Chocolate Cake or Duct Tape

“Chocolate cake it is,” she thinks.

After just having endured another torturous four-hour screaming match, Eliza comes to the same conclusion as she always does: “Greg and I are just a little upset right now, but some homemade chocolate cake will fix it.” To her, it’s really just simple logic.

Just like always, she knows that he’ll be out for at least a couple of hours now and when he comes back, he’ll expect dinner to be ready and a large slice of chocolate cake to be waiting for him for dessert. Or at least he should expect it by now, being as he is observant enough to know where the front door is without thinking about it.

She pulls out her trusty old cookbook and flips to the right page on the first try. Although the page is not marked – the corner is not folded down, there is no sticky note peeking from the top, nor a tab along the side – it opens readily, as it is the only page she reliably uses, and the book knows this. Looking down at the page, she reads the title, “Mama Grace’s Feel-Good Chocolate Cake.” She puts on her apron as she wishes for truth in the promises of the pre-recipe blurb: “Instantly turns around even the worst moods like magic!” She has bet on it so many times that it feels absurd to back out now. She likes to think it works well enough; maybe if she serves it enough times the magic will stick. To Eliza, this chocolate cake is like duct tape. When something is broken that you just don’t know how to fix, simply keep applying and it will all hold together for a while.

She has made this cake so many times by now that the book is really just for shows. She needs the recipe like she needs a map to leave her own house. Every step of the process has become muscle memory. Argue, put on apron, open book, pre-heat oven, grease pans – it’s a basic order of operations that she knows full-well how to follow.

Measuring out each ingredient gives her time to go over the events of the day as if there is some clue she’s still missing. As she cracks three eggs, one by one, into the mixing bowl, she wonders if it would have made a difference if she hadn’t asked what was in the mail. She knows in her soul that it wouldn’t, but still her heart hopes and her mind wonders. Every little thing seems to lead back to the same argument – years in the making now. It started as a five-minute argument, but gradually, like a snowball rolling down a hill, has built itself up to a whopping four hours. She is made to spend four hours reliving all the bad moments – all the bits that just won’t be left alone to settle to the bottom of her conscience.

Thirty minutes from go time, Eliza pulls the chocolate cake out of the oven and sets it aside to cool off – just as she is trying to do, the heat of rage still working its way through her. Now it is time to make the chocolate frosting. She amuses herself by thinking how convenient it is that her elevated temperature can help warm the butter quickly. After a couple of minutes in her hands, it has softened perfectly, and she gets to work whipping the ingredients together. This frosting used to be the reason why this cake was her go-to dessert. Greg absolutely loved it. He would request it for his birthday and eat it by the spoonful, so she always made a little extra to make sure there would still be enough to cover the cake. Now she makes it with the hopes that he will taste all those happy memories and things will somehow change.

They say insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Eliza is not insane. She doesn’t expect different results; she just wishes for them while expecting the cycle to continue. Eliza is patching a hole in a boat with duct tape. She knows the boat is eventually going to sink, no matter how much duct tape (or chocolate cake) with which she tries to fix it. She is just trying to keep it afloat for as long as possible. Is it worse to keep the cycle going? Maybe, but Eliza does it her way.