“Gretchen will,” I say.
“I send her to the store.”
“You can’t just send my only waitress out on errands. And without asking?”
“She back before all the people come for the lunchtime.”
“That’s not the point.”
“The boy is helping,” Tee says. She drops the plate into my hands. “Go now. Shoo.”
The boy is Jude. He stands at Cecelia’s chair, watching as she unrolls her cinnamon bun into one long strip, breaking off the final center swirl to save for her last mouthful. She’s told me, every time, she thinks it’s the best part, squishiest and drenched in buttery sugar. I give a tiny smile and wave, and give Seamus the plate. “Thanks,” he says, eyes seeking to connect with mine. I look at the floor.
“Liesl, Liesl,” Cecelia bubbles, “Jude said Daddy and I can come to the taping. He said only super-special people can come, and we’re on the list.”
“Oh? Am I on this list?”
“Don’t be silly. You have to be there.”
“Maybe,” I say.
Jude adjusts his glasses. “I thought Pops told you. This place is too small to fit everyone who wants to come. You had to submit names.”
“I didn’t.”
“We know. Pops took care of it for you.”
I start to itch in my anxiety places, beneath my kneecaps, the back of my neck at the hairline, my navel. I cross one leg over the other and rub, trying to scrape away the irritation with my jeans. It doesn’t work, so I bend and scratch in earnest. Cecelia giggles, a tongue of cinnamon roll hanging from her mouth. “Martin does that when he has fleas.”
“Martin?”
“Miss Betsy’s dog.”
“Our neighbor,” Seamus adds.
“No fleas,” I say. “I’m allergic to being on television shows.”
Even Seamus smiles at this, a very small, seemingly wistful smile that straightens his lips rather than curls them. He hasn’t touched his food since I brought it. I tuck Cecelia’s dress strap back on her shoulder and give the top of her warm head a kiss. “Well, it’s back to the kitchen for me.”
“Wait, Liesl, can you come to church on Sunday? You can sit with me and Daddy and Jude.”
I sigh. She asks every week. “Oh, sweetie, I’d love to, but I just can’t tomorrow. I’m really, really busy.”
“You always say that.” Her eyebrows dive toward the bridge of her nose. “Daddy says we can’t ever be too busy for church.”
“That’s us, Cecelia,” Seamus says. “Liesl has much more work than we do.”
“Another time,” I tell her.
“Promise?”
I hesitate, feeling her father’s gaze on me. I don’t have to turn to read it. Don’t say it if you don’t mean it. She’s had enough of that. “Yes.”
Cecelia bounces from her chair and squeezes me. “When, when, when?”
“Cecelia,” Seamus says.
“Soon. Just give me a few weeks to recover from this whole circus, okay?”
“What circus?”
“The TV show,” Seamus tells her. “Sit, okay? I’ll tell you when you can ask.”
The girl motions as if she’s zipping her mouth closed, then turning a key and tossing it over her shoulder. Then she nods with conviction. “Not until Daddy says. Got it.”
I hug her again and wander to the other tables, talking to patrons and offering to refill glasses of iced tea. Everyone wants to ask about Bake-Off. I answer diplomatically, my knees and neck throbbing for a good scratch. Jude spends a few more minutes with Seamus and Cecelia, then clears the dirty dishes left around. Gretchen reappears, hurrying by with an apology, and right away takes the order of a couple who sat down only moments ago. I lock myself in the bathroom and rake my nails over my legs until pinpricks of blood appear. Then I hold wads of toilet paper on the tiny wounds until they scab.
Seven
It lasts three weeks, what I call my mother’s possession. Possessed by what or whom, I can’t say. But something has evicted her spirit from her body and taken over. I wonder if my real mother is tethered in the house somewhere, waiting to sneak back in. I comb the air, feeling for some thread of her. There’s none.
My father calls it mania. At least he does when he’s on the phone with the doctor, closed in the front room we call the library, speaking with hushed but urgent words. I try to listen at the door, but he sees the shadow of my feet beneath it and says, I’ll call you back. I scurry up to my bed and hide in the blankets.
My mother is a tornado, blowing through projects and money. She cuts her hair short as a boy’s and colors it platinum. She peels the flowered paper off the bathroom walls and begins painting them tangerine, but bores of the job halfway through, leaving us with a patchwork mess. She rearranges the furniture. And she bakes. All with seemingly endless energy.
Between the secret calls and his long hours at work, my father tries to clear the wreckage my mother scatters all around us. He gathers up the shopping bags full of clothes and shoes and jewelry she purchases on her lone JC Penney credit card, returning them to the store. He rescues party invitations from the mailbox before the postman comes, the yellow envelopes smudged, stamps upside down, handwritten addresses marching wildly in all directions. He hides the checkbook under the spare tire of his truck. He washes bar smoke from her blouses.
I get my first key to the house after finding myself locked out twice because my mother is gone when the school bus drops me off. The first time I sit on the stoop, waiting, the neighbors eventually inviting me in as dusk falls and the shadows grow long. I eat a Hungry-Man roast turkey dinner on a TV tray while Mr. and Mrs. Grimm watch Wheel of Fortune, and when my father finally pulls into the driveway, I run home without a thank-you. The next time it happens, I hide in the backyard, eventually managing to shimmy open a basement window with a screwdriver from the shed; I climb down onto the water heater and, once upstairs, make a peanut butter sandwich and start my homework at the kitchen table. After that, my father gives me a key on a tooth-shaped fob advertising our dentist’s name and address. For the back door, he says. Don’t lose it.
And then it stops. The shopping, the redecorating, the baking. Instead of moving on to some new, frenetic activity, my mother is still in bed at noon. A day passes, another. My father tells me she’s resting and to leave her be. I peek in on her. The shades are pulled low and she’s curled on the very edge of the mattress, eyes open. I roll in behind her, smell the oil on her scalp and dried saliva on the pillow. My arm loops over her body. Tell me something, I say, about bread.
If she hears me, she gives no indication. Her respiration slows and grows loud with sleep. I try to match my breaths with hers, like stepping in footprints left behind by another. But the prints are too big, the breaths too widely spaced, and I feel light-headed. So I fall into my own pattern and it’s hypnotic. I start to doze.
Never punch down.
My mother’s voice floats through to me, and I say, What?
You never punch down dough. No matter what the recipe says. Never punch it down.
Several days later my mother is dressed and washed, her unnaturally blond hair hidden in a silk scarf. She makes her special tea for us, brewing the loose leaves in warm milk instead of water, sweetening it with honey. We sit and eat zucchini muffins and she asks me how school is going, her hands fidgety, her words nervous. She’s almost my mother again. Close enough, I think, to believe things will be back to normal soon.
Patrice Olsen is nothing I expect. I think metropolitan mama, in tailored trousers and pointed white blouse, hair slick and severe and pulled away from her face. I think triangle-toed shoes and slender hips and seamless boysenberry lip color. And not much older than I am, if at all. Thirty-five at the most.
She is none of those things, and when she comes to the counter, I ask if I can help her, like any other chubby, middle-aged customer in denim and comfort clogs. “Patrice Olsen,” she says. “You’re Liesl McNamara, correct?”
“That’s me.” I shake the plump, dry hand she offers, and while I’ve never held a live snake, I imagine it feels like her skin, rough and taut and sort of shimmery. I can’t help but wipe my own palm on the leg of my jeans.
“Good. Do you have an office? There’s quite a bit to go over.”
“I don’t, actually.”
“Well,” she says. She adds no more to the sentence.
“My apartment is upstairs. We could talk there. Or we can just sit at one of the tables. Maybe that one, in the corner?” I motion to the back of the café.
“The kitchen. Is that an option?”
“I suppose. If you don’t mind—”
“I don’t.”
“Okay then.” She follows me into the back. I introduce her to Tee and Gretchen.
Patrice tucks her frizzled gray hair behind her ears. I offer her a stool and she struggles to perch her short, round body on it. “And your manager? Xavier Potter? I have been corresponding with him.”
“He’s gone for the day.” Manager? I don’t correct her.
“I see.” She lifts her oversized quilted bag onto the counter, removes a yellow legal pad, and gives me a binder with the Bake-Off logo custom-printed on the front. “Page three, please. Let’s review the schedule, which I sent you. This afternoon you’ll meet with hair and makeup. And wardrobe. Tomorrow will be a day of filming interviews and voice-over segments and speaking with customers. The color.” She crosses off several words from her pad. “You do have those photos together?”
“Uh, yeah.” I have no idea what she’s talking about, but she doesn’t seem like the kind of person I should admit it to, so I make a mental note to call Xavier as soon as possible.
“Fine.” Another check mark. “On Friday you’ll be closed, of course. The restaurant will be prepared for the show. Things will need to be rearranged, lighting brought in, some props. We may need to record more fill footage. And then Saturday, it’s hair and makeup by six a.m., contest begins at nine, and judging at five p.m. This is all familiar to you.” She stares at me, her green eyes unblinking, and I realize she meant that final statement as a question.
I nod. “Oh yes. Absolutely.”
Patrice caps her pen and sets it on the pad, folds her hands over it. “Ms. McNamara. I have been doing this a long time. There are two types of people who come on these shows—those who seek them out, who believe their half hour of fame will bring happiness and unicorns and make all their dreams come true, and those who find themselves in the middle of it all without ever intending to be there. We both know where you fall.”
“Ms. Olsen—”
“Patrice. Please. To the first group, I tell them, ‘Enjoy it. But realize it’s not going to change your life.’ They never believe me.”
“And the second?”
“I tell them, ‘Enjoy it. And realize it’s not going to change your life.’ They rarely believe me either.”
I look at her. Her face is soft with unexpected kindness. “I understand.”
She opens her pen and flips to the next page of paper.
Even in times of want, men seek out bread, as if any substance milled and kneaded and shaped and baked provides the sustenance of a wheaten loaf. Perhaps they know this isn’t truth, but convince themselves of it because bread brings them comfort. Each slice has the potential to become the body of the risen Christ, the church tells them—with the proper priestly blessing, of course—so they fashion their gleanings to something almost bread, hoping for a miracle of their own.
Animals are slaughtered first, not only for food, but for their feed. The grains eaten by cows and chickens can be used to nourish a family in the form of pottage, a mash of boiled cereals and water, unseasoned probably, because all the sugar, honey, and maple is finished—if they could ever afford it at all. And then the flour disappears, the housewife telling her family this is the last loaf, and she cuts it thin so it will last several days, toasting the stale pieces over the fire to revive them.
And then it’s gone too.
What is to be done now? The French make acorn bread, shelling and grinding the bitter little hatted pods into meal, sometimes mixing it with other meals or flours, if there are any to be had. Those eating it do so in disgrace, since acorns have long been used as food for swine. The Germans harvest wild oats and shore grasses with heads mimicking those of wheat, and even reeds and rushes. Any vegetable seed one could find is dried and crushed. In Sweden, pine bark and needles sometimes comprised upward of three-fourths of the loaf. And if water is scarce, animal blood may be used to mix and bind it all.
Anything resembling grain is consumed. Straw is plucked from the thatched roofs of village homes. The hungriest eat grass like cattle, on their hands and knees, unable to wait for it to dry; they often die of dehydration due to continued diarrhea. Men even mix what little flour they can afford with dirt, cooking it into flat cakes, consuming the very medium from which both they, and the wheat they desperately desire, have been conceived.
Patrice slides her fingers over a touch-screen phone nearly the size of her pad, pecking here and there with beak-like precision. “Technology,” she sighs. “I’m forced to keep up with it, but give me pulp and pen any day.” A vibrating beep mocks her. “Hair and makeup await outside.”
“Will this take long?” I ask.
She glances at me. “Yes.”
“Give me a minute, then.”
Wild Rise closes in ninety minutes but it buzzes with an unusual intensity, customers drawn in by the monstrous Good Food Channel bus outside the building. Gretchen assures me she can handle the crowd. “They’re not ordering much anyway. No food, really. And the bread is practically gone—they’re only here to gawk.” She assures me she’ll come find me if I’m needed.
They wait on the sidewalk, two people more like I expected Patrice to look, a post-thin man and woman, both wearing tight black jeans and t-shirts. His is flamingo pink and too small, with the words blue bells scribbled all over it, maybe by his own hand. Hers is oversized and hangs off one shoulder, fat aqua and gray stripes circling her torso. Patrice introduces them as León and Janska. I shake hands. “These nails will never do,” the woman says.
I tuck my fingers in my back pockets.
“I trust you’ll remedy that, Janska,” Patrice says. “Ms. McNamara, it’s been a pleasure. I’ll see you tomorrow morning. Early.”
She disappears into the bus. León sweeps his palm over my hair. “My, my. When was the last time you had a trim?”
“I don’t remember.” And it’s true, though I estimate it has been at least a year.
León doesn’t need my memory. His days are measured in split ends and half inches. “I have seen worse,” he says. “Don’t worry you that. We can use the bus, but Miss Patty-Cakes thought you’d feel more comfy in your own abode. So let’s take this party up one story, if that’s good with you.”
“Uh, okay. Sure.”
I never lock the downstairs door, the one beside the entrance to Wild Rise, and we climb the narrow wood steps to the landing, where I take the key from an otherwise empty clay planter hanging on the wall. “We ain’t in the Village anymore, Toto,” León says. He and Janska laugh.
Inside, I offer them drinks and both ask for coffee. While I start the pot brewing, they agree hair before makeup or wardrobe, and León opens his suitcase, a vintage hard shell with loud, popping latches, atop the kitchen table. He shakes open a sheet of plastic and covers the floor, setting one of my chairs in the center. “Your throne awaits.”
I arrange two coffee mugs—my favorite ones, matching hand-thrown pottery with sharp angles and mottled gray glaze; I don’t want them to think I’m completely unsophisticated—on the counter with the milk and sugar. And then I sit. León wraps more plastic around my neck and paws through my hair more intently, like one baboon grooming another. “We’re gonna fix you right up, girl.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Color first. This blond does you no good
at all. Too much ash, not enough sparkle.”
“Sparkle?” My voice breaks.
“Not real sparkle,” Janska tells me. She pours two mugs of black coffee. “He won’t glitter you.”
“Oh, good.”
“Chickadee, you need some major chillage. I got you read. We’ll brighten you up and add itty-bitty highlights. Nothing you wouldn’t want your mama to see.” León peers into my sink. “Mind if I wash your hair here?”
I shake my head. He closes his suitcase and has me sit on it, folds a towel over the edge of the counter, and gently leans my head back. Warm water sprays over my hair, tickling my scalp at the base of my neck, sending reverberations through the muscles of my back. He massages my head, fingers kneading deep, and I think of dough. Rinse, condition, rinse. He squeezes the wetness from my ends and wraps me in a turban. I stand, wobbly, my body soft beneath his fingers.
“Is this what you mean by chillage?” I ask.
He grins. “You just let León take care of you.”
As he paints my hair and twists the foil around it, I listen to them talk of television shows and trendy nightspots and people they both know but I’ll never meet. I realize how confined my days are, to the two floors of this building and the stairway between them. To the Coop once a week and Target, four miles away, when I need a shower curtain or a new notebook. But León and Janska also live on their own narrow island of reality, limiting their daily tasks to what fits them best.
While waiting for the color to set, Janska manicures my nails, clipping away teepees of dead skin at the cuticles and filing ragged keratin edges. Her own are painted aqua to match her top and set with tiny rhinestones, long and shiny, Egyptian scarabs perched on the end of each finger. “Um, what were you thinking for me?” I ask.
Laughing, she says, “Just a coat of clear polish. If that’s okay.”
I nod.
Patrice Olsen does understand people. I would not have been able to handle all this in the network bus surrounded by unfamiliar words, smells, noise. In my own space it’s bearable. When I look at my hands and don’t recognize them, there’s something else I know. The chipped Formica table I bought at the Salvation Army and love because the top is the perfect shade of Oma Opal, just like my grandmother had in her small cottage. The braided wool rug, a spiral rainbow hiding the drab commercial carpeting already installed here when I rented it. The loveseat, with its two wrinkled canvas cushions. The slightly yellowed light. I can breathe here.
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