The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake Review New York Times

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake
By Aimee Bender
Hardcover, 304 pages
Doubleday
List toll: $25.95

Information technology happened for the commencement time on a Tuesday afternoon, a warm spring 24-hour interval in the flatlands near Hollywood, a calorie-free cakewalk moving due east from the bounding main and stirring the black-eyed pansy petals newly planted in our bloom boxes.

My mother was home, blistering me a cake. When I tripped upwardly the walkway, she opened the front end door before I could knock.

How most a do round? she said, leaning past the door frame. She pulled me in for a hello hug, pressing me shut to my favorite of her aprons, the worn cotton one trimmed in sketches of twinned ruby cherries.

On the kitchen counter, she'd set out the ingredients: Flour bag, sugar box, 2 dark-brown eggs nestled in the grooves between tiles. A yellow cake of butter blurring at the edges. A shallow glass bowl of lemon pare. I toured the row. This was the calendar week of my ninth birthday, and it had been a long day at schoolhouse of cursive lessons, which I hated, and playground yelling about signal scoring, and the sunlit kitchen and my warm-eyed mother were welcome arms, open. I dipped a finger into the wax baggie of brown-sugar crystals, murmured yes, please, yep.

She said there was near an hour to get, then I pulled out my 1 spelling booklet. Tin can I help? I asked, spreading out pencils and papers on the vinyl place mats.

Nah, said Mom, whisking the flour and baking soda together.

My birthday is in March, and that year it barbarous during an peculiarly bright spring week, vivid and clear in the narrow residential streets where we lived only a scattering of blocks south of Dusk. The night-blooming jasmine that crawled up our neighbor'due south front gate released its exciting scent at dusk, and to the north, the hills rolled charmingly over the horizon, houses tucked into the chocolate-brown. Soon, daylight savings time would arrive, and even at nearly 9, I associated my birthday with the first hint of summer, with the feeling in classrooms of open up windows and lighter vesture and in a few months no more than homework. My pilus got lighter in bound, from light brown to well-nigh blond, almost like my mother's ponytail tassel. In the neighborhood gardens, the agapanthus plants started to push out their long green robot stems to open to soft purples and blues.

Mom was stirring eggs; she was sifting flour. She had one bowl of chocolate icing prepare bated, some other with rainbow sprinkles. A block claiming like this wasn't a usual afternoon activity; my mother didn't broil all that oft, but what she enjoyed nearly was anything tactile, and this cake was just one in a long line of recent varied hands-on experiments. In the last six months, she'd coaxed a strawberry plant into a vine, stitched doilies from vintage lace, and in a burst of motivation installed an oak side door in my brother's bedroom with the aid of a hired contractor.

She'd been working as an role administrator, but she didn't similar copy machines, or work shoes, or computers, and when my father paid off the last of his police force schoolhouse debt, she asked him if she could take some time off and acquire to practise more with her easily. My hands, she told him, in the hallway, leaning her hips against his; my hands have had no lessons in anything.

Anything? he'd asked, holding tight to those easily. She laughed, low. Annihilation applied, she said.

They were right in the manner, in the center of the hall, as I was leaping from room to room with a plastic leopard. Alibi me, I said.

He breathed in her hair, the sweet-smelling thickness of it. My father usually agreed with her requests, considering stamped in his 2-footed stance and jaw was the word Provider, and he loved her the manner a bird-watcher'south heart leaps when he hears the phone call of the roseate spoonbill, a fluffy pinkish wader, calling its lilting coo-coo from the mangroves. Cheque, says the bird-watcher.

Sure, said my father, tapping a handful of postal service confronting her back.

Rah, said the leopard, heading back to its lair.

At the kitchen tabular array, I flipped through my workbook, basking in the clicking sounds of a warming oven. If I felt a hint of anything unsettling, information technology was similar the sun going swiftly behind a deject only to smooth directly seconds afterward. I knew vaguely that my parents had had an argument the night before, but parents had arguments all the time, at dwelling house and on Television receiver. Plus, I was still busily going over the bad betoken scoring from lunch, chosen by Eddie Oakley with the freckles, who never called fairly. I read through my spelling booklet: knack, knick, knot; cartwheel, wheelbarrow, wheelie.

At the counter, Mom poured thick yellow batter into a greased block pan, and smoothed the height with the flat end of a pink plastic spatula. She checked the oven temperature, brushed a sweaty strand of hair off her forehead with the knob of her wrist.

Hither we go, she said, slipping the cake pan into the oven.

When I looked upwards, she was rubbing her eyelids with the pads of her fingertips. She blew me a buss and said she was going to lie down for a trivial chip. Okay, I nodded. Two birds bickered exterior. In my booklet, I picked the person doing a cartwheel and colored her shoes with red laces, her face a calorie-free orange. I made a vow to bounce the ball harder on the playground, and to bounce it right into Eddie Oakley's corner. I added some apples to the wheelbarrow freehand.

The room filled with the smell of warming butter and sugar and lemon and eggs, and at 5, the timer buzzed and I pulled out the cake and placed information technology on the stovetop. The house was repose. The bowl of icing was right there on the counter, ready to go, and cakes are all-time when merely out of the oven, and I actually couldn't mayhap wait, so I reached to the side of the cake pan, to the least obvious role, and pulled off a small warm spongy chunk of deep gilt. Iced it all over with chocolate. Popped the whole matter into my mouth.

Excerpted from The Item Sadness of Lemon Cake past Aimee Bough. Copyright 2010 by Aimee Bender. Excerpted by permission of Doubleday. All rights reserved.

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Source: https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127475483

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