by Jeanne Ray
“We’re going out,” my mother said.
“Both of you?” My mother hated to drive and my father couldn’t drive and they couldn’t stand one another’s company. Now they were going out.
“She wants to make the boxes herself. Make a cardboard box? Stupidest damn thing I’ve ever heard of.”
“You want one that’s exactly the right size. We’re making a quality product from the best ingredients. You don’t see Ruth using margarine, do you? We aren’t going to stuff a piece of newspaper in the side of the box if it’s too big. I’m going to take one of each of the pans for now so that I know what I’m dealing with.”
“Sure,” I said. My father seemed grumpy and my mother seemed insane and I was perfectly happy to see them taking up each other’s energy.
“You’d think there weren’t enough cardboard boxes in the world already. These are modern times, Hollis. You don’t have to make everything yourself. Look at Ruthie here. You don’t see her building a mill in the backyard to grind down her own flour. Where are the chickens? Where is the cow? I thought you said everything has to be from scratch.”
“Shut up and get in the car,” my mother said. “Do you have to go to the bathroom again before we leave?”
“I went to the bathroom five minutes ago and you know it. Stop showing so much interest in my bathroom habits.”
My mother shook her car keys to indicate that the wagon train was pulling out and then they were gone.
As completely overwhelming as my parents were, it was a real novelty for me to see them like this: together. Before my father came I had looked forward to getting to see my father. Despite the viciousness of their fighting, I hadn’t thought that there might be some very peculiar pleasure in seeing the two of them together.
By the time Camille came home from school I had amassed ten cakes in different stages of readiness. Every one of them was perfect except for one that seemed to have lost its spring when touched. I held it back for our dinner.
“What’s going on?” Camille said. She put down her backpack and made one slow circle around the kitchen. Her pink lips parted in disbelief. “Have you completely lost your mind? Do you really think we’re going to eat all of these?”
I turned off the KitchenAid. If I had it to do over again I would have assembled my entire family together and told them about my plans all at once. “I’m trying to start a little business. I thought that maybe I could sell cakes.”
Camille leaned over and inhaled deeply from an almond apricot loaf. “You want to be a baker?”
“Bad idea,” I said. I was tired.
“I think it’s genius,” she said.
I wiped my hands off on the dish towel tied around my waist. I never was one for aprons. “You really think so?”
“Well, face it, you have all this, like, cooking energy, and you are always unleashing it on your family but it’s too much for us. It’s just too big. So if you could take that energy and put it off on some other people, things might be easier on everyone.”
It was the greatest number of sentences Camille had spoken directly to me without shouting for years. I felt timid and hopeful. “I hadn’t thought of it that way.”
“So are you going to incorporate? What’s your company called?”
“Called?”
“Well, you have to have a name, don’t you? I mean, you’re going to have business cards, right?”
“I don’t have business cards.”
“You can’t just write your number on the bottom of the box. Oh my God, you do have boxes, don’t you?”
“Grandma is doing that.”
“Good, then I’ll make the cards on the computer. You need a great name. Something catchy and to the point.”
I mulled it over. I looked around the kitchen for inspiration. “Cakes by Ruth?”
Camille rolled her eyes. “Didn’t you ever take a marketing class in school?”
“You take marketing?”
“You need something that just hits you, bang! And then everybody will remember you. It’s like the Taco Bell Chihuahua. What is it you want to say?”
“Please buy these cakes.”
I was making a joke but she shook her head with great seriousness. “Not buy. You don’t want to ask people to buy something so up-front like that. It’s too, I don’t know, desperate.”
“Please eat these cakes.”
“That’s closer. That’s on the right track.” Camille bent down until her nose was parallel with a cake. She looked at it very hard. She seemed to be in conversation with the cake, then suddenly she yelped and clapped her hands together. “Eat Cake!” she cried. “That’s what the company will be called. It’s very classical, its got the whole Marie Antoinette thing, except of course you know she never actually said that. It’s hip, it’s funny, it’s memorable, it’s in your face. Eat Cake.”
“Eat Cake,” I said. I might have wanted something a little fancier but that certainly summed up the goals of the project.
“Mom, it’s great. You’ll make so much money you can rent some kitchen someplace and stop cooking at home all the time. You can get out on your own.”
“Do you think I’m ready?”
“It’s time,” she said solemnly.
How I wished I had an ounce of Camille’s confidence and bravado. She so rarely showed any enthusiasm about anything that when she did she practically lit up the room.
“I have to say, I find these cakes much more attractive now that I know they’re leaving home.”
“Sort of like the way boys get better looking when they’re going off to war.”
“Or junior year abroad.”
“Exactly. I have a slightly bum cake here, if you want a piece.”
She peered over to the cake in the corner, the one that had been shunned by the more perfect cakes. She was thinking it over. “Sure,” she said finally. “A little piece.”
I was cutting two little pieces when the phone rang. It was my mother.
“I wanted to tell you, we’re eating out.”
There was an enormous amount of racket in the background, music, laughing. “Are you in a bar?”
“We’re in the mall, we’re going to get some dinner. There’s a Friday’s in the mall. If you need us you can call the Friday’s.”
“For Christ’s sake, we are not fifteen years old,” I heard my father say in the background. “We do not have to tell her where we are and where we’re going.”
“She makes us dinner every night, Guy. Have you not noticed that? Do you think it’s fair to let her set two places for us at the table and then just not show up?” My mother had obviously turned her face away from the phone but the conversation was remarkably clear, along with all the screaming children and high-pitched laughs, the call and reply of shopping teenagers.
“Who is that?” Camille said. She could hear the noise in the background but she couldn’t make out the voices.
“Your grandparents,” I said.
She pointed her fork at me. “Your parents.”
“So you called her. Great. Hang up the phone.” My father.
“Thanks for calling, Mom.”
“We should be in by eight.”
“Give me the phone!” he said.
“Here, take it. What’s wrong? Can’t hold the phone?”
“We have no idea what time we’ll be in! We’re adults. Adults go out to dinner.” I could hear him shouting but I knew that the phone was nowhere near his mouth.
“Cakes going okay?” my mother asked.
“Oh sure, everything’s fine. You two have fun.”
“Did you get a chance to see Oprah? I walked right out and missed her today.”
“Mom, you’re just doing this to make him crazy. Say good-bye and hang up the phone.”
“Hang up the goddamn phone or I’m going to go to dinner without you.”
“I don’t care if you go to dinner without me,” I heard my mother say. And then the line went dead. I was grateful. I could
n’t stand the thought of hanging up on someone.
“So none of this is genetic, right?” Camille said.
“My parents adopted me and then your father and I adopted you. I was just waiting for the right time to tell you.”
“Thanks,” Camille said. “It’s a relief.”
For the first time since my mother moved in with us more than a year ago, Sam and Camille and I ate dinner together alone that night. We were oddly shy around each other, no one really knowing what to say and all of us wanting to say, Gosh, this is kind of nice. We were thrilled to have them gone and yet they were the only thing we could talk about.
“So I’m kinda getting used to the whole pin-through-the-bone thing,” Camille said. “At first, I didn’t think I was going to be able to stand it. Now I hardly notice it at all.”
“And he’s getting more flexibility in his fingers,” Sam said. “Those exercises that Florence gave him have really been working. You’ve got to hand it to the old guy. He’s doing really well.”
“I’m surprised at how well my mother is doing, really. I know she despises him but they seem to be doing okay. I mean, they fight constantly but at first I didn’t even think she was going to speak to him.”
“Oh, that first night when Grandpa came? I thought she was going to go the whole time without saying anything.”
And then we pretty much ran out of things to say. I had thawed out some frozen vegetable soup I found, some frozen French bread. It wasn’t bad. There was cake for dessert. I started to wonder how the family was going to be reconfigured in the future. Wyatt was in college and might not ever live at home again except for summer vacations. In all probability, one, if not both, of my parents would still be in the house until Camille went off to college, making this evening the rarest thing in the world. Would one—and God, please, not both—of my parents live with us until they died? I didn’t want them to die and yet I wondered what the time line was we were talking about. Would they live to be a hundred? Would I be taking care of my parents when I was nearly eighty? And then there was the biggest question of all: Would Sam always be here, or was he really thinking about sailing off and leaving his responsibilities behind him? I felt a terrible sadness come over me. I knew there was no sense in trying to hold on to anything in life, and yet I wanted to keep everything just like this. Just the way it used to be. I would be better this time. I had learned how to appreciate what I had.
That’s when my parents came in, my mother’s arms full of cardboard boxes and various packages, my father trailing behind her with empty arms.
“Behold, the wanderers,” Sam said, and raised his water glass to meet them.
“Did you have a good time?” I asked.
“I’m just going to put these things down in my room,” my mother said.
“You’ve got two minutes,” my father said. “I don’t want you in there cheating.”
“What do you think? I’ve got sheet music stuffed under the mattress?”
“You’re tricky,” my father said. “And you’re cheap. You’d do anything to win your bet.”
“I’m cheap? Who paid for dinner?”
“You picked a cheap restaurant.”
“Mom told me today that I was adopted,” Camille told my father.
“That’s great, sweetheart, but your grandma and I have a little bet going. There’s money involved. It’s a very serious business.”
My mother came back into the kitchen with her jacket off. She was curling and uncurling her fingers the way I had seen her do a million times when I was little, the way she always made me do before I sat down to play the piano.
“What’s the bet?” Sam said.
“Your father thinks I can’t play ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ without sheet music.”
“Now, let me tell you, in all fairness, the second half is her fault. What I said was that she couldn’t play ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ if her life depended on it. She threw in the no-sheet-music part herself.”
I was a little concerned about this one because I had no memory of my mother ever playing “Rhapsody in Blue” and I certainly had no memory of her ever playing anything without sheet music.
“Okay,” she said without a care in the world. “Let’s do it.”
“I’ll warn you,” my father said. “She had a drink.”
“I had a glass of white zinfandel. That hardly means I’m impaired.”
We all filed into the living room, where really no one ever went unless it was to play the piano. My mother’s baby grand Steinway, which she had brought with her from Michigan, had taken the place of my upright, which had been squeezed uncomfortably into the den. We did not need two pianos in the house, but neither of us wanted to be the one to give ours up.
“Take a seat. Everybody take a seat,” my father said, dropping himself down into the most comfortable chair. Sam and I sat together on the sofa and Camille lay down on the rug even though there were plenty of seats left. My mother took her place on the piano bench.
“I used to play this piece two or three times a night,” my father said. “It was my opener. I remember there was one night back in Denver—”
But my mother had no interest in the story. Dum-dum-dum-dum … dum-dum-dum, she flew into the keyboard, her hands springing up higher than her shoulders. She attacked the Gershwin. She got so much energy out of that piano you would have thought there was an entire orchestra in the room. Her back stretched and flexed with the power of a sixteen-year-old Olympic swim champion. She tore the keyboard apart, evoking Manhattan at night, the sweeping skylines of brightly lit windows, the syncopated energy of the crowds in the streets. I had seen my mother play all my life and I had never seen her play like that before. Camille rose up on her elbows. Sam and I leaned forward. My father, speechless at last, had tears in his eyes. It was no abridged version, either. She knew the whole thing, every surprise turn, every crescendo. When she roared through the final notes we were clapping like crazy, my father was stamping his feet and whistling, his poor useless arms immobilized and envious. My mother stood up and made a light comic bow from the waist.
“Ten bucks!” she said.
“I had no idea you could do that,” Camille said.
“Anybody can do that if they practice long enough,” she said casually.
“You never told me you could play like that,” my father said. “I think you’re a ringer.”
My mother crowed. “I’ve been telling you I could play like that all night. You-never-listen-to-me.” She smacked the back of her left hand into her open right palm to punctuate each word. “That was always the problem. He never listened.”
“I would have listened if you had played like that,” my father said.
“Where did you learn that?” I asked her. “I don’t remember you playing that at all.”
“Play it? I played that thing so much that when I’m in my casket you’ll be able to pull me out and set me in front of a piano and I’ll still be able to play it.”
“But where was I?” I asked.
My mother sat down backward on the piano bench and relaxed. “Oh, you were a little girl. You were only two. Even at two I’m surprised you don’t remember it. It was right after your father and I broke up and I took on a bunch of extra piano students. There was this boy, Jimmy Depriest. He was a mediocre piano student until one day he heard Gershwin on the radio. He was so obsessed with Gershwin his parents came to talk to me. They thought there was something wrong with him, like he wouldn’t be a regular kid again until he learned this music and could shut up about it. They wanted me to teach him Gershwin, which was more than a little bit out of his league. But they were insistent. Well, you can’t teach what you don’t know, so I learned the piece. I played it a hundred times. Then I started teaching it to Jimmy and I played it about a thousand times more. He wanted to come for a lesson every day and his folks paid, so what was I going to say? It drove the neighbors batty. They would bang on the walls every time we started. That song got so stuck in my
head I couldn’t have gotten rid of it with shock treatments. After a while I wanted to run screaming from the room every time it came on the radio. I was never so sick of a piece of music.”
“And you’re telling me you hadn’t played it in all that time?” my father said.
“Why would I have to? I know it.”
“But you always have to have sheet music,” I said, trying to make sense of what I knew and what I had seen.
“That was an old habit. I never look at sheet music anymore.”
It was a piece of music I have always loved, and now I knew why. It was the theme song of my childhood.
“Well, you would think this would be the moment when I would say that if I had two good wrists I would get up and show you how it’s done, but that’s exactly how it’s done. I couldn’t do any better than that, Hollis. My hat’s off to you.”
“That’s awful sweet talk,” my mother said. “But you still have to pay me the money.”
That night Sam and I lay down beside each other in the bed, not talking about cakes and not talking about boats. “Your mother,” he said. “Who would have thought it?”
“Amazing,” I said.
We rolled toward each other and kissed in the dark, sweetly, chastely. No matter what happened there was always that kiss at the end of the day, and I wondered what it would be like to try to go to sleep without it, not like I went to sleep without it when Sam was out of town. I was thinking of sleeping without it as in never again. I wanted to turn to him and grab him in the dark, but I didn’t know if I wanted to pull him to me or smother him with my pillow, so I stayed on my side of the bed and went to sleep.
While I was asleep, I dreamed of all my little cakes in the water, buoyant as ducks. To every cake there was attached a small sail, every one a different and beautiful color. It was a regatta of cakes, and they left the dock and the rocky shore of the lake and headed out toward open water, which I worried was dangerous. But the cakes seemed to be having a wonderful time. They were finally going someplace. Their sails puffed out with the wind. They picked up some speed. I thought, This is it, I’ve lost my husband and my cakes. And I stood alone on the dock and I cried.
