A Foray into the Domestic Arts

Many years ago, I baked chocolate chip cookies for a guy I’d recently started sleeping with. For me, this was a much bigger deal than having fucked him in the first place.

"You must really like him, my friend said. "Either that, or the sex was phenomenal."

She was right on both counts. He was electrifyingly intelligent, funny as hell, genuinely sweet, all muscle, and prodigiously talented. The sex positively crackled, as did our conversations. I found myself aroused at random and inappropriate places (Kinko's, the pharmacy) and felt grateful that I couldn't sport a telltale hard-on.

So, I baked. As I don't keep a well-stocked cupboard, I drove to the store at midnight, when my creative bouts usually seize. I giddily plucked just the right chocolate chips and organic flour from the shelves. Me, the writer girl, in my look-at-me red leather boots, reading labels on bottles of gourmet vanilla. The novelty of it all. Surely, he would be moved by the depth of my affection.

Back home, I put on Sarah Vaughn and Elvis Costello and had at it. I found an apron on the top shelf of my closet. I excavated the electric mixer my mother gave me years ago, when she still hoped I'd become someone who gave dinner parties. I meticulously cracked eggs and added baking powder with long-ignored measuring spoons. God help me, I sifted.

Two hours later, buzzing from pilfered dough, exhaustion, and ardor or something like it, I took the final cookie sheet out of the oven. My kitchen and I were both a mess, but I was happy. "The Great Cookie Offering," I called it. If he doesn't want me now, he never will.

Which, as it turns out, was precisely the case. He was touched and appreciated my effort and consumed the entire batch in one sitting. But he didn’t want a relationship, and while he said this could change, I doubted it would.

My heart more bruised than broken, I couldn't help but think that this was a lousy reward for my once-an-election-cycle culinary endeavor. Damn it, I baked. I shelled out forty bucks for ingredients even though I was in between permanent day jobs. I went to my crappy temp job the next day on two hours of sleep and with a splitting headache. All so I could be told that he thought I was an amazing, beautiful, intelligent woman whom he was really attracted to, but that it "could be another six months to a year" until he figured out what he wanted from a relationship.

Over a decade later, I still haven’t baked for anyone else. I don’t mind swallowing, but the Great Cookie Offering left a bad taste in my mouth.— Litsa Dremousis

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