Eat Cake: A Novel

by Jeanne Ray

  “I have no idea about that one, but if you promise to wait until after I’ve left the house to do it, I’ll go pick him up.”

  Under normal circumstances, say, yesterday afternoon, Sam would not have readily volunteered to drive to Des Moines, but this morning was a different story. He was depressed, adrift, and he saw my father’s problem as one that was bigger than his own. He seemed almost perky as he took his shower and moved around the room getting dressed.

  “Don’t you think you should wait until the doctor calls?” I said. I didn’t want him to go until I had told my mother. I wanted to be able to present the visit as a possibility rather than an inevitability that was barreling up I-35 toward our house.

  “The doctor will call and tell us to come and get him. End of story. He’s Medicare. They aren’t going to want to keep him in that bed a minute longer than they have to.”

  “But you don’t know that. He could need more surgery.”

  Sam looked at his watch. “I’ve been an unemployed hospital administrator for just over fourteen hours. I doubt the drill has changed too much since I got out of the business.”

  “Wouldn’t you at least rather fly?”

  Sam shrugged. “I have the time. Besides, the driving might actually be easier on him.”

  I stood up and put my arms around my husband. “You’re an awfully good guy to be doing this.”

  “An awfully good guy would stay here and break the news to your mother while you drove to Des Moines. I’m not so good.”

  “It’s just that—” I stopped in hopes of finding a better way of saying this. “I know you have a lot of other things on your mind.”

  Sam kissed my forehead, something he had done on our first date when he couldn’t work up the nerve to kiss me good-night. Ever since then I have found it to be a gesture of supreme tenderness. “This will give me a chance to think some things through, like where I want to work. Then I’ll come home and start looking for a job. I bet it’s all going to turn out great.”

  I had to hand it to my father: He was still sedated in Des Moines and he had already managed to settle Sam’s nerves in Minneapolis. “I know it will.”

  I encouraged Sam to put a couple of things in an overnight bag, even though he assured me he wasn’t going to be gone overnight. “When you get back from picking up my dad, you should take a couple of days and go sailing.”

  “It’s too cold to go sailing now.”

  “So don’t go on the lakes. Go down to Florida. Maybe your brother would meet you, or you could take somebody from work.”

  “I know some guys who aren’t very busy.” Sam smiled. “But I think we should be saving our money right now. I’m talking about having to sell the house and you’re telling me to go on vacation.”

  “It might be good. You know, relax, think things over.” Sam had grown up on the lake in Chicago and had sailed all through his youth. Being out on the water relaxed him like nothing else. There was hardly ever time to do it now, but every time he stepped off a boat he looked ten years younger.

  “We’ll see,” he said, and picked up his bag.

  I pulled on my bathrobe and together we went down to the kitchen. My mother was up, but as far as I knew she was always up. She was up when we went to bed at night and she was up when we came down in the morning.

  “Are you going into the office?” she said to Sam. After all, he clearly had the look of a man who was going somewhere with great purpose.

  “I don’t have a job,” he reminded her.

  My mother was flustered and she knit her fingers around the edges of her coffee cup. “I know that. I just thought that maybe, I don’t know, that you were going back for papers or something.”

  Sam assured her it was nothing like that.

  “Of course, you’re not wearing a suit. If you were going to work, you’d be wearing a suit.”

  Sam laughed. “Hollis, you missed your calling. You would have been a brilliant detective.” He headed for the door.

  “You aren’t leaving already?” There was a trace of panic making a sharp edge around my words. “You haven’t even had a cup of coffee.”

  “I’ll pick one up,” he said. “This way I’m still ahead of the traffic.”

  Sam left the house every morning and I have to say his departures were hardly an event, but this morning I wanted to throw myself around his ankles.

  “You girls have fun,” he said, and waved to us. Just like that, he was gone.

  “Ruth,” my mother said in a low voice. “I think that something is terribly wrong.”

  I looked back at my mother. I could make her a list of what was wrong. “What?”

  She leaned toward me even though we were alone together. “He had a bag,” she whispered.

  “A bag?”

  “He had a suitcase.”

  I looked back out the window and watched Sam’s car pulling away in the bright clear light of early morning. Wouldn’t that be something if this was all a ruse, if Sam was taking his small duffle bag and making a run for it? “I know,” I said. When there is no good place to start, you just have to pick something at random. This was going to be it. “I packed it for him.”

  “Is he leaving?” my mother said. There was such fear in her voice, and all at once my heart went out to her completely. How must she have felt when my father left her? Both of her parents were dead, she had a small child, a schoolteacher’s salary. What was I thinking, telling my father he could come here to stay? But then there were those casts. I straightened up in my chair and tried to pull it together.

  “Sam is driving to Des Moines.”

  My mother started to react to that, a drive she would have felt was too long to make alone, whatever anxieties she might have had that this meant we were all moving to Des Moines, but I held up my hand to stop it before it started. “He is driving to Des Moines to pick up Dad.”

  She cocked her head to one side like a dog that was trying to make sense of some unfamiliar sound. “Dad as in your father Dad?”

  “Dad had an accident,” I said. I waited to see a flicker of pain or anxiety cross my mother’s face but nothing came. She could have cared less if my father had been run over by a bus in Des Moines and Sam was going out to make funeral arrangements. I reached over and took my mother’s hand. “I don’t completely understand what happened, but he fell and broke both of his wrists. He isn’t going to be able to take care of himself for a while and I told him he could come here. I’m sorry about this, I really am. I know this is going to be hard on you, but when the hospital called this morning, I didn’t know what else to do.”

  My mother looked at me for a minute and then she took her hand away. “Well then,” she said. “I guess I’ll have to find a place to live.”

  “Mother.”

  “It doesn’t give me a great deal of time, but when I put my mind to something, I can usually get it accomplished. It’s not as if I’ve never been on my own before.”

  “Mother, you’re not moving out.”

  “What choice do I have? You invite my ex-husband in to live with us. Do you really think I can just stay here?”

  “Mother, please. I didn’t invite him to live with us. He’s very sick. He needs my help. I know he’s your ex-husband, but he’s also my father, and I have some responsibilities to him.”

  My mother looked at me in a way that made me shiver with cold. “He never had any responsibilities to you.”

  I closed my eyes and nodded. This was a very difficult conversation to have, and without a cup of coffee, it seemed almost impossible. “I know you’re right. I will try to make this as quick and as comfortable for everyone as I possibly can. I’m really, really sorry.”

  “I never would have done this to you,” my mother said quietly. On one hand she couldn’t. I didn’t have an ex-husband. On the other hand I knew what she was saying. She was always true to me. She put me first.

  At the moment when I saw our conversation moving toward the more practical details of sl
eeping arrangements, there was a terrible scream that came from the back of the house. My heart froze. My instinctive reflex was to take it personally; what had I done to cause screaming?

  “Seven thirty-five!” Camille came into the kitchen wild-eyed, her dazzling yellow hair twisted into a plastic clip, her pajama bottoms trailing over her feet. Her face was so pretty like this, without makeup. She looked like she was twelve. “You didn’t wake me up!” She was howling.

  I looked up at the kitchen clock. “Honey, I—”

  “I have to shampoo this morning. I have a test.” She pressed her fists over her eyes while the huge injustice of her life pounded her down. “Forget it. Forget it. I don’t know why I even bother trying. I’m going back to bed. I’m not going to school.”

  “Honey, I’m sorry I forgot to wake you up. There’s been a lot going on here this morning.” Honey, I have bought you three alarm clocks and shown you how to use them. Honey, I am a human being, not an alarm clock. “You have to go to school.” I tried to make my voice peaceful, neutral.

  “If you thought my going to school was so important, then you might have remembered to knock on my door this morning.”

  “Camille,” I said.

  “You can’t make me go to school like this.”

  My mother picked up her nearly empty cup of coffee and slammed it down on the table hard enough to break the cup free of the handle. It spun around twice and then fell over on its side, making a pool of milky coffee on the table. She lifted the small ceramic U still curled in her fingers and pointed it toward my daughter. “You are sixteen years old. This is not a hotel. Get yourself dressed this instant and get out of here.”

  Camille suddenly wore the same bewildered look my mother had had three minutes before, and while she opened her mouth, she said nothing. She blinked, turned, and went back to her room without so much as slamming the door.

  I looked at my mother in disbelief. I didn’t even know she was capable of sounding so angry. “Thank you,” I said.

  “It’s all in the surprise factor,” my mother told me. “If I did it all the time she wouldn’t listen to me, either.”

  Chapter Three

  MY FATHER WOULD SLEEP IN WYATT’S ROOM. MY mother didn’t like this. Wyatt’s room was Wyatt’s room regardless of whether or not he was away at college. She followed me from the northwest corner to the southwest corner of the bed while I stripped off the sheets. She did not offer to help.

  “This says to Wyatt that he is no longer a member of this family, that his room doesn’t mean anything to you.” She picked up the framed picture of his high school basketball team and wiped her sleeve across it, implying dust.

  “Mother, Wyatt could care less. Call him. Ask him.”

  “Put your father somewhere else.”

  I stopped, my arms full of the blue-striped top sheet and pillowcases. I strongly suspected they were clean. “Okay, we’re not going to put him in Camille’s room. He’s not going to sleep with me and Sam. Something tells me that your room isn’t a likely candidate—”

  “I’m not talking about putting him in another bedroom. The couch in the den is all he needs. He’s probably been sleeping on park benches for years anyway. If you put him in a nice bed like this, he won’t know what to do with himself.” But then something much worse occurred to my mother. She put down the photograph. “Or he might stay. Don’t you see it? This is probably all a ruse. He’ll come here, make himself comfortable in Wyatt’s bed, and the next thing you know we won’t be able to get him out of here with an exterminator.”

  “What do you think? He broke his own wrists out of some desperate desire to come and visit us? You can’t put a man with two broken wrists on a couch. Logistically it doesn’t work. There wouldn’t be room for him.” I snapped off the fitted sheet.

  “Did I say the couch? Put him in the garage. We’ll make up some sort of bed for him out there. We can rent a roll-away. You can leave your car in the driveway. That’s sacrifice enough.”

  I put down the bundle of laundry in Wyatt’s desk chair and opened a dresser drawer. “You’re not even being serious now.” I scooped out an armload of sweaters.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Well, I figure he’ll need some drawer space.”

  My mother turned pale. She put a hand on the headboard to steady herself. “He is going to stay, isn’t he?”

  “For a while, just until he’s better.”

  “You’re lying to me. You’ve been lying to me all along. You think that once he’s in, there will be nothing I can do about it. He’s moving in here.”

  I put the sweaters down on the bed and went to my mother. Her eyes were filling up with tears behind her glasses. “I know this brings up a lot of bad memories, but you have got to trust me.”

  “Trust you?” My mother stepped away from me. “How could I ever trust you?”

  When she turned and left I did not go after her. There was nothing else I knew to say. A few minutes later I heard her banging out an especially angry Beethoven piano sonata in the living room, the notes swarming the air like a cloud of wrathful bees. Either this visit was going to be the most painful, horrible thing that had ever happened or it would just be bad. I picked up Wyatt’s baseball glove and slipped it on. I balled up my other hand and beat my fist into the glove until I felt something that surpassed a sting. Wyatt was a lefty.

  The truth of the matter is I didn’t bear my father any particular ill will. I had for a short time when I was young. I thought he was a terrible man. But as I got older it occurred to me that just because someone isn’t cut out to be a husband or a father doesn’t make him terrible, only terribly disappointing. Sometimes my father came to Minneapolis. He played piano at the Marquette Hotel downtown and I would go and hear him. It happened once after my mother moved in with us, and I lied and told her I was going to a book club. They weren’t life-changing events, those evenings, but they were nice. My father was a funny guy who liked a lot of attention. He played the piano with the same kind of unself-conscious elegance with which Fred Astaire danced. He could make the piano tell jokes. He never looked at his hands. I sat at the bar and nursed a very weak white wine spritzer and every now and then my father would lean into the microphone and say, “Ladies and gentlemen, do you see that beautiful woman over there? Would you believe me if I told you she’s my daughter?” The first couple of times it had mortified me, then after a while I came to see that the only thing to do was nod and give a little wave. My father’s fingers wandered off into the high notes, remembered what they were supposed to be doing, and then made their lazy way back down toward the melody again. When my mother played the piano, which she did beautifully, she always had an expression on her face like she was trying to unscrew an especially tight lid off a jar. I never once saw her play a note that wasn’t written on the sheet music. I never looked at my parents and wondered why they broke up. I looked at my parents and wondered how they had managed to get through one entire meal together without killing each other.

  To be honest, I didn’t know all that much about my father, or I knew as much about him as anyone who bought a gin and tonic and sat at the bar. He was born in San Diego, he started playing the piano when he was four, he started playing in clubs when he was fourteen, sometimes hitchhiking up to Los Angeles and then later up to San Francisco. He liked to tell these stories into the mike. It occurred to me now I didn’t even know if they were true. He painted himself as a skinny boy in dusty jeans, his dark hair combed back with Vaseline, his one suit for playing folded neatly in the bottom of a paper sack while he waited by the side of the road for a ride. My father, it seemed, had two talents in his life, one for music and one for mobility. He traveled as effortlessly as he played. The slightest possibility of a job was reason enough to get him back in his car in the years he had a car, back on the bus when he didn’t, or on a plane in his few phases of being flush. I really doubted that he cared when a job was over. It just meant that there was a chance at another
job in a new town. I tried to imagine him here, his wrists decked out in casts. I wondered if he would be able to turn a doorknob.

  Wyatt’s room was clean but the air seemed a little off. With some real effort I managed to pry open a window. It was March in Minnesota and there was still some late spring snow on the ground, but the cold air was wonderful. When I started to look around I was able to locate the source of the stuffiness: Wyatt’s room was full of sneakers. I found eleven odd shoes in the bottom drawer of his dresser. I found dozens of pairs under the bed and piled up in the closets. They were old, peeling rubber, missing laces. Their insoles hung halfway out like the tongues of overheated dogs. They represented every trend in athletic footwear in the past ten years, puffy white high-tops that looked like big marshmallows, techno running shoes with clear windows in the soles, preppy boating shoes with smooth bottoms. I wanted to throw them all away, but then I wasn’t sure. Was he keeping them for a reason? Was he sentimental about one thing? Was it all right to get rid of old shoes without my son’s permission? Was it all right to store my ailing father in a room full of shoes? I went to the kitchen and got a big black Hefty bag. I would put the shoes in the basement for now. That was a compromise. After my father left I would put them back, and then at some point I would talk to Wyatt and ask him about his collection.

  “Are you throwing those away?” my mother said, popping up out of nowhere. My mind was a million miles off, in some piano bar. I dropped a small blue Ked, a child’s Ked, and covered my heart with my hand.

  “Were you in the closet?” I asked her. Why hadn’t I noticed the Beethoven had stopped?

  “Those are Wyatt’s shoes!”

  “I’m just clearing them out for now. He’s kept every pair of shoes he’s had since he was six.”

  My mother looked at me like I was burning his birth certificate. “I didn’t expect this of you,” she said. And then she was gone again.

  How had I come to this point? I couldn’t comfort my husband or discipline my daughter or help either of my parents. I couldn’t even decide if it was okay to throw out a pair of shoes. I sat down on the bed and felt a terrible lump coming up in my throat. Then just when I thought I was going to really break down for a good cry, I remembered a large bag of pistachio nuts in the back of the pantry. I don’t know what made me think of them. I had hidden them beneath several packages of dried pasta. Sam liked pistachio nuts. I bought them for a cake recipe I had seen in Gourmet. I stood up like a sleepwalker, my hands empty of sheets or shoes. I would take care of all of this once the cake was in the oven. The recipe was from several months ago, I didn’t remember which issue. I would find it. I would bake a cake.