Stir (21 page)

For years, the challah I baked was fine. Not great, though I was convinced it was. That's because we always ate it super fresh, still warm from the oven, when all breads, even so-so ones, taste like something special. Once cooled, and certainly by the next day, the bread would be just okay. Its flavor would flatten out and the texture would go a bit crumbly and stiff.

This challah is different, thanks to a tip from my friend Andrew Janjigian, a baker and editor at
Cook's Illustrated
magazine. Instead of kneading the dough, he said, try folding it. Then stash it in the fridge for a long, slow rise. With this technique, the gluten develops beautifully. The crumb is elastic and light, and the loaf pulls apart in fluffy wisps like cotton candy. The flavor is deep, almost buttery, though it's made with olive oil. And it's just as good on day two.

While this recipe takes a day or so from start to finish, it needs your attention for only a minute here and there over the first couple of hours. Then you leave the dough alone until you're ready to shape and bake it. I start the dough before dinner a night in advance, then go about my business at home, popping into the kitchen whenever it's time to fold.

I've included weight measures for the liquid ingredients here, because I've found it to be the simplest way to measure them for this particular recipe. With sticky, clingy things like honey and oil, it's fastest when you can measure directly into the bowl.

Please note that this recipe calls for instant dry yeast, not active dry yeast. Andrew explained to me the difference: Active dry yeast is coated with a layer of dead yeast that must be dissolved in order for the yeast to activate. That's why you have to proof it. Instant dry yeast, on the other hand, is all viable yeast. It's easier to use because there's no need to dissolve it in liquid. You just add it to your dry ingredients, and you're off. It's all I ever keep around. I buy the big red, white, and blue sacks of SAF-Instant yeast, which you can find online and in some grocery stores. Fleischmann's makes two instant yeasts, BreadMachine Yeast and Rapid-Rise Yeast, that are widely available in stores.

Dry ingredients:

4 cups (500 grams) bread flour

1½ teaspoons instant dry yeast

2 teaspoons fine sea salt

Wet ingredients:

2 large eggs plus 1 large egg yolk (save the extra white in a covered glass in the fridge for glazing later on)

¾ cup (190 grams) water

⅓ cup (75 grams) olive oil

¼ cup (85 grams) honey

For sprinkling, before baking (optional):

Flaxseeds

Rolled oats

Sunflower seeds

Pumpkin seeds

Whisk together the dry ingredients in a large bowl, and the wet ingredients in a smaller bowl. Dump the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients and stir with a rubber spatula until a wet, sticky dough forms. Cover the bowl with plastic and let sit for 10 minutes.

Peel back the plastic. Grab an edge of the dough, lift it up, and fold it over itself to the center. Turn the bowl a bit and repeat around the entire lump of dough, grabbing an edge and folding it into the center, eight turns, grabs, and folds in all. Then flip the dough so that the folds and seams are on the bottom. Cover tightly again with the plastic, and let sit for 30 minutes.

Repeat the all-around folding, flipping, covering, and resting for 30 minutes four more times. (I keep track by drawing hash marks in permanent marker right on the plastic.) The dough flops more than it folds in the first round or two. Then, as the gluten develops, you'll get proper folds. By the final fold, the dough will be wonderfully elastic, and you'll be able to see and feel the small pockets of air within. Pull the plastic tight again over the bowl and refrigerate for 16 to 24 hours.

Cover a baking sheet with parchment paper and set aside. Transfer the dough to a lightly floured surface and divide into six equal pieces. Roll into six strands, about a foot long and ¾ inch in diameter, dusting sparingly with flour when necessary to prevent sticking. (You'll want to add as little extra flour as possible.) Form two three-strand braids, and transfer the loaves to the prepared pan. Cover with plastic and let proof at room temperature for 2 to 3 hours, until the dough is noticeably swollen and puffed and bounces back very slowly, if at all, when you poke it lightly with your finger.

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.

Remove the plastic from the loaves and brush with the reserved egg white. If you'd like, sprinkle with seeds. Poppy and sesame seeds are traditional challah toppings. I typically cover one with a combination of flaxseeds and rolled oats, and the other with sunflower seeds and pumpkin seeds, though lately I've been opting for no seeds at all.

Bake for about 20 to 25 minutes, until the bread is golden and gorgeous and a tester inserted into the center comes out clean. You can also check for doneness with a thermometer. The internal temperature of the loaves will be 190 degrees when fully baked.

Transfer to racks and let cool.

Makes 2 loaves.

I
was grateful when the semester began. It had been a strange four weeks since the surgery. I hadn't known what to do with myself, so it felt good to be back in an environment that prescribed my next steps for me: Pass out syllabi. Grade papers. Meet with students. I started my dissertation. I attended lectures and organized seminars. Sometimes, I'd mindlessly go to hang my finger on the strap of the helmet I was no longer wearing, and my hand would thump to the desk below.
This is me
,
getting on with it,
I'd tell myself.
This is what I am supposed to be doing
.

Every morning I'd inspect my head and my face, looking for improvement.
Is my scar a bit flatter? Has the swelling gone down? How is the bruising?
One by one, the signs of surgery disappeared. The dent in my head did not. It was an odd effect. I didn't look sick anymore. Just deformed. This was my face now.

Don't look. It doesn't matter.
I turned away from the mirror when I brushed my teeth.
Don't look.
But sometimes I did. I'd glide my fingers gently down into my scooped-out temple and tickle the soft skin. If I pressed at all, it hurt. The spot was tender like a bruise. I looked at the top of my head. After the initial surgery to clip the aneurysm, my scar had been barely visible, a thin, straight line tucked neatly beneath my hair. But now my head had been opened twice more along that same seam, my scalp stretched repeatedly back into place and stitched closed. I had a landing strip, a half-inch band of permanent baldness across the top of my head. These things were not going away.

That there was nothing left to be done was supposed to be a good thing. Now the sense of finality had been turned upside down. There was nothing left to be done, all right. They'd fixed what could be fixed. I shouldn't complain, I told myself. The dent was in the squishy part of my temple and didn't pose a threat to my brain. The protective part of my skull was fully intact. My helmet sat in our bedroom closet on a shelf so high I couldn't reach it without a ladder. But the surgery hadn't felt like the end point I'd expected.

I went over and over the conversations with doctors and secretaries in my mind, trying to figure out what I could have done—what I should have done—to make sure the plastic surgeon was there. I had tried to be vigilant, smart, careful, polite, thorough, responsible, good. How could something have gone wrong 
again
?

My doctors and friends liked to tell me how, even with the remaining dent, it was
soooo
much better than before. But really? Was that the bar? Was a skull that looked as though it had been attacked by a killer melon baller really all we had hoped to surpass?

I wanted to punch myself in the face for thinking these things. If I were more grateful, less shallow, stronger, wiser, if I had my priorities straight, if I had learned anything at all about what really matters from the previous year, if I were a better person, this stupid little defect would mean nothing to me. Maybe then I could look in the mirror and see my face, and not a reminder of my own near-death, my own brokenness, screaming back at me. I was healthy and helmet free. I was given the green light to run again. To have children. I was back in school. My brain was clean, the aneurysm gone
.
What was wrong with me, getting all worked up about a dent the size of a golf ball?

I called my dad. He said my feelings weren't about the remaining defect, not really, and he was right. They were about the whole long slog of it coming to an end, about having no more next steps, no upcoming tests or surgeries to keep me looking ahead and looking forward to becoming well again, bit by bit. There were no more bits. This was me, all patched up. I felt as though I'd been on a bus for thousands of miles, then dropped, alone, at the end of a dusty highway. I hadn't arrived anywhere at all, but there was nowhere left to go.
What had happened to me?
What the
hell
had happened to me?
“You had to feel it sometime, Jess,” my dad said. I didn't understand what he meant. Hadn't I been feeling it all along? Wasn't this the part where I was supposed to
not
have to feel it anymore?

Stop it. Just stop it. Stop crying. You're fine.
I would will myself out of this: I had a weird-looking face. So what? I'd never been beauty oriented, anyway. All my life, I'd assumed it had to be one or the other. You were pretty or you were smart. You cared about looks or the important stuff.

Eli didn't believe me when I said the dent was no big deal. Even I didn't believe me. But, each in our own way, we pretended that we did. We wanted so badly for it to be true that everything was okay. If we could just stand back, keep quiet, and let time do its thing, shrinking and squeezing all that had happened into a mere blip in the larger context of a long and healthy life. If we could just hold tight.

Health. Family. Work. These were the things that mattered. I lunged for them. I shoved my nose into the yellowed pages of nineteenth-century books and newspapers. I wrote a paper. I translated texts. I did yoga and lifted weights. I started running again, too, though I feared it. Eli came with me, at first. We started slowly, running, then walking, then running again, as much as I could take. Soon, we were counting the miles. Each bridge along the Charles was a finish line: JFK, Western Avenue, River Street, BU. Sometimes panic would claw itself out of the box where I kept it and swipe at my heels. I'd notice an itch on my scalp and scan the trail to see who might come to my rescue if I collapsed.
The couple on the bench. The man with the dog. That girl on the grass has her cell phone out
.
She could make the call.

I was starting to think again about becoming a mother, allowing myself to want it all the way now that the surgery was over. But was that right of me? Moms were supposed to be strong. Fearless. Moms are the Protectors, and here I was, unsure of whether I could even protect myself. Though my doctors insisted otherwise, I felt prone to breakage. I feared having a child and being too sick to care for her. I feared dying and leaving her without a mom.

Then other times, I felt strong.

One unseasonably warm evening in late October, I ran alone for the first time all the way to the Mass. Ave. bridge, over three miles from my front door. The river widens there, and when the autumn sun is low, the city of Boston glows orange and the water is liquid light.

“I think I'm starting to be ready,” I told Eli when I got home. “Are you?” I was sure I already knew the answer. We'd had this conversation before, two summers earlier, one night in bed right before I got sick. His answer had been yes, and had stayed yes, as far as I knew. Trying to conceive was something we had looked forward to once we had learned it would be safe. My body just had to get strong enough again. I was the one we were waiting on.

Eli looked away and did what I call his “uncomfortable yawn,” an unconscious move of his that buys him some time when he's about to say something hard. It starts out as a fake yawn with his chin jutted out to one side, then blossoms into a real one. I felt my chest tighten.

“We need to talk about your head,” he said.

“No.” I knew where he was going.

“I think we should go see the plastic surgeon. See if he can fix it.”

“No way.”

“Jess—”

“Are you crazy? Another surgery? No. It's just a stupid dent. I don't even care. I want to be a mom. I want to do this. I'm ready to do this.”

“You do care.” His voice was soft. “And you should.”

“It's just my head. It's just my face.” I was crying. “I can't believe after everything . . . The risks of another surgery . . . We know what can happen. I need you to understand.”

“I don't understand.”

I wanted to shake him.
We've escaped! We've made it!
I can't go back
.

“Don't you at least want to know?” he pressed. “Find out if something can be done? I'm just talking about getting some information.”

“Stop,” I said. “Please stop.”

 • • • 

We didn't exactly decide to “start trying.” What we did was more along the lines of “stop preventing.” Anything else would have felt too medical, and I needed this to feel like the opposite of medical. We'd had sex—careful, attentive sex—when I was still missing a part of my skull. Now we could lose ourselves again. Or, almost. I wondered sometimes when Eli closed his eyes if it was because he didn't want to see. Wherever his hands were, I felt where they deliberately were not: along the side of my face, my temple, my brow. Sometimes, when Eli would pull me close in the darkness, he'd accidentally brush his lips against my sunken skin. I'd shrink back from the soreness, then try to mask my recoil as a coy pivot, sliding my body into a different position alongside his.

I'd read somewhere that even under perfect conditions, when both of the relevant parties are as fertile as can be and timing is spot-on, there's still only a 33 percent chance of conception with each cycle. So it wasn't the not being pregnant that troubled me those first few months. It was the conversation we'd inevitably circle back to. If I wasn't pregnant, surgery was an option again. We would be eating breakfast, doing the crossword puzzle in bed, or driving up to a friend's wedding in Montreal, and Eli would get that look and yawn that yawn.

“Just think about it,” he'd say.

“I have,” I'd insist. “And no.”

I was fine. Fine!
Doing the work. Running the miles. Attending classes and giving talks. But back in the library stacks, in seminars about the very writers who had inspired me to go to graduate school in the first place, something wasn't right. I felt like I was moving around in a life that was two sizes too big and two sizes too small at the same time. At night a jolt of adrenaline would sometimes shock me awake, and I'd start sobbing, afraid.
But of what?

All those months, the helmet had concealed the part of my head that was broken. Cruising the frozen foods aisle, sipping tea at a café with a hockey helmet on my head, I didn't look particularly damaged. I think I mostly just looked like a weirdo. “Hey, killer!” someone had called out as I stuffed my bag into the overhead compartment on our way to Seattle. Sometimes, I'd be walking down the street and hear a voice shout, “Safety first!” That my actual illness was invisible made me feel invisible. Now, with the helmet gone and a head that looked more or less like a head, I waited to reappear. Instead, I felt more invisible than ever. If the helmet had hidden my secret, my newly reconstructed skull, however flawed, hid it even better.
But I am still broken!
I screamed inside. I wanted no one to know. I wanted everyone to know. I said nothing.