Eat Cake: A Novel

by Jeanne Ray

  “You gave her the cake and she took it?”

  “She seemed glad to have it.”

  My mother nodded her head in approval. “Well, I like her already.”

  That night I lay in bed and thought about cake. I was thinking about what I would bake for Florence Allen when she came back again, something she might eat with equal enthusiasm. I wanted a cake that would in no way be a logical followup to the sweet potato cake. I wanted a cake that would come completely out of left field, something that would astonish her. But I wouldn’t just be making it for her. I wanted something for myself, a cake that was complicated and beautiful, a cake that would take up time I didn’t have with enough tricky steps to keep my mind completely off of the matters at hand. I thought about a chocolate layer cake with burnt orange icing and the orange in the icing made me consider a Grand Marnier cake instead. Finally, in a complete non sequitur, I settled on a charlotte. I would make a scarlet empress. I closed my eyes and imagined myself making a jelly roll, the soft sheet of sponge cake laid across my counter. I spread the cake with a seedless raspberry preserve and then I rolled it up with even ends. I was nearly asleep. My parents were floating away from me. I took a knife and started slicing off the roll, but I didn’t let it end. No matter how many rounds I cut, there was more there for me, an endless supply of delicate spirals of cake. It was the baker’s equivalent to counting sheep, lulling myself to sleep through spongy discs of jam. There were enough slices of jelly roll for me to shingle the roof, to cover the house, to lay a walkway out to the street. In my dreams I made the house a cake, and inside that cake our lives were warm and sweet and infinitely protected.

  Chapter Six

  WHEN WYATT WAS FIFTEEN I FOUND TWO PLAYBOY magazines circa 1989 in his sock drawer. I had not been snooping. I always returned his clean socks to the drawer. I had been doing it with his full knowledge since he was old enough to wear socks. But on this particular day I was depositing an unusually large collection of small bundles to the dresser and could clearly see Miss June staring back at me with an expression that could only be described as brazen. She was barely covered by a couple of mateless tube socks that always stayed behind.

  What I thought at the time was that I wished Wyatt could have been a little cannier about hiding his belongings, but as it turned out, I seemed to have a talent for finding things. Lately, a different kind of magazine had been turning up around the house. I found them slipped under sofa cushions and hidden in bathroom cupboards, copies of Wooden Boat, Classic Sailing, and International Yachting. Sam had always liked the occasional boating magazine, so I doubt I would have noticed them if they had just been lying around in the open. But somehow the fact that they were wedged into the middle of a stack of towels made them seem suspicious, almost dangerous. I made no attempt to look for them and yet I seemed to find them everywhere. Finally I took a copy, closed the bedroom door, and flipped through one. It was filled with glossy pictures of elegant boats: boats cutting through white spray, boats reflected in a glassy lake, boats tied humble and obedient to their docks. Sam came in the room without knocking. After all, it was his room too.

  I tried to keep my perspective. They were only boats. “Are these yours?” I asked him.

  He took the magazine I was holding and rolled it in his hands. “Where did you find this?”

  “In an empty shoe box in the garage.”

  “Why were you looking in empty shoe boxes?”

  “I was going to mail Wyatt some brownies. That’s why I save the shoe boxes.” I tried to imagine myself in the garage just looking around to see if I could find someone else’s secrets. Did anyone have time for things like that?

  Sam tapped the magazine against his leg. He seemed very uncomfortable. “I like to look at boats, that’s all.”

  “So look at boats,” I said. “But why would you want to hide them? It’s not like I’ve never seen you look at a boating magazine before.”

  Sam sighed and sat down on the edge of our bed. “I don’t have much of a sense of privacy right now. Somehow everything feels different. I’m not used to being home all the time. It’s not like I’m trying to hide something, it’s just … I’m trying to figure something out is all. I just need to think it through.”

  We hadn’t talked about boats again since that first night he mentioned them to me. I was so sleepy that night I had half wondered later if I had dreamed the whole thing up. “Think boats through?”

  He looked up as if I finally understood him. His eyes brightened. “Yes.”

  “Okay.”

  “Did I ever tell you about my first boat, the first boat I sailed in?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Sam got up and put the magazine in his bedside table drawer. “It was with my uncle Nick. He kept his boat on Lake Michigan.”

  “Uncle Nick, sure.”

  “I loved being out on the water with him. I would say those afternoons with Nick were some of the happiest times in my childhood. He explained everything to me, all about sheets and lines and how to tack. He was a great teacher. Sometimes I wonder if it was the water that I loved or if it was just the sound of Nick’s voice.” Sam stopped and shook his head. “I’ve been in a lot of boats since then, some great boats, but since I lost my job, since everything’s been falling apart, I don’t know, every time I feel myself getting panicked I think about that boat. I just close my eyes and I’m sitting in the Oday with Nick and as far as I can see in every direction there’s water, and then I feel better again. It’s like I can breathe.”

  The boat was his cake. But I had never told him about my cake visualization. Now I wished I had told him years ago when I first started. I thought it was too late to try to go over it now. Of course he had his boating magazines. Didn’t I sit down at the kitchen table and pore over every page of the Baker’s Catalog the minute it came in the mail? Everyone has a private life, the things they love and think that no one else could really understand. I felt so close to Sam at that moment and yet there was no good way for me to explain it. “I understand.” It was all I could say.

  Sam smiled and kissed my forehead. “Thank you,” he said finally. “I’m glad we could talk about this.”

  I should have just left it there, in that nice moment between us, but I didn’t. “Do you want to take up sailing?”

  Sam looked utterly defeated by the question. “Oh, Ruth, I don’t know.”

  I wanted Sam to be happy. I wanted it more than anything. But at the same time I had been going over our finances and things were not looking good, not in the short term or the long term. There was tuition, a mortgage, my father’s outstanding hospital bill. There were five people costing money in this house, six if you counted monthly checks to Wyatt. As a group, we were not bringing very much in. I didn’t feel like I could say anything to Sam. He knew what we had and what we owed, and I didn’t see how reminding him was going to be helpful. Still, a boat? “Aren’t boats very … expensive?”

  “Not all boats,” he said.

  “I guess I just don’t understand if you’re thinking about this as a hobby or a job.” I didn’t understand if he was thinking about it as something to do here or something to take him away. Minnesota was the land of ten thousand lakes, but for the most part they weren’t the sort of lakes that were conducive to international yachting. If I had found stacks of canoeing magazines hidden around the house, I might have thought he was on to something.

  Sam fell back on the bed and stared up at the ceiling. “It really is like your father says. Sometimes you have time to sort it all through. Is it enough to just find a job that will take the place of my other job? I’ll tell you, Ruth, I think about it now and I’m not so sure I was happy in the other job. I think I was just on autopilot the whole time. I don’t want to go back to that life. I want to try to figure out what I’m supposed to do, what I might be good at. I really want to be good at something, to feel passionate about it. Do you understand that? Your father says that’s the best chance a person has
to make a real living in this world.”

  “Tell me the truth here. Just tell me what you want to do. Whatever it is, I’m going to be behind you.” I was hoping that he didn’t plan on following my father’s example. I had a mental image of Sam on a boat far, far out in the ocean. He looked tan and calm and happy as he sliced through a field of limitless blue water. The very thought of it scared me to death.

  “I told you, I’m not sure.”

  But I knew Sam, the way he was pressing his thumbs together, the way his shoulders bent in. This was more than just boats. “There’s something else.”

  Sam sighed and rolled over on his stomach. He was facing away from me, which I thought was a very bad sign. “I’m getting two months’ pay as severance,” he said.

  I had the feeling that the ground was suddenly loose under my feet, loose and slowly slipping down into some invisible drain beneath the bed. Two months was nothing. It was a sneeze. We had used up almost two weeks already, nearly twenty-five percent, without even realizing what we were doing. “Can you negotiate?”

  “It’s the same for everyone,” he said. “There might be a lawsuit but that’s not exactly the kind of thing you can take to the bank. The whole thought of a lawsuit makes me feel pretty uneasy anyway.”

  I lay down on the bed next to my husband. I put the palm of my hand on the flat of his back. I was terrified. I loved him. “So what do you think we should do?”

  Sam was quiet for a long time. He seemed to be taking very shallow breaths. “Can I talk to you?” he said. “If I say something, can you just agree to think about it for a while without telling me what a bad idea it is? I know it’s a bad idea, but I just don’t want you to tell me so the minute I say it.”

  “Okay,” I said, trying to keep the tentative dread out of my voice.

  “Well, the way I look at it, we have two choices.” He kept his head turned away from me so that I would think it was really the wall he was confiding in. “Either we take that money and just live on it for two months like it was a regular paycheck and I try to find another job I don’t really like so I can bring in other regular paychecks, or …”

  But then he stopped. Nothing came after the “or.” I waited until the moment had taken on the tinge of something unbearable. “Or?” I said finally, hoping to remind him where he had left off.

  “Or I take that money and buy a boat. I fix the boat up and sell it for a lot more money and we make a profit.”

  I tried not to breathe, as I knew that even a sharp intake of air would sound judgmental at this point. Boats sounded like a bad idea to me, a really bad idea, but I was willing to withhold judgment for a while. I trusted Sam, even if I didn’t understand him at the moment.

  “Okay,” I said.

  Sam turned his head over and looked at me. “Okay what?”

  “Okay, I heard what you were saying and I promise not to be critical and to think it through the way you asked me to.”

  “Great,” Sam said, closing his eyes. “You think I’m an idiot.”

  My father was in the kitchen reading a John le Carré novel. His arms were spread out over the table. I came in just as it was time to turn a page. He pushed the book out with the tip of the metal halo until it was down near his fingertips, then, using the slightest amount of touch possible, he maneuvered one page over and slid the book back toward the edge of the table again until it was close enough to read. “It breaks up the narrative flow, I’ll tell you,” he said, not looking up. “But I’m using my fingers.”

  “Dad, I’ve got to talk to you.”

  “I’m a captive audience.”

  “You can’t keep hounding Sam to discover himself. He needs to get a job, to get back to his regular life. That’s what’s going to make him happy.”

  “That’s what will make you happy,” my father said.

  “We have bills. Wyatt’s in college, we’re still paying off Camille’s braces, this house isn’t paid for. Don’t you ever think about those things? Shoes, insurance, school trips, the auto club? Doesn’t any of that stuff occur to you?”

  “Not anymore, really. I’ve lived my whole life outside the box. People feel so bound down to their possessions, their responsibilities, that they wind up not even living their lives. I know you have your worries, I just think that Sam deserves to think about Sam for a change.”

  I picked up his hand and started to rotate his fingers, first in one direction and then the other. Florence was coming back today and I wanted him to be limber. Still, I will admit there was a part of me that felt like giving one a little bit of a twist until he agreed to see things my way. “Do you know,” I said, starting with his index finger, “that he’s thinking about buying a boat?”

  My father looked down at his spy novel. “I don’t know anything.”

  “Okay, just for the sake of conversation, forget about the fact that we are in real financial straits, did you ever stop to think that he could be hurt on a boat?” I took another finger and went five times to the right and then five times to the left in circles that were slow and no larger than quarters.

  “Gently now,” my father said. He was always nervous when we touched his hands.

  “He could drown.”

  “Oh hell, Ruthie, don’t give me that. Sam can swim.”

  Sam could swim, but from where? The middle of the Atlantic? The doorbell rang. “That’s Mrs. Allen,” I said. “Try to behave yourself.”

  “Behaving. There’s more to life than behaving. I never should have left you with your mother. That was my mistake. I should have taken you with me. Then maybe you’d be able to see some version of the world other than the one that’s presented to you on the ABC nightly news.”

  I walked away from him, the old adage “Saved by the bell” ringing in my head. Florence Allen stood at the door in her white lab coat, smiling. For the first time in my life I understood the idea behind medical professionals wearing white. Before it had always just struck me as terribly impractical, what with all the mess they had to deal with on any given day. But now I could see that the white was a message. It said order, it said the calm inside the storm. It stood out like a beacon, a brightness you turned toward in your confusion.

  “How’s he doing today?” she said.

  “Which one?”

  She laughed as if I had made some sort of joke. “Your father.”

  I sighed and stepped away from the door. “Come in and see for yourself.”

  When we walked into the kitchen my father stood up. “Mrs. Allen,” he said. “How nice of you to come back. On your way to work?”

  “On my way home from work, actually. I’m not in such a rush today. How have you been feeling?”

  “Fortunate, mostly. A man with such a fine family to take care of him would have to feel fortunate.”

  “Are you having much pain?”

  “Nothing that isn’t manageable. Ruth very kindly moves my fingers around three times a day just the way you told her.”

  As if it were a piece of good advice, she picked up his hand and started moving his first finger in circles. I noticed her circles were bigger than mine.

  Sam must have heard us. When he came into the kitchen he was wearing a pressed shirt and his hair was combed. I hadn’t noticed it before he had made the effort to straighten up, but Sam had been getting a little disheveled lately. “Florence, I thought that would be you.”

  She looked up from the work of my father’s hands. “How’ve you been, Sam?”

  “I can’t complain,” he said.

  “He should complain,” my father said. “Everyone in this family conspires against this man.”

  Sam gave a halfhearted smile. “Guy likes to exaggerate.”

  “Don’t pretend it isn’t true! This is a sensible woman here. I feel it. Everything about her says that she has some insight into the human condition.”

  Florence put her chin down slightly and stared first at my husband and then my father. “Have I come at a bad time?”

&nb
sp; “No,” Sam said. “Listen, Guy. Let’s not tie Florence up here. She’s doing us a favor coming by. Speaking of which, I have a call in to the doctor. I’m hoping that we’ll be able to come and see you,” he said to Florence, “as a regular paying patient instead of having you make free house calls.”

  “Do you have any interest in sailing, Mrs. Allen?”

  It was at that point my mother walked past the kitchen. She did her level best to stay out of any room my father was in, but then she saw that we had company and she stopped and backed up a few steps.

  “You’re the woman who took the cake,” my mother said by way of introduction.

  “Mother, this is Florence Allen. She’s helping us with Dad’s therapy.”

  “Well, I can see that.”

  “I took the cake,” she said. “It was a wonderful cake.”

  “We’re supposed to call her Mrs. Allen,” my father told my mother.

  “I don’t mean took the cake, of course. I don’t mean that you stole the cake. My daughter said she gave it to you. I guess I didn’t say that right. My name is Hollis. May I call you Florence?”

  “Of course,” Florence said. I thought there was the slightest edge of nervousness in her voice. Run! I wanted to say to her. Run as fast as you can.

  “Now wait a minute here,” my father said.

  “Okay,” Sam said. “It’s time to let Florence get to work.”

  “He calls you Florence and she calls you Florence and I’m supposed to call you Mrs. Allen?”

  “With my patients I find it’s better if—”

  “But I’m not your patient, exactly. We don’t come to the hospital. We don’t pay you anything.”

  “I’m working on that,” Sam said.

  “For heaven’s sake, Guy, just listen to Florence and do what she tells you.” My mother crossed her arms snugly across her chest. She was glowing with self-satisfaction. “You think he’s bad now, you should have seen him when I was married to him.”

  “Can you hold a fork, Mr. Nash?” Florence said. She put down his hand. With that question she regained complete authority. The room settled down to listen.