Eat Cake: A Novel

by Jeanne Ray

  “But you’re not going to worry,” he said. He could read my mind sometimes. When you live with someone for twenty-five years it isn’t exactly a magic trick. “There are plenty of jobs for me. This only happened”—he looked at his watch—“three hours ago. Less than that. Two hours and forty-five minutes I’ve been unemployed. I don’t think we should start panicking yet.”

  “I had no intention of panicking.”

  He kissed my hand again. “Let me fix you another drink. I thought it was good with the cake. We’ll drink and eat cake and in the morning we’ll come up with some sort of plan. I think it would be good if we didn’t try to figure it out right this minute.”

  There was a dull, rattling fear in the lower part of my abdomen, but the calm in Sam’s voice covered it like a soft layer of snow. Sure, we would figure this out. We had figured out plenty of things before this.

  Chapter Two

  THE MORNING WAS A DIFFERENT STORY. PANIC HAD set in during the night like rigor mortis. Sam was staring straight up at the ceiling, his eyes unnaturally large, his fists holding on to the edge of the sheet like it was the only thing keeping him from being flung against the ceiling.

  “Bad night?” I said quietly.

  “We are in big, big trouble,” he whispered.

  I propped up on one elbow. “Sam, that isn’t true. We’re going to take some time to figure this out, remember? That’s what we decided.”

  “I have to find a job.”

  “You’ll find a job.”

  He rolled over to face me, curling his pillow under his cheek. “What if I don’t know how to do anything else? I’m old. They manufacture these kids now. They’re geniuses. They live off of those big fancy coffees and a couple of protein shakes and they don’t go home or want time off. All they know how to do is work. They were actually engineered to not have a life. How does someone like me compete with someone like them?”

  “Were you up all night?”

  “We’re going to have to move, Ruth. We’re going to have to sell the house. We can’t afford to keep a house like this.”

  “You have a severance package, right?”

  “It hasn’t been completely negotiated yet. Anyway, we aren’t living in the nineties anymore. Or the eighties. In the eighties they fired a man and gave him half of the company in stock options. Today you’re just out there. Two months of health insurance and you’re on your own.”

  “You know it’s not going to be like that,” I said, trying to comfort both of us. “There’s going to be money and there’s going to be time.” I put my hand on top of his white knuckles. They were practically frozen. I tried to wiggle my index finger into his fist to loosen up his grip and get a little blood in there. “This is a hard thing, I know that, but it’s happened to a lot of people before. We’re going to get through it.” We’re going to get through it? Is that what people really said to one another when something bad happened? I hadn’t worked outside the home since Wyatt was born. When I quit my job as a high school history teacher, it was because I was eight months pregnant and ready to start a new phase in my life, it wasn’t because the principal was walking me to the door and handing me the contents of my desk in a cardboard box. When I left my job they threw me a party with cupcakes and all the kids made a big banner saying, A FAREWELL BASH FOR MS. NASH! The end of work was a celebration. After all those years of loyal service Sam hadn’t been given so much as a cupcake. Frankly, I thought he was too good for them.

  “It’s possible,” I said, “that this might turn out to be a good thing.”

  “I don’t see how that would be possible.” He wasn’t blinking. I hadn’t noticed that before.

  “Well, the truth is you haven’t exactly been in love with your job for a long time, and you probably never would have left on your own, even though you thought about it plenty. So what if this is the thing that forces you out of the nest?” This was pure improvisation on my part but it was starting to sound good to me. It was sounding right. “There’s a perfectly good chance that this is a day you’re going to remember for the rest of your life. This is the day when you got your second chance, when everything changed.”

  “We have a mortgage, a son in college, a daughter in private school who is about to go to college, sizable credit-card bills, and a pitiful savings account. I think I’m going to remember this day for a long time.”

  I mulled this over, trying to find the hole in his reasoning but not coming up with one. I scooted over to Sam’s side of the bed and put my arms around him. “You just need to relax. Take some time, think about yourself for a change. When you’re ready there’s going to be a great job for you.”

  Sam slipped one arm beneath me and sighed. “You’re very charitable for a woman whose husband is unemployed.”

  “Temporarily unemployed,” I said. “You don’t exactly have a long history of slacking off.”

  Sam kissed me and for a second I had the distinct impression that the mood in the bedroom was about to shift from desperation to romance, but then the phone rang. Sam sat straight up, the sheet still knotted in his fists. The panic was back. “What if it’s them?” he said.

  “Them?”

  “What if it’s the hospital? What if they changed their minds?”

  “Sam, it’s not the hospital.” Whoever it was was calling too early. It wasn’t even six o’clock in the morning. I leaned over to get the phone.

  “Wait,” he said. “Don’t answer it. I don’t know what I’m going to say.”

  “You won’t have to say anything. I don’t want to wake up Mother and Camille.”

  The call was collect and so it was my father, who had never been awake at quarter till six in his life unless he hadn’t been to bed the night before. The operator never said it was Guy calling for Ruth. He always had to make the names up, Mahler calling for Alma, or Rosencrantz calling for Guildenstern. This morning it was Sacco calling for Vanzetti, which made me think he was probably in some sort of trouble. I said I would accept the charges. Sometimes he called twice in a week and then we wouldn’t hear from him again for ten months. It was hard to track him down. His home was a series of hotel rooms and mail pick-ups. At seventy-five he was still playing piano in bars and on cruise ships. A couple of times I had encouraged him to think about the future and he’d had a good laugh and we’d dropped it. My father wasn’t anyone I knew particularly well and so his future wasn’t any of my business. I was hoping this call had nothing to do with money. It wouldn’t be the best morning to call this house for money. The operator connected us and my father said my name. In the background I could hear all sorts of squawking and overhead announcements, but I couldn’t tell what they were announcing, exactly.

  “Dad, it’s so early. Are you in a bus station?” I asked.

  “Not a bus station. Do you want to take another guess?”

  I listened harder. Normally I wouldn’t have enjoyed this game but I wasn’t so eager to get back to the business at hand.

  Sam tugged at the sleeve of my nightgown. “Your father?” he mouthed.

  I nodded. I listened again.

  “Hurry up and guess,” my father said, his voice full of booming good nature. He must have been up all night, in which case he could not possibly be sober.

  “A casino.”

  “She thinks I’m in a casino,” he said to someone, and I heard a woman’s voice laugh and repeat the funny sentence to another woman, who also laughed, from farther away.

  “Okay,” I said. “I give.”

  “Darling girl, your old dad’s coming for a little visit.”

  Now I sat up in bed. I twisted the cord around my wrist and pulled it snug. “Well, that wouldn’t be the best plan because as you may remember my old mom lives here now.”

  “She’s still there? I thought she would have found her own digs by now.”

  “These are her digs.”

  “Can you tell him you’ll call him back?” Sam said. “We’re in the middle of a crisis here.”
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br />   “Dad?”

  Sam reached up and put his hand over the receiver. “But don’t tell him what happened.”

  “I wasn’t going to tell him.”

  Sam let the phone go and fell back on the mattress like a coconut falling out of a tree. He made a soft thud.

  My father cleared his throat. “I’m sorry about your mother, I know that makes things a little complicated for everybody, but we’ll work around it.”

  “It doesn’t make things complicated. It makes things impossible. I don’t mean to be cold-hearted here, but you remember that Mother hates you, right? This is her home now. I can’t just—”

  “Ruthie, listen again.”

  This time I imagined my father holding the phone up to the ceiling and suddenly I could hear quite clearly what the intercom voice was saying. “Dr. Lewis, please report to the ICU.” It was the way he would break some sort of bad news, to make a riddle out of it, to come around to the information by the most circuitous route possible.

  “Dad, what’s happened?”

  “I had a little accident.”

  “And you’re hurt?”

  “I’m fairly hurt,” he said, his voice as chipper as ever. “It isn’t an impossible situation but I am going to need to come and stay with you even if it means we have to grind up a few Valium in your mother’s Metamucil.”

  “How are you hurt?”

  “I broke my wrists.”

  “You broke your wrist?” That didn’t seem so impossible. A person could still get around in the world with a broken wrist.

  “Wrists. Plural. Both of them. I’ve got a lovely nurse named Gina who’s holding the phone for me right now.”

  “You can’t hold the phone?”

  “I can’t hold a fork.”

  “Let me talk to Gina.” I pressed the phone against my chest and whispered to Sam, “This isn’t good.”

  “She wants to talk to you, darling,” I heard my father say, and then Gina said hello.

  “Are you Guy’s daughter?” Gina had a big, solid smoker’s voice. I imagined her heavyset, bleached, with frosted lipstick. My father’s type.

  I owned up to being the daughter and asked her what the problem was.

  “The problem is your dad has three sets of pins in each of his wrists. They did the surgery when they brought him in last night.”

  “Surgery?”

  “Those pins don’t get in there by themselves.”

  “This is serious.”

  “This is pretty serious. Bones don’t heal so quickly when you get to be a certain age.”

  “You think I’m too old for you?” I heard my father say in the background.

  Gina didn’t answer his question. “The doctors think with time and a good bit of physical therapy he should make a solid recovery.”

  There were a million questions to ask but none of them came to mind. I just saw my father propped up in a hospital bed, his arms plastered straight out in front of him, and for reasons I could not explain I felt guilty. Maybe he hadn’t been much of a father but I certainly hadn’t been much of a daughter. Suddenly there were tears in my eyes and Sam was whispering to me, “What happened? What happened?”

  “What happened?” I said to Gina.

  “It seems to be a pretty complicated story. We’ve had a couple of versions since last night. The bottom line is he fell and smashed his wrists.”

  “But nothing else.”

  “His wrists, his right elbow. I think he’s got one shoulder that’s sprained. It was enough.”

  “Oh, Dad,” I whispered. “Let me talk to him again.”

  “He’s taking a good bit of Percocet for the pain right now. He may not sound entirely like himself.”

  But he had sounded exactly like himself, which made me wonder if he had been taking Percocet for a while. “Dad? Can you hear me?”

  “I didn’t fall on my ear, darling.”

  “I didn’t know if Gina had the phone up.”

  “She’s doing a great job.”

  I almost couldn’t ask it. The question got halfway up my throat and then lodged there like a chip of crab shell. “Do you know if you’re going to be able to play the piano again?”

  And then my father roared. His laugh was huge and round and I could hear the nurses laughing with him even though they wouldn’t have known why they were laughing. He sputtered and coughed, trying to bring himself down again. “Ruthie, you’re a genius! That was the first thing I said. I’m smashed to bits and they’re taking me off to surgery, all these doctors are poking and prodding, and right before they put me under I say, ‘Doc, will I ever play the piano again?’ And the man looks at me with contempt. Contempt! He says, ‘I wish you guys could come up with a new line.’ Like I’m taking up his time by even asking.”

  “That’s terrible.”

  “So I say, ‘You have to understand, this is how I make my living. I play the piano.’ And he tells me to lie still. Some other kid, I swear to you not a day over sixteen, comes in calling himself the anesthesiologist. He comes at me with a mask and saying I should start counting backwards from one hundred. By this point I’m irate, and I say, ‘Bring a piano into this operating room at once and I’ll show you who’s kidding around!’ My old wrists are splattered all over the gurney, of course, but I would have rallied them for one last round of ‘Moonlight in Vermont.’ ”

  I could hear the nurses gasping in the background, they were laughing so hard. My father had an audience, a full house. He was high on Percocet and surrounded by nurses and had his daughter’s undivided attention. “So the doctor says, ‘What’s the opening chord for “Rhapsody in Blue”?’ and I say, ‘C sharp minor, you jackass.’ And then he blinks at me. It’s three in the morning and I swear to you, Ruthie, until this instant the guy had been completely asleep. He tells the junior anesthesiologist to hold off for a second. He asks me who I play and what kind of piano I like. It turns out this guy has a Beckstein in his living room. Some rich surgeon who can probably just barely pick his way through ‘Chopsticks.’ A Beckstein! Such a waste. But now his heart is in the game, and he says he’s going to make a real pianist of me yet. He says I’ll be playing Rachmaninoff when he’s through with me. He thinks I can’t play the Rach.”

  I was wondering if he actually could play Rachmaninoff when all of a sudden my father was quiet, and the quiet alarmed me.

  “Dad?”

  Then I heard Gina’s voice again. She said that my father could tell me the rest of the story when he got here, that he needed to get some sleep.

  “Ruthie?” Gina said.

  “Ruth,” I said.

  “Ruth, we’ll check in with you after the doctor comes by and let you know when your father is going to be discharged. Then you can come pick him up.”

  I closed my eyes and tapped the earpiece of the phone against my forehead a couple of times while Sam watched with real interest. “Could we speak privately?” I asked the nurse.

  “Sure.”

  “I mean, not in front of my father. Could you go to another phone?”

  “Your father is out like a light. I can’t believe he stayed awake this long. He isn’t going to hear anything we say.”

  Was it possible to fall asleep so quickly? Again I saw him, small in the bed, his arms swallowed whole by his casts. I tried to picture myself inside the cake, and when that didn’t work, I tried to picture my father inside the cake, casts and all. That seemed better. “How important is it that he come to stay with us?” I said. “I don’t want you to think I’m a monster, but my father and I aren’t close, and my mother lives with us, and my father and mother really aren’t close, and it’s going to create—”

  But Gina stopped me. “It’s not my business to pass judgments one way or the other, so let me just speak medically here. Your father is old enough that going into a nursing facility is probably going to be hard on him. A lot of people his age go in seeming pretty young and they just don’t come out. His chances for a full recovery are going to be
better if he’s with family. His chances of not winding up with some problem he didn’t go in with are going to be better. Now, if you can’t do that, you can’t do it. Only you know the answer to that question. If you have to put him in a facility, you’re going to have to think about the cost. I don’t know what your father’s financial situation is, if he has good insurance, but if he doesn’t, then that creates a whole other set of problems. I can pretty much guarantee you that money is the key to good care in a situation like this one.”

  “Right,” I said. “I understand.”

  “You’ve got some time to think about it,” Gina told me. “At least a couple of hours.”

  “I don’t even know where you’re calling from.”

  “Mercy Hospital,” she said.

  “No, I don’t know what state you’re calling from. Where is he?”

  “Des Moines,” she said, and then added for greater clarification, “Iowa.”

  “He broke both his wrists?” Sam said.

  “That’s the story.”

  “How did he fall?”

  “I didn’t get any of the details.” Des Moines wasn’t too far away. He could have just as easily been in Tucson. I wondered briefly if he had been meaning to visit.

  Sam shook his head. “I guess he’s coming here, then.”

  “How can he?” I pulled the pillow over my head and pushed it into place. Pull the mask down firmly and cover your nose and mouth, a voice instructed in my head. Breathe normally.

  “It’s not so much a matter of how can he,” Sam said, gently removing the down pillow from my head. “It’s a matter of how can he not?” His nose was only a few inches from my nose. He looked resigned but not particularly upset. I was now the one who was upset. “I may not know your dad well, but I can promise you two things: He doesn’t have supplemental health insurance and he doesn’t have anyplace else to go.”

  I wanted to protest, Who doesn’t have supplemental health insurance? But the clear, unadorned truth of what my husband was saying didn’t leave me much room to argue. “How will I tell my mother?”