Christmas Cake Read online

  “So, that means getting to the hospital at six A.M.?” Louise asked. She was thinking ahead of arrangements she would need to make for being with her friends in the waiting room.

  Jessie nodded. “It’s always best to be first,” she noted.

  “Yeah,” Louise responded, although not very convincingly.

  “She’ll just be in for a few hours,” Jessie added.

  Both women recalled that she had done well with the last surgery. She was groggy afterward; but she had not gotten sick from the anesthesia. It had not been too terrible for her. The chemotherapy, however, had been quite terrible. Margaret had gotten an infection at one point and was hospitalized with that for about a week. Everybody knew that she was not looking forward to another round of chemotherapy.

  “Are we all spending the night with her Tuesday?” Louise asked, knowing she would certainly stay with her friend. Jessie and Beatrice, however, had spouses, so Louise wasn’t sure if they would be bunking with her and Margaret or not.

  Jessie shrugged. “We didn’t really get that far,” she replied.

  Louise nodded.

  They both glanced around the room. It was as if neither of them knew what to say.

  “How do you think she’s really doing?” Louise finally asked.

  Jessie shrugged again and shook her head. “She’s not talking much to me,” she noted. “You?”

  Louise shook her head in reply. “We haven’t talked about anything except the weather and when a good time to work on the church flower beds would be.”

  “I think she’s just holding up for us,” Jessie surmised.

  Louise thought about that. “Maybe. We didn’t take the news very well,” she added, recalling how shocked they had all appeared when the doctor came in with the news.

  Before he came in, Beatrice had even cracked a joke that maybe it was time for Margaret to consider getting breast implants and that maybe the doctor could recommend a good plastic surgeon. She remembered how they were all laughing when the doctor finally walked into the room. No one was ready for the bad news.

  “I think Margaret’s just trying to take this the way she takes everything,” Jessie said.

  “As it comes,” Louise finished the sentence for her friend. They both were very familiar with how Margaret handled problems.

  Margaret never intended to fix things. She didn’t run from trouble but she didn’t try to make it something it wasn’t either. She was as levelheaded and as calm as any woman Louise or Jessie ever knew.

  “Remember what Charlotte used to say?” Louise asked.

  Jessie nodded, recalling the former pastor and how much she thought of her parishioner. “Yep, even before there were bracelets and bumper stickers with ‘WWJD’ on them,” she said, referring to the popular phrase from a few years before, “Charlotte was saying when she got in a jam she asked herself, ‘What would Margaret do?’”

  Both women smiled. They knew Charlotte loved all the people she served as pastor. But some people complained that she was too close to the members of the cookbook committee. Some of the other women were jealous of their relationships. And yet, even among the committee members, everyone knew that Charlotte respected Margaret the most.

  All three of the other women, Louise, Jessie, and Beatrice, knew that the preacher and Margaret had a very special bond. It hadn’t, however, ever bothered them. They all knew that Margaret was the bravest, most faithful of them all. The fact that the preacher recognized that and honored that didn’t trouble them or make them jealous; it simply made them respect the young woman even more. Secretly, they all approved of the special friendship.

  As if the two women were reading each other’s thoughts, they glanced up at each other, and Jessie shook her head. Neither of them had contacted Charlotte to tell her about Margaret.

  “Do you think Margaret has called her?” Louise asked.

  “I don’t know,” Jessie replied. “I tried once,” she added. “But when the answering machine at the women’s shelter picked up, I just didn’t know what to say. I hung up before I left a message.”

  Louise nodded. She hadn’t even had the courage to go that far. None of the three women wanted to break the news to their former pastor. They knew that Charlotte would be very upset.

  “Maybe we should just wait until after the surgery. Then we can let her know when the treatments start,” Louise offered.

  Jessie narrowed her eyes at her friend, and Louise understood what the face meant. Charlotte would need to be told.

  “Well, I suppose since you took care of Beatrice and agreed to take care of this holiday project, I will make the call to our young Charlotte.” Jessie rolled her eyes as if she couldn’t believe what she was agreeing to do.

  “I think that’s just right,” Louise replied cheerfully. “I’ll get Hilda Brown’s hot milk cake recipe; and you tell Charlotte that the woman she respects the most in the world has cancer in her liver, a second metastasis.” She kicked Jessie’s chair a bit. “That’s fair, sounds easy enough.”

  Both women smiled. They understood that nothing about what lay ahead for them in the next weeks before the holidays this year was going to be easy.

  Italian Cream Cake

  1 stick margarine or butter

  ½ cup vegetable shortening

  2 cups sugar

  5 egg yolks

  2 cups flour

  1 teaspoon baking soda

  1 cup buttermilk

  1 bag of coconut (14 ounces)

  1 teaspoon vanilla

  1 cup chopped pecans

  5 egg whites, stiffly beaten

  Cream margarine and shortening. Add sugar and beat until mixture is smooth. Add yolks and beat well. Combine flour and baking soda and add the creamed mixture alternately with the buttermilk. Add coconut, vanilla, and pecans. Fold in the stiffly beaten egg whites. Pour batter into 3 greased and floured 9-inch pans and bake at 325 degrees for 25 minutes or until cake tests done.

  ICING

  1 8-ounce package of cream cheese

  ½ stick melted margarine

  16 ounces powdered sugar

  1 teaspoon vanilla

  chopped pecans

  4 maraschino cherries, chopped

  coconut

  Beat cream cheese and margarine until smooth. Stir in powdered sugar. Add vanilla and continue beating. Ice cooled layers, sprinkling top layer with pecans, cherries, and coconut.

  Chapter Three

  Beatrice hung up the phone after her conversation with Louise and sat back down on the barstool. She rested her chin in her hand, then tilted her head to watch the birds at the bird feeder outside the kitchen window.

  It was one of the things she loved most about her house. She always made sure that she had a window in front of the sink and a bird feeder just a few yards away so that while she cooked and did the dishes, she could watch the birds as they gathered nearby. It was the way she liked to think about being connected to the animal kingdom. All the mothers, the female of the species, gathering the food for the young ones, all of them trying to have enough for themselves to sustain the energy necessary to do all that was required of them.

  For most of her adult life, Beatrice would catch glimpses of the world outside while she was in the midst of her kitchen work, her cleaning and peeling and baking and canning. She loved to watch the birds. It somehow kept her active, kept her engaged in the tasks at hand, kept her doing what had to be done.

  She would study the tanagers and the flickers as they spilled the seeds all around them or carried them off to nests in trees close by, and wonder if they ever watched her and if they felt the same camaraderie through the window that she did. She wondered if they even stopped to see another female taking care of her brood.

  Bea looked closely and noticed the same birds that had been there all season. She saw the little brown sparrows and the black and white chickadees, their small feathered bodies flitting about, the seeds flying from the small shelf. Beatrice was glad Dick had repleni
shed the food earlier. She knew the squirrels had gotten most of it the day before, and she didn’t feel like refilling the container.

  When they had first married, Dick had tried to get his wife to move the feeder, get it away from being so close to the two trees it stood between, to deter the squirrels from jumping on it, but Beatrice wouldn’t have it.

  She liked the feeder right where it was, right outside the window at the sink. She didn’t care if the squirrels did manage a quick jump from the trunks of the big maples to the tall white pole where they easily shimmied up to the feeder. It didn’t bother her that they could get to the food so easily. Besides, there were only a couple of squirrels left in the neighborhood anyway. The Bixbys from next door had gotten a new dog and he had run off most of the squirrels and rabbits. Lucky for Beatrice, he didn’t seem to bother the birds.

  She watched the morning action at the feeder and thought about the conversation she just had with Louise. She had surprised herself with the revelation she made about her heart not being in the holiday cookbook. She hadn’t really known that she felt that way until she said the words out loud. Now that the fact was out there, that her heart wasn’t in the project, she felt a bit relieved but also a little scared. She knew it wasn’t like her to give up so quickly. She wondered if what Dick had said a couple of months ago was true, that she was depressed and needed to get some medication.

  She recalled the conversation they had that led him to say that. He had been trying to get her to go out for dinner for weeks and she kept declining the offers. Beatrice used to love to go out to restaurants. She loved the movies and trade shows. But in recent weeks she only went out for church and various required meetings. She just didn’t have the interest in leaving her house anymore.

  When she had said to Dick that she didn’t want to go out on a Friday night after he had purchased tickets to some country music show over in Siler City and had made dinner reservations at their favorite steak house off Highway 421, he had told her that he was concerned about her, that he had talked it over with his sister and his doctor, and that he thought Beatrice was clinically depressed and needed some help.

  Beatrice had never thought of herself as the depressed type. She knew several people from the community had claimed to be depressed. Her daughter’s husband had even started taking some drug he had seen on the television because he said he felt the way the man on the commercial said he felt. And for the most part, Beatrice had tried to be sympathetic toward those facing that illness.

  However, she had never admitted it because she liked to think of herself as being nonjudgmental and compassionate, but the truth was, she tended to look down on those people who battled with the mental illness of depression.

  She was truly supportive of some folks who claimed to need medical or professional intervention because of intense sadness or fatigue, indifference, or other depressionlike symptoms. She understood why some people would be depressed.

  She knew that Nadine Klenner needed help after her daughter was killed in that car wreck at the church. She didn’t think that the young mother’s condition was a pretense or a means of getting pity. She completely understood why Nadine needed to be in a psychiatric unit and take medications for some months after the accident.

  She understood when her son-in-law sought assistance because he had just buried his father and was having to place his mother in a nursing facility. This was at the same time he lost his job and was diagnosed with the illness that had killed his father. Beatrice had encouraged him to get help.

  It wasn’t those folks who suffered tremendous losses or faced horrid tragedies that she judged for having problems with feelings of overwhelming sadness, or for saying they couldn’t go to work anymore, or for admitting that they needed some additional help. There were lots of people that she believed should get professional assistance.

  It was the ones who didn’t seem to have anything wrong in their lives that made Beatrice raise an eyebrow when they said they were “under a doctor’s care” for their depression. It was the ones in whom she didn’t see anything that she would describe as “traumatic” or reasonable cause for a mental breakdown.

  She just didn’t understand how a healthy person who had a good job and whose family was intact, and who had a home and a car and good health could suddenly just feel indifferent about life, not want to get out of bed, or weep uncontrollably. She couldn’t accept that a person couldn’t shake the bad mood or the loneliness. She figured a person could pull herself or himself out of the pit of self-pity.

  She had always thought a good prune cake could undo the knots or just getting outside would lift a person’s spirits. She knew working in the garden and having a knitting project always made her feel better. And Beatrice understood that she had always managed the hardships of life, significant losses of a spouse, of siblings, and of her parents, disappointments in relationships, isolation, loneliness; she just didn’t understand why everyone else couldn’t either.

  She thought about the former pastor of the church, Charlotte. She recalled how the young woman often seemed inattentive, somewhere other than where she was. Margaret had mentioned that she was concerned about her, that maybe she needed to talk to someone.

  Beatrice, however, simply thought she needed to get out more, date some, leave the church on her day off. For three or more years, Beatrice had given her pastor craft books, flyers about singles meetings, flower bulbs for the beds around the house, books to read, anything to draw the young woman out of her sadness.

  When she heard that the pastor was seeing a therapist, Beatrice thought Charlotte had gone to the dark side. She figured the pastor just wasn’t praying enough, wasn’t faithful enough; and she had questioned whether she should even have been in the ministry. Beatrice just didn’t understand how a preacher—a person trained in seminary, one who knew all the scriptures, was supposed to help others, and was supposedly called to serve God—could feel withdrawn from her community, could wrestle with depression.

  She pretended to understand, acted like she was sympathetic with Charlotte and some of the others she had heard about who were going into therapy or having to take antidepressant medication, but the truth was, she just didn’t understand. She had assumed a person could take care of those “feelings” herself. She thought if a person stayed busy enough, engaged enough in her family or community or a project, there would be no time for depression. She had really believed that a good prune cake, a regular Bible class, and volunteer work could push sorrow aside.

  Until now.

  Now it was she who didn’t want to get out of bed or change out of her pajamas. She rolled out only because Dick was so noisy and so persistent in the mornings, she couldn’t stay in there. She had lost her appetite, had difficulty remembering details, cried a lot more than she should about small things, insignificant things, things that never used to worry her, and she didn’t care about the Hope Springs Women’s Guild Christmas Cake Contest and Cookbook.

  She submitted the idea when Margaret started getting sick, and although most of the women rolled their eyes at her as they always did and tried to get her to change her mind, they had agreed to the project, but only if she did most of the work. That had been weeks before and she hadn’t done anything. She just didn’t care whether the book was put together, or whether there was a Christmas cake for the community. She just didn’t care about anything.

  Her feelings of despair, she thought, did have to do with Margaret and the recurrence of the cancer; but Beatrice also knew that she had started feeling this way before they heard the news from the CAT scan. That information just seemed to make her worse, and now, she realized, it prevented her from being more proactive about her own condition.

  Once Dick found out from Bea about Margaret’s prognosis, he had left his wife alone these last couple of mornings when she wanted to stay in bed or didn’t want dessert after dinner. He figured her sadness was appropriate after hearing the bad news about her best friend. He hadn’t menti
oned her going to the doctor again. But Beatrice didn’t know how long Dick’s empathy would last, and she didn’t know whether she wanted to use Margaret’s illness to justify or explain the way she had been feeling. In spite of that, however, she didn’t know what to do.

  She continued to watch the birds out the window. She noticed how the small ones had cleared away now that a blue jay was there. The long, slender bird pushed the others aside and perched right along the edge of the feeder. He seemed to enjoy his dominant posture, his high place in the bird kingdom. He ate a few seeds and appeared to dare the other birds to return.

  Beatrice picked up the phone at her side and dialed the funeral home. Betty Mills, the receptionist, answered.

  “Betty, it’s Bea. Is Dick around?” she asked, twirling the cord with her right hand.

  “Hello, Beatrice,” Betty said with her smooth funeral home voice. “How are you today?”

  “I’m fine,” Bea replied. “How are you?” she added, trying to be cordial. The truth was, she never really liked Betty. Bea thought she always sounded a little too sweet. Bea thought she talked down to the bereaved, treated them like children.

  “I’m doing really well, hon,” she responded. She cleared her throat. “I heard about your Christmas cake contest at the church. I think I’d like to enter my Italian cream cake,” she said.

  “That’s nice, Betty.” Beatrice thought an Italian cream cake didn’t sound very Christmas-like, but she didn’t really feel like discussing it.

  “It was my grandmother’s,” Betty continued. “We had it every Christmas.”

  “That’s real nice.” Beatrice tried to sound interested.

  “One year, there was a shortage on the maraschino cherries and Grandmother had to ride three hours over to Virginia to get a can.” Betty sighed. “We loved that cake.”

  “That’s special,” Beatrice noted.

  “So, what’s the prize?” Betty asked.

  “Um, we’re still working on that,” Beatrice replied.