The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

The sandwich wants you to love it, I said.

The guy started laughing. My voice, though, was dull. George reached over and took a bite. Is that ham? he said.

The sandwich? asked the guy.

Was yelling at me, I said, closing my eyes. It was yelling at me to love it.

George took another bite, and then re-wound the plastic tightly around the bread. Does that sound like her?

Nah, said the guy, laughing a little still.

I mean, do you love her? George asked.

The guy shrugged. Depends on what you mean by love, he said.

I laid my head on the table. The yelling was loud, and it was too much information to sort through, and it was way too much for nine years old. George handed the rest of the sandwich back over the counter.

That’s it, he said. No more tests for Rose. He reached over and took my hand and squeezed it. We weren’t even in traffic.

Thanks for your help, said George, standing, pulling me up. You’ve been great. Tell Janet to slow down.

Whoosh, said the guy, shaking his head. Sheesh. Thanks? he said, with a voice that sounded like he wanted us to stay.

We threw out our napkins and pushed back through the door, me still holding tightly to George’s hand. I was so relieved to hear the traffic outside, to see the bubbles of closed car windows, people I couldn’t access in their cars going about their day.

Outside, Joseph was still sitting on the rock wall that protected those few scraggly pink azalea plants, making a petaled arrangement of curves on paper.

Well, she’s for real, said George, stepping up close. He raised my hand, like I’d won something. Your little sis. She’s like a magic food psychic or something, he said.

Joseph looked up. He didn’t move his face at all. Instead, he handed over three pages of graph paper with perfect shapes on them. Screw-ups for your wall, he said. Cool, said George, taking a minute to look at each one.

So, George said, turning to me as we started to walk. Seems like it’s mostly the feelings people don’t know about, huh?

Seemed like that to me too but I didn’t like the idea at all.

The guy was so angry! he said, laughing, telling Joseph about the clerk.

Joseph listened as George went through the story, and I took George’s hand every time to cross the street and he held mine back with fingers warm and firm. Sometimes he forgot to drop my hand at the sidewalk and I would hold on as long as he let me, until he needed his arm to make a gesture about the gothic beauty of black rose cacti or the jaunty angle of someone’s chimney. I knew just how that sandwich felt. With my hand in his, I looked at all the apartment buildings with rushes of love, peering in the wide streetside windows that revealed living rooms painted in dark burgundies and matte reds. I’m a food psychic, I told myself, even though the thought of it made me want to crawl under the buildings and never come out.

I savored that walk, and rightly so, because as soon as we got home the cord snapped. Or Joseph cut it. The second we walked in, he ran to his room and brought out a rare hardback illustrated book on fractals he’d checked out of the library, which was catnip to the eighth-grade science mind, and the two of them spent the rest of the daylight and into the evening staring at a leaf.

11

In the lengthening days of spring, Dad upped his tennis and went to work on a case about redistribution rights and my mother continued her carpentry, returning home smelling warmly of sawdust and resin. She brought home a teak board and a box sanded to the smoothness of satin. A pine sling-back dining-room chair, with straight square legs and a complex pattern in the backside stained a golden brown. We circled it, in admiration. She fanned her fingers and complained of the splinters, so she and Joe went on a special trip to a beauty supply shop, where he picked out the finest pair of tweezers on the shelf. They still enjoyed running errands together. That Sunday evening, after dinner, Joseph sat close to Mom on the sofa, and with care, he dipped the tweezers in a shallow bowl of warm water and patiently used his long fingers, his shared dexterity, to clear her hands. Once he removed a splinter, he wiped it on a paper towel, re-dipped the tweezers, and dug around for the next. It took an hour, and quickly became a regular routine, every Sunday evening.

You could be a brain surgeon, Joe, Mom murmured, watching.

Sometimes I wondered if, on Saturdays, she dragged her hands over raw wood to preserve this special time with him.

I struggled by, for the rest of the school year. I filled in my spelling workbook. I took the bus. At recess, I was first in line for the dodgeball group, and several times the teacher had to pull me out for throwing the ball too hard. Eddie called me a cheater. Eliza looked at me from the sidelines with too much sympathy; I threw the ball at her. I broke a kid’s glasses because I threw too close to his face.

I didn’t know who else to talk to, or tell, so, on my own, I ate packaged snack food, learning the subtle differences in tightness and flatness from the various factories across the country, and I ate pre-prepared food from the grocery store that had been made by happy clerks, and uptight clerks, and frustrated clerks, and sometimes I felt scared to open up the refrigerator. Baked goods were the most potent, having been built for the longest time from the smallest of parts, so I did best with a combination of the highly processed-gummy fish, peanut-butter crackers, potato chips-made by no one, plus occasional fast-food burgers, compiled by machines and made, often, by no one, and fruits and vegetables that hadn’t been cooked. At school, I ate my apple and carrots and then used my allowance to buy food out of the snack machines and made it through the day that way.

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; it’s for school? I pulled on my father’s cuff. Please? Dad disliked the outlandish portion sizes in restaurants, but he pushed his lips together, thinking, and mentioned a new Italian place he thought might be good, on Beverly. We went on a Saturday. The chef was a little surly in his minestrone, but also agreeable, easygoing, easy to eat. It’s a tradition? I sang, hopefully, in the car.

Do I need a pound of meat at a sitting? Dad said, driving through yellow lights. Do I really?

Mom rubbed his neck. You’re a growing man, she said.

But I’m not! Dad said, hitting the wheel. I’m not growing at all anymore! Only horizontally!

The school nurse sent for me as a follow-up. I’d dropped four pounds. She recommended ice cream. Ice cream was generally okay. I gained it back.

But so what do I do? I asked George, a couple months after the cookie store visit, when Joseph had left his room to make a bowl of popcorn. George was lying on the floor, on his back, and had somehow acquired one of those red-point laser beams, and was pointing it up to the corners of the ceiling.

Hey, he said. Check this out.

I stepped a foot inside, and watched the red light mark a dot at each ceiling convergence.

Light rays, he said.

Pretty, I said.

But what do I do about it? I asked again, after a minute.

About what?

About my food problem?

He put the red dot right on my forehead. Now you look Indian, he said.

George?

It’s not a problem, he said, moving the dot away. It’s fantastic.

I hate it, I said, tugging at the sides of my mouth.

Or maybe you’ll grow into it, he said, shooting the red dot through the keyhole in the door.

He smiled at me, and it was genuine, but it was also a smile from further away. Our boats on the river had