by Rachel Toor
“Maybe. Hey, pied beauty, you want a piece of parsnip?” I headed over to Dad’s side of the kitchen. He and Jenni had separate work spaces—his was by the stove and she had used the counter to lay out all her materials.
Jenni grabbed me by the arm and said, “You stay over here. If you’re not going to help, don’t get in the way. Be a fountain not a drain, Alice.”
Dad, who was chopping something, rocked out to Bruce Springsteen.
“Geez, who’s in charge around here?” I said, gathering up a bunch of cake crumbs, rolling them into a ball, and popping the whole thing into my mouth. I made a smaller ball and gave it to Walter.
13
As it turned out, I continued to be more of a drain than a fountain.
Walter jumped off my shoulder, onto the counter, and ran across the top of the cake.
Dad shouted, “Alice!”
Jenni tried not to be mad, but he had left some footprints. (“Leave only footprints” may be a good motto when you’re hiking in the woods, but not so much when you’re running across a birthday cake.) I said, “You’re going to put icing on it, right?”
When I wasn’t looking, Walt nibbled on a leather case Mom used for spare keys. By the time I caught him, he’d already made substantial progress. He jumped to the floor, ran to the refrigerator, and I had to scream at Dad not to step on him.
Dad got mad and said, “Take that rat upstairs. Now.”
No one is ever supposed to refer to Walter as “that rat”—it’s dehumanizing. Almost as bad as calling him “it.” If someone responds to his own name, it shows a sense of self, and he deserves to be treated as someone with a self. But I knew it probably wasn’t a good time to have this discussion with my father so I grabbed Walt and brought him back to his cage.
I stayed upstairs for a while trying to figure out a gift for my mother. I decided to give her a novel, since she mostly reads serious books—biographies and bestsellers that explain big ideas in economics or science. I thought it would be good for her to read some fiction.
When I was little, to encourage me to read, my parents made me a promise: they would buy me any book I wanted. I’m not sure they realized I was going to want books more than clothes, or shoes, or even a pony, though I did want a pony for a long time and finally had to settle for weekly riding lessons. A couple of years ago they bought me an e-reader and said I could use their credit card to download any book. But I hardly used it.
While I appreciate the convenience of electronic versions, I love real books, the smell of them, the way they feel in my hands.
About once a month Dad and I go to a local bookstore. Dad says bookstores are staffed with supersmart people who believe that literature matters and that if you can find someone who either knows or shares your taste, they can be a great resource. So I look for books recommended by the staff, especially Barbara and Garth, read the descriptions on the back covers, and get anything that looks good. I leave the store with big bags and I stack the books up on the floor next to my bed. Whenever the stack starts getting too small, I freak out, and we have to go get more. I always need to have a big TBR (to be read) pile. When I finish books, I move them to the bookcase, where Walter sometimes nibbles the edges or stores food along the tops.
I scanned my shelves to figure out which one I could give to Mom. Maybe it’s a little tacky to give someone a previously owned book, but it’s not like they get used up in the reading. So I considered my options:
Pride and Prejudice. No. She must have read it at some point. Who hasn’t?
The Things They Carried. No. A book about war could send the wrong message, though it’s really about love and friendship and is totally awesome. I’m not sure if it’s fiction or nonfiction.
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Maybe. Mom always says she doesn’t like murder mysteries, but in this one the person who gets murdered is a poodle, and the detective is a fifteen-year-old boy who’s maybe got Asperger’s. Plus, he has a pet rat named Toby. Not many novels with sympathetic rat characters.
Stargirl. No. We read this together when I was a kid. But I love it so much.
Where the Wild Things Are. Ditto.
The Hunger Games. No. Even though the book is a zillion times better than the movie, I’m pretty sure that, based on her reaction to the movie, Mom wouldn’t want to read it. She didn’t like the idea of kids killing kids. I said it wasn’t at all surprising: kids are vicious, if she hadn’t noticed.
The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson. No. I didn’t want to give up my copy, especially since Walter-the-Man told me that you could sing all of her poems to the tune of “The Yellow Rose of Texas.” I often sang “Because I could not stop for Death” to Walter.
Then I saw the perfect gift book.
Of course, I didn’t have any wrapping paper in my room, so I cut out pages from one of Mom’s People magazines and made a collage of photos of the lips of different movie stars—which even I could tell had been pumped up with collagen—and taped it together with Band-Aids. I thought this was a clever commentary on my mother’s chosen profession.
Then, since I didn’t have a card, I folded a piece of paper in half, wrote on the front, This is a card, and scrawled Happy Birthday, old girl. XO, A inside. I was quite pleased with myself when I went back downstairs to the kitchen, where Jenni and Dad scurried around like busy mice.
The main dish was Cornish game hens, because Mom loved them. She said her mother always used to make them on special occasions. I like them because they’re like minichickens, and as everyone knows, I love all things mini.
Dad had finished putting stuffing in their body cavities and was slopping some kind of orangey sauce on their skin.
“What is a Cornish game hen, anyway?” I asked, as I stuck my finger into the batter Jenni was mixing. After all these years of eating them, I’d never really thought about what they were other than Cornishgamehens. Like the way you don’t think about the lyrics of songs like “America the Beautiful” as meaningful words. They’re just Obeautifulforspaciousskies and Forpurplemountainmajesties. Purple mountain majesties?
“It’s a bird.”
“I know that. Is it just a mini-chicken?”
“No,” he said. “It’s a different species. You know—there are turkeys and ducks and chickens and Cornish game hens.”
He said it with such certainty I felt compelled to check. I whipped out my iPhone and Googled.
“Ahem,” I said. “From Wikipedia: ‘A Cornish game hen … is a hybrid chicken sold whole. Despite the name, it is not a game bird, but actually a type of domestic chicken. Though the bird is called a “hen,” it can be either male or female.’”
Dad said nothing. Jenni didn’t look up from the cake.
“So,” I said, “a Cornish game hen is not Cornish, not game, and not even a hen. It is, in fact, a mini-chicken.”
“Nice, Alice,” Jenni said, still not looking up, as she greased the pan.
14
In addition to the regulars—Jenni and Walter-the-Man—Sylvia and Gary came over for dinner. They had both gone to medical school with Mom. Sylvia was my mom’s best friend, an oncologist, and Gary was a radiologist.
Jenni had set the table. She folded the napkins into swans. She filled vases with marbles and made a “flower” arrangement using vegetables: radishes morphed into roses under her knife, carrots turned into happy daisies, and green onions served as leafery. She had found this cool centerpiece—Dad said it had been a wedding present—and filled it up with tall skinny white candles. She had also printed menu cards and placed them in front of each person’s plate:
Wild mushroom toast points
Shaved fennel salad
Cornish game hens
Roasted asparagus with lemon-and-thyme butter
Smashed root vegetables
Meyer lemon sorbet
BlackBerry cake
I thought the last item might have been a mistake so I asked her about it. I had, after all, been
eating balls of smushed-up chocolate-cake crumbs.
“Nope,” she said. “Blackberry cake.”
Jenni asked me to set out wineglasses for red and white wines, plus the champagne flutes. Seriously, our dining room had never looked this fancy. I decided to change my clothes when I saw that Jenni had put on a black cashmere sweaterdress that came from the Jenni Sack—Mom had bought it “by mistake” and had “gotten the wrong size” and “couldn’t be bothered to return it.” It was Jenni’s favorite item of clothing ever.
Mom knew we were making dinner for her. She hated surprises. We’d learned that the hard way a few years ago. But when she got home from work and saw the dining room, she went straight to Jenni and put her arm around her. “My girl,” she said.
After everyone was seated, after lots of oohing and aahing about how beautiful the table looked, Dad lifted his champagne glass and said, “To Sarah.”
Mom had declared no birthday candles and said we weren’t allowed to sing “that song.” She always said, “I can’t stand that song.”
But I started to sing it anyway.
Jenni kicked me under the table.
“What?” I said.
Dad interrupted and said, again, “To Sarah.”
Gary said, “Yes, to Sarah.” And raised his glass. “The smartest woman I knew at Duke.”
Mom put down her glass, leaned across the table, and said, “What do you mean?”
Gary said, “What do you mean what do I mean? What I said. You were the smartest woman I knew at Duke.”
Mom tried to raise her eyebrow. She couldn’t and instead widened her eyes and said, “Tell me, Gary, what man at Duke was smarter than me?”
Everyone laughed and Mom looked really happy.
Sylvia raised her glass and said, “To the smartest person we knew at Duke,” and everyone drank. I took a few gulps, but it’s not that much fun to drink with your parents, especially if they give you permission. Jenni doesn’t like alcohol, what with her dad and all, but she had one sip after the toast.
Jenni was up and down all night, filling people’s glasses, bringing in food from the kitchen. At one point, I saw my mother take hold of her arm and squeeze it. The look that passed between them made me feel invisible.
Sylvia started to ask me a question but I was afraid it was going to be about college so I cut her off, saying, “Isn’t it time for cake?”
It wasn’t.
So we sat there for a while longer and finally Jenni went into the kitchen to get dessert and I trailed behind her saying that I would help. We both knew I wasn’t going to help.
Jenni had covered the cake with a dish towel. When she pulled it off, I gasped. I actually gasped.
Jenni has made some great cakes, but this one was Cake Boss–worthy.
It was, in fact, a BlackBerry cake. That is, it was a cake that looked exactly like Mom’s BlackBerry. We had tried to get her to switch to an iPhone, like a normal person. She resisted, saying she loved her BlackBerry, loved the keyboard, loved the way it felt in her hand. Jenni had created a cake shaped like something my mother loved.
She’d used edible paper to put the letters on each key and to write the “e-mail” message on the screen: Happy Birthday Sarah. We love you. She’d done all of this since Walter had run across the top. I thought it was just going to be a plain chocolate cake.
Jenni carried the cake to the dining room and placed it in front of my mother, who threw her head back and laughed and laughed. She stood up—nearly pushing her chair over—and hugged Jenni so hard I could practically hear the whoosh of breath leaving Jenni’s lungs.
We all applauded.
“Now, presents,” Jenni said, clapping her hands so that only the palms touched, like a seal catching a ball.
Dad slipped a box from Mom’s favorite jewelry store in front of her. For years they’d had a joke, “Where’s the box?” On her birthday, or during Hanukah, Dad would give Mom these nice, practical gifts—like a GPS for her car, or an iPod preloaded with her favorite tunes, or once, and this was a low point, an automatic hot-water dispenser for the kitchen. Mom, who always complains about being cold when the temperature dips below eighty-four degrees, drinks gallons of hot water with lemon at practically every meal, and she hates waiting for the teakettle to boil. Even the microwave is too slow for her. So Dad had installed the InSinkErator.
But when he brought my mom into the kitchen and showed it to her, she said, “That’s great, Matt. Love it. But you don’t get someone hot water for her birthday. Now. Where’s the box?”
This time, though, there was a box. A tiny, exquisite suede box. Mom opened it, snapped it closed, and threw her arms around Dad. “Oh, Matt,” she said.
Sylvia said, “Pass it over,” and my mom handed her the box. Sylvia took out a small gold ring with a stone the color of royalty.
“Tanzanite,” Mom said.
“And this,” Dad said, handing her a shoe box wrapped in shiny silver paper with a big blue bow. “Sorry—I can’t stop being me.”
She opened it to find a dozen pairs of reading glasses. Mom was always losing her reading glasses. “Now you can leave them all over the house and office,” Dad said.
Sylvia grabbed one of the pairs of glasses, put them on, and inspected the ring. “This is gorgeous, Matt. Nice job.”
“I had some help,” he said, and looked over at Jenni.
Christ on a bike! How much planning and shopping and colluding had these people done?
Sylvia gave Mom a gift certificate to a spa and said they were going to have a pampering day together.
Walter-the-Man handed over a card, and when my mom opened it, three tickets to a Gillian Welch show fluttered out. Mom, Jenni, and I all love Gillian Welch.
“Girls’ night,” Walter-the-Man said. “I’ll babysit Matt.” And he mouthed to my dad, NC State game.
Jenni’s present was something she must have spent the past few weeks in shop class working on: a makeup mirror. It was carved out of some dark hardwood, and she had done the electrical work so it had a light built in. Part of it was regular mirror, and part was magnifying. The detail was intricate, delicate, and elegant.
Then it was my turn. I handed over a paperback book published in 2000, the cover of which had been nibbled by a rat, wrapped in pages torn from a magazine and held together with Band-Aids, along with a card that could have been made by an eight-year-old. Jenni looked horrified.
My mother read the title out loud: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.
I said, “It’s a true story. Both of his parents died of cancer when he was a senior in college and he had to take care of his little brother. It’s really funny.”
Sylvia put a hand on my mother’s back.
“That’s very nice, Alice. Thank you,” Mom said, and the room got quiet.
Jenni’s face was white.
Dad was staring into his cake plate and shaking his head. He looked up at me and said, “What is wrong with you?”
“It’s really funny,” I said in a weak voice.
15
The grownups escaped into the living room to talk and drink more wine, leaving me and Jenni to clean up. Jenni stacked the plates aggressively and practically threw the silverware into the dishwasher.
I said, “I think I’ll get Walter to help us with this.”
She stopped, bent over the sink, and said without turning around, “Can you think about somebody other than yourself for one minute?”
“What do you mean? I was thinking about Walter.”
“You know, Alice, I’ve listened to you whine about Yale. Everyone has listened to you whine about Yale. You work so hard on your vocabulary. Do you know the meaning of the word self-absorbed? How about self-centered? How about just plain inconsiderate?”
I looked at her. Jenni was never mean and rarely angry, but now she hissed at me.
“Your dad worked really hard on this dinner and you couldn’t even remember it was your mom’s birthday. All you think about
is yourself. And then you give her that crummy old book. Did you also manage to forget that your mother’s mom died of cancer when she was in college?”
I hadn’t even thought of that. It was just a really good book. I said, “But it’s funny.”
Jenni was trembling and her lower lip started to quiver. Her voice got soft and she said, “And another thing.”
It’s never a good thing in an argument when someone says, “and another thing.” I braced myself.
“Do you realize that in all our conversations about college, you haven’t once asked me what I’m planning to do next year.”
Crap.
She was right.
I hadn’t brought it up because school never seemed important to her. Jenni cared about cheerleading and dances and the right color of lip gloss.
“I—I didn’t think—”
“Right. You didn’t think. So you know what? In July I’m moving to New York City.”
“What?”
“Your mom got me an internship with a designer she knows from college.”
How could this be? I hadn’t heard anything about it.
Jenni continued. “I’m going to work for a year, live in Brooklyn as a nanny with another friend of your mom’s from medical school, and then apply to FIT or maybe Parsons the following year. Your mom has made all of this possible for me.”
Jenni was going to apply to Parsons?
“We all tiptoe around you because we love you. And we forgive you for being so self-involved because we know that’s how you are. But it would be nice if you could at least sometimes, for a few minutes, notice that there are other people in the world.”
She dried her hands on a towel and walked out, leaving me to finish the dishes.
16
Jenni avoided me at school the rest of the week. Mom and Dad were annoyed with me, so when I got home I just went up to my room and stayed there. I read e. e. cummings’s poems out loud to Walter and I repeated the line, “nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands” five times. I played a lot of Freerice.
