The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

by Aimee Bender

Like—did you ever walk down a hall and accidentally overhear a secret?

  He thought about it, for a minute. No, he said. Why?

  What if you did?

  I’d keep the secret, he said.

  I shifted around in my seat. Okay, I said. Okay. Or, just do you have any special skills?

  He chuckled a little. No, he said.

  I didn’t mean that you don’t, I mean—

  No, really, he said. He turned to me fully, and his face was friendly. I hit the mean all through law school, he said. I scored exactly in the fiftieth percentile on the LSAT. Five oh. He nodded at himself, pleased.

  I closed my textbook.

  But you were in Briga—I said.

  Doon, he said. I was a perfectly average singer, he said. Even the teacher said so.

  You hate hospitals, I said.

  So?

  I don’t know, I said, pulling at the corner of my textbook. Why do you hate them?

  That’s not a special skill, he said.

  No, I said, waiting.

  He re-shaped the pillow at his back. Show previews skimmed across the screen, advertising our favorite high-intensity medical program, which was coming up soon.

  I just don’t like sick people, he said.

  Is it because you feel something?

  What?

  Like you feel their sickness, or something?

  He scratched his nose. He looked at me a little funny. No, he said. I just don’t like them. How do you know about that anyway?

  Was he kidding? The TV switched to commercials, of dancing kids on tree-lined streets.

  Mom tells our birth stories all the time, I said. How come you can watch it on TV?

  He waved his hand at the screen. Oh, that’s different, he said. That’s fun.

  It’s in a hospital, I said.

  It’s a set, he said.

  I think it’s set in a real hospital, I said.

  Doesn’t matter, he said. No smell.

  But what if you get sick? I said.

  I never get sick, he said.

  He picked up the remote. Twirled and twisted it, on the sofa. The questions were drumming in me, piling on each other, and I dug deeper into my end of the sofa and tried to remember how George did it, at the dinner table. Softly, as if the answer was not dire. As if the question was a seed placed a few feet in front of a curious bird.

  You never get sick? I said, after a pause.

  Dad glanced back over. Wiggled his feet.

  I just have healthy genes, he said, lifting his shoulders. Always have. All that good Lithuanian chicken.

  We stared ahead, together. I picked at the corner of my textbook where the lamination had broken open, revealing the soft layers of brown cardboard.

  Would you visit if I have to go to the hospital sometime? I said.

  He flapped a hand at me. You’re a healthy kid, he said.

  But just in case, I said. If it’s serious?

  Hasn’t been, he said.

  But if it was?

  He looked over at the clock, blinking greenly at the base of the TV. In two minutes our show would come on.

  I, he said.

  His eyes on the clock.

  Might, he said.

  His hand rested in the fold of the red ledger. Colors scattered across the screen.

  There was nothing much else to say, so we watched the series of car commercials flying by. According to the ads, the first car made you manly, the second made you rich, the last one made you funny.

  I pointed out a zippy yellow hatchback driven by a clown. I didn’t really like it so much one way or another, but I just needed something to do. Dad peered at the picture. Then he turned to a blank page in his ledger, jotted down the name of the car, and wrote my name, with a precise little arrow pointing to it.

  You’re not so far from sixteen, he said.

  He pressed the mute button, and the room filled with sound. Horns, voice-overs, snatches of songs. It was like we were exchanging codes, on how to be a father and a daughter, like we’d read about it in a manual, translated from another language, and were doing our best with what we could understand. Thanks, Dad, I said. The commercials ended, and the show began with a couple of nurses bustling through an ER. A man had a seizure on the tile. Someone yelled through the intercom. I got pulled into the story, and so at first I didn’t hear when he said my name at the break.

  For you, Rose? he was saying. For your birth?

  When I turned, his face was closer than usual, and I could see the slight strain in the lines above his eyebrows. The quiet urgency in whatever he wanted to tell me.

  Yes? I said.

  His hand hovered in the air.

  For you, he said, I brought binoculars.

  Mom came home right as the TV show ended. Ten p.m., on the dot. We heard the car in the driveway, and then the key in the lock, and she breezed into the room with a shine to her cheeks I couldn’t look at. I looked at my father instead, to see if he saw any of it, but he was half caught in the images flashing by of another car, a fourth car, one that made you perceptive, a car he probably should buy, and he saluted my mother from his spot on the couch and asked how the errands had gone.

  Great, she said. Fine. Rose, you’re still up? How was the show?

  What errands did you run?

  All sorts, she said, brushing a wisp of hair out of her eyes.

  Where are the bags? I said.

  Oh, she said, waving her hand. In the car, she said.

  She winked at me again.

  Time for bed, I said, before she could.

  Come sit, said my father to my mother, patting a couch cushion.

  I left the room.

  17 That night, as I burrowed into the sheets, my mother still tucking in sheets better than anyone, I closed my eyes and went through my usual routine, which involved thanking God, or the mysterious bounty of the world, for the vending machine at school, for the sad lady with the hairnet who still worked at the cafeteria, for the existence of George, and for whoever ate my mother’s cookies at the co-op. It was my usual routine, so it took a second for the change to sink in, and then I shook awake, pressed into my pillow: Larry, rising, Larry, the likely man who saved me from eating her cookies, the man I’d been praying a thank you to for the last almost four years as Mom brought tray after tray of baked goods to the studio. Joseph! I said, knocking on the wall we shared. I said it loud. I knocked again, rapping my hand hard on the wall. To wake him up, from whatever deep state of study he was in. I kept knocking.

  After ten minutes, he strode into the room in his pajamas. What, he said.

  He was tall, like Dad, but skinny, unlike Dad. He did not care about soccer. His eyes were caverns. And I could see how he was leaving, how he was halfway out the door. Still, as he stood there, arms crossed, hair flat, grim, tense, I remember it as a wash of relief, that he was still there, tangible, able to come in, annoyed, to be in my room. It was an antidote to the feeling that nobody was home.

  18 My brother had taken to disappearing. Not in the way of a more usual adolescent boy, who is nowhere to be found and then arrives home drunk, with grass-stained knees and sweat-pressed hair, at two in the morning. No. It would be the middle of the afternoon, airy and calm, and Joseph would be home and then not home. I would hear him packing up those college boxes in his room, shuffling, rustling, and then I’d hear nothing.

  He was scheduled to babysit me on Sunday night, just a few days after the roast beef dinner, while our parents attended a law office party downtown. It was my father’s annual post-holiday work party, this year located at the Bonaventure, a pole-shaped silver hotel Joseph had always admired for its outside elevator, one that rode up and down the building like a zipper. He appreciated the vacuum closure inside the booth; I liked the rotating bar at the top. My mother enjoyed parties but my father dismissed them as an unpleasant job necessity, and the two of them would dress up and drive off and hold cocktails and chat while Joseph got twenty bucks for half watching antsy me
.

  To be babysat by my brother was basically to share the house for the course of an evening. Usually we weren’t even in the same room. At twelve, I was too old for a babysitter by a lot of people’s standards anyway, but it was a good way to avoid acknowledging that a lot of seventeen-year-old boys would push to go out, and my brother did not: either push, or go out. He went once with George to a rock concert and came home in a taxi after an hour, alone. Too much, he said, when Mom asked.

  I asked my mother if I could do something else that night, go to a friend’s house or something, but she said she liked paying Joseph to watch me. Please? she said, touching my hair. It makes him feel like a big brother, she said. But he doesn’t watch me, I said, kicking at the wall. She took out her wallet from her purse. How about I pay you too? she said, slipping me a twenty-dollar bill.

  That Sunday, I spent the afternoon watching TV. I rolled up my twenty-dollar bill and tucked it inside a jewelry-box drawer. I played twenty-five games of solitaire, and I lost twenty-four of the times, until I got so sick of the deck I took it outside and made the entire suit of diamonds into a streamlined fleet of mini paper-plastic airplanes. I put the final touches on my current-events modern world presentation, and then stared into space for a while, outside on the grass, surrounded by thirteen snub-nosed diamond-planes, crashed. I felt over-stuffed with information. Over the course of several packed days, I’d tasted my mother’s affair and had the conversation with my father about skills. I was not feeling very good about any of it—I felt a little closer to my father, yes, but if I was dying in the hospital, he would probably wave a flag from the parking lot. I felt relieved that my mother had another person to give her cookies to, but that person tore up the family structure and my father had no clue. And who could I tell? I loved my brother, but relying on him was like closing a hand around air. I soaked up my time with George, still, but he was stepping ahead into a future that did not include me.

  Sometimes, at school, across the dirt quad that separated the junior high from the high school, I’d see George with an arm slung casually around a girl, talking into her hair as if it was the most normal thing on earth to do. Not only were his eyebrows growing into proportion with his face, but he seemed to be progressing internally at a regular rate as well. Eliza, too—when I went over to her house after school, we flipped through fashion magazines and tested lip glosses. There, we were becoming teenagers; at my house, I pulled a shoebox of dolls and stuffed animals and Grandma’s objects out from under my bed. Beheaded cherubs, old overly bent Barbies, broken jewelry. Eliza went along with it, agreeably, but she made me swear I would never breathe a word to anyone at school. If you tell about this, she said once, her eyes wide, brushing down the long plastic hair of a Barbie, I will bury you, she said. I’d nodded, mildly. It seemed reasonable to me. We were, after all, almost thirteen. With naked dolls in hand, or even the occasional doll-baby, it sometimes felt like we were pedophiles.

  My mother had bought a new dress for the work party, and she modeled it for me as my father got ready, the lavender pleated skirt skimming the air. Very pretty, I’d told her, in the mirror. Dad will love it, I said.

  You okay with tonight? she said, standing in my doorway.

  Sure, I said. I got paid.

  Oh, and please don’t tell about that, she said, lowering her voice. Usually the babysittee doesn’t get any money.

  I looked up at her. You’re kidding, I said.

  No, she said, with total sincerity. It’s a unique setup.

  I returned my gaze to the floor of my bedroom, sorting through some of Grandma’s latest: a polished brown rock, a red rhinestone bracelet with a bent clasp.

  And the hotel number is on the fridge, Mom said. She swished the folds of her skirt. She seemed both fidgety and calm at the same time. The guilt in the roast beef had been like a vector pointing in one direction just barely overpowered by the vector of longing going the opposite way. I hated it; the whole thing was like reading her diary against my will. Many kids, it seemed, would find out that their parents were flawed, messed-up people later in life, and I didn’t appreciate getting to know it all so strong and early.

  That afternoon, the house smelled of roasted pine nuts, because she’d spent the day in the kitchen, making homemade trail mix. I made my own pretzels! she’d announced at 4 p.m., turning off the oven, whipping her hair into a fresh ponytail. I had to taste them—she had presented a few tiny warm pretzels on a plate to me with such a look of triumph and hope—and it turned out to be the food that best represented her: in every pretzel the screaming desire to make the perfect pretzel, so that the pretzel itself seemed tied up in the tightest of knots, the food form, for once, matching the content. Now, that’s a pretzel all right, I’d said, chewing.

  In my room, she glanced around the space, filling time, until her eyes came to rest near my bed.

  Oh! Now, look at that!

  Their velvet-and-wicker marriage stool served as my nightstand, pushed right up next to the bed. I’d had it for a while, but it must’ve slipped my mother’s watch. One book fit nicely on its soft top, and I could wedge homework papers into the interwoven pattern of the base.

  I like it, I said.

  She walked over, pushed at the cushion. God, it’s so old, she said. We should re-upholster it; I could do it at the studio, in a day. Can we? You could pick your favorite color and material—

  I like it how it is, I said.

  Hey, Paul, she called. Come look at this!

  In the other room, Dad shut some drawers. He strode over to my doorway, with two ties around his head.

  Blue? he said. Or red?

  Look, she said, pointing.

  At what?

  Red, I said.

  In the doorway, he nodded at me, almost shyly. We’d been a little friendlier with each other since the TV watching. He was decked out in a blue blazer, gold buttons winking. Her lavender dress, his red tie. It was like they had traded in their used-up models for a glamorous in-love pair.

  Very nice, I said, as he pulled the blue tie off his collar and draped it on a bookshelf.

  Mom pointed at the stool. Look, she said. Our daughter, the family historian.

  Dad, preoccupied with straightening the red correctly, skimmed the room, but when his eye caught the stool, his face cleared. He stepped in, closer. Knelt on the floor and ran a hand over the eaten velvet.

  Ah, he said. He looked over at me, still sitting and sorting on the floor. Where’d you find this?

  In the garage, I said. A while back.

  The moths love it, said Mom.

  Dad leaned in, to smell the cushion. The peach color, now a pale beige from age. He felt the structure of the wicker base, which was still in good shape.

  Mom wants to re-upholster it, I said.

  Oh no! he said. He shook his finger at the air. Never! he said. Hey, he said, to me; you asked about special skills? He rose, to stand. This was my special skill, he said. Making this happen.

  Mom crossed her arms in the door frame. The holes in it! she said. What special skills?

  He went and put an arm around her. It’s our original anniversary, he said, kissing her cheek. Rose, you know the whole story?

  I laughed. Mom laughed. She did not put an arm around him. The calm look I’d seen in her just minutes earlier had stiffened, her eye hollows deepening. Neither of them seemed to understand how things had gotten so strained—at the start of their courtship, Dad had thought Mom’s lostness was a sign of her spontaneity and he let her lead the way on weekends, taking the BART around and getting off at unexpected places to buy discarded records at street fairs. Mom had thought Dad’s steadiness meant he could handle and help anything, and she loved to watch him mailing his bills, studying, making his lists. All of which he still did.

  At my door, my father kept his arm tight around her, but he suddenly seemed stuck there, like a person who stumbles in public and apologizes to the air.

  You take good care of that, he told me,
sternly, pointing at the stool.

  Somebody has to, I said.

  For a second, his shoulders tensed, in his blue blazer. I waved goodbye, to get them out of my room. Go to your party, I said. Have fun.

  Mom fled first, in a circle of purple. Bye! she called, to Joseph’s room. Out we go! said Dad, too loud, as they passed, sparklingly, through the front door.

  The car drove off. The house settled itself around its new number of inhabitants. Outside, the day was ending, sky a middle blue. I flipped on the light and kept myself busy for an hour, zipping the doll gals around in boats made of slippers, marrying and divorcing the stuffed animals. I had stolen Grandma’s chipped teacup from the kitchen cabinet, and I used it as a friendly companion to the stuffed flamingo, who had an unusual love of tea. The polished brown rock was best friends with the beheaded Barbie. The blue tie a river to swim upon. After a while, even I grew bored, and embarrassed. I felt half five years old and half forty. It was too dark to throw tennis balls around the neighborhood, the only activity I knew that seemed to fit my age. In the kitchen, I dawdled around, eating a piece of factory bread coated with factory margarine, opening and closing some drawers. Thought about calling Eliza but remembered she was out. I found my way to Joseph’s door. I knocked. No answer. I knocked again.

  Usually on Sunday nights, Eliza went to the movies with her parents. She got to pick. She said they also all enjoyed sharing a large popcorn, with salt and butter flavoring. The popcorn would reside in Eliza’s lap, and both parents would dip in as they flanked her, as if she were the sole precious book between their sturdy bookends.

  No answer at the door. I knocked again.

  I made a gagging sound. I let out a half-strangled cough. Emergency! I said. Choking!

  Nothing.

  The air felt much too quiet in the hallway, bordered by the walls covered in framed family portraits. Cars puttered by outside, heading south to park near Melrose. Nightgown elastic cut into my arms. I was restless, and tired, and the tension of the week had built up in me and I felt my usual pool of politeness draining away. What was the point? My mother had a second life, my father revered the long-ago past, soon George would eat at the dorm instead of our house, and my usual obedience felt up. Done. For once, I ignored the Keep Out sign written in seventeen different languages, and the black-inked skull and crossbones which usually gave me nightmares, and I put a hand right on the doorknob and turned.