The Unironic Luxury of No-Bake Desserts
I have to make something for the library bake sale. The neighborhood mommies have finally asked me to participate, and they never ask me to do anything. I have no children, so they treat me like a seagull at a picnic, allowed to hang about until I get too close to the table.
“No store-bought stuff,” Gina says. She looks down at my shoes like my shoes will tell her if I’m a baker or not. Maybe they do.
I am not a baker, mostly because my oven has been broken for months. The YouTubing-DIY-genius who flipped my house built the cupboards around the oven, so to fix it, the entire kitchen must be redone. I cannot afford a box of cake mix, let alone a new kitchen.
I need these women to like me. I want to be invited to their BBQs and Christmas parties. I’m so tired of watching them parade past my front window with their Tupperware cakestands and Pyrex casserole dishes.
So I stand in the baking aisle and cry. I cry because I thought by now in my life, I’d have money for ovens and cake mix. I thought I’d have a family and friends and never be lonely again.
“Honey, you okay?” The older woman beside me is tiny, and her cart looks comically large in comparison. Her hair is too big, her makeup too heavy, and she reminds me of my grandmother before she got lung cancer and died.
I tell this stranger everything. It comes spewing out like a shaken can of soda. When I finally stop, she nods.
“You got peanut butter at home?” she asks.
She leads me around the store, throwing ingredients into my single-woman handbasket. We get to the vanilla, and I nearly choke at the cost. I grab the generic version.
“Does it matter?”
“Sweetheart, it’ll be fine.”
I think of my mother, who’d never say something so cliché. She’d scold me for buying such a stupid house, or for being broke.
At checkout, I thank the woman, and she hugs my waist. I stand, hands up, like someone’s holding me hostage, while the manager watches us curiously.
As I put my bags in my car, I see the woman shuffling across the parking lot in her neon pink clogs. She carries a small, amber bottle, which she presses into my hands.
“The real thing matters, but it’s okay to get help.” She winks, then turns back to the store.
I cry again in my car, because unsolicited help is a thing for fairytales and Hallmark movies and not for treeless grocery store parking lots. Finally, I wipe my smudged mascara and drive home, the bottle of genuine vanilla rattling in my cupholder.
Julia Rajagopalan is a writer of speculative and literary fiction who lives just outside of Detroit, Michigan, with her husband and their very grumpy dog. She has a Master of Science in Information from the University of Michigan. http://JuliaRajagopalan.com