Aimee Bender - The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

Headed home, alone.

There had been a report in a magazine. About a small island off the coast of central California where only a handful of people lived. At the rim of the island was an abundance of trees with a kind of stretchy, tasty bark, but the birds had taken over those trees and very few were surviving. One in particular fell over-an old elegant palm type, a beauty. It grew closest to the edge of the island, and despite its voracious roots, its enormous trunk, it was no match for the steady impact of beaks and thinner dirt and unprotected weather and the gopher holes that eroded its root system below. It fell all the way over and into the ocean. This was a report about the island. About animals, and tree types, and festivals. I’d read it at the dentist’s while waiting for a cleaning.

Many trees in the second ring, up a little higher, had also been overtaken by animals, but some made it through-there, there was enough of a balance of sun and shade, and the roots could dig deeper, and the birds were less crowded, and one of the trees in that area survived, reaching out sideways with tangled branches. It was an interesting tree, one that the islanders commented upon. They found it a symbol of survival, in how it leaned so drastically to the side. They held the summer festival under its stretching boughs, and many weddings happened beneath its main branch, the tear-filled vows strewn with messages of reaching.

Twenty yards in? The other trees grew straight up. Plenty of room for elaborate roots. Birds alighted and flew off. Gopher holes made no dents. The trees were strong, functional. They provided shade and oxygen.

Was it so different, the way I still loved to eat the food from factories and vending machines? How once, in junior high, I’d been caught actually kneeling in front of a vending machine, on my actual knees, in prayer position, with bowed head, breathing a thank you into the little metallic grate that received the baggies after they fell down the chute? The security cop, touring the school, had laughed at me. I thought I liked Oreos, he chuckled. I love them, I told him solemnly, gripping the bag. I am in love with them, I said. I was around twelve then. I did not know how I would get through the day without that machine at school; I prayed those thank yous to it, and whoever stocked it, and whoever had bought it, every night.

Was it so different than the choice of a card-table chair, except my choice meant I could stay in the world and his didn’t?

Many thanks to the Immaculate Heart Center and the Corporation at Yaddo, and for the wisdom and great help of: Bill Thomas, Henry Dunow, Melissa Danaczko, Alice Sebold, Glen Gold, Miranda Jung, Mike Jung, Suzanne Bender, Clifford Johnson, Harold Meltzer, Meri Bender and her dance “Quartet,” David Bender, Karen Bender, Brian Albert, Phil Hay, Julie Reed, Lori Yeghiayan, Helen Desmond, and Mark Miller.

Aimee Bender is the author of the novel An Invisible Sign of My Own and of the collections The Girl in the Flammable Skirt and Willful Creatures . Her work has been widely anthologized and has been translated into ten languages. She lives in Los Angeles.