Wedding Cake

My Gram had 2 couches in her living room. Except she didn't call them couches, she called them davenports. I remember sitting on one of them with her and using my index finger to carefully scrape the icing off the bottom of one of those porcelain bride and grooms that go on top of a wedding cake. It was a special treat she had brought especially for me. I was about 3 years old at the time.

I must be part elephant, because that memory stayed with me. I pondered it all through my childhood--just whose wedding ornament was that? I had seen my parent's wedding pictures, and had looked for their ornament atop their wedding cake, and it definitely looked very much the same. I had been presented with a puzzle piece that didn't quite fit in with the picture of my life as I knew it. I knew the story of how they met, how mutual married cousins (that is, my mother's cousin was married to my step-father's cousin) fixed them up, the young widow with a toddler and the recently tragically injured man. They had so much in common really, 2 small town kids who had suffered so much so soon. So, one weekend afternoon, when I was about 10, I gathered my courage and went out into the kitchen where my parents were wreathed in coils of cigarette smoke, sitting at the table doing whatever it was they did, and told them the memory, and asked them what it meant.

The man in the wheelchair tightened his brakes, picked up a pencil lying nearby, and began doodling on the edge of the newspaper. He was a lefty, and he drew quite well. My mother swallowed deeply several times. Her eyes flicked from side to side like she was looking for the exit, but then she rallied her inner forces, and began to speak. She told me it was a deep, deep secret that I was never, ever supposed to tell.

A secret, deep and dark! The best kind. I loved secrets. Secrets were a form of currency in our house. They always meant power for the one who held them. They were like dragon's treasure, worth hoarding. And worth revealing, when the time, when the person, when the situation, was right.

She told me she had been married before. My eyes widened. That man was actually my father, but he had been killed when I was a baby. So sad! She talked about it as if it were a very shameful thing, which, I suppose it was, for her, and yet her voice also betrayed a hint of a thrill. She went on to say the man in the wheelchair had adopted me, and that my original birth certificate was locked up in a safe place where no one would ever find it or see it again. I pictured some obscure vault in an anonymous building in a city far away where all the secret birth certificates were locked up.

This was a lot to digest. I went back into my room. Then I came back out. What was my last name? She told me. It was an Italian name. And as the years went by, and I became angrier at their twisted treatment of me, their assaults on my mind and heart, they would blame my temper on my "Italian blood." Not on the fact they were making me crazy. Stuff like this: another Saturday afternoon, and they must have been bored. I was in my room playing veterinarian with my stuffed animals, and hear them frantically calling me. I rush down the hall to the kitchen and there is my step-father with blood coming out of his nose. He says. "Look what your mother did to me! She hit me!"

Well, she also hit me. They both did, so none of this was out of the realm of possibility. But still, I was a bit shocked. Because usually it was just me they hit, not each other. In fact, I had never seen them hit each other, so this was a new twist. In the past, just nasty words flew between them. So, there I am, standing there, pondering all this carefully while hiding my reaction. Being careful and playing it very, very cool, because I knew where their fights led once I walked into the room. They led straight to me. Apparently my mother isn't having enough fun with this, my poker faced non-reaction. So, she reaches over and scoops up a glob of blood onto her finger, and puts her finger in her mouth and eats it.

It's ketchup. Their laughter chased me all the way back to the safety, the sanity of my room.

Until next time, I remain, your friend, Rozenkraai