“It needs to be fed,” said Carl. “A tablespoon of wheat flour. Once a week. It will only take you a minute or two—no more.”
If anyone else in the neighborhood had phoned with a request like that, Dave would have assumed they were joking, but Carl Lowbeer didn’t joke. And Dave knew enough about Carl to know that if he had unexpectedly developed a sense of humor, it wasn’t going to be about his sourdough.
Dave got the story at Polly Anderson’s annual Christmas party. Carl had brought a loaf of his bread to the party, and Dave—who had missed lunch and breakfast—was stuffing it, and everything else he could lay his hands on, down his throat. Carl materialized out of the crowd and said, “I see you like my bread,” and Dave replied, “What? Oh. Yes.” And stood there, nodding politely, while Carl told him how he got the sourdough starter from his aunt Ola in Germany—how she got the starter from her mother, Carl’s great-aunt; it had been in the family for over thirty-two years. “My mother used it, too,” said Carl.
“It’s very good,” said Dave. And it was, although to be truthful, Dave had been thinking of the bread more as a utensil to convey great mounds of smoked salmon into his mouth. Until Carl mentioned his bread, Dave hadn’t really noticed it.
“I have a genealogy,” said Carl. “I could show you if you come over. My great-aunt made the first batch in Schaffhausen.”
“You have a genealogy?” said Dave, swallowing a mouthful of salmon.
“Of the starter,” said Carl. “Like a family tree. I have it in a frame in the den.”
“Really?” mumbled Dave, reaching for the eggplant dip with another piece of the bread.
When Carl and Gerta appeared at his house this past Christmas with a loaf of bread, Dave wondered if Carl hadn’t misinterpreted his enthusiasm. Dave and Morley hardly knew the Lowbeers. There was a moment of awkwardness when Dave opened the door and saw them standing there. Soon Carl and Gerta were in the kitchen slicing the bread so Morley could try it.
“Umm,” said Morley, her mouth full. She was staring at Dave. Is this your fault? Dave shrugged.
The Lowbeers left as abruptly as they had arrived, declining to eat anything themselves.
“That was weird,” said Morley after they had gone, cutting herself another piece of bread. “It’s sort of sour-I don’t think I like it.”
“It’s okay,” said Dave without great enthusiasm. Then he added, “It’s better with smoked salmon.”
The night before he left for Florida, Carl phoned Dave with his instructions.
“Usually,” he said, “we take it with us.”
“The starter?” said Dave. “On vacation?”
“We took it to Germany last March,” said Carl.
“To Germany?” said Dave.
“Gerta carried it in her suitcase. She was going to take it in her purse, but she didn’t want it to go through the X-ray machine. She was afraid the X rays might kill the enzymes.”
“You took the starter to Germany?” said Dave.
“Last summer we took it to the cottage, but it didn’t do well. We had to feed it commercial flour, and when we brought it back, it was pale … out of sorts.”
“You took it to the cottage?” said Dave.
“It has done three interprovincial trips and two international ones,” said Carl. “Plus a change of planes in Holland.”
Carl explained why he didn’t want to take the starter to Florida. “What if there’s a hurricane?” he said. “What if the power fails? I don’t want to be worrying all the time. It’s supposed to be a vacation.”
Then he told Dave what he wanted him to do. “The starter is in the fridge. In a Mason jar. There’s a bag of wheat flour on the counter beside the fridge. Once a week you put a tablespoon of the flour into the Mason jar. Okay?”
“Okay,” said Dave.
After supper Dave said, “What is starter, anyway?”
Morley looked at her husband and shook her head. She said, “Why did he choose you, of all people? Doesn’t he understand what he is dealing with? The idiot.”
Dave didn’t press the point.
The next day he went to Wong’s Scottish Meat Pies for lunch.
Kenny Wong said, “Making sourdough bread is like making yogurt. You need something to get it going. When you’re making sourdough, you use fermented dough from your last batch of bread. That’s the starter. In the pioneer days, when you couldn’t run to the corner store for a packet of yeast, sharing a starter was a true act of friendship. You should be honored.”
“He didn’t give it to me,” said Dave. “He asked me to look after it.”
“Still,” said Kenny. “If you don’t feed it, it will … you know …”
“No,” said Dave. “What?”
“It’s a living thing. I don’t know. If you don’t feed it, who knows. It might die or something.”
Dave’s first visit to Carl’s house was on Friday. When he got there, he couldn’t find the keys, and he panicked. Had he lost them? He phoned Morley.
“You never had them,” she said. “Remember? Carl was going to leave them under the garbage can.”
Dave let himself into Carl’s house and found the Mason jar of starter in the fridge. He pried the jar open and peered in. The starter looked like moist oatmeal. The pleasing sour aroma of fermenting yeast wafted up out of the jar and made Dave smile. He looked around for the bag of flour. The kitchen was full of ceramic knickknacks. The walls were covered with framed sayings, scrolls, tea towels from Germany and Arizona. The room had the feel of a souvenir shop. There was a set of ceramic containers shaped like dogs on the counter. They were lined up in descending order of size, each dog with a tag around its neck: SUGAR, COOKIES, TEA, COFFEE. The flour wasn’t on the counter where Carl had promised. There was a brown paper bag by the telephone. It was full of white powder. Dave dumped a spoonful into the starter and put the starter back in the fridge. Then he spent half an hour snooping around the Lowbeers’ house.
When Dave got home, Morley was in bed reading. He stood at the end of the bed and got undressed. “All his shirts are ordered by color,” he said as he pulled his sweater over his head. “All the blue ones together, all the white ones.” Dave rolled up the sweater and tossed it toward his bureau like a basketball. It landed in the garbage can. He sighed.
Morley said, “You went through his closet?” She kept reading, but she sounded shocked.
“Of course I did,” said Dave. “He has two pair of lederhosen. Can you imagine Carl in leather shorts?”
He was using his feet to push his clothes into the pile at the bottom of Morley’s closet that served as a laundry hamper.
“I can’t believe you did that,” said Morley. She was looking at him over the book. “Two pair? Really?”
“You know what I found in the bathroom?” said Dave.
Morley put her book down on the bed. She was sitting up. Looking at him.
The next Friday, when Dave went to feed the starter, he thought maybe it didn’t smell quite the same as it had the week before, but it was hard to tell. He didn’t want to touch it with his fingers, so he got a fork and poked at it. He decided it was just his imagination. He put another spoonful of the flour into the jar like before and went into the den to look at Carl’s books.
The third Friday he went directly to Carl’s on his way home from work. He was feeling good—happy because on Saturday he was leaving with Morley and the kids for Montreal. They were going to St.-Sauveur in the Laurentian Mountains for a long weekend ski trip. He was going to feed the starter and go home and pack. He fished the jar out of the fridge and gasped when he opened it.
He ran to the phone.
Morley answered on the third ring.
“The starter,” said Dave. “The starter.”
“Who is this?” said Morley.
“It’s me,” said Dave. “I’m at Carl’s. Something is wrong with the starter.”
Something was terribly wrong with the starter. Instead of resembling a bowl of mois
t oatmeal, it looked hard and dry.
“And white,” said Dave. “It’s all dried up. I think it’s dead.”
“You sound like you’re reporting a murder.”
“I am,” said Dave. “It’s dead. It smells.”
“It’s supposed to smell,” said Morley.
“Not like this,” said Dave. “It smells horrible. Like chemicals. Like a jar of solid smog. It smells like death. What am I supposed to do?”
When Morley arrived, it took her under a minute to figure out what had gone wrong.
“This is what you’ve been feeding it?” she said, holding up the brown paper bag Dave had found by the phone.
“Yes,” said Dave.
“Spackle,” said Morley.
“Polyfilla?” said Dave.
“That’s what it says here on the bag,” said Morley.
It was written neatly in Gerta’s handwriting.
Dave sat down and stared out the kitchen window.
The Lowbeers were due home Sunday evening. “What am I going to do?” said Dave.
“I don’t know, but it’s going to be interesting,” said Morley. She was standing by the counter opening the dog containers. “She has brown sugar in the Coffee dog.”
Later that night Morley was standing in her bedroom trying to stuff an extra ski sweater into one of the kids’ suitcases.
“You’re leaving,” said Dave. “No matter what—right?”
“Right,” she said.
“Right,” said Dave.
He went downstairs and stared at the phone. Ten minutes later, he called Kenny Wong.
“I think I have a recipe for sourdough starter,” said Kenny.
“I’m coming over,” said Dave.
When Dave got to Kenny’s restaurant, Kenny was waiting for him with a book, a bottle of buttermilk, a hair dryer, and a bottle of Scotch.
“We’ve got to get going,” Kenny said. “It takes three days to make sourdough starter.”
“We’ve only got two,” said Dave.
“That’s what the hair dryer is for,” said Kenny.
When they got to Carl’s, Kenny rubbed his hands together and said, “First things first.” He started opening cupboards until he found the glasses. He poured two big tumblers of Scotch and propped his cookbook open on the kitchen counter. It was called Cooking Wizardry for Kids: Learn About Food … While Making Tasty Things to Eat!
Kenny smiled and held up his Scotch. “I get all my best stuff from this book,” he said.
“You can’t be serious,” said Dave.
There was a moment of silence. Kenny and Dave stared deep into each other’s eyes.
By three in the morning Dave and Kenny were anything but serious. They were still at step one of the recipe—waiting for a cup of buttermilk to warm and collect bacteria from the kitchen air, as the recipe called for, in the natural old-fashioned way. Kenny had the hair dryer set up to blow over the buttermilk.
“Like forcing a tulip,” he said.
The bottle of Scotch was half-killed. Dave had discovered the Lowbeers’ polka records. Kenny was wearing one of Gerta Lowbeer’s aprons. There was a mop lying on the kitchen counter.
“Tired, my dear?” said Kenny to the mop. “It must be time to add the flour,” he said. “I figure six hours under a hair dryer is the same as three days in a warm place. What do you think?” He was still talking to the mop.
Dave was sitting on the floor. His head was in his hands. He was staring into the distance. He was remembering the disdain in Carl Lowbeer’s voice when he had told Dave about the Rutenbergs. “We gave them some of the starter because they said they wanted to bake bread, too. They killed it within six months. They’re fools.”
“I’m dead,” said Dave.
They finished at ten on Sunday morning. Kenny had slept in the Lowbeers’ bed, Dave on the living room couch.
When they left, the sourdough was bubbling like a pot of oatmeal.
“It looks sort of the same. It smells right. But it didn’t bubble like that,” said Dave.
“It’ll slow down in the fridge,” said Kenny.
“And there’s more than there used to be—there was only half that much,” said Dave.
Kenny picked up the Mason jar and scooped half of the new sourdough into the garbage. “How’s that?” he said. “Does that look about right?”
The Lowbeers arrived home on Sunday, as planned. Dave flew to Montreal before they arrived and joined his family in St.-Sauveur. When they got home on Tuesday night, there was a loaf of bread and a note from Carl on the back porch.
You certainly looked after the starter.
Thanks for everything.
“He knows,” said Dave. “He must.”
“That’s just Carl,” said Morley.
Dave wasn’t so sure. He gave Carl a wide berth for the next few weeks. They didn’t rub shoulders again until the first neighborhood barbecue, on the long weekend in May.
Dave was at the condiment table looking at the buns when Jim Scoffield leaned against him and whispered conspiratorially, “Aren’t you going to have one of Carl’s sourdough buns?”
“What do you mean?” said Dave nervously. Did everyone know?
Jim rolled his eyes. “Carl just gave me his bread lecture. Do you know he has a framed genealogy in his den?”
Dave felt relief wash through him. “Did he tell you about his aunt in Germany?” he asked.
Jim nodded.
Dave smiled. “He’s a bit much,” he said, “but I like his bread.”
Dave picked out one of Carl’s buns from the bowl on the picnic table. He wandered over to the grill, got a hamburger, and then looked around the yard. Carl was standing near the fence, a hot dog in his hand. He was alone.
Dave waved and headed over.
Music Lessons
The problem of Sam’s piano lessons began with his Christmas report card. The music teacher, Mrs. Crouch, wrote: Sam has an unself-conscious sense of rhythm. It appears to come from inside him.
“What does that mean?” said Dave. He was sitting in the kitchen reading the report. “ ‘It appears to come from inside him.’ Where else would it come from?”
“I think she means it’s a gift,” said Morley.
In February, at parent-teacher night, Mrs. Crouch sought them out. “Do you know he has perfect pitch?” she asked.
Morley smiled. It wasn’t so much what Mrs. Crouch was telling her—just to have a teacher say nice things about her child was good enough. Morley didn’t want her to stop.
“The other day in choir,” said Mrs. Crouch, “he started to sing the descant quietly to himself. I just happened to catch it as I walked by. Most of the grade sixes can’t do that.”
Morley nodded earnestly.
By the time they got home, however, her joy had been sideswiped by a spasm of guilt. Sam was eight years old, and they hadn’t done a thing to encourage this musical talent. When Stephanie was eight, she’d been taking piano and dance lessons. What if Sam did have a gift? Morley felt as if she’d been asleep at the switch.
She knew from her years in the theater that every time you see a great artist stand up onstage and perform, there is another person standing alongside. Usually, it’s a teacher or a parent. All great artists need a support system. Someone who believes in what they have to offer.
She had done absolutely nothing for Sam.
That night Morley dreamed she was in the audience at a symphony concert. In the middle of her dream, the conductor abruptly snapped his baton in two and hurled it on the stage. The hall fell deadly quiet, and the conductor swiveled around and looked at Morley. Someone, he boomed, glancing back angrily at the orchestra, has to leave the stage.
Morley noticed for the first time that the musicians were playing vegetables. Then she saw Sam push his way through the middle of the leafy greens. He was waving a large eggplant over his head. “How do you expect me to play the eggplant,” he said, “when I’ve only ever been given potatoes?” Then h
e left the stage, passing the cucumbers with his head hanging. As he went, Morley noticed that the entire root section was having dental work done as they played.
When she woke up, Morley turned to Dave and said, “I am going to get Sam a potato—I mean piano—teacher.”
She knew what had gone wrong. Stephanie had kicked up such a fuss about her piano lessons that she had worn Morley down. It wasn’t fair. Sam deserved his own chance.
He started lessons at the beginning of March with the only piano teacher in the neighborhood who had space to take him. The teacher’s name was Ray Spinella, and he had only one arm. He wasn’t the teacher Morley wanted, but she wanted to get Sam going. Everyone said the best teacher around was Laurence Merriman. But Laurence Merriman wouldn’t take Sam until September, and only if Sam got his grade one first. Brian suggested a month at a music camp. “Camp Dutoit is good,” he said.
The problem was that Sam didn’t want to go to Camp Dutoit to get his grade-one piano. Sam wanted to go to the Lazy M Ranch and learn to ride a horse.
Dave said Sam should go to the horse camp. “Summers are for fun,” he said. But Morley found herself uncharacteristically muddled. She was sure Sam would have fun at Camp Dutoit once he got there. But she didn’t want to send him against his will. Morley thought perhaps if she gave him some time, a few weeks of lessons, maybe he would change his mind. The danger was, if she gave him too much time, there wouldn’t be a spot left for Sam at either camp. So she sent a deposit to both. She thought things would be clear by the time the bulk of the fees were due.
Well, the bulk of the fees were now due, and things were no clearer. The forms from both camps were sitting on Morley’s desk. And if she didn’t choose one and get the check in the mail soon, Sam wouldn’t be going away at all. Morley thought of sending money to both camps to give her a few more weeks. But she knew that was crazy. And if she did that, one day she would have to tell Dave. As much as you’d want to keep that sort of behavior to yourself, it would be difficult—eventually, you’d just blurt it out.
On Thursday, Dave’s sister, Annie, phoned from the airport. She said, “I just got into town. I’m recording some sort of, I don’t know, thing. Tonight. I’m flying back tomorrow morning early. Are you free for lunch?”
Home from the Vinyl Cafe Page 5