I went into the kitchen to get a cupcake. I heard the front door open and close and Valerie drooped into the kitchen and slumped into a chair at the table. She had her hair slicked back behind her ears and sort of plumped up on top. Blond lesbian impersonator does Elvis.
I put the plate of cupcakes in front of her and took a seat. “Well? How was your date?”
“It was a disaster. She's not my type.”
“What's your type?”
“Not women, apparently.” She peeled the paper wrapper off a chocolate cupcake. “Janeane kissed me and nothing happened. Then she kissed me again and she was sort of . . . passionate.”
“How passionate?”
Valerie turned scarlet. “She Frenched me!”
“And?”
“Weird. It was really weird.”
“So you're not a lesbian?”
“That would be my guess.”
“Hey, you gave it a try. Nothing ventured, nothing gained,” I said.
“I thought it could be an acquired taste. Like, you know how when we were kids and I hated asparagus? And now I love asparagus.”
“Maybe you need to stick with it longer. Took you twenty years to get to like asparagus.”
Valerie thought about that while she ate her cupcake.
Grandma came in. “What's going on here? Am I missing something?”
“We're eating cupcakes,” I said.
Grandma took a cupcake and sat down. “Have you been on Stephanie's motorcycle yet?” she asked Valerie. “I rode on it tonight and it made my privates tingle.”
Valerie almost choked on her cupcake.
“Maybe you want to give up on being a lesbian and get a Harley,” I said to Valerie.
My mother came into the kitchen. She looked at the cupcake plate and sighed. “They were supposed to be for the girls.”
“We're girls,” Grandma said.
My mother sat down and took a cupcake. She chose the vanilla with the colorful spinkles. We all stared in shock at this. My mother almost never ate a perfect cupcake with sprinkles. My mother ate leftover halves and cupcakes with ruined icing. She ate the broken cookies and pancakes that got burned on one side.
“
Wow,” I said to her, “you're eating a whole cupcake.”
“I deserve it,” my mother said.
“I bet you've been watching Oprah again,” Grandma said to my mother. “I always know when you've been watching Oprah.”
My mother fiddled with the wrapper. “There's something else . . .”
We all stopped eating and stared at my mother.
“I'm going back to school,” she said. “I applied to Trenton State, and I just got word I'm accepted. I'm going part-time. They have night courses.”