The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

had traded in their used-up models for a glamorous in-love pair.

Very nice, I said, as he pulled the blue tie off his collar and draped it on a bookshelf.

Mom pointed at the stool. Look, she said. Our daughter, the family historian.

Dad, preoccupied with straightening the red correctly, skimmed the room, but when his eye caught the stool, his face cleared. He stepped in, closer. Knelt on the floor and ran a hand over the eaten velvet.

Ah, he said. He looked over at me, still sitting and sorting on the floor. Where’d you find this?

In the garage, I said. A while back.

The moths love it, said Mom.

Dad leaned in, to smell the cushion. The peach color, now a pale beige from age. He felt the structure of the wicker base, which was still in good shape.

Mom wants to re-upholster it, I said.

Oh no! he said. He shook his finger at the air. Never! he said. Hey, he said, to me; you asked about special skills? He rose, to stand. This was my special skill, he said. Making this happen.

Mom crossed her arms in the door frame. The holes in it! she said. What special skills?

He went and put an arm around her. It’s our original anniversary, he said, kissing her cheek. Rose, you know the whole story?

I laughed. Mom laughed. She did not put an arm around him. The calm look I’d seen in her just minutes earlier had stiffened, her eye hollows deepening. Neither of them seemed to understand how things had gotten so strained-at the start of their courtship, Dad had thought Mom’s lostness was a sign of her spontaneity and he let her lead the way on weekends, taking the BART around and getting off at unexpected places to buy discarded records at street fairs. Mom had thought Dad’s steadiness meant he could handle and help anything, and she loved to watch him mailing his bills, studying, making his lists. All of which he still did.

At my door, my father kept his arm tight around her, but he suddenly seemed stuck there, like a person who stumbles in public and apologizes to the air.

You take good care of that, he told me, sternly, pointing at the stool.

Somebody has to, I said.

For a second, his shoulders tensed, in his blue blazer. I waved goodbye, to get them out of my room. Go to your party, I said. Have fun.

Mom fled first, in a circle of purple. Bye! she called, to Joseph’s room. Out we go! said Dad, too loud, as they passed, sparklingly, through the front door.

The car drove off. The house settled itself around its new number of inhabitants. Outside, the day was ending, sky a middle blue. I flipped on the light and kept myself busy for an hour, zipping the doll gals around in boats made of slippers, marrying and divorcing the stuffed animals. I had stolen Grandma’s chipped teacup from the kitchen cabinet, and I used it as a friendly companion to the stuffed flamingo, who had an unusual love of tea. The polished brown rock was best friends with the beheaded Barbie. The blue tie a river to swim upon. After a while, even I grew bored, and embarrassed. I felt half five years old and half forty. It was too dark to throw tennis balls around the neighborhood, the only activity I knew that seemed to fit my age. In the kitchen, I dawdled around, eating a piece of factory bread coated with factory margarine, opening and closing some drawers. Thought about calling Eliza but remembered she was out. I found my way to Joseph’s door. I knocked. No answer. I knocked again.

Usually on Sunday nights, Eliza went to the movies with her parents. She got to pick. She said they also all enjoyed sharing a large popcorn, with salt and butter flavoring. The popcorn would reside in Eliza’s lap, and both parents would dip in as they flanked her, as if she were the sole precious book between their sturdy bookends.

No answer at the door. I knocked again.

I made a gagging sound. I let out a half-strangled cough. Emergency! I said. Choking!

Nothing.

The air felt much too quiet in the hallway, bordered by the walls covered in framed family portraits. Cars puttered by outside, heading south to park near Melrose. Nightgown elastic cut into my arms. I was restless, and tired, and the tension of the week had built up in me and I felt my usual pool of politeness draining away. What was the point? My mother had a second life, my father revered the long-ago past, soon George would eat at the dorm instead of our house, and my usual obedience felt up. Done. For once, I ignored the Keep Out sign written in seventeen different languages, and the black-inked skull and crossbones which usually gave me nightmares, and I put a hand right on the doorknob and turned.

It was probably eight o’clock. The sun, down. The house was dark, because our father, along with cutting his restaurant meals in half, also believed strongly in only lighting the room one was inside. Something to do with bills. I, in contrast, enjoyed sitting in a fully lit house when they were away, and I was minutes from running through the rooms and switching everything on. Light is good company, when alone; I took my comfort where I found it, and the warmest yellow bulb in the living-room lamp had become a kind of radiant babysitter all its own. But that night I wanted to locate my assigned guardian, and I hadn’t given up yet, and against my usual instincts, I pushed in. The door creaked open. Crrrrk. Had he rusted up the hinges deliberately? No lock in place, and no light on inside-only a crossbeam through his back door, from our neighbor’s backyard lamp-pole, angling downward to the floor like a shaft of moonlight. It was a cave, in the house, a basement that had risen. I stepped inside. My heart picked up a beat. No movement, no stirring. Piles of books on the floor. A to-go container of romaine lettuce on his desk. He wasn’t in the room, but it felt, faintly, like he was in it. I peeked in the closet. His shirts! His shoes! Bare hangers; umbrellas. Joe? I said, trembling. Are you here? All silence. Empty but not empty. Was someone watching me? The walls? Joe? I whispered.

It was so eerie a feeling that I ran out of the room and ran around the house, flipping on lights, calling his name, opening closet doors, calling, turning on every switch I could find-over the oven, TV on, flashlights on, closet lightbulb pulled, starting to get actually scared, calling-and when I roared back to the now wildly yellow-lit hall outside our rooms, there he was, tall, leaning, looking like someone had socked him in the face. I’m here, he said, thinly. You don’t have to shout. But where WERE you? I asked, still too loud. Sssh, he said. Nowhere. Just busy. But where? I said, jumping a little, in place, and the glare of the hall lights revealed the bags under his eyes and the lines in his cheeks, a face too lived in for someone who had not yet lived all that long.

I was in your room, he said.

I squinted at him. What? I said. He hated my room, all its girl things. Really? Are you okay? Why?

He took a long moment to scratch the side of his nose.

I needed a pink Pegasus pen, he said.

It took me a minute to hear him. A blankness, while we stared at each other. The words disintegrating around us. Pin. Nk. Peg-a. Sus. Pen. Then he made some kind of sneezing snort sound, and we both started to laugh. I held my stomach. He sat on the floor, and laughed and laughed. My stomach cramped. I pulled at the carpet, to stop. I was laughing through mouth and nose at the same time. I can’t breathe! I said once, and then we both dropped into laughing again. His: low and almost silent and throaty. I hugged my body to the wall, to calm down, and when he let out a raggedy sigh, I exploded for another ten minutes.

Stop! I said, wheezing, pressed into the wall.

When we finally stopped, spent, coughing, Joseph lifted him self slowly up off the floor. As if each joint and bone was more weighted than usual. With deliberate steps, he walked through the rooms and turned off every light, one by one. I listened from the hallway as he clicked the switch on each flashlight. As he pulled the metal chain in the hall closet to ink out the bare bulb. Across the house, blocks of light darkened, like a miniature city going to sleep in neighborhoods.

Something inexplicable had exhausted us both, so by 9 p.m. we were in our beds, asleep.

19

I didn’t hear my parents come home. Monday morning broke in with my father’s usual honk, and I stirred in my bed, and listened. Quiet from my parents’ bedroom, where Mom slept in. A bird outside, calling a trill across the neighborhood.

From the kitchen, I could hear the sounds of breakfast, as performed by my brother: a crash of cereal into a bowl, a sloshy pouring of milk.