Family Recipe
Fiction
Note: This story deals with the subject of pregnancy loss.
While written in Great-Grandmother Miller’s wobbly cursive and slightly blurry (from years of wayward vanilla extract splatter) blue ink, the instructions were thankfully easy to follow. Cream together butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add oil. Add eggs. Add vanilla. Flour, salt, baking soda. Mix. Bake. Clear. Systematic. In the end, you have a springy, moist, yellow cake. That’s what Caroline liked about baking, and it’s why she fell in love with science — if you follow the instructions, anyone will get one reliably consistent, reproducible result.
Caroline picked up an egg out of its carton. She’d forgotten to let it sit at room temperature, and its pebbled shell was startlingly cold on her fingertips. She cradled the egg, hoping the warmth of her hand was enough to raise its temperature enough to emulsify correctly with the other ingredients, then rolled it back and forth a few times, noticing the weight of the yolk directing the shell to its next location in her palm. As the egg traveled the length of the lifeline on her palm, Caroline remembered reading that it’s physically impossible to crush an egg in your palm. Her fingers clenched around it, and she was unsure if they were going to test the theory or simply hold the egg as it warmed. Her grip tightened.
Women in her family had been making this cake for generations to mark births. Each year of surviving the world and its travails was celebrated with sugar roses, or sometimes plastic balloons, and always candles, the latter accumulating each year until the celebrant’s years lived surpassed the quantity that came in a pack of multi-colored, twisted, wax-striped birthday candles. Each time, the dominant-trait Miller nose leaned over the cake to blow out candles, reminiscent of the other faces that had done so over in the years and generations prior.
Caroline carefully measured out the cake flour, first sifting and then scooping it into a measuring cup, using the backside of a knife to level it, just as her mother had taught her. Precision is essential in baking, but not to the extent that she needed to measure it out in grams the way Michelin-starred pastry chefs advise. Caroline had hidden her food scale from herself when she got pregnant and had to resign herself to accepting weight gain. As a teenager, Caroline had struggled with body image and only in her late twenties, after graduate school, had she acknowledged her earlier preoccupation with weight and diet culture. Still, she sometimes fell back into old habits of calorie counting (and could still recite that there are seventy-eight calories in a hard-boiled egg and two hundred and thirty-four in an avocado). “Pregnancy brain” helped her forget where she’d put the food scale, but when she lost the fetus fourteen weeks in, she lost her appetite, too, and no longer cared to recover it.
A pinch of salt was easy, that was just measured in the valley of her hand when she cupped it, the lifeline of her palm creating a crevasse in which to hold it. Caroline tossed it into the mixing bowl of dry goods. Stirring was mindless and relaxing. If you do it long enough, everything finds a way to sit together, neatly and homogeneously, and most importantly, irretrievably.
At their wedding ceremony, the minister had instructed Caroline and Aaron to pour a different color of sand into a jar to represent the blending of their lives. “No person, no matter how OCD, could ever possibly separate all those grains of sand now that you two have combined them,” he said. He was right in so many ways. Their lives were irreversibly enmeshed, even when she was going through something so emotionally taxing but ultimately so unique to becoming a mother. Except that she wasn’t a mother. She had no blossoming stomach, no Caesarian section scar, no leaking breasts, no playdates, no Cheerio-strewn car seats.
She knew all these things to be the hallmarks of motherhood because her identical twin sister Julia had them. Growing up, Caroline and Julia had lived the same life: matching school dresses, lunch boxes, bedspreads, even the same set of friends, until high school when their tastes in extracurricular activities diverged. Caroline was interested in science and tennis; Julia was interested in sculpture, body piercings, and boys. At least to Caroline, Julia seemed to be the last person who would wind up living in suburban San Jose, California, with three kids. Yet, before she was twenty-eight, Julia seemed to happily and effortlessly acquire three children with an unlikely-to-go-bald husband and a mortgage. Caroline could accept their differences in personality and interests, but late at night, she sometimes awoke and lay next to Aaron in silence, wishing she were getting up for a baby’s midnight feeding instead of due to existential dread. How could Julia have it so easy — the first baby was a mistake! — and Caroline could have such a difficult time when, genetically, they had the same bodies. Of course, Aaron and Julia’s husband Andrew were factors, but on those dark nights, sometimes in bed and once, doubled over on the bath mat and cold black-and-white bathroom floor tile as she waited for her uncooperative uterus to empty, Caroline allowed emotion, instead of logic and science, to take over her thoughts. She would think about her beloved nieces and nephew and wonder what half of what her own DNA might have done, given the right set of circumstances. If only she could figure out what the right circumstances were.
***
Caroline’s and Julia’s mother had not grown up with the idea that motherhood was her raison d’être. Uncharacteristic for women of her 1950s upbringing, Sylvia was an artist in both her vocation and nature. As a young girl, she rebelled against the gender-conforming dress code at her private, all-girls’ school in Texas, wearing long pants instead of skirts, refusing to wear shoes, and always wearing her long, wavy hair down. The summer after high school, when she had saved up enough of her waitressing money for a train ticket, she fled from Houston to Santa Cruz, California, eager for the salty air and sunshine to inspire her art.
Her dream was to open her own gallery, featuring both her own art and the works of other female artists who didn’t come from families with connections in the art world. Before she would be able to run her own gallery, she would have to work in several already-established galleries, which was how she met Sam. He was ten years older than Sylvia and had just reached a point in his luxury car sales career where he could afford to spend money on original art for his newly purchased condominium in Aptos.
One evening, he spotted a tall plaster sculpture of a mermaid in the front window of the downtown gallery where she was working. He decided, spontaneously, to walk into the gallery, and he began a conversation with Sylvia about his time in the Navy and the long history of sailors and their mermaid lore. Sam returned the following evening to chat again, and then on the third night, he asked Sylvia out to dinner at a small, family-owned Italian restaurant where she ordered “noodles with red sauce” because she was too nervous to attempt to pronounce anything on the menu. She had agreed to go out with him more for the free meal than for any real interest in a date, but two weeks later, Sam purchased the mermaid sculpture, and six weeks after that, he purchased a heart-shaped diamond ring, which he presented to her during a walk along the Santa Cruz boardwalk. Sylvia never thought she would get married and definitely never thought she would wear a diamond, but she accepted his proposal on the condition that they return the diamond ring, and together they exchanged it for a simple turquoise and silver one that she wore on her right hand. “My Silver Sylvia,” he called her, and she moved into his condo with two suitcases of clothes and seven boxes of art supplies. Sam planned a surprise honeymoon to Italy for a month so that Sylvia could see the Great Masters’ works of art. He asked a Canadian tourist to snap a photo of them on the Ponte Vecchio in Florence, Sam in a brown suit and Sylvia holding a cone of pink gelato, still unaware that she was newly pregnant with the twins, wearing her long hair parted down the middle and striped orange bell-bottoms. The photo would hang in their bedroom for forty years. Sometimes she would catch Caroline and Julia looking at it when they were little, wondering who these glamorous world travelers were, and Sylvia would tell them to follow their dreams before they got married. “I always wanted to have an art gallery,” she said. “Instead, I have snapshots on my walls and crayon scribbles on my Frigidaire.”
***
As she stood in the kitchen, Caroline stirred and mixed and blended, letting her mind wander. She didn’t allow herself to do this very often; she usually tried to control her thoughts using mindfulness techniques, directing and guiding her thoughts away from painful ones, and focusing on more palatable ones. Each time she thought of her most recently lost pregnancy, she told herself to stop, sometimes even saying the word out loud if she was alone, and shoved long-undisturbed memories like Hamlet’s “To Be, Or Not to Be” soliloquy that she memorized for high school English class, all of her first cousins’ middle names, the US states and capitals, names of her childhood pets, anything at all, to the forefront of her brain to move her mind away from the thing that was the most painful.
Mixing the wet and dry ingredients came next. Caroline tried to choose a bowl big enough to hold both, but in her compulsion to make this cake, she simply grabbed the first bowl she could lay her hands on. The messy batter barely fit in the bowl and glopped out onto the counter when she stirred too vigorously, but she wasn’t deterred. After a few minutes, she had a yellow-tinted batter that she poured into two identical nine-inch, round, non-stick cake pans and slid them into the preheated oven.
Sitting and waiting was never Caroline’s strong suit. She balanced herself on the barstool at the kitchen counter while she waited for the cake to bake, taking sips of decaf and scrolling through Instagram, Twitter, an infertility subreddit, which was too depressing, and then, out of habit, Instagram again. She couldn’t bear to look at Facebook, filled with old high school classmates and posing pictures of their matched set families that made her heart ache with loss and longing. She scrolled for what she thought was a few moments, but turned out to be eighteen minutes, noted when the timer went off. The cake passed the “toothpick test,” an old trick from her mother, to ensure that the cake was correctly baked and could begin to cool. She cleaned up the mixer from the cake batter and began to make the frosting.
Powdered sugar billowed up into the air and Caroline laughed at herself for hoping, just for a moment, that this infusion of sugar would sweeten her home. For the past year, a dark cloud had settled over their life together. The air was fraught with tension more days than not. Just once, Aaron had suggested that raging hormones could be part of the reason why they were short with each other. Of course she assumed he meant her hormones, but he didn’t say that.
“Raging hormones? Like I’m some horny, acne-riddled teenager?” she said.
“No, no, I’m not saying that. It’s just very taxing on the body to have all those hormones surging like this.”
“Yes, I’m aware of the effects the hormones can have, thank you. It’s also the disappointment, pain and death that’s rough. Maybe that’s what’s making me cranky.”
Fights between them were new and had an unrehearsed quality to them. Before trying to conceive, she and Aaron had usually gotten along well. Caroline assumed from conversations with her girlfriends that she and Aaron fought less than other couples and she rarely took issue with the small irritations that crop up in every marriage, like his leaving socks on the floor or the toilet seat up. But it wasn’t just the lack of fighting that Caroline felt was a sign their relationship could withstand the stress of infertility. They both knew and respected the intensity that each of their jobs required, dealt with death and loss sometimes in their respective work, and genuinely got joy out of doing simple things as a couple, like hiking in Muir Woods. When Caroline went shopping at the Marin Country Mart, Aaron often liked to go along just to be with her, although he would publicly claim he liked to listen to the jazz band that played on Tuesday nights.
Since they started trying to conceive, their biologically driven paths had caused them to converge, except, of course, for the actual act of coming together trying to make a baby. He was able to move on — literally move with his body and with his life after each potential pregnancy or loss. He could walk away from a conversation about it physically unchanged, but Caroline’s body had wounds to remind her of the trauma (or failure, depending on the moment’s mood).
Caroline and Aaron had been trying, unsuccessfully, to get pregnant for over a year until they finally got a positive test. At first, Aaron liked to joke with friends that he was intentionally delaying the process so they could get more practice, but that joke quickly wore on Caroline’s nerves, and she asked him to stop telling it. Month after month, she’d get her period and feel disappointment, sadness, and as the months wore on, although she knew she shouldn’t, she began to feel shame. When Caroline’s period resumed after her first miscarriage, early on in their fertility struggle, she was curled up on the sofa, mindlessly watching The Great British Bake Off on tv with a heating pad across her hips, when Aaron sat down next to her.
“What if we just aren’t meant to have kids?” he said.
Her chin quivered as she tried to hold back tears. “What are you trying to say? That this is my fault?”
“No, no, no, nothing like that. I’m just saying, what if we choose not to have kids?”
“Infertility isn’t a choice, Aaron. Besides, ever since I was a little girl, I’ve wanted to be a mother. I’ve been dreaming of this my entire life.”
Aaron grabbed the remote and paused the tv. “What if,” he said gently, “we dream a new dream.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, what would our life look like if we leaned into not having kids? We could travel, we could buy a boat —”
“When have we ever said we wanted a boat? We’re not boat people,” she said.
“I’m just saying. There are a lot of things out there, it doesn’t have to be a boat per se. We could travel, stay up late to see the Northern Lights, eat pizza in Milan, walk on the Great Wall of China. Sleep in one of those little huts in Tahiti over the water. You can’t do that with a kid. What I’m trying to say is that a life without babies doesn’t have to be meaningless.”
Even years after this conversation, Caroline continued to be jealous of Aaron’s ability to redirect his life’s vision so easily. Maybe it wasn’t easy for him. Perhaps he felt that he had to be strong for her, but she resented it anyway. When they had first met and fallen in love, their relationship was wholly centered on each other; now, since trying to get pregnant, her uterus had taken center stage.
Both Aaron and she were scientists; he was a primary care doctor, and she was a cancer researcher, primarily focusing on the disproportionate rates of breast cancer for women in Marin County, where they lived. They had each fallen in love with science during their respective childhoods. Aaron had first loved taking care of garden-variety bugs in his childhood terrarium. Caroline had won a junior scientist competition at the Santa Cruz County Fair when she was in fifth grade, testing what kind of packing material was most effective when dropping a bag that held a single raw egg. She had loved how she changed one single thing and the outcome varied wildly — styrofoam peanuts kept the egg intact, whereas crumpled newspaper left nothing but a drippy, viscous mess. Once she learned exactly which materials worked, she could replicate it and get the same successful result. With her fertility, however, Caroline had to resign herself to accepting there was so much she couldn’t control. As a scientist studying women’s health, she knew an especially in-depth amount of medical information and was considered an expert on postmenopausal hormone replacement therapy’s relationship to breast cancer, but none of that was relevant enough to help her get and stay pregnant. She knew the recipe for it, but, for the first time in her life, couldn’t get the results she felt were inherently promised.
The mixer whirred around in circles when she added the butter, and the combined ingredients reliably emulsified to become fluffy, sugary frosting. Nested steel bowls sat stacked at attention like dutiful soldiers, ready to receive their food color droplets and march into whatever color Caroline had given them orders to be. This was going to be a sailor themed birthday cake, which called for red and blue frosting. It was dark now, and with the kitchen only lit by a few dimmed, recessed spotlights. She was careful not to spill any frosting on the expensive, cold Carrara marble countertops she’d fallen in love with when they first toured this house with the realtor. Although it was small on square footage, they’d both loved the Craftsman style and tucked-away-among-the-trees aesthetic that seemed so unique to this Mill Valley neighborhood. When they bought the house, Caroline had fantasized about filling it with children and their endless parades of toys, stuffed animals, sporting equipment, and clothes of varying sizes. Picturing children’s clutter seemed optimistic and joyful, like they could afford to provide for (and occasionally spoil) their children. But to Caroline, adult clutter, at least the kind procured by two high-earning, childless adults, looked wasteful and indulgent. Without children’s belongings, their tiny home, stuffed to the gills with adult pursuits like baking appliances and dust-covered at-home gym equipment, felt painfully empty. (Like the meat-grinder attachment for the mixer? When they’d put it on their wedding registry, had they been envisioning a life where they slayed their own livestock and stuffed their own sausages? Honestly, who grinds their own meat? She felt embarrassed that they had ever conveyed to their wedding guests expectations for such a ridiculously abundant life that they could impose artisanal challenges on themselves.)
After a few minutes of stirring each bowl, she had the colors ready. The cake had cooled, and Caroline began to decorate it. Her mother had taught her how to ensure an even consistency by spinning the cake plate so that she could hold the frosting-filled offset spatula with one hand and guide the cake in its rotation with the other. Caroline lost count of how many times she spun the cake around, mindlessly adding and smoothing, adding and smoothing, until she had completely covered the cake. She moved on to the decorative trim, which she carefully piped on the top and bottom and added the tiny plastic balloons. Finally, she placed a single candle in the middle. She struck a match and held it to the wick, hoping that it would catch.
A light switch flipped on behind her, and she spun around to see Aaron, sleepy-eyed and confused, standing in just his pajama pants in the doorway. “Babe,” he said. “It’s the middle of the night. What are you—” His eyes landed on the cake. “Hun, why are you baking a whole cake? I thought you were supposed to bake cupcakes or something easy for everyone to eat on the sailboat tomorrow.”
Caroline’s face flushed with shame while she waited for Aaron to figure out the date’s significance. The little boy’s birthday theme and a single candle.
“Oh, honey,” he said.
“Yes, but...I …I just need to do this.”
“But is this really —”
“I just need to do this.”
“He’s gone, honey. He never had a birthday. He never had a birth.”
“I know that, Aaron!” She snapped at him and did not feel badly about it. “Don’t you think I would have noticed that?”
Aaron’s face sunk. “I’m sorry.”
Caroline chose her words deliberately and slowly. “I just need to be alone right now. Today was his due date, and I couldn’t pretend that it’s not. He was supposed to be here today. Please. Can you please let me just have this?” Aaron approached his wife’s back and tenderly placed his hands on her shoulders. He kissed the top of her head. “Okay,” he said, backing away and returning the lights to their previously dimmed state.
Alone again, Caroline stared down at the cake and its solitary candle. Although she wasn’t particularly religious, she thought about those candles you sometimes see at the back of Catholic churches in Europe, where people light votives for dead relatives... or was it for dead saints? Either way, maybe this was like that. She was lighting a birthday candle for her baby, although, since he had never been born, had he ever really died, either? When she found out she was pregnant with a boy, she’d imagined a whole life for him — admittedly, a stereotypical depiction of a man’s life, but what else did she know about this little fetus to base it off of? — baseball games, Cub Scout meetings, pinning a corsage on his high school prom date, college and then maybe medical school like Aaron, or earning a Ph.D. like her. A Technicolor-quality movie reel had been playing in her mind since the moment she found out she was pregnant with this little boy, from imagining his entrance into the world and its perfect adherence to her detailed birth plan, all the way to his peaceful passing as an old man in his bed, surrounded by his children and grandchildren as he fell asleep with one last satisfied sigh under an heirloom quilt. In a sense, he had lived, if only in her imagination. “Happy birthday, Little Boy,” she said quietly. “I love you.”
Tomorrow, she would make sailing-themed cupcakes out of a Betty Crocker boxed mix, which she would decorate with gloppy spoonfuls of unnaturally colored store-bought frosting, and stick little shark fins toppers in a few for her nephew and some mermaid tails for her nieces. She and Julia would share, like so many things in their lives, a bottle of sauvignon blanc, and the two families would enjoy the sunshine when it broke through the fog and the sparkling city views on the chilly San Francisco Bay. But not tonight. Tonight was just for her and the son she would never hold. She closed her eyes, made a wish, blew out the candle, and went back to bed.