The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

by Aimee Bender

  I don’t understand, he whispered.

  I laughed a little, under the closed lids.

  Me neither, I said. Not at all. Please, I said.

  My whole self, calling out: Just now. Just once. Forget all of it. Just now. Don’t step back. Please.

  Rose—he said.

  And he didn’t move, closer or farther, and I didn’t either, but it was as if a light wind lifted through the window and pushed us just the few extra inches needed. Then the elbows, the shoulders touching, and his arms circled around me, and we held each other close, and I moved my face up to his, my forehead to his cheek, and I was the scared teenager then, and we kissed, a kiss horrible in its pity, or worry, but beautiful because it was George and I’d wanted to kiss him ever since I could remember. Just soft, just lips on lips, just kissing, light. His mouth tasting of sunshine and focus and rumbling adulthood.

  It was like we were re-setting the room, together. A room that held nothing inside it now holding two who had known each other through years. It was coaxing and invitation and there was a terrible sweetness to all of it, in the awakeness of my face, and his fingers, and the brushing and gripping of hands on shoulders and faces and backs and in how all the roads had already forked. The surge built and lifted, and I moved into him closer and he pressed into me, and it was turning a corner, heading down new and urgent byways, driving, gravity pulling us lower, but then both of us began to stop it, slowed everything down. Moved our faces apart. Kissing slowly, slower. Pauses. Embellishments. Punctuation. I held on to his arms, tightly. Remember this, I thought. He stayed close, and held my face, and shoulders, and touched the back of my neck, and for what felt like over an hour, we just stood with each other, with hands and lips and skin and quiet.

  Thank you, I said. I kept my eyes closed. No one saw that happen, I said. Not even me.

  Me, he said.

  34 When my mother arrived on Sunday, twelve hours of travel from Nova Scotia to Newark to L.A., we hugged at the door and she kept framing my face in her hands, placing it, as if to make sure it was me. She tried to soften the worry lines pressed into my forehead, but instead, as if drawn by an undetectable marker, they just extended from my forehead onto hers. It bothered her, that I was upset. Usually, like my father, I took Joseph’s disappearances in stride and just waited out the time till he returned. Still, she did look rested from her trip, her cheeks red and glistering from the brisk stirrings of winds out east.

  We stood facing each other in the front hallway.

  Thank you, she said, for checking. She pressed on my shoulders. Her eyes changed. Listen—she said.

  I shook my head. No need, I said. There are bigger things to worry about. I’m not going to say anything.

  She kissed my cheek fervently, gratefully, left her tears there. Then picked up her purse and said she was going to drive out quickly to Bedford Gardens to confirm it all.

  I listened as her car drove off and then walked around the house. I had trouble standing still. I thought of calling someone—Eliza, even Sherrie—but the only person I really wanted to talk to was George and I already felt like I’d asked too much. I didn’t feel like calling Eddie. So while Mom was at Joseph’s, and Dad settled down to watch the opening chapter of a Civil War miniseries, I found my way to the kitchen. Windows swiveled open, tabletops clear. A head of garlic was resting alone on the counter, so I dug in my thumb and pulled it into sections. Pressed the heel of my hand on the side of a broad knife to smash down each clove. Peeled papery white layers off the firm yellow centers. Minced.

  My mother hadn’t seen the bed out on the balcony, and when she came back, she was too agitated to cook, so I said I would do it. I’d already started. As Dad spoke to her in low tones in the next room, I salted a pot of water for spaghetti. I opened a can of good tomatoes, and added it to the chopped garlic and onion sizzling in olive oil. It was the first time I could remember making a whole meal, start to finish. As best I could, I kept focused on the task at hand, and as I chopped parsley into small wet green bits, I just tried to let the ingredients meet each other, as I had tasted in the onion soup.

  Dinner’s ready, I said, after an hour. My father stepped in, prompt, stretching, and my mother wandered in with weary eyes and set the table. Her shoulders heavy. I placed a bowl of grated Parmesan cheese in the center of the table and served everyone a bowl of spaghetti with marinara sauce. Dad rubbed my hair like I was a little kid; Mom opened a bottle of wine. They picked up their forks and folded into their bowls and ate quietly. I watched them eat for a few minutes, and then my mother asked if I was going to join them, so I felt the narrowness of the corridor and picked up my fork and twirled the pasta around it. The first full meal I’d made on my own. My hand shaking a little as I bit in.

  The sauce was good, and simple, and thick.

  Sadness, rage, tanks, holes, hope, guilt, tantrums. Nostalgia, like rotting flowers. A factory, cold.

  I pressed the napkin to my eyes.

  It’ll be okay, said Dad, patting my hand.

  Once, during the meal, my mother looked up. Her eyes were wet. You made this?

  Yes.

  It’s good, Rose, she said. It’s filling. Where did you learn to cook?

  Nowhere, I said. I don’t know. Watching you?

  Have you been practicing?

  Not really, I said.

  They each had two helpings. I ate four bites of mine.

  My father cleared his own dish, rinsed it and left the room.

  My mother stayed at the table. Waves of worry about Joseph broke over her as she ran fingertips beneath her eyes.

  We sat together, for a while, at our place mats. I tried to stay calm, after those bites. I hardly understood most of it.

  When she stood up, moving more slowly than usual, we did the dishes together, washing the red streaks down the drain, spooning leftovers into bowls. I checked the pasta box ingredients to see what factory I’d tasted but nothing seemed to match.

  Mom finished rinsing and drying the silverware. The lavender-scented dish soap, a pure clear purple. Outside the kitchen window, lamplight glimpsed off a dog collar as a neighbor toured the sidewalks, pulling the leash.

  She squeezed out the sponge to dry and placed it on the aluminum bridge between sink sides. It seemed she’d forgotten I was there.

  Where are you? she whispered out the window, into the night.

  Part four

  Here

  35 I lived at home throughout what would’ve been my college years. I did not go to college. I worked first as a tutor for middle-school kids and then as an administrative assistant at a commercial company that produced cable TV ads. All those smiling people my father and I watched as we sat together paid my bills.

  While Eliza and Eddie and Sherrie cycled through the dorms, and the dorm cafeterias, I took down my high-school movie-star posters and replaced them with landscapes and painting prints. I moved the weatherworn marriage stool into the closet and packed my dolls and high-school books in larger boxes and settled those in the garage. It was probably better for me anyway, to go simpler, to avoid the drama of the dorm cafeterias entirely, but mostly I stayed at home because Joseph was gone.

  After my visit to his apartment, he did return, one more time. My mother had been driving over every day, several times a day, and on the sixth afternoon she found him facedown again on the floor of his bedroom, starfished. He’s back! she sang to us all, on the phone, from his place. He’s alive! She sat with him at the hospital, kissing his hands, drenched in reprieve, and my father nodded as if he’d known it all along, and more calls were made and fanfares blown, but I did not feel any relief. Doctors came and tested him extensively and my father called up experts and called in favors, but once Joseph was released he only stayed a few more days. As soon as he had an hour alone in his apartment he disappeared again and did not come back. There wasn’t even time to decide if he could stay at Bedford on his own anymore—he went there for a few hours to pack up books for school and
Mom had to get groceries for dinner and that was it. To me, this was not a surprise; the act of seeing him there, changing, had been enough to point towards the inevitable future. Whether or not he returned once or twice or three times more, he was headed in, or into, away, and what I’d seen that day was a certain harbinger. The most sobering moment of my life.

  When he did return that one time, pasty, exhausted, more drained and dehydrated than ever, refusing to comment, I went once to the hospital to visit, and that was the last time I saw him.

  My mother still drove to his apartment every day, on her way to the studio. To check. He loved this apartment, she said, paying the rent and kissing the envelope fold before dropping it into the mailbox. He will return here, she said, when we drove past. She kept up the lease even though the rows and columns in the red leather ledger advised her otherwise. After six months went by, my father tried to convince her that Joseph knew where we lived—on Willoughby—and that he would come to his primary home first, but she raised her eyebrows when he started talking about it and walked right out of the room. Sometimes in the middle of a conversation about Joseph she would walk out of the room and then out of the house itself and we’d hear her car drive off. I never saw her grab any keys. I think she took to leaving them in the ignition, dangling, like a getaway.

  On nights when she was home, in the TV room, huddled close to my father and that red leather ledger, muted television colors making stained-glass shapes on the carpet, he whispered into her hair about investing the rent money for a future day when Joseph would come back and need his savings.

  Not yet, she said, sitting straighter. I feel he’s returning soon, and he’s going to want that place. I felt it strong today, as I was driving home, she said.

  She ran her fingertips over the ballpoint-indented numbers, as if they could swirl into a code and tell her where to look.

  It was the landlord who finally said no; he wanted to re-do the apartment appliances, and when he found out no one seemed to be living in apartment four at Bedford Gardens, he called up my mother, annoyed. She made up a story about how Joseph was attending graduate school back east in anthropology but that he loved the apartment for his times in L.A. and wasn’t it better to have a scarce tenant? The landlord, suspicious about sublets, asked her to move out, and so, on an overcast chilly Monday, I took the morning off work and my mother and I loaded all the items from Joseph’s apartment into the same green Ford truck she’d borrowed from the lumberyard long before. There wasn’t a lot to pack. Inside, the apartment itself looked just like how I’d seen it last—even the same distant smell of starch still hovering in the kitchenette.

  I felt uncomfortable being there, so I kept an eye on his stuff, standing at the edges like a bodyguard, and in each room, my mother wept. She stood at the window in his bedroom, holding the edge for support, like a painting for the neighbors who might look up from their worlds. She stood at his bedroom closet for a while, as if trying to find a secret trapdoor he’d built into the wall leading to a nest he’d made in the insulation of the building. As if he was king of some underground citadel and commanded all the moles and rats.

  I had this dream last night, she told me, as we closed the door and walked down the stairs to the full truck. Into clean fresh air. She pocketed the spare key. Downstairs, I’d loaded the folding table and chair into the cab, behind the seats, so they could not be snatched out of the truck bed or fall out on a bumpy turn.

  I dreamed he was surfing in Australia, she said, settling into the driver’s seat.

  She turned on the ignition. Her profile was calm, a little worn, with just the faintest lines at the corners of her mouth pulling down. She faced me. Is it ridiculous? she said.

  I pulled Grandma’s old bamboo salad bowl into my lap. My other hand behind the seat, holding everything steady.

  I bet he’d like it, I said. I heard you can see millions of stars there.

  She pulled away from the curb and drove for a while. It felt good, to leave. As she drove down Sunset, I learned the intricacies of the bamboo bowl, which was cracking on the side and had a bump on the uphill northern slant. Boxes slid in the truck bed, to and fro.

  At a red light near Western, Mom turned to me. Her face drained of expression.

  Rose, she said. Listen. We never finished this discussion. I want you to know. I’ll break up with him if you want me to, she said.

  With Joseph? I said, tapping the bowl, smiling a little.

  Her forehead creased, confused. I feel terrible that you found out about it at all, she said. I’ve tried to be so discreet—

  You’ve been very discreet, I said.

  She bowed her head. More tears leaked from the corners of her eyes and fled past the borders of her sunglasses.

  You really don’t think your brother left because of this? she said. I can’t help but think it. You found out, maybe he found out—

  I ran my fingernail along the crack in the bamboo bowl. Mom, I said. It wasn’t news. I’ve known since I was twelve, I said.

  She stared at me.

  Twelve?

  Twelve, I said.

  She counted aloud, numbers I didn’t understand. But that’s the year it started, she said.

  I patted the bowl, in agreement.

  Did somebody tell you?

  No, I said.

  Did you overhear something?

  No, I said. Just a good guess, I said.

  The light turned green.

  You were always like that, as a kid, she said wonderingly, pausing. You would come hug me just exactly when I needed a hug. Like magic.

  Mom, I said.

  I love your father—

  Mom, I said. It’s okay.

  Cars honked behind us. She reached over to my cheek, my ear, touching my hair.

  Go! yelled a car.

  She moved along. A driver zoomed past and gave us the finger.

  Look at you, tough guy, I said.

  What a daughter I have, she said, driving. Look at you. What an amazing, what a beautiful daughter.

  I kept my eyes on the road. Hands in the bowl. It was convenient, how my own survival came across as magnanimous.

  It wasn’t magic, I said. You always looked like you needed a hug. Hey, Mom, I said. Remember how you said that Joseph would guide you? As a baby?

  She gripped the steering wheel. Yes, she said, her voice cracking.

  Does he?

  She wiped her cheek. What do you mean? Does who?

  Larry, I said.

  Larry, she repeated. His name new between us.

  I watched out the window, waiting. Convenience stores and restaurants and guitar shops passing by.

  Not like your brother, she said, slowly. But he has been very helpful.

  Then good, I said.

  He’s a nice man.

  I don’t want the details, I said. But good.

  I know it’s wrong, she said, falling back into panic, shoulders rising. I know I should give him up—

  No one wants you to give him up, I said.

  At the house, we unloaded the stuff onto the lawn. A few boxes of clothes and science books. The leftover furniture. The salad bowl, and some mismatched silverware and plates.

  I lifted a box. Where shall I put it? I said.

  His room, Mom said, exhaling. Please.

  I stumbled through the front door, arms full. Joseph’s room was now Mom’s part-time; she slept many nights there, since she said it was a way to feel close to him when she was missing him particularly. The counters were crowded with her things: blouse piles, turquoise bathrobe, jewelry on his desk, makeup on the nightstand.

  We marched back and forth, stacking boxes against his wall.

  Mom liked to look at his posters, and peer in his desk drawers, but the other unspoken advantage to Joseph’s room was that oak side door she herself had installed so many years before. It had its own lock and key, so she could come and go as she pleased, and since she still slept in, I never knew anymore how many nights she s
pent at home. If my father was troubled by her new level of independence, he did not breathe a word about it. They were kinder with each other than I’d ever seen, talking in lower voices, sitting closer to each other on the sofa, but even so, I often woke up in the morning to find him hunched over, leaving a tray with a cup of tea at the base of Joseph’s door.

  My father still seemed shockingly unaware of anything that was going on, but based on what I’d tasted, it had occurred to me that inside my mother was some kind of tiny hospital, and my father drove around that one as vigilantly as he drove around the big ones laid out on the map of the city.

  He and I hadn’t talked anymore about where my brother might have gone. No more theories of windows and checking. No more jovial assurances that we were all over-worriers. He took up jogging to give those restless feet a purpose, and sometimes, a couple hours after dinner, I’d stand at the front door and see my father circling the neighborhood in darkness, in his old raggy Cal T-shirt and shorts. When he ran up the walk, drenched in sweat, in the yellow glow of the porch light I could see a redness around his eyes that was deeper, ruddier, than the redness in his cheeks. He kept a towel outside on the flower-box ledge, and he would wipe down his face and pat his hair neat before he stepped foot back into the house.

  When all was unloaded, and the truck was empty, Mom pulled me close and kissed my cheek and flooded me with thank yous so many times and with such elongated emphasis that it only seemed to prove the need for Larry all over again.

  I went to work. She drove the truck to the lumberyard. For weeks, Joseph’s boxes stayed exactly where we’d placed them against the walls of his room. Mom said she couldn’t bear to look inside, so over a series of evenings, daylight extending longer, I finally unpacked them myself. When I found clothing I washed and folded it and put it back into empty drawers; I shelved the books, and the one pot he’d used to cook up ramen joined all our other pots inside the kitchen cabinet. I put a few of Grandma’s items—the salad bowl, the movable lamp—back in the side room, where they began. I tossed old sundries, like rice and pasta. I left the Morehead folding chairs and table leaning against the side walls of his closet, and I feared for a day when my father or mother had a spontaneous fit of grief or terror and called up Goodwill to give it all away.