As I was mixing the batter for
this cake tonight, a cake that is meant to accompany me to the Catskills on my first work retreat this week, to win the hearts and minds of my new coworkers, fretting as the chocolate seemed to curdle and separate, a thin, filmy layer rising to the top, I suddenly remembered the last time I made it, in another humid kitchen, another thick, relentless summer. I may have even been wearing the same tired aqua & white striped boxers - the one item of clothing I didn't give back, or set out on the stoop with the note: "My scummy ex-boyfriend left this stuff behind. FREE."
I remember these boxers. I remember him in them the night I still mark as one of our best, when we made tiny, misshapen salmon hand pies, pinching the dough together with all four hands. It was summer in Vancouver, and we took them down to the beach near my house with a bottle of wine. The neighbours were throwing an opulent party, and they had a band playing on their deck that cuts out over the ocean like a hat perched askew. We got drunk and took advantage, wading thigh-high into the Pacific in our underwear, dancing, goosebumped. He held my waist and tipped me back until my hair swam and made me gasp. I remember watching him, tanned, his body harder than it had ever been from marathon training, of which he was then in the thick. And he was wearing these boxers, and I suddenly felt like he was so far beyond my reach, too perfect to stick.
All of this, in these stupid boxers that I appropriated at some point over the last eight years, and me frantically stirring this ridiculously silky batter that was doing exactly what it wasn't supposed to do, exactly what it had done the last time, when I made it for him in his kitchen, an early birthday celebration, and I forged ahead even then, dripping the globular mess into the pan and then watching in horror as it spit and fizzed in the oven, the butterfat rising to the top of the chocolate and settling there like grease on a puddle. I cried. He valiantly ate two slices. I threw the rest away.
The first time I made this cake - I don't even remember. What I do remember is reading
Molly's story and thinking, That could be my life one day. I could live like that, so present, so alive. With friends and pearl earrings and a balcony. I could make things with my hands and feed the people I love and live a life of such honest existence.
I stirred the fucking batter. I stirred it with all I had. My hair stuck to my neck and curled at my temples and I threw the plastic spatula in the sink and grabbed a spoon and folded the batter over and over again, willing it, begging it, to come together, to become gorgeous, to work. To work. For something to work. For something to come together. For something to work. For something to work.
