How to Eat a Cupcake (5 page)

“Hello?”

“Crap. I must have dialed the wrong number. You're no saint.”

It was Jake Logan, with an old joke. In spite of my mood, I laughed. “That's Ms. Julia, to you,” I said airily. “What on earth do you want?” Jake and I hadn't spoken much on the phone since our mutual breakup during our freshman year in college, but we'd seen each other at various parties thrown by the Devon Prep crowd over the years and had maintained an easy, drama-free friendship.

“Ah, yes. It
is
you, isn't it?” he said. I could practically hear his mischievous smile through the phone. “Good! I just woke up and was afraid I dialed the wrong number.”

“You just woke up? It's ten o'clock!”

“Please, no judgment. I'm calling with a very attractive offer. It appears the sun is out, which as you know is simply inappropriate for a June day in San Francisco.”

“True,” I said, matching his mock-businesslike tone. “Do go on.”

“To spite this defiant sun, in defense of our poor burned-up fog, and in celebration of the return of San Francisco's prodigal daughter—that's you, Saintie!—I propose we sit inside all day and drink. Balboa Café, for old time's sake. You in?”

I squinted out at the bay, considering. A drink at ten in the morning with an ex-boyfriend was not exactly my style. And yet. Wes was halfway around the world. Annie clearly wasn't speaking to me. When I spent time alone I thought only of hospital beds and a suddenly, heartbreakingly unknowable future. So where, exactly, had “my style” gotten me after all these years? And, really, what harm could there be in having one drink with Jake? I was supposed to meet my mother at the florist's in an hour, but she could handle that appointment in her sleep, couldn't she?

“I'll be there in thirty,” I said, feeling the flutter of—what, exactly? Relief? Trepidation?—well, something other than sadness in my chest.

I
walked down the long, steep slope from our house in Pacific Heights toward the flat stretch of the Marina neighborhood that housed the Balboa Café and many of the other bars that I had frequented on my trips to the city during college at Stanford. I'd never been much of a drinker and usually nursed one vodka-soda over the course of a night, taking tiny sips until I was left with only melted ice and a vaguely metallic lime taste. Lately, though, I'd started to enjoy drinking more and more. The first couple of drinks tended to make me feel morose and self-pitying, but the third? The third made me feel suddenly lighter, as though nothing that had happened over the previous couple of months was really worth worrying about at all.

Even with the panoramic view of city carved into steeped slopes and shining bay and green expanse of hills to the north, the walk made me miss Manhattan. When I first moved to New York, I'd been surprised to find that despite what everyone said, the city was
cleaner
and had
fewer
scary homeless people than my hometown. In San Francisco, sidewalks and streets appeared messy and leaf-blown all year long and buildings needed to be painted annually to combat the damage of salty winds and months of dust. There were entire neighborhoods that seemed in perpetual need of a hose-down. Still, there was something undeniably magical about this city by the bay. It was, and always would be, my home. Annie and I had that much in common, at the very least: we were San Francisco girls, born and raised.

Jake was sitting at the dark wood bar with his back to me when I entered Balboa Café. A girl a few stools down leaned toward him, her blond ponytail dangling over her shoulder as she laughed at something he said. Her friends exchanged knowing glances at the sound of her flirtatious laughter, and soon the whole group had burst into a fit of giggles. I paused in the doorway, watching them.
Why do women with muffin tops insist on wearing low-slung jeans?
I wondered, irritated.
Is it really too much to ask for a couple extra inches of fabric to protect the innocent public's eyes from their unsightly bulges?
I sighed, reminding myself I didn't care one bit if Jake flirted with a girl who couldn't have been older than twenty-one and whose pale pink Hanky Panky thong was pulled
above
the layer of fat on her lower back. And yet, gazing at the two of them, I felt a territorial buzz start up behind my eyes. It was a feeling I'd had before.

By the time I entered my senior year at Devon, I had long established myself as the school's queen bee in every respect. Of course, I didn't think of myself that way at the time, but looking back, it's easy to see that's who I was. I had the best grades, led a pack of pretty, popular friends, and had a closetful of clothes any girl would have killed for. When I noticed Jake Logan of the shipping Logans, captain of the football, swim, and baseball teams, and most certainly headed to Dartmouth in the fall, flirting with
Annie
in the hall—Annie, whose social circle at that point consisted of two pimply, tweezers- and sunshine-adverse girls whose names I always confused—I know I should have been happy for her. Instead, almost without thinking, I turned on the charm. Okay, maybe it wasn't
entirely
without thinking. In any event, Jake and I were officially dating by the end of the week.

“Julia!” Jake called from the bar, stirring me from these unproductive musings.

I crossed the room, enjoying the disappointed flush that crept up the back of Hanky Panky Girl's neck as I did so, and perched myself on the stool beside Jake. He leaned over to kiss me on the cheek.

“Glad you made it. Vodka tonic?”

“Please.”

He ordered me the cocktail and watched with an amused twinkle in his aquamarine eyes as I took a long drink.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said. “Fabulous.”

He held his beer up to his lips and shook his head. “I don't know,” he said, gulping. “Something's different.”

I shrugged. “I'm engaged.”

Jake laughed. “Well, I know
that
, Jules. It's not the rock—it's you. You seem . . . I don't know. Different.”

“No, I don't,” I said sharply. I drained my drink and Jake ordered me another. We'd moved on to other, lighter topics of conversation—Caroline Sistenberg's recent stint in rehab for a Vicodin addiction that developed after she blew out her knee skiing in Aspen that winter, the new Peter Carraway restaurant opening in Jake's building in North Beach, whether I should switch to a martini for my third drink—when I suddenly found myself asking, yelling, actually, truth be told, “And anyway, would it be so bad?”

“Would what be so bad?” Jake asked, surprised.

“If I were different! If I'd changed. People change, Jake. Sometimes for the better.” I had no idea why I was saying this. I wasn't even sure I believed it. And anyway, I
hadn't
changed—I was exactly who I'd always been. Except, really, I
was
different now, wasn't I? I suddenly envisioned that the only thing left of the old me was a painted, external shell.
This
, I thought angrily, trying to rein in my wayward thoughts,
is why I shouldn't drink
.

Jake shook his head. “I never said change was bad, Jules. I was just checking in on you. I didn't mean to upset you.”

“I'm not upset!” I said, but my face burned. I looked down at the martini that had appeared on the bar in front of me. “Maybe I should go.”

“Oh, c'mon, stay,” Jake said. He gave my shoulder a playful little push. “Let's talk about something fun.” He squinted at me. “I know! Have you met Linus Tarrington's new girlfriend yet? She's one of those awful girls who are always wearing sequins and preening for photographers at events. And do you know where she grew up?
Fresno
.”

“Oh God, really?” I asked weakly.

“The worst part is I think she really has her eye on
me
. I have this theory that she's planning on leapfrogging her way through our crowd and right into Gavin Newsom's bed.”

“Jake, no!” I said, feeling the beginnings of a smile work its way onto my lips.

He leaned in conspiratorially and held out his hand. “I'll bet you a hundred dollars she dumps Tarrington right after opening night at the opera.”

“Poor Linus!” I said, shaking Jake's hand and laughing. At last, the martini spread its warmth through my veins.

And so I stayed. Over the course of the next several hours, we got very, very drunk. I remember wondering, when Jake finally walked me out to find a cab, whether I would tell Wes about this little sojourn down memory lane. Why would I? I decided. Really, there was nothing to tell. Just old friends catching up over drinks.

I recited my parents' address to the cabdriver, hoping I wasn't slurring my words. In the harsh light of day—and it was, uncomfortably, still quite sunny out—I was acutely embarrassed by the impropriety of being drunk on a Sunday afternoon. As I settled in the seat and pulled out my cell phone, I was surprised to see that I had just missed a call. I put the phone to my ear and tried to ignore the taste of bile that crept into the back of my throat as the cab raced, seemingly, straight up into the sky, peeling through every stop sign along the way.

Hi, Julia. It's Annie
, the voice mail message began.
I've reconsidered. Let's do it. Let's open a cupcakery together. Call me.

My mouth fell open and I slammed my fist down excitedly into the torn leather seat, and when neither action seemed to adequately express the surprising lightness that had suddenly swelled like helium in my chest, I found myself yelling, “YESSSSS!!!!!” into the cab, forgetting for a just a moment to care one bit what the cabdriver, or anyone else for that matter, might think of me.

July

Chapter 3

Annie

L
ater that week, once June had given way to July, I walked toward Valencia Street Bakery through dense morning fog, still questioning my decision to go into business with Julia. At that point, of course, I had no idea just how far—and how dangerously—the cupcakery would plunge us into the past. I suppose if I wanted to—and, believe me, I often did—I could blame everything that happened moving forward from that point on Becca's expert needling. Becca and that too good bottle—okay,
bottles
—of Sonoma Cabernet.

The day after the Save the Children benefit, after I'd received that annoying call from Julia and had walked my three canine charges back to their respective homes, I'd headed to Becca and Mike's apartment on Capp Street for Craptastic Sunday. Having determined that the worst thing about moving in with her boyfriend Mike was that he refused to watch the steady stream of crappy reality television shows that she favored, Becca had invented Craptastic Sunday, a bimonthly event during which Mike vacated the apartment and Becca and I spent the better part of the afternoon emptying her DVR while simultaneously emptying a bottle or two—and on that one occasion, three, but we later agreed that had been a terrible mistake—of wine.

“So how was it seeing Richie and Muffy McRicherson?” Becca had asked as she poured the first glasses of the afternoon.

Becca and I had been freshman roommates at Cal. At first, she'd been standoffish. That fall, her first roommate, a Midwestern girl, had dropped out in a fit of homesickness and she'd been left with a coveted two-room single, so she wasn't too pleased when I showed up at her door halfway through the year with a letter from student services clutched in my hand. Eventually, we'd bonded when, after making a pact to jog off the “freshman fifteen” we'd gained, we'd ended up, instead, sharing a joint behind the bathroom at the track and then an old-fashioned triple-scoop sundae at the ice cream parlor on College Avenue. After Devon Prep, Berkeley felt like a breath of fresh air; each year of high school had been more difficult than the year before, and by contrast, Cal, with its laid-back professors and the relative diversity of its student population, seemed like Utopia. Suddenly, I was surrounded by interesting, smart people who didn't base their opinion of me on the label of my bag or the tightness of my ass or the birthplace and occupation of my great grandfather. I knew there were people like that everywhere, including Cal, but it was much easier to avoid that crew at college without becoming a social outcast. In Berkeley, there were options. San Francisco was just across the Bay Bridge, but I felt entire oceans away from Pacific Heights. Nonetheless, Becca, whose parents worked at a post office in Sacramento and who had a quartet of loud, overly muscled brothers who scuffled like puppies during the holidays I spent with them after my mother died, had an unfortunate fascination with the St. Clairs. She seemed to think of the family as an alien species worthy of endless dissection and analysis.

“The party was exactly as I expected, with one glaring exception,” I'd told her as I sank back into the couch, still flabbergasted by the call I'd received that morning from Julia. “The Ice Princess was in attendance.”

“What? No! How did that go?”

“Weird. She's engaged, but she was flirting with a guy I used to have a huge crush on—her ex-boyfriend, actually. And she was doing this whole sweet-as-apple-pie thing to me that was just disturbing. ‘Oh, Annie, your cupcakes are
amazing
.' Blah blah blah. It was one of those conversations that seriously makes me question if all compliments aren't inherently backhanded. I mean, isn't a compliment just someone's way of telling you they didn't think you had it in you to look so good or be so successful or, I don't know, pull off a sweater that shade of green?”

Becca looked at me, her head cocked to the side. “So you're telling me that bitch complimented you?”

“I know, I know. I sound crazy. This is what one night with the St. Clairs does to me. A decade of normalcy becomes a blip on the radar and I regress to being a self-doubting, self-loathing teenager.” I sighed. “Never mind. Let's just watch some craptastic TV before Mike gets home twitching for
SportsCenter
.”

“First of all,” Becca said, “you forget that I knew you when you were a teenager, straight off the St. Clairs' yacht and fresh upon the Berkeley shore, and you were never self-doubting, self-loathing, or self-anything that I remember.” She paused, her finger in the air. “Maybe self-deprecating. I'll give you that, if you really feel you need to remember yourself as self-something.

“And second,” she continued, “I'm as fired up as any red-blooded American woman to watch some ripped, shirtless dude make out with The Bachelorette in a hot tub, but you seem a little distracted. And unless you're going to sit there and hurl clever peanut gallery comments at the TV, unless you can really put your game face on, I think we need to keep Craptastic Sunday on pause a little longer and just hash this whole St. Clair thing out.”

I groaned. “C'mon, Becca. Do we have to? Julia has wasted enough of my time and energy today.”

“Today?” Becca peered at me “What do you mean? I thought you saw her yesterday.”

I looked down into my wineglass. I hadn't planned on telling Becca about Julia's call because I knew exactly what Becca would say. She would tell me I was crazy for saying no to Julia's business proposal, just like she had told me I would be crazy to say no to Lolly's catering request. But the thing about Becca, who taught math to tenth graders in one of the city's toughest schools, was that she was in possession of the most highly attuned bullshit detector I'd ever encountered. I could practically see it, flashing and beeping and vibrating behind her eyes as it honed in on me. It was an exercise in futility, really, to attempt to keep anything from her. And I did loathe exercise.

“Julia called earlier today,” I admitted. “She wants to open a cupcake shop with me and she said she'd put up the money to get us started. But before you say anything, I already told her no. It would be too uncomfortable. I couldn't bear to work with her.”

Becca's mouth dropped open. “Okay, you are now officially off-your-rocker insane,” she said. She whipped her long, chestnut hair in front of her shoulder and began twisting it furiously until it coiled tight against her head. “I mean,” she said, looking like a crazed, lopsided Princess Leia, “I think it would suck to work with Madonna and have to look at her bizarro mutant biceps and hear her faux-British accent day in and day out, but if she were willing to, gee, I don't know,
make all of my dreams come true
, I could probably learn to deal with her track suits and icy disposition.”

“How is it that this is the first time I'm learning of your beef with Madonna?”

“Nice try. We're discussing you and Julia.”

I shrugged. “What can I say? I feel like a second-class citizen when I'm with that family. Come on, Becca, you know what Julia did to me. If she's funding my dream bakery, it's not really my dream anymore because it means I've become a St. Clair employee, which is more like my nightmare.”

“But your mom was a St. Clair employee. And she loved them, didn't she?”

“Look where it got her.”

There was silence as Becca took this in.

“It's not like they killed her, Annie,” she said finally.

“You say tomato . . .”

“Annie!”

“What? She basically died on their kitchen floor.”

“That's not the same thing,” Becca said. “You know that
where
she died and
how
she died are not necessarily related.”

I poured myself another glass of wine, ignoring the slight shake in my hand as I did so. “Objectively speaking, yes, I know that. But it's tough to be objective when you're talking about your dearly departed mother.”

“Fine, I get that. As long as you can admit that those feelings are irrational.”

“Did I ever tell you what Julia said to me at my mother's funeral? She said, ‘Well, at least now you're totally free. You can be anyone you want to be.' She presented this bit of wisdom like a gift, like I should thank her. I wanted to sock her.”

“Okay,” Becca said slowly, quietly. “But still. It's crazy talk in crazy town to let these feelings get in the way of your dreams. Unless, maybe, owning your own bakery isn't your dream anymore?”

My desire to own my own bakery was as strong on that day as it had been the day the seed was planted during my first pastry class at the San Francisco Culinary Institute five years earlier, and Becca knew it. The question was only whether or not the trade-off of linking my life with the St. Clairs in order to achieve my dream was worth it. The answer, I realized, was yes. Even if it meant allowing Julia back in my life. I took in the prodding smirk on Becca's face. She loved winning. It was, perhaps, the only thing she and Julia St. Clair had in common. Me, on the other hand? Sometimes I wondered if I had a competitive bone in my body.

“You know what, Becca?” I'd said then. “There are moments when I really, really hate you.” The victorious grin that had grown on her face was highly contagious, just as I'd suspected it would be.

A
t five in the morning, the kitchen of the Valencia Street Bakery was a warm, dark, cavelike place: my private domain. I always found myself lingering in the doorway for a moment when I first entered the kitchen, savoring the silence and the way the edges of the appliances blurred with the still-gray air. Then I began my work. The two hulking ovens hummed and clacked and whooshed, the room swelled with warmth and the smell of butter and yeast, and the kitchen grew slowly brighter as though a veil were being lifted up and away from the dented steel counters and filling pastry racks.

At six, Lorena, my assistant baker, and Carlos, the dishwasher, arrived bleary-eyed at the back door. I unlocked it, returned their mumbled hellos, and watched as they shuffled through their predictable morning rituals. Carlos, a skinny twenty-year-old who lived at home with his parents and five siblings, flipped on the radio and hoisted himself onto the counter next to the sink, blinking himself slowly into consciousness. Lorena, neat as a tack in a teal button-down stretched taut over her enormous bosom, her graying black hair pulled into a tight bun at the nape of her neck, immediately strode through the swinging door into the café and returned to hand out three steaming mugs of coffee. She stood, stout and serious, studying the prep list and taking admirably large gulps of the scalding hot coffee, before tackling the first duties of her day: mixing muffin batter and preparing pastry fillings. As Lorena switched on the stand mixer, Carlos dove into the Sisyphean task of scrubbing the mountain of crusted trays, tins, and bowls that had already stacked up in the sink. Lorena, Carlos, and I formed just the latest of a string of close-working kitchen teams I'd been a member of over the years, but we were more well-oiled than most, having been together long enough to iron out some of the kinks that come with working ungodly hours in tight quarters. But really, even the smallest, hottest, most adversarial kitchens in which I'd worked over the years—where Spanish bounced rapid-fire off the appliances—inevitably came to feel like some strange version of home. Eventually, though, someone always moved on—to a better gig, another kitchen, or a new city. This time, I realized with a pang, that someone would be me. I just hoped Ernesto, the owner of the bakery, would promote Lorena to head baker. She'd been working in kitchens for thirty years, and what she lacked in creativity she made up for in diligence and dependability. As tempted as I was to poach her for the cupcakery, I didn't have the heart to leave Ernesto and take his best assistant baker, too.

At six thirty I heard the jingle of keys in the café's front door, and a moment later Ernesto himself popped his head into the kitchen.

“Morning all,” he trilled. Ernesto was a triller, the kind of man who was as chipper at six thirty in the morning as he would be when he locked up at ten that night.

“Banana-chocolate,” I said, passing him a tray of perfectly golden muffins.

He faked a swoon against the door frame. “These are going on the top shelf. Ay, the aroma! The customers won't stand a chance.”

“As long as you save them some.” Ernesto's habit of “sampling” the goods sometimes made me feel more like his personal chef than his head baker.

“How can I serve something I haven't tried myself?” Ernesto called from the front room. I could hear him sliding the display case open. “It would be . . . what's the word? Unethical. And, you know, cruel. To me. Smelling these gorgeous little darlings all day long without being able to taste them. Cruel and unusual. Torture!”

I rolled my eyes, but couldn't help feeling pleased. I had to admit it was nice to have a boss who loved what I made. Over the years, I'd had every type of boss out there—the one who thought I used too much butter, the one who thought I used too little, the hairy one who was always trying to make out with me in the freezer, the one who never once in the two years I worked for her tasted a single one of my recipes, but fired me the day I asked for a raise. And now here I was, working for my dream boss, a boss who gave me free rein in the kitchen and had clearly formed an unhealthy, if flattering, addiction to the pastries I created, and I was going to quit? For the first time since college, I was in a place where I was one hundred percent sure that I would be able to pay my rent the next month—and even the month after that!—and I was about to throw all of that security away. I pressed my fingers into my temples to ward off the impending headache.

Still, Becca's words circled back through my thoughts, a not-so-gentle reprimand. Since when had I become such a slave to security? Since when had my dream to be my own boss morphed into merely working for my dream boss? Sure, the route I was headed down meant I was going to have to work with Julia, but wouldn't the end result of owning my own bakery make the hassle of seeing Julia day in and day out for ten months be worth it?
She's only around until May when she'll get married and move on to her next dilettantish distraction,
I told myself.
You just need to make it until May.