The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

by Aimee Bender

she didn’t like copy machines, or work shoes, or computers,

and with each bite, I thought—mmm, so good, the best ever, yum—but in each bite: absence, hunger, spiraling, hollows.

Mom hugged him like he’d been gone for a year, and he patted her shoulder like she was a puppy,

So every food has a feeling, George said when I tried to explain to him about the acidic resentment in the grape jelly.

Mom loved my brother more. Not that she didn’t love me—I

Rain forest, what does that mean? I asked. You are lush, she said. I need rain? Lots of rain. Is that good? I asked. Not good or bad, she said. Is a rain forest good or bad?

I had assumed, since birth, that Joseph was so weird because he was so smart. But here was George, even smarter,

And what’s Dad? I said. Oh, your father, she said, leaning her hip against the counter. Your father is a big strong stubborn gray boulder. She laughed.

I asked my father if we could go out to eat more often, to give Mom a break from the cooking. But I love cooking! Mom said, brushing at the air. Is there something so bad about my cooking? No, no, I said;

plus a kind of slippery unease, that it had not been fate after all.

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 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.

For you, Rose? he was saying. For your birth? When I turned, his face was closer than usual, and I could see the slight strain in the lines above his eyebrows. The quiet urgency in whatever he wanted to tell me. Yes? I said. His hand hovered in the air. For you, he said, I brought binoculars.

I felt a little closer to my father, yes, but if I was dying in the hospital, he would probably wave a flag from the parking lot.

I felt relieved that my mother had another person to give her cookies to, but that person tore up the family structure and my father had no clue.

We were, after all, almost thirteen. With naked dolls in hand, or even the occasional doll-baby, it sometimes felt like we were pedophiles.

She’d run after me in the halls with a slapdash sandwich she’d made in five seconds to get me to tell her if she really liked this guy or if she was just kidding herself.

So what are you doing after graduation? I asked. He turned back. Me? he said. School, I guess. Baseball. Why? You want to keep in touch? Nah, I said. That’s my girl, he said,

A heartwarming story, Dad said, nodding. I like it. When’s our show on? Ten minutes, I said. Anyway, it’s not over. Why not? said Dad, his hand on the door handle. I like where it ended, he said. Let’s end it there.

we do need a Sunday and Wednesday dishwasher, she said. Our dishwasher just got a job in a movie. Playing a dishwasher.

I didn’t mind the quiet stretches. It was like we were trying out the idea of being side by side.

My dad, Dad said, would walk into a store and take a whiff and he could tell a lot about whoever was in the store with that whiff. Who was happy, who was unhappy, who was sick, the works.

There is also a tinge of sadness in the cook, I said. Now he put down his pencil for good, and folded up the crossword. In us all, he nodded.

That she might not actually know us seemed the humblest thing a mother could admit.

I leaned over, and kissed her cheek. From us both, I said.

he whispered to me that the chair was his favorite, was the easiest to sustain. That at other times, he had been the bed, the dresser, the table, the nightstand. It took time, it had taken almost constant practice.

I told him about the line I’d drawn, on the chair. I asked him to only pick that chair, in the future. Not another chair. Not another item. That one. So then, no matter what happened, I would know.

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?