The Cake House Read online

  Claude sat back and winked at me. “That settles it. We’ll all go.”

  My mother came back into the dining room from the kitchen. “You have fun,” she said, as she took my plate and Claude’s.

  “No,” said Claude. He took the plates from her hands and set them down, kissed her cheek. “We all go together. You’re going too.”

  I looked to see Alex’s reaction, but he had retreated behind his usual mask of cool disdain. He nodded to his father, turning to run up the stairs, and a moment later I heard the door close and his music begin.

  My mother tried to smile and went back to clearing the table. Claude squeezed my shoulder, and I was struck by an urge to give him a hug and let him hug me back. To hide the heat in my cheeks—from horror, from embarrassment—I went into the kitchen to help my mother with the dishes.

  By the next day, I began to regret saying I wanted to go to the game. It took place in the evening and didn’t start till seven P.M. Alex wanted to meet us there.

  “You’ll come with us,” Claude told Alex, who had become a living statue, like one of those street performers who stood so still you wondered if they were mechanical rather than living flesh and bone.

  My mother made us late. She had chosen a dress with a noisy print of big tropical flowers. It swished around her legs. I remembered the dress; she’d worn it a few times with my father, on those rare evenings when they’d left me alone to go together for dinner or to some event. But when she came downstairs, Claude halted, and his brow creased when he tried to hide his cringe. She blushed, then went back up the stairs and changed into a blouse and slacks, returning clutching a designer handbag of brown leather. Her hair fell in easy waves of honey, a woven shawl wrapped around her shoulders. This apparently met with Claude’s approval. He smiled at her, but she hesitated before smiling back.

  Once we arrived at the high school, parked, and made our way through to the football field, I began to feel better. The air was fresh and crisp. It had drizzled earlier, but the sky was a dark inky blue with the requisite smattering of pale stars. The crowd buzzed, alive, pulsing with energy. This was what high school was about, with the added scent of cotton candy and roasted peanuts. The four of us sat in the bleachers, halfway up on the home-team side. Claude busied himself getting refreshments and a large bag of popcorn. We chewed our popcorn and sipped our drinks, Claude a beer, the rest of us soda. My drink was so cold my hand hurt to hold it, but I sucked it up until my head throbbed and my chest felt tight because of the gas bubbles. The game started with announcements before the teams ran onto the field. They slapped one another’s hands, falling into their first formation. I knew nothing about football.

  A few minutes into the game, Alex sat up straight in his seat. He reached across and touched Claude’s arm. Claude followed Alex’s gaze. They were looking at a group of adults, two couples, as well as a few teenagers I recognized from school, standing at ground level in the walkway meant for foot traffic.

  Claude swallowed the rest of his beer. “All right,” he said, setting his cup down.

  Next to me, Alex held his breath and sank into his seat like he wanted to slide off and down between the slats of the bleachers. There was a closed-off, dark expression on his face, and then a brief flash of disgust before he sprang up and made his way down the steps.

  Claude grabbed a fistful of popcorn while my mother watched a young couple and their little daughter. The girl was maybe two years old, trying to climb up the stairs of the bleachers by herself. She kept falling. Oopsy-daisy. One small leg slipped, but her mother held her hand and let the child dangle until she found her feet again.

  “Where’s Alex going?” I asked, picking up my camera and searching through the viewer for a good picture. The football field, the lights, the crowds. Click.

  Claude turned and held out a kernel of popcorn, opened his mouth to indicate I should do the same. I copied him, and he tossed the kernel into my mouth. Grinning, he did it again. “He’s talking to some friends of his,” he said, holding another kernel. I opened my mouth again, with one eye out for a familiar blond head.

  Alex was leaning in close to the two teenagers, who went to our school. One of them turned to another adult, an older man who must be his father. They introduced Alex. Alex shook the father’s hand. He leaned in close again to be heard. He looked back at Claude as he spoke, waving at us. The man waved too.

  That was Claude’s cue. He got up. “I’ll be right back,” he told my mother, then took the stairs two at a time, joining Alex and his friends.

  I watched everyone shake hands. Introduce themselves. Laughing. More leaning in; then business cards were passed around. More talking. At one point, Claude cupped his hands around his mouth and called for my mother. His voice carried over the noise of the crowd; she wasn’t paying attention, still looking at the small family with the two-year-old daughter, but her eyes were unfocused and she wasn’t seeing them anymore. I nudged her.

  “Claude wants you.” I pointed to where Claude stood talking to the parents of Alex’s friends while still trying to get my mother’s attention. The father had graying hair and deep-set raccoon-ringed eyes.

  My mother sat up straight and watched Claude, who waved at her again, flicking his fingers in the universal sign for Come here. She hesitated, her eyes moving as she saw whom Claude was with: the gray-haired man, his wife, and the other couple, the teenage children. She shifted to the edge of her seat, paused, then said, “I’d better go.”

  Claude met her at the base of the stairs, put his arm around her, guiding her to where the others were milling around. He introduced her. Several rows up, I heard him say, “This is my wife.”

  Apparently I wasn’t required to shake hands or receive pats on the head. I picked up the half-empty bag of popcorn, but it had become cold, chewy, and greasy.

  I couldn’t help but notice that the dress my mother had started out in would have been inappropriate. Next to the other wives, she looked pretty and stylish, younger than they were, but these women were open with her, willing to include her as one of their own. One put a hand over my mother’s and leaned in close to say something funny. My mother was stiff at first but loosened up as she returned with a joke, and the women laughed. Claude beamed. I had never seen her like this before: belonging, at ease with others, making friends.

  Alex was no longer there. He had slipped away.

  The game continued, and I wondered what was the point of going if people stood around and talked instead of watching. Someone made a touchdown and the Canyon High cheerleaders did flips and cartwheels and split jumps. Canyon High wore green and white and gold. Newhall wore black and red. I liked watching the team huddles, with everyone’s arms around one another, sharing secrets that might win the game. The team burst apart with friendly slaps, ready to fight; then the football twirled in the air in its giant, majestic arc, caught in the cradling arms of its savior.

  Near bursting after drinking my soda, I left the stands to go find a bathroom. Daunted by the long line, I decided to go farther onto the campus, where there might be fewer people. The school was a different place at night, with strange shadows that moved with the wind. I went all the way across to the far end of campus.

  Alex was leaning against a graffitied cinder-block wall where the Dumpsters were kept, talking to a boy I recognized from that time in Alex’s room. I was too far away to hear what they were saying, but whatever it was, Alex didn’t seem interested. The boy was agitated, gesturing with his hands, and then he stopped. He looked Alex up and down and said something real quiet-like, a curse, a swearword. Alex shook his head, said something that appeared to satisfy the boy. They spoke for another moment before Alex shook his head again, and the other boy stood there a second before slouching away.

  I took the boy’s picture as he shuffled across to the far chain-link fence that marked the border of the campus. He hopped over the fence and then shuffled down the street to where a big, boat-like station wagon was parked.


  “Take good pictures?” asked a warm, low voice. Alex sounded annoyed.

  In answer, I raised my camera and took his picture. He blinked from the flash.

  “I have to pee,” I said.

  Alex took the camera from my hands, lifting the strap from around my neck. He fingered the back of the camera. “You should ask permission first.”

  “I never have before.”

  For a moment I thought he would open the casing and expose the film, but he returned the strap to my neck, placing the weight of the camera against my chest. “When you get these developed, I’d like to see them.”

  He had never asked to see my pictures before. It was against the new unspoken rules. Even though I wanted to be mad at him, I smiled.

  He waited while I found the bathroom.

  When we returned to the game, Claude and my mother were still talking to the gray-haired man and his wife. I wondered if this was how it had happened with my father, with Claude shaking his hand and laughing at a shared joke.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The prescription drugs came in the same kind of plastic bag as my photographs: store logo on the front with cutouts at the top as handles. My mother left them on the dining table next to her purse—I thought she had brought home my latest developed roll of film, but instead I found a white paper package with her name on it. The bag tore when I opened it, and an amber vial fell into my hand.

  “What are these for?” I asked.

  She took the bottle before I could read the drug’s name. The pills rattled when she thrust them into her purse, fumbling enough that she dropped her keys. Then her sunglasses fell from the top of her head and she had to pick those up too. “Something to help with my headaches. It probably won’t work. I don’t know why I bothered.”

  She went upstairs, and I didn’t see her for the rest of the day. I didn’t see her the next day either. A week after the football game, she finally came down to make a dinner of pasta and homemade sauce, but she overcooked the tomatoes and left the spaghetti too long on the stove.

  “It’s all right,” said Claude when she turned away, one hand covering her face, the diamond ring on her finger trembling. “We’ll get takeout.”

  Claude talked to my mother in quiet murmurs, inching closer until she let him put a hand on her shoulder. “Why don’t you go upstairs? Let me take care of it. I’ll bring up some food for you. Go and get some rest.”

  Her face was white when she passed me in the hallway.

  In the kitchen, Claude was rummaging in a drawer. He pulled out a stack of menus and fanned them out like playing cards. “What’ll it be, Rosie?”

  I picked one from the middle of the pack: Chinese food.

  “My favorite,” said Claude. “Why don’t you call? Order whatever you like, enough for all of us.”

  I took the menu but stayed to watch Claude pick up the saucepan. He looked at its contents before turning it upside down over the sink. The condensed tomatoes plopped with a wet splat against the porcelain.

  Alex showed up for takeout, but as soon as he swallowed the last of his food, he vanished into his bedroom, leaving Claude and me alone in the flickering light of the television with the volume on low.

  I retrieved a stack of my photographs and sat cross-legged on the carpet, laying the photos side by side so I could see them together: pictures of my mother, of Alex surrounded by his friends at school, pictures from the football game. I noticed that the carpet needed vacuuming, crumbs and hard bits of dirt sticking to the palms of my hands.

  “Can I see those?” Claude asked. As usual, he had his own puzzle in front of him: paper printouts, file folders, glossy brochures overlapping like conversations where no one was listening. He came to the edge of the sofa so he could get a better look.

  “No,” I said, attempting to hide the photos with my body and arms. “This is none of your business.”

  Claude laughed, moving from the couch to sit next to me. He picked up a couple of photos. “These are great,” he said, admiring a photo of my mother standing by the window in my bedroom, a cigarette dangling from her lower lip and a wreath of smoke flowing behind her like a wedding veil.

  He put the photo down and started flipping through the others. He stopped when he found the photo I’d taken of him and Alex and my mother talking to Alex’s friends and their parents at the football game. He froze, then held it up so he could get a better look.

  “Why’d you take this one?” he asked, with no inflection to his voice.

  I shrugged, not wanting to say how I studied Alex, searching for why he was different with his friends than he was with me. “Because I wanted to.”

  “What kind of reason is that?”

  “I don’t know.” I tried to snag the picture, but he held it out of my reach. “Give it back.”

  “Not until you tell me why you took it. A real photographer plans each shot, frames the picture, and considers her subjects and how she wants the photograph to come out. Otherwise you’re wasting film.”

  “It’s my film to waste.”

  Claude’s smile didn’t reach his eyes. “Can I have it?” he asked.

  “Have what?”

  “This picture. Can I have it?”

  “Why?” I tried grabbing the picture again, confused. If he wanted a photograph, it should have been one of my mother.

  “I want a few of these.” He pointed to the rest of the photos and picked up another one, of Alex talking to his friend by the cinder-block wall. “They’re very good,” he said.

  I gathered the rest in a messy pile before he could get his hands on any more. “Well, you can’t have them. What do you know about photography anyway?”

  “More than you. I used to be quite the shutterbug. Worked on the school newspaper, lo these many years ago.”

  Incomprehensible to think I shared anything with Claude. “You couldn’t have been very good.”

  He barked a laugh, and he was back to the same Claude. “I like you, Rosie. Here, judge for yourself.”

  From the bottom of the bookshelf he pulled out a crusty binder. The spine crackled as I opened it to find newspaper clippings, all yellowed to the color of old bruises, pasted onto thick black paper. The first article showed a picture of a man, wrinkles crisscrossing his face, sitting on a park bench wrapped in a threadbare, dirty blanket. Caption: A vagrant admiring the sun on a Monday morning. On the next page a little girl cried, her gap-toothed mouth hung open, her hand offering a busted balloon while behind her a Ferris wheel turned. She held the torn bits of plastic as if they were a precious but dead pet, perhaps her first loss. The next photo, a long shot of a street littered with trash, and a lone figure trying to sweep with only a broom. Another, of a group of men at a podium pointing into an unseen crowd, and behind them stood a second row of men in military uniforms holding automatic machine guns. A closer inspection revealed that the last picture was of a stage production, costumes and props and artificial scenery.

  They were horrible—and beautiful. He liked to photograph terrible things, things in which I couldn’t find evidence of the happy-go-lucky, blustering Claude who loved to joke and laugh. But I remembered how he had been when he had caught Alex in my room, and I remembered the hard way he asked why I had taken his picture at the football game.

  The final clipping was of a woman with a long face and straight hair that fell well past her waist, exaggerating her height and her bony, exposed shoulders. She stood onstage to the left of the conductor, in front of an orchestra, one big-knuckled hand wrapped around the neck of a violin. Tall and imperious, she dared the camera to take her picture. I realized that I knew that arctic dare.

  My finger traced her face, the thinness of her arms, the curved lines of the violin. With a jolt, I understood; it was the sound of her violin that seeped from underneath Alex’s bedroom door every day. Her glare drew my attention. The angles of her face were so severe that I could have cut myself if I’d touched her, sliced my hands open to bleed on the carpet. The caption
below the picture read, Violinist Catherine Craig takes the stage with the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

  “That’s Alex’s mother,” Claude said, no longer smiling.

  My tongue stung with questions, surprised that he had volunteered the truth and intrigued by the flare of remorse in his eyes.

  “I met her that day for the first time”—he nodded at the binder in my hands—“when I took her picture.”

  “Did you love her?”

  “Oh yes,” said Claude.

  “What happened?”

  “She didn’t love me back. Not enough, anyway. I wasn’t enough for her. It was a long time ago.” Claude held his hand out for the binder, snapped it shut. Back in its place, the dust crowded around it protectively. He stood over me, so tall I felt the bones of my neck grind together as I looked up. “You know, I’d build you a darkroom, if you let me. It’d be better that way. Keep everything in house, close to home. You wouldn’t have to wait to have your photos developed.”

  I went back to stacking my photographs by subject matter, returning them to the envelopes they came in. “Why do you always have to buy something?”

  He reddened, and it made me think of the overcooked tomatoes flushed down the drain. “Who do you think gives Alex the money to buy your film? And who asked him to buy it for you in the first place? Tell me to stop and I’ll stop.”

  I’d finally succeeded in making him mad. But it was a quiet anger, cold and reserved, and once again I marveled to see the similarity between father and son.

  “I don’t know how to use a darkroom,” I said softly.

  He considered this. “If you’ll give me this picture, I could teach you,” he said, and bopped me on the head with it, trying to be playful again.

  Before I could respond, Alex came down the stairs, pausing when he saw the two of us. “Can I borrow the car?” he asked Claude.

  He had never asked for this before, at least not while I had been living with them. Father and son stared at each other. Push me, pull me.