Eat Cake: A Novel (2 page)

“Ruth?” My mother came into the kitchen holding a stack of papers in one hand. My mother was always holding papers. They seemed to be a natural extension of her hand. I imagined her sleeping with fistfuls of paper clutched to her chest. “I need you to look at these for me. I’ve been over them a million times and they just don’t make any sense. Does it look like Blue Cross paid the doctor or does it look like I have to pay him? I don’t want Dr. Nickerson to think I didn’t pay him.”

She was wearing a pink warm-up suit that appeared to have been ironed. She was looking at me, but I wasn’t sure that she saw me at all. If she had seen me she surely would have commented on the fact that I looked like I had just been dragged from the lake, that I was raising myself up from a fiery ring of tangerines.

“I’ll go over them, Mother, but I just got in from the grocery store. I need to put these things away first.” I pushed back a wet clump of hair that stuck to the side of my face like seaweed.

“Did you get the dried apricots?”

“Were they on the list?”

She closed her eyes for a minute. “I can’t remember. I can’t remember anything.” She turned to her granddaughter. “Camille, it’s a terrible thing to be old. I hope you never get to be my age. Or maybe by the time you get to be my age they will have invented a cure for forgetting things.”

Camille made some small humming sound that acknowledged that she had heard her own name spoken but she did not stop reading.

“I’ll put apricots on the list for next time,” I said.

“And these papers. Will you look at these? If I owe Dr. Nickerson money I think I should pay him.”

I scooped up the sodden remains of paper sack and threw them in the garbage. I put myself inside the cake and tried to breathe slowly. I made it a simple lemon cake, no glaze. I was an only child and my parents had been divorced since I was two. My mother had done everything on her own. She had taken good care of me, played rounds of Go Fish, cooked nutritious meals, sewed me clothes that never looked homemade, taught me to play the piano in a passable manner. This was payback time. “The mail has already gone out today. Just let me get the milk in the refrigerator.”

“Camille,” my mother said. “Come over here and help your mother. We’ll get this done in a minute.”

Camille closed her eyes and pushed her fingers against the slender bridge of her nose. I could tell she was trying not to scream, and even though I didn’t expect her to have much success, I appreciated her minimal efforts at restraint. “When I came into the kitchen to
read
, there was nobody in here. If I were smart I would just stay in my bedroom until it was time to go to college.” She slapped her magazine shut, knocked one narrow hip against the table, and was out of the room.

My mother and I watched her, both of us frozen for a moment. It wasn’t as if we hadn’t seen it before, but it never ceased to be a surprise.

“You never spoke to me like that,” my mother said quietly.

“No, I don’t expect I did.”

“I think I would have had a heart attack,” she said. But then she thought about it some more. “Or I would have killed you. One or the other.”

“I think that’s right.” Sometimes I wanted to run after Camille and grab her.
Where is Kitten!
I wanted to know.
What have you done with my daughter?

“You and Sam need to do something about this. That girl has too many privileges. She talks on the phone all the time, goes out with her friends. She has a car!”

I wondered if my mother thought I hadn’t noticed that one.

“How can you allow a child to behave that way and let her have a car?”

“I don’t know,” I said honestly, because even though I wasn’t interested in hearing her point of view at the moment, it was not entirely without validity.

My mother shook her head. “So the groceries can wait for two minutes. Come sit down and look at these forms.”

And so I sat down, my raincoat still pooling water in its cuffs, my groceries on the floor. I fished my reading glasses out of the bottom of my purse. “You know, Sam is so much better with these things than I am.” I took the papers from her hands.

“Sam’s so busy,” she said. “He runs a hospital all day. He shouldn’t be bothered with medical papers as soon as he walks in the door.”

But she would ask him. She always did. I would fill out the forms and then she would ask Sam to correct my work.

“Ruth! You’re getting those wet!” She leaned over and blotted the papers with a paper napkin. “Can’t you at least dry your hands first?”

On my mother’s behalf, I will say that the insurance forms were viciously confusing, and that after sitting there watching me read for a few minutes she did get up and start to put the groceries away, though she held up every other item and asked me where it went.

“I thought so,” she’d say, and then put the can of soup with the other cans of soup.

My mother moved in with us a little more than a year ago after her house in East Lansing had been robbed in the middle of the day while she was playing bridge with friends. Whoever did it knocked down the front door. They didn’t pick the lock or jimmy open a window, they just kicked the door in, smashed it to bits, and stepped inside. After that she didn’t want to go home. She had a new door installed and waited to calm down. She went back to the hostess of the bridge party and stayed with her for a week, thinking the feeling of uneasiness would pass. When it didn’t, she packed up what the burglars had deemed unfit to take, including her enormous collection of fabric remnants, and moved to Minneapolis to live with us.

My mother had been a high school music teacher who went back to school to get her certification in history and geography when the state’s budget for music programs was cut back. She was practical because she had to be; that was the hand life had dealt her and she didn’t complain. A roast chicken showed up as chicken hash the next night and then chicken soup for the weekend. My father, whom she had met at a convention of Michigan high school music teachers during the two weeks he actually was a high school music teacher, played piano at clubs, bars, and wedding receptions, his engagements sending him out later and later, and then farther and farther away, until it seemed like too much trouble to make the trip home. This was the early nineteen fifties, when being a divorced woman with a child was still a cause for sideways glances from other women in the grocery store, but my mother kept her head up and trudged forward. I try to imagine sometimes how hard her life must have been. I know that our life together was hard enough, but children are remarkably adaptable creatures, and if
there is little there they settle for little. But my mother was a young woman, working all day, giving private piano lessons in our house on the weekends and after school. Sometimes my father would blow into town, seeming relaxed and handsome and nearly famous, but he always blew out again, and while he may have left behind a box of macadamia brittle or a child’s coat that was already too small, he never left actual cash for the gas bill.

When my mother finally retired, it looked like things were going to be fine for a long time. She still gave private piano lessons and collected a manageable pension from the school system. She had her friends, her bridge group, her music appreciation club. She even went on a package tour of Europe that Sam and I had given her for her birthday. I always saw her as one of those women who would have to be dragged out of her home by six policemen when she was ninety-eight. But then, what in life actually works out the way you think it’s going to?

I wish I could find the person, the people, who kicked in her door. I never have gotten over my need to tell them that they took too much. The television, the stereo, largely worthless jewelry, six pieces of family silver which included her mother’s butter dish that had come over with the family on the boat from Denmark, they could have all of it, but they shouldn’t have kicked in the door. That was the thing that changed my mother for good. Divorce and hard work and single motherhood—she was up for all of those challenges. But to be seventy-three years old and know that someone can just kick in your door, that they don’t even have to have enough finesse to force the lock, really destroyed her sense of how the world was ordered. It scared her, my mother, who had always been such a brave person. Even after it was long over it left her unsure of things. Now she was living in what was once my guest
room and lacked the certainty to fill out consumer questionnaires without my going over them with her.

“Oh, Ruth,” my mother said, looking over my shoulder while I tried to wrestle Blue Cross Blue Shield to the ground. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

“I think that’s got it.” Not that it mattered. Sam would check it. I pushed back from the table. The kitchen floor had only the lightest sheen of water left on it. My hair was half dry. “I should get to work on dinner.”

My mother looked at her watch and I saw a familiar cloud of hesitancy and desire pass over her face.

“Oprah’s on,” I said. My mother was a fool for Oprah. “Go.”

“I can help you.”

I shook my head. “Dinner’s a piece of cake. I’ll be fine.”

My mother headed off to the den and I was glad. I would take a moment by myself over practical assistance any day. There was a time when Camille used to pop out of her room at five-thirty, eager to mince onions and stir sauce. Then again, there was a time that a wall divided the east and west of Germany. Life was not a static experience. We shouldn’t expect things to remain the same.

I held four chicken breasts in my cupped hands. I stared into the cold, translucent flesh, wondering how I could make them sing. I got tired of cooking dinner. Everybody gets tired of cooking dinner. There’s too much responsibility. Did we eat this last week? Is this good for you? Is it balanced, is it green, will he like it, will she eat it, do I have the right ingredients, enough time, will this new recipe fail me? Camille wouldn’t eat red meat anymore and had recently informed me as I set a plate of chops on the table that pork, so widely advertised as “the other white meat,” was in fact as red as
a flank steak. “Pigs are more intelligent than dogs,” she said. “Why don’t we just eat Benjy for dinner?” Lately she had been talking about giving up chicken and fish, maybe even becoming a vegan, which would reduce me to coming up with fascinating ways to cook broccoli every night without benefit of cheese sauce. My mother clipped chilled-salad recipes from women’s magazines and taped them onto the refrigerator to voice her own preferences. Sam was deeply suspect of anything that he hadn’t eaten before and had been known to pick dishes apart until he could clearly identify each of their elements. Wyatt, my vacuum, the only truly brilliant eater in the family, was a junior in college and enjoying the deep, hot wells of cafeteria food that could be ladled onto a tray. As for me, I couldn’t have cared less. I think I would have been happy with a carton of lemon yogurt every night if it meant I didn’t have to cook. Dinner, I think, would be fascinating if I only had to do it once a week. Dinner could be riveting if there was a way to make it cake.

I washed the chicken breasts and stripped out their tendons with pliers. As I was beating them flat between sheets of wax paper I started thinking about making a carrot cake. I had plenty of carrots. I had been planning on making glazed carrots for dinner but there was no reason why I couldn’t shred them instead. My family tended to grumble when there was too much cake in the house. As a rule, they liked to see cakes go right out the door, to school bake sales, to sick friends, for someone’s birthday. When Camille’s friends came over they told her she was lucky. “My mom wouldn’t know how to bake a cake if you threw a box of Duncan Hines at her,” her friend Becca said as she lobbed off a hunk of chocolate chiffon, but Camille only snarled. Still, if I made the carrot cake without frosting, if I put a minimal amount of sugar in it and baked
it on a sheet pan so that I could slice it into squares, I could practically pass it off as cornbread. It hadn’t been a great day, and no one ever objected to cornbread. I left the chicken for a minute and got out the flour. There were raisins and walnuts. I held two cold eggs in one hand and felt the knot between my shoulders start to unravel the tiniest bit around the edges.

An hour later Oprah had said her piece and my mother came into the kitchen and sniffed the air. “That’s a cake.” She pushed the oven light on and peered inside.

“Carrot bread.” I pulled the pot holders out of their drawer.

“There is no such thing. Really, I’m going to be the size of a house if you keep baking this much.”

“I’ve always baked this much and you’ve never been heavy a day in your life.”

“That isn’t true,” my mother said, pouring herself a vodka and orange juice. “I looked like a snowman when I was pregnant with you.”

“That was a long time ago. Nobody remembers it.”

“I remember it,” she said darkly.

I picked up the phone in the kitchen and called Camille’s room. She had her own line with call waiting. No matter how remote Camille could be in person, she always answered the phone, which is why I strictly forbid her to have caller ID.