Dad’s 84th birthday party was going nicely. I’d invited a bunch of his old friends for the afternoon celebration, and the house rang with convivial laughter the way it had in the days when Mom was hostess. Instead of birthday cake, I made his favorite, mince pie, and Dad managed to blow out its four candles, not easy for a man on an oxygen concentrator. Then it was time to serve up the aforementioned mince, a crumb-topped strawberry rhubarb pie from a local farm stand, and a cheesecake, courtesy of Trader Joe’s.
I stood in the dining room with Ellie and Margaret, steadfast friends of my parents since the 1950s. “I wish Mom were here,” I said, staring at the three as-yet untouched desserts. “I never did learn how to serve pie.”
Ellie gave me a little squeeze, no doubt remembering her recent visit with Mom in the memory unit across town. “Sweetie, compared to your mom, none of us learned how.”
Before Alzheimer’s, cakes, pastries and candies were my mother’s specialties. Not so long ago, she would have been serving three picture perfect desserts she’d made from scratch. What’s more, every portion, from first to last, would have been worthy of a photograph.
I’m not sure where she learned the art of serving dessert. I never bothered to ask. Perhaps it was at her high school job at a soda fountain, or during her Chico State college days when she worked for room and board in the home of a well-to-do family. In those years, she volunteered on committees, joined a sorority and later a bridge club–all places where desserts were dished with style.
As a child, I believed the talent for serving pie was something you had to be born with, like a photographic memory or perfect pitch. I used to think she took dessert duty at every family function because no one else, not my aunts or even my revered grandmother, had been blessed with the gift.
Later, as I careened through adolescence, I dismissed my mother’s abilities entirely. Pie and cake cutting, if I thought about them at all, were skills I would undoubtedly master the moment I acquired the opportunity to practice them. If Mom could do it, how hard could it be? After surviving some messy, embarrassing trials as a newlywed, I declared dessert wrangling off limits.
It’s ironic that much of what Mom did manage to teach me, skills like using laundry bluing, darning socks, or spreading liquid floor wax with a lamb’s wool applicator, have gone the way of the buggy whip. I don’t know why I didn’t learn to imitate the gentle sawing motion she employed for angel food, the trial cuts she made over a sheet cake as she calculated the number of servings, her tricks for keeping a cheesecake blade clean. Maybe because when it came to dessert, I thought she’d always be around to serve it.
As I slopped Dad’s piece of mince onto a paper plate, I compared my effort against the memory of one of Mom’s perfect wedges, showcased on bone china, garnished with hard sauce, a sterling dessert fork tucked beside it. At least Ellie and Margaret were close by, laughing along with me, looking the other way when I used my fingers, and, unlike Mom if she’d been there, refusing to let me give up.
“Your mom was in a class apart,” Margaret said before she took loaded plates to the living room. “You’re just going to have to settle for being one of us.”
“Sounds like a plan,” I said, remembering to divide the rhubarb pie in half before making the rest of the cuts. That made things a little easier, and I let myself imagine all the times Mom must have gotten pie filling on her fingers and frosting on her sleeve. There had to have been dropped forks, burned crusts and fallen cakes, even before dementia began cutting its ragged slices. In the next room, I heard approving murmurs as folks dug into their desserts. Without thinking too hard, I slipped my knife through the creamy center of the cheesecake like I’d been doing it all my life.
My dear friend Susan Bono is a freelance editor and writing coach who lives in Petaluma,
CA with her husband, youngest son, ancient cat, and three chickens (see photo.) She edits and publishes Tiny Lights: A Journal of Personal Narrative and its online counterpart, www.tiny-lights.com, instead of cleaning out her cupboards, drawers and closets, which are now, alas, all full.
You can find more of her wonderful essays in the archives of the St. Petersburg Times
http://www.sptimes.com/2004/07/11/Floridian/Sips_at_youth_s_fount.shtml
and the Northern California Bohemian.
http://www.metroactive.com/papers/sonoma/02.01.01/anniversary-0105.html
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