Stones for Bread (12 page)

And then it’s gone too.

What is to be done now? The French make acorn bread, shelling and grinding the bitter little hatted pods into meal, sometimes mixing it with other meals or flours, if there are any to be had. Those eating it
do so in disgrace, since acorns have long been used as food for swine. The Germans harvest wild oats and shore grasses with heads mimicking those of wheat, and even reeds and rushes. Any vegetable seed one could find is dried and crushed. In Sweden, pine bark and needles sometimes comprised upward of three-fourths of the loaf. And if water is scarce, animal blood may be used to mix and bind it all.

Anything resembling grain is consumed. Straw is plucked from the thatched roofs of village homes. The hungriest eat grass like cattle, on their hands and knees, unable to wait for it to dry; they often die of dehydration due to continued diarrhea. Men even mix what little flour they can afford with dirt, cooking it into flat cakes, consuming the very medium from which both they, and the wheat they desperately desire, have been conceived.

Patrice slides her fingers over a touch-screen phone nearly the size of her pad, pecking here and there with beak-like precision. “Technology,” she sighs. “I’m forced to keep up with it, but give me pulp and pen any day.” A vibrating beep mocks her. “Hair and makeup await outside.”

“Will this take long?” I ask.

She glances at me. “Yes.”

“Give me a minute, then.”

Wild Rise closes in ninety minutes but it buzzes with an unusual intensity, customers drawn in by the monstrous Good Food Channel bus outside the building. Gretchen assures me she can handle the crowd. “They’re not ordering much anyway. No food, really. And the bread is practically gone—they’re only here to gawk.” She assures me she’ll come find me if I’m needed.

They wait on the sidewalk, two people more like I expected Patrice to look, a post-thin man and woman, both wearing tight black jeans and t-shirts. His is flamingo pink and too small, with the words
blue bells
scribbled all over it, maybe by his own hand. Hers is
oversized and hangs off one shoulder, fat aqua and gray stripes circling her torso. Patrice introduces them as León and Janska. I shake hands. “These nails will never do,” the woman says.

I tuck my fingers in my back pockets.

“I trust you’ll remedy that, Janska,” Patrice says. “Ms. McNamara, it’s been a pleasure. I’ll see you tomorrow morning. Early.”

She disappears into the bus. León sweeps his palm over my hair. “My, my. When was the last time you had a trim?”

“I don’t remember.” And it’s true, though I estimate it has been at least a year.

León doesn’t need my memory. His days are measured in split ends and half inches. “I
have
seen worse,” he says. “Don’t worry you that. We can use the bus, but Miss Patty-Cakes thought you’d feel more comfy in your own abode. So let’s take this party up one story, if that’s good with you.”

“Uh, okay. Sure.”

I never lock the downstairs door, the one beside the entrance to Wild Rise, and we climb the narrow wood steps to the landing, where I take the key from an otherwise empty clay planter hanging on the wall. “We ain’t in the Village anymore, Toto,” León says. He and Janska laugh.

Inside, I offer them drinks and both ask for coffee. While I start the pot brewing, they agree hair before makeup or wardrobe, and León opens his suitcase, a vintage hard shell with loud, popping latches, atop the kitchen table. He shakes open a sheet of plastic and covers the floor, setting one of my chairs in the center. “Your throne awaits.”

I arrange two coffee mugs—my favorite ones, matching hand-thrown pottery with sharp angles and mottled gray glaze; I don’t want them to think I’m completely unsophisticated—on the counter with the milk and sugar. And then I sit. León wraps more plastic around my neck and paws through my hair more intently, like one baboon grooming another. “We’re gonna fix you right up, girl.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Color first. This blond does you no good at all. Too much ash, not enough sparkle.”

“Sparkle?” My voice breaks.

“Not real sparkle,” Janska tells me. She pours two mugs of black coffee. “He won’t glitter you.”

“Oh, good.”

“Chickadee, you need some major chillage. I got you read. We’ll brighten you up and add itty-bitty highlights. Nothing you wouldn’t want your mama to see.” León peers into my sink. “Mind if I wash your hair here?”

I shake my head. He closes his suitcase and has me sit on it, folds a towel over the edge of the counter, and gently leans my head back. Warm water sprays over my hair, tickling my scalp at the base of my neck, sending reverberations through the muscles of my back. He massages my head, fingers kneading deep, and I think of dough. Rinse, condition, rinse. He squeezes the wetness from my ends and wraps me in a turban. I stand, wobbly, my body soft beneath his fingers.

“Is this what you mean by chillage?” I ask.

He grins. “You just let León take care of you.”

As he paints my hair and twists the foil around it, I listen to them talk of television shows and trendy nightspots and people they both know but I’ll never meet. I realize how confined my days are, to the two floors of this building and the stairway between them. To the Coop once a week and Target, four miles away, when I need a shower curtain or a new notebook. But León and Janska also live on their own narrow island of reality, limiting their daily tasks to what fits them best.

While waiting for the color to set, Janska manicures my nails, clipping away teepees of dead skin at the cuticles and filing ragged keratin edges. Her own are painted aqua to match her top and set with tiny rhinestones, long and shiny, Egyptian scarabs perched on the end of each finger. “Um, what were you thinking for me?” I ask.

Laughing, she says, “Just a coat of clear polish. If that’s okay.”

I nod.

Patrice Olsen does understand people. I would not have been able to handle all this in the network bus surrounded by unfamiliar words, smells, noise. In my own space it’s bearable. When I look at my hands and don’t recognize them, there’s something else I know. The chipped Formica table I bought at the Salvation Army and love because the top is the perfect shade of
Oma Opal
, just like my grandmother had in her small cottage. The braided wool rug, a spiral rainbow hiding the drab commercial carpeting already installed here when I rented it. The loveseat, with its two wrinkled canvas cushions. The slightly yellowed light. I can breathe here.

Janska finishes my manicure and asks to see my closet. “I’m wardrobe too. Did you have any thoughts about what you wanted to wear Saturday?”

I shrug, gesture to the clothes I have on now, linen-look drawstring shorts and a sleeveless blouse. “I don’t know. Something like this?”

“Do you have anything more . . . fun?”

“No.”

“Let’s take a look anyway.”

She opens the bedroom closet and stares at the few things I own. “What about this?” she asks, removing a gauzy tunic-style shirt with a bold, violet geometric design tumbling over it. “The tag is still on.”

“I bought it on clearance a couple years ago, but every time I put it on I just feel too . . . I don’t know. Too purple, maybe?”

“It’s perfect for the camera. With these.” She takes a pair of dark capri jeans, cuffed beneath the knee, off the hanger. They are hand-me-downs from Gretchen. “Great. That was simple.”

León beckons me back to the kitchen, to the waiting chair at the sink, where he removes the foil from my hair, rinses it, and buffs it until damp. Then I’m coated with a plastic cape and he cuts a part in the middle of my head and combs my hair straight
against my cheeks.
Seaweed
, I think, reminded of my time at the ocean as a child.

“What do you think of bangs?” León asks, twisting chunks of hair into alligator-mouthed clips.

“I haven’t had them since I was ten.”

“They’re making a comeback. On you, anyway. You have too much forehead without them.”

My cheeks burn. “Oh.”

“I’ll keep enough length for you to be able to pull it up out of your face still.”

“How much are you taking off?”

“To the shoulders. A smidge more.”

“That’s how long it is already.”

“Oh my. Janska, we pegged her right. She doesn’t look in the mirror.”

He begins to snip. I close my eyes and listen. I rarely use the mirror for more than making sure my hair isn’t too lumpy when I tie it into a ponytail. I brush it through in the shower to save time. The lighting in the bathroom is so poor, I can’t see much anyway. Sometimes I lean close to tweeze a stubborn prickle of hair from my chin, or to pinch away the blackheads from my nose when they become large and dark and tempting. Otherwise, I’m grab-and-go. And if I leave my hair down, as I do occasionally on winter Sundays when my neck is too cold and I don’t want to wear a scarf around the apartment, I still fasten back the front and sides in a single tiger-striped Goody barrette at the horizon of my skull, that place where the top begins curving into the back, the same way I’ve done since junior high.

León shoots a puff of mousse into his palm and rakes it through my freshly sheared hair. Then the blow dryer; he brushes and tousles and finally finishes. “Peek-a-boo now or after Janska has her way with you?”

“Now,” I say, at the same time Janska says, “After.”

She opens her bag, black with trays of shadow and gloss, and
rummages until she finds tweezers. I know she’ll attack my eyebrows, but the pop of each filament releasing from my skin is oddly comforting. Then she shakes my cosmetics pouch. “It was on the bathroom counter.”

“I wear makeup. Sometimes.”

She unzips the cracked plastic bag, given to me as a teen by someone at the church my father attended for a while, a white elephant gift at a ladies’ Christmas tea. Shakes the contents onto the table. “You’re better off without it,” she says, and sweeps it all into the trash can.

“Wait—”

“Your mascaras are expired and none of those are even remotely good colors for you. I’ll replace.”

Janska winds paintbrushes in her hair, knowing the position of each particular size and plucking them out as needed. She explains to me each step, though I won’t remember, lightly dusting my skin with mineral powder, highlighting my eyes at the corners and the brows, adding color to the top lids and liner to the bottom. “Focus on your eyes. They’re small but amazingly vivid. Making them seem larger is easy.” My lashes are thickened. My lips are glazed. She tells me to smile big and finishes with a few strokes of blush. “There. Go peek in the mirror.”

I do. And I look beautiful.

I shake my head, my hair airy and layered around my face. I’m not used to it against my skin, but I resist the urge to tuck it behind my ears. The makeup reminds me of those five-minute miracle routines boasted in every issue of
Cosmopolitan
or
Woman’s Day
, the ones I tried but always failed to make look anything like the glossy, airbrushed photo. I don’t want to be so pleased. I’ve always considered myself above such nonsense, the idea that denim or hair or lipstick can—or should—make someone feel better about herself.

I can’t help it.

“So, what do you think?” Janska asks when I return to the living room. Both she and León are packed and ready to move on.

“It’s nice. Thank you.”

“Nice?” León clutches his chest. “I am wounded. But never fear. León always survives. It’s what all artists must do. Now,” he says, holding up his cell phone, “Miss Patty-Cakes is gonna want some evidence of your transformation.”

“You don’t call her that to her face, do you?”

“Seriously, girl? You think I have a death wish? Patrice Olsen may look like she’s off to the PTA bake sale, but she’s one sly cupcake, that one. Smile pretty for the birdies.”

My mouth twists and I blink with the flash. León sighs and snaps one more photo. “Good enough.”

I thank them again and show them the door, then resist the urge to run back to the bathroom and stare in the mirror again. I’m thirsty, but don’t want to smudge my lips. After five dry minutes, I go downstairs to the kitchen. Everyone stops and stares.

“Liesl,” Gretchen says. “Holy cr—”

“You look lovely.” Xavier.

“What are you doing here?” I ask. It’s twenty minutes until six.

“I called him and Jude ’cause I didn’t know when you’d be done,” Gretchen says. She still looks stunned.

“Oh, thanks. I can take over from here.”

“We’re nearly finished,” Xavier says. “Let us do it. You, I believe, have plenty of other things needing your attention at the moment.”

I nod. “Okay.”

My plan is to skim through the binder Patrice gave me and perhaps sort the e-mails previously sent. But once in the apartment again, I’m too airy to read. Or sit. Can split ends weigh a person down so much? Foolishness, I know. Suddenly I want to be outside. I want—heaven forbid—to be seen. I check my face again and add a little more lip color; Janska gorged my plastic pouch with samples. Then, with only the leanest pause, I slip into my only dress, a little black knee-length thing I bought for a wedding when I lived in the city. Baby-doll
style with a rounded neckline, the kind that can be dressed up with rhinestones and shiny shoes. Or dressed down, like I do now, with a single silver bangle and turquoise flip-flops.