Rumination Fugue Publication Rumination Fugue Publication | Seite 56

IMAGINE A PICTURE OF YOU,
your brother and your parents are having dinner. It's dinner
time, you could tell from the dim sky, or more specifically, the smell of the kitchen. Proba-
bly you will rush to the kitchen and lean on your mother’s back, asking what’s smelling so
delicious, or even, if it’s me, I’ll stuck my finger in my mother’s fresh dish with meat and
sauce in it, while concealing it behind my back pretending to chat with her. You’ll drag
your father and your brother in the arm, waiting on the table before anything was ever
served. You’ll serve everything you can, as the youngest and the hungriest in the family,
and all your family members will settle down, probably falling over each other to praise
your mother’s dish, especially when your mother’s lemon cake severs as a desert after the
meal. You’ll talk about school, work, and life while keep plugging meat inside your
mouth. Watch out! Your brother may make fun of you. You will all take turns to do the
dishes, it’s like a family duty which everyone obey and never quarrel with each other.
However, each family holds their own situation towards family relationship. For Rose,
she needs to place a cereal box in front of her to block the eye contact between she’s and
her brother’s, and her brother stared back because he has nowhere to put his eye on (Bend-
er 71). Mother serves everything for the family, and that lemon pie, Rose is about to burst
into tears because the sorrow and sadness she senses from the very first bite (Bender 13).
Instead of praising mother, dad makes fun of mother’s “indecent” job, making handcraft.
In the end, women are who must do the dishes. Dad escapes because of his role as the
source of finance, and due to Joseph meticulous, it is better to do without him (Bender 37).
Due to the family environment described above, Rose turns into a sensitive girl with the
capacity of tasting others feeling. Joseph, her brother, turns into a boy who can’t deal with
normal emotions. He transfers into furniture sometimes without premonition.
Rose and Joseph are characters attribute to Amy Bender’s novel The Particular
Sadness of Lemon Cake. The four main characters, Lane, Paul, Rose, and Joseph are
family members depicted in the previous paragraph. When it comes to their mother Lane,
who is both good at cooking and making handcraft furniture, it leads me to build connec-
tions between their capacities and their mother’s trait. This idea brought me to a wider
perspective of the influence of family environments, which construct by parents’ personal-
ities, relationship, behaviors, and attitudes. How they show adolescent’s personalities
reflect their family environments, and how the following generation manifest similar
characteristics as the previous generation.