This Cake is for the Party

by Sarah Selecky

  Their parents let them inhale it? I said, with some tone in my voice.

  She looked at me.

  It’s bad for you. They shouldn’t have been inhaling it.

  Come on.

  No, it’s bad. The parents were doing it too? It’s not good for your brain.

  Why is it so bad?

  You inhale it, Robin. Your body absorbs it.

  I don’t think it’s so bad. Helium is really stable. It’s inert.

  It kills brain cells.

  Keane, helium is really difficult to split.

  What is that supposed to mean?

  My wife has always been too intelligent for me.

  So on Friday morning I cleaned up the cat’s mess like I said I would, and by the time I got to the studio, Robin was already in the back filling the Buddha moulds with blue wax. She said, Keane, I meant to tell you this, there’s a strange sound in the car.

  What kind of sound? I asked.

  When the heater’s running, there’s this sound, she said. Like: rrrrrrrrrrr.

  When did you notice it?

  Last night, coming back from Island Daze.

  And it’s a whirring sound.

  No, she said. More like a rattle. I hit a pothole on Mary Point Road and then the fan started rattling. It’s pretty loud.

  Let me take a look, I said.

  Keane, she said. Her voice thin and grainy, uncooked rice.

  I tried not to get sucked in. What is it? I asked calmly.

  The mileage. It’s listed there. Seven seven six three oh seven.

  What?

  It’s there, she said. Talking to herself now. Seven seven six three oh seven.

  Look at it this way: 7/7/63/07. Do you see it? Robin sees these things. She can read the patterns. I would never see this stuff if she didn’t point it out, but once you see it, you can’t unsee it. She was born on July 7, 1963. She was trying to tell me that it was there in the mileage. That it was a sign. The last two numbers—07—that’s this year.

  I didn’t ask her to explain it to me. I didn’t want to get into it. But I knew the day was going to be a writeoff as far as production went. Robin was filling another set of moulds, but I meant to get a whole box of cubes finished and priced and packed before the next day. I didn’t want us to work so much on her birthday, like I said before.

  Before going under the hood, I checked the mileage. There it was: 00776307. A coincidence, right? I put the key in the ignition and turned on the heat and listened for myself. A loud, sick-sounding fwap-fwap-fwap reverberated through the dash. I turned the fan on low, and it rattled more quietly. Then I turned it off and thought about how on earth I was going to get in there, to get at the fan itself. The car needed a good vacuum. There were raisins and dried cranberries scattered on the floor mats and stuck inside the crevices of the stick shift and the cup holders. A while back, Robin had an accident with a bag of trail mix. She hadn’t vacuumed since then—it had been about three weeks. I guess you tend to let things go when you’re in Christmas production. I noticed that there weren’t any nuts left in the mess—just the raisins and berries.

  It was no easy task getting into the heater from under the hood. I fumbled and heard my father’s voice come out of my own mouth, motherfucker goddammit, as I twisted upside down to peer into the cavern of the Honda’s innards. I screwed my hand into the space I saw next to the glove compartment, thinking the fan should be right next to it. My fingers landed on something soft. I should have grabbed my headlamp.

  I hitched my neck at the most uncomfortable angle I could manage and was rewarded with a better view. There was a nest. Snipped bits of plastic and chewed-up fibres from a hole in the car seat, a pile of peanuts sitting cozily on the ledge of the glovebox. And right beside it, the plastic wheel that sits in the heater. I pulled it out. The poor mouse must have been in his nest when Robin hit the bump. Knocked right out of bed and straight into the rotors. The fan tore his body to shreds. There weren’t even any bones left. But his head was whole, and his eyes were still open, wide and scared to death.

  The car wouldn’t start after I put the fan back in. I took it out and put it back in five times before kicking the damn thing and shouting at it again. Goddammit Jesuseffingchrist. The car was out of commission and it was the start of our busy season.

  Stu and Olivia are our closest neighbours—they live about a kilometre down the road. When they came for dinner that night, they brought their baby, Morgan, with them. It’s all the rage now, apparently. Gender-neutral baby names. Morgan is a girl, but you still can’t tell to look at her. She’s one and a half years old, but big and tall, so she looks more like a really slow three-year-old.

  It was like Hurricane Morgan hit our house. It’s not her fault. We should have baby-proofed more than we did. She shredded three pages of Robin’s life drawing book. Just ripped them out. In hindsight, did I know it was a bad idea to leave the book out on the coffee table? Yes. Did I jump up to save the book as soon as Morgan got her hands on it? No. Why? I was trying not to be uptight. I was trying to be laid-back. Then these cork coasters that we have on our glass coffee table—they’re not important, right, they’re just coasters—she tore those to pieces and threw them around the room.

  Olivia and Stu watched their baby rip our things apart with polite and amused looks on their faces, like they were watching a recital. At one point, Stu did take the book out of her hands and he said, No no Morgan. Then he looked at me and shook his head as if to say, She thinks she can read already! before he placed the book on the top shelf where she couldn’t reach it.

  Robin sat quietly in the brown armchair, smiling at everyone, but she was pinching her nail beds. She was pressing so hard, the skin of her fingertips turned white. I was worried about her. It had been a stressful day—the cat was sick, there was something wrong with our car, and Robin had heard something on the CBC that had made her anxious. Also, it was the day before her birthday. Sometimes her birthday makes her tense. I know when she’s nervous. She has a bad habit of biting her lips, her cuticles, the insides of her cheeks.

  She stood up, left the living room, and went into the kitchen—our house is small, the kitchen is part of the living room anyway—and she opened the oven and lifted the edge of the tinfoil and told us, Dinner is ready! She was rushing it a little. But I was just about ready for the night to be over too.

  Okay, said Olivia. Just let me give her a quick change before we sit down.

  She took Morgan into our bedroom. Robin stood at the kitchen sink, looking out the window. Stu asked me about work. I told him, The countdown is on. You know how it gets.

  Stu nodded. Tell me about it, he said. We’re so behind. It’s impossible to work at the same pace now, with Morgan. We even had to cancel our table at Island Daze this year. We didn’t have time.

  Robin had to do the Daze on her own yesterday, I said. I had to work too.

  Stu and Olivia are jewellers. They make wispy little earrings and fragile-looking necklaces with microscopic glass beads and silver wire. They use a magnifying glass and tweezers to build each piece. The wire is thin and light, like two-pound test.

  Olivia came back into the room with Morgan, handed her to Stu, and took the white bundle of cotton diaper into the kitchen. Robin used our two blue pot holders to lift the dish out of the oven. She’d made shepherd’s pie— vegetarian, for Stu and Olivia—with wild mushrooms and lentils and tarragon bubbling underneath mashed potatoes. Olivia found our compost container on the counter. She opened the lid, unwrapped the diaper, and dumped the contents into the pail. Then she refolded the diaper and tucked it into a plastic bag. There was a bad smell. It permeated the kitchen and reached us in the living room before you could say, Holy crap.

  It was a perversely poetic ending to an altogether shitty day.

  Robin and I almost had a baby. We lost her. We were young. Many of our friends were having children and I wanted us to have one at the same time so that the kids could grow up together. Robin was nervous
. She couldn’t see herself as a mother. But I knew I wanted to have a child with her, and after months of talking about it, she changed her mind. After four months of a hardening belly, Robin started to bleed. I drove her to the doctor, who said she should go to the hospital. It was a stormy night, which meant a rough ride on the car ferry. The boat moved over the waves in long, sick humps, up and down. On the way down, it looked like we were headed to the bottom of the sea. Sea water sloshed over the windshield. I found myself reaching over Robin’s seat to be her second seat belt, as though my arm could save her from sinking. At the hospital, they told us that the baby had died. She had died weeks before, but Robin’s body had held on, hadn’t allowed a miscarriage.

  Everyone expected that we’d want to try again. But Robin said no, and I understood. And, you know, the world just went on. Our friends’ kids grew up and we all kept making up our lives the way we always did. We turned out okay.

  This happened a long time ago. September 18, 1987. I think about what our life would have been like. We named her Julie. She would be twenty years old now. That’s exactly how old Robin was when we got married.

  See, the way time circles?

  We stopped using paraffin about two years ago. Robin said that I’d been breathing too much of it, that it had started to affect my brain. She was probably right. I have short-term memory loss. It’s pretty bad. I can ask you the same question three, four times in a row. This could also be because I’m getting old, but Robin said no, it’s the fumes. So we started to use this new wax—EcoSoya, a 100-percent all-vegetable wax made from soybeans. It’s remarkably stable, even when you re-melt and reuse it. We had it shipped from the Gelluminations Project out of Kansas. Don’t get me started on candle gels. I think they’re wrong. It just so happens that this place also handled the soy wax that we needed.

  We had an article in InStyle magazine last year. Well, a picture, and our website address underneath: www.keanecandles.com. We got a lot of response from that one picture. It was only about two inches by two inches, one of the sunburst carvings—but the orders nearly killed us. A glossy American magazine, it’s the golden egg for us up here. We also sold our candles to a few famous people. Drew Barrymore, for one. Gillian Anderson. Mae Moore. You’ve never heard of Mae Moore? She’s a lovely woman. And that guy who wrote that detective novel about the artist. It was big last year, you know the guy. I can’t pronounce his name. No—not Oprah. She didn’t hear about us in time, I guess.

  Are you a cat person or a dog person? I’ve always loved dogs. I grew up with a black Lab. But we travel too much for a dog. We got the cat when she was still a kitten. She was probably too little to be separated from the litter. Her tail stuck up like a toothpick. Maggie. She’s black and white. When she eats kibble, it sounds like knuckles cracking.

  This is what happened five years ago. I came back to the island after a weekend away. I had been on the mainland picking up flats of beeswax from Queen Bee Wholesale. The car smelled like sweet honey. It was a good drive home. No traffic on the bridge. I was the last car on the early ferry, which meant I got home an hour before I thought I would. It was Robin’s birthday. I had a salmon in the back of the car and I wanted to smoke it on the grill with arbutus leaves.

  I knew something wasn’t right as soon as I pulled into our drive. The front door was wide open.

  At first, I thought someone had broken into our place and destroyed everything inside it. I couldn’t get in the house because of the rubble. Then I saw that it was something else: Robin had arranged shards of broken glass and pottery in a straight line from the front door right along the hallway. Then the line curled into a spiral that filled the entire living room. The shards were arranged by colour. She’d broken everything that could have been broken. Our plates and bowls, our glasses, the mirrors and picture frames. The Japanese glass fishing float. The face of the clock. The Tiffany rip-off lampshade. The Pyrex cooking dishes. She’d constructed a massive sculpture from the shards of everything we’d ever collected in our life together. It moved from translucent blues and greens to opaque colours that shifted into a rainbow, with white in the centre of the spiral. It covered most of our house. I didn’t know we owned so much that could be broken.

  She was happy to see me. She wasn’t upset. Her eyes were unfocused because she’d been concentrating so hard. For how long? Two days, she told me.

  She stood up. Her ankles were cut. Her fingers smeary with blood.

  Babe, I said. You’re hurt.

  No, she told me. Just scratches. Look!

  I looked.

  Aren’t you going to say anything?

  Everything’s broken, I said.

  She eyed me with laser precision. You aren’t looking, she said. It’s Spiral Jetty.

  The thing is, Robin runs so close to the line. She’s more brilliant than most people, and so it’s a challenge for her. It’s hard enough to be reasonable in this world. Why do you think people live on these little islands? To get away from the insanity of the city. When you’re creative like Robin, it’s even harder. The same rules just don’t apply. Robin sees things differently. It’s her gift.

  Eventually, I saw that she was right. It was more than a mess. It was beautiful. Sure, I was frightened when I saw it at first, but that was only because I was attached to all of the things when they were in their unbroken form. When I was able to see what she’d done, when she showed me how to look, I could see it: all the broken things were just things. She’d created something else. It was like one of her signs. It pointed to something much bigger, something far beyond things.

  She’s definitely smarter than I am. You want an example? This spring I was in the studio writing an email to Eli, a colleague in New York. He carves wood—really beautiful work. He traded me at the Seattle show in 1991: a few candles for a walking stick that I still have at the front of the house. It looks like there are elves and faces and worlds in that stick. I was emailing him to see if he was going to be at the Toronto show this year. I wanted the email to sound upbeat.

  Robin, I asked. How do you spell uh-huh?

  She laughed and laughed at me.

  Finally, I got it out of her. She called out from the wick station in the back: U-H hyphen H-U-H. I typed it as she called it, and on the screen, it looked just like it sounded. I felt remarkably stupid.

  Our sex life is really none of your business.

  After Stu and Olivia left, Robin wanted to go out to check on her candle moulds. You have to pierce the wax with an awl after the first pouring, to break the bubbles that form. Then the second pouring fills them entirely, and they’ll burn properly. I stayed in and cleaned up—swept up the broken bits of our cork coasters, taped Robin’s book back together, dumped the compost, washed the dishes.

  Robin came in after a while and told me that the lights had to be out at 10:00. She said one thousand. I didn’t think much about it at the time. No, that’s the truth. Robin’s eccentric. And we turned the lights out before ten, so it was okay.

  Robin fell asleep like she’d been hit with something. I lay beside her and watched her sleep. Oh, my Robin. When she sleeps, her body twitches like it’s shot through with electrical currents. Even when it’s resting, her body won’t rest. She wore her green nightshirt with the ripped-open seam that exposed her shoulder, a sweet bend of skin like a section of an orange. I watched it rise with her breath and fall with her breath. There was nobody I loved more than this. It was as though there was nobody else on earth I had ever loved. I rested a hand on her warm hip. She moved her arm in her sleep, pinwheeled it up and around, scooping away her long hair so I could nestle my face in her shoulder. She did this in her sleep. Her black hair in a fan above her pillow, the length of it falling over the edge of the bed. The nape of her neck exposed to my breath. Our bodies have slept like this for the past twenty-six years. Our bodies found each other so easily in sleep.

  When I first met Robin, I was afraid to talk to her. True story. Eventually I got the balls to do it. It was
at a smoky party, an event at the York campus, north of everything. Artists everywhere. I don’t remember what I said. I don’t want to remember. She had interests, you know? Was she dating anyone at the time? Oh, yes. Did I think that one day I’d be saying, This is my wife? Not for a second. Of all the men who wanted her attention—and there were a lot of them, believe me: philosophers, artists, musicians, architects, a veterinarian for God’s sake—Robin chose to marry me. Why me? I will die without really knowing. She said it was because I was good with my hands, but how could that be enough for someone like her? I never even finished my degree. But Robin. Her mind works on ten channels at once. And she’s graceful. Lord, she’s beautiful. She’s taller than I am, and in all of these years, her skin hasn’t lined at all. Except for the quotation marks between her eyebrows, which I wouldn’t even have noticed if she didn’t point them out to me. Right now, her face—it’s—you can’t see how beautiful she is.

  They’ve told me that she’s going to be fine.

  We always listened to the CBC while we worked. That Friday, there was a story on the news about the gas prices. I didn’t catch most of it, because I came back into the studio late, after trying to fix the car.

  Keane, Robin said as soon as I came in. They are saying that the gas prices are going up—they’re already at one oh two.

  The car isn’t running anymore, I said.

  One oh two.

  I tried not to get hooked by the wrench in her voice.

  That was the temperature you had, the fever that summer—

  What fever? I asked.

  —and that was in July 1997. Now it’s July 2007. It’s exactly ten years later.

  I didn’t ask her: What do you think is supposed to happen ten years later?

  She had bitten the inside of her cheeks until they’d bled.

  So you see why I can’t believe her all the time? It isn’t my fault. I’m sorry about the cat. What kind of a cat has food sensitivities? It seemed like she was perfectly fine. Maggie, I mean.