The first time I ever had one of Wilma Dean Jacobs’ cakes, I was a boy. I was redheaded. I was chubby. I was a connoisseur of refined sugar products.
In our town, there was only one place that sold Miss Dean’s seven-layer cakes. It was the little gas-station convenience store up the street from my house. The Happy Store.
I think it was a Chevron.
It would go like this: Your mother would send you to the Happy Store before special family occasions, such as birthdays, baby christenings, parole-release dates.
You’d ride your bike to the Happy Store, you’d walk inside. The bell would ding over your head.
And the first person you saw would be Miss Carla Waters, standing behind the cash register.
Miss Carla was about yea-high. Eighty pounds, soaking wet. Silver hair. A voice like a tuba. She was an older woman who smoked Camels. She always had one hanging from the corner of her mouth. Her husband worked up at the landfill.
The Happy Store had a small wire-metal rack of Dean’s Cakes.
Illustration by Sean Dietrich
There would be at least 10 or 12 cakes. Mostly carmel. Plastic cake domes. Small, unassuming, stick’em labels on the fronts.
The cakes were like eating a cake made by your grandmother. Sort of.
Namely, because everyone knew who Miss Dean was. She was Miss Dean, from Andalusia, just up the road.
People YOU knew actually knew HER. Your cousins knew her. Your mom’s friends knew her. You dated a girl whose mother went to grammar school with Miss Dean.
That’s who she was.
And although you never knew her, you knew her caramel cake. Everyone did.
Miss Dean’s seven-layer caramel cake had a familiar flavor. The kind of flavor that reminded you of something special. Something nostalgic. Her caramel cake tasted exactly like cherubs singing Handel.
You can still remember exiting the Happy Store, gingerly placing the prized cake on your bike rack after purchasing it. You can remember securing the cake with bungee cords while Miss Carla was taking a smoke break on the sidewalk, watching you like a falcon.
“You’re going to need more bungee cords,” Miss Carla would say.
“I don’t have any more bungee cords,” you would reply.
So, Miss Carla would go inside and return with five or six bungees.
“Just bring them bungees back to me,” Miss Carla would say.
Then she’d point her cigarette at you. “WITH the price tags STILL ON,” she added.
Then you took the cake home. Your mother carried the cake to your cousin’s party. The cake was always a big hit.
All the church ladies stood around a card table, eating a slice on paper plates. The ladies all smelled like Estée Lauder Youth Dew, and they kept their pinky fingers suspended as they held their plastic forks. And they raved.
As they ate, they tried to find a way to connect the family dots, because that’s what people do in our part of the world.
“Wilma Dean Jacobs is kin to my second cousin,” one woman would say.
“Oh yeah?” another would retort. “I have a friend who was in Civic League with Wilma Dean.”
“That’s nothing,” one woman would say. “Wilma Dean Jacobs attends my son-in-law’s first cousin’s stepfather’s uncle’s orthodontist’s goddaughter’s Sunday school class.”
Our family trees in this region are not “trees” at all. They are family briar patches.
So, when I heard that Miss Wilma Dean Jacobs died, I took a moment. I drove to the local supermarket, which stocks Dean’s cakes. I tried to remember a simpler time. Before Miss Dean was a famous name.
I bought a caramel cake. And just for old-time’s sake, I bought a few bungee cords.