The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

by Aimee Bender

I could feel the tears beginning to collect in my throat again, but I pushed them apart, away from each other. Tears are only a threat in groups.

Joseph crumpled up his perfect arc and pulled out a fresh piece of graph paper. Don’t crumple, Joe, said George. I fucked it up, said Joseph, tossing it into the trash. I have that plan for my bedroom, remember? George said. All mistakes wallpaper, he said, turning back to me.

Truth was, it was hard to see George eat those cookie halves without hesitation. Without tasting even a speck of the hurry in Janet’s oatmeal, which was so rushed it was like eating the calendar of an executive, or without catching a glimpse of the punching bag tucked beside every chocolate chip. I was so jealous, already, of everyone else’s mouth. But I loved George in part because he believed me; because if I stood in a cold, plain white room and yelled FIRE, he would walk over and ask me why. It was the same thing that would make him into a very good scientist.

You try, as a child. There was the same old dread, and there was the same old hope, and due to the hope, I ate the piece of pie she sliced on the small white plate, with a silver fork, beneath the dual lightbulbs in the ceiling fixture.

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.

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.

The questions were drumming in me, piling on each other, and I dug deeper into my end of the sofa and tried to remember how George did it, at the dinner table. Softly, as if the answer was not dire. As if the question was a seed placed a few feet in front of a curious bird.

I wondered what he knew about the family; what he didn’t know. What family he lived in. My mind wandered around.

I had to have someone else see this, had to, because Joseph would never confirm it for me, no one would, and I would call George first, it could only be George, only George, who’d believed me years ago when I told him the cookie was angry or the string cheese was tired, only George could be trusted to see what was in front of him.

Once again, my salvation looked to any outsider like good and generous daughterliness.

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