The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake Read online

  Let me know, I said, rinsing my hands of dust. If you ever want to give anything away. Just let me know, I said.

  I won’t give anything away, said my mother.

  Because of all this—all the goods crossing the household, all the resettling of room assignments, all the discussions in cars, all the nights of jogging—it wasn’t a good time for their only other child to leave home. We needed to be in the same house then, as a kind of checkpoint, or performance of permanence, and if my father didn’t actually call roll at the dinner table, ticking off a box for my mother, and then one for myself, it was only because he thought it would make him look like he couldn’t count.

  All here! he said, on a regular basis, as we passed around the dishes.

  36 Shortly after Joseph’s final disappearance, George packed up his own things and drove the three thousand miles across valley and slope in his chugging gray VW Bug to Boston. He was starting his graduate program at MIT, and for the first few months, he called at least once a week.

  Any news? he always asked at the end, and I always told him no, no news.

  We said goodbye, and have a good night, and talk soon.

  After summer deepened into fall, after hearing about the mounds of work and lab time he’d been assigned, over the sounds of frantic rummaging at his desk and even, once, an alarm clock ringing, I sank down by the phone base in the kitchen and told him we were fine, that all was fine, in case he was just calling out of obligation.

  The rummaging halted.

  What do you mean? he said. I call because I want to.

  I lined a pile of yellow phone books into a tower.

  I mean, you don’t have to take pity on me, I said, getting the phone book corners all matched up. That’s gross, I said. You helped me so much, that day. Thank you.

  Rose, he said. His voice was tinged with annoyance, and the activity sounds subsided as he settled into a chair. I don’t pity you, not at all. What are you talking about?

  Outside, our neighbors turned on their sprinklers for a late-afternoon lawn watering. They were trying to grow an avocado tree from a sprouted pit.

  Please, I said. George. I never expected anything more than the one time, I said.

  Ping, ping, against the side windows.

  Why not? he said, after a minute.

  Why not what?

  Why not expect more than the one time?

  Water droplets smeared, on the windows. No one else home yet. I could just picture him sitting in his chair, listening. With his concentrated listening face. With the just-reddening October leaves outside. Elemental in our kiss, for me, had been its property of one-time-ness, which I had told myself even as it was happening: kissing George was a little like rolling in caramel after spending years surviving off rice sticks.

  I mean, I said, in a small voice. Right?

  Well, he said, louder, it was meaningful to me, he said. Okay? It was not nothing.

  No, I said. I pulled the pile of phone books into my lap. For me too. I didn’t mean that—

  I mean, I’m here, he said. You’re there. You should have your own life. I have my own life. That’s smart. But you’re Rose, he said. Okay?

  I leaned my cheek on the top phone book. Five-thirty. Water pinging. Parents home soon. It had never felt so wrong to be having such a conversation in their house, an hour away from making dinner for my mother.

  George, I said, as softly as I could.

  Through the wires, his breathing quieted. For a few minutes, we just stayed there on the phone line, together. Stillness, on his end. I stared at the shelf of cookbooks across from the phone base and mind-moved the black garlic-cookbook to lie on top of the wider-based green pasta-book.

  Hey, I said. So. I ate my own spaghetti, I said. I laughed a little. First time I ate anything I made, I said.

  And? he said.

  Big neon sign in there, I said. Big orange letters. Saying that I am not ready for George.

  No, he said.

  Nearly, I said.

  That was the first time you ate your own food? he said. In all these years?

  First time, I said.

  And?

  Tastes like a factory, I said, spitting out the word.

  From where?

  I don’t know, I said.

  You mean that made the pasta?

  I don’t think so, I said, mind-sliding the horizontal books shoved into the top of the shelf back into their vertical slots.

  Huh, he said, and his voice stretched and moved upwards, as if he were standing. Well, you go figure that out, then, he said. I don’t want to call up to have a conversation with a factory. I do that enough with the automated bank guy.

  Tall books at the sides, short books in the center. Wide books on the horizontal plane, leaning books straight.

  I hate that automated bank guy, he said. Tioo, he said. That’s how he says two. Ti-oo.

  You going out?

  I guess, he said. There’s a study party.

  Downward steps of cookbooks, gradated rows.

  Okay, I said. Thank you. Good talking to you. Have a good night.

  He grunted. Pity you, he said. Ridiculous.

  When we hung up, I just sat in the chair for a while with those phone books in my lap. Heavy-weighted paper. All the shelving urgency dissipated. It had felt of utmost importance during the call, this re-shelving, something I was reminding myself to do just as soon as we were off, but now that the phone call was over the urge evaporated. It was comfortable, to sit. Something about being pinned to the chair by all those pages upon pages of phone numbers.

  37 That year my brother disappeared, I knew very clearly what I could not do. I could not bear college, the ache packed in the assembly line of trays. I could not yet make the move out of the house. I could not buy a plane ticket to go see George and walk by his side hand in hand against a backdrop of brilliant yellow bursting sugar maples. Could not.

  But there were things I could manage, smaller things, and so, on my own, I decided it was time to meet the various cooks of Los Angeles County and to find some useful meals that way. I would eat out as often as possible. This was about all I could handle, and it was the one important thing I figured I could do while living at home. There was a whole lot to consider, and some things need to be considered slowly.

  Besides everything else, it had been no small surprise, the Sunday after Joseph disappeared, when I made that spaghetti dinner for my parents and ate it myself. There had been way too much to sort through right away, but I was left with two particularly disturbing first impressions. One was the sickly-sweet nostalgia, in the taste of a tantrum, the longing for an earlier, sweeter time with an aftertaste like a cancer-causing sugar substitute. And the second was that factory.

  To taste a factory was not a big deal; I tasted them all the time. I knew them by name and often even by address. But I thought I knew all the factories in America, and the entrance of a new one in that meal had surprised me, a lot.

  The day after I made the dinner, while my mother drove back and forth to Joseph’s apartment, checking with the police to see if she should file a report, while my father sat on the sofa and insisted aloud, during commercials, that all would be fine-fine-fine, I went to the kitchen cabinet and checked all the pasta boxes. Made in Ames, Iowa, or Fara San Martino, Italy. I knew these places so well—I could name them in a second in any restaurant meal—in the rigatoni, or macaroni, or sheets of lasagna. I reread the ingredients on the slab of Parmesan cheese, which were all fresh, and I walked over to the supermarket and asked at the customer service desk where they got their garlic and onions. I spent an hour in the back room of the market, which smelled of leafy greens and cold cardboard, going over shipping receipts with the customer service representative. She told me how she really wanted to sing in the opera.

  At home, I made the same meal again. Both my parents ate it gladly, and as my mother drank her wine and explained how the co-op was being very supportive, I pretended to eat with them by clanki
ng my fork and sipping my water and set aside a bowl for myself for later. When both parents were tucked into their various beds, sleeping, I heated the leftovers on the stove. Sat down at the table, alone.

  That same unknown factory, again. Loud and clear, in the food. A machine-tinge I could not identify. Alongside a little-girl voice wanting to go back, to go back to a time with less information. Go back, said the little girl. Blank, said the factory. I steeled myself and sat at the table with a spoonful of pure sauce and tried to move as slowly as I could through all the layers of information, to the point where I thought I was practically feeling the farmer reach his hand down to pick the tomatoes, in Italy; I was nearly hearing church bells ringing through villages in San Marzano, but the tastes of the too sweet nostalgia and stone-cold factory kept returning in a metallic whir, and none of it matched any factory I’d known in my reservoir of factory tastes, which seemed only to indicate that it must’ve come from the cook.

  It was like seeing that photo and not recognizing my own face. It was like lifting my brother’s pants and seeing the legs of the chair.

  I did not like tasting that, no.

  So it wasn’t as loud as a neon sign, maybe, telling me I wasn’t ready for George, but close.

  While Eliza went through school, just as I’d imagined, with keg parties, and virginity losses, and tearful midnight talks with her roommate, and waning updates as the months and years passed, I spent my days working at the office, filing and making copies for other people, and every lunch I scanned the streets and consulted the stacks of those yellow phone-book pages to try out something new.

  I started in our neighborhood, buying a pastrami burrito at Oki Dog and a deluxe gardenburger at Astro Burger and matzoh-ball soup at Greenblatt’s and some greasy egg rolls at the Formosa. In part funny, and rigid, and sleepy, and angry. People. Then I made concentric circles outward, reaching first to Canter’s and Pink’s, then rippling farther, tofu at Yabu and mole at Alegria and sugok at Marouch; the sweet-corn salad at Casbah in Silver Lake and Rae’s charbroiled burgers on Pico and the garlicky hummus at Carousel in Glendale. I ate an enormous range of food, and mood. Many favorites showed up—families who had traveled far and whose dishes were steeped with the trials of passageways. An Iranian café near Ohio and Westwood had such a rich grief in the lamb shank that I could eat it all without doing any of my tricks—side of the mouth, ingredient tracking, fast-chew and swallow. Being there was like having a good cry, the clearing of the air after weight has been held. I asked the waiter if I could thank the chef, and he led me to the back, where a very ordinary-looking woman with gray hair in a practical layered cut tossed translucent onions in a fry pan and shook my hand. Her face was steady, faintly sweaty from the warmth of the kitchen.

  Glad you liked it, she said, as she added a pinch of saffron to the pan. Old family recipe, she said.

  No trembling in her voice, no tears streaking down her face.

  I bowed my head a little. I wasn’t sure what else to say. Thanks again, I said.

  One of the dim-sum restaurants on Hill Street in Chinatown knew its rage in a real way, and I ate bao after bao and left that one tanked up and energized. An Ethiopian place on Fairfax near Olympic made me laugh, like the chef had a private joke with the food, one that had something to do with trains, and baldness. I didn’t even get the joke, but the waitress kept refilling my water and asking if I was okay.

  I’m fine, I told her, holding my spongy injera bread packed with red lentils. It’s so funny!

  She rolled her eyes, and brought me the check early.

  My favorite of all was still the place on Vermont, the French café, La Lyonnaise, that had given me the best onion soup on that night with George and my father. The two owners hailed from France, from Lyon, before the city had boomed into a culinary sibling of Paris. Inside, it had only a few tables, and the waiters served everything out of order, and it had a B rating in the window, and they usually sat me right by the swinging kitchen door, but I didn’t care about any of it.

  There, I ordered chicken Dijon, or beef Bourguignon, or a simple green salad, or a pâté sandwich, and when it came to the table, I melted into whatever arrived. I lavished in a forkful of spinach gratin on the side, at how delighted the chef had clearly been over the balance of spinach and cheese, like she was conducting a meeting of spinach and cheese, like a matchmaker who knew they would shortly fall in love. Sure, there were small distractions and preoccupations in it all, but I could find the food in there, the food was the center, and the person making the food was so connected with the food that I could really, for once, enjoy it. I ate as slowly as I could. The air around me filled with purpose. This was the flora of George’s road, and a swinging kitchen door meant nothing. I went over at least once a week, sometimes more, and my time in general was marked by silent sad dinners with my parents and then lunchtime or dinnertime visits to the café as a kind of gateway into the world. It was somehow fitting, that the place had come to my attention first on the night that Joseph left, me sitting across from George, soon to re-set the room with him, wearing my father’s suit jacket over my shoulders, shivering, trying to understand what I’d seen. The waiters recognized me on Fridays, when I came in at six. On Sundays, when I went over for lunch, while they served half-glasses of wine for tasting customers lounging at the back counter beneath the gilded chandelier.

  I bought very few new clothes, and no new technology, and I paid no rent, and so I spent most of the money I made on meals. I allowed myself the extravagance of leaving a restaurant if I could not bear what I found on my plate, and instead did my father’s trick by asking for a to-go box and putting all the food inside it, with a plastic knife and fork, and handing it outside to someone homeless who did not have the luxury of my problem.

  38 One afternoon, after a particularly amazing roast chicken, I paid my bill and circled around the outside of La Lyonnaise, finding my way to the kitchen door of the restaurant, a back entrance that opened up into a section of alley that housed a brown Dumpster and a pigeon family. I had the day off from filing. My mother had recently become co-president of the co-op studio, and was busy moving the massive piles of tools into a new loft building off Beverly, close to downtown. Dad at work. He’d gotten so into his jogging that he’d joined a group called Nightrunners that ran exclusively after dark to avoid excess car exhaust. He trained every night at home.

  At the back of the restaurant I didn’t want to knock on the door; I just felt like standing closer to it, but after ten minutes or so, a small older woman with short dyed blackish hair opened up, holding a white plastic bag of garbage. She stepped out and picked her way carefully on the asphalt in her thin pink satiny slippers. Threw the bag in the Dumpster. Her face looked a little etched and weary, but her eyes were fresh. She stopped when she saw me.

  Hello, she said. Delivery?

  No, I said. Sorry. I’m just a happy customer.

  Ah, she said, pointing. The front is that way.

  I nodded. Yes, yes, I said. I know.

  She stepped her way back through the alley and returned to the door of the kitchen. Pigeons burbled behind me. She too looked like a regular lady, living in the world—didn’t seem particularly with it or excitable or stellar. But that chicken, bathed in thyme and butter—I hadn’t ever tasted a chicken that had such a savory warmth to it, a taste I could only suitably identify as the taste of chicken. Somehow, in her hands, food felt recognized. Spinach became spinach—with a good farm’s care, salt, the heat and her attention, it seemed to relax into its leafy, broad self. Garlic seized upon its lively nature. Tomatoes tasted as substantive as beef.

  At the door, she stood for an extra moment, looking to the side, and she seemed to be watching the squat palm tree in the house across the way as it swayed a little.

  Are you Madame Dupont? I said, thinking of the small precise type at the bottom of the menu, with her name and Monsieur Dupont’s as owners and co-chefs.

  She blinked, yes.
/>   I love your cooking, I said. You make spinach taste like spinach, I said. I stumbled, embarrassed. Sorry, I said. I could go on and on. I don’t know how to say it right.

  You’re saying it fine, she said. Thank you. She fiddled with the doorknob. Why are you in the alley?

  I glanced around. Pigeons pecked at the trash. Could I work here, in some way? I asked. On weekends?

  She craned her head forward, as if to hear me better. Brushed a little dirt off the step with her slipper.

  As a waiter? she said. Waiters apply in front.

  I shook my head. No, I said. Not that. Through the back door, I said. Through the food.

  Sherrie flashed through my head, years-ago Sherrie, who I’d heard had gone on to sing old standards at piano bars in San Francisco.

  Well, I suppose you could take out the trash, she said, reaching back into the kitchen and bringing out another full white bag.

  Okay, I said, stepping forward.

  Okay? said Madame. She handed it over. Patted her cheek. And we do need a Sunday and Wednesday dishwasher, she said. Our dishwasher just got a job in a movie. Playing a dishwasher.

  Please, I said. I walked to the Dumpster and tossed the bag in. I’d love that, I said.

  You love washing dishes?

  I brushed off my hands. I would here, I said. I do.

  39 Grandma died. In Washington. She checked into the hospital, prepared. For her final mailing, she’d given a priority-mail package to the head nurse with careful instructions and our address written on it in big black pen.