Bread Alone (13 page)

I open the new jar of yeast, stir it around with my little finger. It feels gritty as sand, but nearly weightless. I know that yeast is an organism, a single-celled plant. I know it reproduces by budding, producing a whole new generation about every five hours. I understand the chemistry, how it feeds on sugar and starch, breaking them down into alcohol and carbon dioxide.

Even given what’s known, and the fact that you can walk into any grocery store and buy it off the shelf, it’s still impossible to dismiss the magic of the process. In the merrye olde England of Geoffrey Chaucer, one of the names for yeast was “goddisgoode,” because it was considered a gift from heaven. But until I went to France, I always thought of yeast as something manufactured, something you got in a jar or an envelope at the grocery store.

My very first morning at the
boulangerie,
Sylvie volunteered to walk with me, even though I had to be there at 5
a.m.
The river breeze was cool and fresh, and shadows were long in the early light. We turned into the narrow alley behind the bakery. Jean-Marc stood just outside the rear door, leaning against the ancient brick wall, one foot up like a stork, drinking espresso from a tiny white cup and smoking the first Gauloise of the day.

When he saw us, he threw down his cigarette and ground it out under one heavy brown boot. The aroma of baking bread curled out the door like an invitation.

“Vous êtes en retard.”
He frowned. “The day is nearly finished.” I started to apologize, but Sylvie laughed and I noticed the slight twitching of the corners of his mouth, which was the most obvious and sometimes the only sign that he was making a joke. “
Venez,
I show you the
fournil
—the baking room.” We stepped through the door and the heat became a tangible presence. “It takes one hour for the oven to be hot.”

We passed a small storage area filled with huge sacks of flour, and entered a long, narrow room with a very high ceiling. At the back was the oven—stainless steel, six feet tall, five decks. The cooling racks lining the side walls were already full of crackling-hot, hissing loaves in different
shapes and sizes and I thought I would faint with pleasure at their smell. Two men in front of the oven were using a long rack with a canvas stretcher on rollers to load dozens of baguettes into the oven. They worked stripped to the waist, sweating from the fiery blast of air. Within minutes, I had beads of perspiration on my forehead and Sylvie was dabbing her face delicately with a handkerchief.

“You see the high ceiling,” she said, pointing up. “Jean-Marc made this.” There was a barely discernible line about eight feet up the wall where the bricks changed slightly.

“Some of the
boulangeries
where I work at school, the top is very low.” He held his hand just over his head. “Especially in Paris. All the
fournils
are in the basements. It is very hot to work there. This is much better.” He looked around the room with a self-satisfied air.

Jean-Marc led us across a narrow hall into a room filled with refrigerators and proofing cabinets and kneading machines with blades the size of airplane propellers, and a huge wooden worktable. One of the men we’d seen loading baguettes into the oven was pushing a wheeled rack full of bread up to the front of the shop. As he passed by the door, Jean-Marc stopped him, took a small, warm, crusty loaf off the rack, handed it to me.

“Pain au levain,”
he said. “You want to taste it.” It was a command, not an invitation. I ripped off a chunk.
“Pain de campagne?”
I said.

Jean-Marc shook his head.
“Pain au levain.
It is different from
pain de campagne.
Taste it.”

The crust was thick and golden brown, the crumb pale gray with an irregular texture. I took a bite. Sweet but with a slightly sour aftertaste. The interior was dense, moist, chewy; the crust crisp and nutty.

I stopped eating it long enough to say, “This is wonderful. What is it? How do you make it?”

His little half smile did something funny to my stomach that had nothing to do with bread.
“Levain
is like your sourdough, the
levure sauvage.
The wild yeast,
oui?
We put the whole-grain flour with the white. To make it more strong.
Plus fort, vous comprenez?
The
levain
that
is firm, it make the bread less sour. The
levain
that is …” He rubbed his fingertips together, searching for the right word.

“Wet?” I suggested.

“Oui, bien sûr,
the wet
levain
make a more sour bread. Like your San Francisco bread.”

That loaf of
pain au levain
was the best bread I ever tasted.

Bearing in mind the gospel according to Jean-Marc, I cut the yeast in half, eliminate the powdered milk and oil, reduce the honey to an eighth of a cup, and throw in some toasted walnuts.

I mix the ingredients together in the KitchenAid. Any urgency I feel is about getting it out on the counter and into my hands. Kneading is what you miss with a bread machine—the feel of bread. You forget what it is to get lost in the rhythmic fusion, the way you can tell by touch the exact moment when the dough comes alive, when it’s ready to rise up and grow. This is what it means, the part about “You are breadmaking itself.”

I leave the dough to proof in the cool air of the laundry room and go upstairs to strip the bed.

The loaves have perfumed the whole house by the time they emerge from the oven. I set them on cooling racks, feeling like a sculptor with a new work on display. Awash in goodwill, I can’t wait till my mother gets home. I want to tell her the worst is over. That I know I’ve been a pain in the ass, but I’m going to make it. It will take time, of course, but the healing has begun. I’ll thank her for her patience and support, tell her I realize it’s time for me to be getting my own place, looking for a job, making a life for myself.

The phone interrupts my enraptured gushing. My stomach balls up.
Wyn, it’s me.
He sounds sad, lonely.
Look, I know I’ve been acting weird.
Try pond scum, David. He sighs.
It’s true. I’ve been acting like pond scum. But I’ve been thinking about you so much. I can’t stand this. I must’ve been crazy to—Wyn, I love you. Do you think you could—

“Wyn? Hi, honey.” It’s my mother. “How are you feeling?”

“Fine. I’m … better. I’ve been up and I—”

“Oh, I’m so glad. Listen, honey, I’m going to go have a drink with some people from the office, and if we get hungry, we might go out to dinner, so don’t wait for me, okay? There’s some of that lasagne left in the fridge for you and there’s salad in the bin.”

“Okay.”

“What did you do today? Besides wash the sheets.” Her voice is bright. She’s trying to be funny, to cheer me up. I want to scream at her.

“Nothing exciting. I made some bread.”

“Oh, did you? I’ll have to try some when I get home.”

“You don’t
have
to. It’s always optional.” I hate myself.

She sighs. “Okay, Wynter. I’ll see you later.”

I hang up the phone, try to ignore the mass of tears that’s pushing on my sinuses, inciting a major headache. It wasn’t David; it’s never going to be David. Get used to it. My mother has a life. She’s going out with friends. I should be happy she’s not here trying to force-feed me and happy that she’s enjoying herself. If I weren’t up to my neck in shit, I’d be ecstatic.

I pour a glass of milk and rip a corner off one of the still warm loaves. I stand at the kitchen sink, dunking the bread in the milk and eating it and crying noisily. When the streetlights start to glow, I go upstairs, remake the bed, take all my clothes off, and crawl between the sheets with Holmes and Dr. Watson.

I’m asleep when my mother comes home and she doesn’t wake me up when she leaves in the morning. I can’t really blame her. I wouldn’t want to have much to do with me either. I get up and take the sheets off the bed, throw them in the washer. I pour a cup of coffee out of the thermal carafe she’s left for me and take it back upstairs.

When I go into the hall bathroom to get clean sheets from the linen closet, I catch a full-frontal look at myself in the mirror and it’s not a pretty sight. In fact, it’s so shocking that I stand and stare at my reflection
for several minutes. My hair is wild—owing, no doubt, to the fact that it hasn’t been combed since Monday. My skin is pasty. Except for the bruised-looking hollows under my eyes. My face looks pinched, the way I look when I have the flu.

I take a sip of coffee and my eyes travel down my body, as if they’re following the coffee on its journey. My collarbone protrudes sharply from the neck of my shirt and my jeans are suddenly gapping at the waist. In earlier times, that would have pleased me immensely, but I’ve learned the hard way that the Twiggy look doesn’t flatter a frame like mine. Instead of looking chic, I look like a Dorothea Lange photograph.

This time when the phone rings, I give myself a little shake. It’s not David, so don’t hold your breath. If it’s my mother, she’s probably pissed off at me. The most likely scenario is that someone wants to sell us a new roof or some aluminum siding.

CM’s familiar voice says, “Hi, Baby. Are you all right?” I want to weep with relief.

“I’m surviving.”

“Have you talked to Asshole?”

“Not really. I saw him, though.” I sing her my sad song of David and Kelley’s early morning meeting, Elizabeth Gooden’s cheery philosophy of divorce, my mother’s sudden renaissance, Tim Graebel’s casual betrayal of his wife of thirty years.

“Your biggest problem right now is that you’ve got too much time on your hands,” she says. “You need to get your own place and get a job. What are you using for money, anyway?”

“I have an allowance. David has to deposit three grand a month in my account or they come and put him in the stocks and let little kids throw rotten eggs at him.”

She sighs. “God, sometimes I have trouble working up sympathy for you. Does David have any single friends who’d like to marry me and then dump me so I can have an allowance?”

“I’m not going to dignify that with a reply.”

“Well, you still need to get a job. When you have things you have to do, you won’t have time to brood.”

I kick off my sandals and lie down on the bed. “Maybe you’re right. If I don’t get something else to think about pretty soon, I’ll go nuts.”

“In fact, I think you should come up here.”

“I can’t go anywhere right now.”

“Why not? You can stay here. We’re starting our master class series a week from Monday, and I’ll be gone for three weeks. You’ll have the whole place to yourself and you can use my car—”

“I can’t, CM. Not till something gets resolved.”

She switches to her drill-sergeant voice. “Well, then, what are you doing to resolve it?” My silence tells the story. “You know, I’m really sorry I’m not there to kick your butt,” she snaps. “I know you’re laying around down there, wallowing in self-pity—”

“Lying.”

“Whatever.” Her voice changes again. She would have made a great radio actress. “I was at the bakery yesterday. Ellen asked about you. She told me they’re still looking for a bread baker.”

“I can’t leave right now. Period.”

“Okay, but the invitation stands, if you should suddenly come to your senses.”

I’m curled up on the couch reading
Middlemarch
when my mother walks in with soup and salad from Gelson’s. She studies me intently, apparently deciding it would be best not to say what she wants to say. She hangs her coat in the hall closet.

“Why don’t you put some of your bread in the oven and we can have it with dinner?”

While we eat, she chats, keeping her tone carefully neutral and upbeat. “This bread is wonderful. I sneaked some when I came in last night.”

“I’m glad you like it.” I take a big gulp of wine and poke at my salad. She sets down her fork and looks at me. Here it comes. “Wyn, you can’t go on like this. Have you taken a good look at yourself lately?”

“Um, actually, yes. Just this afternoon. Although I’m not sure I’d call it a
good
look.”

“Can you stop being a smart-mouth for five minutes? I’m concerned about you.”

“I’m sort of concerned about me, too.” I try to smile. “I was having a good day yesterday. When I made the bread. I was feeling somewhat functional.”

She frowns. “So what happened?”

“You called. I mean, when you called to tell me you weren’t coming home for dinner, I just felt … I don’t know. Deflated. I wanted to show you my bread.” I can’t believe the way my voice is cracking. “Like a little kid, you know. It’s … really stupid. And”—I inhale deeply—”and, when the phone rang, I thought it might be—”

“David,” she finishes. “I know. I used to think that about your dad. After he died, I would sometimes imagine that I’d pick up the phone and he’d say, ‘Hey, Jo. Put that roast back in the freezer. Let’s go out for dinner tonight.’ “