Benny passed through a dimly lit foyer smelling of dusty paper and school days and entered a large, warm room with rows of fold-up chairs and a table covered with snacks and flyers. She nodded her thanks when someone handed her a paper cup of coffee and a gluten-free cookie. She basked in the murmured welcomes, the sanctuary of unknown faces, the heat of the cup on her fingers. She was already feeling better. She could have stopped herself right there, but she didn’t. Instead, she took a seat between a young man in a pilly blue sweater and a woman in a scarlet skirt and allowed the tide of goodwill and the need for catharsis to pull her up to the head of the room.
Until then, no one had wanted to know who she was, where she had come from, or why she was there, because, after all, everyone was there for the same basic reason and the why, exactly? of their presence on that particular evening, and the who, exactly? they had been, or hoped to be, would not require elaboration unless and until they took the floor. And now, she was holding on to the edge of the lectern with one hand and clasping a half-eaten cookie with the other.
“My name is Benny and I’m an alcoholic.”
With those few words, Benny had officially crashed a meeting for recovering alcoholics for want of a place where people would say Come in, no matter what. Where they would support her even when she told them that she hadn’t attended her own father’s funeral service. Where they would listen without a trace of shock in their faces when she told them why. Where she could say, to people who might not understand but who would listen to her, anyway, that she was tired of having her authenticity as a person called into question simply because she did not fit the roles that others wanted her to play, or because she wanted to play roles that others seemed to feel were beyond her.
Benny knew that she should run out of the room without saying another word, but the cookie was homemade and she could taste a hint of ginger. And for the first time in a long time, someone was listening. So she spoke. She told them everything. Once she had finished talking about her father’s rejection, about her mother’s disappointment, about the brother who wouldn’t talk to her, about the lover who had hurt her, she came right out and admitted that she’d attended the meeting under false pretenses because she hadn’t known what else to do. She hadn’t meant any disrespect, she said, she was going to be leaving right then. She stepped away from the microphone and headed straight for the exit, shaking her head and muttering, “I’m so sorry…”
As she rushed past the chairs, a woman raised her voice and said, “There are support groups for that sort of thing, you know?” and a second person said, “At least you were honest,” while Mister Movie-Hair, who had unwittingly led Benny there to begin with, said, “Good luck to you.” Benny’s face was burning but she had the feeling that somehow, her first and only AA meeting had been of some help to her after all.
Benny walked down the steps of the building and kept going for forty minutes until she reached her apartment. She sank into the couch and pulled a blanket around her, grateful for the warmth and the smell of last night’s garlic still clinging to its fibers. Enough, enough, enough. Benny turned on her cellphone and called home but there was no answer. Later she would do the math, and she would figure out that her mother had been in the hospital after her surfing accident and that Byron hadn’t bothered to call Benny to let her know. This was the kind of thing that could happen when you’d stayed away for too long.
Cake
Benny lay awake for hours, thinking of what she might have said, had her mother picked up the phone. At four in the morning, she got out of bed and wiped down the kitchen counter. She emptied the oven of the pots and pans that she kept stored there, took some eggs out of the refrigerator, and reached into a lower cupboard for the most important ingredient, the jar of dried fruits that had been soaking in rum and port. She poured the mixture into a bowl and added dates and maraschino cherries. No citron, though. She had never liked citron. Nor had her mother.
Benny had just enough time to go through the whole routine and set two black cakes on top of the stove to cool before getting ready for her morning job. She still felt the need to talk to her ma but she didn’t have the courage to try calling her again. This would have to be her message, the cakes. She had taken some photos of the preparation. She would send them to her mother along with a letter.
Benny would let her mother see what she had learned from her, how closely she had been paying attention, how well she had improved her technique. Because baking a black cake was like handling a relationship. The recipe, on paper, was simple enough. Its success depended on the quality of the ingredients, but mostly on how well you handled them, on the timing of the various processes, on how you responded to variables like the humidity in the air or the functioning of the oven thermostat.