Moongirl Cake

Moongirl wasn’t her given name, but folks hadn’t called her Lillian Mae since the last year of high school. The nickname started the summer her hair turned white at seventeen — not gray, mind you, white — and it curled like it had someplace to be. Her best friend Marlene said it made her look like the moon glowing through a lace curtain, and the name stuck quicker than a June bug on a screen door.

It was the early 1960s, and Moongirl had two babies at her feet — a curious little girl named Birdie who insisted on wearing her Sunday shoes in the sandbox, and a baby boy named Bobby who mostly just stared at the ceiling fan like it owed him money.

Her husband, Charlie, was what the other husbands called “involved in the community,” which meant he was rarely home and always smelled faintly of aftershave, cigars, and those clubhouse meatballs nobody really liked but always ate. Golf on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Lodge on Wednesdays. Arts & Letters on Mondays. Fridays? Well, Fridays were hers.

Moongirl claimed Friday the way a hungry neighbour claims a potluck casserole — firm and unapologetic. Every week, while Bobby napped and Birdie narrated her imaginary radio show from the porch, Moongirl would tie on her pineapple-printed apron, tune the kitchen radio to Patsy Cline, and bake her signature cake: Pineapple Upside Down.

It wasn’t fancy, but it was famous. The kind of cake that made grown men loosen their belts and widows blush. Caramelized pineapple rings so glossy you could check your lipstick in ‘em, a buttery golden sponge that held together like good family gossip, and cherries dropped right in the center of each pineapple like punctuation.

“You put a cherry in the middle,” Birdie would whisper reverently each time, like she hadn’t watched her mama do it thirty-five Fridays in a row.

“I surely do,” Moongirl would say, pressing it in like sealing a promise.

Once the cake was flipped (cleanly, always — Moongirl said broken cakes brought bad luck and lukewarm coffee), she’d cut two little slices: one for Birdie, one for herself. Bobby didn’t have teeth yet, but he’d gum the edge of a crust with mighty determination.

The rest of the cake went to whomever needed it most that week — Miss Martha down the road whose son still hadn’t written home from basic training, the exhausted mailman who Moongirl suspected hated his job but loved pineapple, or the checker at Dominion who once called Birdie a “bright little spark.” That got her two weeks’ worth of cake.

Charlie would come home around eight, whistling through his teeth, asking, “Did we have cake today?”

“We surely did,” Moongirl would say, sipping milky tea and rocking Bobby with one bare foot, “but the moon doesn’t rise twice.”

And he’d smile, kiss her hair, and go heat up leftovers. Because everyone knew — even Charlie — that Fridays belonged to Moongirl, her cake, and the quiet kind of magic only a woman with babies on her hip and sugar in her soul could make.

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COPYRIGHT 2007-2025 Patti Friday b.1959.