More silence from my mother. She can play this game all day.
My father stews before eventually letting out an exaggerated exhale. “What kind of cake does the boy want to make.”
“A lighthouse cake,” my mother informs him.
“A what?”
“A lighthouse.”
“I meant what flavor. It has to be a shape too?”
“Yes, it has to be a . . .” My mother stops and I hold my breath. “I will bake you two sheet cakes. Vanilla. I think that’s allowed. But you had better get to work figuring out the rest.”
“It’s Sunday. The game starts at five.”
“His meeting is tomorrow night. And it had better shine.” More whispering. “Remember the Pinewood Derby.”
The Pinewood Derby was the last project my father and I undertook, back in Cub Scouts. Each boy was given a kit with a block of pine, plastic wheels with metal axles, and fathers and sons were tasked with making model cars and racing them together. My father had fun carving and sanding our block into the body of a race car, holding it up for inspection and making small adjustments to the aerodynamics; I took the job of painting it very seriously. I found a corner of his workshop where I finally fit in, and he even helped me look through picture books from the library on fast cars and choose just the right colors—blue with orange stripes. The racetrack itself was assembled in the basement of the Nazarene Church, where we sometimes had our meetings. I overheard my father tell one of the other dads that my paintjob could best be described as “enthusiastic”; I wasn’t certain that was an insult, but I also couldn’t rule it out. Together we placed fourth. There were only three trophies.
I cried in the car on the way home.
“We don’t cry over losing,” my father had said, but I wanted a trophy. Yes, they were gold and shiny, mounted to a base that looked like marble, and I had imagined how it would look in my bedroom. But more so, they were a symbol. I would never have one for running or swimming or playing baseball. A trophy would have stated clearly that I could excel at something other boys did. A trophy would have been proof that I was a normal kid.
In the passenger seat I held our race car tightly in my hands and rotated it slowly, as if it were on a barbecue spit. I stopped crying two blocks from our house. In the driveway, after we sat in silence for a moment or two, my father said, “I’ll bet some of the other fathers hollowed out their blocks and placed weights inside. I wish I had thought of that.” It was only then that I understood that he was disappointed too. “Lou Fletcher even has a drill press. Damn.”
“How does making something heavier make it go faster?” I had asked. It seemed antithetical to me.
“I don’t know, son,” he replied at the time, clearly growing annoyed. “It just does.”
“Are you listening to me?” my mother says sharply to my father now, making me jump in my secret spot.
“Yes. Pinewood Derby. I heard you.” I hear a kitchen drawer close and my father retreat to his workshop, hopefully to develop a plan. After I’m sure that he’s gone, I slink into the kitchen and stand silently until my mother slips her apron around me, the one that says I’M A PEANUT BUTTER AND JELLY MOM.
“How are we going to make a lighthouse out of two rectangular cakes?” I ask, studying the two cake pans.
“That’s your father’s department.” She opens her cookbook and measures the flour, the whole time my eyes trained on her. “This would go a lot faster, Francis, if you just let me do it.”
I blink twice. “That would be against the rules.”
“No one would have to know.”
I’m already uncomfortable with the amount of help my mother’s giving. How do I explain this? “I would know.” Scouting, among other things, is about honor.
“Yes,” she says, “I suppose you would.”
I watch as she combines all the ingredients into a bright melamine mixing bowl. As she puts the paddles into her electric mixer I’m dubious and ask, “Will Dad be able to do this?” Maybe honor is not the most important quality, maybe the goal here is a decent cake.
“That’s the great thing about cakes. Grandmothers make them. You don’t need the Army Corps of Engineers.” The electric mixer whirrs to life.
When the cakes are out of their pans and cooling on wire racks, my father and I stare at them, careful not to look too closely at each other. He’d cut a board in his workshop for us to build the cake on, and he allowed me to cover it in foil. What comes next is anyone’s best guess.
“Well,” my father says, “we’re stuck with each other.”
The proclamation lies flat between us. Even I understand it’s a mouthful.
“How are we going to make these into a lighthouse?”
My father squats so that his eyes are counter level and he surveys the two cakes. “Do you trust me?”
“Are you going to hollow it out and put weights in it?” This is new, my talking to him in this tone.
My father studies me over the rim of his glasses. “Nobody likes a smartass, James.”
I nod, not saying that it was, in part, a serious suggestion.
“What are you wearing?” His eyes land on my apron.
“Do you want one? Mom has one that is blue.”
“Take that off. We’re men, we’re not frightened of a little mess.”
I glare at my father and he glares at me, his the more menacing. Without breaking eye contact, I slip the pink apron over my head and drop it on the floor, and only then do I look down, away from him. I’m angry, but I don’t entirely understand why. I am afraid of a little mess (and deathly afraid of a big one). I wish I could wear an apron all the time in Webelos, especially that day we bent young trees to frame a lean-to—I got sap all over my clothes.
My father pulls a small bowl aside and cracks an egg on the edge using only one hand before tossing the eggshell into the sink.
My eyes grow wide. “Where did you learn to do that?” My mother always used two hands.
“The United States Marine Corps.”
“Really.” I’d heard my father speak of his time in the Marines on many occasions (too many, in fact) and the stories had never once excited me, but any place that could teach you to crack an egg with one hand—with the flick of a wrist and a flourish—could not be all bad.
“After long drives we would cook eggs and Spam on the hood of our Jeeps while they were still warm from the engine.”
On second thought, my original assessment was correct.
“What do we need an egg for?”
“For the frosting.”
“There’s no eggs in frosting.” I’ve helped my mother with enough cakes to know that. “Besides, Mom already made buttercream.”
My father looks over at a large bowl of cream-colored frosting as if startled by it. He swipes his finger through it and takes a lick. It’s the first time he doesn’t seem totally repulsed by the task ahead. “Well, okay. We need to make blue, and we need to make gray.”
“Gray?” Gray is the color of seals and manhole covers and stormy skies. Certainly nothing you eat. I try to think of gray lighthouses and can’t imagine that either—lighthouses are usually white.
“Blue is easy. There’s already food coloring for that.” He takes the small blue tube of coloring out of the box and sets it on the table. “But gray . . .” My father scratches the short whiskers under his chin. He didn’t shave for church this morning because we were running late. “How are we going to make that?”
Why are we going to make that? is the real question, but I know better than to interrupt my father when he’s thinking. “Gray is a mixture of black and white,” I offer, hoping that might help.
“That’s good.” My father rests his hand on my shoulder; it feels heavy and he pushes a little too hard. “The frosting is white, but we don’t have black. But I think we could get a
gray effect by mixing three primary colors.”
I look at the box of food coloring options for primary colors. “Blue, yellow, red!”
“It’s your cake. Give it a try.”
It’s our cake. I have the brief, terrifying thought that he’s sabotaging this project so as not to appear less than manly. He spoons some of the white frosting into a separate bowl, and even though I hesitate, I eventually add drops of coloring in equal amounts and stir the frosting until a ruddy color appears.
“I think I added too much red,” I say; our gray has a brownish hue. I don’t know how I could have allowed an extra drop of food coloring pass my careful scrutiny, but the result is hard to argue with.
My father looks over the bowl. “Nah, it’s perfect.” His graying sideburns are not unlike the color of this frosting: brown with a hint of red, but enough in the way of gray to make it interesting. “We’re going to use that for the rocks.”
Rectangle pans? Gray frosting? Rocks? Nothing about this says lighthouse to me, and, worse, nothing about it suggests edibility or prizeworthiness. Not only were we doomed not to ribbon, we were likely to be laughed out of the room.
My father must read the expression on my face, because he says, “Boy, what do lighthouses do? What is their primary job?”
If they have a secondary job, I do not know it. Their primary job is to keep ships from crashing into . . . “Oh.” I’m almost impressed with his vision; he was giving this real thought.
We frost the first cake blue for the ocean. My father breaks the second cake unevenly (I gasp) and places half on top. “Frost that one gray.” The cragged edges make the perfect rocky coast. I use a little of the white frosting to make waves and ripples in the water—enough to make the sea look choppy; if we’re making a lighthouse cake, it might as well look like the lighthouse was put there for a reason. My father crafts a tower out of the remaining cake, and because it’s delicate, he frosts that himself. Together, we use the last of the gray frosting to make a dome on top.
When I stand back to take our creation in, I can’t help but be impressed. Perhaps we weren’t stuck with each other after all—perhaps we make a pretty decent team.
“You know what this needs?” my father asks, and then he leaves the room. He does that a lot, asks questions and then doesn’t wait for the answer. I follow behind him as he treks back to his workshop. I fidget in the doorway as he opens and closes the little drawers that he uses to sort little things like screws. “Aha!” After a few false starts he finds what he’s looking for: old parts from a model train set he had as a boy. He plucks out five tiny trees that are the perfect scale for our cake.
“Are we allowed to use those?”
“You bet. I read the official instructions. The cake need only be eighty-five percent edible.”
“In that case . . .” I pull one of my father’s moves and run inside and up to my room. I return to the kitchen with a little plastic ship that I never play with.
We place the finishing touches on our cake and my eyes brighten. I have visions of the other boys cheering and raising me on their shoulders as I clutch the first-place prize, even though I know deep down I’m the only one who would get that excited about baking.
We win second prize. Lance Davies and his father made a race car cake that noses ahead of us for first. (Foiled by race cars again.)
“Good job,” my father says, and he shakes my hand after collecting our red ribbon. I think he’s almost relieved we didn’t place first.
The cakes are sold in a silent auction to the parents, friends, and judges who were invited to our meeting to raise money for further Webelos activities. I want my father to buy Lance Davies’s cake so we can dissect it to see if perhaps it’s only eighty-four percent edible and therefore disqualified. My father decides at the last minute to make a play for our cake, but bidding has already closed.
It’s not until my mother says good night to some of the other women and makes her way to our car that we learn what she has done. She bought our cake while I was distracted with Lance’s. I sit with it in the backseat, and my father even drives extra-slow to keep it from sliding as he goes around corners.
As the bridge that spans the widening gulf that exists between my father and I, my mother sometimes seems feeble. The cables that keep her suspended feel tired and frayed. But tonight, as she turns back to smile at me before patting my father on his leg, she seems fully made of steel.
◆ TWENTY ◆
There used to be this popcorn ceiling in Kenny’s room. Stucco ceiling. Whatever people call it. A particular scourge of suburban homes in the 1960s and 1970s. Why bother to fix the cracks when you can slather layer upon layer of ugly crap on top of them and pass it off as style? Look, everyone, what a lovely pastiche of caulk and putty from the local hardware store and diet cottage cheese! Doesn’t everything look just as good as new? These treatments are a lie. They don’t fix the underlying ceiling, the cracks, the weaknesses, the imperfections. They only serve to cover them up. But now somehow the popcorn is gone and I’m trying to remember when it came down, who did the work and why, in a family that apparently loves to cover up faults and deformities with slop and untruths, someone had the foresight to say: No, here we should make things right.
“You awake?” Daniel asks.
We lie on our backs clutching the blanket up to our necks, our eyes wide open in the darkness, both of us afraid to do much more than breathe. I count to fifteen in my head. “Would you be asleep? If you were me?”
Daniel exhales, carbon dioxide and excess oxygen fluttering his lips.
Naomi volunteered to take my bedroom with my old twin bed since she’s alone, and Aaron sleeps in a He-Man sleeping bag on the floor. Kenny and Ellen live close enough to spend the night in their own home, so Daniel and I settled in Kenny’s room, which is bigger and more comfortable for guests. Kenny invited us to spend the night at his house, the big brother finally showing up to walk me home—although where and what home is anymore, I’m not sure—but I told him not to be silly. I am an adult; I stand up to my own bullies now. So they packed up William and Zachary and left, Ellen holding my hand for a few seconds too long, letting go just before it became awkward, and they walked out the door.
The bully is in her own room, just across the hall.
I sat at the dinner table long after everyone left, like I did as a child when I was not dismissed for refusing to eat my peas. My mother retreated to her room; Naomi and Ellen tended to the children. Kenny and Daniel sat with me for a while, but Daniel eventually got up, as someone had to clean up the meal, and Kenny stepped away to gossip with Naomi.
Eventually we all went to bed.
I squint to further study the ceiling, but the only light is from the November moon, whose bluish glow softens the entire room; I can’t tell where the walls end and the ceiling begins—it feels like we’re in an igloo. Winter is a month away, at least by the calendar, but an icy chill seeps through the windowsill, washing over me like a whisper spilling more gut-wrenching secrets. A swift breeze tickles the maple tree outside, and I can see the shadow of the last of its dying leaves waving at me like hands, large hands, of basketball players or giant, hulking Swedes.
One of the branches raps on the windowpane and Daniel flinches. “What’s that noise?”
“The tree,” I murmur, as if lulling a twitchy child to sleep.
I planted that tree as a fourth-grader. I remember my father and me extracting it from the neighbor, Miss Egan’s, yard. She was a miserable old woman with a crooked back who had never married and owned too many rag dolls that may or may not have been handmade. She always wanted our dandelion leaves, which seemed odd, but I think she used them in soup. She had expressed some rather unkind thoughts about this maple when it was hers, and when those thoughts seemed to percolate into a plan of action we rescued it from a sinister fate by transferring it, roots and all, in a rusty
wheelbarrow to its current post outside Kenny’s window. We planted it a respectable distance away from the house, imagining its future growth, my father digging a hole for it a few feet closer to the lamppost.
At least he was my father then.
“Night is darker here than in the city, yet the moon and the stars are brighter,” I say.
“It’s too quiet,” Daniel replies. “Too quiet to sleep.”
Sure, that’s the problem.
I remember noticing when we drove up to the house that the grass, even in November, looked impossibly lush, like Astroturf. I have lived enough time in a glamourous metropolis to understand that what is fake sometimes looks real, and what is real can look impossibly fake. There was nothing fabricated about rural New York, and yet the entirety of it is carefully constructed, perhaps on a cavernous soundstage. The stars are stage lights rigged to camouflaged rafters, the trees made by the world’s leading plastic arborist. The house and barn, once so familiar to me, merely false fronts, propped in place by an intricate series of two-by-fours and steel girders. In summer, the sound of crickets is piped in. We saw a production recently of William Inge’s Picnic, in which a friend of ours played Madge; I remember thinking how much the set looked like home. I’ll bet if I saw it again I would be struck by how much the set designer’s construct felt like home too, now that I was seeing home through more jaundiced eyes.
Daniel takes my hand in his; it feels surprisingly warm around my frozen fingers. My heart weakened, it’s unable to pump blood to my extremities. “She didn’t know what she was saying.” It’s the first reference to dinner Daniel’s made since we retired to the privacy of Kenny’s room.
I chuckle. Not amused—bemused, maybe. Exhausted. Because I know she knew exactly what she was saying. “You wanna bet?”
“Okay, so maybe she knew what she was saying, but you know that doesn’t make it true.”
I roll over on my side. I’m looking right at his ear, which, in this light, looks like both a grotesque deformity and a painstakingly sculpted work of art. “It doesn’t make it not true.”
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