The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

by Aimee Bender

  Are you in pain? I asked.

  I’m okay, he said. He turned around to look at me, with eyes big and gray, and his voice softened, turning almost gentle.

  Just go, he said. Rosie.

  The room stretched longer, between us. A ringing bell. Maybe once, in our entire childhood, had he called me Rosie. He never even called me Rose. His face, those gray eyes, so big and, for a moment, all kindness. My throat tightened. I did not understand why. I did not understand what was going on.

  I went to sit on the floor, at his feet. It was easy, to go kneel at his feet, and he wanted to kick me off, I could tell, but there were chair legs near his legs, so he could not kick me. And he could’ve grabbed me with his hand, pushed me away, but he didn’t, and that gentleness was still in him: Rosie, he’d said, and I reached down, and when I lifted up the pant leg, there was no cut. I don’t even know how to describe it, what I saw. There was no blood at all, and how good it would’ve been, to see blood—to see it pouring out of his leg, and the surgery he would’ve needed, the painkillers, the beige rug soaking through.

  All I could grasp was just that he had not inserted the chair leg into his own, but that somehow it was mostly just a chair leg there, dressed in a sock, going into his shoe. No flesh leg visible at all, or only some kind of faint shimmer of leg that I could hardly see clearly. Had he cut off his legs? No. Again: no blood there, none. Instead, there was only that shimmer of human leg around the leg of the chair, a soft fading halo of humanness around the sturdy metal of the chair, a shifting of textures that somehow made sense. It looked like a natural assertion of chair over him, like the chair was dispelling him, or absorbing him, as natural as if that was the way it was with everyone. And then the chair leg, with its rubber foot, went inside his shoe, which no longer seemed to hold a human foot at all.

  I sat there. I did not say anything. I held on to his knee, the knobby bone of his fleshy knee.

  In the silence, something big and wordless. Those Morehead chairs, scattered throughout his apartment. How I’d show up, one day, and all the other furniture would be out on the balcony with the bed, and only four Morehead chairs would be in his apartment. Plus some pens and shoes.

  I love them, he’d told my mom, as each one came in the mail. They’re great, so functional.

  How rarely we heard him use the word love. Or, for that matter, great. He was sitting on the floor of the living room, in high school, cross-legged in front of the red brick fireplace, folding and unfolding the latest. I didn’t really care about the chairs, good or bad, but Joseph loved them, seemed to truly value chairs that could fold so easily into a line. The mailman had started to hate us.

  God, she loves them too, said Mom. I can’t stand them—no style. Cheapo.

  She stood above Joseph with her hands on her hips. There’s a table, too, she said, and, sure enough, it arrived the following week.

  Joseph called Grandma, that night of the fourth chair.

  Thank you, he told her, sincerely.

  I stood in the hall. He listened to something for a while.

  You too, he said.

  When he hung up, I was over at his side in a second. I could not give him a moment alone. What’d she say?

  She’s not making much sense, he said, brushing at the air. She said something about playing cards, he said. Mah-jongg?

  Well, they’re card-table chairs, said Mom.

  Can I have them, in my room?

  Sure? Mom said, tightening her lips. She eyed a chair, the knobby aluminum screw at its joint, the plastic brown-swirled cushion.

  He pulled splinters from her hand, weekly. Even in college, even during finals week. On the couch, with tweezers, for hours.

  In his room, he was back to the laptop, clicking. Reading the news, as if I wasn’t there. Frozen focus ahead. The moment of tenderness was over, the gateway had closed, and with the same certainty I’d felt just a few minutes before, about how much I’d had to stay and pay attention, something had flipped, like a pancake, easy, and now I had to go get the telephone and call George for help. Something big was happening with my brother, and I could hardly comprehend what I was seeing. I would have to leave the room for a second, but it had to be slow, this was not something that could happen quickly, and we had been to the hospital before and we could always go again and the doctors could take him back and maybe they would know what to do. It was twenty seconds, it was ten, to stride out of the room, to find the phone in its cradle and pick it up. And I didn’t have a choice then, either; I had to have someone else see this, had to, because Joseph would never confirm it for me, no one would, and I would call George first, it could only be George, only George, who’d believed me years ago when I told him the cookie was angry or the string cheese was tired, only George could be trusted to see what was in front of him. I walked out of the bedroom, strode into the living room, hunted around, found the phone, grabbed it, clicked it to on, and brought it back to Joseph’s room.

  Ten seconds, eight. The window was still open, the room dark. Only an empty chair, at a table, supporting a laptop, with the front page of the New York Times, news bright and colorful.

  Before I went out of my mind with sadness and bewilderment, and George found me at the market down the street, crying; before I called my mother in Canada and said he was gone again, had left, he had been here and seemed okay and then he was gone; before I called my father and wept incoherence to his secretary; before that, all I knew to do was to mark that one. That was my only lucid thought, and a thought I have felt as proud of as anything I’ve ever done in my life. Was just the impulse to take the one pen I could find in the room, the one on his nightstand, a black ballpoint, and to go to the back of that card-table chair, the one at the desk, one of four, the one in front of the laptop, and to draw a thin wobbly line under Morehead. She always signed her name the same. This one, I said, as I drew the line. Him.

  Part three

  Nightfall

  29 My mother kept good photo albums of the family, up to date. With stickers and captions and exclamation points. In one, she showed me a group picture of us in northern California, visiting distant cousins on a seashore near Sausalito. I peered closely at the people, noting my mother in her pale-green linen dress, my father looking especially tall and tan. Who’s that? I said, pointing to a brown-haired girl with a ponytail in a red T-shirt that reminded me of one of my T-shirts.

  That’s you, she said.

  What? I said. No, I said.

  She laughed at me. It’s you, she said. I think you had a new haircut.

  Maybe it was the angle? Or the light, or the fact that I was surrounded by people I never saw again, or the newness of the landscape, but for a few seconds before she told me, I did see myself as a stranger—an average light-brown-haired girl who looked pleasant enough, wearing a familiar red T-shirt I knew from my own closet. Once I knew it was me, the face clicked back into the formation I recognized from all the mirrors of my life. Of course, I said, laughing, as if I had known all along.

  30 The way it happened with Joseph was such that I was able to tell most of the story exactly as it had happened to me, and everybody focused on facts. I had seen him, yes. At his computer. He had spoken to me, he had called me Rosie. He’d seemed preoccupied, irritable, and then deeply, sweetly kind. He had no weapons nearby, he did not seem to be on drugs, and he’d told me, many times, that he was working. He had not greeted me at the door. I had broken in. My mother had been worried. She had sent me. She had called from Canada. Nova Scotia. He had been dressed. He had looked thin, but not emaciated. Not so different than his usual self. His refrigerator was empty of food except for butter, grape jelly, and a bread so old it crumbled into dust on contact. The bedroom window had been open, and the running theory of both my parents was that he had somehow jumped out of the window from the second floor, and maybe he had even packed himself a duffel bag, for some reason stashing it in the bushes, and that now he was on a journey. He needs time to search for himself,
my mother said, through her tears, when she arrived the next day, in her Canadian wool sweater, bizarre for the warm April Los Angeles afternoon. Did he seem suicidal? the policemen asked, in their navy blue, with their pads of paper, when we filed a report the following Monday. I looked at my mother and said no. And I meant no. Alone, I said, a few times, instead.

  That night, after I drew the line on the chair, I could not stop shaking. I left his bedroom and sat in the stairwell, in the outdoor corridor of Bedford Gardens, shaking. I crawled into his bed. No one entered or left the building. Time passed in blank sheets.

  Shadows of banana leaf plants gathered around the mermaid fountain. Car lights, turning corners, cast shafts of light through the building. His damp, old pillow.

  I was still holding the phone close to my cheek, like a blanket. It held no dial tone, as my mother had predicted. The strongest pull was just to fall asleep there, in the bed, for a long time, as if it had been put there on the balcony for that exact purpose—to catch me upon leaving, the mattress my endpoint—but I had calls to make, people to inform. The closest pay phone I’d seen was on the busy street, Vermont, just a couple of blocks away.

  After a while, I unfolded myself from the bed, left the phone receiver on the comforter, and descended the stairs. The air was cool, and it was dark out, the deeper, thicker dark of nightfall. My brain felt emptied, as if a wind had blown it clear. The way water from a hose pushes dirt off the sidewalk. Not in a good or a bad way, just cleared.

  Friday night bloomed in full form on the city streets, and Los Feliz was busying up for a weekend evening, restaurant umbrellas opened, table candles lit by electric wands. People sat outside in pairs, hands holding flaxen-colored glasses of wine. Forks and knives clinking on clean white plates. Outside the Jons grocery store, I could see a pay phone in a small glass booth, wedged into a far corner of the parking lot. I walked over, steadily. Alert. Pried open the folding door. Inside, the booth contained a half-bench and an old worn phone book lodged inside a black plastic cover. I took the seat. A tired-looking mother and son exited the store, balancing brown bags. Across the street, at the nearby triangular taco stand with the orange neon sign, two teenage girls picked at their hair, waiting in line, their wrists dressed with rows of gold bracelets. Cars drove up and down Vermont. They were all landscapes to look at, no different than a painting.

  I faced the phone. Dug in my pocket for change. The silver square buttons on the pay phone itself were my sole lifeline to people. In them, a reminder that someone, once, had dug in a mine to find iron, had spent sweat, and hours, to bring up to land the supplies demanded by the phone-making company that then made an alloy and melted it into squares embossed with tiny numbers that coded a sequence that attached to electrical wiring that would pulse through poles and rubber-coated lines to ring in the household of the only person in the world I could bear to talk to.

  Okay.

  I faced the little squares. ABC. DEF. GHI.

  George was probably out now, at some Friday Caltech event. In his car. Flooded with girls. Rising quickly, into places I could no longer reach. I knew his number by heart, and I fed the change into the slot, punching in the correct sequence. Then I sat very still, on the bench, while the wires linked and connected. The phone rang several times.

  Hello?

  I gripped the receiver. For a second, when he answered, I just pressed the plastic hard against my ear. I was so overcome with thankfulness that (a) he existed, and (b) he was nearby, and (c) he actually picked up.

  Hi, I said. It’s Rose. Edelstein, I added.

  Rose, he said. I know your voice. Come on. I’m really glad you called. Listen—

  George, I said. It’s not about today.

  I handled it awkwardly, he said. I just; I mean—

  George, I said, louder.

  He must’ve heard the jangle in my voice, because he stopped.

  What? he said. What is it? Is Joe okay?

  I stared through the window of the next-door liquor store, past the low shelves of candy bars to the clerk standing behind the counter. He had wavy black hair, and was resting on the expensive glowing bottles at his back, reading a Forbes.

  Can you come out? I said. I’m at the Jons.

  Where?

  On Vermont, I said.

  Is he okay?

  I didn’t answer. My throat had filled.

  I don’t know, I said, after a minute. I’ll call my dad too. I’m at the Jons, I said again, watching as the clerk rubbed his eye and turned a page of his magazine, folding and tucking it behind the others.

  Did he disappear again? George asked.

  Yes, I said, low.

  The grocery store door slid open and a couple in their twenties exited, in biker gear, his arm looped around her waist. She was stirring her straw around the bottom of a slushie.

  George made a hmm sound, into the phone. Then he said not to worry, we’d been through this before, it would be all right, and that he’d be over right away.

  Half an hour, okay? he said.

  What’s wrong? I heard a woman’s voice ask him, from the background corners of his room.

  I’ll be here, I said, dimly. In the phone booth, I said. Like Superman.

  Then I called my mother and left a message on the workshop machine telling her to come home, and I called my father and spoke with his secretary. Is he there? I asked. It’s about my brother. Tell him to call his daughter, I said.

  He’s almost done for the day, she said. Are you home?

  No, I said. I’m at the grocery store. I peered at the pay phone’s number, written in faint pen by someone’s hand on a thin strip of rectangular paper, attached under glass to the chrome body of the phone. It was a dinosaur, this phone. Everything about it, including the fragile shaky pen markings of a human hand, seemed destined for extinction.

  Just tell him to come to Bedford Gardens, I said. He’ll understand.

  Then I hung up, and swiveled my body to face the parking lot, waiting.

  To see someone you love, in a bad setting, is one of the great barometers of gratitude. Pasadena is twenty minutes east of Los Feliz, more with traffic, more on Fridays, and the parking lot of the Jons filled and emptied about five more times before George arrived, each car spilling out stranger after stranger with a need for groceries. A willowy woman with long gray hair. A compact man in a three-piece blue suit. A shaggy guy with tons of piercings. All wrong. With every unfamiliarly shaped person that drove up, my jitteriness increased. I wanted, desperately, to match up my memory with the parking lot’s contents, and every new combination of nose, eyes, and mouth that stepped out was an affront to that hunger. If I’d even seen a neighbor, or my old flute teacher, or the lady who sold us bread at the bakery, I would’ve run out of the booth and hugged them. It’s me, Rose, Rose, I would say. Rose.

  I sat very still, in my glass booth. Hands folded in my lap. A mildew smell drifted over from the yellowing pages of the phone book. When, finally, George drove up in an old gray VW Bug, his hair matted, glasses on, stubble on his cheeks, wearing old jeans and sandals and a T-shirt, at first I just watched him park, putting on the parking brake, opening the door, and I let the relief wash over me, because I knew how he was supposed to look and there he was, real, looking exactly like that.

  Hey, I said, standing, waving from the phone booth. He walked over with a stride of seriousness. We hugged. This, the gift of the steelworkers and the wire operators who had installed the poles that crossed the city. He smelled of fresh-cut apples, and sureness, and my head rested into the nook of his neck. After a minute, he pulled back, hands grasping my shoulders, and asked me what happened. I didn’t know how to answer, so I just said that my dad was on the way and Joseph had vanished—that I’d seen him and he seemed off and I’d gone for the phone to make a call and ten seconds later, when I’d returned, he was gone. George nodded, listening. We left his car parked in the lot and exited the store area to walk over to the apartment building. When the light at Verm
ont turned green, we stepped into the street and George grabbed my hand and the ghosts of our younger selves crossed with us.

  31 By the time we arrived at the front entrance of Bedford Gardens, my father was angling his car into a narrow parallel spot on the street. His office wasn’t far, and it was past the worst traffic time now, so he’d just taken Sunset west as soon as his secretary passed along the message. Once the car was set evenly between bumpers, he unfolded himself out of it, in his usual lawyer suit, navy blue with faint gray stripes, and that black-and-gray hair, as imposing as ever. He wiped his forehead down as if to pat his thinking into place, nodded a hello to George and then came up and hugged me tightly, closer than usual, his hands broad paddles on my back.

  It’ll be okay, he said, when he saw my face.

  Gone, I said, stupidly.

  He peered up the stairs, into Bedford Gardens. From street level, all the lights in the building seemed to be out.

  He’s not there, I said.

  How about this, said Dad, patting for his wallet. Let’s grab some food first. And you can tell us what you know. We’ve been through this before. Beth said you sounded awful on the phone, he said. He looked at me closely, eyebrows low. You don’t look great, he said. Did he hurt himself? he asked.

  No, I said. No blood.

  Drugs?

  No drugs, I said.