When I Finally Eat the Cake

Sumitra Singam

After the embryo transfer, Mel and I go to dinner with Aroha. Aroha orders sake. Mel has some. Nurse Annie had said Mel should go home and rest.

Mel is like one of those outdoor standing gas heaters. Rigid and blazing with heat.

I’d said to Mel on our first date—“I don’t want kids.” She’d laughed and said, “Me neither.”

“You’re wound up as tight as a spring, love,” Aroha says to Mel, refilling her sake. Aroha is sturdy and muscular, with a fleshy nose that sits like a sumo wrestler across her face. When she speaks, her vowels flatten into a landscape with no nuance.

Mel sags, puts her face in her hands. “It’s so tough, you know? In the lead-up there were blood tests and ultrasounds every day, and now there will be nothing for ten days. I’m just supposed to wait?”

The waiter asks what we want, and I point to the sashimi.

“Raw fish?” Aroha rolls her eyes at Mel. They’ve known each other since school.

I imagine our future. Tired, sleep-deprived, all my clothes stained with baby sick, smelling of cows. I imagine that I’ve become an ear. Mel has become a huge eye. Her eye will snap shut wetly, and I will sense her desire to keep it closed forever. I will know the effort that it takes, that blindness is not the easy way. My ear, what is now my whole self, will sag with whatever gravity is left holding us to this place. Perhaps she will know this through some trick of the light behind her closed eyelid. Perhaps it is a matter of waiting through the scolding susurrus of wind, listening for the currents within.

The agedashi tofu has left a stain on my white shirt. I wet an edge of my napkin in my glass of water and dab at it. Now there is a transparent patch right over my nipple. I don’t like bras.

Aroha comes home with us after dinner. Mel has made a cake.

Aroha pulls out one pink and one blue candle and puts it on the cake.

“Oh, you darling!” Mel pulls her into a hug.

I don’t want to eat the cake.

Aroha has become a mouth, lips fleshy and bee-stung. Her teeth are yellowed, she has silver fillings in her right lower molars, a fleck of spinach in her upper right canine. Her breath is hot, garlicky. She puts Mel on her spoon and brings her to her mouth. Mel says, “Oh, you darling!” and takes her clothes off.

Aroha laughs, over loud. Crumbs fall like rich soil to the carpet. My plate is on the kitchen bench. The slice is smaller than everyone else’s.

“You need to rest, honey.” Aroha narrows her eyes at me when she says that. “Maybe a nice peppermint tea? Hot water bottle?” Aroha fusses in the kitchen. We don’t have a hot water bottle.

“Come on, let’s get you into bed.” She takes Mel’s hand and leads her upstairs. It takes a long time for Aroha to settle Mel. Then she leaves.

Mel says that she is really in her body. She can feel it opening like a flower. Her hips hurt. She wants a massage.

Poached eggs with hollandaise sauce make Mel cry because of her eggs. She thinks my eggs would have worked better.

When I am an ear, I will birth eggs through my narrow auditory canal, which will swell painfully against my mastoid process, and they will all be frying on top of a hot water bottle.

Aroha comes back with a pink weighted blanket. She tucks Mel into the sofa and puts Great British Bake Off on. She puts the remote next to her arm and brings her a cup of peppermint tea. She kisses her on the forehead.

My eggs won’t stay tucked in under the blanket. They’re hard-boiled and roll easily downhill. Their shells crack like crazy paving, but the insides are immovable. Mel’s huge eye looks at my eggs. “See?” she says. “See what you could have become?”

Mel wonders if she should ring to ask Nurse Annie about the pulling feeling in her groin. It could be a good sign. Aroha says her mother always knew she was pregnant by the pulling in her groin.

The inner canthus of Mel’s eye pulls downward, and it is a good sign. There is a crust of sleep covering a nest of lice-babies. She is happy.

Nurse Annie says she can’t say one way or the other. Mel wonders if the massage was a bad idea.

Mel wants to know why I never ate the cake she made. She says it really hurt her feelings.

Before I was just an ear, I had a mouth as well. I could take all of her in. She tasted sweet, earthy. She filled all the hollow parts of me, anchoring me to her. There was no need for anything else.

She says these things matter. It’s about putting the right energy into the universe. I will have to eat the cake.

Aroha takes Mel to the clinic for the pregnancy test. She says she needs me to stay home, keep the positivity going here. I am going to eat the cake.

When I finally eat the cake, it is carbon dated to two million years ago. I feed it into my ear-self, and the crumbs swell floury and dry, an osteoma of my ear canal. It is vegan, eggless. The cake sounds like a badly remembered song, just out of reach. When I finally eat the cake, I see that it might have been good once, but I was always coming at things too late. I will have no one to talk to about this strange memory of sweetness. When I finally eat the cake, there will be no listening to do, nothing to learn. It will decay in deep time, resolve into amplitude, frequency, wavelength, and vibrate forever against my eardrum.