The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

by Aimee Bender

  Thanks for your help, said George, standing, pulling me up. You’ve been great. Tell Janet to slow down.

  Whoosh, said the guy, shaking his head. Sheesh. Thanks? he said, with a voice that sounded like he wanted us to stay.

  We threw out our napkins and pushed back through the door, me still holding tightly to George’s hand. I was so relieved to hear the traffic outside, to see the bubbles of closed car windows, people I couldn’t access in their cars going about their day.

  Outside, Joseph was still sitting on the rock wall that protected those few scraggly pink azalea plants, making a petaled arrangement of curves on paper.

  Well, she’s for real, said George, stepping up close. He raised my hand, like I’d won something. Your little sis. She’s like a magic food psychic or something, he said.

  Joseph looked up. He didn’t move his face at all. Instead, he handed over three pages of graph paper with perfect shapes on them. Screw-ups for your wall, he said. Cool, said George, taking a minute to look at each one.

  So, George said, turning to me as we started to walk. Seems like it’s mostly the feelings people don’t know about, huh?

  Seemed like that to me too but I didn’t like the idea at all.

  The guy was so angry! he said, laughing, telling Joseph about the clerk.

  Joseph listened as George went through the story, and I took George’s hand every time to cross the street and he held mine back with fingers warm and firm. Sometimes he forgot to drop my hand at the sidewalk and I would hold on as long as he let me, until he needed his arm to make a gesture about the gothic beauty of black rose cacti or the jaunty angle of someone’s chimney. I knew just how that sandwich felt. With my hand in his, I looked at all the apartment buildings with rushes of love, peering in the wide streetside windows that revealed living rooms painted in dark burgundies and matte reds. I’m a food psychic, I told myself, even though the thought of it made me want to crawl under the buildings and never come out.

  I savored that walk, and rightly so, because as soon as we got home the cord snapped. Or Joseph cut it. The second we walked in, he ran to his room and brought out a rare hardback illustrated book on fractals he’d checked out of the library, which was catnip to the eighth-grade science mind, and the two of them spent the rest of the daylight and into the evening staring at a leaf.

  11 In the lengthening days of spring, Dad upped his tennis and went to work on a case about redistribution rights and my mother continued her carpentry, returning home smelling warmly of sawdust and resin. She brought home a teak board and a box sanded to the smoothness of satin. A pine sling-back dining-room chair, with straight square legs and a complex pattern in the backside stained a golden brown. We circled it, in admiration. She fanned her fingers and complained of the splinters, so she and Joe went on a special trip to a beauty supply shop, where he picked out the finest pair of tweezers on the shelf. They still enjoyed running errands together. That Sunday evening, after dinner, Joseph sat close to Mom on the sofa, and with care, he dipped the tweezers in a shallow bowl of warm water and patiently used his long fingers, his shared dexterity, to clear her hands. Once he removed a splinter, he wiped it on a paper towel, re-dipped the tweezers, and dug around for the next. It took an hour, and quickly became a regular routine, every Sunday evening.

  You could be a brain surgeon, Joe, Mom murmured, watching.

  Sometimes I wondered if, on Saturdays, she dragged her hands over raw wood to preserve this special time with him.

  I struggled by, for the rest of the school year. I filled in my spelling workbook. I took the bus. At recess, I was first in line for the dodgeball group, and several times the teacher had to pull me out for throwing the ball too hard. Eddie called me a cheater. Eliza looked at me from the sidelines with too much sympathy; I threw the ball at her. I broke a kid’s glasses because I threw too close to his face.

  I didn’t know who else to talk to, or tell, so, on my own, I ate packaged snack food, learning the subtle differences in tightness and flatness from the various factories across the country, and I ate pre-prepared food from the grocery store that had been made by happy clerks, and uptight clerks, and frustrated clerks, and sometimes I felt scared to open up the refrigerator. Baked goods were the most potent, having been built for the longest time from the smallest of parts, so I did best with a combination of the highly processed—gummy fish, peanut-butter crackers, potato chips—made by no one, plus occasional fast-food burgers, compiled by machines and made, often, by no one, and fruits and vegetables that hadn’t been cooked. At school, I ate my apple and carrots and then used my allowance to buy food out of the snack machines and made it through the day that way.

  I asked my father if we could go out to eat more often, to give Mom a break from the cooking. But I love cooking! Mom said, brushing at the air. Is there something so bad about my cooking? No, no, I said; it’s for school? I pulled on my father’s cuff. Please? Dad disliked the outlandish portion sizes in restaurants, but he pushed his lips together, thinking, and mentioned a new Italian place he thought might be good, on Beverly. We went on a Saturday. The chef was a little surly in his minestrone, but also agreeable, easygoing, easy to eat. It’s a tradition? I sang, hopefully, in the car.

  Do I need a pound of meat at a sitting? Dad said, driving through yellow lights. Do I really?

  Mom rubbed his neck. You’re a growing man, she said.

  But I’m not! Dad said, hitting the wheel. I’m not growing at all anymore! Only horizontally!

  The school nurse sent for me as a follow-up. I’d dropped four pounds. She recommended ice cream. Ice cream was generally okay. I gained it back.

  But so what do I do? I asked George, a couple months after the cookie store visit, when Joseph had left his room to make a bowl of popcorn. George was lying on the floor, on his back, and had somehow acquired one of those red-point laser beams, and was pointing it up to the corners of the ceiling.

  Hey, he said. Check this out.

  I stepped a foot inside, and watched the red light mark a dot at each ceiling convergence.

  Light rays, he said.

  Pretty, I said.

  But what do I do about it? I asked again, after a minute.

  About what?

  About my food problem?

  He put the red dot right on my forehead. Now you look Indian, he said.

  George?

  It’s not a problem, he said, moving the dot away. It’s fantastic.

  I hate it, I said, tugging at the sides of my mouth.

  Or maybe you’ll grow into it, he said, shooting the red dot through the keyhole in the door.

  He smiled at me, and it was genuine, but it was also a smile from further away. Our boats on the river had drifted apart. There was a loyalty call he’d had to make, and I could hear the popcorn popping in the kitchen, and the alluring smell of melting butter in a pot. Joseph muttering away, as he prepared it. That popcorn, a puffy salty collapsing death. I would not eat a piece of it.

  Maybe, I said.

  I think, George said, you should become a superhero. He put the dot on my mouth. Open up, he said.

  Laser, down my throat.

  There, he said, bouncing the dot around. Supermouth.

  Almost six months after the incident with the cake, on a Saturday morning in August, I awoke to the smell of fruit and leaven to discover that Mom was rummaging around in the kitchen, cooking up a summer pie from scratch. Joseph had left early to launch a battery-operated rocket with George in the park, and Dad’s car had honked at its usual exit time even though it was the weekend. Things had been tense around the house. Dad, brusque. Mom, wound up. When Dad was home, she’d tell him stories in a really fast voice and he seemed barely able to listen, eyes floating around the room.

  When I shuffled into the kitchen in my pajamas that morning, she greeted me as if I was her long-lost best friend. Rose! she said when I walked up to the door. Good morning! How are you? How’d you sleep? She grabbed me in for a hug and held me
tight. Her hair, freshly washed, smelled like a field of new lavender. So! she said, clapping her hands. Honey. What do you think about pie for breakfast?

  The fact that she was up at all likely meant that she’d never gone back to sleep after her 2 a.m. wake-up, and that she’d started baking out of boredom at around five. Mixing bowls and spoons and sprinklings of flour covered the counter.

  Or cereal? I said.

  I’m trying out the newest recipe in the paper, she said. Peach-and-dingo pie. Ready, kiddo? Will you taste it with me?

  Dingo? I said. Isn’t that a kangaroo?

  Lingo? she said. Lingoberry? Something like that.

  She pulled me to the kitchen table, beaming. It was unlike her, to be so imprecise. The morning had warnings written all over it.

  My mother had been baking more often in general, but she took plates of desserts to the carpentry studio, where her boss, thank God, had a sweet tooth. He just loved the cheesecake, she’d tell me, shining. He ate all of my oatmeal cookies. Some charmed combination of the woodwork, and the studio people, and the splinter excising time with her son kept her going back to Silver Lake even when she hit her usual limits, and every night, tucked into bed, I would send out a thank-you prayer to the carpentry boss for taking in what I could not. But this morning I was the only one, and it was the weekend, and carpentry rested, and the whole kitchen smelled of hometown America, of Atlanta’s orchards and Oregon’s berry bushes, of England’s pie legacy, packed with the Puritans over the Mayflower.

  You try, as a child. There was the same old dread, and there was the same old hope, and due to the hope, I ate the piece of pie she sliced on the small white plate, with a silver fork, beneath the dual lightbulbs in the ceiling fixture. In my daisy pajamas and ripped bunny socks. The taste so bad I could hardly keep it in my mouth.

  What do you think? asked Mom, squinting as she tasted, leaning back in her chair, just as she had before.

  We began with cake; we end with pie.

  I leaned over, too. I could not, for this last time, hide any of it. I leaned right out of my chair and slumped down on the tile floor of the kitchen. I got on the floor because I had to go low. The chair was too tall. The light fixture, glaring.

  Rose? she said. Baby? Are you okay?

  No, I said, low.

  Are you choking? she asked.

  No, I said. But I closed my eyes. A gripping in my throat. The graininess of the pie dough, of the peach syrup: packed, every bite, with that same old horrible craving.

  Was it her? Was it me?

  It was mid-morning, and outside, I could hear the neighborhood kids on their bikes, wheels splashing through puddles from early-morning lawn waterings. It had been an unusually mild August so far, and the light outside was open and clear. In the dewy air after the spray of the sprinklers, I liked to wander down the sidewalk and scoop up any flapping worms with a folded leaf and stick them back in the dirt. I was, in general, an easygoing kid like that, a rescuer of worms. But this morning, while kids biked and swished outside, I grabbed a paper towel and dragged it hard down my tongue.

  I started tearing at my mouth. Get it out! I roared.

  What is it, baby? Mom asked, struggling out of her chair.

  My mouth, I said, suddenly crying. The tears steaming hot, down my face. Everything flooding. I tried to pull at it—my mouth—with my fingers. Take it out! I said. Please. Mommy. Take it off my face.

  The floor tile was cool, and I was so glad it was there, the floor, always there, and I put a cheek down, right on the tile, and let the coolness calm me.

  Mom knelt by my side, her cheeks flushed with worry. Rose, she said. Baby. I don’t understand. What do you mean?

  I threw the paper towel away. Pulled off another. Wiped down my tongue. Pulled off another. I had been avoiding my mother’s baked goods, but I had eaten her cooked dinners now for months and months, which she made for us every evening with labor and love. Trying not to show everything on my face. Eating a potato chip after every bite. I’d been spending my lunchtimes tasting bites from my friends’ lunches, navigating the cafeteria, finally finding a good piece of doughy pizza made in the school kitchen by a sad lady with a hairnet who worked far on the left. She was sad, true, but the sadness was so real and so known in it that I found the tomato sauce and the melted cheese highly edible, even good. I would try to time it just right in the cafeteria every lunchtime to get her food, because sometimes she took her lunch break right at ours; I would shove to be first in line to catch her before she left, rushing ahead, and my teacher had taken me aside to ask what was going on. There’s a lady, at the cafeteria? I said, staring at her bright-blue earring stud. You still have to stay with the class, Rose, she said, pulling me to her gaze. That same sad lady returned from her break ten minutes before the bell rang, so I took to nibbling on an apple or anything packaged until she returned and then running to her window and getting whatever she put her hands on, so that before lunch was over I could eat a feeling that was recognized. I ate fast food whenever I could, which was not unlike holding Joseph’s forearm to cross the street instead of bearing the disappointment of his hand. I was working to find, in every new setting, something filling, and my whole daily world had become consumed by it. And, day in and day out, I had been faking enjoying eating at home, through the weekly gaps and silences between my parents, through my mother’s bright and sleepless eyes, and for whatever reason, for that one time, I could not possibly pretend I liked her pie.

  The pie, sitting on the counter, with two big brown slices cut out of it.

  What is it? Rose? It’s the pie?

  You feel so bad, I said, to the floor tile.

  What do you mean? she said, touching my shoulder. Are you talking to the floor? You mean me again, Rose?

  You’re so sad in there, I said, and alone, and hungry, and sad—

  In where? she said.

  In the pie, I said.

  In the pie? she said, flinching. What do you mean, baby?

  Not baby, I said. No more baby.

  Rose? she said, eyebrows caving in. The sheets of tears came down over me again. Blurring. I clawed at my mouth. What are you doing? she said, grabbing my hands. Honey?

  I pulled away from her. I tasted it, I said, pitching.

  But, Rose, she said, tasted what—

  I TASTED YOU, I said. GET OUT MY MOUTH.

  She drove me to the emergency room. I cried on the whole drive over, and I cried all through the waiting time, in the plastic chairs. Eventually, the doctor came in, and gave me a shot, and put me in a bed. She’s inconsolable, I heard my mother say, her voice high with concern, as I drifted off.

  12 The doctors didn’t know how to diagnose me, but I did have a delusion, they said, about my mouth. I stayed six hours in the wing off the emergency room of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center that day, taking tests, answering questions, peeing into a cup.

  We arrived at around ten-thirty in the morning, and after I calmed down, and the shot wore off, and after a few hours of basic medical work-ups, a tall male doctor with half-moon spectacles came into the room where I was recovering. I rested in bed, silently. Embarrassed by the scene I’d made.

  My mother sat in a side chair, nervously cleaning out her purse. The room around us was painted in layers of beige—a dark beige trim, an ivory wall, and a tastefully framed watercolor of some straw in a vase.

  He sat down on the edge of my bed, and asked me a list of questions. How I felt. If I slept. What I ate.

  Your bedtime is eight-thirty? he asked, writing it down.

  Yes.

  And you wake up at?

  Seven.

  And do you wake up in the middle of the night?

  Sometimes.

  He scribbled something on the chart. Why?

  Just some days, I said. I wake up at two.

  Mom wrinkled her nose, as if something smelled funny.

  Just when she’s up, I said, pointing.

  The doctor turned to Mom. Ah, he said, sym
pathetically. Insomnia?

  Oh no, Mom said. Just a little restlessness.

  Oh sure, the doctor said. Restlessness, I know that. You from here?

  Bay Area, Mom smiled.

  Bay Area! the doctor said. Such a nice place. I’m from Sacramento.

  Oh, really? Did—Mom said.

  Excuse me, I said.

  They both turned to me.

  Am I done? I said.

  The doctor opened his mouth to say more but then turned back to his chart. He asked me a few more questions about throwing up, just like the school nurse had, jotting it all down in his boxy doctor-handwriting. Then he left. Mom went out to talk to him. I lay against the pillow and aged many years in that hour on my own. After a while, he and Mom re-entered the room with another doctor and stood at the foot of my hospital bed. Used tissue and sticky candy and worn business cards filled the trash, the dregs of her handbag.

  They all stared at me from their heights of adulthood.

  Thank you for your help, I said, sitting up straight. I feel better.

  They’d served me a hospital bowl of noodle soup, which tasted of resentment, fine and full. I ate it all, making sure they could see. I ate each of the salt crackers, tucked in their ridge-edged plastic wrapping, factory-made in East Hanover, New Jersey.

  I’m very sorry, I said. Did I have a fever?

  You know you can’t remove your mouth, the tall doctor said.

  I know, I said. It’s part of my body.

  The other doc scratched her head. But—

  I don’t know why I said that, I said. I was feeling sick.

  My mother, standing to the side, leaned in. Is she—she whispered to the taller doctor.

  Both doctors tilted their heads. She seems to be okay. Give her time, they said. Perhaps it’s an isolated incident.

  I finished my soup. Changed back into my clothes while they gave my mother papers to sign. An old man in a wheelchair rolled past our doorway. Out in the hall, the fluorescently lit corridors lent a dull glow to the white linoleum floor, making it hard to tell the time of day, but I caught a glimpse of a far window, floor-to-ceiling, lit yellow with the blaze of a fading afternoon.