Joy For Beginners (7 page)

There was an almost literary irony, she thought now, in how Jack had gone rampaging through his life this year, cleaning the shelves in one sweep, when the reality was they were already emptying, quietly and efficiently, on their own. Searching for a clean slate, he had chosen a woman at the beginning of her adult life, who would want to fill shelves again with children and diaper bags and strollers, more baggage than you could ever carry on. He had jumped out of the cycle only to go back to the beginning, filling his hands again.

Marion’s thumb moved to the inside of Caroline’s left shoulder blade, following the line of the bone, reaching in to the muscles below.

“Too much?” Marion asked.

“No,” Caroline answered. Behind her the last rays of the sun reached into the living room, lighting the walls blue and gold.

O
ne time, almost two years ago, Daria’s older sister Marion had given her a gallon-sized Ziploc bag filled with off-white goo. The over-Xeroxed instructions called it “Amish Friendship Bread.” It was so easy, the instructions declared—mush the bag, mush the bag, mush the bag. Add some water and flour and sugar. Mush again. Make more starter, give new bags of goo to three of your friends, and bake your bread. Stunningly simple. You can do it, Marion had said supportively; you might have fun.

It was a chain letter camouflaged as food, Daria could see that. It even came with a peppy little note like all the chain letters in junior high: “Pass this on to three friends. If you do, your dearest wish will come true. If you don’t, you will fall to earth in a plane crash/suffer a heart attack/lose the love of your life.” Those letters were always threats dressed in smiles, the epistolary equivalent of a head cheerleader. Daria hated them, deeply and viscerally—their cheerful theft of your time, their assumption that you had three friends.

Daria had taken the goo-bag home, held between two fingers like a wet diaper, and pitched it onto the kitchen counter. In the morning she noticed that bubbles had surreptitiously formed in the bag during the night, lightening the humorless quality of the starter. Bubbles. All on their own, without her help. She mushed the bag, feeling the goo beneath the plastic give under her fingers, a bit like clay, but smoother, looser. The next morning the same, and the next, opening the seal and letting out the air each time, then closing the bag, gently and firmly, like a mother tucking a reluctant child into bed. Maybe there wasn’t so much to that baking thing after all.

On the fourth morning she walked into the kitchen, flicked on the switch for the coffeepot and looked over at her burbling little friend. The edgy, fecund smell of yeast tickled the air, mingling with the earthy aroma of the percolating coffee. She reached over and gave the bag a squeeze, an affectionate foreshadowing of mushing to come, at which point the seal, not entirely secured from the previous release of air, popped open and goo vomited across the counter, trickling over the edge, oozing into a partially opened drawer and dropping onto the floor in round, soft splats.

Shit, thought Daria. She scraped the goo back into the bag, wondering what fermentation aids were lingering on the average kitchen counter, and stored the whole mess on top of the refrigerator. It sat there throughout the day, morose, guilt-inducing, occasionally emitting a small, pathetic bubble to call her attention to its fate. She’d had boyfriends who were subtler. She was about to go on a trip, anyway, a weekend with a man she barely knew, the excitement of the date enough without adding the guilt bread. Maybe she could let the stuff die now. It couldn’t possibly live through such a traumatic experience.

What was the point, anyway? She wasn’t Amish. She liked cars and bread from the store, and the way a zipper could slide open down your back in the right man’s hands. She wasn’t her mother, the bread-making queen. Her dishes didn’t match, because she made them herself—not that her mother ever seemed that impressed with Daria’s pottery. Why did you have to prove you could bake bread when you made the plates you served it on?

But the next day, when the starter still miraculously burbled, she had relented and the plastic bag accompanied her on the weekend getaway, sitting in the backseat of the man’s car between their overnight bags like a small nervous child with a gastrointestinal disorder, surrounded by paper towels in case of eruption.

“Really?” the man she barely knew had asked.

“You said you liked me for my unpredictability,” she answered.

“Really?” he repeated.

The guilt-goo survived longer than the relationship, arriving home with Daria on Sunday evening. The car had been cold on the drive back but the starter seemed to be doing a better job of coping with the weekend than she was, even though once she read the directions she realized she was supposed to have made bread from it the day before. The stuff was impressive, Daria had to admit as she held the bag in her hands.

Sitting on her kitchen table was her grandmother’s bowl, creamy white inside, crimson on the exterior. Daria remembered the first time she had seen the bowl at her grandmother’s house when she was a child, how the sun coming in the back kitchen window lit up the deep red of the glaze and nestled in the ridges running up the sides, how she had gotten her hand lightly slapped for trying to sneak batter, when all she had done was reach out to feel the smooth surface, the edge of a ridge pressed against her finger. When her grandmother had died a few years earlier, Daria refused all objects from her house, claiming she didn’t have space in her tiny apartment, anyway. But as she had passed through her grandmother’s house while the other relatives were still talking in the backyard, she saw the bowl on the kitchen counter and took it.

Guilt bread made in a stolen bowl, Daria thought wryly. She divided the starter into four parts and poured one portion into the bowl.

The goo looked a bit gray, and Daria had already put in baking soda before she realized it should have been powder, but she put the whole thing in a loaf pan and dumped some cinnamon across the top and stuck it in the oven—from which it emerged forty minutes later, fragrant, lovely and forgiving.

 

SO WHY DID SHE have to do it all again now? Daria thought, mulling over Kate’s challenge. Hadn’t she already proved herself? She’d even taken Kate half the loaf of the Amish guilt bread—on a plate she had made herself, red for healing power.

Sometimes, Daria thought, that group of women was more trouble than it was worth. She’d only said yes to the do-one-thing-that-scares-you pact because she thought she would get something exciting like bungee jumping or sex on a houseboat. She should have known better. Kate hated boats. “Learn how to make bread”—that was classic Kate.

Standing in her pottery studio, Daria ripped open the plastic on a package of clay and got ready to prep it.

 

DARIA ALWAYS TOLD PEOPLE that unpredictability was her birthright, earned by her unanticipated conception on the night of her sister Marion’s sixteenth birthday party. Daria had often wondered what could have prompted her mother into such a display of sexual recklessness, as it was obvious to Daria early on that love or the desire to look down into the clear gaze of a baby’s eyes had had nothing to do with it. Maybe it had been all those lanky teenage bodies, sending their hormones ricocheting about the house. Despite all evidence to the contrary, Daria liked the idea that there might at least have been something passionate in her creation. Not that she was ever likely to ask her mother.

Daria often referred to her mother as the patron saint of perpetual disappointment. Daria envisioned her, arms outspread, welcoming the hordes of the ticked off, the judgmental, the depressed, into her all encompassing embrace, where she would teach them essential life skills such as how to take the silver lining out of clouds, or conjure flaws out of thin air. Daria had overheard her mother telling friends how the labor with her second daughter was like birthing a cactus—the implication clear to Daria that things had not changed in the intervening years.

 

DARIA TOOK a sharp wire with a wooden handle on each end and sliced through the cool, hard block of clay in front of her. She picked up a chunk, testing its weight in her hands, feeling its moist surface clinging to her skin. Then she cupped her hands around it and shoved down, hard, onto the board with the heel of her hand, her thumbs. She pulled the red-brown mass off the board with the ends of her fingers, pivoting it toward her, pushing again with all her strength, feeling the energy move from her shoulders through her elbows, down her forearms to the clay. Push, flip, push, flip, pressing out the air that would cause a pot to explode in the kiln.

IT WAS MARION whom Daria remembered when she thought of her childhood. Marion, already owning the sensual, sanddune lines of breasts and hips and thighs by the time Daria was born, taking Daria out into the world with a grown-up assurance that was both a relief and entirely frustrating to Daria. When she was young, Daria always thought that the glasses Marion wore were special, allowing her to read the road signs in life that were incomprehensible to Daria—the line forming between their mother’s eyes, a smile from an aunt or uncle that might or might not be friendly, the inflection in a shopkeeper’s voice.

It was Marion who had told Daria the story of the chocolate cake Marion made herself for her sixteenth birthday party, a tower of three dirt-dark layers and luxurious brown frosting. A taste of that cake had magical effects, Marion had told Daria, as wonderful as the bite of Snow White’s apple had been disastrous. In Marion’s tale, Daria’s conception became art, created by a kind of glorious, dark chocolate fate.

But when Daria was five, Marion left the Midwest and moved to Seattle, taking her stories and her special glasses with her, and Daria gave up trying to read the road signs of life. It seemed much simpler to become something for the world to navigate around, rather than the reverse.

It wasn’t difficult. Daria already attracted attention with her tumbleweed hair and desire to play in the mud, her preemptive strikes on the playground, her unusual eating habits, which changed and developed over the years. There was the time when she was six and decided to eat only one color per week, following the order of the rainbow (yellow by far the easiest, particularly if you were allowed to include tan). Twelve was the year of vegetarianism; fifteen, the stage when her body started following the curves of her older sister, a time of green protein shakes and strenuous gustatory self-denial.

What was considered odd in elementary and junior high school became an asset on the dating circuit later in life. Men always loved the hummingbirds, weightless and colorful, so quick you could never catch them even if you wanted to. And her affinity for mud had turned into a profession in clay.

 

DARIA HAD FIRST ENCOUNTERED clay the summer she turned ten, when her mother signed her up for arts and crafts camp. The fact that Daria’s mother—who was eternally and vocally annoyed at Daria’s love of playing in mud—was willing to spend good money when it was called clay was highly amusing to Daria, who wisely said nothing and even expressed a few carefully timed expressions of reluctance to make sure her mother didn’t change her mind.

But the moment Daria touched clay, her hands instinctively wrapped around the ball the teacher had given her. It was like mud you could control, flexible, warmed by your hands, made slick with water. She spent the first day rhythmically flattening her ball into a circle, then rolling it up into the roundest shape she could create, feeling the silkiness of its surface against the skin of her palms, the calming weight in her hands. She listened barely, dreamily, to the teacher explain the origin of clay, imagining the particles letting go of the big rocks and rolling downstream, flattening, smoothing out, blending with others. She wondered where her clay had wandered from, which river it had floated down, what made it stop and settle. The teacher was calling clay common, but Daria knew better. Every particle in her hands came from somewhere, traveled to somewhere else. There was nothing common about that; it didn’t matter that they were cast off in the first place.

 

EVEN NOW, every time Daria soaked the hard scraps from previous projects and watched them turn back into wet clay, she marveled at how infinitely forgiving her medium was. Up until the time it was placed in the kiln, any pot could be sent back to its beginning, any mark could be undone, the final piece holding all its iterations within itself while displaying only the final one.

As Daria cut and wedged her last chunk of clay for the day, she heard her cell phone ring. Rinsing and wiping her hands, she reached over and opened the phone, seeing Sara’s number on the screen. Daria and Sara had met a few years earlier, when Sara’s twins were only a few weeks old. Marion had organized a baby-holding circle, to give Sara a chance to use one of her arms for something other than cradling a baby, Marion had said. Daria was not a big fan of babies—in her experience, they tended to crawl on the floor and eat clay—but Marion had insisted Daria join the group, saying they needed five people, one for each day of the week when Sara’s husband was at work. And even though Daria and Sara were completely different—Sara quintessentially domestic, tied to her three children and her house and her husband—Daria couldn’t help liking her. There was just something so genuinely friendly about Sara, and her children’s Halloween costumes were something you didn’t want to miss. Daria always thought Sara would make a wonderful artist, if she’d just stop making peanut butter sandwiches.