Eat Cake: A Novel

by Jeanne Ray

  “Dad.” I leaned into the den, trying to shield our guest with my back, but she was too tall for that.

  “Ruthie! Ruthie, watch this. They’re going to show it again. Here it comes, here it comes.” But when it came my father threw his head back and closed his eyes. “Christ Almighty. Have you ever seen such idiocy in all your days?”

  The blinds were down in the den, and despite the brightness of the day, the place resembled nothing so much as a cave, my father and husband the two overfed bears. “I have, yes. Dad, this is Florence Allen.”

  When Sam looked up a flash of real panic cut across his face. He put his beer bottle on the floor behind the leg of the coffee table and hopped to his feet. “Florence!” he said, and held out his hand to her. “I’m so glad you came by. This is my father-in-law. This is Guy.”

  My father smiled his best piano-bar smile and raised one metal-cased arm. “Hello there.”

  “Sam,” she said, smiling. “Mr. Nash.” She nodded her head politely toward my father.

  “Oh now,” my father said, turning his torso toward her, his arms jutting out with welcoming affection. “None of that Mister business. It’s strictly Guy here. You say you’re Florence?”

  “I say I’m Mrs. Allen, actually.”

  “A tough one!” my father said. “I like that.”

  Sam shot my father a look, but I could have told him my father was impervious to looks. “I thought I was going to bring him in to see you. You didn’t have to drive over here.”

  “I was on my way home from work,” she said. “Today’s my half day. It’s not any trouble.”

  Mrs. Allen went over and looked into the pan of water my father’s feet were resting in.

  “I was just working on his nails,” I said apologetically. I didn’t want her to think I was neglecting him, that I simply left his feet in pans of water all day. Check it, I wanted to say. It’s still warm.

  “Have your feet been swollen long, Mr. Nash?”

  I came over to look into the water, as did Sam. My father’s feet were two balls of rising bread dough. Had they just now expanded? Had they somehow sponged up the water? Was I so consumed by the horror of his nails that I neglected the horror of his feet?

  “Oh, they get a little puffy. I’m not a young man, you know, things puff up from time to time.” He added an unseemly chortle.

  “I don’t think they’ve been this swollen before,” Sam said.

  She slipped her hand into the bath and took the pulse of both of his feet. “It’s probably the medication. I can get some compression socks for you to wear but you’ll need to be mindful about keeping them elevated.”

  “I need to be mindful of my feet? Isn’t it enough that I’m being mindful of my arms?”

  “I suppose you’re smart enough to do both things at once,” she said.

  “Is there something I should be doing?” I asked her, feeling suddenly guilty that I had ever thought of running off to Canada.

  “It would be a good idea to massage his feet,” she said to me. “It will help with the swelling.”

  “A foot rub!” my father said, clicking his heels together in approval. “Now, there’s an idea.”

  Florence Allen simply didn’t seem to hear what she wasn’t interested in. It made her seem very calm. “Let me take a look at those fingers,” she said. He laid his fingers carefully over the edges of her fingers and she studied them. My father watched her watch them.

  “What do you think?” he said.

  “I think you have nice-looking hands,” she said, and my father smiled. “Sam tells me you were a pianist.”

  “I am a pianist,” my father said. “I am an injured pianist.”

  “Have you moved your fingers much since your surgery, Mr. Nash?”

  “The doctor said I should wait until I was ready. I don’t think they’re ready quite yet.” My father looked at his hands as if they were old friends he was worried about but didn’t want to let on, friends for whom he put on a brave face.

  “And when do you imagine they will be ready?” She took the index finger of his left hand and began to move it in tiny circles. We all held our breath.

  “I’d rather not rush it,” he said tentatively. Like the toenail clipping, he was waiting for the pain to come. He was braced for it.

  She moved on to the next finger. “I’ll tell you, Mr. Nash, if you don’t rush it, these fingers of yours are going to turn into cement and they’re going to stay that way. The time to go to work is right now. You must have practiced the piano a great deal in your life to be able to make your living playing.”

  Practice was something my father didn’t like to admit to. Practice was what my mother forced on her students. He billed himself as a natural. He didn’t practice, he said, he played. He had always just played.

  “I’ve practiced plenty,” he said, reversing himself. “If this is the talk where you tell me what work is, I’ll save you the effort. If what this is going to take is work, then we won’t have any problems.”

  “Then we won’t have any problems.” She moved on to the next finger. “Watch this.” She motioned for me and Sam to stand beside her. “You need to rotate them for him. Clockwise and then counterclockwise. Do you see that? Just gently for now. We’ll get them loosened up again. We’ll have you back on the piano in no time.”

  “I’ve never even heard Guy play,” Sam said. “Can you believe that? You’ve got to start back just so you can play for me.”

  My father looked at my husband with real affection. “After everything you’ve done for me, the very least I could do is play you a song.”

  “Just keep it simple,” Florence said.

  “I don’t plan to start with ‘Chopsticks,’ ” my father said.

  “You start where you start. Just keep your fingers moving. I want you to do this three times a day, more if you can take it.”

  “I can take it,” my father said.

  “I’ll come back again in a few days and see where you’re at. We should be able to start pressing and bending pretty soon.”

  “Is that it?” my father asked disappointedly. Maybe he thought he was going to get the chance to make some progress on this first visit.

  “That was a good start for today.” She looked at her watch. “I should get going.”

  I noticed that my father still had one unclipped set of toenails sitting in the water basin. I decided they could wait.

  “Come on and have a cup of coffee before you go,” Sam said.

  Florence shook her head. “It’s not like the old days around the hospital,” she said. “I don’t know the boss anymore.”

  Sam smiled. “I can still write you a note.”

  “You got out of there just in time, I mean it. You’re going to be glad you’re gone.”

  “Maybe I would have come to that conclusion if I had someplace to go.” He looked around the den, at my father, the television, the plate of half-eaten sandwiches left from lunch. “Not that I’m not perfectly happy to be home.”

  “You’ll have a place to go,” Florence said. Her voice was kind and yet it didn’t have the slightest trace of pity in it. “As soon as you’re ready, the perfect job is going to find you.”

  “I hope you’re right,” Sam said.

  I felt like my heart was going to break for Sam. I hadn’t thought of how it might be hard for him to see an old friend from work.

  “I’m always right about these things,” Florence said.

  “Sam’s going to come out of this one back on top!” my father said. “No more working for the man.” My father looked over at the television screen. “Look at that. I think there’s blood on the ice. Sam, turn up the volume.”

  “Good-bye, Florence,” Sam said, reaching down sadly for the remote. “Thank you.”

  She waved to him and my father and we left them on the frozen blue rink.

  I knew the polite thing to do would be to walk Florence Allen to the door and let her go, but I turned us toward the kitchen i
nstead, hoping that she might relent for the coffee if it was just the two of us. I realized that I had been so consumed with meeting the needs of my family that the only nonrelatives I had talked to in the past week were the check-out girls at the grocery store. Here was an adult, an intelligent adult I did not know, right in my own kitchen.

  And Florence Allen seemed to want to go to the kitchen. She wanted to talk to me in private as much as I wanted to talk to her.

  “How’s he doing?” she said in a quiet voice once we were alone.

  “He doesn’t complain, really. He’s not the easiest man in the world to have around, but given all he’s been through, I think he’s holding up pretty well.”

  She shook her head. “When they fired Sam they took away the spirit of that hospital. There’s nobody to stick up for the people anymore.”

  “Sam? I thought you were talking about my father. Sam is a very easy person to live with, all things considered.”

  “You have a crisis overlap here,” she said.

  “I’m not even sure I know how Sam is doing.” I pulled out a chair and sat down at the table. Florence followed my lead. “I know this is terrible for him, but to tell you the truth, we don’t really talk about it. I don’t want him to feel like I’m pushing.”

  Florence sighed and stretched her long hands out on my kitchen table. She studied them for a while, trying to figure out how much she wanted to say. “Sam saved my job once. It was about five years ago. They were cutting back the whole physical therapy department. They said it was going to be cheaper to contract out the work, and Sam went to bat for me. He said I’d be his mission, and he did it. I’m still there.”

  “I didn’t know that,” I said. I wondered what I was doing at home five years ago when Sam was at work saving Florence Allen’s job. Probably driving Wyatt to hockey practice.

  “He’s a very good man, your husband. Everybody thought so.”

  “I always thought so.”

  “He went through all that to make sure I’d have a job and now he doesn’t have one. How does something like that happen? And now on top of that I wonder if I’m going to have to leave anyway. It seems like all the hospitals are the same these days. It’s all about the bottom line.”

  “It sounds like a tough job.”

  “You’re the one with the tough job,” she said. She took off her heavy bag and rested it on the kitchen table. “Did your father live with you before his accident?”

  I shook my head. “Only my mother.”

  She raised one eyebrow, a talent I have always admired and do not possess. “And your father did not live with your mother.”

  “Correct.”

  “A very tough job.” She nodded her head like a detective who was just beginning to put together the gravity of the crime.

  I agreed. “Would you have a piece of cake?”

  “Cake?” she said.

  “Do you eat cake?” Maybe as a medical professional she was opposed to cake.

  “I should probably be going, but thank you.”

  I didn’t want to seem desperate, but I was. I wanted to sit down with someone who was not a member of my family and have a regular conversation. “I made it myself.”

  “A scratch cake?” she said. I thought there was a flicker of interest in her tone.

  “Always.”

  She looked at her watch as if it might give her approval. “I don’t see that one slice would hurt.”

  I took down two plates from the cupboard. In the next room I heard the volume on the television rise again and I was grateful for the privacy it gave us. “We really appreciate you coming over.”

  “That’s my job,” she said.

  I sliced the cake. It served well, no breakage, few crumbs. “Well, a lot of people wouldn’t want that job. I would think you’d have to be a pretty generous sort of person to want to take care of other people. I don’t think I could do it.” I set two pieces of cake down on the table. “Would you like something to drink with that?”

  “Wait a minute,” she said. “I just take care of people in a hospital. You do it in your home. You don’t get to leave work at the end of the day like I do.”

  I sat down and handed her a fork. “But it’s my father. See, that’s the difference. I didn’t sign on for this. I was born into it.”

  Then Florence Allen did the most remarkable thing. She put her hand on my wrist, just set it there like it was the most natural thing in the world to put your hand on the wrist of someone you barely knew. She looked at me squarely when she spoke. “Everybody has parents. Very few people take care of them.”

  Gently and smoothly, her words pricked the edge of the enormous well of emotion that had been pressing on my chest since the day my father arrived. I tried to hold myself together but I didn’t seem to have the energy to manage it anymore. Great tears welled up in my eyes and I had to pull my hand away from hers to get a paper napkin from the holder. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I have no idea why I’m doing this.”

  “Honey, if I was you I would have been crying a long time ago.” She clearly was someone who was very used to being around the fully displayed emotions of strangers and it didn’t faze her in the least. She went ahead and ate her cake.

  When Florence Allen took a bite of her dessert the expression on her face changed completely. She looked puzzled at first, as if she wasn’t at all sure it was cake that she was eating. She cut herself another bite and then held up her fork and looked at it for a minute before slipping it into her mouth. She chewed slowly, as if she were a scientist engaged in an important experiment. She lifted up her plate and held it up to the light, studied it from different angles. Then she dipped down her nose and inhaled the cake. “This is sweet potato.”

  I dabbed at my eyes again and told her that it was.

  “Sweet potatoes and raisins and … rum? That’s a spiked glaze?”

  I nodded.

  She took another bite and this time she ate it like a person who knew what she was getting into. She closed her eyes. She savored. “This is,” she said. “This is …”

  “Easy,” I said. “I can give you the recipe.”

  She opened up her eyes. She had lovely dark eyes. “This is brilliant. This is a brilliant piece of cake.”

  In my family people tended to work against the cake. They wished it wasn’t there even as they were enjoying it. But Florence Allen’s reaction was one I rarely saw in an adult: She gave in to the cake. She allowed herself to love the cake. It wasn’t that she surrendered her regrets (Oh well, I’ll just have to go to the gym tomorrow, or, I won’t have any dinner this week). She had no regrets. She lived in the moment. She took complete pleasure in the act of eating cake. “I’m glad you like it,” I said, but that didn’t come close to what I meant.

  “Oh, I don’t just like it. I think this is—” But she didn’t say it. Instead she stopped and had another bite.

  I could have watched her eat the whole thing, slice by slice, but no one likes to be stared at. Instead I ate my own cake. It was good, really. Every raisin bitten gave a sweet exhalation of rum. It was one of those cakes that most people say should be made for Thanksgiving, that it was by its nature a holiday cake, but why be confined? I was always one to bake whatever struck me on any given day.

  Florence Allen pressed her fork down several times until she had taken up every last crumb. Her plate was clean enough to be returned to the cupboard directly. “I’ve made sweet potato pies,” she said. “I’ve baked them and put them in casseroles, but in a cake? That never crossed my mind.”

  “It isn’t logical. They’re so dense. I think of it as the banana bread principle. Would you like another piece?”

  She folded her long fingers over her stomach and shook her head. “I don’t want to ruin it by making myself sick.”

  “Take it home, then.” I stood up and took out a package of the extra-heavy, extra-large Chinette paper plates I had become so fond of over the years. It is a universal truth: No matter how trustwor
thy they are, people don’t return cake plates.

  Florence Allen looked at me as if I had pulled off my engagement ring and offered it to her. “You can’t give me your cake. Your family will want that. What would they think of me if I took their cake?”

  “They’ll think you’re doing them an enormous favor,” I said. “They want it out of here. The truth is I have plenty of time to bake something else to have with dinner.”

  “Is it somebody’s birthday?”

  “Somewhere I figure it’s somebody’s birthday. It’s always somebody’s birthday.” I pulled a sheet of Glad wrap over the cake and pressed it into her hands. I was glad to see it go. “I appreciate your help with my father. I appreciate you liking the cake.”

  “I shouldn’t take your cake,” she said. “But I want it. My daughters, my husband, they won’t believe it.” She held it up on the flat of her palms and looked at it.

  I smiled. I thought about telling her how happy I would be to bake her a cake every day for the rest of her life if she was willing to come back and help me with my father or even just express an interest in what I was doing, but then I thought there was no need to tell her. It could scare her off. A guaranteed future of cakes was more than most people could really understand.

  We said our good-byes and Florence Allen left with the cake. My mother came into the kitchen just in time to watch her walk down the driveway toward her car. She craned her neck forward to get a better look.

  “Is that a nurse?” she said.

  “Kind of.”

  “A nurse for your father?”

  “She’s an old friend of Sam’s from the hospital. She just came by to give Dad some advice about working his fingers.” I picked up the plates from the table.

  “So she’s not going to come and take care of him?”

  “No, I think that’s still up to us.”

  “Up to you,” my mother said. “I’m touching the old man more than I think is appropriate.” My mother kept watching Florence Allen until finally she had to move to the other side of the window so she could see the picture from another angle. “Ruth, look, I think she’s taking the sweet potato cake.”

  “I gave it to her.”