Americana Stories, The Food Court—Fiction

Make Peace with the Cake, by Olga Zilberbourg

Our Leo was six or seven weeks old when we received advice from fellow Russians, as we came to call ourselves after twenty years in the US. They had two kids in elementary school and when they shared their parenting philosophy, Sioma and I listened.

“We don’t do kids birthday parties,” they said. 

Why not? 

Birthday parties were a giant waste of time, they said. Treated as mandatory by middle-class Bay Area parents, no matter the racial or ethnic background, these utrenniki were all alike: a bouncy house at a playground, pizza, cake. One couldn’t drop the children off but had to hang out and talk to the adults. If you couldn’t sustain a conversation about baseball scores or local politics, forget it. “Remember how it was back home?” the dad asked. “Parents weren’t involved. It didn’t cost anything to have fun. We just played and played, and the food was immaterial.”

Before Leo, I would’ve argued. The food might’ve been immaterial to the dad because, as a young boy, he didn’t have to provide it. Our Jewish grandmothers always made sure there were plenty of good things to eat. But now, I didn’t care to argue about the past. 

Sioma and I took in their wisdom, starry-eyed, trying to imagine our tiny pooper and spitter-upper eating cake at a birthday party.

To be sure, Leo wasn’t himself in any rush to enter the circuit. When his first birthday came, he pushed at a cupcake as though it was a foundational threat to his life, and munched on grape halves. At his second birthday, he decided that his cake was treasure and guarded against all enemy approaches to it. We found no way to convince him that not only was it food, but also a food meant to be shared. 

Then the pandemic happened. Quarantine. Leo started preschool late, and for two years, there was barely any talk about socializing outside of school. We filled the weekends with trips to the park, the ocean, the zoo. Leo fell in love with a flamboyance of flamingos and once spent forty minutes watching them stand around while he munched on his grapes and dry toast. One thing about Leo, he stayed true to himself; with him, it was grapes once, grapes forever.

In his third and final year of preschool, birthday party invitations started coming every two weeks. He had twenty-four classmates, so that made a certain sense. Sioma and I, on the other hand, didn’t feel like celebrating much. Earlier that year, the country where we’d grown up attacked its neighbor. It turned out that most of our friends weren’t actually from Russia, but from Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, and one family was Korean by way of Kazakhstan and Crimea. We were from Russia. It made Sioma feel guilty by association. 

I didn’t know what I felt, besides tired—and angry. 

One day, we got an invitation to a birthday party by those same friends who didn’t believe in birthday parties. I accepted on our behalf and yelled Sioma into going. It was a pool-side shashliki, hosted in their housing development in Cupertino. The parents had actually gotten divorced, and the dad had moved out, but here he was, getting drunk at the grill. Their preteens turned the skewers into rapiers. The adults were busy sipping nice Mendocino vintages. The mom was telling us about her family’s roots in Belarus. I enjoyed listening to her talk while arguing bitterly in my mind. Of course, none of our Jewish grandparents were from Russia proper. Most of our families had come to Russia from the shtetls in the Pale, and what of it? Should we erase the memories of our childhoods in Russia while we were in the business of revising our past? My support for Ukraine was unconditional, regardless.

Soon, Leo reported that there was meat sloshing in the pool drains. He showed us a brown clump as proof—worrying indeed—then took off his floaties and went to count the tiles on the patio. Instead of cake, the mom offered cream puffs made of filo dough made from a recipe she found in some Russian-language Jewish cookbook. It’s creative, I told Sioma. He began to develop an argument that certain forms of dessert were objectively better than others. Sioma certainly preferred cake to grapes and filo dough. 

“So do I,” Leo said, grown-up-like. “I want grapes and cake.”

Before leaving, we stuffed twenty-dollar bills into the jar designated “Drones for Ukraine” and downed vodka shots with words said to hasten Ukrainian victory.
~

Later that night, Sioma suddenly started crying. He lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, and when I turned to kiss him goodnight, his cheek was wet.

“What’s up?” I asked, scared by his loss of control, and trying not to show it.

“Leo is such a beautiful kid,” he said.

“Shoo. He’s the ugliest little toad. How dare you hex him.”

“I can’t imagine ever leaving him. This dad? He’s talking about moving to Thailand now that he’s single again. But he isn’t single, you know?”

“The mom would be thrilled,” I said. “He was on her turf through the whole quarantine, pushing the kids to go from one Zoom extracurricular to another until they got nose bleeds, literally, she says.”

“And now that the pandemic is over, he’s like I’m outta here?” Sioma said. “I don’t get it.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Men.”

Sioma turned toward me. The nightlight was still on, and the enlarged irises of his eyes looked like tender chamomile hearts. “I want you to know that I see all that you’re doing.”

“What am I doing?”

“You know, cooking, cleaning. Looking ahead. You’ve probably already picked out the cake for Leo’s birthday party.”

It was, indeed, our turn to plan a birthday party. I’d already booked the playground and the bouncy house for the next month and was waiting for Sioma to look over the invitation before we sent it out to a few dozen preschool families. 

I nodded, but before I could explain, Sioma said, “We should, actually, say no to the birthday parties. Do you know that this dad also showed me a gun he bought? He says Democrats are ruining this country and that they are stoking racial unrest. He’s afraid his new brown neighbors are plotting to kill him.”

“Wait, there was a gun at this birthday party? And you didn’t leave? Or tell me about it?”

“I mean, it’s not like he was going to fire it. I’m just saying, people like him are a bad example. We should focus on teaching Leo the values that we want him to have. We’re wasting so much time with these birthday parties. His life will be richer with the flamingos.”

Now I started crying. Sioma asked, What? What? He’d looked into my eyes and told me he saw me, but what he saw was a familiar face that brought him comfort. He had no idea what I was thinking. But if he didn’t understand what he had seen, explaining wouldn’t do any good. By this point in our marriage, I’d had enough experience to know I needed rest more than a fight. I felt scared and alone, and still, it was more important to sleep.

I let my tears run dry and told Sioma I’d already spent a lot of money on deposits. He let it go at that. I lay on my side and calmed myself with the memories of my own favorite birthday party. I was eight years old. My grandmother had spent the day in the kitchen. She taught me how to use water glasses as cookie cutters and let me taste the buttery dough. The guests arrived toward evening, and we played games and all that, but what I still remembered from that day was the taste of the cookies. 

There was no going back to that kitchen, though, and no predicting what, to Leo, would feel as special, as precious, about his birthday. I couldn’t protect him from the pandemic. I couldn’t stop a dictator from waging war. I couldn’t even stop a man from brandishing a gun at his son’s birthday party. Cake was a safe bet. And a bouncy house.

~~~