The cake has become a problem. In the back of the car the three women try to solve it like an equation. Rita sits in the middle, squished between Hilda and Seraphina, the golden cake board flat against her thighs. Rita, nearly six feet tall, has made a commitment to use her height to her advantage. No more shrinking away. But in the car she must slump to avoid thumping her head.
The cake is a giant vanilla sheet cake. It was served at a retirement party for a manager at the company where Rita works, wheeled out on a rolling table with Now You’re Dead to Us! written across the top in sapphire icing. She is an assistant, just like Hilda and Seraphina, though they have been at the company much longer. At this point in the night Dead to is all that remains of the lettering. In the car, Rita counts up the Dead to people in her life: her mother, her older sister, and her ex-boyfriend, who worked overnight at a hospital and came home smelling of cigarettes and bleach. Plus, the younger version of herself who tolerated too much. Who allowed bad things to happen.
The car hits a pothole. The cake quivers on the golden board. A loose hunk slides off the scalloped edges, and now Hilda has cake in her shoes. The three of them gasp. At a red light, the driver twists around, demands to know just what they’re doing back there.
She moves with a slight limp because one of her satin shoes is stuffed with cake.
“We’ll fix it,” they say, like good assistants. “We’re so sorry.” Even though they have no idea what to do. The cake didn’t seem like it would be such a problem when they were leaving the party, which was held in a stately townhouse, in a neighborhood so pristine the sidewalks glistened. The party was Rita’s first company function; she arrived in her nicest clothes, a black scoop-neck dress with low black heels, a black bucket purse, and her lucky yellow windbreaker. On their way out they were stopped by the manager and owner of the townhouse—older, elegant—in a blue silk dress. She appeared in the narrow vestibule insisting that they take the cake home.
“You can share it with your roommates,” the woman said. “Or just eat it yourselves. The three of you are skin and bones!”
No one stepped forward. Rita could sense the desperation crackling underneath the mask of the woman’s generosity. It was too much cake. Too much! It was Rita who reached out with her long arms. She was finding her impulse to accommodate hard to shed. Leaving the party together bound all three to the cake. Hilda held open the townhouse’s heavy front door so Rita could slide out sideways. Seraphina ordered a car on her phone. Rita was relieved. Her phone is ancient, and she forgot to charge it before the party, and by now it’s nothing more than a hard dark lump in the bottom of her bucket purse.
“You’re the first stop,” Seraphina says to Hilda. “And you have a roommate. You should take the cake.”
“My roommate can’t eat gluten,” Hilda replies. “She says the smell makes her ill.”
At her stop, Hilda slides out of the car. She moves with a slight limp because one of her satin shoes is stuffed with cake. The streetlights are ablaze. It looks like she’s passing through a short tunnel of light to reach her building.
The cake lurches on the board every time the driver sails over a bump or makes a sharp turn, and now Seraphina is claiming her fridge is too small.
“City fridges, you know? Also, sometimes I sleepwalk and do things I can’t control or remember. I could eat that entire cake in the middle of the night.”
They live in adjacent neighborhoods, both farther afield than Hilda’s. That’s one thing Rita has noticed about cities. Learning where someone lives can shift your entire sense of them.
“How long have you been with the company again?” Rita does not really understand what the company does. All day she enters data points into a computer. Whenever she asks the other assistants about the particulars they just smile and tilt their heads. She wants to tell her coworkers that she does not know anything. She is from a tiny town. She has only lived in this city for a month. Could someone please explain?
“Too long.” Seraphina yawns. She pats her open mouth. Her short, square fingernails are painted crimson. Rita’s mother believes yawning lets the devil in.
“I should be a manager now,” Seraphina adds. “It’s actually ridiculous.”
Rita wants to ask why there are only assistants and managers. No other class of employee. She wants to ask about the endless data streams. Is that how all the assistants spend their time? She might have asked these questions before taking the job. But she was so desperate to get away from her mother, her older sister, and her ex-boyfriend who worked overnight at the hospital.
“What does it take, exactly?” Rita asks. “To become a manager?”
“Total commitment,” Seraphina says. “Like, your commitment has to be utter.”
When Seraphina gets out at her stop, she takes off her navy heels, tucks one under each armpit, and trots up to her building.
If I abandon this cake something bad will happen. Rita has exorcised her mother’s superstitions, but that hasn’t kept her from developing her own. That’s why she wears her yellow windbreaker whenever she goes out. It’s why she hums the same song in the shower every morning. It’s by Norma Tanega, one of her mother’s favorites; at some point “A Street That Rhymes at Six A.M.” got lodged somewhere deep within Rita. Fly a red balloon on someone else’s time. They will try to pull you down and change your mind. Rita’s fridge is large for a studio apartment and nearly empty. Maybe she’ll cut up slices of the cake and hand them out to neighbors. Maybe this cake will help her get to know people. At her stop, Rita inches across the back seat with the cake board cradled in her arms. Her yellow windbreaker flaps around her hips as she emerges into the night. Her black bucket purse hangs from the crook of her elbow. Her phone is dead and useless in the bottom. She uses her body weight to close the passenger door.
“Oh,” she calls out from the sidewalk, but it’s too late. The driver is speeding away. She’s on the wrong block. The faces of the buildings, the numbers—everything is wrong. She’s not even on her street. She does not recognize these street names. Is she in the right neighborhood?
She hurries down the block. She trips on uneven sidewalk—a treacherous lip of concrete—and mashes the cake to her chest. She peels the cake back. She has clots of icing on her collarbone. Icing in her hair. She tries to imagine telling Seraphina and Hilda about this ordeal tomorrow. She tells herself that by then, it will feel like a joke. “You will never believe it, the saga of that cake . . .”
Rita keeps walking. She hopes for a bodega where she could get a roll of paper towels. Explain where she lives and ask for directions. Instead, she finds a bus stop with a bench and sits down. She grabs at the cake, shoves fistfuls into her mouth. She can’t carry this cake around all night. But she can’t abandon it. What else is there to do? The cake is solid and sweet. The icing leaves a buttery film on her lips.
The last time she ate well past fullness was after her ex-boyfriend locked her in his bathroom. He reported to his overnight at the hospital. She sat in his cramped, windowless bathroom for sixteen hours. By the time he came home and let her out, she was mad with hunger. She ate an entire loaf of bread in seconds. When Rita told her older sister she howled with laughter.
She has clots of icing on her collarbone. Icing in her hair.
Rita eats until her mouth dries out. Until her stomach swells and tightens. Somehow, she’s only managed to eat the to and the last d in Dead. How is there still so much cake? She stands up. She keeps walking. Block after block is strangely dim and quiet. She spots a lit window in a garden-level apartment. The blinds are half raised. Rita nudges open a low metal gate with her knee and goes down a few stone stairs. She can hardly see where she’s stepping. She crouches down. She makes a shelf for the cake with the undersides of her forearms and peers through the window.
A woman around her age and also quite tall walks into a tiny living room. She has an aura of familiarity about her. She’s holding a small white plate with a slice of cake. She sinks into an orange saucer chair and stares intently at something in front of her. Maybe she’s watching TV. A few bites and the cake is gone. Rita envies the modest size of the slice.
The woman walks the white plate into the kitchen. She returns wearing sneakers and gripping a set of keys. Rita hustles into the narrow gap between the woman’s building and the one next door. From the shadows she watches the woman leave, up the stairs and into the night. Off on a quick errand, perhaps, or a late-night visit to a friend, at ease in this city.
Rita slides between the buildings, down a thin alley that takes her around to the back, where the garden-level apartment opens onto a small patio. The door is locked, but the window is cracked open. She sets the cake board down on the metal top of a garbage can, pushes open the window, and climbs inside. She can see why the woman left the window ajar. The dishwasher is running, and the tiny kitchen is a sauna. She reaches outside for the cake and slides it through. The woman’s fridge is large and nearly empty. The golden sheet fits easily inside.
Rita closes the fridge door. She feels like her tall body is humming with light. She wanders around the apartment. She’s just in here looking for a phone charger. All she wants is to go home. She finds a charger and plugs in her phone. Ten minutes, she tells herself. Then you’re gone.
She starts looking at photos of the woman. This feels like a violation, but she can’t help herself. Two photos in silver frames on top of a bookcase. A few tacked to a corkboard. There is something familiar about her face. In each one, the woman is alone and in the throes of adventure: dangling from a cliff face in a climbing harness, in a raft, a black paddle hoisted over her head, in an immense and misty forest with a yellow windbreaker tied around her waist.
The moment Rita drops into the orange saucer chair she returns to the retirement party. To an uneasy thing that happened in the coat room. She was elbow-deep in a large closet, in search of her own yellow windbreaker, when a man with a silver goatee appeared behind her and draped a fur stole over her shoulders.
“Oh,” she said, shrugging the fur away. “That isn’t mine.”
“It could be,” the man said. “Wouldn’t you like to be made of fur?”
For a second, she was a statute, tall and silent and still, but then she remembered her vow to be different in this city. She slipped her windbreaker off a hanger and rushed past the man, cheeks burning, head down. What would the woman who lives in this apartment have done? Screamed? Cursed? Hit him with a hanger?
She doesn’t fight the yawn that pries apart her jaws. She gives her open mouth a little pat, like Seraphina did in the car. She’s got icing all over her fingers, a sweet grit under her nails. She stands up. She washes her hands in the bathroom sink. She splashes cool water onto her face. She strips off her clothes and gets in the shower. She shampoos her hair. She dries herself with a thick, soft towel. In the bedroom, she drops the towel and her sugar-crusted clothes into a cloth hamper. She finds a T-shirt and sweatpants in a drawer. She puts them on. City apartments are so small. It never takes too long to find anything.
She turns out the lights. She peels back the sheets and slides into the woman’s bed. When this woman comes home and opens her fridge, she will find a terrible surprise. Rita presses her skull deep into the pillow.
Hilda and Seraphina like to talk about how this city has changed them. “I was a different person before I came here,” they say. “I can hardly remember that other self.”
Hilda and Seraphina talk about these discarded versions of themselves like they are gone forever. Like they have been eaten alive by the current form. Rita waits to hear the lock turn. For the bedroom door to creak open. She has brought something into bed with her. It lies cold and flat under her left hand. She found it in a kitchen drawer. The blade is spade-shaped and serrated at the edges. A cake knife. Rita is starting to think Hilda and Seraphine don’t know as much as they claim to. They seem to have no idea that those old, lost versions could still be out there, floating around this city or waiting in bed with a knife.