Julia's Chocolates (9 page)

“See! You just did it, Lara!” Lydia said, handing her another daiquiri. “You said that you exist separately from your vagina, except that’s not true. Our vaginas hold our powers, our passions, our secret core. They are dear to us, and we must cherish them as we would our very best friend!”

“But I don’t want to see my best friend’s vagina,” Katie said, flipping her red ponytail behind her back. “No offense to any of you, I’m sure you all have dandy vaginas, but I don’t care to see them. Especially when I’m eating.”

Caroline finally intervened. “Well, I think we can come to a compromise here, a give-and-take. Why don’t we all sit down at the table and then take off our skirts and pants under the table and then we can be one with our vaginas during dinner, as Lydia suggested, but we don’t have to actually see anyone else’s vagina.”

“Good idea,” said Lara. “Let’s eat. I’m starving. Naked or not, I gotta eat.”

“Perfect! A perfect Vagina Plan, Caroline!” Lydia approved, clapping her hands together. “Now help me bring in the meal. We’ll celebrate our vaginas without making everyone else celebrate them, too.”

“Well, I’ll strip down,” said Katie. “But my personal vagina does not deserve any celebration. It has only gotten me into trouble. Vaginal irritation, yeast, bad sex, a baby, bad sex, good sex, more bad sex, another baby, yeast, bad sex, another baby, bad sex, still another baby. My vagina and I aren’t speaking much, but I’ll eat some of that chocolate cake you have in your kitchen that looks like this house and hope my passion and my vaginal strength come back.”

“That is not my delectable creation, although I wish I could claim it,” Aunt Lydia answered, turning toward the kitchen. We all followed her like she was the Piped Piper. “My brilliant niece Julia made that cake.”

As they entered the kitchen, Lara and Caroline gasped, then their heads whipped over to me at the same time, like a line of Rockettes, before snapping back to my cake. For long, long seconds everyone at the Getting To Know Your Vagina Psychic Night meeting stood and stared in wonder at my chocolate cake. I had even recreated tiny chocolate toilets and the bridge on the lawn.

“It’s like looking at art. Chocolate art,” whispered Lara. “The pigs are incredible, Julia. They’re even wearing their names.”

“I’m telling you!” Aunt Lydia announced. “This chocolate cake is better than foreplay. My niece makes Better Than Foreplay Chocolate Cake, that she does.”

“Oh, Good Lord,” said Katie. “We’re not supposed to eat that, are we?” And then she burst into tears.

Super. I had made Katie cry for the second time. I put my arm around her shoulders. A slice of chocolate cake would cheer her up. It had almost always worked for me.

I learned as a child that baking with chocolate can take your mind off life. It started when one of the young mothers in our neighborhood, Renee, gave me an old cookbook of hers with recipes for chocolate cakes, candy, muffins, etc. She taught me how to bake.

The walls of her kitchen were painted yellow. The cabinets were blue with handles in the shape of coffee mugs. Red tiles danced along the backsplash. She had a nice husband, three kids, two dogs, four cats, and a lizard that sat on the counter watching her all day. “I’m a hard-core Mommy, Julia. Hard-core. Want me to show you my new recipe book on making crepes?”

Using money from baby-sitting, I started buying my own ingredients to bake when my mother was gone for days or weeks at a time. When Renee got sick on her husband’s birthday, I offered to bake the cake. I whipped up the eggs just so, melted the butter nice and slow, sifted the flour not once, but twice, mixed the dry ingredients with the wet ones a spoon at a time, then watched the cake as it rose in the pan in the oven.

I doubled the recipe for a thick, creamy chocolate icing, then decorated the cake with swoops and swirls—not so much it would look tacky, but enough to give it style.

Renee was so happy when I gave it to her, she blew her nose and cried. I had been sneaking out on Sunday mornings to go to church with her (her husband was a minister), and after that I started baking cookies, cupcakes, and muffins for their women’s brunches, and I became close to the women there. They, in turn, reached back out to me with clothes and friendship and food.

And calls to Children’s Services.

When my mother found out what was going on, we moved again. “They think they’re better than you,” she told me, shoving a trembling hand through her hair, one eye swollen shut from where one of her boyfriends had hit her. He had hit me, too, but had used his fist on my gut so my bruise didn’t show. “You’re their project, nothing more, nothing less. They think you’re going to hell and they’re gonna save you. How could they like you, anyhow? You’re dirty all the time. You never smile. Your hair’s a mess….”

I hid my tears as we drove away from that neighborhood, but the minister’s wife had given me something valuable to my heart and to my soul: a chocolate ticket to life.

Baking with chocolate calms my nerves. There is something about melted, warm, gooey chocolate, and the memories of Renee’s red and blue and yellow kitchen with the ever-watching lizard that reaches deep inside of me. When I have felt despair crushing me into nothing, I have reached for chocolate with one hand, a recipe book with another.

Chocolate, you could say, has saved my life.

The Cheers To Vaginas Tacos, the Fruit Salads For Fruitful Women, the Greens For Clean Secretions Salad, and the hot sauce to cure vaginitis had all been eaten. The strawberry daiquiris had been drunk. I personally had three to make sure that the “woman in me” could escape and explore. We had filled our plates, slithered out of our pants and skirts under the table, and eaten, the candles flickering.

Within seconds we forgot we were half-naked and supposed to be celebrating our vaginas and chattered away. After an hour, I let my mind swerve to Paul Bunyan. I hadn’t seen him for a week. I knew he had worked on Stash’s farm the day I met him, and the next day Stash and his workers were on Paul Bunyan’s ranch, and then Paul Bunyan apparently grabbed his great blue ox and went back to the city.

“Got a big trial that’s going to start in a few weeks. He didn’t tell me what it’s about, but I read it in the papers. Man tried to have his wife killed. Hired a hit man. The hit man got to know the wife and liked her. Hit man told the wife what was going on. She called the cops.” Stash shook his head. “The plot is too stupid and too overused to even use in a movie but there it is, in real life.”

I was afraid to ask. But I did. “Whose side is Paul—I mean, whose side is Dean representing?”

Stash looked shocked. “Well, he’s on the wife’s side. Of course.”

My body sagged with relief. Men who protected criminals were as creepy as the men they represented.

Those blue eyes of Paul’s, and that smile, kept appearing before my eyes. Not that it meant anything, not anything at all. I am, after all, not into men anymore. The very thought of getting involved with any member of the male species made me feel ill.

Besides, Paul Bunyan was probably married or had been married eight different times. He wasn’t the classically handsome sort. There was no way he would ever land in the pages of a magazine. But he was huge, his hair was good, he had those blue eyes and a nice, slow smile.

I told myself to rid Paul Bunyan from my mind. The man scared me. Those blue eyes that
really looked
at me scared me. That nice and friendly smile and that low, gravelly voice, and that laugh that made me want to laugh along with him scared me, too.

“You can stop kidding yourself anytime.” The sharp tone shook me from my reverie, and my eyes flew to Lara, who sat across from me. Katie was at my left, Caroline across from her, and Aunt Lydia at the head of the table to my right.

“I’m not kidding myself, Lara!” Katie snapped, dropping more sour cream onto the meat in her taco. “I just know things will get better.”

“When?”

“What?”

“When? When on earth do you really think that things will get better?” Lara took out the rubber band holding her hair back and shoved her hands through it. In the candlelight she looked pale, as if she hadn’t slept in a week. “You’ve been saying that for three years, as long as I’ve known you. You smile when you say it, but you know the truth.”

“Yes, I do know the truth! My husband is a good man, and he’ll stop…” Katie’s voice faded. “He’ll stop drinking. Things have already gotten better—”

Lara rolled her eyes. “Katie, you told me earlier this week that J.D. had passed out on the couch after working his way through three bars. He just lost his ninth job. No one in town will hire him because of his drinking problem, and soon no one in Decateur or Rosemont will hire him, either!”

“So what the hell do you want me to do!” Katie turned red and tossed her napkin on the table. “You, of all people, should understand, Lara. I took wedding vows, I said all that stuff about forsaking all others, in sickness and in health, till death do us part, and I’m not going to just walk out because he’s not perfect!”

“
Not perfect
?” There went another roll of the eyes. “Katie, he’s not even got the ‘p’ in perfect going for him. You’ve been married how long?”

“Ten years?”

“Ten years? Four children in ten years and an alcoholic husband.”

“He’s not an alcoholic.” Katie said, but her voice was as weak as a dying rabbit. “He drinks too much. There’s a difference.”

“I won’t argue with you, not because I’m not right, but because it’s pointless. But the result is the same, isn’t it? J.D. drinks. You work all day cleaning houses, often bringing Logan with you to work because you don’t trust your husband to watch him. The man will be drunk, won’t hear his cries, won’t feed him—”

“Stop it, Lara.” Katie covered her face with her hands.

“You work all day, pick up the other kids, take them to soccer and the community art classes, you volunteer at school, then you go home, try to get your husband off the couch, fix dinner, help the kids with their homework, clean your own house, pack lunches for the next day, and at eleven o’clock at night you start writing. Have I about got it?”

Katie didn’t move.

“And this has been going on for your whole marriage. And he’s a mean drunk, isn’t he?” Lara asked, relentless.

I sat, frozen. Mean drunks were the worst. I would far rather have a friendly, horny drunk than a mean drunk for a husband. Mean drunks hit. I had seen that with precisely three of my mother’s boyfriends/husbands.

Katie opened her mouth, then shut it. Opened it again. “I can handle this situation. I’m doing what’s best for the kids.”

“You’re in denial, Katie.”

“And you aren’t, Miss Perfect Minister’s Wife?”

“No.” Lara took another big drink of her daiquiri. “I’m not perfect, and everyone here knows it. But I love you, Katie. You’re one of the nicest people I’ve ever met. You’re the best mother I know. Your kids are so good, so sweet, and it’s because of you. Don’t forget that people talk at church. Everyone loves you. Every time someone is sick or sad, they can count on cookies from you, help from you. And yet you never, ever help yourself.”

“I
am
helping myself—dammit, I am! I am keeping my family together.” Katie put her elbows on the table and bent her head for a moment, then looked Lara straight in the eyes, all vestiges of pretense gone. “I can’t divorce him. If I did, he would turn on the charm for some other woman, get married, and then my kids would go and visit him, without me there to supervise. He can’t take care of them. He yells at them, Lara. I would worry the entire time they were there. And what if his new wife didn’t like the kids? What if she was mean to them? What if her kids didn’t like my kids, and yet my kids are stuck there for the weekend with their father getting drunk and a mean stepmother?”

I didn’t know what to say, but I knew enough about divorce to know that the father always got visitation unless he was an axe-wielding, drug-snorting, ex-convict son of a bitch. Katie was right about that.

“But what about you?” Caroline spoke up, her face pale, her cheekbones standing out in the light. “When are you going to choose you?”

“What do you mean, ‘choose you’?”

“I mean, when are you going to see that you matter, that your happiness matters, that you don’t deserve to be married to a drunk?”

“J.D. will get to a point where he’ll stop drinking—”

“No, he won’t,” Aunt Lydia, Lara, and Caroline said together.

“Not unless he faces a crisis,” Lara continued. “He has to hit the very bottom of the ladder, then fall off of it, then crack his head open, then wake up in his own vomit in a strange place with bars before he’ll change, Katie. If then.”

“When he’s sober, he’s nice to the children.” Her voice faded. “Usually. Sometimes. Now and then.”

“How often is he sober?” Caroline asked, but by the way she asked it, I knew she already knew. “He’s an alcoholic.”

“No, he’s not. And if he is, alcoholism is a disease.”

Aunt Lydia snorted. Lara blew air through her teeth and looked disgusted. Caroline’s lips turned in on themselves.

“Bullshit,” Lara said. “Letting alcoholics claim they have a disease lets them off the hook. It forces their families to feel sorry for them instead of kicking them out into the street. I’ve seen people with real diseases, and they did not find their disease,
they did not bring their disease on themselves
, by willfully drinking their way through thousands of bottles of liquor over a period of years. The only disease the alcoholics have is the disease of weakness and selfishness. And you’re enabling him to stay just as he is, Katie.”