My sister spends the most amazing amount of time on the phone. The other night Dad summed up all our feelings by answering the phone “Hello, Allison residence. This is Allison’s father speaking. Would you like to speak to Allison’s mother, Allison’s sister, Allison’s cat, or Allison’s dog? No? Oh, here she is, then.”

Sunday was her birthday. That afternoon I overheard her complaining loudly over the phone to one of her friends: “She just doesn’t get it! I mean, I feel like I ought to warn her. He’s such a player, and she has no idea. I swear . . . if I had a cool cape, and could fly . . . I’d make a great superhero. I could go around saving people from their boyfriends.”

“Relationship Woman,” I suggested. Inspired, I addressed her birthday card to Relationship Woman, with a sketch of a girl wearing a purple cape and brandishing a telephone triumphantly. She liked it a lot.

Birthdays in our family are usually enjoyable, but this one went off unusually well. It wasn’t that there weren’t mishaps, but that the mishaps didn’t make people grouchy. After the presents were opened, I went to put some candles on the German chocolate cake I had made. I found some half-burned ones from my last birthday and judged them good enough to use again. “Some of those should only count for half a candle,” Mom whispered as I tried to make them form a circle around the cake. She was right - once I’d got them stuck in, they were pretty stubby looking. And it’s hard to make fourteen anythings into a ring, so I had to cover the puncture wounds in the icing where I had stuck them in the wrong places. Dad was trying to get the camera working, since the shutter has been sticking lately. Mom poured a glass of milk as I got the matches, both of us commenting on the muted X-Files playing in the other room. “It’s an army guy,” I narrated. “Hey, it’s two army guys. There are three army guys.”

“Oh,” said Mom, who had been watching earlier. “I thought he was the one who got, like, fried earlier.”

“Really?” said Allison excitedly, popping into the kitchen. “Who got fried? Can I – “

“Get out of the kitchen!” said Mom, waving the milk jug at her. It’s sort of a tradition that you don’t get to see your birthday cake until it’s all ready. Allison retreated to the dining room. I began lighting the candles. “Oh, we need ice cream,” said Mom, poking around in the freezer. “Here’s some strawberry.” The match was burning down a lot faster than the candles were getting lit. “But I think there’s some vanilla in the other freezer,” she mused.

“Forget about the ice cream,” I said, trying to get all the candles lit before the match burned down to my fingers. “Let’s get this cake on.”

Allison suddenly reappeared from the dining room. “Is he still getting fried? I want to see!”

“Bugger it all,” I shouted, blowing out the match just as the flame was reaching my thumb, “Get out of the kitchen!” Mom began whacking her with the milk jug. Squawking, Allison was chased back to her chair. Eventually Mom fetched her glass of milk again and dimmed the lights, as I stood in the doorway with the flaming cake in my hands. As the tips of the candles got closer and closer to the cake, I decided haste was called for. “Happy birthday to you - ” I began.

“Oh, are we having cake now?” said Allison, falling sideways into her chair.

"Oh,” said Dad, trying to wedge the camera shutter open with a fork.

"Get that stuff off the table, would you?" I said as Mom cleared the wreckage of wrapping paper and cards from Allison’s place. “Happy birthday, dear Allison . . .” We finished the song in great disarray.

"I don’t know what to wish for,” said Allison.

"Hey, cool,” I said. “All the candle flames are leaning into the center of the circle.”

"Whoa,” said Allison, amazed.

"I forgot to sing the first half of that,” said Dad bemusedly.

"You could wish,” said Mom pointedly as the candles burned still lower, “for a cake that’s not covered in wax.”

"You could wish for superpowers and a cool cape,” I suggested. She grinned and blew the candles out, all fourteen at once. We applauded and went to find the ice cream. Somebody said something that reminded Dad of a country song, so he began singing it melodramatically. As Allison started slicing the cake, I began remembering all its flaws. I had used some old walnuts in the icing because we didn’t have pecans, and the egg whites had done odd things to the batter. “It’s not perfect,” I warned them, taking a drink of milk. “It’s pretty good, but it’s not perfect.” This inspired Mom to start singing “Close Enough to Perfect for Me” in her worst Kentucky accent. The fact that both of my parents were simultaneously singing country-western songs was too much for me. I began laughing . . . which was a bad idea, given that I had a mouthful of milk.

I had never choked before, not really. It’s a little scary. I’m told that it’s worse with soda, because it fizzes as it’s filling all your breathing passages, but milk was weird enough. Allison froze as she watched, the knife in her hand poised over the cake. Mom and Dad stopped singing and watched in amazement. Eventually my esophagus remembered what it was supposed to be doing, though, and everything was fine.

We somehow got to talking about a game of mad libs Mom and Dad had played with a trashy romance novel on a car trip years ago, and someone went to get it. The phone rang for Allison at about this point, so she chatted happily to one of her friends while Mom read aloud from the novel. “You wouldn’t believe what my mother’s doing . . . really? Hey Mom, Steven wants to hear.” She handed the phone to Mom, who continued reading.

"Repressia Kumquat looked up at him and nodded scarcely. The whole decathalon seemed crazy. If there was the slightest riboflavin between her going to Snarkville with him and the sacrilege that she wanted to leech the transmission fluid, it was a mystery to her.”

So it was a nice night, all in all. We may be an atypical bunch, but we do have fun in our own way.

May 15
June 13