Stones for Bread

by Parrish, Christa

  ON BAKING DAY

  Remove the dough from the refrigerator about 2 or 3 hours before you plan to bake. Gently transfer it to a lightly floured work surface, taking care to degas it as little as possible. To form a boule, hold the dough in your hands and sprinkle with more flour so it doesn’t stick to your hands. Stretch the surface of the dough around to the bottom on all four sides, rotating it as you go. When it’s correctly shaped, the ball will be smooth and cohesive. This should take less than a minute to accomplish. Generously sprinkle cornmeal on a pizza peel or sheet of parchment paper. Lightly coat the plastic wrap with olive oil or nonstick cooking spray, loosely cover the dough, and proof at room temperature for about 2 hours, until increased to one and a half times its original size.

  About 45 minutes before baking, preheat the oven to 550 degrees Fahrenheit or as high as it will go. On the lower shelf, put the empty broiler pan. Position the pizza stone on the shelf above.

  Just prior to baking, score the dough ½ inch deep with a serrated knife or razor. Transfer the dough to the oven, pour 1 cup of hot water into the steam pan, then lower the oven temperature to 450 degrees Fahrenheit.

  Bake for 25 to 35 minutes, until the crust is a rich golden brown, the loaf sounds hollow when thumped, and the internal temperature registers about 200 degrees Fahrenheit in the center, using a baking thermometer. For a crisper crust, turn off the oven and leave the bread in for another 5 minutes before removing.

  Cool the bread for at least 45 minutes before slicing or serving.

  I open the back door for the third time in fifteen minutes. My deliveryman hasn’t come and I need the fresh flour to begin tomorrow’s dough. Flour is temperamental—the fatty acids in the wheat germ reacting with the air the moment it is ground—and it eventually becomes rancid. This cycle takes up to nine months, but freshness matters to me. I won’t use anything older than two weeks from mill to loaf.

  Good bread, like wine, has depth. Subtle layers of flavor emerge by the use of different flours, by the length of the rise, the smallest ratio change of basic ingredients. I always make everyone taste. “Notice the nuttiness of this one,” I say, chewing slowly.

  “Mm, yeah, nutty,” Gretchen says, laughing. “Totally nutty.”

  I savor the differences, even if no one else can.

  “If I didn’t know you better, I’d think you had a boyfriend.” Gretchen. She reties her apron and leans against the counter. Scratches a bit of dried dough off the edge with her purple thumbnail.

  “Brent’s late.”

  “He’ll be here. He always is.”

  “He should have been here an hour ago.”

  “Liesl, chill. And have some caffeine.” Gretchen hands me a Coke. “I’ll call the Coop, okay?”

  The Coop—that’s what the locals call the natural food co-op. I nod. The pain in my head reverberates as Tee clatters around the kitchen, still muttering in Ukrainian. Contrary to his promise to reposition the pot exactly as Tee left it, Zave turned it upside down and marched his fingerprints around the otherwise shiny stainless steel. “You have to instigate?” I said.

  “She has to lighten up. It’s not good for her health, to be so serious.”

  “You better watch out. It might not be good for yours when she gets done with you.”

  The two hours she and Xavier worked together this morning were nothing short of torture. She threw sour glances at him and banged things. And after he pinched some freshly grated mozzarella from the plate she left at her workstation, she marched across the room and rapped his knuckles with a wooden spoon. He grinned and swiped some more.

  After Zave leaves, she says she will buy a padlock for her cookware if that man doesn’t stop touching it.

  “But I use them too, Tee.”

  “You are the boss,” she says. “He is a pig.”

  The woman holds grudges.

  I hear the front door open and Gretchen swings back through the kitchen. “Someone for you.”

  “Hello?” I call, coming into the bakery. A man stands near the counter, a sack on his broad shoulder, the side of his head white with residue from a tiny slit in the paper. More flour flakes onto the cash register. I brush it off.

  “Are you Liesl?”

  “Yes?”

  “Delivery. From the Coop.”

  “I gathered that. Where’s Brent?”

  “Who?”

  “Brent. He usually brings my flour.”

  “I can’t say. It’s just me today.”

  The man belongs in Vermont, with his curly copper hair and equally unruly beard. He conjures images of lumberjacks, without the plaid shirt, or perhaps a long-retired linebacker, body still thick but softening with age. His work boots scuff my wide-plank pine floor.

  My headache grows.

  “You need to go around back and unload there,” I tell him. “I’ll meet you at the door.”

  “No problem.”

  “Gretchen,” I shout, stumbling back into the kitchen. “Where’s that Advil you offered me earlier?”

  “Right here,” she says, rattling the bottle.

  “I need some.”

  She uses her talented thumbnail again, this time to pop the lid off the painkiller. Her polish, I see now, is glittery. She shakes a couple pills into my hand; they’re the same color as the delivery guy’s hair.

  “He tracked flour and dirt all over the café,” I mumble.

  “I’ll take care of it.”

  A horn honks. The man drives a small box truck, dirty white with the hint of a logo peeking through the paint someone used to cover it over. Backs to the door and parks, engine idling. I shout at him to turn the truck off. I don’t want the fumes in my kitchen.

  He calls out the window, “What?” and I make gestures with my words now, turning my wrist as if I clutched a key and then running my hand across my throat. He shuts off the engine and swings the driver’s side door open. “I couldn’t hear you. What did you say?”

  “I said I didn’t want your carbon emissions in my bread.”

  “Oh. Sorry.” He looks genuinely chagrined.

  “It’s fine. Let’s just get the flour.”

  But the guy is a chatty one, introducing himself as Seamus and saying he’s only been living in Billingston for a month. This is his first day delivering for the co-op, though he’s had other jobs with other businesses. “Liesl, that’s not a name you hear too often.”

  “I guess not.” I direct him to put the bags on the table. I’ve yet to clean the old flour from the bins; it will be bagged and donated with today’s leftover bread.

  “Only time I’ve ever heard it was in The Sound of Music. Are you German?”

  “It’s Austrian.”

  “You’re Austrian?”

  “No. The Sound of Music takes place in Austria.”

  “Oh. Sure. Well, my daughter couldn’t remember your name. She called you the bread lady.”

  Confused, I shake my head. The slight movement vibrates the head pain around my skull and down into my face. “Your daughter?”

  “Oh, she was here yesterday with her class. Cecelia.”

  I wriggle my jaw from side to side. My ear pops. “She was very sweet.”

  “She said you were really nice to her. And your bread wasn’t too bad either.”

  “Not bad?”

  “I had some this morning for breakfast. Peanut butter and fried egg sandwich. I have to admit, I’ve never had chocolate bread before. I thought it would be sugary, but it wasn’t.”

  “You ate peanut butter and eggs on my bread?”

  “Yeah. We usually do Friehoffer’s, but it wasn’t bad.”

  “Liesl,” Gretchen warns. It’s only bread, her look says.

  Only bread. And not only bread, all at the same time. “If thou tastest a crust of bread, thou tastest all the stars and all the heavens,” Robert Browning wrote. That’s how I feel. Others, I need to remember, gunk it up with pulverized peanuts and unfertilized chickens.

  Gretchen turns to Seamu
s. “Thanks so much for bringing this over.”

  “Yeah, no problem. That’s my job.” He peers at me, scratches his thick beard. “Are you okay?”

  “Yes. Just a headache. I didn’t eat enough today.”

  “Okay, well. You should do that. Eat more, I mean. It’s important.”

  I give an exaggerated nod. Exhale. “You’re absolutely right. Thank you. We’ll see you next Friday.”

  He squints at me, cheeks twitching. “Good, okay then. Have a nice week.” His truck pulls away from the back door and out the driveway. Through the window at the front of the building I see him disappear down the street. I groan instead of saying what I’d like to say, which would not only be rude but breaking more than one commandment.

  Tee drops a pot lid, grunts something unintelligible, and rummages through the refrigerator. “All cheese is gone. That man ate it. I know he did to spite me. I spit on him.”

  Gretchen looks at me, hides a smile against her shoulder. “I can run to the Coop.”

  “No, let me. I need some air,” I say. “And I want to find out when Brent’s coming back.”

  Three

  We vacation each year, somewhere small and coastal and boring. This year it’s Maine, a ten-hour drive and a rented cottage on a bluff overlooking the sea. Little for me to do but toss rocks into the ocean and poke yellow-green seaweed with dead sticks. I wish we can visit somewhere exciting, like Disney World or the Grand Canyon. Or even Lake George, where the neighbors go every year, coming home with T-shirts and taffy and sunburns, and already-broken prizes from the boardwalk arcade.

  The water is too cold to swim. I wear my suit anyway, sand creeping into it while I make castles; eventually I run home to bathe and change because it’s like wriggling on sandpaper.

  I wash and find my parents on the deck, sitting close, chairs touching, arms touching, maybe silent for hours, maybe silent only now that I’ve come. They soak one another in. I feel like an outsider, trapped in the intensity radiating from them, until my father makes room for me on his lap. He props his legs on the splintery gray railing. I rest my feet on his, curling my toes over his own, his nails scratching my skin. He kisses my hair. Mother offers me a sip of her wine, liquid jelly in a squat glass. Nur einen kleinen Schluck! She rarely speaks German in the home if Oma isn’t visiting, and never to me. I feel giddy and older than eight, and try not to pucker after I gulp down a sharp mouthful of purple. The coughing comes anyway, and my parents laugh. Sie glaubt, sie ist ein Fisch!

  Invariably, they tell me—again—how they met. More for them than for me.

  I wish I can say it’s in some tiny Parisian café or a neighborhood bakery in Brooklyn with the most perfect Jewish rye. But they meet in an appliance store. My father works there, twenty years old and earning money for city college. He and the other young salesmen wager to see who can get customers to walk out with items they never intended to buy. My father’s item this day is an electric fondue pot. The customer is my mother.

  Ice to Eskimos, boys. Ice to Eskimos, he says.

  She comes in for vacuum cleaner bags and leaves with only that. He loses two dollars to the guys but manages to get her phone number, which he feels is more than a fair trade.

  They marry three months later.

  I don’t understand them. Even as a child I see how different they are. Perhaps their unrequited passions glue them together, the daily failure to live lives other than ordinary. My mother puts aside her passion for baking to work as an elementary school secretary because we need the money. She buys cheap blenders and toasters from garage sales for my father to deconstruct in the basement. She always has dough crusted in her engagement ring. My father, a lunch meat deliveryman, works thirteen-hour days bringing black forest ham and logs of salami to grocery stores. A proprietor of three failed businesses. He’s a tinkerer, a connoisseur of spare parts. He builds metal whirlygig sculptures in the garden, much to the complaint of the families on our street.

  They live on crusts of what may have been.

  I’m hungry, I say.

  Let’s go out. It’s vacation, my father says. None of us like seafood so we find a near-empty Italian place, and when the hostess asks, Booth or table? my mother nudges me to answer and I pick the booth. My parents sit across from one another and I’m next to my mother, against the window, my bare legs sticking to the red vinyl. The air conditioner blows above my head, and I try to rub the gooseflesh from my arms. We order, and the waitress brings our salads and drinks—I have ginger ale, a rare treat—and a basket of bread.

  We all snatch a slice. The crust is thin and flaky, the crumb a blinding white pillow. My mother nibbles a corner and places the remainder on her saucer. My father finishes the first piece and takes a second, peels the foil off a little plastic pot of margarine. Have you tasted this? he says. It’s just like yours.

  My mother’s face doesn’t change.

  The waitress brings our food, and in the shuffle of dishes I break the corner off my bread and sneak it into my mouth, a puff of warm, moist cotton ball. Tasteless, like the time I licked my fingers after sticking them into a torn bag of bleached all-purpose flour at the grocery store.

  Beneath the table, I reach out and rest my hand on my mother’s thigh. She doesn’t respond and I think I’ve made a mistake. My fingers tremble. I begin to pull my hand away, wiggle my tongue around my closed mouth to work up enough saliva to excuse myself to the restroom, but as soon as my lips part my mother blankets my hand with her own.

  My father never notices we don’t finish our bread.

  On the last Sunday of every month, Wild Rise offers sanctuary.

  I’d been open nearly two years when the pastor of the community church on the outskirts of town called, one of three churches collecting my leftover bread. He asked if I’d be interested in hosting the fellowship meal, and his question captured my undernourished spirit, famished for connection in ways the rest of me hadn’t realized. Or ignored. Yes, it said, but my flesh wanted no part of it. Sunday was my only day off, and I told him so.

  “We’ll make it easy for you,” Ryan said. “We’ll open, close, clean, and provide the food. You don’t even need to be there. We’d just like to use your space.”

  “Who said no already?”

  “I haven’t asked anyone else.”

  “Fine, but you can’t use the kitchen.”

  “Not even the sinks?”

  I sighed. “Only the sinks.”

  Ryan calls these Sundays Sanctus dies Solis—sacred Sunday. Bread is passed and broken. Simple foods are served. There’s a blessing and a five-minute message, but mostly people talk to one another, sharing life in groups of three and four around the tables. And in a year it has grown from a dozen members of his own congregation to sixty people each week. Some come from area churches, some make the trip from an hour away or more. Some are tourists leisurely strolling the sidewalks of Billingston who walk into Wild Rise expecting to order lunch and instead find the hospitality of strangers. Some are people of the community—curious, seeking, occasionally antagonistic—all handled with grace, their questions welcome. And some come only for the free meal.

  I’m there too.

  I tell myself it’s because it’s the bakehouse, and no one but Xavier and I are allowed in there alone. Half-truths are easy, but they’re always only half. Eventually the other side bobs to the surface and demands attention.

  The room fills quickly. I nod to Ryan as he shakes hands and welcomes each person who comes through the door. He smiles and waves me over, but I hover near the counter, watching plates fill with fruit salad and triangles of turkey and ham sandwiches, today’s offerings. In the center of each table a loaf of my bread—extra from yesterday—has been placed.

  I lean into the kitchen door; it opens for me, accepting me into the solitude of the back room. More self-imposed isolation. I’ve been doing it since I was twelve; after twenty-one years it’s my body’s natural response, those neural pathways firmly established, and I
tell myself I can’t expect to act differently.

  I’ve only been navigating this faith thing slightly longer than I’ve been running Wild Rise, and I’m much, much better at bread. But these Sundays make me hungry for more.

  Monday through Saturday I have no time to be empty. From the moment I wake in the still-dark early hours to the moment I fall asleep each night, my hands stay busy, my mind churns with business and baking, and if a wisp of loneliness somehow manages to invade my day, I brush it away with a wave, like smoke. Like flour dust. The first three Sundays of the month are not much more difficult. I usually set my alarm with every intention of making it to church. Sometimes I do, but mostly I toss restlessly between sleep and excuses until noon. I get up, eat, run errands, and catch a sermon or two on the radio while I prep the next day’s dough. It’s not enough. I know it’s not enough. But I can’t seem to do differently. And during Sanctus dies Solis, that still-undernourished part of me cries out, unable to be ignored. I promise myself I’ll get to services or open my Bible. The conviction never lasts past Monday morning, though, once the hustle becomes bustle and I can feed that emptiness with tasks galore.

  For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.

  Thirsty, I drink a glass of cool water in long, loud gulps, counting how many it takes to finish. Six swallows, or seven, if I count the residual moisture my throat instinctively pulls from my mouth at the end. Then I nab one of Tee’s tomatoes and eat it like an apple. I’ll have to replace it before tomorrow, and even then, she’ll somehow know it’s not the same one she bought, even if I bury it under the nineteen other ones in the bag. Seeds drip over my fingers; as I rinse them, I hear Ryan’s voice. I stand by the door, shoulder propping it open enough for me to understand his words. He speaks on community, on the inherent need humans have because we are created in the image of the Godhead to be in close fellowship with one another. Without it, we shrivel. Without it, we deny who He made us to be. “And even if you think you don’t need it,” he says, “you do. Sorry, folks. No one can go it alone and experience the fullness He has for them.”