Aimee Bender - The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

Will I see you? I said.

Of course, he said. I’ll come by all the time.

His cheek was warm on my forehead, but even as he spoke, it was like the opposite was forming underneath his words, like letters shaped backwards in the reflection of a pool.

My mother stuck her head out the door. Find him? she called.

Not yet, I called back.

She rustled outside, carrying Joseph’s cap and gown, wrapped in plastic. In the kitchen, the phone rang again. Mom had started asking George polite questions about Caltech, so I ran in to pick it up.

Hello?

It was a man’s voice. Hello? May I speak to Lane?

Who’s this?

This is Larry, from the co-op, said the voice.

I picked out a pen from the pen cup, and drew a circle on a pad of paper. I didn’t expect him to give his name so easily.

She can’t talk, I said. We’re about to go to my brother’s graduation, I said.

Ah, right, he said. He had a friendly voice, easygoing, medium-pitched. Just tell her I called, he said. This is Rose, right?

I doodled a demon head on the pad. Who?

Rose? Her daughter?

I gave the demon head bloodshot eyes. I could just imagine my mother telling Larry all the things in her day. Going over every detail of every piece of wood. Telling him the names of each member of her family. I hadn’t been able to stop myself from thanking him every night before I went to sleep, as I watched tray after tray go to the co-op covered in cookies and pies and return the next day, empty.

I scribbled wiggly hair on the demon head. Yes, I said. This is Rose.

He made a little exhale sound, half of a laugh.

Nice to meet you, he said.

Out the kitchen window, George was answering Mom’s questions. Bobbing his head. Soon to fly off into the world of dorms, and girls. It seemed brutally unfair, that he would not be coming over two or three times a week anymore. Mom walked to the car, talking, making some kind of airplane shape with her arms.

You know I know, I said, to Larry.

Know what?

I smiled a little, into the phone. Watched as my mother popped the trunk of the car and looked in there. In the trunk? Joseph? It all seemed funny, for a second, just funny and ridiculous and sad.

I just know, I said. The thing I’m not supposed to know.

He paused again. A muggy silence.

It’s okay, I said. I mean, it’s bad. But it’s okay. Just stop calling the house. And nothing on weekends. All right?

That frozen silence, on the other end. But a heavy, listening silence. George hung up his gown and Joe’s gown carefully on the inside hooks of the back seat of the car.

I think I understand, said Larry.

Mom was saying something else, animatedly, to George, by the side of the car. Her pink, wide mouth.

Thank you, I said, and hung up.

I paused over the pad of paper. Then I wrote it down, on a clean sheet: Larry called.

At a quarter past twelve, Mom honked the car horn. Soon the rehearsal would begin: all the robe-clad grads lining up to mark the ceremony in the high-school auditorium. Our father and George’s family would meet us later, at the school, for the real event.

The horn did nothing but startle the neighborhood kid who was biking, so she left the car to go check the neighbors’ house. Jo-seph! she called, down the street. I stuck the note on the fridge, under a magnet. What to do? I liked seeing her happier. Life was better with her happier.

I walked through the house. Closed open closet doors, shut off lights. Finally, I went to stand in my brother’s room. The whole running and looking, opening and closing, a giant ruse. Like he was anywhere else but somewhere near his room. Even though I could not find him I knew where he was not, and he was definitely not at the neighbors’. The books, the half-packed boxes, the piles of clothes. That familiar tightening tension in the room itself.

He’ll be here soon, I said.

Mom was running down the sidewalk. What should we do? she called to George. It’s time!

I know, I said, too quiet for her to hear. I closed my eyes. Just wait a sec, I said.

She kept running down the sidewalk, towards the end of the block. Jo-seph! I heard her calling. Jo-seph! George stood by the car, talking to the kid biking to and fro. Tossing and catching a loose pine cone.

I left my brother’s room and went to my own, the land of Pegasus pens, and broken stools, and doll stuff. There, I opened the jewelry box my mother had given me for my most recent birthday. She’d made it with leftover bits of lumber, and it was a shiny even oak, with carefully set drawers, handles hewn from twigs. Each piece she made more skilled than the last.

She, who loved him more than anything, was down the street, calling. George, his closest friend in the world, stood outside scanning the sidewalk. It was an unexpected moment for me. My brother and I had never been close, and I didn’t understand what was happening, but it seemed I still knew more about it than anyone else. For whatever reason, I was involved in this way. I sifted through the jewelry-box drawers, past the leftover roll of a twenty-dollar bill. Listened as carefully as I could for clues while settling colorful stones beside each other.

Nothing came from the room itself, but as I untangled a long satin ribbon, I heard two steps, out of his room, one two. When I walked into the hall, there he was, in his door frame, with that same look on his face, like he’d been washed and dried in a machine.

Jo-seph! our mother called, from down the street.

Jo-seph! George echoed.

Joseph looked over at me, calmly. We stared at each other, for a longer minute than was expected.

Ready, he said.

In August, they packed up, in brown boxes: George to Pasadena, Joseph to Los Feliz. On the day he headed east in his boxy U-Haul, a painted picture of rugged Alaskan mountains on the truckside, George came into my room and gave me a long hug. I’ll see you soon, he said, holding me by the shoulders, looking at me in the eyes, although I wouldn’t see him, not for months. Eliza was over that day, and to my distaste and her delight, he hugged her too. Take good care of Rose, he told her. I’m fine, I said, bumping inside the door frame, but Eliza nodded, solemn. Her cheeks filling at the bottom with blush. Maybe you could show us the dorms sometime, she said. I almost whacked her on the head with the yellow doll-brush hidden in my back pocket. Yes, I wanted to see the dorms, more than anything! But not with her there too.

My brother convinced my parents to rent him an apartment off Vermont, near Prospect Avenue. About fifteen minutes away. He sat with Dad in front of the TV for a half-hour, the longest I’d ever seen them alone together, and he gave a heartfelt eyes-ahead speech about how hard he planned to study and how helpful it would be to be close to school. He had no interest in driving, and from his new doorstep he would be able to walk to Los Angeles City College, to the 7-Eleven, and to the Jons grocery store. The place was a tenplex with its name written diagonally on the front-Rexford Gardens, or Bedman Vista, or something like that. The units circled a courtyard complete with a wall of ferns and a broken mermaid fountain. Joseph’s apartment was on the second level, with an outside hallway that served as a collective balcony.

To furnish the new apartment, Mom supplied him with seconds from the co-op studio. A dresser with a finicky drawer, a very small table of unclear purpose, a standard pine nightstand, a pair of spindly maple stools.

How about this? Mom said, on moving day, holding up a coat rack made by one of her colleagues; the wood was elegant, a rich striped rosewood from Brazil, but it hadn’t been cut correctly with the buzz saw and something was off in the balance, so it needed to be wedged inside a corner.