The Monday Night Cooking School - By Erica Bauermeister Page 0,20
the sifter in a fluttering snow shower into the large measuring cup. “Flour is like the guy in the movie who you don’t realize is sexy until the very end. I mean, be honest, when you are dividing up duties in the kitchen, who wants to be in charge of the flour? Butter is so much more alluring. But the thing is, flour is what holds a cake together.”
Lillian began adding some of the flour to the batter, then milk.
“There is a trick, though,” she commented, as she alternated adding flour and milk one more time, ending with a last portion of flour by hand. “If you mix the flour with the other ingredients for too long you will have a flat, hard cake. If you are careful, however, you’ll have a cake as seductive as a whisper in your ear.
“And now, one last step,” she said. Lillian beat the egg whites into a foam, adding just a bit of sugar at the end, as the class watched it turn into soft, then stiff peaks. When it was done, Lillian carefully folded the frothy cumulus clouds into the batter, a third at a time. She looked up and gazed out at the class. “Always save a bit of magic for the end.”
CARL HAD BEEN forty-four when Helen had told him she had had an affair—over by that point, but she just couldn’t keep it from him anymore, she had said. It was the most stunning thing that had ever happened to him, a rogue wave when he thought he understood the elements about him. Helen sat across from him at their kitchen table, crying, and he realized he had no idea whose life he had suddenly walked into. He remembered odd things at that moment—not the first time he had kissed Helen, but the time soon after, when he had walked up behind her as she was standing in her small dormitory kitchen and he touched his lips to the back of her neck.
She didn’t want to leave him, she said, and she didn’t want him to leave her. She loved him, always had; she just needed for him to know. He found himself wishing that she, who could keep a Christmas secret from their children for months without wavering, could have kept this one for herself—not forever, but for a while, as if in recognition that some announcements need anticipation to ease their transitions into our lives, a chance to feel the wavering doubts, to note the passenger seat of the car set to measurements not our own, the last cup of coffee taken from the pot without an offer to share.
It was, as Carl would later say, a spectacular failure of imagination on his part. He, who inhabited the future every day in his job, who helped people prepare for disaster of any magnitude, hadn’t seen any signs. Helen insisted that was because she had never changed how she felt about him, but he couldn’t believe that was strictly true. He wondered how he hadn’t known and if he hadn’t—as was so obviously the case—how he would ever know anything again. He lay in bed at night next to Helen, and thought.
Carl knew the statistics for divorce, of course. It was part of his job. In fact, statistics predicted a far greater chance of divorce than automobile accident, death by violence, or the all-too-graphic possibility of “dismemberment”—which was perhaps why insurance companies didn’t sell policies for marital stability. In the weeks after his conversation with Helen, Carl found himself observing the young couples who came to his office, fascinated that people would spend hundreds of dollars a year insuring against the chance that someone might slip on their front steps in ice that rarely made an appearance in the coastal Northwest, yet go to bed each night uninsured against the possibility that their marriage might be stolen the next day. Perhaps, he thought, imagination fails when the possibilities are so obvious.
CARL SAID YEARS LATER that it was his very lack of imagination that had caused his marriage to continue. As easy as it was, after Helen told him, to imagine his wife with someone else—he knew, after all, which drink she would order if she wanted courage (scotch, straight up), which stories were her favorites to tell about the children (Mark and the bunny, Laurie learning how to swim), how she might touch the tip of her nose and dip her chin if she found one of his