Joy For Beginners (8 page)

“Daria?” Sara’s voice on the phone sounded more excited than Daria had heard it in a long time. “I have someone here you have to meet. Can you come for dinner tonight?”

 

SARA’S KITCHEN WAS a chicken farm of chaos, the twins, Max and Hillary, sitting in booster seats at the kitchen table, board books and grapes and crackers spread about them, seven-year-old Tyler’s soccer shoes dripping mud in the center of the floor. Sara negotiated the obstacles unconsciously, her eyes on the children, the ingredients for the meal she was preparing. Daria stood at the kitchen island, tearing lettuce leaves for a salad.

“So, who is it I’m supposed to meet?” Daria asked. Sara pulled a cooking tray of chicken strips out of the microwave and arranged them on plates. The twins whooped in anticipation.

“You remember me talking about my brother, Henry?” Sara’s voice was lit with happiness. “He’s been traveling for years, but he’s in town now for a while.”

Daria had heard about the elusive Henry, Sara’s twin brother, the one who left home with a backpack after college and returned only sporadically for a dose of family before heading out to a new country whose language he didn’t speak, a culture whose food he’d never tried. Last Daria had heard, Henry was in Peru, but you never knew. Postcards sometimes took months to arrive, and Henry was not a big believer in email. His last stint had been long enough that he had yet to meet Sara’s own twins.

“What does he think of the rug rats?” Daria motioned toward the twins at the kitchen table.

“They adore him, of course. He let them go through his backpack. There were presents. I’ll never be able to keep them out of my luggage now,” Sara said. “If I travel,” she added ruefully, efficiently knocking the lid of an applesauce jar with the side of a knife and popping the seal. Outside, the sound of steps moved across the gravel path toward the kitchen.

“Okay, darlings,” she said, moving aside the board books. “Time for dinner. Uncle Henry is here with the milk.”

Daria looked up as the back door opened. She didn’t know why she had expected Henry to look as if he was a boy just out of college; maybe it was all the stories Sara told about when they were younger. But the man in front of her was in his mid-thirties, slim and dark, with a quiet stillness about him that seemed to pool in his eyes. He moved across the kitchen with a grace like his sister’s but with none of the tiredness, ruffling Max and Hillary’s hair as he passed, and handed Sara the carton of milk. His jeans were old, his T-shirt older.

“Yummmmm . . .” he said, smiling at the twins. “Chicken fingers.”

He turned to Daria and held out his hand. “I’m Henry.”

“Daria.” He smelled like warm wheat fields and wine.

“What can I do to help?” Henry asked, turning to his sister.

“Help Daria finish up that salad, and once Dan is home from work, we’ll eat.”

Daria moved slightly to make room for Henry at the kitchen island. He slipped into place next to her and picked up the knife, making a series of quick, controlled slices down the length of a carrot. Daria watched it fall open into a row of neat circles.

“Short-order cook?” Daria asked.

“Sometimes. When I need to. Mostly I’m a baker.”

“A baker? Really? As in bread?” Daria shot a look across the kitchen to Sara, who grinned and ducked her head.

“Uhm hmm.” Henry picked up a radish and a smaller knife. With a few deft strokes he turned it into a rose and handed it to Hillary, causing Max to clamor for his own.

“Troublemaker,” Sara commented affectionately. “Daria, why don’t you get Henry out of my way and show him your work. Daria makes these incredible pots, Henry; she’s getting really well known. I’ve got one of them on the bookshelf in the family room.”

“Not very subtle, is she?” Daria commented as they went into the next room. She pulled the pot off one of the upper shelves, where it had been placed far out of the reach of the children. It rested, barely contained in her palms, its shape a reverse hourglass. Tendrils of green and blue swam on the surface, memories of seaweed and sky.

“It’s lovely,” Henry said, taking it into his own hands. “It reminds me of an octopus pot, only much smaller.”

“Exactly,” Daria said, surprised. “How did you know?”

“I remember seeing these long lines of them, pulled up on the beach in Greece.”

“He’s a real water freak,” Sara called from the kitchen. “Ask him where he is living, Daria.”

“Where are you living, Henry?” Daria asked dutifully.

“Down in the marina, off Eastlake.”

“You live on a houseboat?”

“I’m boat-sitting. A friend of mine is traveling for a year.” He laughed at the excitement on her face. “Why? Do you want to see it sometime?”

 

“WHY A BAKER?” Daria asked. She and Henry were sitting in folding chairs on the deck of the houseboat in their heaviest coats and scarves, watching their breath fan out into the darkness. It was well past midnight; the noises from the other houseboats had quieted, the only lights from the porches, illuminating the small ripples shivering across the lake.

“Why a potter?” he countered.

“I asked you first.”

“Well, I like mornings.” He laughed at her expression. “Really. It started the first time I was driving across the States. It’s so much easier to be on the road before everyone else. And the light, the way the sun comes up across the fields in the Midwest and just defines every cornstalk; it’s really beautiful.”

Daria nodded. It was one of the few things she missed about where she had grown up.

“Anyway, I ran out of money in this little seaport in Massachusetts. I didn’t have any baking experience, but I was willing to get up early and they needed a dough mixer. And I liked it. There’s something about getting up at four in the morning that’s different than staying up all night. I liked walking down the middle of a road if I wanted, looking up at the moon. And I liked being the first person in the bakery, turning on the ovens, measuring out the flour and the water, smelling the yeast. I liked the idea that I was making a day out of such simple ingredients.”

He looked out over the water. Daria hugged her knees against the cooling air.

“Why a potter?” he asked after a while. “Your turn.”

Daria’s answer was quick, practiced. “I like to play with mud.” She laughed, the sound bouncing off the surface of the lake.

Henry stayed quiet for a while. “You know,” he said musingly after a few moments, “I never met anyone who worked so hard at being unpredictable.”

Daria’s arms pulled forward, tightening into each other.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“I’m just saying that sometimes it seems as if it makes you as uncomfortable as you want it to make others.”

Daria stood up, rubbing her arms. “You know, we’ve both got work in the morning.”

Henry nodded. Daria went into the houseboat to get her things, and then walked back out onto the deck, her hands in her coat pockets.

There was a small splash in the water.

“What do you think that was?” Henry asked.

“Just a rock,” Daria said. “See you, Henry.”

“Good night, Daria. Good luck with the wheel tomorrow.” When she turned around at the end of the dock to look back at him he was still in his chair, legs stretched out toward the water.

 

DARIA SLAMMED THE BALL of clay down onto the batter board, kicking the flywheel with her foot to start its motion. She wet her hands and cupped them around the slightly flattened ball, centering it, pulling the clay up into a column, then pushing it down into a mound, repeating the motion, a dialogue between hands and clay, feeling for imperfections, flexibility, like the first conversations at a cocktail party. If you paid attention, you could tell if something was going to work or not, before you put a lot of work into it.

It was cold in the studio—a hazard of her occupation. Marion always said that Daria worked in a morgue, but a heated studio would dry out the clay faster, and it was easier to wear big old sweaters and have a hot pot ready for tea. Daria liked to joke that cold studios were why potters so often made mugs; they needed boiling liquids for warmth. Daria huddled into her sweater, waiting for the physical activity to warm her. The studio had the bite of November, the air heavy with moisture. A good day to make pots, but it would take longer for them to dry out.

With her thumb, she drilled a hole in the center of the clay, pressing down on the floor of the mound with the pad of her fingers, widening the opening. Elbows braced tight against her sides for stability, she placed one hand inside, the other cupping the outside, fingers down, thumbs touching each other at the top as she pulled the sides up, making a cylinder, the tips of her fingers creating ridges that moved up the piece as she raised her hands, pulling the clay with her, feeling it follow her lead. She wet her hands slightly and repeated the motion, more slowly this time, the wheel losing momentum, slowing with her. A lot of potters preferred motorized wheels; they were less work, certainly, easier on the knees. But Daria liked the manual wheel—the first, hard kicks, the way the motion smoothed out and followed the natural order of the process, a connection between feet, hands, and center.

There was a knock at the door, startling Daria. No one came to the studio; even Marion knew better than to come to any door but her apartment.

She cleaned off her hands with a rag and opened the door to find an oblong shape wrapped in a white cloth, laid on the tiles of her doorstep. She picked it up and felt the warmth coming through the material: she smelled the thick, golden scent of freshly baked bread as she unwrapped the loaf. She pulled off a chunk and bit into it, feeling the crunch of the crust against her teeth, the softness beneath it, the heat rising up into her face.

Tucked into the paper wrapping was a note. It read: “7 pm tonight. Be hungry.”

Utterly predictable, Daria thought. But she smiled.

 

HENRY REFUSED TO TELL Daria where they were going. The building they ended up at was made of brick and wrought iron, set in the oldest part of town. The neighborhood was once the hub of the city, a patch of land where first settlers and then shopkeepers staked their claims, back when Seattle was the last stop before Alaska, when you could make more money outfitting prospectors than you could ever dig out of the ground or sift from a river. The staid and the desperate and the adventurous mixed together, holding on at the edge of the continent. Nowadays the prospectors were inside the buildings playing with computers, the panhandlers sifting a different kind of river. When Daria was in her twenties and first arrived in Seattle, she had loved the edginess of it all, but it had been a while since she had come down at night and things had become darker somehow. She pulled her coat a little closer and concentrated on the white Christmas lights hung among the branches of the trees lining the street.

Henry looked at her and smiled slightly, opening a door that was almost hidden on the side of the building. They entered an industrial kitchen, its entryway lined with gray plastic garbage cans marked “wheat” and “white.” Daria watched as Henry moved confidently through the space, lifting a cloth cover from a large metal pan and inhaling with satisfaction. He wore a long black coat and a scarf wrapped casually around his neck. The whole scene seemed hopelessly, deliciously Parisian, and Daria felt her shoulders relax.

“Is this your bakery?” she asked.

“From five until eleven five mornings a week. Come on,” he said, leading her out to a hallway behind the bakery and up a flight of creaking wooden stairs covered with a faded rose-colored runner that smelled of bread and old tobacco. The opaque glass door at the top had an ornate doorbell, and Henry pushed it and waited, until the door opened to reveal a tall, round man in his thirties wearing cargo pants and a tuxedo jacket.

“Henry!” he said joyfully. “The man who makes the world smell wonderful in the morning. I’m glad you’re here. And this?” He motioned to Daria.

“I’m Daria,” she answered, putting out her hand.

“Beautiful name. Lovely face. I’m William—welcome to the Underground Restaurant.”

“The what?” Daria asked Henry in an undertone.

“You’ll see,” he whispered.

The space was vast and open, with eighteen-foot ceilings and huge, multi-pane windows spanning the main wall, looking out to the cranes and containers of the port, the water beyond. The floors were oak, as old as the building itself. In the far corner was a kitchen with a six-burner commercial range and a capacious refrigerator. A wood-fired pizza oven nestled next to the stove, crackling cheerily. A steep red ladder led up to a loft area above the kitchen. The rest of the room was given over to two long tables and a series of ancient couches and oversized chairs where people were already lounging, wineglasses in hand.

Henry grabbed two wineglasses from the table near the front door and pulled a bottle of red wine from his coat pocket.

“I love the pockets of this coat,” he said cheerfully. “You could keep a tuba in them.”

The wine was soft and round in her mouth and tasted of cherries and chocolate. The room was warm for all that it was cavernous. Henry and Daria found a pair of chairs and sank in, watching the people around them.

“So, does William live here?” Daria asked.

“Yeah; I met him because he’s always the first customer at the bakery in the morning, and he insists on meeting all the new bakers. He owns the building.”

Daria looked over at William, at his whirlwind of uncut hair, the frayed edges of his cargo pants.

“Software,” Henry explained. “Retired.”

“So, is he a chef now?”

“No; that’s the chef.” Henry pointed to a small, thin man pacing the kitchen area. Henry named a restaurant that Daria had only read about in magazines, a place with eight tables and two seatings per night, no menus. “He works there, but he likes to experiment on his nights off, so William convinced him to do a dinner here. This is the first time it’s been at William’s loft; the idea is his baby, but it’s almost never in the same place twice. Right before I moved here they had an evening in an old warehouse that was going to be torn down. They invited poets and wrote on the walls and ate everything with their hands.”