She is a good wife. She has made the best cake for her husband within the limits of time and her own baking experience. Her husband treats her well, is a wonderful man in the the most obvious sense of the word. He is fond of her, pays her attention, and his touches are gentle and sincere. The love in those touches aren't ebullient but they are real, they are never forced, for he loves her in the easiest way one can understand love. Their son is a timid little boy, who can't imagine being separated from his mother for more than two minutes, more than a minute. Even if he isn't in the same room with her, he at least needs to know that she is somewhere nearby. He desperately wants to please her.
She wants to please them both, but not desperately, and not reluctantly either. It is merely a duty of a wife and a mother to please and love the others in her family.
Today is her husband's birthday. She had made one cake and it was imperfect. Its letters were crooked, and one of the icing flowers seemed unreal. She dumped it all into the garbage and started over. Her husband deserves the best, not only because he loves her, but because a good person deserves nothing less than the perfect birthday cake. It's true that even if the cake is a total fiasco, he would still love it, and love her. Criticism and overt complaints have never been part of the vocabulary between these two.
His enthusiasm for this cake of closer to perfection is not any greater than what it would have been for the one now in the garbage. She knew this when she dumped that symbol of her failure as a wife into the garbage. But she persisted in making a new one, less, now she realizes, for his sake, for his love, than for her own selfish desire for redemption, redemption for something, but really nothing concrete. She has been a good wife. Giving him a son and doing all the chores of the family. Her only vice had been reading, but that never bothered him; it is only a vice because it takes her away from these two men of her life, takes her mind, and sometimes heart, to places they are forbidden to enter. Sometimes when she reads she notices the small creature standing with his toy train at the threshold of the kitchen door. Her heart sinks under the weight of her guilt when she chooses to ignore this constant shadow of hers, knowing well that he wants to be part of this world of fantasies. She doesn't read cheap romance novels that take her to shallow fantasies substituting real illicit affairs, but rather classics, classics that made her think about other people, their lives, their sorrows, their challenges, all to, perhaps, I don't know for sure, all to fill the void she feels nearly every second of her waking life.
That void is ever so enlarged when she wants to be a good wife and wants to make the best cake. The second cake is really just a selfish way to fill that enlarged void. Now her beloved and loving husband, with his usual sincere and beautiful smile, so timeless, leans over the burning candles, closes his eyes, and blows them off with all his might. In that process, a few but visible droplets sprayed all over the surface of the perfect cake.
The boy is happy. He's always happy when the two adults in the house are happy, which appears to be quite often. He claps his hands in joy. This only exacerbated the sudden anger in his mother. She saw the droplets. She now can't believe that all her effort is suddenly undone, the product of her hard work, tainted. It really doesn't matter how good a job she has done; the result is always perfect affections. Suddenly, that void of hers is left intact, if not enlarged.
The smile on her husband's face fades when he sees his wife in such strange state. She is expressionless, looking at the cake that used to be on fire but now seems cold and dead. He is worried. And he becomes even more worried when he asks what the matter was and she doesn't answer. He touches her hand and is a little startled at the coldness of the fingers. His heart races, and that somehow makes his son's heart race as well.
Without looking at either one of them, keeping her eyes on the extinguished cake, she says, "I am going out for a minute." She then turns around and walks to the door. She almost isn't conscious of her own action, as if she were sleepwalking. She opens the door after taking the car keys, closes it behind her, not hearing whatever her husband is saying, or the unending, desperate questioning of her son, and walks to their SUV.
Inside the car, she sits quietly, staring into the distance where all the other middle-upper class family houses are standing in which other people are cooped up together being nice in their own ways. She stares and thinks about what she was reading this morning.
