Eat Cake: A Novel (10 page)

“What about you, Camille?” My father pointed toward her by turning his entire arm in her direction like the metal needle of a compass.

“Pass.”

“I’ve been trying to give her lessons for years but she just won’t stand for it,” my mother said.

“Maybe the piano isn’t your instrument,” Sam offered. “It isn’t the piano for everyone.”

“I think the guitar would be kind of cool.” Camille’s voice was small and I immediately understood she was saying something that she actually wanted to do. If Camille wanted to play the guitar, I would get her guitar lessons tomorrow.

“You need to start an instrument early,” my father said. “You should have taken up the guitar ten years ago.”

Camille’s head dipped ever so slightly and she nodded. I could not understand it for the life of me. My father adored Camille. It made no sense at all that he was undermining her this way.

“Let me understand this,” my mother began slowly. “Sam here, who—forgive me, Sam—has very likely passed the middle point of his life, is free to start down any path he chooses, is encouraged by you to start medical school so that he could be a doctor just in time to draw Social Security, while our Camille, an ancient junior in high school, is too old to take up the guitar. For heaven’s sake, Guy, at least be consistent. Madonna was forty-two when she started playing the guitar.”

Camille bloomed, smiling so wide we were treated to a rare glimpse of every one of her perfect white teeth. “That’s right!” she said. My mother could not have made more of a celebration out of the moment if she’d uncorked a case of champagne. Who would have thought she was a denizen of popular culture?

My father sighed. “So corrected,” he said. He bent back his head in such a way that made me think he would have rubbed his neck had he had the hands with which to do so. “I think the medication is making me fuzzy. I’m sorry. Please don’t hold me accountable, Camille.”

“I don’t,” she said kindly, and patted his good shoulder.

“I think I’ve gone too far. I think I should finish my delicious cake and go to bed.”

Camille took her cue and forked another, larger bite of cake into his mouth. I got up and gave him his pills, dropped them on his waiting tongue, and then waited while he washed them down with milk pulled up through his straw.

“I’ll get you to bed.” Sam pushed back from the table.

My mother shook her head. “I’ll take him in,” she said, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

My father swallowed hard. “Will you brush my teeth?” He wasn’t being funny. “I need to brush them after all this cake.”

“I’ll even floss them,” she said.

“I never floss. I hate to floss.”

My mother smiled with some real and secret pleasure. “Tonight,” she said, and tapped the table to mark the exact moment in time, “you will begin to floss.”

“Don’t forget to put on the antibiotic cream,” I reminded her.

“I know,” she said, shaking me off. “I know.”

Good-nights were said and departures were made. I had no early memories of my parents walking in the same direction. Once they were gone, my husband and daughter and I sat at the table and looked at each other like members of an over-informed jury.

“This is what it was like when you were growing up?” Camille said.

I shook my head. “It wasn’t like this at all.”

“They were nice to each other then?” Camille leaned forward. This was going to be her bedtime story.

“They were divorced when I was so little I don’t even remember them being together. My dad would show up every now and then and they would argue, but most of the time, no, it was pretty quiet.” I looked over my shoulder, down the hall to the closed door of Wyatt’s room. “Maybe if they had fought more then, they could have worked it out of their systems.”

“Or they would have killed each other,” Sam said. “One way or the other there would have been more resolution.”

“Promise me that you two won’t ever get divorced,” Camille said, her voice low and serious. “I don’t think I could stand this.”

I looked at Sam. I knew it was an easy question, like when Camille was six and asked us to promise her that there was nothing under the bed that planned to eat her up after she fell asleep, but
suddenly it occurred to me, these were hard times, really hard times with lots of changes, and that our marriage was something we needed to be very careful with.

“I promise you,” Sam said, looking at me. He took my hand and squeezed it. “I absolutely promise you that.”

“Good,” Camille said. “Because I feel like I’m getting a look at what it would be like to have divorced parents and I have to tell you, I’m not interested.” She gave us both a hug and kiss good-night and that made all of the day’s discomforts worthwhile. After she was gone, Sam and I cleaned up the kitchen together.

“Hollis is taking her time in there,” he said, peering down the hall.

“Flossing is hell,” I said.

We went to our bedroom and brushed and flossed our own teeth, then we got into bed. Once it was dark, Sam started in on a different kind of bedtime story, one that did little to wind the listener down for sleep.

“I did some checking on your father’s insurance situation,” he said heavily. “He doesn’t qualify for a home health-care nurse.”

I felt a deep pang of disappointment. We had been talking about the home health care we couldn’t afford. I was hoping there might be a little help out there. “What about physical therapy?”

“The doctor said it would start after he got the pins out, but I don’t know. I think he needs to be working his fingers a little bit if he expects to have a job when this whole thing is over.”

“Is he going to have a job? Do you really think he’s going to go back out on the road and start playing the piano again?” I thought of the empty suitcases waiting in the closet. Would he simply fill them up and start over? “Which thought is worse, my
father wandering the earth looking for a good piano bar or my father staying exactly where he is?”

Sam sighed. “I don’t know what I think. I can’t imagine this is it, that we’re going to spend the next however many years watching your parents duke it out at the dinner table every night.”

“Till death do us part.”

“I know an occupational therapist at the hospital, Florence Allen. I did her a favor once a long time ago. Maybe I could get her to look at him and give us some advice.”

“I’d try anything,” I said. I liked to think that occupational therapy would make sure my father had an occupation again someday.

“There’s something else,” Sam said.

“And it’s more good news.”

“I talked to my friend in Des Moines and had him pull up your father’s records. Medicare only covers eighty percent of the hospital stay, do you know that?”

Maybe I knew that. I had spent enough time looking at my mother’s insurance papers. I felt distinctly cold in the bed. “Meaning exactly?”

“Exactly eight thousand nine hundred seventy-two dollars and fifty-eight cents. They won’t be sending the bill out for a few more weeks. But it’s coming.”

I got out of bed and took two Tylenol PMs. It was either that or go to the kitchen to make a seven-tiered wedding cake covered in sugared violets. When I got back in I gave two pills to Sam and handed him a Dixie cup of water. He swallowed with gratitude and we lay there side by side in the dark.

“What are you thinking about?” Sam asked me.

I told him the truth. I was thinking about Q-tips. “There’s
something about cleaning out his ears that completely undoes me. It’s just so … so …”

“Intimate.”

“Well, yes, that too, but I’m always afraid I’m going to stick it in too far and rupture his eardrum.”

“Then he would be a deaf pianist with broken wrists.”

“It just goes from bad to worse.”

The moonlight fell over the bedspread in the shape of window panes. I put my head on Sam’s shoulder and he put his arms around me and for that moment I felt safe, like I was standing inside a cake.

“Ruth?”

“Hmm?”

“You’re not going to divorce me because I lost my job and drank a beer in the middle of the day, are you?” Sam asked.

I propped my chin on his chest. “You’re not going to divorce me because my incredibly difficult divorced parents are both living with us, are you?”

Sam kissed me. “Let’s call it a draw,” he said.

“Tell me one thing, though,” I said. “I’m only asking you this because my father can’t hear us. Is there something you’re interested in? I mean, if you could really turn your life around and follow your dreams, if you didn’t have to worry about us or the money, what would you want to do?”

“You already know what I want to do.”

I tried to stifle a yawn but I failed. “I do?”

“You said it—well, you sort of said it, that first morning after I lost my job.”

My eyes were closed. That was before my father was living with us. That was seven lifetimes ago. “I don’t remember.” I could
feel the wave of Tylenol PM breaking down over my head and pulling me out in the dark tide of sleep. Even as I was asking him the question, I was forgetting what I was saying. I did, however, hear his answer, which he whispered into my ear.

“Sailboats,” he said in the enormous darkness. “I’d like to build wooden sailboats.”

MY FATHER WAS USED TO GOING TO BED AROUND
four o’clock in the morning. Staying up late was actually part of his job description. Piano players who worked in bars could not be members of the early-to-bed, early-to-rise set, not unless you wanted people to start hanging out at piano bars at nine o’clock in the morning. I understood it, and I understood why old habits would be hard to break. Still, the fact that he wanted his breakfast at one in the afternoon took some getting used to. My father commented often on the aggressive sunniness of Wyatt’s bedroom, which lacked the blackout shades hung over every hotel window nationwide. My mother commented on the fact that most adults had completed half a day’s work before Guy had flickered an eyelid. I was just grateful to have a little extra time to run errands and get the housework done before he was up and underfoot. Once my father was awake, the second half of my day began. Sam and my mother and I split up the tasks. In short, they took care of bathing, brushing, and any other bathroom matters. Once they got him toweled off and into his shorts, they gave a heavy sigh and turned him over to me. I was standing at the edge of my father’s bed, the bed I no longer thought of as Wyatt’s bed, with a bunched-up sock in my hands, when I saw them. I stopped, frozen, sock aloft.

“Ah,” my father said. “I know. They’ve gotten pretty bad.”

“Do they hurt?” I didn’t know how he’d been walking around.

He shook his head and flexed back the balls of his feet to see for himself. “Oh no, I don’t even notice them. I guess that’s the problem. I wasn’t so good at keeping up with them when I was able to do something about it. Now, my hands, my hands always looked first rate. I always got a manicure every Thursday afternoon no matter what city I was in. But I’ll have to admit I’ve let the toes slide.” I glanced at his fingernails, which were a little long, but the toes were in a league of their own.

“How did I not notice this before?”

He shrugged. “Who pays attention to feet? You’ve got things to do, you just want to get that sock on. Go ahead,” he said, and pointed out his foot like some gruesome version of Cinderella. “Let’s just cover them up.”

I sank down to the floor and for a moment I thought I was going to cry from some complex combination of exhaustion and grief and anger and guilt and love. Every one of those feelings surprised me. What kind of person would let her father walk around with a shoe half full of razor blades? His toenails were heavy, yellowed, and flaking. They twisted up and left and right and down, each one with its own specific set of problems. Even if I had never seen my father’s feet, which I had from time to time since he moved home, I should have been aware of them. I thought of the morning not too long ago that I had stood in this very room with my mother. She had told me that my father meant to come and stay, that once we let him in there would be no getting rid of him. Now I could see she was right. I didn’t think he would live here forever, I thought at some point he would get well and move on, but I knew now that I would always be worrying about him. For
the rest of his life I would be calling him up in piano bars asking him if he had remembered to cut his toenails.

I patted the top of his pale foot, which seemed too cold, which worried me also. “I’ll get you an appointment with the pedicurist. I’ll tell her it’s an emergency.” Most men you couldn’t take to the pedicurist, but I figured my father wasn’t most men. Still, he balked.

“Just leave them. They don’t give me any trouble. Once we get this hardware out, I’ll take care of it.”

“In another six weeks they’re going to be cutting out the front of your shoes.”

“They’ll be fine.”

“Why wouldn’t you want to get your toenails clipped?”

“It’s just … you know I don’t like to go out. It can all get so complicated. It’s one thing if I’m out with Sam, but for me to go into some beauty shop …”

I understood. It was about the bathroom. More and more my father was becoming afraid of not having anyone around to take him to the bathroom. There had been one afternoon when he was taking a nap and everyone went out and when he woke up and needed to go … well, I probably wouldn’t have felt any differently. “So I’ll cut them.”

“Really?” His face brightened. “You could do that?”

“You don’t need a degree for toes. If I don’t do a beautiful job, who’s going to see?”

“That’s the spirit,” my father said, and gave one foot an appreciative stomp. “Nobody’s going to see my toes.”

“I’ll get a pan of water. I think we ought to soak them first.”

“Soak them in lye if it would make it any easier on you.” My sockless father stood up. He stopped to tap the top of my head lightly with the tip of his finger, what had come to pass as an affectionate
gesture from a man who could make very few affectionate gestures. “I’m going to go in the den. I can watch a little hockey while you work.”