Birthday Cake
I recently attended a writing prompt workshop in Nahant. Here is one of my responses to the prompt: What was the greatest challenge of your life so far? This was what I ended up with (after editing and rewriting).
“Birthday Cake”
It was supposed to be a great day to celebrate. I faced the mountain. Not climbing it—smelling it.
I wheezed any time the television panned over daisies. Allergies hit me from May to December any time I cracked a window or went outside my six-story condo nestled in the Fenway. My wife wanted me to meet her parents in their country home, up in the mountains, in early June, the worst time when the wildflowers bloom.
I sneezed. Yes, dear. Let’s go.
We bought a cake and drove up north on the interstate, the car’s fan blowing on recycling, my eyes watering in anticipation of bobcats brushing against asters, bellflowers growing in fields of green, beavers and termites felling trees and biding their time near bearded beggarticks, and, of course, my throat seizing. Did I bring my EpiPen? Another day of sun, my app forecasted, which in the late spring was like the recurring nightmare in which I wake up on a horse farm in a bale of hay. Pollen floats and covers the sky like snow or swarms of locusts and eventually blocks the sun, and my body breaks out in hives as my heart rate slows to a couple of beats per minute.
Couldn’t we have met back in the city? I’ve taken all the pills, The Claritin, Aleve, I even rubbed myself with calamine. I drew up an oatmeal bath with a touch of molasses, sugar, and maple syrup.
Oh my, this is the exit. Only twenty minutes away. I’m excited. My nose drizzled as I saw black-eyed Susans sprouting along the side of the highway.
We’re now here. What? There? Where? My car careened into a ditch. My wife called it their driveway, but I saw no house. They didn’t actually live right off the road. I crane my neck. We had to hike up to that ledge, where I saw no house. I was assured it was there above the shelf, across a stream, and over the ridge yonder.
We set off.
My muscles flexed on the trail. The hundreds of little rocks stuck out of the mud, providing obstacles as I repeatedly tripped forward uphill. My wife stood in a sundress above me at the top of the ledge, her well-done-steak-colored hair sprayed into a brick unmoved by the swirling winds of mites, allergens, and microspores.
How did you get up there already? I misstepped into a thorn. My calf sliced. Had someone said thorns? I’m allergic to them. “For fuck’s sake!” I screamed and retreated down to our blue sedan. The hundreds of rocks I’d tripped up on I now fell over, churning up a bit of a mudslide as I rolled in a ball to the sedan with the broken taillight on the rear right side.
If these people want to see me, if they truly will accept me, they can meet me here. But when my wife came down, her eyelids half closed and she sucked in her lips.
“How are you so damaged?” Michelle asked.
“I’m just applying some first aid,” I said, rubbing the white hydrocortisone cream into my calf. “I’ll try again.”
I looked at Michelle, who was no longer beside me but had suddenly reappeared on the ledge. How did she do that? She was wearing a brown belt. Had she left our condo wearing one?
Michelle hands went to her hips. She was in an orange tank top, camouflage pants, and that belt.
Did she have a twin? A time machine? There was something about her I didn’t know. Why was I hiking up this mountain with my collection of allergies, burning my eyes into allergic blindness? How important was this gathering?
My mom had once given me the advice, “You should marry a city girl, or at least someone from the suburbs who grew up with a car garage. One or two is fine. Three’s too many, as a child who doesn’t know to brush off a foot of snow, scrape the ice underneath, and fruitlessly blow hot air into a frozen keylock isn’t like us. But someone with a barn or a tractor isn’t someone you can relate to.” Her words etched in my mind as she lay in the hospital on her deathbed, infected from sepsis she’d received from a paper cut. I’d promised her, but Mom recovered. She no longer called me and the Tractor Girl, even on my birthday.
“Tractor?” Michelle repeated. Was I talking aloud? How much of my diatribe did she hear?
First of all, we were married. Secondly, why had I waited so long to meet Michelle’s parents? What had I missed? Was I alive at my half-Portuguese and half-country wedding when Michelle’s parents never showed up?
“They don’t do well driving on 128,” Michelle had said.
“It’s just a straight shot down 93, and then Storrow Drive,” I had responded.
“They are not for city expressways, and their family car is a dump truck.”
Am I thinking aloud again? I thought.
“Yes, you are,” Michelle said. “And the dump truck has all sorts of space for removable seats. When I moved into college, they brought my closets and dressers all assembled. They once took the town to Tanglewood.”
I scratched. Was it the air or the mosquitoes pricking my head, my arm, my legs, and through my four layers of clothing around my midsection? I scratched again.
“We have a tractor that could come down and get you,” Michelle said. “We reserve it for the children.”
“Yes, that would be quite nice.”
The tractor ride typically took only eight minutes each way on the fire road curving their property. Still, a tire needed to be inflated, a belt needed to be replaced, and finally that first tire needed to be patched and re-inflated. That wasn’t my fault. An hour and eleven minutes later, I stood crying atop the ledge, facing a rickety rope suspension bridge across a fifteen-foot wide stream, followed by a rope swing to pass over yonder ridge.
Also, it wasn’t my fault that the ice cream cake we had bought had fallen and melted.
Happy birthday—me.
