Banana Cake on the Breezeway
Natalie Serber
Word Count 906
At sixteen, the annual visits to my grandmother’s cinderblock house in Florida stopped being fun. I didn't want to leave my friends behind for three summer weeks. They’d be smearing baby oil on their shoulders, drinking weak beer, and hooking up. I would be drinking iced coffee and playing scrabble. I wasn’t worried about missing them. I worried my friends wouldn’t miss me. Upon returning, I wouldn’t be part of the inside jokes, the history they'd made. Belonging was tenuous for me, a kid who went to five elementary schools and spent most of the fifth grade alone in the library. When I found friends in high school, I was a follower. Cut class? Why not. Be lookout while a "hilarious" friend pooped in the Burger King sink? Of course. Eat mushrooms? Sure. If it meant not getting culled from the pack, absolutely.
My single mom, sick of me sneaking in past curfew, getting bad grades, and slamming doors, wanted her own summer life. I was not a kid who would get up to messy business on my own, so off I went to Florida. Mostly I was quiet and bored. I picked at my pimples, played with my hair—braiding, cutting progressively shorter bangs with nail scissors. I read Agatha Christie books, ordered iced tea and tuna sandwiches by the pool at the Miami Sheraton, where Grandma ran the Kid Klub.
Though I'd outgrown her size 4½ shoes, I jammed my feet in her flats, sandals with kitten heels, patent leather pumps, red espadrilles, all lined up on her shoe rack, which amazed me. A shoe rack! At our house shoes were abandoned by the couch or the back door. My mother tacked Indian bedspreads to the ceiling, ashtrays overflowed, paperback novels—by Peter Benchley, Xaviera Hollander, and James Michener—splayed on the arms of our couch. My grandma raked her white shag carpet, so it stood tall. She made her bed every morning, crisp with a yellow chenille bedspread. She taught me to sausage roll pillows at the top, to smooth the surface with the palm of my hand. When I'd left for Florida, my mom's waterbed was leaking. She'd accidentally lost the cherry on her joint and burned a tiny hole through her sheets and the plastic.
Grandma and I fell into a rhythm, movies on Saturday afternoons, the pool every day, dinner—cottage cheese, chicken salad, and my personal favorite, Sara Lee banana cake—served on her breezeway, TV at night. Grandma went to bed early, and I'd stay up to paint my toenails, watch David Letterman, read her Time Life book collection: This Fabulous Century. Sometimes I snooped through her small desk, excavating drawers, examining bills: Florida Power and Light, Burdine's Department Store, State Farm. I held her letter opener, dagger-shaped and heavy. It seemed so civilized, a tool for opening a letter! I felt the faint stirrings of aspirations for a new me… shoe rack, letter opener, smooth bed.
It must have been in her desk where I found the pot. Tucked into an envelope sent by my mother. Why? I don't know. Maybe Grandma had glaucoma. Maybe she'd gotten a contact high the last time she was in California. My mom always talked about contact highs. Me, our cat, Grandma, we were all susceptible, and my mom thought it was ‘far out.’ Alone in the living room, I'd take a few hits and get more banana cake. David Letterman dropped watermelons off a five-story building, read his top-ten list, a dog attacked a vacuum cleaner on the stupid pet tricks segment. I'd slice another piece of cake and flip through the Time Life books, past pictures of breadlines and the Viet Nam war, Woodstock and the stock market crash of 1929, Twiggy and Richard Nixon. I'd peel frosting from the top of the cake, rest the package on my chest. My prone body flattened her shag carpet. I licked my fork, was mesmerized by the Picasso print my grandma had over her desk. “The Tragedy” was from his blue period. A family mourned on a beach. The mother and father stared down at the cold sand; a child ignored at their knees. What must it have been like for my grandma, who lost a child to spinal meningitis when the girl was only four. Joy fell sick with a fever on Friday and was dead by Sunday. Grandma was only twenty, just four years older than me. I'd heard the story from my mother, never from grandma. The print was unbearable and beautiful. It was exquisite torture. The parents draped in dark clothing. The flat sea, their bony feet. My tiny dark-eyed grandma, who touched up her roots every three weeks and wore heeled slippers at the breakfast table, asleep now in her queen bed in the other room, was witness to this intense pain every time she walked through the room. The banana cake package was now empty. I let my ears fill with my own dramatic tears. I didn't even know I was lonely. I didn't know that I was using her story, using Picasso and the pictures of the Dust Bowl to evacuate my awkward fears. Was I normal? Would I ever be loved? I did this nearly every night for three weeks. And in the morning, if Grandma was disappointed that there was no banana cake to enjoy with her coffee, she bought another one and never said a thing.
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Natalie is the author of Shout Her Lovely Name, a New York Times Notable Book, and Community Chest, a memoir of her experience with breast cancer. Her fiction has appeared in One Story, Zyzzyva Magazine, and others. Essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, O, The Oprah Magazine, The Today Show, San Francisco Chronicle, The Rumpus, Oldster, Salon, and Fourth Genre. She’s currently working on a novel in stories, Must be Nice, and a memoir about growing up with a single mother in the 60s, Go Back to Sleep. Find more of her work, as well her newsletter read.write.eat. at www.natalieserber.com