On the Road to Find Out (14 page)

She didn't like getting older, but she did like a celebration and she loved it when my dad cooked.

When I was a kid, I refused to eat my dad's food. There's usually too much going on. The potatoes are a perfect example. Why couldn't he make plain old smashed potatoes like the ones they served in the school cafeteria? Why did he have to go and put in those other weird vegetables? I mean, have you seen a parsnip? It looks like a deformed albino carrot, pale and sickly.

When I had a box of Kraft macaroni and cheese at Jenni's house for the first time, I knew I'd found the foundation of my food pyramid. That's what her father cooked for dinner nearly every night after her mom died, until Jenni learned to cook on her own. I envied her. Then I discovered Easy Mac—which Jenni says her dad says is too expensive—and that's my go-to meal and snack. It drives Dad nuts. He offers to make me real mac and cheese, the kind with creamy béchamel goo and funky stinky Gruyère, and I respond by sticking a finger in my throat and making gagging noises. Dad doesn't get too upset, but it bothers Mom. So she compensates by making a big deal of what a great cook he is and eating more than I know she wants. My dad measures how much you like his food by the quantity you eat.

When I got out of the shower, Walter was waiting for me in the bathroom, doing laps around the toilet. He likes to lick my legs dry. He starts with the tops of my feet and works his way up my ankles. He has plenty of water in his cage, so it's not like he's thirsty.

“Okay, that's enough.” I dragged the towel in front of him and he chased it, and I slowed it down and he pounced and landed on it and I zoomed him around on the towel and said, “Sleigh ride!” He got bored with the game before I did and jumped off. Then he had a sneezing fit.

I went into my closet—he followed right behind me—and put on my holey jeans and a sweatshirt that had a psycho bunny on it. I perched Walter on my shoulder and went back downstairs.

When I came into the kitchen Jenni looked at me and said, “You're going to change before dinner, right?” She knew how much Mom hated those Walter-enhanced jeans.

“Maybe. Hey, pied beauty, you want a piece of parsnip?” I headed over to Dad's side of the kitchen. He and Jenni had separate work spaces—his was by the stove and she had used the counter to lay out all her materials.

Jenni grabbed me by the arm and said, “You stay over here. If you're not going to help, don't get in the way. Be a fountain not a drain, Alice.”

Dad, who was chopping something, rocked out to Bruce Springsteen.

“Geez, who's in charge around here?” I said, gathering up a bunch of cake crumbs, rolling them into a ball, and popping the whole thing into my mouth. I made a smaller ball and gave it to Walter.

 

13

As it turned out, I continued to be more of a drain than a fountain.

Walter jumped off my shoulder, onto the counter, and ran across the top of the cake.

Dad shouted, “Alice!”

Jenni tried not to be mad, but he had left some footprints. (“Leave only footprints” may be a good motto when you're hiking in the woods, but not so much when you're running across a birthday cake.) I said, “You're going to put icing on it, right?”

When I wasn't looking, Walt nibbled on a leather case Mom used for spare keys. By the time I caught him, he'd already made substantial progress. He jumped to the floor, ran to the refrigerator, and I had to scream at Dad not to step on him.

Dad got mad and said, “Take that rat upstairs. Now.”

No one is ever supposed to refer to Walter as “that rat”—it's dehumanizing. Almost as bad as calling him “it.” If someone responds to his own name, it shows a sense of self, and he deserves to be treated as someone with a self. But I knew it probably wasn't a good time to have this discussion with my father so I grabbed Walt and brought him back to his cage.

I stayed upstairs for a while trying to figure out a gift for my mother. I decided to give her a novel, since she mostly reads serious books—biographies and bestsellers that explain big ideas in economics or science. I thought it would be good for her to read some fiction.

When I was little, to encourage me to read, my parents made me a promise: they would buy me any book I wanted. I'm not sure they realized I was going to want books more than clothes, or shoes, or even a pony, though I did want a pony for a long time and finally had to settle for weekly riding lessons. A couple of years ago they bought me an e-reader and said I could use their credit card to download any book. But I hardly used it.

While I appreciate the convenience of electronic versions, I love real books, the smell of them, the way they feel in my hands.

About once a month Dad and I go to a local bookstore. Dad says bookstores are staffed with supersmart people who believe that literature matters and that if you can find someone who either knows or shares your taste, they can be a great resource. So I look for books recommended by the staff, especially Barbara and Garth, read the descriptions on the back covers, and get anything that looks good. I leave the store with big bags and I stack the books up on the floor next to my bed. Whenever the stack starts getting too small, I freak out, and we have to go get more. I always need to have a big TBR (to be read) pile. When I finish books, I move them to the bookcase, where Walter sometimes nibbles the edges or stores food along the tops.

I scanned my shelves to figure out which one I could give to Mom. Maybe it's a little tacky to give someone a previously owned book, but it's not like they get used up in the reading. So I considered my options:

Pride and Prejudice
. No. She must have read it at some point. Who hasn't?

The Things They Carried.
No. A book about war could send the wrong message, though it's really about love and friendship and is totally awesome. I'm not sure if it's fiction or nonfiction.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
. Maybe. Mom always says she doesn't like murder mysteries, but in this one the person who gets murdered is a poodle, and the detective is a fifteen-year-old boy who's maybe got Asperger's. Plus, he has a pet rat named Toby. Not many novels with sympathetic rat characters.

Stargirl.
No. We read this together when I was a kid. But I love it so much.

Where the Wild Things Are.
Ditto.

The Hunger Games.
No. Even though the book is a zillion times better than the movie, I'm pretty sure that, based on her reaction to the movie, Mom wouldn't want to read it. She didn't like the idea of kids killing kids. I said it wasn't at all surprising: kids are vicious, if she hadn't noticed.

The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson
. No. I didn't want to give up my copy, especially since Walter-the-Man told me that you could sing all of her poems to the tune of “The Yellow Rose of Texas.” I often sang “Because I could not stop for Death” to Walter.

Then I saw the perfect gift book.

Of course, I didn't have any wrapping paper in my room, so I cut out pages from one of Mom's
People
magazines and made a collage of photos of the lips of different movie stars—which even I could tell had been pumped up with collagen—and taped it together with Band-Aids. I thought this was a clever commentary on my mother's chosen profession.

Then, since I didn't have a card, I folded a piece of paper in half, wrote on the front,
This is a card
, and scrawled
Happy Birthday, old girl. XO, A
inside. I was quite pleased with myself when I went back downstairs to the kitchen, where Jenni and Dad scurried around like busy mice.

The main dish was Cornish game hens, because Mom loved them. She said her mother always used to make them on special occasions. I like them because they're like minichickens, and as everyone knows, I love all things mini.

Dad had finished putting stuffing in their body cavities and was slopping some kind of orangey sauce on their skin.

“What is a Cornish game hen, anyway?” I asked, as I stuck my finger into the batter Jenni was mixing. After all these years of eating them, I'd never really thought about what they were other than Cornishgamehens. Like the way you don't think about the lyrics of songs like “America the Beautiful” as meaningful words. They're just
Obeautifulforspaciousskies
and
Forpurplemountainmajesties.
Purple mountain majesties?

“It's a bird.”

“I know that. Is it just a mini-chicken?”

“No,” he said. “It's a different species. You know—there are turkeys and ducks and chickens and Cornish game hens.”

He said it with such certainty I felt compelled to check. I whipped out my iPhone and Googled.

“Ahem,” I said. “From
Wikipedia
: ‘A Cornish game hen … is a hybrid chicken sold whole. Despite the name, it is not a game bird, but actually a type of domestic chicken. Though the bird is called a “hen,” it can be either male or female.'”

Dad said nothing. Jenni didn't look up from the cake.

“So,” I said, “a Cornish game hen is not Cornish, not game, and not even a hen. It is, in fact, a mini-chicken.”

“Nice, Alice,” Jenni said, still not looking up, as she greased the pan.

 

14

In addition to the regulars—Jenni and Walter-the-Man—Sylvia and Gary came over for dinner. They had both gone to medical school with Mom. Sylvia was my mom's best friend, an oncologist, and Gary was a radiologist.

Jenni had set the table. She folded the napkins into swans. She filled vases with marbles and made a “flower” arrangement using vegetables: radishes morphed into roses under her knife, carrots turned into happy daisies, and green onions served as leafery. She had found this cool centerpiece—Dad said it had been a wedding present—and filled it up with tall skinny white candles. She had also printed menu cards and placed them in front of each person's plate:

Wild mushroom toast points

Shaved fennel salad

Cornish game hens

Roasted asparagus with lemon-and-thyme butter

Smashed root vegetables

Meyer lemon sorbet

BlackBerry cake

I thought the last item might have been a mistake so I asked her about it. I had, after all, been eating balls of smushed-up chocolate-cake crumbs.

“Nope,” she said. “Blackberry cake.”

Jenni asked me to set out wineglasses for red and white wines, plus the champagne flutes. Seriously, our dining room had never looked this fancy. I decided to change my clothes when I saw that Jenni had put on a black cashmere sweaterdress that came from the Jenni Sack—Mom had bought it “by mistake” and had “gotten the wrong size” and “couldn't be bothered to return it.” It was Jenni's favorite item of clothing ever.

Mom knew we were making dinner for her. She hated surprises. We'd learned that the hard way a few years ago. But when she got home from work and saw the dining room, she went straight to Jenni and put her arm around her. “My girl,” she said.

After everyone was seated, after lots of oohing and aahing about how beautiful the table looked, Dad lifted his champagne glass and said, “To Sarah.”

Mom had declared no birthday candles and said we weren't allowed to sing “that song.” She always said, “I can't stand that song.”

But I started to sing it anyway.

Jenni kicked me under the table.

“What?” I said.

Dad interrupted and said, again, “To Sarah.”

Gary said, “Yes, to Sarah.” And raised his glass. “The smartest woman I knew at Duke.”

Mom put down her glass, leaned across the table, and said, “What do you mean?”

Gary said, “What do you mean what do I mean? What I said. You were the smartest woman I knew at Duke.”

Mom tried to raise her eyebrow. She couldn't and instead widened her eyes and said, “Tell me, Gary, what man at Duke was smarter than me?”

Everyone laughed and Mom looked really happy.

Sylvia raised her glass and said, “To the smartest person we knew at Duke,” and everyone drank. I took a few gulps, but it's not that much fun to drink with your parents, especially if they give you permission. Jenni doesn't like alcohol, what with her dad and all, but she had one sip after the toast.

Jenni was up and down all night, filling people's glasses, bringing in food from the kitchen. At one point, I saw my mother take hold of her arm and squeeze it. The look that passed between them made me feel invisible.

Sylvia started to ask me a question but I was afraid it was going to be about college so I cut her off, saying, “Isn't it time for cake?”

It wasn't.

So we sat there for a while longer and finally Jenni went into the kitchen to get dessert and I trailed behind her saying that I would help. We both knew I wasn't going to help.

Jenni had covered the cake with a dish towel. When she pulled it off, I gasped. I actually gasped.

Jenni has made some great cakes, but this one was
Cake Boss
–worthy.

It was, in fact, a BlackBerry cake. That is, it was a cake that looked exactly like Mom's BlackBerry. We had tried to get her to switch to an iPhone, like a normal person. She resisted, saying she loved her BlackBerry, loved the keyboard, loved the way it felt in her hand. Jenni had created a cake shaped like something my mother loved.

She'd used edible paper to put the letters on each key and to write the “e-mail” message on the screen:
Happy Birthday Sarah. We love you.
She'd done all of this since Walter had run across the top. I thought it was just going to be a plain chocolate cake.

Jenni carried the cake to the dining room and placed it in front of my mother, who threw her head back and laughed and laughed. She stood up—nearly pushing her chair over—and hugged Jenni so hard I could practically hear the whoosh of breath leaving Jenni's lungs.