Black Cake: A Novel (26 page)

B
enny opens her suitcase and
pulls out her silver-gray sweater. She refuses to wear all black to her mother’s funeral tomorrow. She flaps open the sweater and hangs it over her old desk chair. She hadn’t planned on being here in her old bedroom. She’s never slept in her childhood home without her parents.

Benny had thought that staying in a neutral place tonight would have been easier. She has always found comfort in the anonymity of travel, in the no-man’s-land of vast airport lounges, the plastic smell of rental cars, the hotel key cards that wiped your identity clean on checkout. All those spaces free of emotional weight. But this time, it was different.

Benny had booked a hotel for her stay here in Orange County, but when she found herself lying in a standard-double room so close to her childhood home, it filled her with a sadness that went beyond the death of her mother, a downward draft that pulled at her when she touched the brushed chrome faucets in the bathroom, the dimmers in the bedroom, the tiny tubes of fake cream beside the coffee machine.

The room was spacious and clean and carpet-quiet, just the way she needed it to be after a cross-country flight, but it was only three miles from the house. When Byron told her to stay over, Benny didn’t think she would. Byron wasn’t even talking to her, except for covering the obligatory comments. Keys, coffee, cremation. But after listening
to the first part of her mother’s recording, after saying good night to Mr. Mitch, she looked at her father’s armchair and knew that she couldn’t bear to go back to the hotel. Of course, she must have known it would be this way. She had, after all, brought her suitcase to the house with her.

B
yron’s phone is vibrating against
the kitchen counter. He’s forgotten about this morning’s appointment at the hair stylist’s. Haircut, no color. He doesn’t mind that bit of gray at his temples, but his hair guy warns him he might want to consider keeping it to a minimum, for a while yet. Byron cancels the appointment, there isn’t enough time, though he knows his mother wouldn’t have skipped it. His ma would not have gone to a funeral without having her hair done first.

His mother would have said it was a sign of respect to do her hair, to check the condition of her clothes, to see if she needed to buy a new shirt. She really was quite conventional in some ways, though, as Byron has come to see, in fewer ways than he’d imagined. But one of his mother’s mantras when he and Benny were kids was
Dress with respect!
That had never changed.

When Byron first got into his profession, he couldn’t have imagined seeing his male colleagues with manicured eyebrows and the women with hair extensions. Times change, and people should feel free to primp and tweak with the trends. He just never thought it would become a professional necessity for geologists, engineers, and mathematicians to be Instagram-ready on any given day of the week. This was more than respect, this was showmanship.

Byron supposes he should be grateful for the social media, the signs that so many people are into the work that he does. He certainly
continues to be intrigued by his own profession. With the sonar technology they have now, his team can amass thousands of square kilometers’ worth of high-resolution maps from just one deep-sea expedition. On some days, Byron just laughs out loud at the beauty of it all.

Byron believes that a lot of the people who follow him online really do
get
how important underwater mapping is, that it isn’t just about technology and being able to see the shape of the land below the seas. It’s about weather patterns, tsunamis, territorial defenses, fisheries, Internet cabling, tracking pollution, and so much more. It’s about how we will live in the future. And, of course, it’s about money. Always, the money.

Byron lies in bed some mornings staring at the ceiling for a long while, wondering how much of his work is doing good and how much is only opening the gates to profit seekers who will use the information to do things like mine previously uncharted areas of the seabed for precious metals, rare elements, oil, and other riches. Much of which, he knows, benefits his own lifestyle.

People talk about responsible management of natural resources, they talk about sustainability and moderation, but Byron hasn’t seen a whole lot of these things in the twenty-something years of his career. He thought that by doing his work well, engaging the public, aiming for the director’s position, he would have done some good. But now that both of his parents are gone, he doesn’t know anymore if his life has really made that much of a difference to anyone or anything.

His parents sacrificed so much to give Benny and him a good life. Is he doing right by them? Is he doing enough?

Byron doesn’t know anymore if his parents gave him a gift or did him a disservice to make him think all these years that he was someone special. He hopes, at least, that being seen in this profession ultimately will count for something, for all those kids out there who look like him and who might want to follow in his footsteps, or for those who might just need to see their own faces coming back at them, smiling, looking good, being treated with respect.

I
n 1978, NASA launched the
first Earth-orbiting satellite designed for remote sensing of the planet’s oceans. Forty years later, whenever Byron visited students in local schools, he liked to let them know about the black woman who’d been a project manager on the Seasat program. But the students were always more interested to learn that the same woman had been instrumental in developing early GPS technology.
Slick!
someone would always exclaim, or whatever the word of the day was.

Like a lot of people, Byron wasn’t aware of any of this when he was in school, but he was already being pulled in that direction. The twenty-minute drive from the beach. The surfing. Learning how to react in the event of an earthquake. Byron grew up understanding that Earth and its oceans were in a constant state of agitation, and by the time he reached college, he knew that he wanted to spend most of his time listening to the seas.

Byron hears the rustle and clink of Benny in her room, getting ready for their mother’s funeral. It has been Byron’s observation that remote sensing, obtaining information about locations without physically being there, is a heck of a lot simpler than gaining understanding of another human being, even when they are right there in the same room with you. He has no idea anymore how to read Benny, how to talk to his sister. There are no machines to help you figure out that sort of thing.

I
t’s not really a funeral.
Their mother’s body isn’t here. Eleanor Bennett’s ashes will be delivered to Benny and Byron in the coming days in a container made for such things. But the pastor says that Eleanor Bennett is here in spirit, in this church where she used to volunteer, where she had so many friends.

Benny links her arm in Byron’s and, thankfully, he doesn’t pull away. She feels as though the crook of Byron’s elbow is the only solid thing in her life right now. Benny tries not to think about all the secrets surrounding her mother’s life. She and Byron still don’t know the full story. They still have to finish listening to their mother’s recording, they still have to meet the sister they didn’t know about until yesterday. They still need to learn how much is left of the mother they remember.

The pastor wanted Benny to say something but she just couldn’t. Byron went up front and thanked everyone for coming, said their ma would have appreciated it, then came back to his seat. Thank goodness for Mr. Mitch. At least he got up there and said something more on behalf of the family. Or Benny thinks he did. She stopped listening after “Each one of us knew a different side of Eleanor Bennett. Mother, friend, volunteer…” At some point, he left the lectern with tears in his eyes. That much Benny recalls. Charles Mitch, slipping back into the pew next to Byron, his eyes and nose as pink as peonies.

People are still going up to speak. This whole thing is becoming
unbearable. Benny leans against Byron’s arm. Byron puts his hand over hers and the touch of his palm, warm and dry, clears all sorts of dust out of her heart.

Someone is patting Benny’s face now, pulling her into a soft, wool-scented hug, invoking the name of her mother in warm tones. Benny is already looking for a way out. She scans the crowd in the living room, searching for Byron, and sees him heading through a clutch of people toward the kitchen. She follows her brother and for just one moment, she expects to see Ma in there at the sink with him, laughing, teasing.

Her ma.

If only Benny had known about her mother’s past before now. A runaway bride, forced to move over and over again, struggling to find her center again each time she’d suffered a loss. If Benny had known all of this, she might have told her parents about her own troubles in college. It might have prevented the slow buildup of misunderstanding between them. Benny doubts her father would have been any more comfortable with her dropping out of school or with her love life but, being Bert Bennett, his anger over the way in which his daughter had been mistreated might have eclipsed all other concerns.

Instead, Benny had stayed away. Worse, after all that, she’d gotten into the habit of trying to keep her head down, trying to get along, trying not to rankle people, trying not to get hurt. What, then, had been the point of it all?

The truth is, Benny had wanted to go to that university almost as much as her parents had wanted her to be there. But just when she’d thought that her world was expanding beyond the suffocation of adolescence and into a new environment, she found that the boxes into which she was expected to fit—whether for race, sexual orientation, or politics—seemed to be making her world narrower.

Mostly, all it took was a look to let her know that she had strayed
outside her designated box. Like the look she got from a white girl she’d been friendly with when she saw Benny coming out of a hairdresser’s for black women. Or the look she’d gotten one afternoon from one of her black dorm mates when she’d walked into the common room, giggling with a couple of white girls. Or, being looked at repeatedly, but not spoken to, at the pride meetings. But looks were slippery things that you couldn’t pin down easily. A kick in the face was more concrete.

The woman who pushed her and kicked her that time at college had been bugging her for weeks.
You think you’re better than the rest of us?
she said to Benny that night. But no, Benny didn’t think she was better than anyone. She just didn’t see why she was any worse.

Then she saw the disappointment in her parents’ eyes and the confusion in Byron’s. So she went to Europe to get away and study cooking.

In Italy, Benny fell in love with a new city, a new woman, and a vision of the kind of person that she could be. She thought that the answer to what her Italian lover called her
disagio
might be to stay there, overseas, so that her distance from her hometown would camouflage the canyon that was being carved between her and her family. But Benny’s discomfort had followed her.

There was a dinner. An international group of English speakers, all acquaintances of acquaintances. They commenced their happy, noisy settling-in at the table, sniffing at the aromas that drifted out of the kitchen, trading descriptions from the menu, when someone said, “And where are you from?”

“Me?” Benny said. “I’m from California.” Even though Benny had already moved out of the state before going to Italy, she remained a California girl in her heart, first and always. She would have carried a Californian passport, had there been such a thing. Correction: Southern Californian. Because there was a difference.

But before she could go on to talk about her parents, someone else jumped in and said, “Benny is from the West Indies.” Why were other people always answering this kind of question for her? For Benny, who
had never even been to Florida, much less the islands. Plus, who says
West Indies
in this day and age?

“And you?” Benny asked another dinner companion, not wanting to get into it. Wanting to shift the focus away from herself. The woman who had answered on Benny’s behalf laughed at Benny’s question.

“She’s American! Can’t you tell? Look at all that blond hair.” Without thinking, Benny touched her own hair, felt the soft, dark ridges above her temple. Three weeks later, after Benny had a falling-out with the Italian lover, she reasoned that she might as well go back home once she’d finished her course. Things didn’t seem so different here, after all.

Of course, Benny had already begun to forget what had led her to Europe in the first place. Not cooking school so much as the need for distance from her family. Because it was easy to forget these things when you were homesick. Looking back now, it seems to Benny that she has spent most of her adult life yearning to return home, only now that she’s finally back here, she feels that nothing was ever the way she thought it was.

Benny’s mother is gone for good, in more ways than one, and the only thing left of her mother, a voice in an audio file, keeps driving home that message.