Free The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake: A Novel by Aimee Bender

tongue.
    I started tearing at my mouth. Get it out! I roared.
    What is it, baby? Mom asked, struggling out of her chair.
    My mouth, I said, suddenly crying. The tears steaming hot, down my face. Everything flooding. I tried to pull at it--my mouth--with my fingers. Take it out! I said. Please . Mommy. Take it off my face.
    The floor tile was cool, and I was so glad it was there, the floor, always there, and I put a cheek down, right on the tile, and let the coolness calm me.
    Mom knelt by my side, her cheeks flushed with worry. Rose, she said. Baby. I don't understand. What do you mean?
    I threw the paper towel away. Pulled off another. Wiped down my tongue. Pulled off another. I had been avoiding my mother's baked goods, but I had eaten her cooked dinners now for months and months, which she made for us every evening with labor and love. Trying not to show everything on my face. Eating a potato chip after every bite. I'd been spending my lunchtimes tasting bites from my friends' lunches, navigating the cafeteria, finally finding a good piece of doughy pizza made in the school kitchen by a sad lady with a hairnet who worked far on the left. She was sad, true, but the sadness was so real and so known in it that I found the tomato sauce and the melted cheese highly edible, even good. I would try to time it just right in the cafeteria every lunchtime to get her food, because sometimes she took her lunch break right at ours; I would shove to be first in line to catch her before she left, rushing ahead, and my teacher had taken me aside to ask what was going on. There's a lady, at the cafeteria? I said, staring at her bright-blue earring stud. You still have to stay with the class, Rose, she said, pulling me to her gaze. That same sad lady returned from her break ten minutes before the bell rang, so I took to nibbling on an apple or anything packaged until she returned and then running to her window and getting whatever she put her hands on, so that before lunch was over I could eat a feeling that was recognized. I ate fast food whenever I could, which was not unlike holding Joseph's forearm to cross the street instead of bearing the disappointment of his hand. I was working to find, in every new setting, something filling, and my whole daily world had become consumed by it. And, day in and day out, I had been faking enjoying eating at home, through the weekly gaps and silences between my parents, through my mother's bright and sleepless eyes, and for whatever reason, for that one time, I could not possibly pretend I liked her pie.
    The pie, sitting on the counter, with two big brown slices cut out of it.
    What is it? Rose? It's the pie?
    You feel so bad , I said, to the floor tile.
    What do you mean? she said, touching my shoulder. Are you talking to the floor? You mean me again, Rose?
    You're so sad in there, I said, and alone, and hungry, and sad--
    In where? she said.
    In the pie, I said.
    In the pie? she said, flinching. What do you mean, baby?
    Not baby, I said. No more baby.
    Rose? she said, eyebrows caving in. The sheets of tears came down over me again. Blurring. I clawed at my mouth. What are you doing? she said, grabbing my hands. Honey?
    I pulled away from her. I tasted it, I said, pitching.
    But, Rose, she said, tasted what--
    I TASTED YOU, I said. GET OUT MY MOUTH.
    She drove me to the emergency room. I cried on the whole drive over, and I cried all through the waiting time, in the plastic chairs. Eventually, the doctor came in, and gave me a shot, and put me in a bed. She's inconsolable, I heard my mother say, her voice high with concern, as I drifted off.
    12 The doctors didn't know how to diagnose me, but I did have a delusion, they said, about my mouth. I stayed six hours in the wing off the emergency room of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center that day, taking tests, answering questions, peeing into a cup.
    We arrived at around ten-thirty in the morning, and after I calmed down, and the shot wore off, and after a few