Basic B*tch

Ciara O’Connor

How can you like fruitcake?

There was a cake

menu, but it was the kind of place where you really had to get up and look at the selection yourself to know: carrot; coffee and walnut; Victoria sponge; apple crumble; passion fruit; double chocolate; peanut butter and banana, and so on.

Carrot cake for me; he ordered the fruitcake.

I was silent all the way back to the table. We sat — him, watching my face play through a tumult of emotions; and me, looking into the eye of a radioactive Maraschino lodged in his slice. I asked him whether he liked fruitcake; he confirmed that he did. “I never knew,” I said. “You never asked,” he replied.

I saw him, this man to whom I’d become so accustomed, as if for the first time.

A flash-foward: we get engaged. He says, “It’s a wedding! It would be weird not to serve actual wedding cake!”

A flash-forward: we have children. He is sent, last minute, for a cake for a fifth birthday party. “There was nothing left,” he’d say on his return. “Only this fruitcake. Shur a cake’s a cake!”

A flash-forward: a visitor calls by, someone important like a teacher or a priest or the cool mother. He offers them coffee and cake. They say, “Ooooh, yes, that sounds lovely.” He puts out a fruitcake.

A flash-forward: I die. He serves fruitcake at my funeral. For ever more, when my friends and family are confronted by fruitcake, they think of me.

Back to reality. It couldn’t be as bad as I remembered; I took a small bite. It was worse than I remembered: that Sisyphean mouthful, which seemed to multiply every time I thought I’d swallowed, and there would be still yet more to chew, always one last beady currant. This was not a cake, this dense slab of schadenfreude, this chaotic, sad brick. What sort of a person opts in to this? Can such a person be trusted?

“Well,” I said. “Isn’t it great that we’re still finding things out about each other.”