Eat Cake: A Novel

by Jeanne Ray

  “I promise you,” Sam said, looking at me. He took my hand and squeezed it. “I absolutely promise you that.”

  “Good,” Camille said. “Because I feel like I’m getting a look at what it would be like to have divorced parents and I have to tell you, I’m not interested.” She gave us both a hug and kiss good-night and that made all of the day’s discomforts worthwhile. After she was gone, Sam and I cleaned up the kitchen together.

  “Hollis is taking her time in there,” he said, peering down the hall.

  “Flossing is hell,” I said.

  We went to our bedroom and brushed and flossed our own teeth, then we got into bed. Once it was dark, Sam started in on a different kind of bedtime story, one that did little to wind the listener down for sleep.

  “I did some checking on your father’s insurance situation,” he said heavily. “He doesn’t qualify for a home health-care nurse.”

  I felt a deep pang of disappointment. We had been talking about the home health care we couldn’t afford. I was hoping there might be a little help out there. “What about physical therapy?”

  “The doctor said it would start after he got the pins out, but I don’t know. I think he needs to be working his fingers a little bit if he expects to have a job when this whole thing is over.”

  “Is he going to have a job? Do you really think he’s going to go back out on the road and start playing the piano again?” I thought of the empty suitcases waiting in the closet. Would he simply fill them up and start over? “Which thought is worse, my father wandering the earth looking for a good piano bar or my father staying exactly where he is?”

  Sam sighed. “I don’t know what I think. I can’t imagine this is it, that we’re going to spend the next however many years watching your parents duke it out at the dinner table every night.”

  “Till death do us part.”

  “I know an occupational therapist at the hospital, Florence Allen. I did her a favor once a long time ago. Maybe I could get her to look at him and give us some advice.”

  “I’d try anything,” I said. I liked to think that occupational therapy would make sure my father had an occupation again someday.

  “There’s something else,” Sam said.

  “And it’s more good news.”

  “I talked to my friend in Des Moines and had him pull up your father’s records. Medicare only covers eighty percent of the hospital stay, do you know that?”

  Maybe I knew that. I had spent enough time looking at my mother’s insurance papers. I felt distinctly cold in the bed. “Meaning exactly?”

  “Exactly eight thousand nine hundred seventy-two dollars and fifty-eight cents. They won’t be sending the bill out for a few more weeks. But it’s coming.”

  I got out of bed and took two Tylenol PMs. It was either that or go to the kitchen to make a seven-tiered wedding cake covered in sugared violets. When I got back in I gave two pills to Sam and handed him a Dixie cup of water. He swallowed with gratitude and we lay there side by side in the dark.

  “What are you thinking about?” Sam asked me.

  I told him the truth. I was thinking about Q-tips. “There’s something about cleaning out his ears that completely undoes me. It’s just so … so …”

  “Intimate.”

  “Well, yes, that too, but I’m always afraid I’m going to stick it in too far and rupture his eardrum.”

  “Then he would be a deaf pianist with broken wrists.”

  “It just goes from bad to worse.”

  The moonlight fell over the bedspread in the shape of window panes. I put my head on Sam’s shoulder and he put his arms around me and for that moment I felt safe, like I was standing inside a cake.

  “Ruth?”

  “Hmm?”

  “You’re not going to divorce me because I lost my job and drank a beer in the middle of the day, are you?” Sam asked.

  I propped my chin on his chest. “You’re not going to divorce me because my incredibly difficult divorced parents are both living with us, are you?”

  Sam kissed me. “Let’s call it a draw,” he said.

  “Tell me one thing, though,” I said. “I’m only asking you this because my father can’t hear us. Is there something you’re interested in? I mean, if you could really turn your life around and follow your dreams, if you didn’t have to worry about us or the money, what would you want to do?”

  “You already know what I want to do.”

  I tried to stifle a yawn but I failed. “I do?”

  “You said it—well, you sort of said it, that first morning after I lost my job.”

  My eyes were closed. That was before my father was living with us. That was seven lifetimes ago. “I don’t remember.” I could feel the wave of Tylenol PM breaking down over my head and pulling me out in the dark tide of sleep. Even as I was asking him the question, I was forgetting what I was saying. I did, however, hear his answer, which he whispered into my ear.

  “Sailboats,” he said in the enormous darkness. “I’d like to build wooden sailboats.”

  Chapter Five

  MY FATHER WAS USED TO GOING TO BED AROUND four o’clock in the morning. Staying up late was actually part of his job description. Piano players who worked in bars could not be members of the early-to-bed, early-to-rise set, not unless you wanted people to start hanging out at piano bars at nine o’clock in the morning. I understood it, and I understood why old habits would be hard to break. Still, the fact that he wanted his breakfast at one in the afternoon took some getting used to. My father commented often on the aggressive sunniness of Wyatt’s bedroom, which lacked the blackout shades hung over every hotel window nationwide. My mother commented on the fact that most adults had completed half a day’s work before Guy had flickered an eyelid. I was just grateful to have a little extra time to run errands and get the housework done before he was up and underfoot. Once my father was awake, the second half of my day began. Sam and my mother and I split up the tasks. In short, they took care of bathing, brushing, and any other bathroom matters. Once they got him toweled off and into his shorts, they gave a heavy sigh and turned him over to me. I was standing at the edge of my father’s bed, the bed I no longer thought of as Wyatt’s bed, with a bunched-up sock in my hands, when I saw them. I stopped, frozen, sock aloft.

  “Ah,” my father said. “I know. They’ve gotten pretty bad.”

  “Do they hurt?” I didn’t know how he’d been walking around.

  He shook his head and flexed back the balls of his feet to see for himself. “Oh no, I don’t even notice them. I guess that’s the problem. I wasn’t so good at keeping up with them when I was able to do something about it. Now, my hands, my hands always looked first rate. I always got a manicure every Thursday afternoon no matter what city I was in. But I’ll have to admit I’ve let the toes slide.” I glanced at his fingernails, which were a little long, but the toes were in a league of their own.

  “How did I not notice this before?”

  He shrugged. “Who pays attention to feet? You’ve got things to do, you just want to get that sock on. Go ahead,” he said, and pointed out his foot like some gruesome version of Cinderella. “Let’s just cover them up.”

  I sank down to the floor and for a moment I thought I was going to cry from some complex combination of exhaustion and grief and anger and guilt and love. Every one of those feelings surprised me. What kind of person would let her father walk around with a shoe half full of razor blades? His toenails were heavy, yellowed, and flaking. They twisted up and left and right and down, each one with its own specific set of problems. Even if I had never seen my father’s feet, which I had from time to time since he moved home, I should have been aware of them. I thought of the morning not too long ago that I had stood in this very room with my mother. She had told me that my father meant to come and stay, that once we let him in there would be no getting rid of him. Now I could see she was right. I didn’t think he would live here forever, I thought at some point he would get w
ell and move on, but I knew now that I would always be worrying about him. For the rest of his life I would be calling him up in piano bars asking him if he had remembered to cut his toenails.

  I patted the top of his pale foot, which seemed too cold, which worried me also. “I’ll get you an appointment with the pedicurist. I’ll tell her it’s an emergency.” Most men you couldn’t take to the pedicurist, but I figured my father wasn’t most men. Still, he balked.

  “Just leave them. They don’t give me any trouble. Once we get this hardware out, I’ll take care of it.”

  “In another six weeks they’re going to be cutting out the front of your shoes.”

  “They’ll be fine.”

  “Why wouldn’t you want to get your toenails clipped?”

  “It’s just … you know I don’t like to go out. It can all get so complicated. It’s one thing if I’m out with Sam, but for me to go into some beauty shop …”

  I understood. It was about the bathroom. More and more my father was becoming afraid of not having anyone around to take him to the bathroom. There had been one afternoon when he was taking a nap and everyone went out and when he woke up and needed to go … well, I probably wouldn’t have felt any differently. “So I’ll cut them.”

  “Really?” His face brightened. “You could do that?”

  “You don’t need a degree for toes. If I don’t do a beautiful job, who’s going to see?”

  “That’s the spirit,” my father said, and gave one foot an appreciative stomp. “Nobody’s going to see my toes.”

  “I’ll get a pan of water. I think we ought to soak them first.”

  “Soak them in lye if it would make it any easier on you.” My sockless father stood up. He stopped to tap the top of my head lightly with the tip of his finger, what had come to pass as an affectionate gesture from a man who could make very few affectionate gestures. “I’m going to go in the den. I can watch a little hockey while you work.”

  “Sure,” I said. “It’s all the same to me.”

  So I got some towels and a plastic basin and every size of clipper and file and cuticle scissor I could find hiding in the back of various bathroom drawers. I got some cuticle cream and a package of orange sticks from Camille’s room. I filled the basin up with warm water in the kitchen sink and threw in a handful of Epsom salts and took the whole production into the den, careful not to slosh the water while I walked. My father was safely ensconced in his chair with the television on. He’d become very comfortable with working the remote with his fingertips.

  “Ruthie, you’ll never believe this. It’s the Maple Leaves playing the Rangers in Toronto, nineteen seventy-nine. I was at that game! Can you believe that! Sam!” he shouted. “Where’s Sam? What a game that was. I even remember where I was sitting. Hey, maybe I’ll be on TV.”

  Sam walked in looking a little bleary-eyed and I wondered if he had been back in our bedroom taking a nap. He turned and looked at the television while I spread two towels out over the floor. “Are those the ’seventy-six Maple Leaves?”

  “ ’Seventy-nine!” my father said triumphantly.

  Sam sank into a chair, his eyes fixed on the screen. “I can’t believe this. You just turned it on?”

  “I was there.”

  Sam looked at him. “No.”

  “You don’t even like hockey,” I reminded my husband.

  “I did in nineteen seventy-nine,” Sam said. He picked up the remote control and turned up the volume. I rolled up the cuffs of my father’s old khaki pants and then picked up his feet and set them into the water.

  “Is that too warm for you?” I asked.

  “You could put my feet in the fireplace,” he said. “Right now I couldn’t care less.”

  My mother came into the room wearing her blue warm-up suit. She knotted a fist against each of her hips in an attempt to become a caricature of a little old woman irritated by loud television. “Some people are trying to read a book.” She raised her voice to a small scream, as if she had to strain to jump up over the volume. It was not that loud.

  “Sorry, Hollis,” Sam said, and reached again for the remote.

  “Go for a jog,” my father said to her. “You’re dressed to go running. So go running.” I wondered how he even knew what she was wearing. He hadn’t taken his eyes off the screen.

  I reached back into the water and extracted one heavily clawed foot. My father did nothing to help me with the lifting. I patted it dry with an extra towel and studied his cuticles, which were in serious need of taming.

  My mother was appalled. “For God’s sake, Ruth, what are you doing?”

  “What do you think I’m doing?” I held his big toe between my thumb and forefinger, turning it from side to side in hopes of finding the proper angle of approach. The light was imperfect. It looked like what I would need was a hacksaw.

  “You’re going to let her cut your toenails now?” my mother said.

  “It was her idea,” my father said.

  “Ruth, you said you were going to take me to the fabric store this afternoon. They’re having a sale on remnants.”

  “Remnants!” my father howled. “Don’t tell me you’re still collecting remnants! Stupidest damn hobby in the entire history of stupid hobbies.”

  At that moment the first goal was blocked and my father’s foot shot out of my hands like a caught fish that sees its chance to make a break back for the water. Sam stood up and cheered. “I remember that block!” my father shouted. “Wasn’t that brilliant!”

  “I could have told you it was going to wind up like this. Exactly like this.” My mother gave me a particularly cold stare, as if I had broken my father’s wrists myself as some kind of social experiment in family reconstruction. Then she turned to leave the room.

  I grabbed his foot and held it tightly in my hand. I was willing to do this, but I wasn’t going to let it eat up the rest of my afternoon. My mother was right. I had promised to take her out. I took a pair of clippers and made my first incision. The sound was not a snip so much as a crunch. My father flinched and then jerked. “Hold still,” I said.

  “Hey!” he said. “That’s too close!”

  I felt my palms starting to sweat and I hoped I could hold the clippers steady. “Watch the game. See what the goalie can do.”

  Sam and my father both glanced at the screen. A toenail flew past the parameters of the towel and I picked it up and dropped it back onto the terry cloth. With no one to scream along, the television seemed as loud as my mother had said it was.

  At the next clip my father jerked hard and made a little squeak. “Watch it there!”

  I stared at him until he relented.

  “It didn’t hurt,” he said petulantly. “But you’re getting too close.”

  I went back to work. It was the moment I reached my personal low, my dark night of the soul. Not that anyone else noticed it, but I suddenly felt I couldn’t go on with all this, that I didn’t have the energy for one more toe. Suddenly the thought of getting in the car and heading north to Canada, home of the Maple Leaves, seemed to me to be the only rational thing to do. Not that there was any money, but I could find a job in Canada. There was a long and noble tradition of my fellow countrymen heading to the great frozen north when things got tough at home. Focusing on the inside of a cake didn’t really cut it for me anymore. I needed to envision another country, someplace with vast open spaces where no one went looking for family members. That’s where I was when the doorbell rang.

  I waited half a minute, thinking my mother would answer it, and then threw in another fifteen seconds thinking Sam might respond. When I came to my senses I picked my father’s foot off the floor and dropped it back in the tub, making a significant wake. “Soak,” I said with little kindness in my voice. I dried my hands of the whole thing.

  The woman I found standing on my front porch was six feet tall, not including the crepe soles of her shoes and the two inches of lift she had in her hair. She had broad shoulders and big arms and
hands that could have popped walnuts out of their shells all day long, but her legs were delicate and pretty, even if they were cased in serious white stockings. She was a dark-skinned black woman in a very bright white dress, and I have to say the whole effect of her, height and width and white and black, was nothing short of dazzling. She had an enormous tan leather bag slung over one shoulder and it was easy to imagine that inside that leather bag was the answer to every problem, Mary Poppins style.

  “I’m Florence Allen,” the woman said. She held out her hand to me and I shook it. “I’m a friend of Sam’s.”

  “Oh, Florence, I’m Ruth. I’m Sam’s wife.” I glanced quickly over my shoulder, still holding her hand. I willed the television to be turned off, the den to be picked up, my father’s toenails to be clipped and filed. “I didn’t know you were coming today.” I thought that Florence Allen was in the neighborhood of my age. She had a nice face but she kept it serious, businesslike.

  “Didn’t you get the message?”

  “Message? No, we aren’t so great about messages around here.” I had until recently been a meticulous, some might even say zealous, housekeeper, but times had changed. You could not make out the pattern on my sofa, there was so much clean laundry encasing it. I suppose I should have been grateful it was clean laundry. I stepped back to let her into the ruins of my home.

  “I spoke to a girl yesterday.”

  “My daughter.”

  Florence Allen raised her hand. “I threw it into the message void, didn’t I?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “I have daughters,” she said. She had a very soothing voice.

  “Goa-lie!” my father shouted.

  Sam banged his beer bottle against the edge of the coffee table in agreement.

  “You could drive the puck right up that guy’s ass and he wouldn’t know it!” my father said.