Bread Alone: A Novel

by Judith R. Hendricks

  He smiles, moving his body over me.

  The phone rings, probably once or twice before I hear it.

  I whisper, “Don’t answer it.”

  He tries. He really does. I can see the battle raging. “It might be the kids.”

  He’s embarrassed, apologetic, torn. But he rolls away from me and picks up the receiver. “Yes? Erica. What’s wrong?” He sighs through his teeth. “Well, I thought since I talked to them earlier—no, it’s okay. No, I’m not busy. Of course I want to say good night to them.”

  He chats patiently—no, it’s more than patient. He’s into it. First Andrew, with the science project. A smile hovers on his face, but their conversation is serious man talk about grades. Haircuts. Andrew says he doesn’t need one; his mother thinks he does. She knew, of course. When he talked to them earlier, he must have mentioned he was having dinner with someone. With the intuition that’s actually a higher form of logic, she knew the someone was a woman.

  It’s Katie’s turn. The cheerleader princess. His tone is teasing, cajoling. I look at him curled up on his side. Naked except for fuzzy black socks. The Titan Rocket has become a miniature gherkin, lying meekly on his leg. In one flash of clarity, I see a world I’ve always known existed, but that I’ve never brushed up against before. This world comprises 6 A.M. Saturday phone calls from Erica reminding him that it’s his turn to drive to early soccer practice. Two sweet, freckled, serious little faces, smiling up at me. You’re not my mother. You can’t tell me what to do. Romantic dinners at Chuck E. Cheese. Chicken pox. Escaped pet boa constrictors. My mother lets me watch MTV whenever I want.

  He’s off the phone now, and looking thoroughly miserable. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay.” I lean over to kiss his cheek. “I need to think about getting ready for work.” I ease off the bedspread with as much dignity as a naked woman can manage.

  I pick up my bra and my sweater and my wool slacks. I toss the jacket on the foot of the bed, take the rest of my clothes into the bathroom with me, and turn on the shower.

  The wind knifes through my jacket. I scurry down the alley toward the bakery’s back door, pondering my aborted transformation from dumped wife to swinging divorcée. Gary insisted on driving me up the hill, apologizing all the way. He said he was sorry so many times, I wanted to stuff my scarf in his mouth. He said he wants to see me when he comes back at the end of the month. I said yes, but my stomach is not totally okay with this.

  I knock on the back door, shift my feet back and forth, try to keep warm. Linda must be in the storeroom or the bathroom. I knock again, louder. Still no answer. Shit, Linda. Don’t mess with me tonight. I’m not in the mood. I take off my day pack, dig down into the zippered compartment, fumble around till I feel the paper clip and metal tag on the end of the bakery key.

  Inside, only a few lights are on. None of the flour buckets are out. For that matter, nothing is out. The worktable is clear.

  “Linda?” No answer. I get this weird, prickly feeling at the base of my spine. “Linda?”

  I lock the door behind me, take a few steps into the room, and then I hear something—not exactly words, more a cross between a groan and a grunt. “Linda, where are you?” Because I didn’t have sense enough to turn on the rest of the lights, I trip over her foot before I see her. She bellows something unintelligible.

  She’s propped against the wall next to the ovens, blocking the narrow passage that leads to the storeroom. Eyes closed, mouth open, a long string of saliva hanging from one corner. Her breathing is noisy, labored. “Linda, are you sick?” When I bend down, I smell the bitterness of juniper berry. Linda is drunk as a skunk. Right on the verge of passing out. An open bottle lies on its side next to her, but it must have already been empty when she knocked it over, because there’s nothing on the floor. Looks like I’m making the bread tonight. But what to do with Linda?

  In the storeroom, I find a couple of canvas tarps. I make a little nest on the other side of the oven. Getting her over there won’t be easy. She’s not that big, but she’s deadweight. Finally I hit on the notion of a drag/carry like they taught us in Girl Scouts to move an injured person. I lay one of the tarps out next to her and by shoehorning myself between her and the wall, I manage to roll her onto it. By this time she’s out cold and it’s like trying to drag a beached whale. Fortunately, she can’t feel anything, so I end up moving her by bracing myself against the wall and shoving her with my feet. Between pushing and dragging, I eventually get her out of my way, throw her coat over her, dispose of the bottle, and get into high gear for bread making.

  When I’ve got both Hobarts heaving dough around and I’m sitting on a stool oiling pans, I remember Tyler saying that Linda took a nip now and then and that it made her more talkative, but she obviously crossed that line hours ago.

  I haul the white bread and whole wheat out of the mixers, into the troughs for their first rise, dump in the ingredients for the raisin bread and cheese bread without stopping to scrape down the mixers. No time for niceties this evening. While I’m measuring out raisins onto the scale, I hear a noise that sounds like a very big Velcro fastener being ripped apart, and I realize that Linda has risen to a half sit and is throwing up. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, as my opa used to say. Well, at least she’s conscious and not choking to death on it. I grab an empty flour bucket, stick it under her head. The stench is overpowering.

  When I think she’s finished, I wet a towel and toss it at her. She wipes herself, lies back down with the towel over her face, and drifts back into oblivion. I throw the bucket and the towel into the Dumpster, leaving the back door propped open. This is something we normally never do because of security, but tonight no one would want to come in here unless they had to.

  At 6 A.M. I’m removing the cheese bread to the cooling rack when Ellen unlocks the front door. There’s a silence. Then, “Holy shit, it’s freezing in here.” Footsteps. “What is that god-awful smell?” Then she’s standing there, looking from Linda to me, to Linda, to the back door, to me. “What the hell happened?”

  “Linda’s really sick,” I say. I pick up the peel, stare into the heat of the top deck, shuffle some loaves from back to front.

  Linda starts rolling around on the tarp, moaning.

  “We’ve got to get her out of here and get rid of that smell or we won’t be selling anything today.” Her eyes narrow as she looks at me. “Has she been drinking?”

  I shrug, look her in the eye. “Beats me. She was fine when I got here. Then she just sort of collapsed.”

  Ellen looks at me hard for a few seconds. “I’ll call her daughter.”

  Paige, the daughter, is here in less than thirty minutes, almost as if she were waiting for a call. She’s surprisingly pretty, in a severe way, hair pulled straight back, no makeup, white nurse’s uniform. When Ellen introduces us, I notice that her pale-blue eyes are red rimmed, as if she’s been crying. She stands over Linda, a mixture of disgust and concern on her smooth features.

  “I expect she’s been drinking since late afternoon,” she says. She looks at Ellen. “My father was killed yesterday.”

  While Ellen and I scurry around cleaning up the bakery, it occurs to me that Linda’s loss, while undeniably sad, presents me with an opportunity. I scrape together a fist-size lump of dough from one of the mixer bowls, break it into pieces, and mix it into a cup of water. Throw in two handfuls of flour, and we have a chef, the seed of a sourdough starter, covered with a damp cloth and sitting on a storeroom shelf to ripen in the cool, yeasty air.

  Jean-Marc showed me how when I told him I wanted a chef to take home with me.

  “First you must make the chef, okay?” “Okay” was his favorite American word. He grabbed a small bowl from a shelf under the worktable and took it over to the flour bins. “You take the flour.” He threw a fistful of white flour into the bowl. “And little whole wheat pour le faire plus fort, vous comprenez? Stronger. Then the water.” He dumped the flour into a mound on the table, made a well i
n the center, and filled it with water. Then, using two fingers and working from the well, he began to combine the two, first making a paste, then adding just enough flour to make a firm dough. He handed me the walnut-size lump. “Knead a little….” He wandered around, searching for something, while I gently massaged the little lump on the table.

  When the dough was springy, he produced a small earthenware crock. “Okay. Ici.” I dropped the dough in. He took a towel, wet it and wrung it out, and laid it over the top of the crock. “Maintenant nous attendons.”

  “For how long?”

  He shrugged. “Until it is ready. Two, three days maybe. We wait for the levure sauvage, vous comprenez?

  “The wild yeast?”

  “Oui. And you must keep the towel wet. N’oubliez pas.”

  Two days later, when I took the towel off to dampen it, I was disappointed to find that my lump of dough had solidified into a dead-looking little rock. I took it to Jean-Marc.

  “What’s wrong? What did I do?”

  He laughed. He took the ball from me and began to peel it like a hard-boiled egg. Under its crust, the interior was full of tiny bubbles and it smelled sweet. “Bien. It is ready for the first refreshment.” He handed it back to me, now half its original size. “Allons. I watch you.”

  “Two hands of flour this time. That is good. Now in the middle.” He made a circular motion and I made a well in the middle. “Now put the chef. Yes. Now a little water. Yes. No. Do not mix the flour yet. First you …” He rubbed his fingers together.

  “You smush it?”

  “ ‘Smush’? This is a word?”

  “Absolutely. Bien sûr.” I squished the dough and water between my fingers until the lump dissolved.

  “Bien. Now the flour. We wait again. Tomorrow, peut-être”

  “Don’t you know how long it will take?”

  He looked at me gravely. “Wynter, you do not tell the bread what to do. It tells you. You know from the way it looks, the way it feels, the smell, the taste. How warm, how cold. How wet, how dry. Vous comprenez?”

  I don’t mind the morning fog. In fact, on this particular morning, it suits me perfectly. I drag myself down the street, replaying last night’s fiasco in my mind. It all seemed so promising. I suppose I’m rushing things. I should be more … “circumspect,” my mother would say. I’m not even divorced yet. I can’t just go around falling into bed with people. I’m lonely and vulnerable. I could have kissed Pee-wee Herman and it would have felt good.

  My jogging shoes crunch in the gravel and I push through the hemlocks instead of walking around them. A movement draws my eye to the porch. Gary materializes out of the fog, in his jeans and red crewneck sweater and battle-scarred leather jacket. He looks like the guy who’d walk a mile for a Camel. Or like big brother Wally in Leave It to Beaver. He looks endearing. I want to be happy to see him, but something almost like dismay nips at me. At the same time, I’m thinking about his mouth on my breasts, about how that leather jacket would feel against bare skin—mine, for instance.

  He starts to say something, but before he can, I blurt out, “One more apology and I’ll never speak to you again.”

  He laughs. “Okay. No apologies.”

  Inside, I hold his jacket for a minute before hanging it up. “I thought you were leaving this morning.” “I changed my flight to this afternoon.”

  “Why?” Okay, it’s a rhetorical question, but I want to hear him say it. “Unfinished business.” He holds me gently, resting his cheek on my hair. “I can’t believe how good you smell.”

  “The bakery.” I smile. “Want some coffee?”

  He’s as tall as I am, so when he pulls back, we’re exactly eye to eye.

  “No,” he says.

  By Monday night, the chef has doubled in volume and the surface is textured with tiny bubbles. When I take the towel off, the unmistakable odor of fermentation rises from the bowl. I add more flour and water and mix it energetically.

  The third time I check the chef, it’s doubled in volume again. It’s soupy and roiling with life. I pinch off a piece and put it on my tongue. The bitter acidity flares like a match before giving way to a nutty aftertaste. It’s ready to make levain.

  I’ve conveniently forgotten that Linda’s coming back until I let myself in the back door Thursday night just in time to see her standing over the garbage can with my chef.

  “What the hell are you doing?” I shout. Her head jerks around and I almost laugh at the shock on her face. I’m sure nobody at the bakery has ever taken this tack with her.

  She recovers quickly. “Who told you to make this?”

  “Nobody told me to make it. I did it for myself, not for the bakery, so just leave it alone.”

  “I don’t want it around here.” She pulls the towel off, throws it on the floor.

  “Ellen said I could let it ferment here. I’m taking it home tonight.”

  She looks me in the eye and dumps my chef into the garbage. Total disbelief combines with frustration to immobilize me. Then I hear myself say, “You are the sorriest excuse for a human being I’ve ever met.”

  She’s almost grinning, she’s so pleased with herself. “What did you say, missy?”

  “I said you’re a bitch.” I turn and walk out the back door, down the alley.

  I hear the back door open and she screams, “You’re fired! You know that, don’t you? You’re fired!” It’s what she wanted all along.

  I light the stove, wrap a blanket around me, and sit in my chair, drawing my knees to my chest. Mac says I need to let it burn hot for thirty minutes every day or two to clean the creosote out of the chimney pipe. The fire grows, snapping ferociously at the kindling.

  Okay, now what? She’s a bitch. She’s unreasonable, impossible to work with. She’s pathetic and stupid. But I’m unemployed and she’s not.

  Working alone for these three nights has crystallized the image of my future. Unlocking the door and feeling the oven’s heat rush out to meet me. Turning on all the lights to find the whole place clean and quiet, expectant. For the first time, I think I understand what CM must feel when she stands backstage, waiting for the music.

  I imagine working in the daytime with Ellen and Tyler, Diane and Misha and Jen. The camaraderie would be fun, but what I remember most is the noise. And I’d have to make muffins and scones, not bread.

  Other alternatives are even less appealing. How can I work in a shop or teach English or sit in an office all day? I think of Lauren at the employment agency where I went that morning after David’s announcement. “I don’t mean to startle you, Wynter, but sometimes we have to do things we hate.” I bet she laughed about me later, sharing war stories with the other client counselors. “Let me tell you about the one I had today—the all-time queen dumb-ass rich bitch.” And I was. Last year at this time, my biggest worry was whether to wear black or white to the Black-and-White Symphony Ball.

  Linda’s beyond comprehension, true enough. But why did I let her get to me? It’s just a chef. Worst-case scenario is, I make a new one. Why did I have to go berserk? Nothing like cutting your own air hose. I reach for my pillow, on the couch.

  When I open my eyes it’s light out. I have incredible kinks in my back and neck from sleeping in this weird pretzel position, and someone’s banging on the door. When I unfold myself out of the chair, my father’s old copy of Might Flight tumbles onto the rug. I pick it up and lurch for the door.

  “Wyn, I’m so sorry.” Ellen rushes in before I have time to say anything, shuts the door behind her. Then she looks at me. “Oh, I woke you up. I’m so upset.”

  “Sit down.” I point to the chair. “I must have fallen asleep.” I fill the teakettle and put it on. “What time is it?”

  “Seven.”

  “Ellen, I’m sorry I lost my temper …”

  She shakes her head vehemently. “I’m sorry you had to put up with her.”

  “She told you?”

  “She was proud of herself I’ve already told her she h
as to apologize to you.” She gives me an ingratiating smile. “And I told her you’re going to be making some new kinds of bread. That is, if you want to, of course.”

  I look at her in surprise. “You mean you still want me to work there?”

  “Are you nuts? First of all, you’re a great baker. Second, you’ve lasted with her longer than anyone in the history of the place. I can’t tell you how many times we’ve been through this. She’s run off everyone we’ve put in there.”

  “Can I ask you a question? Why do you keep her on?”

  Her gaze shifts to the teakettle, which is starting to whistle softly. “I just can’t bring myself to fire her. She’d never be able to get another job. Too old, too obnoxious … She’d end up on unemployment. She’ll be retiring soon, but till then, I guess we’re stuck with her.” She shoots me a pleading glance. “You’ll stay, won’t you?”

  “What I don’t understand is why she threw it out, even after I told her it was mine and I was taking it home.”

  She runs a hand over her close-cropped dark hair. “She’s just a miserable human being, that’s why. Her bitterness poisons everything she does. And you committed the unforgivable sin of trying to help her. She’ll hate you forever for that.”

  The kettle’s blasting now. “Want some tea?”

  “No, thanks. I’ve got to get back. I just ran over here to make sure you weren’t pulling up stakes and heading for L.A. Listen …” She hesitates. “I know it’s going to be really awkward going back in there tonight—”

  I laugh. “It won’t be the first time I’ve shared space with someone who didn’t want me there.”

  I don’t knock. I use my own key to unlock the door and go in. She’s just bringing two flour buckets out of the storeroom.

  “Hi.”

  She gives me a blank stare and heads back down the hall. O-kay. I pull down the black notebook, put on a Mozart piano concerto, start weighing out flour for white sandwich bread. While I’m oiling bread pans, the concerto ends, shutting off the tape deck with a resounding click.