* * *
It was a long morning. Ida kept fussing round her—“Can I get you something? A cup of broth? Would you like to lay down a minute?”—but once the spasm passed she insisted on finishing the cake herself. Of course she was going to finish it — what kind of birthday would it be if Ida had to bake her own cake? She felt light-headed, maybe a bit flushed even, but she poured the batter into the pan and shooed the girl away. “But, ma’am,” Ida kept saying, “you don’t know this stove — it’s a neat trick to damp it just so—”
“I’m not helpless. I’ve been baking cakes since before you were born — believe me, I know what I’m doing.” She glanced up at Ida where she was stalled at the door to the hallway, looking tragic. “Go, go on! You must have something better to do than stand here worrying over me — what about the mending I gave you? What about Edith’s dress?” She turned away to pull open the door of the oven and felt the blast of heat in her face. And then the pan was in and the door shut and she straightened up and turned round to see that Ida hadn’t moved. “Where is Edith, anyway?”
“Out walking.”
“Walking? In this?”
“Yes, ma’am. She took her mackintosh and went out after she had her breakfast.”
“But where?”
A shrug. “Just for a walk, that’s all she said. Said she felt confined — you can hardly blame her.”
She fought down an impulse to damp the stove — it was too hot, she was sure of it — but she didn’t want to fiddle with it while Ida was watching. She said, “No, you’re right. It’s just that I worry.”
“Of course you do, ma’am.”
And that was that. Ida went off to her chores, and Marantha, though she felt overheated, though she felt the sluggishness invade her limbs and her lungs twist and tighten as if they were being wrung out like a pair of wet rags, sat by the stove and adjusted the damper and opened the door repeatedly to peer in at her cake though she knew she shouldn’t have. Perhaps she nodded off for just a moment, she couldn’t say. But the next thing she knew Will was there, the back door thrown open on the smoke issuing from the stove — and the cake, the cake that was blackened around the edges and as squat and hard and dry as a cracker — and her first thought wasn’t for the cake or the smoke but for him, for how common he looked, how like a vagrant in his filthy wet clothes and crumpled hat. “Jesus,” he said, his voice climbing the register, “what in Christ’s name do you think you’re doing?”
There was the smoke, the rawness of the outdoors, the look of him. “Baking,” she said.
“Baking?” He threw it back at her, incredulous. “More like burning the place to the ground. Have you no sense at all? What do you think we took on Ida for?”
“Ida,” she spat. “Always Ida.”
“Well, isn’t she the cook?”
“It’s her birthday.”
He was towering, huge, the mustache clinging wet to his face like some sort of bleached-out fungus, and he was trying to balance on one leg and jerk the muddy boot from the other. “I don’t give a goddamn,” he started and then caught himself. In the yard, in the rain, the faces of Adolph and Jimmie appeared and now they were crowding in at the open doorway.
She didn’t care. She was angry, frightened, outraged. He couldn’t imagine what she felt, none of them could. They were healthy, they were going to live, and she wasn’t. Everything they saw before them was infused with the color of life, bright and shining even in the rain, but for her it was all dross. “You look common,” she said — or no, she threw it at him. “And these men, these, these hands, will not take their midday meal in this house. Will not, do you hear me?”
She paused for breath then and no one moved, no one said a word, though the smoke dodged and swirled and the cake blackened and her lungs rattled with the effort of drawing in the breath she so violently needed because she wasn’t finished yet. “And I wish the place had caught fire,” she said, but she was rasping now, all the resonance scoured from her voice by this thing with the claws, by the disease that plucked you up at random, that got inside of you and slowly strangled the life from you. “At least then we could leave this rat’s hole and go back to, to”—she was coughing suddenly, coughing till she felt the sputum dissolve in a hot rush of blood she tried to choke back even as it filled her mouth and broke free to redden her lips and douse the front of her dress in a spatter of bright red droplets—“to civilization. Civilization, Will.”
She held them with a look of fury until Adolph — and Jimmie, Jimmie following his lead — backed out the door and into the rain.
Will said her name once, softly.
“Don’t speak to me,” she said. “Don’t ever speak to me again.”
Edith’s Turn
Four days later, it was Edith’s turn. This time she let Ida do the baking, but she insisted on mixing the batter herself and sitting there in the kitchen till the cake came out of the oven plump and moist and perfectly browned across the top — she was Edith’s mother still, no matter her condition. And every year since Edith had come to her from the orphanage, helpless, impossibly small and vulnerable, this perfect shining infant whose natural mother had tossed her aside like so much refuse, she’d baked a cake on her birthday — and on Christmas too. A cake. The smallest thing. And on this day, the day of Edith’s fifteenth birthday — the twelfth of February, a day she’d marked with a star on the calendar the day they’d arrived — with the rain finally stopped and the sun burning bright in a cored-out sky, she’d risen from her bed with a fierceness of purpose. She didn’t need coffee or tea or any other stimulant, just the cake pan, just the batter, just Edith.
It was a wonder, really, considering how low she’d been these past days. Confined to her bed, weak, bored, feeling useless, she’d lain there staring at the stained canopy and the curtains that hemmed her in, imagining she was already in her grave, a damp place, wet, reeking, the raw earth pressing down on her without mercy or appeal. She was feverish. Her dreams were dense, clotted with images of grasping hands and spectral faces that loomed up out of nothingness and vanished again just as quickly. She’d lost blood, too much blood, and though the hemorrhage hadn’t been nearly as bad as the one she’d suffered in December, for which fact she was grateful, it had left her weak and disoriented all the same.
She’d forced herself to come downstairs that first night — for Ida’s sake, to help her commemorate the occasion and lift the pall that lay over the house — and everyone had been in good spirits, all things considered. The cake was a humiliation, of course, Ida having had to produce another while she herself lay supine on the bed with the smell of it drifting down the hallway and up the stairs to mock her in her weakness and debility, and she hadn’t been able to join in when Edith led a chorus of “Oh! Susanna,” substituting “Ida” for “Anna,” and yet still she felt fortunate to be there — moved, deeply moved — and couldn’t keep from thinking about the following year and the one after that and who would be sitting there in her place. She looked up at Edith, at her face luminous with the pleasure of watching Ida unwrap the gift she’d given her — ribbons, blue satin ribbons Edith had brought with her from the mainland and kept hidden all this time — and she began, very softly, to cry. Will had looked away — she was angry with him still, though at that moment she felt so soft and fragile she would have accepted anything from him — and when she woke in the night, he wasn’t there beside her in the bed.