If everything in this world rings like soft (sometimes loud) music,

If all the forks and spoons, all the rooms, all the objects you touch seem to sing the chorus,

If you’ve ever glanced at a chair and swore you saw the ghost of every person who sat, cried, laughed, or professed their love on its seat, 

If you’ve ever watched an egg fold into flour, disappear so completely into the dough, and thought, maybe it’s true, maybe it’s all magic, 

then you need to read Aimee Bender’s The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake.

***

In The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, Aimee Bender invites us into a world where the magic of the everyday and the indispensability of our emotions pulse through everything. The novel begins when Rose Edelstein, the story’s narrator, realizes she can taste emotions in food on her ninth birthday. The first moment: eating a bite of homemade lemon cake with chocolate icing and tasting the hollow sadness of her mother within it:

“I could absolutely taste the chocolate, but in drifts and traces, in an unfurling, or an opening, it seemed that my mouth was also filling with the taste of smallness, the sensation of shrinking, of upset, tasting a crowded sense of her thinking, a spiral…”

This moment feels so true to me, like Bender is asking me to look, then look again at the ways others are experiencing the world around me. To care about it all. 

I think of a:

SPRINKLE SANDWICH

In kindergarten, my mother used to pack me peanut butter sandwiches covered in colorful sprinkles that stained the white bread in bright spots—sometimes red, sometimes green. When she packed me a green sprinkled sandwich, all the other children at school called me a mold eater. The scene is fuzzy in my mind, not as full and complete as recent memories, but I can still feel its lingering suffocation. I can guess at the details. The children may have twisted their faces and stuck their tongues out. The teacher may have eyed my food from the corner of the cafeteria, whispered something to a colleague. 

I am certain this is the first time I remember feeling shame—that deep hiding feeling that makes all my body want to close its eyes. I hated that feeling and its connection to my family. I knew when my mother sprinkled those green sugar pellets on bread, she was thinking nothing but love, love, love. She was also probably thinking you’re so cute I want to squish you! It was her favorite thing to tell me and my brother as children (and now), because she had all this motherly love that needed to go somewhere, needed to be sprinkled on a sandwich or forced into a too-tight hug. Even as a kindergartener, I understood this and I did not tell her to stop making those sandwiches. 

To cope with the shame, I ate with the sandwich half hidden in my lunchbox, sneaking my face into the portal for a bite, then another bite. 

***

There is a moment in Bender’s novel when Rose confesses her empathetic tasting powers to her older brother Joseph’s best friend, George. 

George is an inquisitive and caring friend who asks lots of questions of those in his life, but not in a way that undermines their truth and experience, just as a way to show he wants to know them. He really wants to know. When Rose says “food tastes funny,” George grabs a pen and follows her into the kitchen where he writes down her observations of each food in the family fridge. Rose tastes “acidic resentment in the grape jelly,” and George listens to her explanation and says, “so every food has a feeling.” He believes her. 

“I loved George in part because he believed me; because if I stood in a cold, plain white room and yelled FIRE, he would walk over and ask me why.”

We could use more people in our lives like George, who, even in our most incomprehensible states, in the depths of our human uneasiness, will walk over to us, listen without judgment, and ask why? I am grateful to have such people in my life. 

And so, I remember: 

AVOCADO TOAST

Another piece of green bread. This one: much more expensive, toasted, covered in smashed avocado, fresh salsa, and scrambled eggs. The eggs were supposed to be the first animal product I consumed after almost two years of being vegan, after I’d been told by doctors I needed to eat more for health reasons. More jams and jellies, the papers they gave me said, more fatty foods. More animal things, I thought. Like eggs. 

It was freshman year of college and I invited my mother to come and watch me eat an egg. I wanted it to be a ritual of sorts, a ceremony of breaking my dietary restriction, because if I treated it like something sacred, then maybe I could make this shift to consuming animal products again with ease, with grace. Just an easy swallow. Down, down, down. 

We met at a coffee shop and I ordered and the food arrived on a clean white plate and I sat across from my mother at a table, staring down. I stared down at the egg and thought about its creator, its mother and its mother’s mother and my mother. And all the mothers. 

I cried. I could not eat the egg. I cried and forced a bite of it into my mouth, promptly spit it out on a napkin (the texture, the texture, the strings and life of it). My mother looked at me, not understanding at all, but also not yelling, not telling me to eat the expensive egg toast. 

We got in her car and she drove me home.

***

Another important thread of Bender’s novel is the brother-sister relationship between Joseph and Rose. As most siblings do, these two have a way of understanding each other, a way that is outside the abilities of their parents. That deep sibling knowing. 

Late in the novel, there is a scene when Rose visits Joseph in the hospital. The siblings are both much older, and their parents do not know what is happening with Joseph; it is only Rose who understands. Laying on the hospital bed, Joseph grabs her hand.

“It was the first time I could ever remember him holding my hand, and he held onto it with real focus, with fingers gripping. … He held on tight, and as we spoke, his voice dropped low, to a whisper. It was the kind of conversation you could only hold in whispers. You’re the only one who knows, he said.” 

I long for a slurp of a:

SOUR SLUSHIE

The ones my brother and I got at gas stations for long car rides when we were children. They started like mismatched rainbows frozen in plastic cups, but with each sip and slurp and swirl of the straw, they merged into one unrecognizable color.

On those long drives, we used to take a slurp every time we passed a radio tower or substation. We pretended like our sipping kept the world powered. Maybe we were inspired by the neon nuclear colors, the highlighter brightness of those drinks, and we could only think of power. Maybe it had nothing to do with the color and everything to do with the sour of it, the way it forced our mouths to pucker.

Now, my brother and I are grown. We both moved from our hometown last year to attend graduate school and returned in December to spend a week with our family. On a warm winter day, we walked from our childhood home into town. 

Along the way, my brother pointed out The Dollar General on Main Street and I removed two dimes hidden in my coat pocket. I’ve only got twenty cents, I said. We should see if we can buy something with it. I believed we could, but my brother did not. He told me to check my coat pocket again. He’d shoved two dollars from his wallet in there. So, we bought a pack of Sour Patch Kids and ate them on our walk back home, skipping the whole way and talking about serious things, real things. We talked about our friends and the still new grief of losing Grandpa and the strangeness of living so far from home and the uneasiness of accepting we’re both adults and the weird feeling of being on the edge of telling it all, everything to everyone, not holding back anymore, being the most honest versions of ourselves. Mouths puckering the whole time. 

***

Each scene in Bender’s novel breathes like a memory I forgot, like something that has always lived in me. But this is especially true of one scene. 

In the scene, a young Rose walks across the street holding George’s hand. Rose’s mother has told her to always hold someone’s hand when crossing a street; it is safer this way. And so, they cross the street, palms clasped, only letting go once the crossing is complete. At this moment Rose wishes, in all her childhood crush love, “that the whole world was a street.”

I have always believed this scene reveals the source of Rose’s magic tastebuds. It’s all in the hands. Whoever used their hands to do the mixing, frying, and egg cracking will also be the one leaving traces of emotion behind for Rose to taste. 

It makes sense, the dripping weight hands carry. After all, they are what hold our current attention, carrying it through, action by action, touch by touch, into the rest of the world.

Food, made by another person, is an offering of safety. A hand holding, in a way. A nourishing hug in a big cooked bite. 

Like a forkful of:

FETTUCCINE NOODLES

My partner at the time was teaching me how to make pasta. He formed a mound of flour into a nest on the table he’d cleaned (probably) thirty times. He cracked an egg into the nest and pulled it through until it disappeared, until the egg was in every part of the dough. Then, he rolled the dough into a thin layer and said, you’re supposed to be able to read a newspaper through it. 

This whole process reminded me of love. How you can see the egg, you can meet the person, and then suddenly, you don’t see the egg, because it’s in every part of the dough, every part of your day, your thoughts, your stretch of life, your past, present, and future. All of it a secret egg.

Later, you might break up and it might take a while to sort that egg out. It’s just so squished in there, so much a part of everything else, but it will rub out, eventually, all those yolky strands of your past. And it might make you cry. No. It will make you cry. It will make you remember what it was like to be a child on the side of the road with a bloody gash. A gash that closes, runs dry into a scab. 

The scab seems like it will last forever, but one day, you reach down to pick it and feel skin again.