Relative Something

I know this girl that professes to dwell in possibilities. Someone in my family asked her to bake a wedding cake. She said, “Yes.” She said yes, even though she had never, ever baked a wedding cake before in her life. She had never talked to anyone who had baked a wedding cake, decorated a wedding cake, or transported a wedding cake. It’s possible that simply saying yes would lead to more stress than she anticipated dwelling in.

It doesn’t really matter that she could have probably purchased a trouble-free wedding cake from a bakery for the amount of money that she spent on ingredients and accessories for this project. Nor does it add much to the point of this story to reveal the number of ‘test’  cakes baked in practice for the final event, or what one does with so many practice cakes once they have been prepared.

This tale begins with a side-story that helps establish a baseline of stress that provides important perspective. Try to imagine that this girl is a career girl. A ‘meetings long into the night’ type of career girl. Let’s just say that this girl works in a capacity of very high responsibility for a public institution that was recently cited for spending beyond their means and placed in very public reprimand by the laws of the state. While managing that crisis for the, pardon my editorial opinion, ‘buffoon’ who is ultimately responsible, she is also actively pursuing alternative top-level employment options.

On the very Friday that she took leave from work to stay home and bake, she got up early to compose a letter to go with her curriculum vitae formatted late the night before, in order to have it finished with little time to spare for a courier to deliver by the deadline for a job she has her sights on. After that, she has nothing to fret over except making her first-ever attempt at a successful wedding cake for a group of about 200 guests of her husband’s niece’s wedding.

Nothing to fret over, that is, until her daughter gets home from college that afternoon with a fever and flu-like symptoms seeking a sick-bed to crash in and hoping for some tender loving care. And her husband gets home from work suffering with prednisone withdrawal symptoms, useless to the world, and collapses in that same bed for the night. So the girl does the best she can with what she’s got and holds together long enough to finish what was planned for the day and make her way to a bed in the spare room for a night’s sleep before the big wedding day.

The next part of this tale requires another side-story. It probably deserves it’s own telling, and it may seem hard to comprehend, but the point here is how it really throws this cake adventure over the top. On Thursday, the girl’s brother sends out a mass-email announcing he is taking his wife out of the country for over a week to celebrate her birthday and leaving their three young children home with his father-in-law. But grandpa is not from this country and his grasp of the English language, based on listening to his efforts, is pretty much represented in single-syllable, one-word sentences. This presents no real problem for the kids, because they speak his native language. However, for the bulk of care-givers generously included in the mailing as enlistees to provide support, it is an additional challenge.

Shortly after midnight, the phone in the girl’s house is ringing. Her number-one son trudges upstairs with the phone to find she is not in her bed, but soon finds her in the next room. Who could be calling at this hour of the night? It is her 7-year-old nephew to report he is throwing up, over and over, and wants more support than Grandpa can provide. The girl is up in a flash and dashing out the door to head over and help nurse what sounds like the saddest of situations. It lasts all night. Vomiting every 45 minutes or so, and then, diarrhea, too. When he finally seems to be able to sleep at around 6 a.m. she finds that his little brother is now awake and wanting attention for the morning. She goes the whole night with little-to-no sleep.

Eventually, necessity drives her back to her own home where she must frost and decorate cake. She tries to shower off all memory and any trace of the sickness from the wee hours just prior and takes on the most important task before her. By the allotted time she is packed and ready to go: cakes, boxes, flowers, decorations, display components, frosting, and tools. The cakes travel just fine. The setup goes well and it is looking beautiful. And then she hears a “snap”.

While the wedding party poses for the last few pictures and the guests are beginning to arrive, the girl turns to see the tiers of wedding cake tipping and crashing before her eyes. Was she dwelling in this possibility? Let’s just say that she isn’t so naive as to have not prepared for the need of ‘backup’ cakes. But what she probably didn’t plan on was the accumulative buildup of these unrelated stresses all precipitating this not so unlikely situation that she now found herself in. I guess that is the point of this whole story. It is at this point that the reader is supposed to try to imagine what it must have felt like to be the girl at that moment the upper layers of cake smashed to pieces on the table and floor.

It’s quite a spectacle. Who knows what life lessons the girl is destined to learn as a result of all this? We could dwell in the possibilities.

The girl reported that the catering staff that had been busy setting tables and preparing the room seemed to suddenly have a pressing need to be someplace else, but not before one paused to exclaim, “You are so fucked,” before leaving the room. Even the girl’s friend, who was along for support that only true close friends can provide, recognized this moment as beyond category and sought extra-ordinary response. She stole behind the bar and poured a shot of whiskey, offering it to the girl, who, without hesitating, despite never having been a whiskey drinker, downed it for whatever possible assistance it might provide.

By the time the wedding ceremony was complete, the backup cakes were in place and the display modified on the fly to no longer involve plastic towering parts. The uninformed were none-the-wiser. Mother-of-the-bride, who reported making it through the ceremony without crying, suddenly lost her breath and was overcome with teary emotion when she first saw the cake. In the still somewhat shocked state of the sudden aftermath, this is one of the possibilities the girl is allowing herself to dwell in: how moved and amazed the mother of the bride was to see, what to her was, the most beautiful wedding cake ever prepared.