Eat Cake: A Novel (11 page)

“Sure,” I said. “It’s all the same to me.”

So I got some towels and a plastic basin and every size of clipper and file and cuticle scissor I could find hiding in the back of various bathroom drawers. I got some cuticle cream and a package of orange sticks from Camille’s room. I filled the basin up with warm water in the kitchen sink and threw in a handful of Epsom salts and took the whole production into the den, careful not to slosh the water while I walked. My father was safely ensconced in his chair with the television on. He’d become very comfortable with working the remote with his fingertips.

“Ruthie, you’ll never believe this. It’s the Maple Leaves playing the Rangers in Toronto, nineteen seventy-nine. I was
at
that game! Can you believe that! Sam!” he shouted. “Where’s Sam? What a game that was. I even remember where I was sitting. Hey, maybe I’ll be on TV.”

Sam walked in looking a little bleary-eyed and I wondered if he had been back in our bedroom taking a nap. He turned and looked at the television while I spread two towels out over the floor. “Are those the ’seventy-six Maple Leaves?”

“ ’Seventy-nine!” my father said triumphantly.

Sam sank into a chair, his eyes fixed on the screen. “I can’t believe this. You just turned it on?”

“I was
there
.”

Sam looked at him. “No.”

“You don’t even like hockey,” I reminded my husband.

“I did in nineteen seventy-nine,” Sam said. He picked up the remote control and turned up the volume. I rolled up the cuffs of
my father’s old khaki pants and then picked up his feet and set them into the water.

“Is that too warm for you?” I asked.

“You could put my feet in the fireplace,” he said. “Right now I couldn’t care less.”

My mother came into the room wearing her blue warm-up suit. She knotted a fist against each of her hips in an attempt to become a caricature of a little old woman irritated by loud television. “Some people are trying to read a book.” She raised her voice to a small scream, as if she had to strain to jump up over the volume. It was not
that
loud.

“Sorry, Hollis,” Sam said, and reached again for the remote.

“Go for a jog,” my father said to her. “You’re dressed to go running. So go running.” I wondered how he even knew what she was wearing. He hadn’t taken his eyes off the screen.

I reached back into the water and extracted one heavily clawed foot. My father did nothing to help me with the lifting. I patted it dry with an extra towel and studied his cuticles, which were in serious need of taming.

My mother was appalled. “For God’s sake, Ruth, what are you doing?”

“What do you think I’m doing?” I held his big toe between my thumb and forefinger, turning it from side to side in hopes of finding the proper angle of approach. The light was imperfect. It looked like what I would need was a hacksaw.

“You’re going to let her cut your toenails now?” my mother said.

“It was her idea,” my father said.

“Ruth, you said you were going to take me to the fabric store this afternoon. They’re having a sale on remnants.”

“Remnants!” my father howled. “Don’t tell me you’re still collecting remnants! Stupidest damn hobby in the entire history of stupid hobbies.”

At that moment the first goal was blocked and my father’s foot shot out of my hands like a caught fish that sees its chance to make a break back for the water. Sam stood up and cheered. “I
remember
that block!” my father shouted. “Wasn’t that brilliant!”

“I could have told you it was going to wind up like this. Exactly like this.” My mother gave me a particularly cold stare, as if I had broken my father’s wrists myself as some kind of social experiment in family reconstruction. Then she turned to leave the room.

I grabbed his foot and held it tightly in my hand. I was willing to do this, but I wasn’t going to let it eat up the rest of my afternoon. My mother was right. I had promised to take her out. I took a pair of clippers and made my first incision. The sound was not a snip so much as a crunch. My father flinched and then jerked. “Hold still,” I said.

“Hey!” he said. “That’s too close!”

I felt my palms starting to sweat and I hoped I could hold the clippers steady. “Watch the game. See what the goalie can do.”

Sam and my father both glanced at the screen. A toenail flew past the parameters of the towel and I picked it up and dropped it back onto the terry cloth. With no one to scream along, the television seemed as loud as my mother had said it was.

At the next clip my father jerked hard and made a little squeak. “Watch it there!”

I stared at him until he relented.

“It didn’t hurt,” he said petulantly. “But you’re getting too close.”

I went back to work. It was the moment I reached my personal low, my dark night of the soul. Not that anyone else noticed it, but I suddenly felt I couldn’t go on with all this, that I didn’t have the energy for one more toe. Suddenly the thought of getting in the car and heading north to Canada, home of the Maple Leaves, seemed to me to be the only rational thing to do. Not that there was any money, but I could find a job in Canada. There was a long and noble tradition of my fellow countrymen heading to the great frozen north when things got tough at home. Focusing on the inside of a cake didn’t really cut it for me anymore. I needed to envision another country, someplace with vast open spaces where no one went looking for family members. That’s where I was when the doorbell rang.

I waited half a minute, thinking my mother would answer it, and then threw in another fifteen seconds thinking Sam might respond. When I came to my senses I picked my father’s foot off the floor and dropped it back in the tub, making a significant wake. “Soak,” I said with little kindness in my voice. I dried my hands of the whole thing.

The woman I found standing on my front porch was six feet tall, not including the crepe soles of her shoes and the two inches of lift she had in her hair. She had broad shoulders and big arms and hands that could have popped walnuts out of their shells all day long, but her legs were delicate and pretty, even if they were cased in serious white stockings. She was a dark-skinned black woman in a very bright white dress, and I have to say the whole effect of her, height and width and white and black, was nothing short of dazzling. She had an enormous tan leather bag slung over one shoulder and it was easy to imagine that inside that leather bag was the answer to every problem, Mary Poppins style.

“I’m Florence Allen,” the woman said. She held out her hand to me and I shook it. “I’m a friend of Sam’s.”

“Oh, Florence, I’m Ruth. I’m Sam’s wife.” I glanced quickly over my shoulder, still holding her hand. I willed the television to be turned off, the den to be picked up, my father’s toenails to be clipped and filed. “I didn’t know you were coming today.” I thought that Florence Allen was in the neighborhood of my age. She had a nice face but she kept it serious, businesslike.

“Didn’t you get the message?”

“Message? No, we aren’t so great about messages around here.” I had until recently been a meticulous, some might even say zealous, housekeeper, but times had changed. You could not make out the pattern on my sofa, there was so much clean laundry encasing it. I suppose I should have been grateful it was clean laundry. I stepped back to let her into the ruins of my home.

“I spoke to a girl yesterday.”

“My daughter.”

Florence Allen raised her hand. “I threw it into the message void, didn’t I?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“I have daughters,” she said. She had a very soothing voice.

“Goa-
lie
!” my father shouted.

Sam banged his beer bottle against the edge of the coffee table in agreement.

“You could drive the puck right up that guy’s ass and he wouldn’t know it!” my father said.

“Dad.” I leaned into the den, trying to shield our guest with my back, but she was too tall for that.

“Ruthie! Ruthie, watch this. They’re going to show it again. Here it comes, here it comes.” But when it came my father threw
his head back and closed his eyes. “Christ Almighty. Have you ever seen such idiocy in all your days?”

The blinds were down in the den, and despite the brightness of the day, the place resembled nothing so much as a cave, my father and husband the two overfed bears. “I have, yes. Dad, this is Florence Allen.”

When Sam looked up a flash of real panic cut across his face. He put his beer bottle on the floor behind the leg of the coffee table and hopped to his feet. “Florence!” he said, and held out his hand to her. “I’m so glad you came by. This is my father-in-law. This is Guy.”

My father smiled his best piano-bar smile and raised one metal-cased arm. “Hello there.”

“Sam,” she said, smiling. “Mr. Nash.” She nodded her head politely toward my father.

“Oh now,” my father said, turning his torso toward her, his arms jutting out with welcoming affection. “None of that Mister business. It’s strictly Guy here. You say you’re Florence?”

“I say I’m Mrs. Allen, actually.”

“A tough one!” my father said. “I like that.”

Sam shot my father a look, but I could have told him my father was impervious to looks. “I thought I was going to bring him in to see you. You didn’t have to drive over here.”

“I was on my way home from work,” she said. “Today’s my half day. It’s not any trouble.”

Mrs. Allen went over and looked into the pan of water my father’s feet were resting in.

“I was just working on his nails,” I said apologetically. I didn’t want her to think I was neglecting him, that I simply left his feet in pans of water all day. Check it, I wanted to say. It’s still warm.

“Have your feet been swollen long, Mr. Nash?”

I came over to look into the water, as did Sam. My father’s feet were two balls of rising bread dough. Had they just now expanded? Had they somehow sponged up the water? Was I so consumed by the horror of his nails that I neglected the horror of his feet?

“Oh, they get a little puffy. I’m not a young man, you know, things puff up from time to time.” He added an unseemly chortle.

“I don’t think they’ve been this swollen before,” Sam said.

She slipped her hand into the bath and took the pulse of both of his feet. “It’s probably the medication. I can get some compression socks for you to wear but you’ll need to be mindful about keeping them elevated.”

“I need to be mindful of my feet? Isn’t it enough that I’m being mindful of my arms?”

“I suppose you’re smart enough to do both things at once,” she said.

“Is there something I should be doing?” I asked her, feeling suddenly guilty that I had ever thought of running off to Canada.

“It would be a good idea to massage his feet,” she said to me. “It will help with the swelling.”

“A foot rub!” my father said, clicking his heels together in approval. “Now, there’s an idea.”

Florence Allen simply didn’t seem to hear what she wasn’t interested in. It made her seem very calm. “Let me take a look at those fingers,” she said. He laid his fingers carefully over the edges of her fingers and she studied them. My father watched her watch them.

“What do you think?” he said.

“I think you have nice-looking hands,” she said, and my father smiled. “Sam tells me you were a pianist.”

“I
am
a pianist,” my father said. “I am an injured pianist.”

“Have you moved your fingers much since your surgery, Mr. Nash?”

“The doctor said I should wait until I was ready. I don’t think they’re ready quite yet.” My father looked at his hands as if they were old friends he was worried about but didn’t want to let on, friends for whom he put on a brave face.

“And when do you imagine they will be ready?” She took the index finger of his left hand and began to move it in tiny circles. We all held our breath.

“I’d rather not rush it,” he said tentatively. Like the toenail clipping, he was waiting for the pain to come. He was braced for it.

She moved on to the next finger. “I’ll tell you, Mr. Nash, if you don’t rush it, these fingers of yours are going to turn into cement and they’re going to stay that way. The time to go to work is right now. You must have practiced the piano a great deal in your life to be able to make your living playing.”

Practice was something my father didn’t like to admit to. Practice was what my mother forced on her students. He billed himself as a natural. He didn’t practice, he said, he played. He had always just played.

“I’ve practiced plenty,” he said, reversing himself. “If this is the talk where you tell me what work is, I’ll save you the effort. If what this is going to take is work, then we won’t have any problems.”

“Then we won’t have any problems.” She moved on to the next finger. “Watch this.” She motioned for me and Sam to stand beside her. “You need to rotate them for him. Clockwise and then counterclockwise. Do you see that? Just gently for now. We’ll get them loosened up again. We’ll have you back on the piano in no time.”

“I’ve never even heard Guy play,” Sam said. “Can you believe that? You’ve got to start back just so you can play for me.”

My father looked at my husband with real affection. “After everything you’ve done for me, the very least I could do is play you a song.”

“Just keep it simple,” Florence said.

“I don’t plan to start with ‘Chopsticks,’ ” my father said.

“You start where you start. Just keep your fingers moving. I want you to do this three times a day, more if you can take it.”

“I can take it,” my father said.

“I’ll come back again in a few days and see where you’re at. We should be able to start pressing and bending pretty soon.”

“Is that it?” my father asked disappointedly. Maybe he thought he was going to get the chance to make some progress on this first visit.

“That was a good start for today.” She looked at her watch. “I should get going.”

I noticed that my father still had one unclipped set of toenails sitting in the water basin. I decided they could wait.

“Come on and have a cup of coffee before you go,” Sam said.

Florence shook her head. “It’s not like the old days around the hospital,” she said. “I don’t know the boss anymore.”