The Birthday Party
Poor old Mrs. Peters, I thought,
smiling perfunctorily as I strapped on a ridiculous cone-shaped party hat and
moved to the kitchen in the little suburban house. These
hats are basically festive dunce-caps.
I was always prone to epiphanies, so long as they were
self-deprecating. But poor old Mrs.
Peters was wearing one of these stupid hats too, and I didn’t want to seem
rude. After all, it was her
birthday.
Now, you
may very well wonder why a fifty year old woman was throwing herself a birthday
party. That very question was one of the
three that popped into my head after I received the invitation. One of the others was: Why invite me? I didn’t know Mrs. Peters very well. I later learned that Mrs. Peters invited all
her neighbors.; I was just the only one to actually attend. The low turnout was related to my other
question: Why throw a birthday party at
noon on Super Bowl Sunday? I have yet to
get a definitive answer to this question.
But nevertheless, there I was, sitting across the table from Mrs.
Peters, sipping from a glass of fresh lemonade, trying to overlook the thinly
veiled sadness lining her face.
Mrs. Peters
had no family, unless you count Mr. Fuzzykins, her hairless Siamese cat (which
I don’t). All skin and claws, Mr.
Fuzzykins begged (i.e. scratched hashtags into my leg) for some of the cake on
the table, a two-layer chocolate disk with a wholly irresponsible number of
candles stuck in it. “That’s a lovely
cake,” I said. Mrs. Peters began to
sob. This carried on for a few minutes,
during which Mr. Fuzzykins chewed through my shoelaces in three places. When Mrs. Peters calmed down, she explained:
“I’m
sorry. I just remembered something from
when I was a little girl. My parents
never had much, and I’d never get birthday presents. But every year my mother would bake me a
flourless cake.”
“Those are
very tough to make,” I said.
“No, she
just didn’t put in any flour. It tasted
awful, but I was always grateful for the thought. When I was ten or so, my father got a better
job, and I started getting real cakes for my birthday. I just remembered, at my first real birthday
party, there was a cake. Small, nothing
special, but to me it was the most beautiful cake in the world and a sign of
the great things that were happening for our family. I promised myself, when I grew up, I was
going to have two beautiful cakes for all my birthdays.”
Mrs. Peters
stood up, grabbed a plate from a cupboard and rummaged through a drawer,
eventually emerging with a large knife.
She returned to the cake, removed the top level and put it on another
plate. She beamed proudly at the
dishes. “Now how about that?” she asked.
“Mrs.
Peters,” I sighed:
“You can’t
halve your cake and deem it two.”
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