Eat Cake: A Novel

by Jeanne Ray

  My father liked exotic things. On the rare occasions we went out to dinner together over the years, he always wanted us to go to some little Ethiopian restaurant down a back alley or he would say he had to have Mongolian food. He would like this cake. It was Iranian. There was a full tablespoon of cardamom sifted in with the flour, and I could imagine that it would make the cake taste nearly peppered, which would serve to balance out all the salt. I stood in the kitchen, reading the magazine while the sharp husks of the nuts bit into the pads of my fingers. I rolled the nut meat between my palms until the bright spring green of pistachios shone in my hands, a fist full of emeralds. I would grind the nuts into powder without letting them turn to paste. I would butter the parchment paper and line the bottom of the pan. It was the steps, the clear and simple rules of baking, that soothed me. My father would love this cake, and my mother would find this cake interesting, and Sam wouldn’t be crazy about it but he’d be hungry and have a slice anyway. Maybe I could convince Camille it wasn’t cake at all. Maybe I could bring them all together, or at least that’s what I dreamed about while I measured out the oil.

  Once my nine-by-twelve was safely in the oven at 400 degrees, the phone rang. I wondered if the caller had somehow sensed that he or she needed to wait.

  “How would you feel about living in Des Moines?” Sam said.

  People in Minnesota don’t go to bed at night dreaming that one day they’ll live in Iowa, but I figured I wasn’t in any position to be close-minded. “I’m open to all discussion,” I said diplomatically.

  “It turns out I know the guy who’s the head of this hospital. He used to work with me, it must have been ten years ago.”

  “You’re at the hospital already?”

  “The roads were wide open,” Sam said. “I made great time. This guy, Dick McKenzie, he seems to think my situation may not be so desperate. In fact, he thinks it’s the right time to make a move.”

  “Sam?”

  “Hmm?”

  “How’s my father?” On the other end of the line I could hear the P.A. system calling out for one doctor or another. It was like I was talking to Sam at work.

  “Oh, Ruth, I’m sorry. You must think I’ve lost my mind. Maybe I have lost my mind. Your dad’s in good spirits. I’d say if you forgot to look at his arms, he’d be his same old self.”

  It wasn’t much information, but then Sam had spent even less time around my father than I had over the years. “Is he in a lot of pain?”

  “Let’s say he’s in a lot of pain management. He couldn’t feel too bad. He’s trying to pick up all the nurses.”

  “When do they think they’ll let him go?”

  “We’re waiting on a discharge now. The doctor already told me he’d get sprung this afternoon. We’ll be home tonight. Did you break the news to Hollis?”

  “It was not our finest hour.”

  “Your dad is a wild card,” Sam said with a sigh. “I think this is going to be hard on her.”

  From somewhere in the distance I heard a whoop.

  “I think it’s going to be hard on all of us,” Sam added.

  “Are you there with him now? Can I talk to him?”

  “No, I’m down the hall at a pay phone. Guy was going to have a bath. He said he’d rather I gave them some privacy.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Listen, you’re an absolute saint for doing this.”

  “It had to be done. You won’t completely discount Des Moines?”

  “Not if you promise we can leave my parents in Minneapolis.”

  “We can sneak out in the middle of the night. Camille can take care of them. She could whip them into shape.”

  I wouldn’t have minded sneaking off with Sam. After all, how many men would not only accept the fact that his divorced in-laws are moving in but actually go to pick one of them up? Considering all he had on him at the moment, he was unfailingly game.

  After I got off the phone I had a heightened sense of resolve. I was going to be as game as Sam. I got the sheets washed and the tennis shoes stored away. I moved the little television out of the kitchen and into Wyatt’s room. I even went out to the side of the house and cut a fistful of the few brave crocuses that were still standing and put them in a glass beside the bed. When Camille came home from school I spelled it all out for her: her grandfather, her grandmother, and the inherent limitations of the mix. I begged her to try to be helpful.

  “Great,” she said. “My dad’s unemployed and I live in a nursing home now.”

  I told her to go and straighten up her room.

  The last time I had lived in a house with my father I was two years old. Even before I was two, I gathered, he hadn’t been much in residence. Good or bad, this was all the experience I was probably going to get in my life with my father, and no matter who was against it, I decided to give it my best shot.

  Given how long it takes to get discharged, all the various conversations there were bound to be about medicines and rehab and follow-up visits, I assumed that they would be late, that Mother and Camille would be in bed and that I would be waiting up alone when they came in. I had not expected that Mother and Camille and I would be sitting in the kitchen eating lasagna (made with steamed vegetables and tofu as per Camille’s request) when the back door swung open.

  “The return of the natives,” Sam said in a weary voice. In either hand he held a ridiculously old-fashioned suitcase with sharp corners and smooth tan sides. He set them on the floor and flexed his hands back. He looked like a man who had just run over to Kosovo for a loaf of bread.

  My father, who had always seemed so much larger than life throughout my childhood, was in fact not such a large man at all. He was thinner than usual, and his white hair, which he liked to wear too long, fell down in his face. He had on a pair of tuxedo pants, black patent-leather shoes, and a hospital gown that tied up the back. He teetered slightly toward the dishwasher and Sam slipped his hand under one armpit. It was not what I had been expecting. I had been thinking casts, hard and white and plastered up in a tidy manner. The most dramatic thing I had imagined was maybe a sling. The truth was considerably less cinematic: Both arms were surrounded by silver halos, bright rings of Saturn through which thin metal rods pierced into his skin. His hands and wrists, puffy and scratched red, were suspended and eerily still. On the right side the apparatus reached higher. His elbow was pinned as well. Camille made a tiny sound and I gave her knee a gentle squeeze under the table. My father held his arms at an awkward forward angle as if he were coming in for an embrace or warding off another fall.

  “Ruthie!” he said, trying to put some boom into his voice. “Let me look at you, girl!”

  But we all just kept looking at him, staring in exactly the way that one would try very hard not to stare if he were a stranger you were passing on the street. There was just something so unfinished about it all, as if the doctors had realized he only had Medicare halfway through the surgery and so had chosen to just walk away. I gave my husband a helpless glance, but Sam looked pretty washed out himself. Someone just coming in on the story might have thought that whatever they had been through, they had been through it together.

  “Dad,” I said. “Are you okay?”

  Behind me I heard the fast scrape of my mother’s chair pushing away from the table.

  “Hollis,” my father said. “Not even a hello for your old husband?” He turned his body toward her and his arms leaned out for their embrace.

  “Go to hell,” my mother said. I had never seen such a look of fury on my mother’s face. She was completely unmoved by the obvious display of physical trauma. In fact, for a minute I thought she was going to go in to break his leg.

  And so the kitchen became paralyzed, the women on one side, the men on the other, my father reaching out for us, Sam holding him up. I wanted to go to them, to kiss them both, but I was afraid that would be the very thing that would send my mother into the abyss. To my deep amazement, it was Camille who crossed the linoleum, put her arms around m
y father’s neck, and kissed his scratchy cheek. “Hey, Grandpa,” she said.

  He looked at her and then he looked at Sam. “Don’t tell me this is Camille. Don’t tell me you’re little Camille?”

  “I’m little Camille,” she said.

  “You’re a butterfly,” he said. There was no bravado in his voice. “Hollis, did you see how beautiful this child is?”

  “I see her every day,” Hollis replied, every word an ice cube thrown at his head.

  Camille leaned forward and whispered something in her grandfather’s ear that made him smile hugely. “I would ruffle your hair, dear child, but I am completely unable.”

  “That’s all right,” she said lightly. “I’m pretty much over the hair-ruffling thing.”

  I couldn’t even remember the last time I heard Camille make a joke. “She’s getting back at me,” my mother whispered to me. “It’s because I yelled at her this morning.”

  “That looks like it really hurts,” Camille said, peering down at the place where the pin met the skin.

  “It would, my love, were it not for pharmacology.”

  Finally my own feet became unstuck from their place on the floor and I went over and kissed my father. He still smelled like Bay Rum. I wondered if one of the nurses had put it on for him or if he had such a buildup in his system over the years that he would smell like Bay Rum in his grave. For a moment I touched my face against his neck while he held out an arm on either side of me. “Welcome home,” I said.

  “Ruthie, you’re a champion, taking your old man in like this. Sam was telling me on the ride up that you two have problems of your own. I was sorry to hear about that. Sam is a fine man. Hard to imagine what kind of ninny would fire him.”

  I saw Sam look queasy. Something told me it had been a long drive. “We’re all going to be fine,” I said.

  “Fine!” my father said, his voice so glad you would have thought I had actually said something of substance. “That’s right! You’re a champion, Ruth. She’s a champion, isn’t she, Hollis? You did a fine job with this one.”

  “Camille is a butterfly and Ruth is a champion,” my mother said. “You’ve got it all figured out.” The configuration in the kitchen had changed. Now Sam and Camille and I were standing with my father and my poor mother was left over by the plates of half-eaten lasagna.

  “I don’t suppose there’s any chance of your letting bygones be bygones?” my father said.

  “Not one chance.”

  He nodded. “Okay, then what are the chances of getting a glass of Wild Turkey? Des Moines is in another state, you know. That’s a long ride.”

  Camille trotted off to the liquor cabinet with great authority, but my mother saved her the trouble of looking. “No Wild Turkey,” she said. “It’s not anything we stock.”

  “Is it all right for you to have a drink?” I asked.

  “A drink? A drink is good for me. That’s what the doctors all say now. I’m not talking about a scandal, just one drink. How is it you could have such a nice house and no Wild Turkey?”

  “I’ll go get some!” Sam said, and jingled his car keys in his hand to prove that he was good to go.

  “Oh, Sam,” I said, “after all the driving you’ve done? Relax, have something to eat. I can go to the liquor store.”

  Sam gave me a look of sheer desperation. I knew immediately what he wasn’t saying: He had driven across Iowa with my father and now he needed an excuse to be alone, if only for the amount of time it took to drive to the liquor store. “I’ll be two minutes.”

  “Get the big bottle,” my father said. “They’ve got a plastic one. You could drop that sucker on the floor all day long and you’re not going to break it. There’s some money in my wallet. Here, just reach in my back pocket.” My father turned around, offering up said pocket, but Sam declined to reach in.

  “Well, it’s good to see you haven’t wasted your life,” my mother said. “You’ve managed to learn something.”

  “Put a sock in it, Hollis,” my father said lightly. “I come in peace.”

  I heard the back door click closed and realized Sam had left without any of the social formalities of departure. Without him, the remaining members of our party stared at one another with unbridled awkwardness. I tried to remember the times I had been in the room with both of my parents. There was the year that my father drove halfway across the country for my birthday. He showed up at the door with a doll in a grocery sack, a pink paper hat on his head, a noisemaker hanging out of the corner of his mouth, which he blew into hard when my mother opened the door. That in itself almost scared her to death. She started yelling at him and he started saying, “For God’s sake, it’s the kid’s birthday.” Which it wasn’t. My birthday had been a month earlier. It wouldn’t have been awful, his getting the date wrong, but as it turned out he had a job to play at a club in town. He was planning on being there anyway.

  “How about some dinner?” I asked.

  “Oh sure, dinner would be good. It smells good.” My father stood there, arms out, as if he were waiting for someone to tell him when he might be allowed to unscrew them.

  I took a light hold of his upper arm and walked him over to the table where he sat down in Sam’s chair. Camille pulled up a chair next to his.

  “All those pills they give you, they make your stomach feel a little funny, you know. I think some food would take the edge off things.”

  “I thought that was the Wild Turkey’s job,” my mother said.

  I glared at her. “Do you have medicine you should be taking now?” I picked up plates and put them in the sink. I had the feeling we were all done with eating.

  “Sam’s got the pills. A whole suitcase full, you wouldn’t believe it. That Sam, he’s as good as a doctor. I guess when you hang out with them long enough, you know all the right questions to ask, but everybody was really taken with him in Des Moines. I told him on the way home, I think he should go to medical school. Wouldn’t that be something, Ruthie? You could be married to a doctor after all.”

  “Dad’s too old to go to school,” Camille said.

  I cut off a piece of lasagna and put it on a plate with some bread and a little salad. My father had gotten so frail. I was glad to have the pistachio cake.

  “You’re never too old to learn something and you’re never too old to start over, right, Hollis?”

  My mother stared down at him. She hadn’t taken up her seat at the table again. “Would you stop turning to me for confirmation on everything? If you want to make proclamations, make them on your own.”

  “Right,” he said, not listening to her at all. “Perfect.” I put down the plate of food and some clean silverware in front of him while he rested his wrists against the table. He stared at his dinner for a minute and then he looked up at me and smiled. “Really great.”

  We all waited.

  “See, the thing is, I can’t pick the fork up, and if I could pick the fork up, I couldn’t get it anywhere near the neighborhood of my mouth.” We all looked at his fingers, all of which appeared to be about half a size too big. They were deathly still.

  “Oh, God, Dad, I’m sorry. I don’t know what I’m thinking about.” I picked up the knife and the fork and cut off a bite. Then I blew on it a little, thinking it might be too hot.

  “What are you going to do, chew it for him?” My mother wasn’t being helpful.

  “It takes a while to get the swing of it all,” my father said. “Trust me. This just happened and I don’t have the swing of it yet myself. I know that I’m hungry but there isn’t much I can do about it.”

  I raised the fork to his mouth and he took the bite and chewed.

  “Wow,” Camille said.

  My father nodded at her in recognition of all her “Wow” implied. “This is the way it is, kiddo. This is why people have families. You never know when you’re going to fall and smash your wrists and not be able to get a fork in your own mouth. It wasn’t such a long time ago your mother was spooning in the cho
w for you.”

  I wanted to say that’s what I was thinking of. I knew that’s what I should have been thinking of, feeding Wyatt and Camille with tiny spoons and Gerber jars, but I have to say the two experiences had nothing in common. There was an incredible sweetness to putting stewed apricots into those tiny mouths, their fat pink cheeks, their wide-eyed pleasure at being loved and cared for. But this, this just seemed sad. Dad’s upper bridge was out, undoubtedly at the bottom of his overnight bag wrapped in plastic. He was short on teeth and I was grateful for the soft lasagna. Feeding my father didn’t make me think about how cute my children were when they were young. It made me think about how dependent my parents were going to be as they got older, how dependent Sam and I would be one day on Wyatt and Camille. Frankly, the whole business broke my heart.

  “So I haven’t gotten the story yet,” Camille said, “about what happened to you. What kind of accident was it?”

  “Could I have a bite of the bread?”

  “Butter?”

  He shook his head. I held up the piece of French bread and my father bit into it and chewed thoughtfully. For a poor kid with a hardscrabble past, my father had lovely table manners. I always thought it was all the time he had spent playing in fine hotels. When he had finished chewing I reached up and dabbed the corners of his mouth with his napkin and he thanked me. “I was walking across a floor and I slipped. I guess they must have just waxed it. Down I went. Bang. That’s the story.”