Being Used

 

A big huge party, you say. It could be at their apartment—Curlytop Grandgirl and her sister’s. They shrug off your idea. Too hard to pull off. They’ll get everybody to send selfie greetings, though. They’ll get Uncle to patch these together for a birthday video. Mom’ll love that.

Well, they’re her girls. Who are you to run things? The slipping-out hard little head, and the squally rest of her—poof, that was 50 years ago. This is now.

People are supposed to send in their footage by September 18.

The deadline hovers.

It’s painful. For one thing, your phone belongs in the dump. Recordings are always tinny. Your husband puts a chair on top of the picnic table, for propping the phone, but you get two mangy heads too far apart, backed by generic leaves. The bathroom might hold more potential—the towels’ colors, the beet-red shower curtain, the glimmering washbowl mirror. But even in the best of light you look like a pair of sad hangers-on, plus your mouths move on behind your words. Eventually the stepladder, too, is in the bathroom, your phone on the flip-down shelf for holding the paint bucket. Things are getting crowded. And putting on a more photogenic shirt, he rips the rotten cloth at the shoulder.

It takes a whole disastrous chunk of the afternoon.

There will be supper at Mom and Dad’s with just the family, say Curlytop and her sister. Generously, they’re including you two. Then extra people will dribble in for dessert. “Can I bring anything?” you ask. For the meal, you mean. “No,” says Curlytop’s sister. “Well, jam.”

They want jam? Just jam?

Curlytop will bake up her cakes in the kitchen of the restaurant where she’s employed. She won’t need you. She’ll have Longer Ringlets along, her cousin.

“May I stop in?” you ask. Curlytop says sure.

The day before the party, late morning, when you’re on the way to town, Curlytop texts to say she’s at the kitchen now. Feel free to come whenever. And if you could bring a fan, that’d be great! It’s so hot up here.

She wants you for your fan.

You don’t have one in the car, obviously. I have class soon, you text back, and then a dermatologist appointment. I’ll check afterwards, see if you’re still there.

But once you’ve gotten your whole body looked at for moles, back in your car you find this next thing from her: I think Ringlets and I have the cakes covered.

You get the car close to the restaurant, though, and call to ask can you come anyhow?

In the stairwell leading up to the kitchen, there’s a warm bakery smell drifting down. Walking in, you see a fig cake, golden, perfect. At the stainless steel tabletop, Ringlets is whisking a thick alcoholic chocolate batter. Curlytop says she might need an extra batch of lemon curd for her lemon poppyseed layers, so can you zest her more rind? Well, but you thought things were under contro— But you don’t say this. Okay.

 

You notice, deep in the bag of lemons, two that have turned a fine blue-green moldy shade.

Ringlets pours out her chocolate but the torte pan is too small. She transfers the chocolate to a larger pan which, when she picks it up, leaks out the bottom. Curlytop says just set it on top of another pan to bake.

You discover, in one section of the industrial-strength sink on the kitchen’s far wall, greasy water, and soaking in it in despair, dirty dishes. So there’s something to do after all. Plus you can use the rags lying everywhere to go around wiping all the stainless steel while noting any interesting developments. The carrot-cake layers stay in the oven overlong and then fall into pieces when Curlytop tries to bang them from the pans, because she forgot the parchment. But the lemon poppyseed layers, already wrapped in plastic, look normal, and the plain yellow layers for the coconut cake only have deep cracks on the undersides, who knows why. The icing will fill them in fine, and people will focus on the coconut on top, although this doesn’t occur to you at the moment.

The horrendous part is that sink. You’ve stood at it before. You helped at a fancy nighttime fundraiser event for Uncle’s job. The faucet and squirter arrangement is bad enough—the faucet, if it’s positioned perpendicular to the wall, hangs out over the sink’s front edge, so there’s the risk of flooding the floor, plus the squirter’s spray, jet strength, hits everywhere. But what kills you are the washing compartments, so deep that you’re forced to stoop, your back humped in an upside-down U, to fish for the bowls and utensils. You have to slosh your rag over them hunched. The night of that event, you left all wet—wet sleeves, wet brain—and now here you are again, bent over the abyss. You grunt to Ringlets, who’s emptying out the slatted rack you’ve parked atop one of the compartments to use as a dish drainer, “This sink is awful. Awful. It’s only good for marinating turkeys. Twenty-five-pound turkeys, or 50-pound.”

But then you’re done. The three of you trudge out. You wonder if Curlytop is tired.

Next morning, she delivers to you the cakes. She had them in her car all night, where her dog couldn’t eat them. After Dad takes Mom off to Charlottesville, you’re supposed to bring the cakes over to their house, picking up Ringlets on the way. Curlytop and Ringlets will frost them with Curly’s frostings she’s already beaten, except for the torte’s alcoholic whipped cream, and then hide all five cakes in the extra fridge in Dad’s shop.

Why is Curlytop beating the cream now, you wonder in Mom’s kitchen, spying the bowl on Mom’s lunker mixer circling round and round robotically. The Bailey’s is dumped in too, and the sugar, and whipped cream can go to nothing in minutes. You try to keep your mouth pretty much shut.

All Curlytop wants you to do, actually, is toast the coconut for the cracked cake. She wants you to toast it in one of Mom’s iron skillets. But you yourself never toast coconut in a skillet. You always toast it in a tray in the oven. Dumb, thinks Curlytop. “Use a skillet,” she says. “That one up there.”

 

Slowly you bring it down off the wall. You sniff at the black. These Murches are meat people. Who wants coconut smelling of meat? Slowly you step over to the sink. You pull off a paper towel, wipe around the black interior. The paper towel comes away gray. Gray coconut, if not meaty? “I’m going to do it in the oven,” you say baldly, advancing yourself, for once.

While it turns a taupe shade in its nice dinky aluminum pan, you stand by, unwilling to make a disaster of things. Turn your back, you’ll get char. After that, it’s just dishes dishes, but not stooping, and carrying the cakes out to the shop, across the gravel, without dropping them.

At home, the day wears on. Before you and Ringlets left, Curlytop was chopping rainbow peppers for the dinner salad. On the kitchen counter lay the stick of butter she would need, making her braided bread, yet, to go with the salad. She’d fixed a sausage-and-bacon-and-eggs-and-hash-browns-and-clementines breakfast for Mom and Dad at their house, and for her sister, and both brothers, and the one’s wife with her belly swelling out with the first great-grandchild. (Yes, this is true.)

Let’s just say everything is a smash hit. In the evening, Mom and Dad back from Charlottesville and the family dotted across the patio, nobody can get over the bread braids. They’re Curlytop’s second go, because the first, she forgot to add the hot milk to the melted butter before stirring in the flour. Something like that. She had to pitch the whole mess. Mom has already seen the movie—they played it for her at breakfast and she laughed and laughed and cried and cried. Now they put the laptop on a little table for you to sit in front of, and oh, you want to eat the whole thing up, it’s that good. The night comes on and the lights strung from the tree twinkle, never mind the tree’s hard knocker walnuts falling down. The extra people crowd into the driveway and onto the patio and you all have to close your eyes for an interminable amount of time while Curlytop and her sister (and maybe Ringlets, too—you can’t see) carry out the cakes. Everybody’s murmuring and joking with their eyes shut. Then you all open them and on the table are these magnificent sugary things, a wavery candle stuck into each, leaping its yellow light into the sky.

People are forking up cake, mashing globs of icing with their tongues, going back for more. You see Curlytop sunk down on the patio steps, in the dark. You see her opening her mouth, releasing a silent, huge yawn.

Later, you notice she’s gone. She’s gone, her sister’s gone. Ringlets and her family, too. The carrot peels Ringlets made into a peony, the edges dusted with edible gold, have melted into the carrot cake’s plate. Curlytop’s overmuch lemon curd, rind-y and fragrant, which she set on the table in a mug so people could take extra, some’s probably left in the bottom. You were an extra, yourself. You got used. Curlytop included you and being included was enough, was it ever.