The car was warm and the cake was heavy. Really, really heavy. Well, maybe it
wasn’t the cake itself, the unmatched layers covered with beginning-to-drip
ganache, maybe it was the two and a half inch butcher block we had somehow
decided to carry it on. In any case, it was heavy, and my duty was to balance
our creation (well, mostly Kate’s creation, but she was busy at the wheel) all
the way to Monterey. And I was killing it.
We were going to Dre’s wedding, at the Naval Post Graduate
School where she worked and had met her sweetie. The drive was two hours long,
down the freeway and the coast past Santa Cruz, our university stomping
grounds. It was a winding road, and I balanced the cake on the plane of my lap,
working the centrifugal force by stacking left and right, keeping my side of
the conversation going and the wedding cake intact.
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| the gown. |
Probably, the cake would have survived regardless of my
MarioCart-inspired acrobatics, but I wanted to feel that I had contributed just
that much more. The week preceding, Kate and I had traveled down to see Dre and
Peter, for his going-away party (in a UHaul full of DJ equipment, positioned
open, facing the dolphins and seals and sunset of the bay). We had ended up in
a pink champagne and Ben & Jerry’s fueled girls’ night arranging of Dre’s
bridal costume, a gorgeously appropriate layering of classic lace and bright
orange embroidery. Kate had volunteered our presence for the Big Little Day,
and then her cake concocting for this last-minute affair.
Like other weddings of my international friends, this one
had been pushed forward by the requirements of Green Cards and
cross-continental travel. Peter is Swiss-Austrian, and the two of them would be
Europe bound soon enough. The ceremony itself would be aptly silly.
Complementing the bride’s orange gown, the groom would wear a lipstick kiss in
all his wedding photos and, after the outdoor naval-base ceremony involving
dancing and bubbles and singing along to Home Is Where You Are, we would all
have to stop and freeze for the playing of TAPS.
It had been unexpected, this wedding. For me anyway. I had
found out about the engagement some months before by phone outside in San
Francisco’s financial district.
“I have something to tell you,” Dre had said, on speaker in
her car during commute hours.
“What?”
“I’m getting married.”
“WHAT?”
“I’m GETTING MARRIED.”
“Hold on, I can’t hear you…”
“Ok, is that better?”
“Um, yeah. Yeah I think so.”
“I’m getting married.”
“WHAT?”
And so on.
 |
 |
| marzipan and construction paper. |
But really, it’s that time. Kate had gotten married a year
or two earlier, in a wedding filled with tiered cakes and mason jars, with forage-inspired
floral displays and a mountain lodge retreat on the side of Mt Tamalpais, where
the fog and wind whipped at all of us but my friend the bride looked so serene. There had been quite a few others. Mostly out-of-the-ordinary, non-religious, and
with unmatched bridesmaids. The most traditional looking was secretly an open
marriage, and the least- involving second and third takes, sheep, two bands and a jam session, a campfire,
and a double teepee- has proven one of the strongest and longest so far.
So I suppose I am starting to evaluate things I had never considered.
Maybe that’s why I would act a little weird once we arrived in Monterey. Maybe
because of the couplings all around. Maybe because of her impending escape to the very place I had just left. Maybe because I was tired
from drinking too much wine the night before while the Kitchenaid threatened to
fling batter all over Kate’s linoleum, maybe because of uncertainty in the
face of the surprising inevitability of Time Marching On.
Meanwhile though, I was working so hard to hold this
now-intact velvety chocolate cake aloft, to prove my support for one of my
closest friends’ great big decision, for everything that had happened before
and would happen after. To prove my capacity for tackling a task at hand. So,
every turn, I paid attention. I looked ahead. I anticipated motion and kept it
all level. So that this cake would arrive and be beautiful and delicious and
worthy of all the things I and we wanted for her. Worthy of her. And through
the hilly expanse of agricultural Northern Califonia, flanked by cows and sheep
and what would be artichokes, with my other best girl at my side and my stomach
aching from laughter and travel, with a mind full of silly memories and
the pushed-back feeling that things were changing regardless of me, with an
extra towel just in case the ganache slipped, and a cup of coffee wedged in the
door of the City Car Share rental: I had to feel like I was killing it.
