“Tell me about home,” Franny says, because she doesn’t know where hers is, and looks for it in me.

“Everywhere you look there are fruit trees and mountains. There are seasons of light, intense in the summer and muted in the winter,” I begin.

Still Life with Cake, c. 1822
(Oil on panel, 24.1 × 28.7 cm)
Raphaelle Peale
Brooklyn Museum

“Tell me about us,” she says. I smell her, all around me, and it makes me heady, and I want to run my fingers through the straight ropes of her hair. I do.

Here’s the story I tell her, made of truth and fancy.

In the creaky kitchen of my apartment, you and I were looking at a cookbook. My mother was there too, throwing things in a large pot and adding spices to flavor. The cookbook fell open to a familiar cake recipe and the pages were stained with old fingerprints and marked with my notes. We were baking the cake as a surprise for my father, and it was the first time you were going to meet him.

“Flour,” I read aloud. You handed it to me.

“Sugar,” you said, and we carefully measured it out.

“Music,” I said, and though the recipe was old, I had never realized it called for music.

“How do you add music to a cake?” I asked my mother.

“Write down the names of songs and run your fingers over the words,” she said distractedly.

I turned to you. “I think my father would like Bach in his cake best of all.”

“Bach,” you wrote at the top of the paper in thick black script. “Bach what?”

Before the cake was finished I woke up, but I’m certain my father would have loved a cake with cello suites in it, and I would have too.

“Cello suites,” I told you. “I think the cello would add some weight to this cake.”

“G major,” you wrote, which seemed extraordinary. I didn’t think you knew the cello suites, and was pleased you did.

“Cello will bring out the flavor,” you said. What you were really saying was, I know the things you think before you think them.

We wrote down the six suites and my mother said, “Run your fingers over the words.” We did, and the ink turned to powder. Just enough really, for the two tablespoons we needed. We added it to the dry ingredients and the three of us sang a song with words we all knew. I spun on the wood floor in my socks.

“Next time we’ll put in banjo music for you,” I told you, and kissed your cheek.

You cleaned out the batter with your finger. There was raw egg in the recipe, but it didn’t seem to bother you this one time. It made me think something of me was rubbing off on you.

Before the cake was finished I woke up, but I’m certain my father would have loved a cake with cello suites in it, and I would have too.

Franny tells me she would never eat batter with raw egg in it, and also that she wishes she could put the story I told her in a jar and wear it on the inside of her jacket so that it always bangs against her chest. I wish I could do that with her. Our voices weave, and so do our legs, and our fingers, and our hair falls all around our shoulders in every color of brown and gold.