CARAMEL CAKE

I can’t tell you what it tastes like.

I can tell you what it looks like though.

           In fact, I’m in a staring match with a sumptuous slice of caramel cake right now. We square off in the haunted little room in Gwinnett Co. We square off right now, but right now is seven years ago, summer and so stiflingly hot even the Dixie Cup of water on the counter is sweating. I’m fifteen. I gaze down at the cake’s dense parka of sugar. Hefty heaps of granulated sugar have been cooked-down to perfection and shellacked atop a wee square of cake. Housed in a plastic clamshell, the caramel topping is so slick it winks at you, beckoning, “LOOKY HERE.”

           In my right peripheral, stacks of USA Today’s that will not be read and Publix coupons that will not be used. An always-on television churns out luminous fitness infomercials and CNN Benghazi coverage. Out the window, the spikey offspring of a sweetgum tree form a moat on the other side of the parking lot. In my left peripheral, Grandma Frances.

           “Ooo she’s gonna capital L Love this caramel cake, mmm-hm,” Mom told me in the car en route. Grandma Frances is gonna love this here caramel cake. “Ooo this is something special. You can’t find this just anywhere.” As we pulled off the parkway I learned how, before she was paralyzed, Grandma Frances was a caramel cake devotee.

           But she doesn’t want the caramel cake. She wants the catheter out. That teeny evil tube slithering around below her waist like the serpent of Genesis. It has to be so acutely unbearable for her to feel it; let alone express it. The pain signals struggle up through her torso, wrenching themselves up to her cerebral cortex then out through the chambers of her throat, escaping finally in a sob, “out.”

           “Take. Out.”

           She has enough trouble forcing out sounds without the luxury of embarrassment getting in the way. This pain is a rude one. It is bad enough to pee yourself. It is worse for it to hurt.

           “It’s gonna be ok, it is. The caramel cake is gonna be here waiting for ya when you’re done,” Mom coos, cloaking concern in an uncharacteristically high voice. The nurse appears. Grandma Frances moves her head slightly to signal “no” She doesn’t want the cake.

           “Well, that's ok too. We won’t let it go to waste!” Mom passes the container to me. “Lily can polish it off for ya.”

            “No thank you,” I reply.

           Mom doesn’t know now, but with these words she’s just rung the opening bell for a fight. Our voices volley to and fro with high-pitched, faux-politeness, but just below an emotional MMA match is ON. (In this corner, Featherweight Champ “MOM” trying to keep her title and it alllllllll together! In this corner, “TEEN,” weighing in at A-Medically-Concerning-Deficit-of Pounds!)

            “C’mon now. You’ll love it,” she prods.

            “No, I’m good. I don’t—I’m not hungry so I’m not gonna.”

            “How many times in your life are you gonna have something like this?” Mom asks.

            We’re trapped in the argument. We spew our sadness into the cake and who will ensure it won’t go to waste. Waste is the worst. We huddle, arguing at the edge of the room, unsure of how to help the growing circle of nurses.

            “I don’t want it,” I shoot back. “I don’t want it. You can’t make me eat it. I’m not gonna-”

            “A bite, one bite. Of all the things in the-”

            “I’m like…I’m not gonna eat it so you can’t-”

            “Eat the damn cake.” She shoves the container into my hands, “Eat… the damn cake.”

            Mom is mad. I am pissed. A dry pufferfish of frustration lodges in my throat. Mom heads to comfort Grandma and I head to the bathroom, caramel cake in hand.

           I push at the dense square with the side of a plastic fork. It remains for a moment before finally budging, toppling from its clamshell into the waiting water in the toilet bowl. More of a plunk than a splash. The frosted top of the cake bobs in the waters as if waiting for the lifeguard to come scoop it up and wrap it in a warm, worn beach towel. The cake wilts and breaks, gurgling down the pipes until new water pours in, fresh and pellucid. With the cake flushed, I’ve gotten my way.

           The cake would have kept. Even on the counter, it would have kept. She could have had it later. She died a week later.

KRYSTAL SLIDERS

(“THEY AREN’T ‘SLIDERS,’ DON’T CALL EM SLIDERS IN YOUR STORY. THEY’RE JUST ‘KRYSTALS.’”

-GAY MARIE BROCK 2020, ALSO FRANCES  IF SHE WERE STILL ALIVE)

           Frances would drive for no less than an hour around Stone Mountain, scouting out the prime fast food spots. The best bites had to be hotly pursued: Checkers for fries; Krystal for little grey sliders steamed with onion vapors; Chick-Fil-A for milkshakes; McDonalds for apple pie and maybe more fries if the ravenous little fingers and tummies in the backseat already gobbled up the garlicky, paprika-y goodness of the first round.

           She’d lay out the loot atop a dunescape of newspaper clippings and perfectly preserved junk mail. My big sister Rosie Ellen (10), the cousins (9, 10 and 13) and I (8) would scarf down our            due, eager to accelerate the twenty minutes Grandma mandated between digestion and cannonballing into the public pool.

           But she would take her time. Slowly, she’d work through the meal, balancing the hot fat of the meat with the chilled sweet of the milkshake. The salty and saccharine combining to create a heady rush of serotonin. It must have tasted so good: the soft pliable potato bun submitting beneath her teeth while the grains of ice between the cream coated the roof of the mouth. Finished, she’d wash it all down with iced tea before sectioning up a well-ripened peach on a paper plate for whichever grandchild rushed back in first with bruised feelings and knees. Typically, the youngest. Typically, yours truly.

            A slice of peach for your wounds. Excessive ooh-ing and ahhh-ing weren’t warranted for minor scrapes. She wouldn’t feign sympathy if she had none. You’d be alright. Here’s a peach.

FELLOWSHIP HALL SPREAD

            In the early 2000s, Frances brought business cards to church. She’d hit you with a tasteful pitch over the fellowship hall spread. She had the best deals and she was the woman who would get it done for you. She was witty and pragmatic and beloved and whispered about and larger than life. She wrangled reclusive relatives out of their south Georgia homes and wrapped them up in the sweaty embraces of the annual Mayo family gatherings.          

BOILED PEANUTS

           Way back when, driving home from Grandma Frances’s place, you’d venture from the bellybutton of Georgia to the left oblique of Florida. You pass a roadside stand every thirty minutes. Inside, alongside some Vidalia onions and fat tomatoes, you can buy a Styrofoam cup of boiled peanuts. Your options are small, medium and large and you really do deserve a large. You owe it to yourself really.

           As you drive on down, you take in the salty pellets. I wish you could try some yourself because I’m struggling to describe the wonder of what happens when you boil peanuts shell-on in a briny vat of water for a few hours. Maybe add a dash of paprika, garlic powder and Old Bay. The tasty ovals emerge from their peanut shells, wet and soft as grounded fruit after a hefty rain. You dip your fingers into the juices of the cup, searching for a stray leftover peanut in the detritus of discarded shells. There’s another treat in there if you suck on the shells. By the time you surrender and concede that they are no remaining peanuts, the tips of your fingers are pruned and puckered.

            Billboards plead their case as you speed by. Some warn of impending hellfire should you, yes YOU, go through with that procedure you’ve been contemplating. “How dare you,” they hiss. They know what you did and you can’t take it back, unless…well, they suppose there is this ONE number you could call and maybe, just maybe if you type in the 1-800 perfectly and stay on your very best behavior, you MIGHT be able to wrench yourself out of Hell come next year. Other billboards just want to remind you there’s an old sex shop after the next off ramp. The latter have a far better vibe.

           At nine, I memorized the sex shop billboards from Stone Mountain to Tampa Bay. Starship. Lion’s Den. Adam & Eve (there’s a couple). Eager to patronize them one day, I had to remember their names and off ramps. Outside, they were wee squat buildings bleached and baking in the sun with only one or two sedans in their parking lot. Inside, I knew, they’d be grand. The walls would be a glorious pink, lousy with racks upon racks of merchandise. They’d be filled with sex things and sex people who liked sex and having sexy sex with other sex people. There’d be a woman at the counter who looked like Anna Nicole and a man who looked like Kevin Bacon (Wild Things era) stocking the shelves and they’d wink when you walked in the door. Dimitri from the animated Anastasia and Patrick Swayze might be perusing the back aisles, catching your eye between the racks. Probably. TBD. I’d have to wait until I was 18 to find out.

           Other billboards highlight the upcoming outlet malls and potential cash windfalls in your future. Did that weight loss drug make you sick? Did someone do you wrong? John Morgan of Morgan & Morgan wants you to know he’s John Morgan of Morgan & Morgan. He grins down at you, reminding you where you are.  Billboards shout to you on behalf of an underground cabal of cows staging heists and ingratiating themselves with American’s conservative “Family Values” population. “EAT MOR CHIKIN,” they shout.

MAYO (NNAISE/AIOLI IF YOU NEED A REBRAND) FAMILY

           It’s been living almost exclusively under aliases for a decade or two so I won’t expect you to realize but Mayo is everywhere. In your town. On your block. Inside your home.

Your favorite special sauce? Mayo.

That mysterious local house dressing? Mayo.

Aioli? C’mon now. You know this one.

The basis for your Caesar dressing? Mayo’s doing the heavy lifting on that one too.

           Full disclosure. I have a vested interest in marketing mayo as the hot new condiment for millennials. Frances was a “Mayo.” A hundred or so Georgian, Floridian and Tennessean Mayos still walk the earth--perusing the aisles of a Piggly Wiggly, talking to neighbors or going live on Facebook while bearing the “Mayo” ancestral name. Before Frances made her way to Heaven that last summer, the massive Mayo family tree would don custom-made “Mayo Family Reunion” t-shirts and wrangle broods of little ones into Toyota Sienna minivans to make the trek to Richland, Georgia.

           Family reunions are big affairs. The Mayos congregate for a few days of feasts, putt-putt and obligatory softcore cousin-on-cousin nightmares. It is fitting that the name printed on all the souvenir reunion t-shirts bears the same name of the ingredient central to nearly all the dishes presented. Potato salad. Deviled eggs. A vista of dips.

           I scamper out of the pool to the picnic spread, knocking water out of my ear with my wrist. Barefoot, I tip-toe quickly, racing the lizards. I reach the folding table. It’s protractible legs stab through the red clay like Ms. Bambi’s snake-skinned stilettos on the playground back in Florida.

           I overburden a paper plate with mounds of potato salad, pigs-in-a-blanket and banana pudding with Nilla wafers and scamper off to eat at my own folding table. Pool water from my bathing suit seeps in through my commemorative t-shirt as I eat, wetting the Georgia peach logo. My wee potbelly juts out below the bottom edge of the t-shirt but I don’t care about that at this point because oh God it tastes so so good.

           A full tummy is a happy tummy. An extra bulge after the picnic just means you’ll sleep better tonight.

           Later, at sixteen, I think back on this moment and I’m repulsed by hungry little girl and her happy rotund midriff. I’m jealous of the little girl with wet grass sticking to her thighs and disgusted by how she takes in the whole plate with ease, giggles to herself and goes back for more of the corner bits of the banana pudding where the Nilla wafers are the most marvelously soggy. 

THE FUZZY ASS ON THE GAFFNEY WATER TOWER

            “You’re letting too much of the good stuff go to waste,” Grandma Frances chirps. She caught me futzing around with a plastic knife one afternoon. Pulling out a Swiss army knife, she shows me how it’s done. (Old Southern folks always happen to have a blade on them when they’re teaching you a folksy lesson on waste and the human condition.) She sections up the peach carefully, plopping the slices onto a paper plate too thin to absorb the peach’s escaping juice. She nods down at her work, passing the plate around to her brothers and son. Not a single morsel goes to waste.

SANDWICH O’ SHAME

           Frances, like her kin, loved a deal. She bought Christmas cards off-season and could repurpose just about anything. She would dumpster-dive after my classmates dropped their unfinished ham sandwiches into the bin.

           “Who did this?” she’d ask if the find was particularly plentiful. One lone hand would peak up. “There’s good meat in here,” she’d insist. When I was eleven, she scolded George S. after finding his eschewed sandwich. Yeah. George. Fucking. S. George “I’m Hot AND I Have An Infinity Pool On The Gulf of Mexico.” He smirked at her and my longstanding crush festered into an exhaustive, attentive kind of hate. That genre of loathing that demands the object of your anger pay attention to you always. You pester them with your distaste. “Looky at how much I hate you. Hey. Hey!” You long for them to  witness you and know how very little you care about their attention.

           I often wonder if Frances ever felt that localized anger. She had just cause to. But she probably just told the person to take their sorry behind back home.

PLEASURE, MY

           I am a vision in a visor. An angry used-car-dealership inflatable tube with bloody knuckles and non-slip shoes. I am fifteen and in retrospect, a bad employee and a bit of a dick. My hair is slicked back into a tight ponytail. The split ends of my ponytail run down below my ass. When she comes home from New York, Rosie calls it “FLDS chic” and asks me how many sister-wives are in the family. Warranted. I want everyone in the world to notice how my clothes don’t fit and my knuckles are bleeding. I want everyone to think I got in a fight. I run out the door after each shift, imaging myself in a Lana Del Rey music video. Some Cherry-Hair-Coca-Cola-On-My-Uniform-Bokeh-Light-Johnny-Cash-Is-Zaddy nonsense. “She’s driving fast, but going nowhere, baaaaaby.”

           I will get home as fast as I can, counting red as yellow and yellow as just cause to go as fast as possible, pulling at the visor that’s stuck in my ponytail. I pass out at home and wake up the next day and every day until graduation at 3:30am, jab-cross-hooking my way through Lana Del Rey and the Weeknd’s discography. I dance around the Everlast heavy bag, a sweaty, ripped virgin with a lust for Chobani and perfectly julienned carrot sticks.

           That’s an anorexia joke—the Chobani part. I’ve got a tight two minute Chobani bit I’ve workshopped to perfection. “Yeah I was absolutely HOOOOORNY for nonfat fruit-on-the-bottom,” I tell people when I talk about the five years I was anorexic. They were an ugly, puss-dribbling, white-knuckled five years, starting around Frances’s death and ending my second year of college. Life was a sorry series of Chobani, carrots, spinach, almonds, Chobani, salad, tilapia, Chobani. Rinse and repeat. There is no joy at the bottom of a fruit-at-the-bottom yogurt but that didn’t keep me from digging for it.

            I was such a Chobani slut, in fact, that I brought one to the funeral service. By the time I got around to it at the buffet after, it had curdled.

VROOM VROOM

            There was a big remembrance party at my sweet Aunt Susan’s house after the funeral. I do mean “party.” Mayos and Chalkleys and Bushs and Sellers and Brocks caravanned back from the church with stuffed Tupperware. The spread covered the counterspace, kitchen table and back porch area where the other cousins tried out an ear wax removal kit someone had bought out of a catalog. I snuck a Mike’s Hard lemonade in the garage once the coast was clear. I snagged the bottle from the outside fridge and leaned against a pile of long-abandoned toy scooters from when my cousins were little. As the syrupy lemon elixir started to slap my dopamine around a little, I decided to go for a run. I was a good runner back then. I ran fast and far, stretching out the space between my index finger and back big toe.

           That night I ran so fast and far that I would brag about the distance for years. I ran so fast and far that the whole of Forsyth County would feel the tight kick of my shins reaching out for the pavement. I would hit the soles of my feet so viciously against the sidewalk everyone in every house down every cul-de-sac would feel how it feels when the ground quivers and drops out from under you.

NO.

           I didn’t tell you this before, but I never looked up from the caramel cake. I never looked up to meet her gaze and never had another chance to.

           After she said “no” to the caramel cake, she said “no” to the grilled cheese. To the bag of Lay’s and peaches. To the slightly melted ice cream in the sweaty glasses they brought around after dinner. To water.

           She had wanted it quicker but that’s not legal in Georgia. So she said “no” to it all.

           I watch the scene back like a blurry old VCR, thinking about how the cake would have kept. I know that now. In fact, the flavors would have gotten to know each other even better. They would have even boldened and flourished with an extra day or two. Maybe she would have eaten it later if it had just been there. Perhaps it would have been so tempting that she would have taken in a bite or two. Waste was the worst.

           The central girl in the old scene pisses me off when I watch her. She never eats the cake. She’s so repulsively proud of herself.

           I would eat it. The cake. I want to eat it. Caramel cake sounds marvelously luscious and wonderful. I know now how much work goes into making something like that. “You skinny Gumby-looking motherfucker,” I think, peering down on the teenage girl who does the wrong thing over and over again into dimly lit infinity. “Just take a bite,” I shout. The lean angry girl keeps staring at the cake in the plastic clamshell. “One bite will barely change your daily calorie journal,” I yell as loud as can be but she walks the clamshell to the toilet. She could just not have the slice of provolone on the Publix veggie she’s planning on having for dinner. That’s all it would take. “Turn around!” I plead, but she just stares down the toilet as Frances cries. “Say something. Say you love her. Say you’ll come back and share the cake with her.” But the girl flushes the cake, washes her hands and walks out the door to wait in the lobby. She does not say “goodbye” or “it’ll be okay” or “I love you.”

           Alone, she finds her way to the Toyota Sienna in the parking lot and peers in the outside rearview mirror. Proud, she stares at herself, luminous with sweat and the victory of rejection. She said “no” to the caramel cake. No one and nothing—no plea or sorrow or morsel of empathy—could make her take the food into her body. How Dare You Try.

           Frances died a week later. I was interviewing for that Chick-Fil-A job at the time. I got the news when I got back home.

           You get a free meal (sandwich, side, soft drink excluding premium beverages) with every shift. Not on Sundays though.

MACARONI SALAD, PICKLES, FLINTSTONE PUSH-POP

            “It’s Sunday, girls.”

            “Hm?” Rosie Ellen and I turn our heads.

            “It’s Sunday. Chick-Fil-A is closed.”

            Plot: foiled. Tummies: grumbling even on the Lord and Truett Cathy’s day off. Rosie Ellen and I whimper, but Grandma Frances hatches a plan.

            “Let’s walk on over to the market.”

            We pop on our shoes and head down the driveway. We look both ways and run across the street, darting behind a cherry red Ford Explorer. It’s cooling down as we hustle through the neighbor’s front lawn onto the pockmarked sidewalk.

             We pass familiar blush-hued ranch-houses. Some houses are shy, hidden behind philodendron, saw palmetto and the palm fronds we cut and wave about every Sunday before Easter. Some are naked to the prying eyes of passersby. You can see in some windows and I want to peer in at the brown-haired neighbor lady I hear sometimes doesn’t wear a shirt but there is no time to peek.

            “We best get going before it starts raining,” Grandma Frances advises and we summit the Snell Isle bridge as little motorized dinghies vroom by below us. Just so you know, in case you haven’t been, the peak of the Snell Isle bridge is the best place. Particularly if you are coming or going to the Snell Isle market.

            The market greets us with a bell’s chime. The scent of the bait shop out back lingers in the checkerboard vinyl flooring. A cardboard cutout of Dale Earnhardt Jr. endorses the display of beers smack-dab in the middle of the store. The same jolly older man tends the cash register. In my memory he has the face of the Coca-Cola Santa, but that can’t be right. (Or can it)

            They don’t keep the back aisle shelved most of the time, but for a cooler stocked with sherbet push pops and choco tacos. We pick up macaroni salad, pickles (dill) and a push pop for dessert.

            We eat on the green bench across the street. Behind our backs a local attorney wonders if you’re “HURT???.” We unseal the macaroni salad and take our turns shoveling in sporkfuls of lightly sweetened, mayo-laden noodles. Passing it each dish to our left, we cycle through hearty, briny and sugary until the next person wants a bite and we shuffle the food down one.

            It’s raining now. Wee chilly dollops smack against the pavement with an audible “ping.” It’s cold. The downy hair of my string bean arms perk up. We sit.

            “Relish.”

            Frances looks straight forward.

            “Needs more relish.”

            The rain pings our skin and we’re cold, but we don’t move.

            “It’s mighty good though.”

            We gaze across the two lanes of sporadically passing pick-ups and sedans at the storefronts. At the Snell Isle market and the silhouette of a NASCAR star. At the bait shop. At the water of the Gulf of Mexico leaping up from the surface with each raindrop as if the sea itself were running after the rain. The grub is good. Light on relish, but good.

            “Mmmmmm-hm,” she says, taking it all in.