joined him, traveling to additional islands and turning the business trip into a family vacation. With each visit we became more at home. We no longer needed to cut the intensity of Kona coffee with decaf. We had been through all fourteen climates of the Big Island. We took to returning to a favorite rental complex in Maui, a Lahaina cove where turtles lived and bananas grew by the manager's office. By the time I was in my midtwenties, one of the few major Hawaii to-dos that remained undone, in our book, was Maui's Road to Hana.

The Road to Hana is a sixty-eight-mile stretch of Hawaiian
state highway known for its tropical rain forest and its sharp curves, more than six hundred of them, which connects the populous center of Kahului with the tiny town of Hana. The trip crosses fifty-nine bridges, most of which are century-old concrete, at least forty-six of which are one lane. Two cars meeting head-on have to spontaneously determine who has right of way—or else play chicken.