The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

That night, as I burrowed into the sheets, my mother still tucking in sheets better than anyone, I closed my eyes and went through my usual routine, which involved thanking God, or the mysterious bounty of the world, for the vending machine at school, for the sad lady with the hairnet who still worked at the cafeteria, for the existence of George, and for whoever ate my mother’s cookies at the co-op. It was my usual routine, so it took a second for the change to sink in, and then I shook awake, pressed into my pillow: Larry, rising, Larry, the likely man who saved me from eating her cookies, the man I’d been praying a thank you to for the last almost four years as Mom brought tray after tray of baked goods to the studio. Joseph! I said, knocking on the wall we shared. I said it loud. I knocked again, rapping my hand hard on the wall. To wake him up, from whatever deep state of study he was in. I kept knocking.

After ten minutes, he strode into the room in his pajamas. What, he said.

He was tall, like Dad, but skinny, unlike Dad. He did not care about soccer. His eyes were caverns. And I could see how he was leaving, how he was halfway out the door. Still, as he stood there, arms crossed, hair flat, grim, tense, I remember it as a wash of relief, that he was still there, tangible, able to come in, annoyed, to be in my room. It was an antidote to the feeling that nobody was home.

18

My brother had taken to disappearing. Not in the way of a more usual adolescent boy, who is nowhere to be found and then arrives home drunk, with grass-stained knees and sweat-pressed hair, at two in the morning. No. It would be the middle of the afternoon, airy and calm, and Joseph would be home and then not home. I would hear him packing up those college boxes in his room, shuffling, rustling, and then I’d hear nothing.

He was scheduled to babysit me on Sunday night, just a few days after the roast beef dinner, while our parents attended a law office party downtown. It was my father’s annual post-holiday work party, this year located at the Bonaventure, a pole-shaped silver hotel Joseph had always admired for its outside elevator, one that rode up and down the building like a zipper. He appreciated the vacuum closure inside the booth; I liked the rotating bar at the top. My mother enjoyed parties but my father dismissed them as an unpleasant job necessity, and the two of them would dress up and drive off and hold cocktails and chat while Joseph got twenty bucks for half watching antsy me.

To be babysat by my brother was basically to share the house for the course of an evening. Usually we weren’t even in the same room. At twelve, I was too old for a babysitter by a lot of people’s standards anyway, but it was a good way to avoid acknowledging that a lot of seventeen-year-old boys would push to go out, and my brother did not: either push, or go out. He went once with George to a rock concert and came home in a taxi after an hour, alone. Too much, he said, when Mom asked.

I asked my mother if I could do something else that night, go to a friend’s house or something, but she said she liked paying Joseph to watch me. Please? she said, touching my hair. It makes him feel like a big brother, she said. But he doesn’t watch me, I said, kicking at the wall. She took out her wallet from her purse. How about I pay you too? she said, slipping me a twenty-dollar bill.

That Sunday, I spent the afternoon watching TV. I rolled up my twenty-dollar bill and tucked it inside a jewelry-box drawer. I played twenty-five games of solitaire, and I lost twenty-four of the times, until I got so sick of the deck I took it outside and made the entire suit of diamonds into a streamlined fleet of mini paper-plastic airplanes. I put the final touches on my current-events modern world presentation, and then stared into space for a while, outside on the grass, surrounded by thirteen snub-nosed diamond-planes, crashed. I felt over-stuffed with information. Over the course of several packed days, I’d tasted my mother’s affair and had the conversation with my father about skills. I was not feeling very good about any of it-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. And who could I tell? I loved my brother, but relying on him was like closing a hand around air. I soaked up my time with George, still, but he was stepping ahead into a future that did not include me.

Sometimes, at school, across the dirt quad that separated the junior high from the high school, I’d see George with an arm slung casually around a girl, talking into her hair as if it was the most normal thing on earth to do. Not only were his eyebrows growing into proportion with his face, but he seemed to be progressing internally at a regular rate as well. Eliza, too-when I went over to her house after school, we flipped through fashion magazines and tested lip glosses. There, we were becoming teenagers; at my house, I pulled a shoebox of dolls and stuffed animals and Grandma’s objects out from under my bed. Beheaded cherubs, old overly bent Barbies, broken jewelry. Eliza went along with it, agreeably, but she made me swear I would never breathe a word to anyone at school. If you tell about this, she said once, her eyes wide, brushing down the long plastic hair of a Barbie, I will bury you, she said. I’d nodded, mildly. It seemed reasonable to me. We were, after all, almost thirteen. With naked dolls in hand, or even the occasional doll-baby, it sometimes felt like we were pedophiles.

My mother had bought a new dress for the work party, and she modeled it for me as my father got ready, the lavender pleated skirt skimming the air. Very pretty, I’d told her, in the mirror. Dad will love it, I said.

You okay with tonight? she said, standing in my doorway.

Sure, I said. I got paid.

Oh, and please don’t tell about that, she said, lowering her voice. Usually the babysittee doesn’t get any money.

I looked up at her. You’re kidding, I said.

No, she said, with total sincerity. It’s a unique setup.

I returned my gaze to the floor of my bedroom, sorting through some of Grandma’s latest: a polished brown rock, a red rhinestone bracelet with a bent clasp.

And the hotel number is on the fridge, Mom said. She swished the folds of her skirt. She seemed both fidgety and calm at the same time. The guilt in the roast beef had been like a vector pointing in one direction just barely overpowered by the vector of longing going the opposite way. I hated it; the whole thing was like reading her diary against my will. Many kids, it seemed, would find out that their parents were flawed, messed-up people later in life, and I didn’t appreciate getting to know it all so strong and early.

That afternoon, the house smelled of roasted pine nuts, because she’d spent the day in the kitchen, making homemade trail mix. I made my own pretzels! she’d announced at 4 p.m., turning off the oven, whipping her hair into a fresh ponytail. I had to taste them-she had presented a few tiny warm pretzels on a plate to me with such a look of triumph and hope-and it turned out to be the food that best represented her: in every pretzel the screaming desire to make the perfect pretzel, so that the pretzel itself seemed tied up in the tightest of knots, the food form, for once, matching the content. Now, that’s a pretzel all right, I’d said, chewing.

In my room, she glanced around the space, filling time, until her eyes came to rest near my bed.

Oh! Now, look at that!

Their velvet-and-wicker marriage stool served as my nightstand, pushed right up next to the bed. I’d had it for a while, but it must’ve slipped my mother’s watch. One book fit nicely on its soft top, and I could wedge homework papers into the interwoven pattern of the base.

I like it, I said.

She walked over, pushed at the cushion. God, it’s so old, she said. We should re-upholster it; I could do it at the studio, in a day. Can we? You could pick your favorite color and material-

I like it how it is, I said.

Hey, Paul, she called. Come look at this!

In the other room, Dad shut some drawers. He strode over to my doorway, with two ties around his head.

Blue? he said. Or red?

Look, she said, pointing.

At what?

Red, I said.

In the doorway, he nodded at me, almost shyly. We’d been a little friendlier with each other since the TV watching. He was decked out in a blue blazer, gold buttons winking. Her lavender dress, his red tie. It was like they