The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake Read online

  As my mother finished the paperwork, the doctor handed me a cherry lollipop, popped out from a factory in Louisiana where, once flavored, the hot sugar cooled on a metal table of small circles and then got stamped onto a white cardboard rod. Not a single hint of a person in it. Thank you, I said. I ate it down to the stick.

  In the parking lot, I opened the car door carefully and settled into my seat.

  Thank you for taking me, I said.

  Of course, Mom said, backing out.

  Were the tests okay?

  They were okay, she said.

  She threaded her fingers through the steering wheel, driving as if she wanted to pull the wheel into her chest.

  The traffic was thick on 3rd Street. Some sort of walk-a-thon was happening. The stores, with dresses in windows, with blown-glass vases, packed with browsing people.

  I scared you, I said, in a small voice.

  She sighed. She reached over, and stroked my hair with her hand. You did scare me, she said.

  I’m sorry.

  Oh, Rose.

  I won’t do it again, I said.

  She rolled down her window and stuck her elbow out, her fingers on the side of the car, drumming.

  You said—Oh, never mind. Let’s just get you home.

  What?

  You said I was feeling bad, that I’m so unhappy, that I’m hardly there, she said.

  I did? I said, although I remembered the whole conversation like it had been recorded. From the open window, fresh air sifted through the car. It was almost four o’clock by now, and the sunlight was gold and streamy.

  I’m fine, she said. I just want you to know, baby girl. I don’t want you to be worrying so much about me.

  She said it, and she looked over, and her eyes were big and limpid, a dark-blue color like late-day ocean water. But in the look was still that same yearning. Please worry about me, I saw in there. Her voice not matching her eyes. I knew if I ate anything of hers again, it would likely tell me the same message: Help me, I am not happy, help me—like a message in a bottle sent in each meal to the eater, and I got it. I got the message.

  And now my job was to pretend I did not get the message.

  Okay, I said.

  She turned on the radio. We listened together to a program with quiz questions, about words that had multiple meanings. I couldn’t concentrate very well, and I just watched the houses and stores slip by on Fairfax, fwip, fwip, momentarily in view, then gone.

  It can feel so lonely, to see strangers out in the day, shopping, on a day that is not a good one. On this one: the day I returned from the emergency room after having a fit about wanting to remove my mouth. Not an easy day to look at people in their vivid clothes, in their shining hair, pointing and smiling at colorful woven sweaters.

  I wanted to erase them all. But I also wanted to be them all, and I could not erase them and want to be them at the same time.

  At home, Joseph was nicer to me than usual and we played a silent game of Parcheesi for an hour in the slanted box of remaining sunlight on the carpet. Dad came by and brought me a pillow. Mom went to take a nap. Joseph won. I went to bed early. I woke up the same.

  Part two

  Joseph

  13 My parents met at a garage sale, held by my dad’s college roommate. All three were in their senior year of college at Berkeley, and Dad’s roommate, Carl, was an unusually fastidious type for someone in his early twenties. He oiled door hinges, for fun. Dad, a natural slob, said he would sometimes open up the freezer just to look at the frozen food stacked in such nice piles, corn bags nested on top of pizza slabs.

  He was good for me, Dad said.

  Carl also organized a biannual garage sale, to purge the household of crap. Mom liked garage sales, because she had very little money and was, she said, a fan of the found object. Most interesting to her was furniture, even then, and she had at that point acquired several velvet-topped footstools that she used in her apartment as guest seats. Her roommate at the time, tawny-maned Sharlene, was passionate about cooking, and they often had big dinner parties of cuisines from around the world, Moroccan feasts and Italian banquets, the table decorated with purple-glassed votive candles and old cracking out-of-date maps, because neither could afford to travel. Her roommate took weeks planning the menu, and Mom’s job was to supply the seating. She’d been spending her Saturdays scouting around San Francisco and Oakland and Berkeley for more footstools, at the Ashby Flea Market and at every open garage, and on that particular morning, sunshine freshening up the gardens, she had stopped to browse through the tidy piles at this little house in the foothills when the tall handsome man in the lounge chair asked if she needed any help.

  You don’t happen to have any velvet footstools? She scanned the lawn, eyes grazing over shoes and kitchenware.

  Footstools, he said, as if thinking about it. All velvet?

  Just the top, she said.

  He shook his head. I’m sorry, he said.

  Or all velvet?

  He shook his head again. Not even close, he said.

  She tipped her chin, and smiled at him. In those days, she let her hair loose, down to her waist, and whenever I met old friends of hers, they would describe my mother as having resembled a mermaid with legs. With a sheerness to her skin that people wanted to shield.

  Dad liked a task.

  What kind of velvet footstool? he asked, rising from his chair.

  Doesn’t matter, she said. About so high? She held her hand at knee level. With a velvet top? Any color?

  Across the lawn, Carl was attaching price labels to a few more books. Nope, he called out. But how about a whisk, for fifty cents?

  Mom dipped her head. There were posters pinned to telephone poles around the neighborhood for other sales. Thanks anyway, she said.

  Or a toaster oven? Carl said, making sparky sale motions with his hands.

  Mom laughed. Nice try, she said. But I’m a woman on a mission.

  Dad asked if he could accompany her, and she shrugged, in the way that most men at the time used as a doorway or lever. A shrug was as good as a yes, sometimes, particularly for a delicate beauty such as this. He ran inside and grabbed the local paper, which had listings of sales in the back placed by the truly motivated garage-sale givers, and together, they did a walking tour of the neighborhoods, past Shattuck and over to Elm, and Oak, where the house lawns waxed and waned in shades of green and yellow and beige. At each stop, Mom strolled around the piles, and Dad would make an excuse and duck inside, asking the house owner if he could please use their phone. It’s important, he said, urgently. I would be very grateful, he said. He was charming, and tall, and offered to haul any heavy items outside, and the owners all said yes, and at house after house, he called up Carl with instructions. Please, he whispered. I need you to send someone to the fabric store to pick up some velvet. He cupped his hand over the receiver mouthpiece. In a fierce hiss, he promised Carl that he, Dad, would start cleaning the living room of his textbooks and shoes, yes, if only he, Carl, would rip off the wool top of the one footstool they had. It’s my stool, Dad said, pacing, trying to stand far enough away from the front door and the garage sale itself so that she, opening and closing the drawers of an old oak nightstand, would not hear.

  I will, all year, clear the rooms of my stuff, Dad told Carl.

  Carl’s girlfriend, who liked pranks, dashed to the closest fabric store, bought and trod on the cheapest mauve velvet, and cut it into a square. Dad kept Mom busy with the tour of the sales for as long as he could, and then they went to lunch at a little café on Durant, where they talked about college and the abyss post-college and he bit his tongue and did not ask for anything else. After splitting a double-chocolate brownie with whipped cream, she sighed. Her eyes shining. I should get back, she said. Of course, he said. Let’s go. He picked up her bag, which held a few new books and records in it. Maybe we can double-check my place on the way, he offered, as lightly as he could. Who knows, he said, sometimes people trade items i
nstead of money.

  Since it’s right by your car anyway, he said.

  He let her walk ahead, down the sidewalk, and Carl and his girlfriend were tired, lounging in chairs, counting the money and deciding if they should lower prices for the remaining scattering of goods, when Mom saw it. She ran ahead, and clapped her hands with delight at the squat low wooden footstool covered with a kind of worn pink velvet that curled under the base of the seat and was stapled neatly to the inside. She saw it over on the side, by the stack of mildewed books and mismatched silverware.

  Can you believe this? she said. Paul? Look!

  She held it up in her arms, running her fingers over the plush.

  Dad rushed over. You’re kidding! he said to Carl. Someone traded this?

  For the toaster oven, Carl said, pointedly. So now we need a new toaster oven.

  Dad nodded. I’d like to buy us a new toaster oven, he said.

  Sounds like a plan, said Carl, closing his eyes. I thought you might be interested, he said, to Mom.

  The color was high on her cheeks. I am very interested, she said.

  She sat on the stool and crossed her legs and said she liked the feel of it, liked it very much. It’s pink as a rose, she said, and Carl’s girlfriend beamed. The label read seven dollars, and Mom dug in her purse and paid for it, which Dad let her do, and she lugged it to her car, which he helped her with, and they made a date for the following night. It was as natural a plan as if they’d been seeing each other for months. Date Her, on his most current checklist with a nicely filled-in box. At their wedding, Carl, the best man, told the full story, holding up his flute of champagne, a story Dad had not told Mom ever. The guests roared. Light hit the gold of the champagne in a spear. Mom, in the photos, was wearing a dress that seemed sheerer than it actually was, so in every photo she looked like a ghost, a ghost that at any moment you might catch nude. It was a work of art, the dress, because it danced right in between the very tangible and the very intangible, and her skin and the dress were hard to distinguish. In the toast photo of her standing with Dad, who was all tangibility, black suit and firm shoulders, her eyes burn.

  I’d started asking her questions about the wedding one afternoon when I was eleven, trying to understand how two such different people had gotten married at all, and she pulled the photo album off the shelf and opened it on our knees, between us. For a while she kept it on that page with the photo of Carl holding up his champagne, his mouth half open as he spoke his toast. She traced the fringes on his wingtip shoes and told me the story, and as she did, I felt the two parallel strands in her telling: awe, that a man had done so much for her in a couple hours, and how competent a man he was, to make that happen, and even how he had become neater, as a result of his promise to Carl, something she thanked Carl for whenever she saw him, explaining how every day Dad would place his briefcase in the hall closet and take off his shoes and hang his jacket—all of that, plus a kind of slippery unease, that it had not been fate after all. I thought, she told me, that the signs were pointing to him. But it turned out he’d made the signs! she said, poking at the photo with the tip of her finger.

  Were you upset? I asked.

  It was our wedding day! she said.

  She turned the page. We looked at people dancing: people I knew, all younger.

  But had you trusted the signs? I asked.

  She shook her head, but not as in no. As in shaking her head free of the thought. She turned more pages, dusky-black paper with delicate photo corners holding the pictures in place, and she pointed out relatives I hadn’t met, or Dad’s dad, who’d died before I was born, holding a napkin to his face like a cowboy. The day grew darker outside, and the whitish sheer dress provided us light on the pages. I looked at the people, and grunted in response as if I’d moved on, but I was still caught back in pages before. My mother looked for signs all the time. A person would be curt to her at the supermarket and she would view it as a sign that she should be nicer to strangers. Joseph would give her an unexpected smile and she’d retrace all her actions to see why she deserved it. Once, we arrived home to a snail at the doorstep and she said it was a sign to slow down, and she took a walk around the block at a funereal pace, saying there was something in there for her if she just took her time. She came back just as vivid-faced as ever. Thank you, little snail, she buzzed, lifting it up and placing it in the cool shadows of a jasmine bush. She was always looking for unexpected guidance, and at that garage sale the world had spit up just exactly what she’d asked for, and what could be a better omen than that? So it must’ve been a real blow, on her wedding day, to find out that the larger hand in action was the hand she was then holding.

  We turned the last few pages of the album. Grandma, in a daisy-patterned sack dress. Mom’s sister Cindy, wearing jeans. Some of Dad’s red-cheeked uncles.

  You’re in here, Mom said.

  No, I said.

  You are, Mom said. You and Joe. In the air. The beginning of you, she said. She kissed the top of my head.

  On the last page, as if to underline her comment, the kiss: Dad and Mom, pressed close together, layers of that ghostly dress blowing around him. We looked at it for a while.

  Do you still have that footstool? I asked.

  We crept into the garage, flicking on the light. In the coldness of the room, with its old stone floor and whistling window, Mom and I rummaged through piles, setting aside crates and boxes. After a half-hour or so, wedged behind a rake and a series of brooms, I found it: a moth-eaten sun-bleached peach velvet seat, stretched over a shiny brown wicker crisscross-patterned stool. Look! I said, brushing my hand over the top. Mom, knee-deep in a pile of baby toys, eyed it the way you eye a person you haven’t seen in a long time when the last exchange was complicated. I can build you a better one, she said, dubiously. I patted the seat. This one, I said. The velvet was soft. I sidestepped the piles and took it for my room. Furniture.

  14 There are heightened years. One was nine. Another twelve. A third, seventeen. My brother used graph paper to make shapes out of sequences; I saw those years as a trio, but not one I wanted to map out on those small graph-paper squares. I didn’t know how I would label that graph, what the x and y axes might be called. Instead, they cluster together in my mind, like a code to a padlock that might hang on a locker. It’s a confounding mechanism, but with all three numbers in place, lined up just right on the notched mark, something in the arch clicks, and releases.

  In the movies, an affair is often indicated by spying at motel rooms, or lipstick marks dashed on a white collar. I was twelve when I sat down to a family dinner of roast beef and potatoes, on a cool February evening, and got such a wallop of guilt and romance in my first mouthful that I knew, instantly, that she’d met someone else. Thick waves of it, in the meat and the homemade sour cream and the green slashes of carefully chopped chives. Oh! I said. I drank down a full glass of water. Ah! my father said, letting out an end-of-day sigh. Roast beef, he murmured, patting his belt. My favorite. I got up to find some factory catsup to help me out, while Joseph turned pages of his book and Mom poured herself a glass of wine. Like it? she said. I glanced over at her. It fit, too: she’d been looking better lately, dressing up more, a little happier, wearing patterned headbands with her ponytail, bracelets on both arms. And things, in general, were in a new flux: Joseph had applied to colleges and was hoping to move out of the house and into the dorm room at Caltech he wanted to share with George. Mom talked often about how much she would miss him, but he didn’t really respond, and whenever a box arrived for any kind of package delivery, regular or Grandma’s, Joseph would empty it and then squirrel it away and begin to put things in it. He was half packed already, months in advance. If he could’ve eaten dinner in his room, he would’ve, but our father insisted we sit together at the table.

  I read a study, Dad said, flaring his napkin into his lap. Families that eat dinner together are happier families, he said.

  I think those families also talk to each oth
er, I said.

  Mom, behind us, spooning up a vegetable, laughed.

  It was true: our dinners, always at the table, framed by floral-print kitchen curtains and the rising steam off casserole dishes, were almost always silent in those days unless Mom felt like filling us in on the latest news and gossip in carpentry. Dad didn’t talk much about work: I leave work at work! was his mantra. Of course, right after dinner he’d put his dish in the sink and go into their bedroom to make calls, and he’d work, often, until ten or eleven unless I knocked lightly on his door to deliver the name of an upcoming TV drama like a fisherman’s lure for a reluctant tuna. Even as young as ten, if I whispered the name of the show with enough pull, I could get him to put aside his stack of papers and wander in to watch. If I was quiet enough, he wouldn’t send me to bed. We colluded in this way: as long as I didn’t announce that I was a kid, he wouldn’t rise up as a parent, and for an hour, we could both have a little respite from our roles.

  He only liked the medical dramas. The law shows made him crabby.

  At dinner, as part of his adolescence, Joseph had taken a liking to reading and eating, so he generally brought a book to the table which he would spread in his lap and peer at between bites. Often a textbook, sometimes a thriller. Both parents had given up trying to stop him, because when, previously, they had wrenched a book out of his hands, he had stared into space so disconcertingly it made the rest of us feel like putting a bag over his head. Sometimes, if he didn’t have a book, to occupy Joseph’s eyes I would plant a cereal-box side panel in front of him, and his eyes would slide over and attach to the words, as if they could not do anything but roam and float in the air until words and numbers anchored them back to our world. By the time he was seventeen, he must’ve memorized the vitamin balances in various raisin-and-oat cereals, and if I’d asked him what percentage of niacin one might find in a single serving of Cheerios, I would not have been surprised if he’d been able to spout the numbers as precisely as his own height and weight.