by Dorothy Hartley
I’m making a birthday cake. All the ingredients are measured out and arranged neatly on the spotless surfaces of the TV studio kitchen and the camera is rolling. We’ve taped six episodes today and I’m tired of looking at pastry. I don’t want to make cakes for TV anymore. I want to make a cake for my mom.
Mary, my mom. Mary baked cakes when she could still see, and I started making cakes when she couldn’t anymore. My name is Mary too, and I look down at the cake I’m making. It looks good, until it slowly splits open like an egg, and my mom is inside it, looking up past pink rosettes of frosting and asking me about the weather.
I wake up from my dream in the last row of the plane. There is no more cake and there is a tall youngish man folded into the seat next to me, wearing a grey suit and drinking a can of tomato juice. He looks familiar. He looks like a lawyer.
Every time I ride a plane, the person next to me orders tomato juice from the drinks cart. Almost nobody drinks tomato juice anymore, except for my mother and the people I sit next to on planes. Tomato juice makes a person trustworthy, because it ties them to a past where more people drank tomato juice. Grey Suit takes a sip from his can and glances at me.
“Where are you headed? Coming? Going?” he asks.
“I’m going home to Ohio to visit my mom for her birthday,” I tell him.
“How old will she be?”
“Sixty next week. I go home every year so I can make her a cake. She was a baker.”
“That’s sweet,” he says. “Are you carrying on the family business?”
I hate this question. Yes, I’ve baked my share of cakes, but that’s not my profession. At least, not yet. When I was nineteen and Mary’s eyes went bad, she had me start baking for her, and she decided that I would open a shop like she had when she was young. She sent me to New York with her life savings—she didn’t want me to stay in Ohio my whole life. I didn’t really think about it. I just went.
And I had every intention of doing it, even though I wasn’t entirely confident that it would work. I had every intention of opening a shop and baking cakes and carrying on Mary’s name and Mary’s recipes and the passion that she had for cake. I just never got that far. When I got to New York City, everything was more expensive than Mary had imagined, and I only had enough money to rent a place to live. There was no capital left for cakes.
I didn’t have a job, so I wandered around to every bakery that I could find. None of them felt right, but I couldn’t bear to tell Mary that I had failed: I just wanted to make cakes and make my mom happy, but in the professional world of pastry you’ve really got to work your way up a ladder, and I didn’t want to start at the bottom. I lied and told Mary that I got a high-profile job at one of the better bakeries in the Upper East Side, making the private decision to leave cake alone for a little while. That was seven years ago.
A few months after moving to New York, I saw a man on the subway wheeling this gigantic cake with pink frosting on a cart. I struck up a conversation. He told me that he was in the cake business, and he hired me on the spot: instead of baking cakes, I became one of the girls who jumps out of cakes at bachelor parties. It was close enough.
The job pays pretty well (though business hasn’t been as good for the last few years), and I can tell my mom that I’m working in cake. Overall, I’m happy. But I can never tell my mom the truth—Mary thinks that I’m running the show at a successful bakery. And maybe, one day, that will be true, but for the moment, I’m doing well where I am. I don’t see a reason to change that.
Grey Suit is still looking at me with steady grey eyes, waiting for an answer. People ask me about baking a lot, and I usually lie to them because of the nature of my job—it sometimes freaks people out when they discover the real reason that I so often have frosting on my clothes—but this guy looks so trustworthy, like we’ve met before, and he is drinking tomato juice. I want to tell him the truth. More pressingly, though, I want him to think well of me—most of the men I know aren’t as nice as he seems to be.
I shouldn’t lie so much, but it’s almost second nature at this point. I like my job enough, but some people just ask so many questions. It doesn’t feel worth it to get into the truth with strangers who don’t really care. Who knows? Maybe he’ll care if I tell him what I do for a living. Maybe, instead of asking me about the logistics of what happens after I jump out of a cake, he’ll take a sip from his can of tomato juice and ask me what I like to do in my free time. Maybe he’ll tell me about being a lawyer, if that’s what he is. Or maybe he’s no different from the other people I’ve lied to on planes.
Suddenly, I realize where I’ve seen Grey Suit before. We were neighbors—we went to school together, and his dad used to help my mom out around the house when my dad skipped out. He’s grown up since then, but I remember him always being nice to me. I’m relieved that I finally recognize him, because it gives me a simple answer: no way in hell am I telling him what I do for a living. He may have always been nice, but he was a little snitch growing up. He might out me to Mary. The truth would kill her.
“Yes, I’m a baker,” I lie. “I run a bakery in New York.”
“I bet you make good cakes.”
“Yeah, I like to think that I put a lot of myself into each one.”
The plane lands, and Grey Suit and I walk to the baggage claim. He smiles and waves at me as we prepare to go our separate ways, but he stops in his tracks, turning around like he’s just realized something important.
“Is—is your mother named Mary Pinkerton, by any chance? I can’t believe that I’m only just now realizing, but I think you and I may have gone to school together,” he says, walking back in my direction.
“That’s my mom,” I reply with some hesitation, trying to make it seem like I hadn’t recognized him earlier—I don’t want to delve any further into my lie with him.
“Do you remember me? We used to play together at your house as kids.”
“Paul?” I ask, feigning surprise. “You look so different! It’s so good to see you!”
“Yes! You look so good. I can’t believe I didn’t realize it before—I knew I recognized something about you—something about your mother loving cake. I’ll have to come by sometime while I’m home to catch up with you and your mom.”
He gives me an awkward hug, and I tell him that I’m late, so I have to go, but that he should come by—that Mary would really appreciate it. I take a taxi from the airport into the suburbs. I have a contact in my hometown who got me a cake gig at a bachelor party for before I’m supposed to go to my mom’s—small town parties can sometimes be a nice change of pace from the big city events I’m used to, and it’s always nice to have the extra cash.
The taxi passes the old elementary school where I went with Paul and the park where Mary used to take me to play when I was little. I imagine her bright eyes taking in the colors of the trees and remember the way she used to put in a lot of effort pushing me on the swings, even though she was never big enough to make the swing go as fast or as high as I wanted it to. In the summers, we used to bring picnic lunches to the hill behind the park and watch the sun setting. She’s always tried to be a good mom.
Once I get into the house where the party is and climb into the cake, I sit for a long time, enjoying the dark tranquility of cake and the sugary quiet of frosting, thinking about Mary and tomato juice and remembering the time that Paul tattled on me about breaking a flowerpot in our back yard. The time I spend inside cakes is always restorative—it gives me time to sit and think. Being inside of a cake is like a quiet assertion of my own will. Not everyone looks at it this way, but my job is one of the few places where I get to decide everything about a situation: I don’t leave the cake until I want to. Nothing happens until I say so.
Even though jumping out of cakes makes me feel a degree of control, there are still variables that need to be taken into account. I can hear men (the variables in question) arriving, greeting each other, opening and closing the refrigerator, joking, clapping each other on the back. With a lurch, someone starts moving me into the living room. I jump out of the cake and lock eyes with a man in a grey suit.