SHE WAS A NEIGHBOR in Tucson, back when my in-laws lived there with their children, including my new husband when he was a boy. How long-limbed and brown he appears in photographs of their Arizona days, and how much of a retroactive crush I’ve developed on the ten-year old who learned to love the desert after a spring rain. Forty years have come and gone and still he speaks of the crimson tips of flowering ocotillo, the ocean of poppies, the blue lupine, and owl’s clover. But nothing is said of the sadness blossoming in their neighbor. Except when my mother-in-law bakes the cake—the one the neighbor taught her to make, the confection named for her, at least at their house—and tells Klotilde’s story as it is cut and served, the feelings at the table spiraling as we bite into its rum-dark layers.
It’s the story of a husband leaving, returning to the place from which they’d come, Budapest or Prague, a place of statue-lined bridges and gilded spires thrown about like wedding cakes, which brings us back to Klotilde and the cake my mother-in-law serves as she remembers the woman, her voice pulling against the strings of the story. And oh, the loneliness of whipped cream, the anguish of broken eggs, the heartache of sugar folded into flour. It’s there, the despondency of baked goods, if only one consents to notice.
My mother-in-law has eyes like the blue of Dutch pottery and sits quiet while we eat the cake. When I make naïve statements suggesting that perhaps things were not as bad as they seemed for Klotilde—maybe her husband came back or she met someone new or took up a meaningful hobby, eventually forgetting him altogether—my mother-in-law only shakes her head. “No,” she says. “No.” She doesn’t humor me, does not take hold of the branch extended by offering even a half-hearted maybe so. This I notice, because more than anything, my mother-in-law refuses to be deflated.
She rises early and walks fast before making breakfast and heading off to stand on corners with signs demanding rights for hotel workers and fair wages for the tomato growers of Florida, or to remind people on their way to soccer practice and shopping trips that we are at war and war kills; then drives home to work with her husband on letters to the editor about health care reform or runs off to read stories to kindergarteners whose families have no books before stopping to visit a friend in a nursing home, to drop a birthday gift for the man whose family has died or moved away. The two of them, my parents-in-law, nearly eighty now, think nothing of loading trucks with medical supplies for Cuba from the launch pad of their backyard. When they hear of hardship or injustice, their first response is action, which I notice and admire because I’m the sort to sit around eating cake while replaying secondhand stories and wondering what they might mean. Not so with my mother-in-law, who is out of her seat and grabbing a jacket; off to help a friend from Sudan; off to work at the overnight shelter for street people; off to register voters in Erie, Pennsylvania; off to deliver the cap she cap for a new baby—off to do more in one day than I manage in a good week. Still and all, around this one story, around this one woman, there is a slump.
But I have not yet said how it tastes, Klotilde’s cake. If I say it is rich with warm overtones, you will not know. If I say that there’s the slightest suggestion of coffee, that it inhabits the space between wistful and brooding, that the cake itself might be more rightly called a torte—still I will not have said enough. The cake is a woman looking over her shoulder as she boards a one-way train. It’s the scratch of an old record, the words of a song you almost remember, the month of November as it gathers into a final sigh and gives itself over to December.
It’s a wisp of a story, really, of the sort that’s been told time and again; only the minor details vary—a woman abandoned to the desert, her husband flown off to the golden domes of home. She’s young and there’s a child who will never know the man gone away, so that as we eat the cake, I can almost hear a lullaby, the voice all loam and gut, the words in Czech or Hungarian or Romanian—or all them perhaps—because, in truth, Klotilde is nothing so much as the scent of vanilla and the froth of beaten eggs. And more than Klotilde, it’s my mother-in-law who’s caught me—this woman who does daily battle with the world, with energy left over for reading to schoolchildren and baking cakes—the way she shakes her head and refuses to be soothed about a neighbor from four decades prior, denying me the lie of a happy ending, that makes me take notice.
Still, it’s a delicious cake and my mother-in-law is a splendid baker, so I lift my fork for another bite, savoring all that is known, while absorbing—at least for the moment—all that can’t be made right. We make our way through the icing into layers of sugar and rum and salt. The way they come together. The way each is needed. All of this, as I take up another forkful and let Klotilde’s cake fall dark and sweet into my mouth.