Eat Cake: A Novel (23 page)

She pulled on her seat belt. I started the car up and put it in reverse. I waited and waited but she said nothing. She was not used to talking things over with me, even when the information was actually about me. “So you’re not going to tell?”

She looked out the window and gently bit her thumb. “Bill was very nice. He liked the way the cakes looked. He was impressed with the packaging. He said he’d give them a try and then he’d call.” She pulled down the visor and checked her lipstick in the little mirror. “Actually, he said he’d call anyway. He said he’d like to take me out to dinner.”

“Did you mention that you were a high school junior whose mother was waiting in the car?”

“I told him I was seeing someone.”

“Are you seeing someone?”

Camille glanced over in my direction and made it clear that that was not a conversation we would be having.

“What did he say about the price?”

“He said he thought it was high.”

“I knew twenty was too high.”

“I told him the cakes were forty.”

“Forty dollars! Are you kidding me? That’s robbery! No one is going to pay forty dollars for a cake.”

“They will if they can turn around and sell it for seventy-two. Anyway, forty is where we started. I’d do it for thirty-five.”

“So you’re the accountant now too?”

“I’m the booking agent. You’re never going to get what you’re worth if you don’t shoot high.”

“Where did you get all this confidence? Really, I couldn’t even walk in the place. Where did you come from?”

“You forget,” Camille said. “I’m adopted.”

We delivered the cakes. Toward the end I got up enough nerve to stand at the side of the window just so I could see her walk in. She kept her shoulders back, her head up. There was no one in the world she was afraid to talk to. I wondered if I had been self-confident at sixteen and then somehow life had taken it out of me, but it wasn’t true. I was never like Camille. She knew she was special and she had no problem at all with that. I was crazy about her.

Well after dark we returned home in triumph. Everyone was waiting for us in the kitchen. “How did it go?” my father said. “Did you kill them?”

“We killed them,” Camille said.

Sam was back in his jeans and a sweatshirt, looking like his best true self. “I knew you’d kill them,” he said proudly.

“You should have seen Camille. She handled all the business. She just walked in there, gave them the cakes, and told them what she wanted.”

“Everybody in the family has a job in Mom’s business except for Dad,” Camille said. “You’re going to have to give Dad a job.”

Her heart was in the right place but I felt terrible that she’d said it. The only person who didn’t seem to mind was Sam. “I’m trying to get on the payroll,” he said.

That night in bed I asked Sam about the job interview.

“It wasn’t really an interview,” he said. “I just met with another administrator I know. I was putting some feelers out. I didn’t think there was going to be a job for me.”

“Did he say if anything looked good?”

“There are a lot of people in the same boat I’m in right now.” Sam waited for a minute. In the darkness he reached out and held my hand. “He said it wasn’t such a good time to be looking.”

“You’re going to find something,” I said.

“And you’ve already found something. I’m so proud of you, Ruth.”

As happy as I was about how the cakes had turned out, I didn’t like the idea that Sam was now in one boat and I was in another. I liked it better when we were both in the water, swimming.

FOR THE SECOND MORNING IN A ROW I WAS UP AT
four o’clock. Yesterday I couldn’t sleep because I was too nervous about getting the cakes off. This morning I couldn’t sleep because I was worried about how they were doing. Did the manager take them home and eat them? Did he feed them to his wife and kids, throw the box away, and consider all the unseen perks of being a restaurant manager? Or were the cakes eaten at a conference table, the owner, the manager, the sommelier, and the head chef all sitting down for a serious slice? Did they discuss the body of the cake, the crumb? Did they analyze the icing? Choose a nice Sauternes to complement it, or did they drink a little water between slices to clear their palates?

Sam rolled over, sighed, and pushed down deeper into his pillow to dream of sloops and yawls. I got up and put my bathrobe on and headed to the kitchen. I turned on the light over the stove and set the oven to three-fifty. I was just going to take the butter out of the refrigerator when, for the second morning in a row, I met my mother coming down the hall from the wrong direction.

“Don’t you sleep anymore?” She was very nearly shouting.

“Keep your voice down. Somebody in this house is probably still asleep. I’m tense, okay? I’m worried about the cakes.”

“Why can’t you be tense in your own bedroom?”

“Mom, I’m not asking you what you’re doing wandering around at four in the morning, why do you care what I’m doing? Why can’t we both walk through the kitchen whenever we want to?”

“There’s no privacy in this house.”

“There hasn’t been in a long time.”

We both folded our arms across our bathrobes and stared at each other.

“What
are
you doing anyway?” she said.

“I’m going to bake some cakes.”

My mother looked at me as if I had told her I was going to move to Memphis and join an Elvis cult. “All you’ve done is bake! You have to stop this.”

“I didn’t make the cakes for the concierges that Dad called. And you said yourself you wanted some cakes for people at church.”

“I didn’t say I wanted them at four in the morning.”

“Well, you don’t get to set the schedule.”

“Fine!” she said. “Then I’ll just go back to work on the boxes. I wasn’t planning on sleeping anymore anyway.”

My mother had on her same old pink chenille bathrobe and her hair was a little out of whack, but there was something different about her. “You look different,” I said. I couldn’t place what it was.

She gave me a very nasty look, as if I was referring to whatever was going on down the hall, which I was not. “I look exactly like I always do at four in the morning.”

“No, there’s something …” I smiled. “You don’t have your glasses on.”

My mother reached up and touched her face and then the top of her head as if she didn’t believe me. Then she turned around
without a word and went back to my father’s room. By the time she came out again I had two cakes in the ovens and was working on my third. It was seven o’clock in the morning.

At noon my father got up and I poured him a bowl of cereal, which he ate by himself using a large-handled spoon. It was as magnificent as seeing a man walk on the moon.

“Are you going to issue a press release? Stop staring at me. I’ve been feeding myself my whole life,” he said.

“Well, I have a short memory.”

He put the spoon in the bowl, picked up a napkin, and wiped the corners of his mouth. It wasn’t fast, but it was perfect. “You know, I’ve got a doctor’s appointment this afternoon. Why don’t we throw those cakes in the back and I’ll go with you to drop them off at the hotels. It would be good to see those guys again. Some of them, man, it’s been years.”

My mother came in with a new set of boxes. Each one was so beautiful, such a deeply realized piece of art, that I didn’t want to let any of them out of the house. Who knew she had it in her? “If you gave me a little more time, you’d be impressed with what I could do.”

“I’m impressed anyway,” I said. “They’re wonderful.”

“Hey, Hollis, Ruth and I are going to take these cakes to the hotels. Why don’t you fix yourself up a little and come along for the ride? You can help carry the boxes.”

“If I’m going to be the porter, then I don’t have to fix up,” my mother said. “Is that a spoon you’ve got in your hand?”

“I’m almost grown,” he said, smiling. “Before you know it I’m going to be out of the nest.”

He meant it as a joke, but a dark cloud passed over my mother’s face. She turned back to her room and walked away. “Let me know when you’re ready to go.”

It didn’t take long for my mother to get herself ready, but she put a special effort into getting my father bathed and dressed. It was no small task. He went out of the house so rarely that we didn’t have to deal with the issue of his clothes very often. At home he wore ratty button-down flannel shirts with half of the sleeves cut off, things that were easy to take off and on. But today he wore pressed pants and a white short-sleeved dress shirt that made him look like he had retired to Miami. My mother had cut open the sleeves of a cardigan sweater partway and hemmed up the edges so that they covered the steel halos nicely. She had shaved him and combed his hair and, in short, made him look more like the man I had known before he fell down the basement stairs of a nightclub.

“Look at you,” I said approvingly.

“I have people to see,” my father said.

“Don’t you think he should wear a tie to go to the doctor?” my mother said. “He won’t wear a tie.”

“I remember when you used to tie my ties. You always tried to choke me.”

Our first stop was Sam’s old hospital, where we went to see the surgeon who had taken over my father’s case. When we entered the front lobby I felt a little like I was betraying my husband, going to see a building that had done him wrong. I thought of all the times Sam had forgotten a file and I had brought it over to him, all the times I’d run over for lunch in the cafeteria when he had a break, the countless Christmas parties, punch cups, and buffet
lines. Sam had given an awful lot to this place. It should have ended better for him. We rode the elevator to the fourth floor and went to sign in. A little while after we’d taken our seats in the waiting room, a nurse came to take my father away for X-rays. “Don’t you want one of us to come?” I asked him.

“I don’t think they’re going to ask me to operate the machine. I only have to show them my arms.”

“I’ll take that as a no,” I said.

“Family,” my father whispered to the pretty nurse as they walked away. “They think I can’t even feed myself.”