Eat Cake: A Novel (6 page)

“This says to Wyatt that he is no longer a member of this family, that his room doesn’t mean anything to you.” She picked up the framed picture of his high school basketball team and wiped her sleeve across it, implying dust.

“Mother, Wyatt could care less. Call him. Ask him.”

“Put your father somewhere else.”

I stopped, my arms full of the blue-striped top sheet and pillowcases. I strongly suspected they were clean. “Okay, we’re not going to put him in Camille’s room. He’s not going to sleep with me and Sam. Something tells me that your room isn’t a likely candidate—”

“I’m not talking about putting him in another bedroom. The couch in the den is all he needs. He’s probably been sleeping on park benches for years anyway. If you put him in a nice bed like this, he won’t know what to do with himself.” But then something much worse occurred to my mother. She put down the
photograph. “Or he might
stay
. Don’t you see it? This is probably all a ruse. He’ll come here, make himself comfortable in Wyatt’s bed, and the next thing you know we won’t be able to get him out of here with an exterminator.”

“What do you think? He broke his own wrists out of some desperate desire to come and visit us? You can’t put a man with two broken wrists on a couch. Logistically it doesn’t work. There wouldn’t be room for him.” I snapped off the fitted sheet.

“Did I say the couch? Put him in the garage. We’ll make up some sort of bed for him out there. We can rent a roll-away. You can leave your car in the driveway. That’s sacrifice enough.”

I put down the bundle of laundry in Wyatt’s desk chair and opened a dresser drawer. “You’re not even being serious now.” I scooped out an armload of sweaters.

“What are you doing?”

“Well, I figure he’ll need some drawer space.”

My mother turned pale. She put a hand on the headboard to steady herself. “He is going to stay, isn’t he?”

“For a while, just until he’s better.”

“You’re lying to me. You’ve been lying to me all along. You think that once he’s in, there will be nothing I can do about it. He’s moving in here.”

I put the sweaters down on the bed and went to my mother. Her eyes were filling up with tears behind her glasses. “I know this brings up a lot of bad memories, but you have got to trust me.”

“Trust you?” My mother stepped away from me. “How could I ever trust you?”

When she turned and left I did not go after her. There was nothing else I knew to say. A few minutes later I heard her banging out an especially angry Beethoven piano sonata in the living room,
the notes swarming the air like a cloud of wrathful bees. Either this visit was going to be the most painful, horrible thing that had ever happened or it would just be bad. I picked up Wyatt’s baseball glove and slipped it on. I balled up my other hand and beat my fist into the glove until I felt something that surpassed a sting. Wyatt was a lefty.

The truth of the matter is I didn’t bear my father any particular ill will. I had for a short time when I was young. I thought he was a terrible man. But as I got older it occurred to me that just because someone isn’t cut out to be a husband or a father doesn’t make him terrible, only terribly disappointing. Sometimes my father came to Minneapolis. He played piano at the Marquette Hotel downtown and I would go and hear him. It happened once after my mother moved in with us, and I lied and told her I was going to a book club. They weren’t life-changing events, those evenings, but they were nice. My father was a funny guy who liked a lot of attention. He played the piano with the same kind of unself-conscious elegance with which Fred Astaire danced. He could make the piano tell jokes. He never looked at his hands. I sat at the bar and nursed a very weak white wine spritzer and every now and then my father would lean into the microphone and say, “Ladies and gentlemen, do you see that beautiful woman over there? Would you believe me if I told you she’s my daughter?” The first couple of times it had mortified me, then after a while I came to see that the only thing to do was nod and give a little wave. My father’s fingers wandered off into the high notes, remembered what they were supposed to be doing, and then made their lazy way back down toward the melody again. When my mother played the piano, which she did beautifully, she always had an expression on her face like she was trying to unscrew an especially tight lid off a jar. I never once saw her play a
note that wasn’t written on the sheet music. I never looked at my parents and wondered why they broke up. I looked at my parents and wondered how they had managed to get through one entire meal together without killing each other.

To be honest, I didn’t know all that much about my father, or I knew as much about him as anyone who bought a gin and tonic and sat at the bar. He was born in San Diego, he started playing the piano when he was four, he started playing in clubs when he was fourteen, sometimes hitchhiking up to Los Angeles and then later up to San Francisco. He liked to tell these stories into the mike. It occurred to me now I didn’t even know if they were true. He painted himself as a skinny boy in dusty jeans, his dark hair combed back with Vaseline, his one suit for playing folded neatly in the bottom of a paper sack while he waited by the side of the road for a ride. My father, it seemed, had two talents in his life, one for music and one for mobility. He traveled as effortlessly as he played. The slightest possibility of a job was reason enough to get him back in his car in the years he had a car, back on the bus when he didn’t, or on a plane in his few phases of being flush. I really doubted that he cared when a job was over. It just meant that there was a chance at another job in a new town. I tried to imagine him here, his wrists decked out in casts. I wondered if he would be able to turn a doorknob.

Wyatt’s room was clean but the air seemed a little off. With some real effort I managed to pry open a window. It was March in Minnesota and there was still some late spring snow on the ground, but the cold air was wonderful. When I started to look around I was able to locate the source of the stuffiness: Wyatt’s room was full of sneakers. I found eleven odd shoes in the bottom drawer of his dresser. I found dozens of pairs under the bed and piled up in the
closets. They were old, peeling rubber, missing laces. Their insoles hung halfway out like the tongues of overheated dogs. They represented every trend in athletic footwear in the past ten years, puffy white high-tops that looked like big marshmallows, techno running shoes with clear windows in the soles, preppy boating shoes with smooth bottoms. I wanted to throw them all away, but then I wasn’t sure. Was he keeping them for a reason? Was he sentimental about one thing? Was it all right to get rid of old shoes without my son’s permission? Was it all right to store my ailing father in a room full of shoes? I went to the kitchen and got a big black Hefty bag. I would put the shoes in the basement for now. That was a compromise. After my father left I would put them back, and then at some point I would talk to Wyatt and ask him about his collection.

“Are you throwing those away?” my mother said, popping up out of nowhere. My mind was a million miles off, in some piano bar. I dropped a small blue Ked, a child’s Ked, and covered my heart with my hand.

“Were you in the closet?” I asked her. Why hadn’t I noticed the Beethoven had stopped?

“Those are Wyatt’s shoes!”

“I’m just clearing them out for now. He’s kept every pair of shoes he’s had since he was six.”

My mother looked at me like I was burning his birth certificate. “I didn’t expect this of you,” she said. And then she was gone again.

How had I come to this point? I couldn’t comfort my husband or discipline my daughter or help either of my parents. I couldn’t even decide if it was okay to throw out a pair of shoes. I sat down on the bed and felt a terrible lump coming up in my throat. Then just when I thought I was going to really break down for a good
cry, I remembered a large bag of pistachio nuts in the back of the pantry. I don’t know what made me think of them. I had hidden them beneath several packages of dried pasta. Sam liked pistachio nuts. I bought them for a cake recipe I had seen in
Gourmet
. I stood up like a sleepwalker, my hands empty of sheets or shoes. I would take care of all of this once the cake was in the oven. The recipe was from several months ago, I didn’t remember which issue. I would find it. I would bake a cake.

My father liked exotic things. On the rare occasions we went out to dinner together over the years, he always wanted us to go to some little Ethiopian restaurant down a back alley or he would say he had to have Mongolian food. He would like this cake. It was Iranian. There was a full tablespoon of cardamom sifted in with the flour, and I could imagine that it would make the cake taste nearly peppered, which would serve to balance out all the salt. I stood in the kitchen, reading the magazine while the sharp husks of the nuts bit into the pads of my fingers. I rolled the nut meat between my palms until the bright spring green of pistachios shone in my hands, a fist full of emeralds. I would grind the nuts into powder without letting them turn to paste. I would butter the parchment paper and line the bottom of the pan. It was the steps, the clear and simple rules of baking, that soothed me. My father would love this cake, and my mother would find this cake interesting, and Sam wouldn’t be crazy about it but he’d be hungry and have a slice anyway. Maybe I could convince Camille it wasn’t cake at all. Maybe I could bring them all together, or at least that’s what I dreamed about while I measured out the oil.

Once my nine-by-twelve was safely in the oven at 400 degrees, the phone rang. I wondered if the caller had somehow sensed that he or she needed to wait.

“How would you feel about living in Des Moines?” Sam said.

People in Minnesota don’t go to bed at night dreaming that one day they’ll live in Iowa, but I figured I wasn’t in any position to be close-minded. “I’m open to all discussion,” I said diplomatically.

“It turns out I know the guy who’s the head of this hospital. He used to work with me, it must have been ten years ago.”

“You’re at the hospital already?”

“The roads were wide open,” Sam said. “I made great time. This guy, Dick McKenzie, he seems to think my situation may not be so desperate. In fact, he thinks it’s the right time to make a move.”

“Sam?”

“Hmm?”

“How’s my father?” On the other end of the line I could hear the P.A. system calling out for one doctor or another. It was like I was talking to Sam at work.

“Oh, Ruth, I’m sorry. You must think I’ve lost my mind. Maybe I have lost my mind. Your dad’s in good spirits. I’d say if you forgot to look at his arms, he’d be his same old self.”

It wasn’t much information, but then Sam had spent even less time around my father than I had over the years. “Is he in a lot of pain?”

“Let’s say he’s in a lot of pain management. He couldn’t feel too bad. He’s trying to pick up all the nurses.”

“When do they think they’ll let him go?”

“We’re waiting on a discharge now. The doctor already told me he’d get sprung this afternoon. We’ll be home tonight. Did you break the news to Hollis?”

“It was not our finest hour.”

“Your dad is a wild card,” Sam said with a sigh. “I think this is going to be hard on her.”

From somewhere in the distance I heard a whoop.

“I think it’s going to be hard on all of us,” Sam added.

“Are you there with him now? Can I talk to him?”

“No, I’m down the hall at a pay phone. Guy was going to have a bath. He said he’d rather I gave them some privacy.”

“Sure,” I said. “Listen, you’re an absolute saint for doing this.”

“It had to be done. You won’t completely discount Des Moines?”

“Not if you promise we can leave my parents in Minneapolis.”

“We can sneak out in the middle of the night. Camille can take care of them. She could whip them into shape.”

I wouldn’t have minded sneaking off with Sam. After all, how many men would not only accept the fact that his divorced in-laws are moving in but actually go to pick one of them up? Considering all he had on him at the moment, he was unfailingly game.

After I got off the phone I had a heightened sense of resolve. I was going to be as game as Sam. I got the sheets washed and the tennis shoes stored away. I moved the little television out of the kitchen and into Wyatt’s room. I even went out to the side of the house and cut a fistful of the few brave crocuses that were still standing and put them in a glass beside the bed. When Camille came home from school I spelled it all out for her: her grandfather, her grandmother, and the inherent limitations of the mix. I begged her to try to be helpful.

“Great,” she said. “My dad’s unemployed and I live in a nursing home now.”

I told her to go and straighten up her room.

The last time I had lived in a house with my father I was two years old. Even before I was two, I gathered, he hadn’t been much
in residence. Good or bad, this was all the experience I was probably going to get in my life with my father, and no matter who was against it, I decided to give it my best shot.

Given how long it takes to get discharged, all the various conversations there were bound to be about medicines and rehab and follow-up visits, I assumed that they would be late, that Mother and Camille would be in bed and that I would be waiting up alone when they came in. I had not expected that Mother and Camille and I would be sitting in the kitchen eating lasagna (made with steamed vegetables and tofu as per Camille’s request) when the back door swung open.

“The return of the natives,” Sam said in a weary voice. In either hand he held a ridiculously old-fashioned suitcase with sharp corners and smooth tan sides. He set them on the floor and flexed his hands back. He looked like a man who had just run over to Kosovo for a loaf of bread.

My father, who had always seemed so much larger than life throughout my childhood, was in fact not such a large man at all. He was thinner than usual, and his white hair, which he liked to wear too long, fell down in his face. He had on a pair of tuxedo pants, black patent-leather shoes, and a hospital gown that tied up the back. He teetered slightly toward the dishwasher and Sam slipped his hand under one armpit. It was not what I had been expecting. I had been thinking casts, hard and white and plastered up in a tidy manner. The most dramatic thing I had imagined was maybe a sling. The truth was considerably less cinematic: Both arms were surrounded by silver halos, bright rings of Saturn through which thin metal rods pierced into his skin. His hands and wrists, puffy and scratched red, were suspended and eerily still. On
the right side the apparatus reached higher. His elbow was pinned as well. Camille made a tiny sound and I gave her knee a gentle squeeze under the table. My father held his arms at an awkward forward angle as if he were coming in for an embrace or warding off another fall.