An Easy Bake

An Easy Bake
by Robert Aquino Dollesin



At three in the morning the covers come off and I get out of bed. Fifteen years of marriage. That's what today would have been. I scheduled the day off from work. I have to bake a cake from scratch. Never done this before. Stands a good chance of turning out to be a disaster. Still, it's something that has to be done. I picked up a recipe book from the library a few days back, picked up the ingredients yesterday. I plan on this being a three-tiered yellow cake, chocolate icing slathered all over it, frosted flowers -- yellow and red -- poking out of it. Her name, Darla, scripted neatly inside a heart. Can I pull this off? Even if I can't, I know I have to try. How many years has it been since Darla showed me how to bake a cake? Too many. Kids back then. Stuck inside the house one summer. I learned a lot that year.

***

I set heavy stones over both ends of the strip of red firing caps. Darla, who sits on the sidewalk next to me with the frilly hem of her yellow skirt pulled up over her knees, says, Pick a color, Tommy. I say, Not now, Darla. Later. She says, I'll pick for you then. Red, she says. She works her mountaintop-shaped cootie catcher in her hands. It opens and closes like it was a paper mouth. She spells the chosen color out loud. R-E-D. I raise a the large rock. Pick a number, Darla says. I bring the rock up over the strip of caps and slam it down hard and flinch when the caps explode. The sulfur smells good, tingling inside my nostrils. Darla says again, Pick a number. I say, Later, Darla, and once more I smack my rock against the caps. Darla sighs. She says, Okay, I'll pick for you then. Seven, she says. She works the cootie catcher, mouths out the letters of the number seven. Does Tommy love me? Darla says, looking at her cootie catcher. I smack the rock down on the unspent caps in quick succession. Little puffs of smoke rise with each miniature explosion. Darla peels back one triangle of her cootie catcher and says, Yes, Tommy loves me. The cootie catcher says Tommy loves me.

After the roll of caps has been blasted, I reach into my back pocket and take out a plastic magnifying glass I got inside a box of Cracker Jacks. I sprawl on my belly on the sidewalk and position the magnifier over a line of ants that come and go from a crack in the sidewalk. The sun pokes one of its rays through the round plastic window. The ants squiggle before dying. Darla, still playing with her cootie catcher, asks the paper mouth a bunch of crazy questions. Will Tommy marry me? Will we have lots of kids together? Silly stuff like that.

Next day we spend most of the afternoon racing barefoot through the meadow, where I load the slingshot my dad made for me, aim it, and try to maim sparrows. But the birds are too quick, and my aim isn't so good. I don't hit any birds. After a while, Darla says, Let's go to my house, Tommy. I say, There ain't nothing to do at your house. She puts her hands on her hips and says, How about I bake you a cake in my Easy-Bake oven. I load another dirt clod into the slingshot and say, Chocolate? I stretch the slingshot's rubber bands back, let go, and watch the ammo fly. Darla says, I can make chocolate if that's what you want. I say, With icing? Darla nods. Okay, I say, jamming my slingshot into my back pocket. Then I add, But only if you can beat me home. I howl out loud and start across the meadow. She runs after me, yelling, laughing. Each time I glance back she's a little farther away, her blonde hair whipping back in the summer breeze.

Halfway across the meadow, Darla screams. I know right off something bad has happened. I quit running and whirl around. Darla's on the ground, writhing. Come on, I say. Quit faking. Get up. When she doesn't get to her feet, I head over. She's crying. Not faking. Really crying.

I squat down next to her. You all right? I ask. Still crying, Darla says, I think my leg's broken, Tommy. I don't think I can walk. I reach down, take hold of her left arm and carefully drape it across my shoulders. I wrap my right arm around her waist. Together, slowly, we come up. I gotta walk slow, so she can hop alongside me. All the way across the meadow, down the street, up her porch steps, I keep my arm around her waist. All the while she keeps saying, Don't let go. You let me go, Tommy, and I'll fall.

In a kind of panic, Darla's mom asks me to help get Darla into the car. She's going to have to drive her to the emergency room. Darla asks if I can come along, but her mom says, You go on home, Tommy. You can come by later. I take a step back and watch the big brown Impala wagon back out of the drive. It speeds up the street, grows smaller and smaller until it disappears around a corner in the direction of City General.

At my house I swat a couple flies that are crawling up the living room window. I drop the dead flies into the coffee can where I keep two frogs. I slump on the couch, pass the time reading the statistics on the backs of my baseball cards. My mom's not home from work yet, so even though I'm not supposed to, I go into the fridge and peel the metal lid back from a can of Snack-Pack pudding, spoon the stuff out while watching television. At the same time, I keep checking out the window to see if Darla's come back from the hospital yet.

The station wagon pulls back into Darla's driveway before my mom gets home from work. Darla's mom helps her out the car. She's got crutches. Her mom guides her to the front door. I give them a little time to get inside. But when I can't wait any longer, I cram the empty pudding can into the garbage beneath the sink. I hurry across the street and bang on the door. Her mom opens up, lets me in. Darla's on the sofa. Her right leg, from just below the knee all the way to the foot, is covered in a white plaster cast. The leg's raised up, heel of foot resting on the coffee table. Her face and arms have been scrubbed clean of meadow dust. She looks different. Like a girl's supposed to look, I guess. Her long hair's been combed back, tied in a ponytail. You okay, Darla? I say, flopping down on the sofa next to her. She doesn't answer. Doesn't even look at me. Just keeps her eyes focused on the TV, keeps staring past her toes that stick up out of the end of her heavy cast. Instead of bugging her with questions, I tuck my legs up under me and watch 'My Three Sons' on the TV screen. After 'My Three Sons' ends, Andy Griffith comes on. I say to Darla, Why are all these shows about men who got kids but don't got wives? My mom and your mom are moms that don't got husbands. Darla shrugs and says, Maybe something happened to the wives and they couldn't do the things their husbands liked doing anymore. Maybe because of that the husbands left. Her answer's a bit annoying, so I just say, Yeah. Maybe.

Next day I don't go by Darla's place. I head out to the meadow alone, where I roll logs over and snatch the grasshoppers that try and hop away. They spit green goo all over my palms. I wipe the goo off on my jeans. I do a little shooting with my slingshot. Fry some ants. But nothing's any fun without Darla. I head home, and when I get there I yank some clothespins off the line in the backyard, clip some baseball cards to my bicycle spokes. I pedal up and down the street by myself, pretending I'm on a motorcycle. Every time I roll past Darla's house, I notice her standing in the window, watching me. I lay my bike on the grass in my front yard and kill some time tossing a tennis ball against the garage door. When I get bored of that, I dig up worms. You never know. My dad could surprise me by stopping by this weekend to take me fishing. I doubt it, though. He don't come by so often now that he's got other kids. When my mom gets home from work, she asks about Darla. I tell her I haven't seen her. She looks disappointed. Well, you should go and see her, she says. I shrug and say, Not much to do over there. My mom says, That's not the point. Besides, you can listen to records. Or you can bring over the rock tumbler you got for Christmas. You and Darla can smooth and shine up some rough rocks. That's no fun, I say. My mom says, I'll bet Darla's lonely. Poor girl's stuck inside all by herself. I'm sure she wishes you'd drop by.

After dinner I go outside. When I look across the street, I see Darla standing in her window again. She pulls the curtains shut. I go back inside my house and grab my rock tumbler, my Spirograph, some colored pencils. Then I head over. Darla's mom opens the door, smiling. Darla, she calls out, Tommy's here to see you. I hear Darla shout, Tell him to go away. Come inside, Tommy, Darla's mom says. Come inside and wait on the sofa while I go and talk to her.

After what seems to be a long time later, Darla comes out her bedroom, following her mom. With her crutches under her arms, she hobbles over and sits at the other end of the sofa. She sets her crutches on the cushion between us. A few minutes goes by. Neither of us speak. Finally, Darla says, Why'd you come here? I say, I brought some stuff for us to do. I hand her the Spirograph Box and show her the Rock Tumbler. She says, Those are boy's toys.. I say, The Spirograph makes cool designs, and the Rock Tumbler smooths stones so you can make jewelery or stuff out of them. Darla says, After we do that, then what? She says, I have to wear this cast for six weeks. The stuff you brought won't keep us busy that long. I say, Well, We could always listen to records. You could teach me how to bake a cake with your Easy-Bake oven.

Darla giggles. Boys don't bake cakes, she says.

I say. You bake the cake then? I'll eat it.

Darla giggles again. No, Sir, she says. You'll bake the cake.

In her bedroom that afternoon I ate the rock-hard cake she'd baked. As she looked on, I dragged my tongue across my lips and pretended I'd never tasted anything better. I never did learn to bake a cake that summer. But I did realize that without someone to share special moments with, all the magic in the world slips away.

***

After I remove the cake from the oven and let it cool on the stove, I use a spatula to frost it over. I add little red and yellow flowers with the squirt tube. Stepping back to see the finished creation, I'm a little disappointed. It's no masterpiece. Not even close. One side is higher than the other. The flowers look more like lumps than roses. I stare a long time. I hear her voice, telling me I better not let her go or she'll fall. I miss Darla so much I can't begin to express how empty her absence has left me. One thing that keeps me going, though, is knowing if she'd have beaten that damn disease, she'd be proud looking at the finished cake. Despite its imperfections, she'd be smiling. I wonder if Fred MacMurray, or Andy Griffith felt their wives absence. In a bit I'll wake the kids. Together we'll sit around the table and together we'll remember how special their mother was.