Aimee Bender - The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

Are you serious? I said.

Stop it! she called past the phone, slapping at someone.

We talked about school for a little while and I tore the fringes into scraps, and after we hung up, my own house felt especially vast. The foundation ticked and settled. All things cleaned and put away. I stood over the trash can and dribbled the torn paper bits out of my fists. That took four minutes. I thought about calling George just to say hi, but I wasn’t sure what a person might say after that, so I left the phone and went into the TV room. My father was sitting on the sofa, reading a newspaper article, his feet wiggling away on the ottoman. He wiggled those feet so often it was like we had a pet in the room.

What are you watching? I asked.

Nothing, he said. He pulled a red leather ledger off a bookshelf, in arm’s reach, and opened it to rows and columns of numbers.

That one soccer-ball drawing spree had been the most eager I had ever seen my father about fatherhood. I’d glimpsed a little me in his eyes then, inhabiting the pupil, sitting next to him in Brazil at the World Cup finals, drinking a beer. But when I’d drawn the faces on the soccer balls, like a TV blinking off, the little me in his eyes had blacked out.

But, Rose, he’d said, holding up the latest eyelashed soccer drawing, why?

Beer is gross, I said, leaving the room.

Still, regardless of his general lack of ability in the paternal realm, my father was a very decent man. He worked for middle-money law so he did not have to screw the little guy, and he studied the books hard because he wanted to do his part correctly and well. He made a good salary but he did not flaunt it. He’d been raised in Chicago proper by a Lithuanian Jewish mother who had grown up in poverty, telling stories, often, of extending a chicken to its fullest capacity, so as soon as a restaurant served his dish, he would promptly cut it in half and ask for a to-go container. Portions are too big anyway, he’d grumble, patting his waistline. He’d only give away his food if the corners were cleanly cut, as he believed a homeless person would just feel worse eating food with ragged bitemarks at the edges-as if, he said, they are dogs, or bacteria. Dignity, he said, lifting his half-lasagna into its box, is no detail.

When we left the restaurant, he would hand the whole package, including plastic knife and fork, to a woman or man wearing an army blanket outside, at a corner on Wilshire, or La Brea. Here, he’d say. Just please don’t bless me. I watched this happen, over and over. He wanted my mother to wear nice dresses and to buy the jewelry she wanted to buy so he could take it off her. He wanted to dress and undress her. The best way I can describe it is just that my father was a fairly focused man, a smart one with a core of simplicity who had ended up with three highly complicated people sharing the household with him: a wife who seemed raw with loneliness, a son whose gaze was so unsettling people had to shove cereal boxes at him to get a break, and a daughter who couldn’t even eat a regular school lunch without having to take a fifteen-minute walk to recover. Who were these people? I felt for my dad, sometimes, when we’d be watching the TV dramas together, and I could see how he might long for the simple life in the commercials, and how he, more than any of us, had had a shot at that life.

The one unexpected side of him-beyond his choice of our mother, who really did not seem like a likely match at all-was his incredible distaste for hospitals. Beyond distaste: he loathed them. When driving through a part of town with a hospital, he would take a longer route, using meandering ineffective side streets to avoid even passing by.

The story went that when Joe and I were born Dad couldn’t even enter the lobby. Mom had struggled out of the car and checked into Cedars-Sinai, a lovely hospital, a hospital with money, about twenty or thirty blocks from our house. After Dad parked he located the maternity ward, called up, found the number of her room, and asked the harried nurse for the exact location of Mom’s window. When the nurse wouldn’t tell him, he called back repeatedly, every minute, until she yelled it into the phone: South Side! Eighth Floor! Third Window From Left! Now Stop Fucking Calling! after which he promptly dialed up a local florist to send the nurse a gorgeous bouquet of tulips and roses, one that arrived long before Joseph did.

The same determination and competence that had led him to conjure up a made-to-order footstool meant he was settled right outside the perfect window for hours, staring up, but the limitations this time were far less appealing. During the hours of labor, Mom pushing and pushing, her best friend, Sharlene, cheering her on, Dad waited outside on the sidewalk. There he stayed, for the eight hours needed for Joe, and the six for me, pacing. He chatted with pedestrians. He did jumping jacks. Apparently, for my birth, he brought a crate, and sat on it for long hours reading a mystery until the parking cop told him to move.

Mom told the story, even though Dad would get embarrassed. She told the story fairly often. For Joseph’s birth, she said, she was in there all day long; when she was done, she shuffled to the window in her torn hospital gown and held the screaming little baby up. Dad was just a small figure on the sidewalk but he saw her right away, and when he glimpsed the blue-blanketed blob, he jumped up and down. He waved and hooted. My son, my son! he called to all the cars driving by. Mom dripped blood onto the floor. Dad lit up a cigar, passed out extras to pedestrians.

After I talked to Eliza, after my mother had left to go on her errands, I parked myself on the other side of the sofa, in the TV room. My father held that red leather ledger in his lap, and he was inputting numbers into new columns. The TV muted across the room. For a while, I just sat and watched him.

Yes? he said, after a few minutes. May I help you?

No, I said.

He had a striking forehead, my father: long with a slight slope at the hairline that lent him an air of officiality. His hair-thick, black, streaked with gray-gripped closely to the top of the forehead, making a clear and assured arch. He looked like the head of a corporation.

Just the previous night, George had been over for dinner and had started asking my father questions about his time in high school. That my father had ever been to high school was funny, and that he was willing to talk about it? Shocking. Somehow, with George there, asking, lightly, the tight box of Dadness was open for looking. I was the lead in my high-school play, Dad said, sipping his water. I dropped my fork on the floor. What? Oh sure, Dad said. Everyone did it, he said. A musical? George asked. Of course, Dad said. Even Mom laughed. Dad filled his mouth with yam. What musical? I asked, and we all waited while he went through the process of chewing, and swallowing, and dabbing with his napkin, ending in the new word Brigadoon .

Who was he? That night, the romance in the roast beef had so excluded him, even as he ate it, every last bite of it, and maybe for that reason, he just seemed a little more approachable than usual. I leaned closer, from my end of the couch.

Yes? he said, from his seat. Rose?

Hi, I said.

He put down his pencil.

Don’t you have homework?

Yes.

He raised an eyebrow. And why don’t you go do that?

Can I bring it in here?

He coughed, a little, into his hand. If you’re quiet, he said.

I ran and grabbed my notebook and textbook. While he worked on the details of his schedule and budget, I did California history on my side of the couch, dutifully answering the questions at the back of the chapter before I’d read the chapter. It was so easy to locate the sentence referenced in the question, and I plugged in the appropriate lines like a good little lab rat, looking up occasionally to see the muted actors arguing on-screen, their eyes emphatic. We worked in silence together. With him sitting there, lightly writing those numbers with his slim mechanical pencil, I seemed to get my work done about twice as fast as usual.