The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake: A Novel (7 page)

Part two

Joseph

13
My parents met at a garage sale, held by my dad's college roommate. All three were in their senior year of college at Berkeley, and Dad's roommate, Carl, was an unusually fastidious type for someone in his early twenties. He oiled door hinges, for fun. Dad, a natural slob, said he would sometimes open up the freezer just to look at the frozen food stacked in such nice piles, corn bags nested on top of pizza slabs.

He was good for me, Dad said.

Carl also organized a biannual garage sale, to purge the household of crap. Mom liked garage sales, because she had very little money and was, she said, a fan of the found object. Most interesting to her was furniture, even then, and she had at that point acquired several velvet-topped footstools that she used in her apartment as guest seats. Her roommate at the time, tawny-maned Sharlene, was passionate about cooking, and they often had big dinner parties of cuisines from around the world, Moroccan feasts and Italian banquets, the table decorated with purple-glassed votive candles and old cracking out-of-date maps, because neither could afford to travel. Her roommate took weeks planning the menu, and Mom's job was to supply the seating. She'd been spending her Saturdays scouting around San Francisco and Oakland and Berkeley for more footstools, at the Ashby Flea Market and at every open garage, and on that particular morning, sunshine freshening up the gardens, she had stopped to browse through the tidy piles at this little house in the foothills when the tall handsome man in the lounge chair asked if she needed any help.

You don't happen to have any velvet footstools? She scanned the lawn, eyes grazing over shoes and kitchenware.

Footstools, he said, as if thinking about it. All velvet?

Just the top, she said.

He shook his head. I'm sorry, he said.

Or all velvet?

He shook his head again. Not even close, he said.

She tipped her chin, and smiled at him. In those days, she let her hair loose, down to her waist, and whenever I met old friends of hers, they would describe my mother as having resembled a mermaid with legs. With a sheerness to her skin that people wanted to shield.

Dad liked a task.

What kind of velvet footstool? he asked, rising from his chair.

Doesn't matter, she said. About so high? She held her hand at knee level. With a velvet top? Any color?

Across the lawn, Carl was attaching price labels to a few more books. Nope, he called out. But how about a whisk, for fifty cents?

Mom dipped her head. There were posters pinned to telephone poles around the neighborhood for other sales. Thanks anyway, she said.

Or a toaster oven? Carl said, making sparky sale motions with his hands.

Mom laughed. Nice try, she said. But I'm a woman on a mission.

Dad asked if he could accompany her, and she shrugged, in the way that most men at the time used as a doorway or lever. A shrug was as good as a yes, sometimes, particularly for a delicate beauty such as this. He ran inside and grabbed the local paper, which had listings of sales in the back placed by the truly motivated garage-sale givers, and together, they did a walking tour of the neighborhoods, past Shattuck and over to Elm, and Oak, where the house lawns waxed and waned in shades of green and yellow and beige. At each stop, Mom strolled around the piles, and Dad would make an excuse and duck inside, asking the house owner if he could please use their phone. It's important, he said, urgently. I would be very grateful, he said. He was charming, and tall, and offered to haul any heavy items outside, and the owners all said yes, and at house after house, he called up Carl with instructions. Please, he whispered. I need you to send someone to the fabric store to pick up some velvet. He cupped his hand over the receiver mouthpiece. In a fierce hiss, he promised Carl that he, Dad, would start cleaning the living room of his textbooks and shoes, yes, if only he, Carl, would rip off the wool top of the one footstool they had. It's
my
stool, Dad said, pacing, trying to stand far enough away from the front door and the garage sale itself so that she, opening and closing the drawers of an old oak nightstand, would not hear.

I will, all year, clear the rooms of my stuff, Dad told Carl.

Carl's girlfriend, who liked pranks, dashed to the closest fabric store, bought and trod on the cheapest mauve velvet, and cut it into a square. Dad kept Mom busy with the tour of the sales for as long as he could, and then they went to lunch at a little cafe on Durant, where they talked about college and the abyss post-college and he bit his tongue and did not ask for anything else. After splitting a double-chocolate brownie with whipped cream, she sighed. Her eyes shining. I should get back, she said. Of course, he said. Let's go. He picked up her bag, which held a few new books and records in it. Maybe we can double-check my place on the way, he offered, as lightly as he could. Who knows, he said, sometimes people trade items instead of money.

Since it's right by your car anyway, he said.

He let her walk ahead, down the sidewalk, and Carl and his girlfriend were tired, lounging in chairs, counting the money and deciding if they should lower prices for the remaining scattering of goods, when Mom saw it. She ran ahead, and clapped her hands with delight at the squat low wooden footstool covered with a kind of worn pink velvet that curled under the base of the seat and was stapled neatly to the inside. She saw it over on the side, by the stack of mildewed books and mismatched silverware.

Can you believe this? she said. Paul? Look!

She held it up in her arms, running her fingers over the plush.

Dad rushed over. You're kidding! he said to Carl. Someone traded this?

For the toaster oven, Carl said, pointedly. So now we need a new toaster oven.

Dad nodded. I'd like to buy us a new toaster oven, he said.

Sounds like a plan, said Carl, closing his eyes. I thought you might be interested, he said, to Mom.

The color was high on her cheeks. I am very interested, she said.

She sat on the stool and crossed her legs and said she liked the feel of it, liked it very much. It's pink as a rose, she said, and Carl's girlfriend beamed. The label read seven dollars, and Mom dug in her purse and paid for it, which Dad let her do, and she lugged it to her car, which he helped her with, and they made a date for the following night. It was as natural a plan as if they'd been seeing each other for months. Date Her, on his most current checklist with a nicely filled-in box. At their wedding, Carl, the best man, told the full story, holding up his flute of champagne, a story Dad had not told Mom ever. The guests roared. Light hit the gold of the champagne in a spear. Mom, in the photos, was wearing a dress that seemed sheerer than it actually was, so in every photo she looked like a ghost, a ghost that at any moment you might catch nude. It was a work of art, the dress, because it danced right in between the very tangible and the very intangible, and her skin and the dress were hard to distinguish. In the toast photo of her standing with Dad, who was all tangibility, black suit and firm shoulders, her eyes burn.

I'd started asking her questions about the wedding one afternoon when I was eleven, trying to understand how two such different people had gotten married at all, and she pulled the photo album off the shelf and opened it on our knees, between us. For a while she kept it on that page with the photo of Carl holding up his champagne, his mouth half open as he spoke his toast. She traced the fringes on his wingtip shoes and told me the story, and as she did, I felt the two parallel strands in her telling: awe, that a man had done so much for her in a couple hours, and how competent a man he was, to make that happen, and even how he had become neater, as a result of his promise to Carl, something she thanked Carl for whenever she saw him, explaining how every day Dad would place his briefcase in the hall closet and take off his shoes and hang his jacket--all of that, plus a kind of slippery unease, that it had not been fate after all. I thought, she told me, that the signs were pointing to him. But it turned out he'd
made
the signs! she said, poking at the photo with the tip of her finger.

Were you upset? I asked.

It was our wedding day! she said.

She turned the page. We looked at people dancing: people I knew, all younger.

But had you trusted the signs? I asked.

She shook her head, but not as in no. As in shaking her head free of the thought. She turned more pages, dusky-black paper with delicate photo corners holding the pictures in place, and she pointed out relatives I hadn't met, or Dad's dad, who'd died before I was born, holding a napkin to his face like a cowboy. The day grew darker outside, and the whitish sheer dress provided us light on the pages. I looked at the people, and grunted in response as if I'd moved on, but I was still caught back in pages before. My mother looked for signs all the time. A person would be curt to her at the supermarket and she would view it as a sign that she should be nicer to strangers. Joseph would give her an unexpected smile and she'd retrace all her actions to see why she deserved it. Once, we arrived home to a snail at the doorstep and she said it was a sign to slow down, and she took a walk around the block at a funereal pace, saying there was something in there for her if she just took her time. She came back just as vivid-faced as ever. Thank you, little snail, she buzzed, lifting it up and placing it in the cool shadows of a jasmine bush. She was always looking for unexpected guidance, and at that garage sale the world had spit up just exactly what she'd asked for, and what could be a better omen than that? So it must've been a real blow, on her wedding day, to find out that the larger hand in action was the hand she was then holding.

We turned the last few pages of the album. Grandma, in a daisy-patterned sack dress. Mom's sister Cindy, wearing jeans. Some of Dad's red-cheeked uncles.

You're in here, Mom said.

No, I said.

You are, Mom said. You and Joe. In the air. The beginning of you, she said. She kissed the top of my head.

On the last page, as if to underline her comment, the kiss: Dad and Mom, pressed close together, layers of that ghostly dress blowing around him. We looked at it for a while.

Do you still have that footstool? I asked.

We crept into the garage, flicking on the light. In the coldness of the room, with its old stone floor and whistling window, Mom and I rummaged through piles, setting aside crates and boxes. After a half-hour or so, wedged behind a rake and a series of brooms, I found it: a moth-eaten sun-bleached peach velvet seat, stretched over a shiny brown wicker crisscross-patterned stool. Look! I said, brushing my hand over the top. Mom, knee-deep in a pile of baby toys, eyed it the way you eye a person you haven't seen in a long time when the last exchange was complicated. I can build you a better one, she said, dubiously. I patted the seat. This one, I said. The velvet was soft. I sidestepped the piles and took it for my room. Furniture.

14
There are heightened years. One was nine. Another twelve. A third, seventeen. My brother used graph paper to make shapes out of sequences; I saw those years as a trio, but not one I wanted to map out on those small graph-paper squares. I didn't know how I would label that graph, what the
x
and
y
axes might be called. Instead, they cluster together in my mind, like a code to a padlock that might hang on a locker. It's a confounding mechanism, but with all three numbers in place, lined up just right on the notched mark, something in the arch clicks, and releases.

In the movies, an affair is often indicated by spying at motel rooms, or lipstick marks dashed on a white collar. I was twelve when I sat down to a family dinner of roast beef and potatoes, on a cool February evening, and got such a wallop of guilt and romance in my first mouthful that I knew, instantly, that she'd met someone else. Thick waves of it, in the meat and the homemade sour cream and the green slashes of carefully chopped chives. Oh! I said. I drank down a full glass of water. Ah! my father said, letting out an end-of-day sigh. Roast beef, he murmured, patting his belt. My favorite. I got up to find some factory catsup to help me out, while Joseph turned pages of his book and Mom poured herself a glass of wine. Like it? she said. I glanced over at her. It fit, too: she'd been looking better lately, dressing up more, a little happier, wearing patterned headbands with her ponytail, bracelets on both arms. And things, in general, were in a new flux: Joseph had applied to colleges and was hoping to move out of the house and into the dorm room at Caltech he wanted to share with George. Mom talked often about how much she would miss him, but he didn't really respond, and whenever a box arrived for any kind of package delivery, regular or Grandma's, Joseph would empty it and then squirrel it away and begin to put things in it. He was half packed already, months in advance. If he could've eaten dinner in his room, he would've, but our father insisted we sit together at the table.

I read a study, Dad said, flaring his napkin into his lap. Families that eat dinner together are happier families, he said.

I think those families also talk to each other, I said.

Mom, behind us, spooning up a vegetable, laughed.

It was true: our dinners, always at the table, framed by floral-print kitchen curtains and the rising steam off casserole dishes, were almost always silent in those days unless Mom felt like filling us in on the latest news and gossip in carpentry. Dad didn't talk much about work: I leave work at work! was his mantra. Of course, right after dinner he'd put his dish in the sink and go into their bedroom to make calls, and he'd work, often, until ten or eleven unless I knocked lightly on his door to deliver the name of an upcoming TV drama like a fisherman's lure for a reluctant tuna. Even as young as ten, if I whispered the name of the show with enough pull, I could get him to put aside his stack of papers and wander in to watch. If I was quiet enough, he wouldn't send me to bed. We colluded in this way: as long as I didn't announce that I was a kid, he wouldn't rise up as a parent, and for an hour, we could both have a little respite from our roles.

He only liked the medical dramas. The law shows made him crabby.

At dinner, as part of his adolescence, Joseph had taken a liking to reading and eating, so he generally brought a book to the table which he would spread in his lap and peer at between bites. Often a textbook, sometimes a thriller. Both parents had given up trying to stop him, because when, previously, they had wrenched a book out of his hands, he had stared into space so disconcertingly it made the rest of us feel like putting a bag over his head. Sometimes, if he didn't have a book, to occupy Joseph's eyes I would plant a cereal-box side panel in front of him, and his eyes would slide over and attach to the words, as if they could not do anything but roam and float in the air until words and numbers anchored them back to our world. By the time he was seventeen, he must've memorized the vitamin balances in various raisin-and-oat cereals, and if I'd asked him what percentage of niacin one might find in a single serving of Cheerios, I would not have been surprised if he'd been able to spout the numbers as precisely as his own height and weight.

On this night, he was hunched over, reading the Caltech general information pamphlet about campus for probably the twentieth time. He didn't read the course catalogue but seemed far more interested in the dorms. Mom refilled her glass of wine. She caught me watching her, and winked.

I didn't talk at the table because I was busy surviving the meal. After the incident in the ER, I no longer wanted to advertise my experience to anyone. You try, you seem totally nuts, you go underground. There's a kind of show a kid can do, for a parent--a show of pain, to try to announce something, and in my crying, in the desperate, blabbering, awful mouth-clawing, I had hoped to get something across. Had it come across, any of it? Nope.

I had been friendly when I was eight; by twelve, fidgety and preoccupied. I kept up my schoolwork and threw a ball when I could. My mouth--always so active, alert--could now generally identify forty of fifty states in the produce or meat I ate. I had taken to tracking those more distant elements on my plate, and each night, at dinner, a U.S. map would float up in my mind as I chewed and I'd use it to follow the nuances in the parsley sprig, the orange wedge, and the baked potato to Florida, California, and Kansas, respectively. I could sometimes trace eggs to the county. All the while, listening to my mother talk about carpentry, or spanking the bottle of catsup. It was a good game for me, because even though it did command some of my attention, it also distracted me from the much louder and more difficult influence of the mood of the foodmaker, which ran the gamut. I could be half aware of the conversation, cutting up the meat, and the rest of the time I was driving truck routes through the highways of America, truck beds full of yellow onions. When I went to the supermarket with my mother I double-checked all my answers, and by the time I was twelve, I could distinguish an orange slice from California from an orange slice from Florida in under five seconds because California's was rounder-tasting, due to the desert ground and the clear tangy water of far-flung irrigation. This all kept me very busy. I had little to add to the conversation.

But my mother would talk. Once she sat down, she would take a couple sips of wine to warm up, and the rest of us would lean in as she filled the space. We were grateful, for the distraction of her. We could float in and out of her speeches, her hand light on the curved neck of the wine bottle. She told us everything about the carpentry co-op, which had managed to hold and even extend her interest; her skills had advanced fast in four years, and she talked about cabinetry, and cutting rabbets, and of the various pitfalls and triumphs involved in ripping a board with a table saw. Of the textural differences between cedar and spruce. Of the mortise, the dowel rack, the transom. She told us about all of the other carpenters, and her opinions of each one, and it was in this way, while I was desperately exploring the distant subtleties of the roast beef, trying to figure out if it was from central California or southern Oregon, that I stumbled across the source of her affair.

Bobbie, Mom said, does
not
do her share of clean-up.

Amber, she muttered, is a fine craftsman but no visionary.

Larry! she said, voice lifting in a curl, put up the new group assignment:

Desks
, she murmured, as if she were talking about roses.

I'd been half listening, sawing off a new piece of the roast beef, still warm and savory and swirling with feeling, beef from Oregon, I'd decided, raised by organic farmers, when the curl-up in her voice matched what was in my mouth. Larry, spoke the roast beef. Larry. I chewed and chewed.

Who's Larry? I asked, taking a sip of water.

Joseph turned a page of his pamphlet. Dad made neat cuts into his potato.

Larry? Mom said, fixing round eyes on me.

Larry, I said. Is he a regular?

He's co-op president, she said, shifting in her chair, and no one who had any listening skills could've mistaken the glimpse of pride in her voice.

Ah, I said. President. I spit a bit of gristle into my napkin.

How's the beef?

Fine, I said. Oregon?

I think so, she said. Did you see the wrapper?

No, I said.

We all voted for president, she said, pushing a row of bracelets up her arm. She said it the way a young girl with a crush tries to slip details into a conversation, to prolong the topic without too much emphasis or spotlight. No wonder she'd stayed. Joseph drank a long sip of juice. Dad mopped up his plate with the soft interior of a dinner roll. By then, I'd plowed through enough of the meat to get by, so I got up and went to the pantry where I found a half-eaten cylinder of stale Pringles.

May I? I asked, placing a curved wafer on my tongue.

Mom sank back in her chair. Teenagers, she sighed.

After a few minutes, Dad cleared his plate and excused himself. Joseph returned to his room, where he was working on some homework about electromagnetics. Mom ran a sponge over the counters. After I'd bussed the rest of the table, I wrapped up the remaining roast beef in plastic and put it in the refrigerator for some adultery sandwiches the next day.

I just have to run some errands, Mom said, as the dishwasher began its chugging wash cycle. She said it to the air, as a throwaway: Dad and Joseph had long ago left, but I was just done cleaning, standing in the doorway, and the words fell to me. Something small and fragile punctured, inside my throat. Where? I said. Just to get some materials for my desk project, she said, kissing my cheek. Can I come? I asked. Sorry, Rosebud, she said. You have homework. See you in a couple hours! as she sailed out the door.