The Story of Betty: When Your Cake Gets Burned

Betty likes cake. She wants it pretty much all of the time. It would not be making assumptions to say that Betty thinks she needs it. She sees life as having neither form nor function without cake. Cake is as foundational to Betty as the anti-VPL, full-figure body shaper she wore to Mary’s wedding.

No one could believe how good she looked in the wedding photos. Wow, how did you do it? You look fantastic! Betty was surprised and hurt by the freedom her friends felt to comment so favorably on her corseted appearance – the shock of her actually looking good for once. Why the hell couldn’t she look 15 pounds lighter for Mary’s Big Day? No one needed to know the truth about the combined magic of Lady Playtex, Spanx, and Photoshop. If Dianne the wedding photographer could eradicate the ring bearer’s outbreak of pre-pubescent acne, Dianne could photoshop a sweet and sexy curve or two for Betty.

Betty had just finalized her divorce that afternoon, and she felt stale and dried out: the remaining crusty corner of brownie in the 13” x 9” that no one wanted to finish. Jay had been checking out other cupcake options for some time before she finally got the guts to file. To discover his penchant for eating cake in all the wrong places had struck a bitter note inside of Betty. The first time she found the raunchy texts from “Sheila” (Betty always said her name to indicate quotes) on Jay’s phone, she had felt a primitive fury fizz its way up from her hips to the crown of her head. Jay's refusal to offer up a crumb of remorse or guilt for his exposed dalliance, Mary had finally convinced her to file.

When Betty returned home from signing the final papers, she decided to celebrate. She shook out a few dozen Tater Tots onto a baking sheet and preheated the oven to 425. Betty knew what had the power to make her feel better and the Tots had it: Tot Power. She wobbled out of her heels and removed her gray knit pencil skirt, leaving it in a pile in the middle of the living room.

Finally! The freedom. Betty felt inspired to pull a kickass move from her kickboxing class wearing just her pantyhose and tried to touch her toe to the ceiling. Her heel came level with the coffee table before she felt the spasm. Oh, God, no! Not another fucked-up spasm, Betty panicked.

But it wasn’t a spasm, thank God. It was just the worrisome run that had started just above her skirt hem earlier that afternoon – the one that had been threatening to crawl down her leg and into her pump for all the world to see and to mock. It was one of those wide ladder runs that thank God hadn’t zippered down the whole length of her leg until now.

Betty frowned as she surveyed the spider veins that the delinquent run revealed. Smoky taupe was a good color for masking Betty’s spider veins. True, the color was so terribly out of vogue that Betty thought it was possible that others might look at her as a trend setter of sorts. Look out, losers, but I’m here to make a statement with my smoky taupe.

Betty, remembering a steamy scene from a movie, peeled off the ruined hose and tossed it at the ceiling fan in the living room. It missed and landed on top of the latest issue of O on the side table, but Betty didn’t care. Betty had read that the average human body gets rid of 40,000 old skin cells a day. She looked at the discarded hose puddling on the cover of the magazine, Oprah with a wide smile and her arms extended to her sides, and thought, The proliferation of scattered skin cells in the world be damned. She hadn’t dusted the damn side tables in over two months. What difference are a few extra dehydrated cells going to make?

The timer went off and Betty could hear the Tots sizzling their readiness when she opened the oven door. She squared up to the table with the oven-hot sheet of Tots in front of her, careful to put down a trivet first to prevent a pesky singe mark in the pine. A bottle of ketchup on her left, a dampish kitchen towel at her right for blotting grease from her eager fingers.

Betty moved a dry towel to the front of her jacket, Jethro style. She didn’t want to take the chance of getting a greasy skid mark on the Stack ‘n’ Whack Blazer that she had bought at the 2003 Quilter Guild Conference in Roanoke. Betty burned her tongue on the first Tot, impatient to feel the crumble of chipped potatoes exploding onto her taste buds. Ouchy mama! Best to wait. Some things require time to better enjoy them, Betty thought.

Betty popped the Tots into her mouth one by one, wiping her fingers between each Tot. She looked at the near-empty pan, shiny with grease and peppered with Tot fuzz. Oh, well. We can’t all look glamorously anorexic like Angelina or Celine. Betty added an extra squirt of ketchup onto the pan for extra good measure. The ketchup bottle bleated out a splurt-ing sound. Betty laughed and lifted her right butt check from the chair while exclaiming, “Corks!” – a dumb childhood response that she and her big brother, Doug, had shouted whenever they passed gas.

Betty let her mind travel over the topography of her bumpy divorce. Now that she was officially single, she really needed to check out her closet. Her wardrobe felt stunted. It was time to spice things up. When Betty got dressed for the gym in the morning, she would pull on her lowest-cut workout top for her personal training session with Butterfly Buns. Butterfly Buns was certainly eye-cupcake to Betty. Betty couldn’t have told you if he had blue eyes or a disturbing pattern of premature male baldness. What she did know is that he had a perfect yellow swallowtail stamped right onto the ol’ derriere. God, I'm such a female chauvinist, Betty mused.

BBuns, as Betty was fond of calling him for short when talking about the tortures of her training sessions with Mary, couldn’t have known that Betty put this much energy into picking out an outfit that was destined to be trashed with streaks of Cover Girl and peri-menopausal sweat 15 minutes into the workout. Betty knew that he was our of her league. Still, a girl could dream.

At the gym, Betty always felt mildly claustrophobic with her torso shrink-wrapped by her outrageously-priced "duo-boob" bra. The contraption was advertised to produce deep cleavage while you worked out. There would be no uni-boob in Booty Town for Betty when pretending to work out at the gym. Betty would not be caught dead in one of the lower-priced, shelf-bra models offered at TJ Max for ¼ of the price. She’d get a job first slinging burgers and fries if she had to, just to keep herself in cleavage.

Betty knew that the pricey personal sessions with BBuns would probably go the way of 8-tracks, disposable cameras, and floppy disks now that the divorce was final. Payments in the way of divorce maintenance were to be made for a limited time, as decreed by both the mediator and the judge. The outcome of both hearings determined that Betty was capable of gainful employment outside the home. Jay was only too happy with decision, as he surely thought he was going to be saddled with Betty’s maintenance for years to come.

How stupid: Betty was to be judiciously weaned from Jay’s payments once she found work. And there was a deadline. She was reminded of that more than once in the hall outside the courtroom. Jay was worried about the burden of support payments, she could tell, and he would launch into Gaslight Mode whenever he spotted her without her attorney: “You can’t ride my coattails forever, you know. The gravy train is stopping and you are going to be shit out of luck when the well runs dry.” Nasty words designed to drain her of any resolve to keep sucking for breath.

Betty wanted to comment on his flagrant mixing of coined metaphors, but she had to pee and ducked down the hall with Jay’s words pelting her back, just like the cougar that sprayed her through the bars of its cage that time at Northwest Trek. There was a reason why there were signs posted on the cats’ cages: "SPRAY SEASON! Don’t stand near the cages." Story of my life, Betty thought. The signs were all there, and I still stand where I can get full-on sprayed with feline testosterone.

No one ever gives you the Big Why along with a warning, Betty thought. That was the problem. They warn you and they tell you, but they don’t provide the Why. Had the sign said: “If you stand too close to the cage you are going to be doused with unpleasant feline bodily fluids,” Betty would have heeded. She isn’t a complete moron after all.

As it turned out, she had to stuff her new L.L. Bean maple-red fall parka in the trash can. Jay wouldn’t even let her put it in the trunk for the trip home so she could take it to the dry cleaners for a proper clean. Betty could laugh about it now and has turned the whole misadventure into a special stand-up bit when at a party – a tale to be whipped out and re-told in the right gathering of mixed company – primarily a crowd of drinkers. Betty enjoyed the looks of revulsion on people’s faces, as much as the laughter the story occasionally elicited from some. A star is born, Betty thought. Maybe she should check out those improv classes at The Sit Down Theatre.

It was all worth it in the end, Betty supposed. Getting a good story out of life – damn the petty costs –had its benefits. The ultimate outcome was a damn shame though, as that particular parka had been discontinued from the catalog’s offerings. It was one of the few stylings that could zip around her middle and that didn’t require her to cuff the sleeves. So what? She was a little out of proportion, that’s all. That’s what BBuns was for – to whip her into shape.

Betty would start to get depressed if she thought about her body image and Jay getting frisky with “Sheila.” Still, she looked forward to the conveyor belt of man-cakes that divorce promised. She likened her array of options to that of sitting in a sushi restaurant and being able to reach out for whatever dish presented itself on the motorized belt.

Betty never understood how those plates of food could be kept sanitary. She had been seated in a booth one time at Zen Sushi and saw an elderly man turn his head and sneeze all over the plates that were passing by at the time. Betty had almost thrown up, but not before keeping a spot on the offending dishes as they made their way throughout the restaurant toward the unsuspecting patrons.

As it rounded her booth, she flicked a balled-up napkin on the first plate that she suspected was infected and counted 13 plates past the Vector Hub before reaching for another California roll. Hadn’t she read that a sneeze could travel at nearly a hundred miles an hour and travel up to 27 feet? She figured that a baker's dozen of plates past the offending dish was safe. The man was quite elderly and didn’t look entirely well. Perhaps his sneezes didn’t have quite the same gusto and, therefore, couldn’t travel as far as a vital person’s.

Ah, yes. The image was enticing: a conveyor belt of hotties for Betty. All of those ads on TV with the deep-tanned, silver side-burned men hanging out the door of an enormous RV while sporting their seductively promising smiles. "Hey, Babe. I’ve got some Viagra on board. Let’s get it on now that we are done babysitting the grandkids."

Betty could see herself shooing the grandchildren back to their parents post-babysitting – all while Silver is still giving her The Look. They would then hop into the RV and drive to an incredibly wide turnout along the scenic road. The turnout would have to be massive, given the size of the RV and it would also have to be overlooking the Pacific Ocean (enter: panoramic nature shot) where they could take advantage of Silver’s lingering and magnificent magic pill. The ads ended with the right touch of innuendo, not too tawdry but full of sexual meaning: If the trailer be a’rockin’, don’t be a-knockin’. Betty thrilled to the idea and ate her last Tot.

Life is gonna be just grand, Betty thought. No more Jay. No more looking at his fungus-y toenails that, in truth, frightened Betty. Betty remembered going to her yearly annual and her doctor asked his usual inventory of big-picture questions in order to better assess Betty’s health. Any major changes this past year? Any moves? Any changes in job? Any deaths in the family? Divorce?

Betty jumped on his last question like a duck on a slug. Yes! Or almost nearly. I know that Jay is sleeping around and am afraid that I might have something. I want a full workup. Betty went on to add that she was also worried about her right pinky toenail – the one that had been smashed by her rolling Samsonite in the San Jose Airport. She told her doctor that Jay might have given her The Fungus. Her doctor paused and added that he hoped that that was the worst thing that she might have caught from Jay. But Betty didn’t buy it. Having fungus-y toenails was not something that she would want to explain to Silver when they were sharing their first post-coital shower together in the RV. (Chorus-pedal effect: Pay no attention to the fungus behind the shower curtain!)

Betty decided that Tots and Heinz were just not going to cut it for such a celebratory event. The divorce must be properly commemorated. She contemplated calling CJ. CJ with her coarse humor and negative wit could work her magic on a night like tonight and make shit from shinola, but she decided no. Too much energy to talk to anyone tonight, Betty moaned. She didn’t have it in her. She was feeling uncomfortably full and achingly empty. Maybe she’d had too many Tots.

Instead, Betty pulled on a pair of sweats, grabbed her keys off the Bless-This-Home hook by the garage door, and headed to Crazy Pete’s. Betty didn’t have streaming apps on her TV so she had to rely on what was probably the last standing DVD rental store in the country. These were rapidly fading from society, Betty mused, and she hoped that Crazy Pete would stay in business at least until she was able to figure out how to access Hulu or Netflix.

She was going to rent DVDs of Kevin Costner, Richard Gere, and pre-Calista-Flockhart Harrison Ford. The jerk. She was also going to stop by the liquor store and buy some Courvoisier and then head to Village Mart and stock up on Dots and Cheetos. This night called for the frizzled crunchy style of Cheetos. No puffs. Some nights Puffs didn’t offer enough crunch.

Yes, she would stay up all night, watch the hunk-o-doodles, and really indulge until her nails were stained orange beyond redemption. She might even light that cigar that was in the kitchen junk drawer from Halloween. The Halloween that Jay had insisted they dress up as Bill and Hillary, even though she wanted them to be Fred and Wilma. Yes, Betty thought, I don’t have to look for work – at least not tomorrow. She might even skip her morning appointment at the gym with BBuns.

Let cake be damned for another day. Betty fished around inside the Cheetos bag and snagged another handful. She was going to live life to its fullest tonight and take command tomorrow. She could do this. She might not be the most elegant or erudite but – damn it! – she certainly wouldn’t hang around and let the devil take the hindmost out of her rear. She could switch things up tomorrow.

There was a salty, stingy feeling in her eyes, and Betty swiped at them both with the now-orange-mottled towel, leaving a streak of Chester Cheeto above her right eyebrow. “There is redemption in not putting up with other people’s crap,” Betty said aloud to no one. It was the kind of thing her father would have said. Her words, looking to find safe harbor in someone else’s ear drums, felt weird just hanging there in the room.