Eat Cake: A Novel

by Jeanne Ray

  “In my hand?” my father said.

  My mother started to say something—one imagines not something very helpful—but she decided to keep it to herself when Florence took a fork out of her bag whose sky blue handle was as big around as a small apple. The little silver tines were bright and shiny. It looked like a cartoon fork, something Sylvester the cat would use to try to eat the little yellow bird. She put it down on the table in front of my father. “I want you to just rest your fingers on top of the fork. Don’t try to pick it up yet. Just curve them around the side.”

  He watched the fork for a while. “I have a perfectly good system of eating,” he said finally.

  “Ruth spooning in your breakfast cereal is not a perfectly good system of eating,” my mother said.

  “I’m not asking you to pick it up.” Florence looked at my mother while she spoke. “This might be easier without an audience.”

  Sam put his hand on my mother’s shoulder. “Come on, Hollis. Let’s you and me go to the grocery store.”

  But my mother shook him off. “He knows perfectly well he can pick up the fork,” she said. Then she took off her glasses, wiped them on the bottom of her blouse, and put them back on just to say she didn’t plan to miss a minute of it.

  My father took a deep breath and set his hand on top of the fork, then he curled his fingers around the side and left them there for a minute. “The thing is,” he said to no one in particular, “I’ve been doing things for myself my whole life. You want to know what independent means, there will be a little picture of me next to the word in the dictionary. But once you can’t do something, it’s like you forget how to do everything.”

  “You’re doing fine,” Florence said. “You’re doing exactly what I wanted you to do.”

  Camille breezed into the kitchen wearing a long-sleeved cropped top and a pair of corduroy pants. If it was cold enough outside to wear sleeves, wouldn’t you want your stomach covered as well? “Hey, Grandpa’s got a fork. That’s great.”

  And with that my father circled his fingers to the best of his ability around the chubby handle and lifted it into the air. He held it aloft for a good five seconds before he dropped it back on the table.

  “Look at you!” my mother said proudly, and put her hand on the back of his neck. In a fraction of the time he had held the fork, she remembered herself and pulled away.

  “Hey, you dropped it,” Camille said, then she smiled. “But at least you’ve got a fork now.”

  We were all enormously impressed. I introduced Florence to Camille, who shook her hand and was exceedingly polite. I was never sure how a person could have such good manners for strangers and such bad ones for the people she saw every day, but probably if I had to choose, I would want it to be this way instead of the other way around.

  Florence moved the fork over to the other side of the table, turning the tines faceup again. “That fork isn’t just a way to eat. That’s the way you play the piano. So if you’re feeling like you don’t want to be bothered with the fork, like maybe you’d just as soon have someone else feed you, you remember that. I want you to pick it up with both hands.”

  “Both hands,” my father said obediently.

  After that, we left them alone. Sam did in fact convince my mother to ride to the store with him and Camille went back to the private world of her bedroom where she was headed in the first place. I sat for a minute in the quiet den and looked at cookbooks, trying to get inspired for a great strawberry frosting, while Florence worked with my father in the kitchen, telling him to press down, to roll his shoulders, to curl his fingers. I listened to the steady instruction of her voice while my eyes scanned over familiar measurements of sugar and cream of tartar. I hoped it seemed as comforting to him as it did to me.

  “Enough?” I heard her say finally.

  “Enough,” my father said. He sounded beat. As angry as I could get with my father, my heart always went out to him where his wrists were concerned.

  “That’s a lot of work.”

  “Ruthie!” my father called out. I got up and went back into the kitchen. “Let’s invite Mrs. Allen to stay for dinner, shall we?”

  I remembered stories my mother used to tell about my father swinging through the front door after practice, the whole brass section of the band trailing him like the tail of a kite. “Hollis!” he would say as she looked up from the stove. “I’ve invited a few of the boys for dinner!”

  “You’d be very welcome.” In this case, I was glad for my father’s inclusive nature, but I was wishing there was something more exciting on the menu than stuffed bell peppers.

  Florence shook her head. “I think my family would be awfully disappointed if I got dinner and they didn’t.”

  “So call up and invite your family too,” my father said.

  “Thank you,” Florence said. “I really can’t.”

  “Then you should at least stay for some of Ruthie’s cake. My daughter is a fine cook, you know.”

  “Oh, I know that,” she said with great authority. “Don’t tell me you have a cake today too.”

  Actually, I had two cakes, a lemon poppy seed cake, which was my favorite casual cake and was for anyone to eat, and then the elaborate scarlet empress, which had occupied my time so completely the day before. It was sitting under a glass dome in the pantry waiting like a present waits under a tree. That was for Florence to take home.

  “Ruthie always has cake. Even if you don’t see any out on the counter, you just ask. She’s always got something squirreled away in the freezer.”

  I cut us each a slice of the poppy seed cake and put on some coffee.

  “None for me,” my father said. “I’m pretty tired.”

  “I won’t make you use the fork,” Florence said.

  He shook his head. “It looks good,” he said kindly. “I’ll have a piece when I get up.” My father stood but paused at the edge of the table to give the cake a long, hard look. For a minute I thought he was going to change his mind. “You should stop asking Sam when he’s going to get a job and start thinking about getting one yourself.” He seemed to be speaking to the slice of lemon poppy seed cake. He made a special effort to lower three of his fingers down a half inch so that he was, in a fashion, pointing at my cake. “You should go into the baking business. That’s something you could do.”

  My father didn’t think I could do much. I suppose I should have been grateful that he liked my baking. “Thanks for the advice,” I said lightly. “Come on. I’ll help you get the bed turned down.”

  I took my father into his room and folded back the bedspread. I closed the blinds to block out some of the sunlight in the room, but it was still brighter than he would have liked it. He sat down on the bed and held his feet out so I could pull off his shoes. He could have done that himself. It is quite possible to remove shoes without using your hands. I knelt on the floor in front of him and pulled them off. “I wish you’d stop putting all your efforts into protecting Sam,” I said in a low voice.

  “Sam’s a good man.” My father flexed his toes up and down. “Leave the socks on. My feet get cold.”

  “I know Sam’s a good man. I’m not saying he isn’t, but I’m not so bad, you know, and I’m your daughter. Doesn’t that count for something?”

  My father lay on his back, one encased arm straight out to either side, and slid his legs neatly between the sheets. I pulled the covers up to his chin and tried to better arrange the pillow under his head.

  “Darling girl, you’re confusing the issue. Just because I’m rooting for Sam doesn’t mean I’m rooting against you. I love you. I’m always going to be behind you. But look at the way the deck is stacked. You’ve got both of your parents living here, two people who always think you’re the best. It wouldn’t hurt if someone took up for Sam once in a while.”

  It seemed wonderfully crazy to me that my father would think I was the lucky one for having both of my parents living with us. “But I take up for Sam,” I said to him. Didn’t I?
I thought about the boat magazines. Maybe he didn’t feel like he could confide in me anymore.

  I sat down on the edge of the bed and my father grimaced a little. “How about a pain pill? You haven’t had one all day.”

  But he shook his head. “I’m cutting back. I’ll be fine once I go to sleep,” he said. “That Mrs. Allen’s a devil with that fork.” His voice was so tired. My father was back in school now and he’d made good marks for the day. Suddenly I felt as though I was picking a fight with a tired old man who had two broken wrists.

  “Get some rest.” I kissed the top of his head and turned off the light.

  “Don’t worry too much about Sam,” he said. “You’ve just got to have a little faith in a person. If your mother had had even a little bit of faith in what I could do, I bet we would have stayed together.”

  “You have no idea what you’re saying. You’ll be more clearheaded after you’ve had some rest.”

  “When I wake up I plan to saw my way through a steak, with a fork and knife. You’ll see.” He gave me a chuckle and I softly closed the door.

  “Sorry about that,” I said to Florence when I came back in the room. “My father has a lot of opinions.”

  “I’m used to men with opinions.” She took her first bite of cake. She’d been waiting for me. “My pound cake always gets a little rubbery strip near the bottom. I bet you’ve never even had a rubbery strip. Yours is absolutely perfect all the way through.”

  “You might need to check the oven temperature. I have an oven thermometer if you ever want to borrow it.”

  She nodded her head. “That might be exactly what I need.” She cut off another bite but she didn’t eat it. “So is Sam having problems finding a job? I don’t mean to be nosy. It’s just when your father said that about him looking for work, I was wondering.”

  “Sam is having problems finding himself. He thinks he needs to find himself before he can find a job. I think he should find a job and then the rest of it will fall into place. My father and I are in different camps on this particular issue.”

  “I just can’t imagine it. Sam was the very best. I would think there would be hospitals beating down his door. The whole place has fallen apart without him.”

  “I’m not so sure he wants a hospital anymore. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if my father hadn’t been staying with us. Maybe Sam would have gone out and gotten a job the next day. Then again, it may not have anything to do with my father.” I shook my head. “I used to think I knew Sam better than anybody in the world. Now I’m not so sure.”

  “What does Sam think he wants to do?”

  I looked around behind me. The door to my father’s room was closed. Camille was too far away to hear us. There wasn’t anyone around but still I was afraid to even say it, as if saying it would make it true. “He says he wants to rebuild wooden boats,” I whispered.

  “Build boats?”

  “Build them, sail them, sell them. All of it.”

  “That’s why your father asked me about sailing.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Boats.” Florence closed her eyes and shook her head. “That’s a bad sign.”

  I thought so too but it frightened me to hear her say it.

  “I used to call it the Mode of Transportation Crisis. My husband had a terrible one when our girls were young. I think the pressure got to him, you know, having to be responsible for a family. One day he’d come home talking about how important it was to see America by train, and then the next day he’d tell me he was going to take flying lessons. Do you have any idea how expensive that is? We were barely making the rent back then and he wanted to take flying lessons! And cars, it was all the time about cars.” She took another bite of cake and smiled, not at her story but at the sweetness in her own mouth. “He just wanted to go, that was the bottom line. Everything he dreamed about featured leaving us behind.”

  “What happened?” My fingers turned cold around my fork.

  She shrugged. “He left. He was gone for about six months.” She paused, as if she were counting up the days in her head. “Then it took another six months after that for me to let him back in the house. But we got over it. That was a long time ago. I like to keep the past in the past. We’ve got a good marriage. He doesn’t talk about going anyplace now except maybe the grocery store.”

  I couldn’t eat the cake. I felt like the room was spinning. I could see my husband untying the line from the dock, using a slender oar to push himself away. It was a bright blue day, a few puffy clouds in the eastern corner of the sky for decoration. Everywhere there was the slap of waves and the plangent cry of seagulls. “I don’t want to lose Sam.”

  Florence took another bite of cake. “You know, this cake is every bit as good as the other one. It’s just not as flashy. That other one took my breath away, but now that I’m really getting through this slice, I can see that it has a lot of character. That lemon glaze, it just has so much lemon to it. Usually a lemon glaze is just a sugar icing that a lemon has passed over.”

  “I always use three times as much lemon juice as the recipes call for,” I said. I could barely make the words. There went Sam’s little boat. The sail was swelling up with wind. The sun was shining in his hair. “You just have to cook it down longer.” Why were we talking about the glaze? I was going to lose my husband, and while he was what I really cared about, I would have been lying if I said that the attending issues did not cross my mind, such as how I was going to pay for things, school and the house and the health insurance.

  “So what if your father is right?” Florence said.

  “And he shouldn’t be forced to feed himself?”

  She sighed and started over again, using her most patient tone of voice. “What if your father is right and the answer to your problems is sitting on that plate in front of you?”

  I looked down at my plate. My slice of lemon poppy seed cake was untouched.

  “You think I should bake cakes for a living?”

  “You have a whole lot of things you’re worried about, emotional things like who’s happy and who’s fulfilled, and practical things, like how to make money and who’s supposed to work. So maybe you should try to find an answer for yourself instead of waiting around to see what Sam’s going to do. Doing something is always easier than waiting. Besides, what if it worked out? Then Sam wouldn’t have to worry about finding a job. You could give him a job working for you, sifting flour or something. You could give him such a good salary he could buy himself a boat.”

  “It’s a lovely thought, but it’s crazy. So I can bake. Everybody can bake.”

  She tapped her fork against my plate. “Not like this, they can’t. I may not know you very well, but you seem to spend a lot of your energy holding things together. Why not put that energy into doing something big?”

  “Cake isn’t big enough to pull us out of this mess.”

  Florence smiled at me. She had absolute confidence in what she was saying. “Take a bite of that cake and tell me that everyone in this country wouldn’t like to have a piece of it.”

  She looked at me hard until I realized that she was not being rhetorical. I took a bite of my own cake. I had to admit, she had a point. The cake was crunchy and sweet and all pulled together by the tart edge of lemon.

  It was good.

  Chapter Seven

  MY FIRST MEMORY OF CAKE IS NOT OF EATING ONE, although in this memory I am five or nearly five and so certainly I must have had plenty of cake by this time just from birthdays alone. In my first memory of a cake it is summer and my mother is standing in the kitchen of our apartment with the windows open and the sun shining off the side of her metal mixing bowl. She is young and straight-backed and beautiful in a serious sort of way. She is measuring the flour she had sifted, holding the cup up to the abundant light to make sure she has exactly the right amount. My mother did not believe in cake mixes, not because she was a purist, but because she was poor, and the cake mix was a relatively new invention
of luxury meant to free up more time for the modern homemaker. My mother, who always had tests to grade and rehearsals to attend, didn’t see herself as much of a homemaker.

  On the morning of the cake, I am standing on a stool beside her, which puts me at a comfortable height to see everything that is going on. My mother pours the flour into a fine-mesh colander that sits over her mixing bowl, and into that colander she adds one tablespoon plus one teaspoon of baking powder from a bright red tin with an Indian on the label, and three quarters of a teaspoon of salt. The precision of it all appeals to me, and I love the teaspoons, but especially the quarter teaspoon, as children love things that are small. They are held together by a single silver ring and the ones that aren’t being used at the moment make a music like bells when she picks up the one that she wants. My mother was a teacher, and when I say that, I don’t simply mean it was the way she made her living. She was a teacher in her soul and found that inside every action there was the opportunity for instruction. I used to wonder if she would have talked the same way if I wasn’t there, if she would have tried to teach the cat how to bake a cake instead.

  “Always take the time to double-check your measurements. I read one teaspoon, I measure one teaspoon, and then I go back to the book and check again. It’s easy enough to beat an egg into the batter but it’s a lot harder to pull one out.” She runs her fork inside the colander and then shakes it gently into the bowl until the flour and salt and leavening all fall together like a light snow. “This resifts it.” She shakes again and the last of the powder wafts down. “There. All the dry ingredients are ready to go.” Next she unwraps the butter and scrapes a stick and a half from the paper into another bowl. “Always soften the butter. I put it out this morning first thing when I woke up. If you try to beat sugar into cold butter, you’re not going to get anywhere. You have to follow the rules, Ruth. It’s all in the book. If a person can read, they can cook.”

  I find that I am taking in every word of what she is saying. Even as a small child I didn’t always listen to my mother, but everything she has to say about cake is something I want to hear.