Black Cake(16)

Benny tells the men she has to go to the bathroom but instead, she heads farther down the hallway to the room where she grew up and digs into the contents of her wheelie bag.

There.

She unrolls an old university sweatshirt she inherited years ago from her brother and takes out a measuring cup, a cloudy-looking piece of plastic that is older than she is. It goes back to the days when Ma was a young bride, newly arrived in America. Ounces and cups on one side, milliliters on the other.

“Take this,” her mother said as Benny was packing for her move to college. She pressed the cup into Benny’s tote bag and patted the bag. “This way you’ll have a little piece of home with you, wherever you go.” After that, Benny never did pack a suitcase without slipping the old cup in among her clothes, a little reminder of all those days spent together in the kitchen with her ma.

Benny’s nose was barely level with the kitchen counter when her mother first showed her how to make a black cake. Ma reached down and pulled a huge jar out of a lower cupboard. One of her tricks was to soak the dried fruits in rum and port all year round, not just a few weeks before.

“This is island food,” Ma said. “This is your heritage.”

While the batter was in the oven, her mother hoisted Benny onto a dark green stool. She told Benny that the seat was the color of the trees that grew straight out of the water where she had grown up. Benny imagined a wide, dark sea pierced by tall trees, like the redwoods that her parents had taken her and Byron to see farther up the California coast. She imagined them standing firm like massive sentinels, as tall waves washed past their trunks.

“One day, you’ll see,” her mother told her.

Benny grew up thinking that her mother and father would take her and Byron to the island someday, but they never did. It was years before Benny realized that the towering water trees she’d imagined were actually mangroves, low, verdant clumps of life rooted in those intertidal zones where fresh water mixed with seawater, where the roots were both hardy and vulnerable, where both sea and land creatures made their homes. Where nothing was any one thing but, rather, a little bit of everything. Kind of like Benny.

Her ma had been using the same measuring cup for twenty years or so when her dad took Benny and Byron to a department store to find a replacement. They ended up choosing a bigger one made out of thick glass.

“For her black cake,” their father said, raising the cup as if in a toast.

“Oooh!” their mother said when she opened the package. She left the gleaming new cup on the kitchen counter and used it almost every day, only never for the black cake. When baking time came around, she would burrow into a bottom cupboard and fish out the old plastic thing, closing off the kitchen to everyone but Benny as she measured and mixed.

Even after Benny grew up and moved out, Christmastime baking with Ma remained an annual ritual. She would come back each winter for the blacking of the sugar, the rubbing of the butter, the sifting-in of the breadcrumbs. And each time, she brought the old measuring cup with her. Whenever her ma saw it, she would wrap her arms around Benny and kiss her on the neck, mwah-mwah-mwah.

Then came the big rift with her parents, that disastrous Thanksgiving Day, two years before her dad died, and Benny stopped visiting altogether. But by then, Benny had already evolved into a person who could smell the weather in a handful of flour and taste the earth in a spoon of cane sugar, and this is what had led her to take culinary classes. That, and dropping out of college. Which, Benny sees now, was what had started it all.

Benny’s decision to leave her elite university, years earlier, had caused the first tear in the fabric of their family home. The fissure had widened with her parents’ growing disappointment in her. They were irritated enough when she went to Italy to take the cooking courses but when she came back to the United States and moved to Arizona for art school, even her brother looked perplexed. The three people Benny loved most in this world no longer made any attempt to hide their doubts in her.

For Benny, the move made sense. Maybe it was the time she’d spent in the pastry-making classes, working with her hands and exploring the use of color and texture. Maybe it was being steeped for one year in the visual stimulation of an Italian city, the mustard-and salmon-colored fa?ades, the marble fountains, slick with water, the faces, the language. Benny only knew that she had come back to the States wanting to do more with her painting. She sensed that some combination of food and art in her life would help to ground her.

Benny didn’t want to work in a kitchen full time so much as she wanted to be surrounded by beauty and comforting things and decent people. She wanted to sit alone in her own café, before the first customers arrived, and work in her sketchbook, looking up through a glass window to see the morning sky turn metallic blue, then white gold. She wanted to use the café to teach children about culture through cooking. She wanted to do things her own way and have it work out all right. Benny wanted to have a safe space and a life that would always be under her control.

But Benny was Bert and Eleanor Bennett’s child and this was not the Bennett way. If you were a Bennett, you were expected to finish college, go on to graduate school, find a real profession, and do everything else in your free time. If you were born to Bert and Eleanor, you banked on your university degrees, you built your influence, you accumulated wealth, you quashed all vulnerability.

In short, you became Byron Bennett.