I’m not good at cutting cake. I never pick the right knife. I grab the one for cheese or steak or bread. This doesn’t mean I don’t want to do it. I always want to hack that first piece.
My father died when I was fourteen, and when I saw his body, I wanted to cut that too.
As I knelt beside the coffin, I regretted not being the kind of girl who carried a pocketknife. In my purse: lipstick, mascara, pressed powder. All that I carried could only conceal. Too bad I hadn’t started plucking my eyebrows yet. With a sharp tweezer, I could’ve carved open an investigation.
Was my father stuffed inside?
In his shiny black box, he didn’t appear to be dead, but he didn’t look alive either. Maybe he’d faked his death with a wax figure, like the ones displayed at Madame Tussaud’s.
My real father was a red-faced man. Sunburnt by light and flushed from physical exertion, his cheeks boiled hot pink to crimson — not that crusty, orange-tinted mortician-made complexion.
Mostly, daddy wore the color of rage, which is every shade of blood unblended, striped and streaking.
Over his dead body, I thought bizarre thoughts. Cake foundation to birthday bundt to frosting to fondant. The fondant got stuck in my head. You could stretch that sugar skin across a dead snake and make it taste like chocolate or vanilla buttercream. Without a blade, who would ever spy the serpent stuffed inside?
But nobody brought a knife to my father’s casket.
There’s a show nowadays, one where people guess whether something is made of cake or not. They slash things open, objects that look nothing like dessert. Someone slices a leather boot or miniature skyscraper or rubber duck. You think the knife will never work, but more often than not, it glides through layers of devil’s food like the smoothest surprise.
I wanted a knife. I wanted to cut the body, mark the man, and know for sure he wasn’t coming back.
My father’s viewing lasted three days. The last morning — a quick farewell before the funeral service. I waved goodbye to a body or a wax figure or a corpse confection. Without a single sliver, I couldn’t prove a thing.
Jen Gilman Porat is a writer whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in Longreads, The Sun’s Readers Write, The Brevity Blog, HuffPost, and elsewhere. Find her on Substack.
Image Credit: Flickr Creative Commons/Meng He
What a powerful journey your memory took me on!
This essay is rich and powerful in such a short amount of space. Thank you.