We
used to make German chocolate cake for our birthdays, which fell close
together, and were both on minor holidays. Hers on the first day of Autumn,
mine on Columbus Day. We both loved fall so it was cool to share birthdays in
fall.
German
chocolate cake is not something you can make on a whim. There are some good
things you can make on a whim. Shortbread cookies, for example. All you need is
butter, flour, and sugar. You usually have all you need in the house for sugar
cookies. We would have all the basic flavorings on hand. Almond, peppermint,
vanilla, lemon, anise.
When
I was in the house after Joe died, I found extracts that had no doubt been
purchased by my mother. It was so strange to pick up a bottle of Angostura
bitters, which she kept on hand for stomach trouble, not for mixed drinks,
which she did not consume. My mother, who died seventeen years ago, sought this
out, selected it, paid for it, brought it home, and put it on this shelf, and
it's been here ever since. Perhaps my hands are the first hands to touch it
since her hands. Death is so mysterious. The bitters tasted just as good.
Angostura bitters does not surrender easily to the pressures of time.
I
still have some spices that Antoinette bought. About a month ago, I had to give
up on many of them. I just knew I'd never use them. She bought nutmeg, I bought
nutmeg. She bought hot pepper; I bought hot pepper. Was I going to use her hot
pepper that she bought before she was diagnosed, almost seven years ago now,
rather than my more recently purchased hot pepper? No. So, I finally threw them
away, because it had finally gotten to the point where it did not hurt to throw
them away. I didn't have second thoughts later and tearfully fish them out of
the garbage can. Good. She would have thrown them away much sooner. Dry eyed.
So
yes we made each other German chocolate cake for our birthdays, and that was
highly intentional. You can't make German chocolate cake on a whim. You have to
shop with the intention in mind of baking it. And after you've bought all that
stuff, and you have it in the house, you can't change your mind later. What are
you doing to do with all those ingredients, fit only to make a German chocolate
cake with? You just have to make the cake. If not, the ingredients would just
sit there, laughing at you.
I
remember once going to the A&P on Ringwood Avenue. That A&P is no
longer there. It is now the anonymous, barren landscape underneath an elevated
superhighway, route 287. I grew up in a town without one traffic light and now
there is a superhighway. And A&P declared bankruptcy and shuttered all its
stores in November, 2015, seven months after she died. I'm not implying any
connection.
Anyway,
we would go to the A&P and do something that shocked both of us. Before we
had taken the small package of Baker's German's Sweet Chocolate Bar to the
check out, we actually *opened it up*!!!
This
was shocking behavior. To open a product before you purchased it. We were such
good girls. We were afraid we would "get caught." Some official
person, larger than us and threatening, representing American authority,
something we would poor, immigrant Bohunk children would never possess, would
come clomping over to us and grab us by the scruff of the neck and carry us off
to the institution for girls who opened products before paying for them.
But
we had to do this. The recipe for the cake was on the inside of the wrapper.
And you need the recipe while you are shopping because you need so much stuff.
And if you don't get it all on this trip, when will you get it? The stores
close – in those days stores actually closed. Sunday presented you with church
and empty parking lots around closed stores. You couldn't suddenly decide to
bake on Sunday. You had to shop in advance.
And
people didn't have cars. Men had cars, and they used them to do manly things.
Shopping for cake ingredients was not a manly thing. Women? Children? No cars.
We probably walked the couple of miles to this store. So, yeah, you needed the
recipe.
LOTS
of eggs. You have eggs at home, of course. You need to buy another dozen. This
is a German chocolate cake. Coconut. Pecans. A can of evaporated milk. Buttermilk.
For a
while there I had a bit of a crisis. *German* chocolate cake? Was this really
the best cake for Polish and Slovak people? The Germans were such bastards! I
researched. I discovered that the chocolate had nothing to do with our
invaders. It was named after its inventor, Samuel German, an English-American.
An all-important apostrophe had been sacrificed to popular usage. Properly, it
was *German's* chocolate cake. This was little comfort. What would people
think?
There's
a picture, somewhere, of Antoinette and me cooking in that little kitchen. I
can see it in my mind's eye. She's sitting on a huge, overturned aluminum bread
dough pan placed on the kitchen table. She's laughing and I'm smiling and
reading the recipe to her. She was sitting on the table because the recipe said
something like keep the bread dough tightly covered, and she figured that
sitting on it would guarantee that it could not escape. We'd make jokes like
this while we cooked. We'd extemporize little one-act comedies based on
absurdities in recipes.
In
improvisational comedy, the kind they do on "Whose Line Is It
Anyway," the rule is "Always say yes." That is, if your partner
suddenly decides you are about to do a parachute jump from a plane, just go
with it. Antoinette and I, when we acted out these little routines, always said
yes to each other. How did we manage these little islands of fun, amidst all
the tension and the fighting? Dunno. Can't ask her. She ain't here. And if she
were, and I asked her, she'd probably call me Soames and start speaking in Cockney accent, and I'd
just go along.
I
have no idea where that photo of us cooking together is, and since I'm the last
one left, except for a distant brother who does not speak to me and does not
want a picture of me or his other sister, nobody but me knows or cares about
that photo.
I
couldn't eat a German chocolate cake now. I tried, recently. I thought baking a
German chocolate cake would exorcise some of the lingering spirits. I did the
shopping. The coconut, the pecans, are still in my freezer. I have long since
used the eggs for breakfasts.
In
those days, we were poor and we were hungry all the time. We had enough
calories. There was always mush on the stovetop. Sometimes you want to eat
something other than mush.
So
German chocolate cake was, well, it was a trip to heaven.
Now?
So rich, so sweet, so much fat. I can't do it. Yeah, that's the reason. The fat
content. Nothing to do with the tears camping on the rims of my eyelids right
now at just the thought of German chocolate cake.
One
of the saddest moments of my life.
This
was years ago. I was living in Jersey. My birthday had come and gone a few days
before, and I had received no notification from anyone to whom I am related. No
cards, no calls, nothing. I expected nothing. Antoinette was going through one
of her years of not talking to me. My mother, when I saw her, would tell me
what a piece of garbage I was and that she regretted ever having me and that I
should get out of her sight because just the sight of me upset her.
For
some reason, I made a quick trip to the house. I hoped to arrive and leave
before anyone saw me. The door was always open so this was easy to do.
I
entered the house, opened the refrigerator, forget why, maybe out of habit, and
saw, lined up there, in the back of the refrigerator, the ingredients for a
German chocolate cake. The coconut, pecans, evaporated milk, and buttermilk,
and the extra, as my mother would say it, in her Slavic-inflected English,
"dozen of eggs." Never "a dozen eggs," but rather "a
dozen of eggs," because of that genitive Slavic grammar thing. My mother
spoke excellent English. When she did this, she was having fun with language.
Injecting her native tongue into the language she was forced to speak because
of that fated day that began on a flower-strewn ox cart and that ended with the
nightmare trip into the hold of a ship that took her away from home forever.
So.
It's decades ago, I'm on a stealth visit to my mother's house, to the very
kitchen that used to be so warm when I cooked in it with my sister, it's a few
days after my birthday, I open the refrigerator door, and there, lined up on
the shelf, are all the ingredients for a German chocolate cake. Ingredients you
can't buy accidentally. Ingredients you must purchase with intention. And if
you don't use them, what do you do with them? Buttermilk? My mother had no
other use for buttermilk.
She
bought those ingredients for my birthday. She bought them in the crazy expectation
that I, and maybe even Antoinette and I, would return to her house and bake in
her kitchen again, for my birthday. And we didn't. And she had to live with
those ingredients, ingredients she had no other use for, staring her in the
face for her folly and the absence of her daughters and the crumbling of her
family.
My
heart broke for her then and it breaks for her now.
In God through Binoculars I wrote,
"Love
is the thorn. Love is the sleepless night. Fighting is not unbearable. It's
actually fun. Like a lot of abused kids, I used to beat up other kids. It was a
rush. This is unbearable: the boundary violation between love and hate and
right and wrong. People who do wrong are trying to do the right thing. The most
frequently repeated message in Twelve Step meetings, the thing we needed to
hear over and over and over and over just to live out our daily lives, was not 'Poor
you' – such words were rarely said. The thing we needed to hear over and over
was, 'You can't save someone who doesn't want to be saved.' My parents' demons
would never allow my love to reach them."
How
to close.
Mom,
I hope, and I pray, that you have found in heaven the happiness that eluded you
in life.
Antoinette,
I miss you. Happy birthday.
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