I’m in my kitchen, scrubbing gently at my non-stick baking pans, listening to the soft purr of the dishwasher and feeling the heat of the ovens wane in the room. The smell of apples and cinnamon wafts and settles gently around the room, a warm blanket to cozy me into the evening as my children drift off to sleep. My thoughts drift to another cake, this one lemon, sitting on my grandmother’s counter. I was about the same age as my youngest child – maybe six or seven – the first time I saw that lemon cake, and it was grand and high and just bursting with importance. I came racing around the corner hall to the kitchen, past the bright orange, red and green cock and hen decorative plates bearing the names of my Grandaddy and Grandmommy – unfamiliar nicknames that no one ever used, but something like the proper names that you sometimes heard people call them – and past the wall mounted rack of collectible salt and pepper shakers; little tea pots and kettles, odd figures of Aunt Jemima looking-black people that I somehow knew were inapropriate, but were never discussed, and more roosters and hens (how I always wanted to play with those salt and pepper shakers, but was never allowed to touch them until after she died, my Grandmommy, and then I sold them one by one to collectors on behalf of the estate, except for one piece, a pewter set made in occupied Japan which I kept for reasons I still cannot explain). I raced around the counter and came face to face with this cake. I forgot about my pursuit of my sister, which angered her greatly, as the sheer heavenly scent of lightly sugared lemon frosting washed over me in waves. I stared. I knew I would not be allowed to touch this cake. It was for some friend, some church gathering, some anything that I had not yet heard of; whatever the case, the cake would be leaving and I would never touch it. My Grandmother bid goodbye to someone at the door, and she turned to me and said, “would you like a piece of birthday cake?”
I was confused. “Whose birthday is it?” I asked. It had been my birthday almost a month before, but no one else’s was due for some time – at least several months. “It is yours. My cousin Billie made it for you when she heard you were coming down to visit.” A whole cake made just for me by a cousin I did not know, a strange benefactor who reached out of my abject boredom into this strange world of antique oddities and somehow created the one perfect delicacy I had never thought to crave. How incredibly perfect. I didn’t know who Billie was and for years I couldn’t fathom the relationship. All I knew was that once a year, when it was somewhat close to my birthday, if we visited my Grandmommy’s house, her cousin Billie would make me a lemon cake. She never delivered it to me in person and I never got to thank her for it. She lived in the same town and she must have been close, but her life was kept completely separate from mine – I never knew why. I grew to love the lemon cakes as a sort of intrigue. My sister never got a lemon cake or anything special from anyone. No other cousin of ours received any special attention from an absent relative either. Just me – the youngest of the grandchildren; the one most likely to be tormented, most likely to squeal, and, as it turns out, the one least liked by my grandmother.
As an adult, I have later learned that my grandmother liked me about as much as I liked her. I have few fond memories of her and these are mostly greetings and goodbyes. My cousins tell me that she found me to be whiny and a pain. I did complain more than the others, but I was the smallest and therefore always the one sleeping on the floor, always the last to get the soft spot, always the one without the pillow and always the one whose input was considered the least. You might complain too. My Grandmother, by the time I was old enough to be a pain in the rear, suffered from Parkinsons disease, although I never knew this until I was well into my teen years and after my beloved Granddaddy had passed away from another equally horrible debilitating illness. Suffice to say, she had been fighting a losing battle for her own health and her husband's health for some time by the time I was a little snot, and I must have been a bit much to take. Children, even well behaved children, can be difficult for the infirm. They are excruciating for the infirm who prefer children to behave like adults to begin with. As the fifth grandchild, I had come to the end of her tolerance limits, I suppose. As everyone else was growing up and supposed to behave better, so I was expected to behave better. I spent a lot of time outdoors when visiting, although what I really wanted to do was rummage through her closets to look in those wonderful hat boxes that tempted me from the guest room closet. I just knew that a whole world of dress up clothes awaited; quiet, patient, whispering to me in the night like the little red shoes that belonged to the girl in the story that my Granddaddy would read to me with his Grover puppet, "come and see, let's go dancing together!" I was right, you know. When my grandmother passed away, my father could not bear to go through her things so I came down and stayed in the house and catalogued everything in it. I saved many things that he would have thrown away, including my Grandaddy's bus driver hat with its badges that looked like police badges, his keys that were always so interesting and clangy, and those lovely, lonely old hats in their crumbly old hat boxes. Sometimes, just to make sure they are still there, I get them out and show them to my daughters and put them on to show them how they were worn. I would have loved to see them on my grandmother's head.
In any event, I begin to understand my cousin Billie’s sympathy a bit more in context. You see, my cousin Billie was my Grandmother’s first cousin and they grew up together as best friends. They were friends and fellow troublemakers, although my grandmother chose the life of family and respectability, while her cousin chose a life of glamour and adventure. Billie was a model. She modeled hats and furs and I have many pictures that she gave me once (when I visited her as an adult) as well as velour swimsuits, lingere and other niceties. She was quite the item for a time, even traveling to Paris to model. She married and divorced no less than five times, and to this day is unmarried and living alone. She was shockingly beautiful, as was my grandmother. My grandmother was shockingly proper, although as I read in her diary (after she passed) she was also rather depressed and perhaps suffering from a sort of bi-polar disorder. Billie never had children. I think they may have lived through each other to an extent, keeping in contact, living close to one another in their older years, and loving each other like sisters the whole time. There may have been more to it than that, but I will never know.
I went to see Billie again when my Grandmother died. My father and I spent some time with her and we tried to give her my grandmother’s house because her own house was literally falling down around her. She wouldn’t have it. Liz’s house was too fine, and too lonely without her in it. She couldn’t bear to live there without Liz.
After that visit, she started to send me lemon cakes again. She couldn’t cook anymore – she was almost blind and very nearly deaf and her stove doesn’t work in her house. She won’t let anyone replace it because she says she doesn’t need one. There is a couple who looks after her, and my father checks on her often and makes sure that her financial affairs are kept in order. He won't let her go unaided if she needed anything, I know. My father loves her because his mother loved her. She is family. She ordered a very fine lemon cake from a store and had it mailed to me that year for Christmas. It was beautiful – it made me cry. I didn’t even want to eat it – I just wanted to look at it and know that she was still alive and wonder what I needed to do. She was my angel my whole life, and now I didn’t know what to do for her. Every now and then I send her pictures of my kids, although I admit to failing her more often than not. My father called once and told me that she was in the hospital and I felt panicky – like I needed to go and see her. I didn’t feel that way about my own grandmother. He said not to go – she didn’t like a fuss. I sent her a bouquet of flowers instead, and a nice card. The woman who cares for her called to let me know how surprised she was and how much it had meant to her.
This year, cousin Billie turned 100 years old. A week before her birthday, she sent me a check for $25 and a note asking me to get gifts for my girls for their birthdays. I was in tears. She is in poverty and she is giving me gifts? What have I ever done for her? I didn’t know what to do, but called my parents again to ask how to receive such a precious gift. They said to deny it would break her heart – just send pictures of the girls and thank you. I sent her four 5x7s of my very favorite photos of my girls with her 100th birthday card and notes about what the girls are doing. I also promised to follow up with pictures of what they got with their birthday money from her and thanked her for her gift. I still felt like I was falling short. How do you honor someone like Billie? For me, she has been a ray of sunshine, a hope, a beacon of light. I don’t know why she decided to make me that first lemon cake. I don’t know if she just had a cake made and decided to drop by one day and said to herself “I’ll just call it a birthday cake for this one” or if she set out to brighten my day at the outset. Whatever the case, she stuck to it. She persisted. She did it out of love, and she did it to stay connected. She reminded me every time she baked that cake that there was someone out there who knew who I was – me – the little one who sometimes got left behind, or lost a shoe, or had to sit on the floor because there weren’t any seats left. She made sure that even the least of these had lemon cake.
This is what I am thinking as I wrap up from my baking tonight. I’ve been baking a lot of apple cakes lately. I started baking apple cakes because we had a lot of apples and they were going to go bad. My mother had this family recipe that she gave me when we first got married and it was one of my favorites from childhood. It was easy to make, but you have to use your hands to squish the apples into the batter. I like to think that there is more love in that cake because you have to really reach into it yourself and grapple with it. I pray over my cakes when I make them. I am a little bit like my Grandmommy and a little bit like Billie. Part of me is a little wild, and part of me is very proper. So when I make my cakes, I pray that God will bless the person who eats it and that he will show me who to give it to. Do you know what? He does.
