The Wedding Cake Grandma and I Baked

Grandma’s hands

Every one of Grandma’s church cakes had the same border. A little shell border around the bottom of every tier, like a row of tiny waves. She had done it on hundreds of cakes. My mother’s wedding cake had it. Mine was supposed to.

I had tried it on a paper plate four times. Mine looked like caterpillars.

“Let me,” Grandma said.

“Grandma, your hands.”

“I know about my hands,” she said.

She took the piping bag from me. Her fingers wouldn’t close all the way around it. She had to hold it in the crook of her right hand and push with the heel of her palm, and her left hand guided the tip, trembling.

Nobody in that kitchen said a word.

She did the first shell. It was perfect. She did the second. Her hand shook, and she stopped, and she took a breath, and she went on. All the way around the bottom of the twelve-inch tier. All the way around the ten. Slow, slow, slow.

On the eight, she had to stop and rest her hand flat on the table. Her knuckles were white and red at the same time. My mother got up and stood behind her and put both her hands on Grandma’s shoulders, and Grandma reached up and patted one of them without looking.

Then she finished the eight. And the six.

It took her an hour and ten minutes. When she was done, she set the bag down very carefully, like it was something that could break, and she looked up at me.

“Your grandpa used to hold the cake board steady for me,” she said. “Fifty years. He never once complained about it.”

That was when I cried. Not over Pam. Not over the cake. Over that.

Six in the morning

I went back to my apartment for a few hours of sleep that night, and I was back in Grandma’s kitchen at five-thirty Saturday morning in sweatpants with my hair in rollers.

The cake tiers were in the refrigerator and the chest freezer, in separate boxes, and I had absolutely no idea how I was going to stack them and drive them eleven miles to the church hall without the whole thing sliding into the ditch.

At six o’clock there was a knock on Grandma’s back door.

It was Marcy.

She was standing on the back step in her white bakery apron with a cardboard box under one arm. It was full of cake boards, plastic dowels, a pair of garden shears and a long serrated knife. Behind her, in the driveway, sat her delivery van with the bakery’s name on the side.

“Your dad came in yesterday afternoon to buy cake boards,” she said. “He told me what you two were doing. I finished the Hendricks cake at two this morning and the Durand cake at four-thirty. I figured I had an hour.”

“Marcy,” I said. “You haven’t slept.”

“Nope,” she said cheerfully. “Let me see what you girls did.”

She came in and opened the refrigerator and looked at our cake for a long time. I held my breath. This was a woman who had made maybe two thousand wedding cakes in her life.

“The ten is leaning,” she said.

“I know.”

“Doesn’t matter. We’ll put it to the back.” She turned around and looked at Grandma, who had come out of her bedroom in her housecoat. “Vera, that’s your shell border.”

“It is,” said Grandma.

“I’d know it anywhere. You taught it to me in that church basement in 1989, when I was nineteen years old and couldn’t pipe a straight line to save my life.”

I hadn’t known that. Nobody had ever told me.