Eat Cake: A Novel Page 6

“In a club?” Camille said. “Were you playing?”

  “That’s right.”

  My mother rolled her eyes. “And the Wild Turkey had nothing to do with it?”

  My father tilted his head. “Why, Hollis, are you implying I was drunk?”

  “If the highball glass fits.…”

  “And by implying that I was drunk, are you then implying that it’s my own fault that I’m in this hardware, that it was my own bad judgment that brought me here to screw up your domestic bliss?”

  “You aren’t as impaired as I thought you were.”

  I put down the fork. “Mother,” I said in a tone of tentative authority I used with Camille.

  My father sighed and shook his head. He still didn’t wear glasses. I would guess he was too vain for glasses. Did he wear contacts? My God, would I have to fish his contact lenses out of his eyes?

  “You weren’t there, you old bag,” he said without energy or malice. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. Lasagna please.”

  I cut off another forkful and served it up. “Try to be nice,” I said to no one in particular.

  “There is such a thing as an educated guess,” my mother said in her best schoolteacher-patiently-explaining voice. “I know why you fell in the past and I think it’s a fairly safe assumption why you fell this time.”

  “You barely knew me fifty years ago. You couldn’t presume to know a thing about me now. Though I have to say you are in every sense remarkably unchanged.” My father looked around, glancing over his shoulder to the kitchen door. Maybe he had figured coming here wasn’t his best idea. I wondered if he was planning on making a run for it. “You would think that Sam would be back by now.”

  “Dad never goes anyplace in a straight line,” Camille said. “He’s probably wandered off to look for a magazine or something.”

  “Need that drink now?” my mother said in a nasty tone.

  My father’s head snapped around and he looked at her with such vicious focus and clarity, I felt quite certain his eyesight was still good. “I need to go to the bathroom.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Oh, of course. You know where it is, don’t you? Let me show you where it is.”

  Now my father sighed with what I could only assume was exasperation with me. “I need some help.” He enunciated every word so clearly that they hardly fit together as a sentence.

  “I bet Dad’s going to be back any minute,” Camille said quietly.

  My father tapped the toe of his shoe on the floor in lieu of being able to tap his finger on the table the way he meant to. “It’s one of the many inconveniences of growing old. There is less time to wait.”

  We all looked at each other for a minute.

  It was a moment that most children of aging parents get to and maybe I was getting there a little earlier than some other people, but that was all right, right? Sooner or later there would be this moment, and if it was now, then there was nothing to do but step up to the plate. I did not put myself inside a cake. I didn’t want to bring the cake into this. “Well, okay then,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  My mother stood up. “No.”

  “Mother, please, let’s not make this—”

  “I’m not going to have you touching your father’s penis.”

  “Hollis, for God’s sake,” my father said.

  “I have homework,” Camille said, and with that she stood up and left the room without the slightest hint of a good-bye.

  “Come on, Dad.” I pulled out my father’s chair and helped him up. My mother came around and put a firm hand on his upper arm.

  “I’m not kidding,” she said.

  “So your final moral triumph is going to be to see me piss myself on the kitchen floor?”

  “Shut up,” my mother said, and started to steer my father away from me.

  “You’re taking him?” I said.

  “I’m sure this will come as a great surprise to you, but I have seen your father’s penis before, and as much as I had looked forward to spending the rest of my days without ever seeing it again, it looks like I’m not going to be that fortunate.”

  While I waited for my father to object, a look of such pure gratitude came across his face that I realized how close he had come to the biggest humiliation of his already humiliating day. Together my parents toddled off, arm in arm, toward the bathroom.

  Chapter Four

  THE NEXT MORNING I UNPACKED MY FATHER’S suitcases while he sat on Wyatt’s bed and watched me.

  “I’ve checked into a lot of hotels in my day and I’ve never once watched somebody else unpack my bags.” My father’s face was fixed in an expression of pure pleasure. Looking only at his face, a person would never know he had steel rods driven through his arms. “I went to Japan once, and the bellboy opened the bags up for me. Looked to me like he meant to unpack them, but I thought then I’d owe him one hell of a tip, so I shooed him away.”

  “I remember that trip. You sent me a postcard.” I took out five rolls of socks, five pairs of underwear, five T-shirts, everything in a neat row. I laid them in the top drawer. “You don’t have to worry about me hitting you up for a big tip.”

  “No tipping. I’m in the best hotel in the world,” my father said. “Hotel Family. Great service.”

  “Where do you keep all your things?” Five shirts. I put them on hangers. Two short-sleeved, one long-sleeved plaid flannel, one dress shirt, one tuxedo shirt.

  “I had another shirt for my tux but they cut it off of me in the hospital. I told them not to. Blood washes out. I know that. But the nurse said it was all torn anyway. Couldn’t be fixed. I’m lucky, though, I wasn’t wearing my good one. That one there is real Egyptian cotton. I won it from a guy in a poker game. Just my size, how about that?”

  And no ruffles. Maybe he was lucky. “Aside from your other tuxedo shirt. Do you have an apartment somewhere? Do you keep your things in storage?”

  “What things?” he asked. He wasn’t following me at all.

  “I don’t know. Chairs. You must have a chair someplace. A bed? A toaster, a clock, a plate? People acquire things, you know. It’s part of life.”

  “No,” he said. “I don’t have things like that.”

  I took my hands out of his suitcase. The contents suddenly seemed to signify too much. “How is that possible?”

  He shrugged, and then he winced a little. He was deeply sore. “I’ve had those things before. I’ve had them a couple of times. I’d get some things together and then something would happen and I’d have to get rid of them. Once I got a storage unit. I was out in Utah. I figured it was dry out there and the stuff would be better off. It wasn’t like I left it all in Florida. I went to a little town where I got a good rate and I paid up five years in advance. In five years I thought it might be time to settle down. I’d come back and get the stuff, maybe rent an apartment in New York. But it never turned out that way.”

  I waited for the rest of the story. My father smiled at me. None came. “What happened to the stuff?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “I think I waited too long. When I finally got back there the storage place was gone. Then I started worrying that I wasn’t remembering the right town. I’d lost the key, hell, years before that. For all I know it wasn’t even Utah. It’s not that I’m senile, this was ages ago, but I’ve never been real keen on details.”

  I asked him what he had lost.

  “I had a box of records in there and a record player. That’s what I really missed. I had been so careful not to hold on to too many records, to only keep a few that really mattered.” Then my father stopped and he smiled at me. “But it turns out life was fine without them.”

  “But you’ve had other things since then, right? I mean, you must buy things. And I send you Christmas presents.”

  “Oh,” he said, eager not to hurt my feelings, “and I’ve loved them. I keep them for a while. I use them. That gray sweater you sent last year, the cardigan? It’s in the bigger bag.”

  “So
this is it? These two suitcases?”

  “A man doesn’t need very much if the hotel is good. They give you everything now, you wouldn’t believe it, soap and razors and shampoo. Half the time there’s a barber in the lobby. And they always give you those little sewing kits. I used to save them but now I know that there’s always going to be another one in the next place I go. I can really sew. At least I could. I bet I could have fixed that tuxedo shirt.”

  Was it possible that my father was homeless? And was it really being homeless if you played piano every night and did not aspire to owning furniture? He seemed so completely matter-of-fact about the whole thing, and still it seemed impossibly sad to me. “Aren’t there ever things … I don’t know … things that you want?”

  My father nodded toward the big suitcase. “Look in there, all the way in the bottom. The flat thing. There you’ve got it.”

  I pulled out a brown leather folder that turned out to be a frame when you opened it. On one side there was a picture of me. It was a studio picture. I am possibly four years old and I’m sitting on a little stool holding a white rabbit on my lap, looking dreamy and well behaved. I remember the day it was taken. I had misunderstood the arrangement and had cried for an hour after they took the rabbit away. On the other side there was a picture of my mother and father standing close together, both of them very dressed up. My father is holding a big white bundle of a baby in his arms and my mother is smiling hugely for the camera. He is twenty-three years old and my mother is twenty-one. Around the edges there are smaller pictures, a snapshot of my wedding, Wyatt and Camille as babies, two women I did not recognize, one of whom was in a bathing suit and waving.

  “I put that on the nightstand wherever I am. It’s the first thing out of the case and the last thing to go in, and I’ve never left it behind anywhere, not even once. That’s all you need to make a place seem like home. You just need your family. I’ve got you all there.”

  I nodded my head, my eyes glued down to the very thin record of our lives. It seemed to be so little and yet I could see how it could be enough. “I’ll put this up,” I said weakly, and set the frame on top of the dresser.

  “Put it up there, that’s fine,” my father said. “But I don’t need it now. If I want to see my family, all I have to do is walk through the door.”

  I emptied out his cases. Five pairs of pants, two sweaters, some knit gloves, three pairs of shoes, nail clippers, a black suit, a tuxedo, a paperback mystery novel from the seventies, the smallest odds and ends of life. I planned to go to out immediately and buy him some new clothes. It was fine if he wanted to leave them behind eventually, but while he was here my father was going to have some extra things.

  “It’s great to be home, Ruthie,” he said, giving me his best smile.

  “It’s great to have you,” I said. At the time that I said it, I’ll tell you, I meant it absolutely.

  Having my father move in would have been a lot to adjust to, but he was not the only new resident in the house. Sam was sitting in the kitchen for hours every morning reading the paper long past the time he should have gone to work. Plus, he and my father had discovered some mysterious cable channel that showed nothing but sports programming twenty-four hours a day. They watched the entire 1985 Lakers–Celtics playoffs in one gulp. The ambient noise of the house was now the low fuzz of roaring crowds, whistles and buzzers, the fast squeak of sneakers on a polished court, not to mention the constant commentary of Sam and my father, who were given to yelling helpful directions at the television set even though the game had been recorded the year Camille was born.

  “Look at their shorts!” Sam kept saying. “Look how tiny Larry Bird’s shorts are!”

  “Stop focusing on that,” my father told him. “It’s a perversion.”

  “It would have been a perversion if I’d noticed it at the time. Back in the eighties their shorts never occurred to me.”

  “Don’t you think they could have better music with the basketball games? All of that dum-dum-dum-dum, dum-dum-dum-dum, it gets on my nerves. Basketball is an elegant sport. Couldn’t you see it with some light piano jazz in the background? A little Beegie Adair?”

  “Do you think it would be unreasonable to have a beer with lunch?” Sam asked my father. “If I had a beer would that make me some unemployed guy drinking in the afternoon?”

  “Technically, yes, it does, but I don’t see that it makes any difference, as long as it’s just the two of us who know about it. One beer does not exactly mark the exit ramp onto the road of steep decline.”

  “What about you? Are you going to have one?”

  “I don’t mind if you don’t mind. You feed beer to an old guy without arms, you’re just making more work for yourself.”

  The two of them had a good long howl over that.

  Sam stuck his head in the kitchen. “Just going to grab something.”

  I was making them sandwiches. I was, at that very moment, putting the pickles on the plates. “Sam, I can hear you in there, you know.”

  He came over and kissed my cheek. He took a pickle off a plate and nibbled at the end before putting it back. “I’ve become completely debauched,” he said. Then he took me in his arms and we made three short circles in the kitchen. “Why did we never take ballroom dancing? We used to talk about it, remember? Your dad says he loves to watch the couples in the bars who really know how to dance. Maybe we could start dancing after dinner.”

  “You think we should do a floor show?”

  “It could be a new career for both of us. We could go into people’s kitchens and dance for them while they digested their food.”

  I laughed and went back to the sandwiches. “I’m not sure my father is the best influence in the world.”

  Sam rested his chin on my shoulder. He seemed so light-hearted that I realized for the first time what a toll his job must have been taking on him all these years. Maybe for a little while unemployment wouldn’t be such a bad thing. “The old guy’s having a rough time of it. I’m just trying to cheer him up.”

  “I appreciate it. I really do.” I handed Sam the two sandwiches, but he put them down and piled all of the food onto one plate. What difference did it make if they ate off the same plate since one of them was handling all the food anyway? With his free hand Sam grabbed two beers and a straw. The extra-long bend-neck straw had proven itself to be a real friend to our family. With a straw, Dad could at least drink without having to ask someone to lift up his glass. He even had lukewarm coffee through a straw. It gave him a sense of independence.

  My father had been in our house for five days now and things were not going at all as I had expected. I had not taken into account the enormous amount of work it would be to have a man with useless arms around. It was like having a baby with perfect verbal skills, a baby who could say, I need my nose blown (often), or, I have an itch on the side of my neck. So far he did not appear capable of doing anything for himself, and a human being, no matter how pleasant, who can do nothing for himself must be carried by those around him. I felt like I was running every minute of the day, bringing in a pillow to wedge against his aching back, counting out pills, making the bed, driving him to the doctor, washing his hair. But I never lost sight of the myriad ways it could be worse. It could, for example, have been my mother with two broken wrists. My father was grateful, not overly demanding, and he complained about exactly nothing. The closest he came to reminding us that he must be in excruciating pain was the fact that he disappeared regularly to take naps. He didn’t talk about the future. Still, there was something about the way he seemed not too entirely displeased about things that got to me, the way he let out a sustained, “Ahhhhhh,” when he spread his wingspan over the sofa, the way he made frequent references to the fact that this was the life. Any doubts I may have had I kept to myself, but my mother kept nothing to herself.

  “How do we even know they’re broken?” My mother caught me later that day while I was folding clothes. She was having to watch Oprah
on Camille’s little TV now that the big one in the den was permanently occupied. She stayed in a bad mood. “Surely there’s some bum doctor out there who would stick pins in your arms for twenty bucks. He could have won them in a card game.”

  I shuddered at the thought. My mother was the only one who never seemed to notice that the steel sticking through my father’s flesh looked like it hurt—a lot. The doctor who examined him at the hospital where Sam used to work said it was one of the worst collections of breaks he’d seen in years. I still found myself wincing as I dabbed the antibiotic ointment on the pin sites three times a day. “Sam picked him up at the hospital, remember?”

  “Which leads me to my next point: The amount of time Sam spends with your father is a little worrisome.”

  “Worrisome?” I said. “Just be grateful. Sam is the one cutting his meat, getting him dressed.” I looked at my mother meaningfully. “Other things.”

  “He’s sainted, I’ll give you that. But doesn’t it seem like Sam is, well, changing?”

  I picked up two white socks and balled them together. “Sam is Sam,” I said, not entirely unaware of what she was talking about.

  She took the socks out of my hands. “These don’t match.” She unrolled the bundle and threw them back in the pile. “You don’t pay attention, Ruth. You’ve always lived in your head. It’s time to come down to the real world. Sam has been a hardworking man his whole life. Now all of a sudden he’s lying on the couch eating cheese puffs and watching basketball? I think that’s a pretty significant change. He should be out there looking for a job or at the very least polishing up his résumé.” She turned the pile of laundry over a couple of times as if she were looking for evidence to support her case. “Look at this. There’s not a single dress shirt in here.”

  “Listen, Sam has been working nonstop for as long as I’ve known him. He hardly ever gets to go sailing or even read a novel. I can hardly remember him ever taking a nap. So why not let him relax for a little while?”

  “You’re starting to sound like your father. Your father is a virus, you know that, don’t you? Everything that’s bad about him spreads.”