A Piece of Cake, A Piece of Mind

My grandmother throws her hands in the air. Her skin is sunburnt, her finger joints knobbly from arthritis. "No," she yells at my mother, "I can't think of anything." Her dentures slip a little off her gums. She bites down. "I can't think of anything," she goes on, "that you or your brother ever did right all your lives."

We're sitting at the dining table eating Dobos torte and drinking coffee. I baked the Dobos torte, my mother's favorite dessert. I'm trying to be a good daughter. I'm not a good daughter in what really matters: I write instead of holding a steady, paying job and raising 2.6 children. So I do little things to compensate, like baking elaborate cakes. "She could be a pastry chef," my mother says, grinning at me. An exaggeration, but she has to compensate too for her disappointment in me. I'm not leading the life that she and my father have dreamed that I would have. This breaks my heart. And it also makes me angry. I don't want to carry this burden. I wish my parents said something to me that would make the burden fall off my shoulders. I blame them for not saying it. I blame them for feeling disappointed.

It doesn't occur to me, until my grandmother picks up her fork again to finish her slice of Dobos torte, her face flushed, her eyeglasses sliding down the sweaty bridge of her nose, that my mother is also a daughter. That she lives with the same burden, the same guilt, that I do.

I can't look at my mother and I can't eat any more. I say, to distract myself, "Grandma, why don't you give me your recipe for doughnuts?" She looks up briskly. She waits until I take my pen and notebook out of my purse. A kilo of flour, she begins, but you have to take out a couple of fistfuls. I scribble quantities and rising times in crooked lines on the blank notebook page. My hand shakes; I make mistakes; I scratch them out messily.

My mother cuts herself another slice of cake.