Page 2 of The Golden Spoon
FOUR DAYS EARLIER
GERALD
I wasn’t surprised when I got the call, though my heart rate did accelerate rapidly. I know this because my watch lit up and gave me one reward point for exercising. And I wasn’t surprised at all when they told me I’d been accepted as a contestant onBake Weekbecause I am an excellent baker. Anyone can be an excellent baker if they’re disciplined enough. It’s just chemistry. To make a perfect cake, all you need are the right equations. Measurements must be precise to yield a crispy mille-feuille, a lacy Florentine, a perfectly chewy pie crust. Temperatures must be controlled and deliberate, if you want to make a soufflé rise or chocolate glaze shine like glass. You can find equations everywhere in life, if you look in the right places.
Say you want to take public transportation all the way from your apartment in the Bronx to a country estate in Vermont for a televised cooking show, as I am doing now. You just need to be fully acquainted with the timetables. You’ll take the D subway line to 34th Street, exiting out of the northwest entrance and coming out onto 34th Street. Then you’ll walk two avenues west to the northeast entrance of the Moynihan Train Hall, leaving you exactly eleven minutes to wait for the Vermonter train, which departs at 8:15. That will get you into Brattleboro at exactly 3:45. There, you’ll have time for a coffee at a caféacross from the station before you hop on the shuttle you’ve scheduled to drive you out to the entrance of Grafton Manor.
I’ve mapped Grafton Manor out using blueprints I downloaded from the Vermont Historical Society’s online database. It’s an enormous house, but I feel like I know the place now, which brings me some comfort as I do not generally enjoy being in new places, particularly not with strangers and for an entire week. I’ve memorized routes from the guest rooms to the dining room, the dining room to the tent, and calculated the length of time it will take me to get to each.
I’ve gone over the variables of my journey so many times that I barely need to look at the schedule I’ve made up for myself as I get off the subway car with my bags and walk briskly down the platform. A man is playing the violin on the platform, Bach. I recognize it immediately as Violin Sonata No. 1 in G minor. As I was able to get an express train, I allow myself two minutes to listen. I close my eyes. The music carries me away from the filthy station back to my childhood kitchen table. I remember every detail, every nick in the wood, every tear in the vinyl-backed chairs my mother would make me sit at until I finished my homework. She would switch on the radio, filling the tiny kitchen with grand symphonies. Classical music was good for studying, she said. While I solved mathematical equations, she would bake, the air becoming thick with the fragrance of cakes in the oven, melted chocolate, sugary fruit reducing on the tiny stovetop.
My mother was an immigrant from Grenada. She’d been trained as a chemist, but when she came to the United States she was unable to use her degree, so she took a job cleaning for a rich family in Manhattan. When the wife got wind of her cooking ability, she was tasked with providing meals for them as well. It was her cakes that garnered her the most attention. Soon all the families in Tribeca were asking for my mother to make treats for their children’s school birthdays or their evening cocktail parties. My mother took baking very seriously and practiced at home, and often in the middle of the night I would wander out and she’d give me a glass of warm milk and a taste of whatevershe was cooking. Finally, the year I turned fifteen, after nearly two decades of patiently practicing and saving, she opened her own bakery. I begged to work there instead of going to school, but she never relented. My baking education was to be done after schoolwork if time allowed. I explained all this in the application video, plus my expertise in hand-ground flours.
Filming falls during my school’s summer break, so I am not bound to my teaching job right now. Of course, I still have a routine I adhere to when school is not in session. I’ve broken down the benefit-to-detriment ratios, though, and the numbers always come out in favor of going. If I win, which I have at least a one in six if not higher chance given my expertise, I will have proven to myself that I am what I think I am, that my calculations are correct. If I lose, I will return to my normal schedule in just a week’s time.
I give the violinist ten dollars and carry on to the exit, emerging into the bright New York morning. I make my way down 34th Street, jostling with tourists and pedestrians, dodging men on the sidewalk selling knockoff sunglasses and flavored ices. I’ve allotted time for them in my schedule. Finally, I arrive at the northeast entrance to the train station. I check my watch: 8:04.
I feel the warm assurance of being on time, of having gotten it right. I carry my bags into the central hall, scanning the timetable to be sure, though I know it by heart.
I look for the Vermonter, but it is not listed where it should be, right between the Northeast Regional and the Acela service to Washington. I instantly scan and find it farther down the list flashing in red:Delayed, stand by for more info.
A cold dread descends on me. Things never go well when they don’t go according to plan.
HANNAH
Other than the wave of blue mountains in the distance, I’m disheartened to see that Vermont isn’t much different from where I live in Eden Lake, Minnesota. The same small towns cling to the sides of the same state highways with the same abandoned gas stations and part-empty strip malls. The same lonely white churches sit in the same overgrown parking lots, their peeling paint visible from the road as I speed past in the back of a black SUV. The driver had been there to meet me at the airport in Burlington just like theBake Weekcoordinators had said he would, holding a printed placard with my name, Hannah Severson. I had expected a bit more fanfare, to be honest, not that I’d thought that Betsy Martin would come fetch me herself, but maybe there’d be someone else there with the driver, a producer or an assistant, someone to welcome me and talk to me on the journey. The driver silently huffed my bags onto a trolly and walked out to the parking lot. I could only assume I was to follow him.
“Ride’s just over two hours,” he’d said, opening the back door and handing me a small bottle of water.
The soft hum of the air conditioner is the only sound as we drive through the rural landscape, each town we pass smaller and emptier than the last. I try to shake off this initial disappointment.Bake Weekis merely a stepping-stone to my future, not the entire thing, I try to remind myself. I have far more glamour in store for me. After all, I’m only twenty-one. That’s still very young. Only the second-youngest contestant ever to compete onBake Week. And besides, there’s nothing like Grafton Manor in Eden Lake. It will all be in my grasp in less than two hours.
“Just have fun,” Ben had told me this morning when he dropped me off at the airport. As I’d leaned over to kiss him goodbye, his hound Frank poked his head in between our seats and licked my chin. I’d petted him and laughed, mentally reminding myself to touch up my makeup later.
“I promise,” I’d said and put on my most cheerful face, the one I know Ben likes—the one everybody likes. But secretly I’d thought,You don’t understand what this means to me. Fun is just fleeting, a momentary pleasure. It comes in on a cloud and evaporates before you can even recognize it for what it is. Success is different. It is something you can hold on to, something you can count and that goes with you everywhere like a designer handbag. Being onBake Weekis everything to me. It is my chance—maybe my only chance—to do something important with my life. Something better and bigger than just working at Polly’s Diner.
My coworkers threw a party before I left. Brian, Lucille, and Sarah organized it. They’d put up crepe paper streamers and pushed all the tables to one side for dancing and invited everyone I knew from town. Polly even closed the whole restaurant early and everyone came out to drink boxed wine and eat slices of pie from the refrigerated lazy Susan. “I just knew Hannah’s pies were something special, didn’t I?” Polly said that night to anyone who would listen, trying to steal some credit. From the moment I got the call I was accepted, everything changed. They all wanted to be around me now that they knew I was going to be onBake Week. I feel guilty knowing that, if I do everything just right, I will never serve a slice of pie to anyone at the diner ever again.
It’s not that I hate working at Polly’s, but I mean who wouldn’t wantBake Weekto help make them a career? I’ve seen the massiveInstagram following the past winners have, the successful YouTube channels, the cookbook and the endorsement deals they’ve scored. One winner even has her own line of cookware—pots and pans with her name embossed in gold cursive along the handle—sold in stores all around the country and on QVC.Bake Weekchanged their lives. It’s not wrong that I want it to change mine too.
The SUV finally pulls off the main highway and onto a narrow road flanked by a dark pine forest. I try to calm my nerves. I take a deep breath, telling myself to get a grip. I would hate to show up looking frazzled, but I’m so excited I can hardly handle it. More excited than when I graduated from high school—the first one in my family to walk that stage in June and not later with a GED—and more excited than I was before my first date with Ben.Bake Weekcan take me farther in life than school or Ben ever could. As long as I don’t mess it up. I can’t bear to think of myself as one of those contestants who leave in the first couple days, only to be forgotten quickly, their fame snuffed out before their social media accounts even have the time to be verified.
I look down at my hands. I’ve tried so hard not to, with the filming coming up and all, but on the ride from the airport I’ve ripped my cuticles to shreds with my teeth. I hope I remembered to pack a nail file in my bag. I take a small compact out of my purse and look myself over in the mirror, checking that my bangs are hanging just right. The makeup I’d put on during the flight over hasn’t budged, but I top up my lipstick with a fresh coat of gloss anyway.
The SUV comes around a bend and out of the woods. As we pass through a tall stone gate Grafton Manor comes into view. I look up at it through the car window, my jaw hanging open. Even though I’ve seen it on TV a million times, I feel my chest seize up. It is even more impressive in person, the pale gray stone with all those giant windows and chimneys. It looks like something out of Harry Potter.
We come to a stop in front of the main entrance. It’s the staircase with the two lions, the one they always show Betsy next to in the beginningscenes ofBake Week. Now a slim brunette woman stands on the top step holding a clipboard. It’s hard to believe I’m actually here at Grafton Manor and not hallucinating. After all that practicing, so many years of my life devoted to cakes and pies and tarts. So much time spent on fondants and days upon days of piping icing onto sheets of torn cardboard, until every line, every green frosted petal and sugary pink rosebud is just perfect. It’s all actually paid off. Hannah Severson of Eden Lake, Minnesota, is a contestant onBake Week.
I get out of the SUV and have to crane my neck all the way back to see where the roof meets the sky. The driver pulls my suitcases from the trunk. I’ve never seen such a big place. It reminds me of my high school French class when I learned about Versailles. I have the impulse to twirl around on the front drive and do cartwheels, but I remind myself to stay calm. I don’t want to look like a child. Little kids don’t winBake Week, and winning is what I am here to do.
I wince as the driver drops one of my bags onto the gravel drive. All my makeup is in there. I can’t have it shattering. There are no Sephoras around here, and I need everything to be perfect.Ineed to be perfect. I gather my belongings and try to stand up extra straight. I walk as confidently as I can toward the woman on the stairs, fighting back the feeling that I don’t deserve any of this. There is no room for dumb errors now. Mom always says there’s only one chance to make a first impression, and I am not going to mess mine up.
PETER
Grafton Manor’s arched windows stare blankly down at me as I arrive in my pickup truck. I take in the elaborate stonework on the façade. I love this kind of architecture. It’s Victorian but nods to the Jacobethan style the English were so fond of in the mid-1800s. This is an incredible specimen. Of course, I’ve seen it on TV a thousand times—I’ve watched every episode ofBake Weekat least twice—but then it was just a backdrop. In person you get a totally different sense of the place. For one, it is in the middle of nowhere. There is a tiny village—really just a gas station and a diner along the road—about a mile away but the closest real town is at least forty-five miles through the woods. You really feel how disconnected it is driving up here. Literally. On the way in, my service kept cutting out and I doubt there’s a good connection anywhere close by.
As if to illustrate my point, a man is standing at the front of the house talking on his cell phone, leaning against one of the marble lions on the staircase. “Do you know where I should park?” I call out to him. He points to where the drive curves around the side of the building.
I follow the road around to a small strip of spaces and park next to a flashy white BMW. Most of the rest of the lot has been taken over by a large trailer. Camera equipment, I realize, as I grab my duffel bagfrom the bed of my truck and amble around the corner back toward the main entrance. Ivy grows up the outer wall on this side of the building, winding its way up the brick around the windows all the way to the slate roof. It flutters in the breeze, making the whole side of the building look ephemeral, alive.
