Wicked Sweet (10 page)

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Authors: Mar'ce Merrell

BOOK: Wicked Sweet
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Alone.
T
he walk home from Chantal’s house takes me over an hour in my party heels. An RV driver slows and stops to ask me for directions to see the bears. I tell the bald guy and his small wife how to get to the bear statues downtown but they insist they want to see the real bears. We’re a small resort town, I tell them, we don’t have a zoo, but I suggest that they might see some at the dump right outside town.
“No. We want to see them in the wild,” they complain.
I point out that the dump is the fast-food restaurant for bears around here. Guaranteed sightings. When I pass the Information Center twenty minutes later, the RV is parked at the booth and the bald guy is leaning out the window, shouting questions. I’m beginning to think the world is full of people who don’t give up until they get the answer they want.
It’s only 8:27 A.M. when I walk in the front door and the first thing I see is my mother. Awake. Folding laundry.
“Hey,” I say carefully. “Is everything okay?”
“Oh, you’re home early. I thought you’d sleep in after your party. How did it go?”
We have a conversation that lasts ten minutes but doesn’t include the details of Chantal’s puking or the reason I’m home early. I focus on the stellar bits: the Cranium game and a little about Parker.
The boys must have had a late bedtime last night because they are all still asleep. Mom and I hardly spend ten minutes a week alone together so I sit back and relax as if things are right in the world. She appears to be in redemption mode—her hair is freshly washed, she’s got on mom jeans and a clean T-shirt; she might even make pancakes. The sun catches her skin and I get a vision of her when she was younger, freckles and an easy laugh and no bra. She is still so proud of her body, still willing to dance on the edge of anything. I remember once a weather balloon was flying over the house on Columbia Street and she told Dad 2 that we were going to track it down. She had on her hippy skirt and hiking boots and we got into Dad 2’s truck and followed it for ten minutes until it dropped near Mount Begbie Falls. We never found it, but we looked for an hour and I collected moss and rocks and sticks while she told me about the time her parents drove her out east and she saw a hot air balloon take off. “I’ve always wanted to float in a hot air balloon,” she told me. “Imagine the freedom.”
My mom talks about the nursing home, mentions that she’s got a few days off in a row, as she folds T-shirts and underwear. And then I realize a pattern. A laundry pattern. Those are
her
T-shirts and underwear. And her socks. And her jeans.
Before I ask her what’s going on, she tells me, “Dad Three left for Vancouver last night to meet up with his brother and look at this house they’re talking about flipping.”
“Yeah …”
“And he’s coming back in a few days to get the rest of his stuff. And I thought it would be good for me to get away. You know, clear my head before I see him again.”
“So you’re meeting up with someone else …” I shake my head. Take a deep breath and hold it.
“Jesus, Jillian, you do not have to give me that attitude.”
I don’t even ask her what attitude she’s referring to.
“I’m not sitting around feeling lousy. That’s not me. I know women who obsess over being left and you know what? They’re not happy. Me? I’m going to be happy.”
There’s no use talking to her when she gets like this. I’m supposed to tell her now that she deserves whatever it is her heart desires, but I’m not going to do it. Not this time. My mother is an only child. Just like Chantal.
“So … who have you got lined up for day care?” I ask.
She drops the black lace underwear she’s holding. “I told you I didn’t need your attitude. You know I need you to help me. And I’ll pay you.”
Right. I’ll put it on her tab.
“What if something goes wrong?”
“Jesus, Jillian, nothing is going to go wrong.” But she’s never left them with me alone overnight.
She carries her clean clothes out of the room, singing a country music song about a woman going after what she wants. I want to stop her and tell her to get out. Before the boys get up. I also want her to know that when she leaves I’ll stay in my bedroom because the worst part is watching her shut the door behind her. What my mother will never understand is that, like the boys, I have separation anxiety, too.
She’s gone within thirty-five minutes. The last I see of her she’s concentrating on getting her lipstick on straight. She promises she’ll be home by Monday at 4 P.M. since I’ve got a party to go to.
A Social Retard Cake
.
M
y mother’s crystal bowls cradle flour, cocoa powder, baking powder, baking soda, salt, unsalted butter (2 sticks), sugar, eggs, egg yolks, vanilla, buttermilk, and bittersweet chocolate (melted and cooled). I am surrounded by sparkle in the kitchen spotlight. I am a cake princess.
What makes me a top student also makes a confident baker. It’s all about precision and focus. As I take on the first step, buttering the cake pans, dusting the insides with flour, tapping out the excess, and lining the bottoms with wax paper, guilt begins to creep in. My parents left this morning, but it’s as if my mother is still here, trying to protect me from the evils of sugar.
On Sunday afternoon Mom and Dad returned from the coffee shop as I finished my shopping list. I sat on the ottoman to hear their final statement. “Your father has convinced me that giving you responsibility in stages is a good thing. This next week will be a trial period. We can revoke your privileges at any time.”
I nodded, though I had no choice.
“And. This is a request.” She looked at my dad for approval. He shrugged. “No junk food. It’s only a week.”
“Request heard,” I answered. I don’t even ask her anymore why she’s so freaked about sweets and cookies and cakes. It’s one of
those off-limits topics. I don’t want to endure her lectures about sexual abstinence and she doesn’t want to discuss dessert with me. The deal works.
I whisk together the flour, cocoa powder, baking powder, baking soda, and salt.
The stand mixer I borrowed from Mrs. Ellis next door (my mother-in-case-of-an-emergency) is a beautiful machine. Pale yellow with silver bling, it sparks sunshine.
I slide the slab of butter into the mixer bowl and beat on medium speed until soft and creamy. Sugar falls in. More beating. A yellow color forms; a color that is difficult to describe as anything but hopeful. Next come the eggs, one at a time, then the yolks. I beat in the vanilla.
“One could be no more happy if one had won the lottery,” I say to my invisible television audience.
I turn the mixer down to low and add the dry ingredients alternately with the buttermilk, mixing sparingly.
Socially delayed individuals would probably eat the cake with their mouths open, crumbs spilling out. Or take the last piece instead of cutting it in half and offering someone else the rest. Or taste the cake and announce that it tastes disgusting. Or worse, spit it out. If I am a social retard, then this cake will redeem me. I may be different from the rest of the crowd but that doesn’t have to be a bad thing.
I divide the batter between the two cake pans and it nearly doesn’t fit. There’s only a quarter inch of space left at the top. I read the recipe over and over to make sure I measured correctly and I do what I have to do—slide the pans into the oven and hope for the best. I set the timer.
The ganache part of the instructions for the Double Layer Chocolate Buttermilk Decadence with Chocolate Caramel Ganache and Toffee Accessories is six paragraphs long. I stir sugar, water, and a cinnamon stick in a saucepan on medium-low heat until the sugar
dissolves. (As a chemistry princess I have mastered the dissolving of a solid into liquid.) Now I increase the heat, and boil, without stirring. The mixture bubbles out of control. I poise my spatula over it. Lift the pan, observe the color. I’m supposed to cook it until it turns a deep amber color. What is the color, exactly, of deep amber, I wonder? More boiling bubbles. And more again. I consult my recipe. It’s supposed to take from five to seven minutes. I don’t know how many minutes it’s been and I think maybe I should have adjusted all the cooking times for a higher altitude. The bubbles are definitely brown though so I move on to the next step: adding cold cream to hot sugar.
I am caught in the crossfire. The mixture bubbles, scalding cream splatters violently, the dark sugar seizes into a ball of goo. “This is not the moment to panic.” I try to channel Nigella. “Baking chemistry requires trust on the part of the baker.”
I whisk and heat and whisk more. Finally the thick gooey stuff looks mostly like caramel sauce. I pour it over the bowl of twelve ounces of chocolate I have set aside. I stir, the chocolate melts, and, eventually, smoothes to a glassy lake of loveliness. I think I’ve survived baking disaster, but then, the timer beeps and I look through the oven door.
My cake batter has overflowed the pans and pools of cake smoke on the oven floor. The cakes themselves are domed but collapse into a well of boggy batter.
This is what happens when you break the rules, my conscience speaks to me in a small squeaky voice that’s a mash up of my mother and Jiminy Cricket. I ignore it. I tell myself any independent choice will result in an infraction of some sort. And for every misstep a solution exists. I babysat Jillian’s six little brothers and I survived. Heck. I did better than survival—I was an optimized thinker. This cake baking dilemma is another opportunity to prove myself. And after cake baking, maybe on to Jillian and our knotted-up friendship.
I consult my recipe, Google my problem. I turn to Nigella’s Web site and on a forum I discover a solution. Though my cake will not be as pretty, it will still be edible, the writer assures me.
I test the center of the cakes for doneness every two minutes, until, twelve minutes later, I pull them from the oven, the edges dried and nearly burned. Failure has never looked this bad. I feel my eyes sting and I recite the elements of the periodic table, starting with hydrogen, the element with the lowest atomic number and, arguably, the greatest potential for everyday explosions.
Call Waiting
.
S
he could have called.
She,
of course, is my mother, but I’m not calling her my mother right now because that would suggest respect.
I had to tell Parker I was sick. He said he understood, but I
felt
the pause. The pause that says what you really want to say before you say what you think you should say. Pause= How could you let me down?
I called the physics group and told them Chantal wasn’t going to the party and neither was I. I didn’t have to tell them not to go. Without us they wouldn’t feel comfortable. And honestly, I was having nightmares about them all together in the same room with Parker. Chantal might have enjoyed having them around, but I know I’d have been on high-alert to stop Gavin’s Darth Vader impression or Brenan’s plot analysis of
Simpsons
’ episodes or Callie’s insistence on Dance, Dance Revolution. All party killers. Maybe even boyfriend killers.
Even though I’m relieved the party won’t wreck my chances with Parker, I still wonder what he’s thinking now. I wonder how much girl drama a guy can take before he walks away. I wonder how much mom drama I can take. I lock myself in my bedroom, ignore the screams of
the twins as they pretend, for the 127th day in a row, that they are knights slaying a dragon.
I know what’s coming; the boys will realize their dragon is invisible but they can slay each other instead. It will be up to me to limit the damage. I’ve tried to stop them in mid-battle, to take away their swords, to distract them, but the slaying is part of the game. I can’t change their knight and dragon story any more than I can interrupt whatever story my mother tells herself when she’s drinking.
She’s probably totally shitfaced in the hotel room doing something with the-guy-without-a-name that’s disgusting. Justifications like “I deserve to have fun,” “I’ve had a hard life,” “Jillian’s brothers love her,” cancel out the one thought she should have: I promised I’d be home by 4 P.M. When she shows up she will tell me one of her lies: the traffic was awful, the clock didn’t work in the hotel room, the car broke down, or I got a phone call from a friend and had to go help.
And then, like now, and like always, I won’t know how to respond. Nothing prepares you for having a lousy mother, just like you can’t really be ready for an earthquake. It’s all about minimizing the harm. I know it’s easy to imagine that you wouldn’t stick around after the first natural disaster—you’d move to a safer building or transfer to higher ground. But, listen to me: it’s not easy to admit you’re living on a fault line.
I don’t call Chantal because I don’t feel like dealing with anyone else right now. I sit on the floor, my back against the metal bed frame that collapses if I sit on the right corner. It’s 5:45 and I know from experience that if Mom’s not home before happy hour, she won’t be home until the bar closes. Self-pity itches at the back of my throat, but I pull my headphones from my pocket, ready to extend my break from responsibility. Four small fingers and a thumb stop me.
Baby Ollie’s chubby fist wiggles under my bedroom door, his fingers stretch, and then retreat. A few sticky “O” cereal pieces are left behind. It happens again. I hear him digging deep into the cereal box,
gathering another handful. He crunches a few with his four teeth and adds the rest to the pile he’s creating for me. Again. I smile. My brothers do this, thing, to me. The moment I decide I hate them, they show me their sweet side, like Ollie with his O’s message. The next time his hand slides under, I tickle his fingers. I hear him giggle.
But the cuteness wears off when I realize what’s really happening—Ollie’s feeding me O’s because he wants to take care of me. If I’d been drinking I’d probably have laughed the way my mother does, giggled and blathered about how Ollie entertains himself so easily and I wouldn’t have made the connection that
he’s
trying to take care of
me.
I can’t let this happen. I can’t.
My brothers will tell my mother that they didn’t even miss her while she was gone. Josh and Stevie will rush to explain the rules of the best-ever game of dragons and knights (make that one mother dragon and six brave knights). Travis, Thomas, and Trevor will remember that I told ghost stories with a flashlight under my chin. Baby Ollie will beg for nacho chips and cheese with pickles on the side for dinner. And me? I will find a way to help myself.

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