Bread Alone: A Novel

by Judith R. Hendricks

  “Oh. Thanks. Thank you very much.”

  He hands me a business card that looks as if it’s been run over by a truck. “If you need anything else, give us a call.”

  I watch him limp down the driveway, wondering what happened to the psycho-killer handyman.

  On Thursday night, I no sooner get to work than I’m in the bathroom throwing up.

  “If you’re sick, I don’t want you here,” Linda says in her most sympathetic voice. “I feel fine.”

  Her eyes narrow. “Are you getting any sleep?”

  “Well, it hasn’t been easy because I’ve been trying to get settled.”

  “What time you been goin’ to bed?” She leans the big wooden peel against the side of the oven.

  “Monday I went to bed at eight-thirty at night. Tuesday about noon. Wednesday at five. Today at two.”

  “There’s your trouble, right there.” She folds her arms and gives me a disgusted look. “You gotta get your routine down, sleep at the same time every day or your body never will get used to flip-floppin’.”

  “What time do you sleep?”

  “Soon as I get home. I have some toast and tea and hit the sack. Get up about four.”

  “What about on your days off?”

  “Same thing.”

  “But how can you have any kind of normal life if you’re up all night and sleep all day on your days off?”

  “Who said bread making was any kinda normal life? I knew you wouldn’t like it.”

  “It’s not that I don’t like it …” I feel my face heating up.

  “You kids are all alike, never done a honest day’s work in your life.”

  “First of all, I’m not a kid, and I don’t think you’re in any position to know about what I’ve done in my life.”

  “Horsefeathers. Look at you.” She holds up her hand, lets her wrist go limp. “Little manicured nails. Polo pants.” She bats her eyelashes and it’s hard not to burst out laughing.

  “What?” I look down at myself and the logo on my Ralph Lauren sweatpants looms upside down at me. “They’re just sweatpants.”

  She turns away, as if I’m too painful to contemplate, heads for the storeroom.

  “Think whatever you like,” I holler after her. “As long as I’m doing my job, you have no complaint.”

  Eight

  Linda notwithstanding, I love my job. Even the tedium of doing the same breads every week is okay for now. Till I find the rhythm again. Till I can look at a bowl of flour and know how many cups or grams there are. Till I can grab a fistful of dough and say with certainty that it’s too wet or not wet enough.

  I love getting off work at seven in the morning, walking home as the city’s just starting to hum and cats are slinking under porches. I love knowing that most of the people I pass are lock-stepping to their daily obligation and I’m done. The day belongs to me.

  Taking Linda’s advice, I start going to bed right after breakfast. With a down comforter to keep me warm, my futon opened up in front of the woodstove, and blackout shades on the windows, I’m having my best sleep in years.

  If it’s not raining when I wake up, I walk the neighborhood. I begin to recognize neighbors at work in their yards, mothers with their baby strollers, kids with their dogs. We smile, say hi or nice day or think we’ll get some rain tonight? I discover a tiny park at the top of the hill on Eighth Place and Highland, with a bench that has a 180-degree view of the Sound and the Olympic Mountains.

  Sometimes I read; sometimes I just sit there, lost in the way the sun glints off the water like handfuls of diamonds. I watch the Washington state ferries chug to and from Bainbridge Island through swarms of bright spinnakers. When the sun falls into that slot behind the mountains, the wind picks up and the temperature drops, but it’s worth the cold walk home to see the Olympics catch fire in the sunset or a huge white bank of fog unroll off the water.

  Sometimes I manage to forget the reason I’m here. That I’m waiting for David to figure out what he wants. Whether the package includes me. I sit on my bench and have heartfelt imaginary conversations with him. He tells me he loves me, that it’s been a terrible mistake, he can’t live without me, he’s told Kelley it’s over. I smile sadly and murmur that I’m just not sure if it can ever be the same with us.

  His voice cracks as he says, “Believe me, Wyn, I understand, but if you let me make it up to you, I swear you’ll never be sorry.”

  Laundry has never been an issue for me in the great cosmic scheme of things. For the last seven years, Hildy, our housekeeper, took care of it along with almost everything else. Sheets, towels, clothes magically appeared in drawers, in closets—washed and ironed, folded or hung up. The closest I got to the process was buying more detergent whenever she said we needed it.

  Now it’s a logistical thing. I have no washer, no dryer. So when I run out of things to wear, I stuff all my dirty clothes in a pillowcase and drag them down to the Queen Anne Launderland on Queen, across from the A & J Meat Market.

  It’s a colossal waste of time. You have to sit there while your clothes go through the whole fill, wash, spin, fill, rinse, spin. Then you have to wait while the industrial-strength dryer makes pommes frites out of your Calvin Klein briefs. Yes, you can read. But if you get engrossed in a book and you don’t jump up and get your clothes the second the machine stops, you run the risk of some grimy-fingered guy waving your black push-up bra overhead and yelling, “Whose 38B?”

  Okay, this might sound just a bit too fastidious, but I worry about germs. I have no idea what these people do in their clothes. They could be out rolling around in nonbiodegradable toxic wastes for all I know. And then I have to put my stuff in the same machine?

  After two forays into this alien culture, I finally figure out that the best time to go is early in the morning. I take my pillowcase/laundry bag to work with me and hit Launderland on my way home. Seven-thirty is too early for anyone else to be there except for one or two retired couples drinking their early bird half-priced coffee and clipping coupons, and some guy in a baseball cap who never even looks up from the notebook he’s scribbling in. Plus, at that hour you have at least the illusion that the place is clean.

  The bakery officially closes at two, but Diane and Ellen are usually there with Jen and Misha, the day crew, till five or six, doing special orders, wholesale stuff, and prep work. I drop in one or two afternoons a week to hang out for a couple of hours.

  I watch Diane put the finishing touches on cakes to be picked up early in the morning, and I help her wrap freshly baked layers for the freezer. Ellen plows through paperwork, makes entries in the ledger book that she keeps in her desk. Her actual baking time is limited, but she supervises the afternoon crew making cinnamon rolls, muffins, cookies, and Mazurka Bars, arguably the bakery’s most famous product.

  Ellen invented Mazurka Bars—at least her version of them—when she lived in New Hampshire, and she brought the recipe out west with her, just like the pioneer women. Except she came in the seventies, driving her derelict Volkswagen Beetle instead of a covered wagon.

  I never heard of them till I started working here, but I soon discovered how wonderful they are—a bar cookie with a thin, flaky crust on the bottom, then the lemon or chocolate/espresso or apple/raisin or raspberry filling, and over that the crumble layer that other bakers would kill for. It has a habit-forming, sandy crunch. It’s not too sweet and it doesn’t disintegrate all over your clothes when you take a bite.

  While the recipe for Mazurka Bars is as closely held as the formula for Coca-Cola, Ellen’s not at all averse to telling me their history.

  “I was messing with one of my mother’s old recipes,” she says. “I wanted some individual desserts I could take to a picnic, but at first they were so crumbly. And the only filling she ever used was lemon. How boring is that?”

  Without waiting for an answer, she rambles on, absently stacking bills in alternating vertical and horizontal rows. She tells me about the first months she lived in Sea
ttle, when the only job she could find was waitressing at the Five Spot.

  “It was okay, you know. I wasn’t making a killing, but they were nice people to work for, and the regulars were fun. Of course, they wouldn’t let me cook, and I was dying to. So I just started baking Mazurkas in my apartment and wrapping them in plastic wrap and hauling them downtown on the bus.

  “I’d hang around outside movies and down at Seattle Center when there was a Sonics game—”

  “Always one step ahead of the health department,” Diane pipes up.

  Ellen laughs. “They never knew where the Mazurka Bar lady was going to surface next.”

  My oma used to say it’s amazing what you can hear when you’re not talking, and I learn all manner of interesting tidbits in those idle afternoons, in addition to the history of Mazurka Bars. Like the secret to a well-risen cake is to cream the butter and sugar forever, so a lot of air is incorporated. Diane usually walks away and does other things while the Hobart beats the bejeezus out of the stuff.

  She wraps strips of wet towels around the cake pans to make the cake rise evenly, eliminating that dome in the center. I discover that spritzing hazelnuts with water before you toast them steams the skins and they slip right off without a fight. That all the small products—muffins, scones, even cookies—can be frozen unbaked and then baked without thawing. I watch Jen cut perfect slices of cheesecake with dental floss and Misha use a thin-bladed knife to surgically remove the charred crust from an overdone cake.

  But maybe the most important thing I learn is that almost any disaster, no matter how awful it looks, can be salvaged if you keep your head and don’t just start dumping things into the garbage.

  Payday is every Friday. Since I’m not completely confident of the reliability of David’s monthly deposits, I’ve gotten into the habit of picking up my paycheck on Friday afternoons and taking it over to the Washington Mutual branch on Queen Anne Avenue. When I unlock the back door one misty November afternoon, the work area is dark and empty, but I hear water running. Out front Tyler bends over the sink, shirtless, pouring blue liquid on her head. The fact that she’s easily seen through the front windows either hasn’t occurred to her or doesn’t disturb her.

  “Hi, Wyn.” She squints at me upside down, then answers my unspoken question. “Ellen lets me do my hair here because my dad won’t let me do it at home.”

  I look around at the puddles of blue liquid everywhere. “Does that stain?”

  “Sort of. It comes out eventually.” “Ellen’s not worried about contamination?”

  She giggles. “It wouldn’t hurt if it got in anything. It’s just Kool-Aid.” She points to a crumpled packet on the counter.

  “One little package makes your hair look like that?”

  “Well, I had to strip the color out first. Twice, ‘cause my hair’s, like, really dark.” She straightens up, pressing her head with a blue-stained towel. “So what are you doing here?”

  “I just came to pick up my check.”

  “How’re you getting along with that paragon of personality, the lovely Linda LaGardia?” She’s doing her strung-out disc jockey voice.

  “Let’s just say we’re getting used to each other.” I perch on the edge of a tall stool next to the counter and watch her fluffing her hair with the towel.

  She pulls on a black T-shirt, picks up the crumpled Kool-Aid packet, aims, and fires a perfect hook shot into the trash. Then, oblivious to my stare, she executes a perfect back jump and falls into the splits. “You were a cheerleader?”

  “In a former life.” She grins. “I got tossed from the squad when I dyed my hair blue.”

  One of the tables is covered with paper. Watercolors. Scenes of Seattle in the rain. A dish of water, a box of paints, and some brushes sit on a half-sheet pan on the counter.

  “Are these pictures yours?”

  “Midterm projects,” she says. “They’re all due Monday.” “They’re beautiful.”

  She grimaces. “ ‘Too derivative.’ That’s what the teacher said last time. Like I give a shit.”

  “They remind me of the Impressionist pictures of Paris in the rain.” I’m determined to give her a compliment, whether she wants it or not.

  Her look is gently reproving. “That’s what they’re supposed to remind you of. That’s why they’re too derivative.”

  I laugh. “I still think they’re beautiful. Do you like doing watercolors?”

  She shrugs.

  “Why are you taking the classes?”

  “Gotta do something. I’m too dumb for college.”

  “You’re not dumb. You’re just nonlinear.”

  She laughs, flinging her blue-fringed head forward, then back. “ ‘Nonlinear.’ Cool. I like it.”

  I look around at all the art on the walls. “Is any of this yours?”

  “Nah. Ellen said she’d hang something of mine, but I haven’t got anything I like that much. I did the menu board, though.”

  “It’s classy. I love illuminated capitals.”

  She looks at me with marginal interest. “How come you know about art? Like the Impressionists and illuminated capitals.”

  “I know a little bit about a lot of things, but not a lot about anything.”

  She nods sagely, disappears into the bathroom. A few seconds later, I hear the whine of a hair dryer. I study the watercolors, imagining how one might look in a frame on the wall of my living room.

  Tyler emerges from the bathroom sporting a halo of blue fuzz that makes her look like a toy Easter chick.

  “Done?” I ask.

  “Almost. Gotta do the spikes.” She opens the door of the Traulsen. “You need an egg yolk?”

  “Not really.”

  “I use the whites for my spikes, but I don’t need the yolks. I think you can do facials with them.”

  “It’s the whites you do facials with,” I tell her.

  She frowns, grabs one egg from a flat and deftly separates it, stashing the yolk in an espresso cup. She beats the white with a few drops of water and heads for the bathroom again. “I’m going to the U2 concert tonight.”

  “Have fun.”

  I tuck my check into the inside pocket of my coat and let myself out. For one minute, I wish I was going to the U2 concert, never mind that I don’t even like them. I think of CM and me at Tyler’s age, running wild in the Valley with a pack of girlfriends. Going to the Sepulveda Drive-In Movie (a.k.a. the Finger Bowl) in my ancient black Chevy with red baby-moon hubcaps and no backseat. Hamburger Hamlet and Jake’s Pizza and Topanga Plaza.

  The bank guard locks the glass door behind me. It’s four o’clock, and mist halos the streetlights in the early darkness. Queen Anne Avenue is teetering on the edge of Gentrification Gulch without falling over. Yet. Trendier places like Starbucks and Häagen-Dazs, Sonora Southwestern Gourmet, Avant Card, and the new bookstore are popping up seemingly overnight, like mushrooms on the forest floor.

  But the old-timers still dominate the street—Arch Plumbing Supply with its windows full of tools and parts predating Liquid-Plumr. Fancy Fabrics, where you can barely squeeze between tables piled with bolts of chintz and dotted swiss and worsted wools. The seedy-looking Greek restaurant that Ellen swears has the best hash browns in Seattle. Another bakery, featuring the kind of Danish my oma loved and cakes with that Crisco/sugar icing that crunches between your teeth. A consignment shop called Rags to Riches, a state liquor store, Thriftway, and a couple of bars.

  One of the bars is Bailey’s. I’ve passed by it plenty of times. It looks like a typical neighborhood pub, low-key, nonthreatening. The kind of place where a single woman could go and have a glass of wine and read. Or write a letter. Or just mope if she felt like it, without being pestered. I’m not used to going out alone, particularly not to bars. But the mist has turned to rain now, and walking in it isn’t quite as much fun. I hesitate for a minute with my hand on the door.

  No. Not yet.

  Without noticing exactly how or when it happens, Linda and I s
ettle into an uneasy accommodation. She quits making snide remarks about my name, age, and work history; I quit trying to make our relationship personal and pushing new ideas on her.

  I think she’s even started to like having me around. Well, maybe not me personally, but someone. She wears wrist braces for her tendonitis. Industrial-strength support hose peek out below her too short slacks. She complains about pain in her right shoulder, probably arthritis. She has to be glad that I’m strong enough to lift the sheet pans, heavy with wet dough, to drag fifty-pound sacks of flour, to do most of the loading and unloading of the oven decks. Of course, she’d eat ground glass before she’d admit it, even to herself.

  I tell her about Jean-Marc. How he saw me rubbing my neck one day and told me, “A little pain is good, Wynter. It is how the trade enters your body.” She gets a big hoo-ha out of that one.

  My antennae start picking up snippets of information about her. There’s a husband. Then I discover he’s an ex-husband. She calls him Bubba. Ellen tells me his name is Walter and that he’s still lurking in a corner of the picture.

  Tyler mentions that he used to be a captain on the ferries. “Pulled down some pretty good bucks, but he got busted down to seaman for drinking on the job. I think that’s when she kicked his ass out. They have two kids, you know.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  Ellen frowns. “You know how I feel about gossip.” Tyler and I look at each other and try not to laugh.

  Just before Thanksgiving, the weather goes from bleak to abysmal—gray, wet, bone-chilling—every day for a week. Ellen laughs at my whining. “Honey, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Wait till February when it’s been raining nonstop for two months.”

  One evening, in an attempt to regain my rapidly loosening grip on sanity, I call my mother. The machine answers and her voice tells me that “the Morrisons” are unavailable at the moment, but that “one of us” will be glad to call back as soon as possible. It’s nine-fifteen, no, almost nine-thirty. Where is she? I don’t leave a message. Just as I settle the receiver back in its cradle, it rings and I jump.