Stones for Bread (8 page)

My gentle father, who began wilting the day he lost his beloved and
would never again straighten, said, “Do you think I could make her do anything? If I had that kind of power, she would be with us now.”

I didn’t believe him then, and I saved so I could go in her stead. In the beginning it was to honor her, and then it grew larger than that. The bread called. I quit my job. I planned a three-month tour of France and Germany, mapping out both famous and little-known bakeries throughout the countries. I would travel by bicycle and train and bus. I would sleep in hostels. And I would feast and learn and come home changed.

And then I, too, had a choice to make.

Less than a week before my flight from JFK to Charles de Gaulle, I was given the opportunity to open Wild Rise. The rent was reasonable, there was an apartment above the store I could live in, and the former pizzeria was already outfitted with a wood-fire oven—something I would never be able to afford on my own. The start-up cost? Enough of my travel fund to worry me. I’d need some sort of income within three months of opening.

Yes, choices.

I took it. I knew the chance would not come again. I trusted God in it, both the business opportunity and the reconciliation of my relationship with my father. Sometimes understanding is long coming.

But I still want Paris. I will, I decide, sell out for it.

Selecting Patrice Olsen’s e-mail, I click Reply and let her know I am honored to accept the invitation to be on
Bake-Off
.

Five

They take a trip without me, to the ocean again even though it’s November. My father brings me down into the basement, amidst his springs and scrap and wire, and asks me to understand.
Because she’s sad about Oma
, he says.
Not because we don’t love you or want you along
. He gives me five dollars and tells me I can use it for ice cream in school or for a Fanta at the corner grocery.
Just remember to brush your teeth afterward
.

The grief sticks to my mother, coating her, like dirt on the mouthful of Bubble Yum I cough to the ground while swinging in the play yard at recess. When I find it, only bits of pink gum show through the grit and grass, and no amount of rinsing in the water fountain can clean it. Only bits of my mother show through the sadness. I can’t imagine the ocean any more effective than the fountain at school.

So I stay home for two weeks with Great-Aunt Mary. She cooks brown meat for every supper—liver and dry London broil and crumbled hamburger pie—and tries to help me with my homework the one time I ask if she knows the secret to adding fractions. She
doesn’t, but tries valiantly to understand the model problems in my textbook before writing a note to Mr. Sanchez explaining my
home situation
and asking him to please give me extra tutoring. Otherwise, she watches her game shows and eats pudding desserts and tells me to go to bed at eight thirty.

My mother seems plumper and happier when they come home. I expect gifts from the seashore, a jar filled with sand and shells and dehydrated starfish, or a box of saltwater taffy. My father hands me a bag of hotel toiletries, shampoo and soap and lotion and a plastic shower cap. Mother hugs me against her neck until I can’t breathe; her body trembles next to my own.
You know I love you
, she whispers.

Oh yes
.

Promise me you won’t forget
.

My eyes flick to my father. He smiles tightly, takes my mother’s arm.
Why don’t you lie down, Claudia? It was a long drive. I’ll be up in a moment
.

She lifts the small case at her feet and carries it up the stairs with her; something rattles inside with each step. My father smoothes my hair, one of his bony, long hands positioned on each side of my part, sliding them down to my ears once, twice, and then giving a little tug on the ends.
Don’t worry. The doctor gave her some new medicine. To make her feel better. It will be all right now
.

Doctor? I thought you were at the beach
.

He opens his mouth in response, but my mother’s voice creeps down to us.
Alistair?

Coming
.

He twitches, as if he wants to come to me once more, but the floorboards creak above our heads and he’s upstairs in seconds. My parents’ bedroom door closes.

I stand on the edge of the living room rug, a braided wool island in the center of my mother’s most loved pine plank floors, and listen. Only the trees talk to me, thin fingers tapping the panes on the east
side of the house. I dump the toiletries onto the couch, peel my jeans off, and sit, legs straight out. Thigh to toe, I squeeze one long line of lotion down each leg. Then another, though I get only over my second knee before the bottle empties, spitting a blob on the nappy fabric of the sofa.
Mayonnaise
. My hands are knives. I spread the cool cream over my skin. Slick. White. I’m a ghost; maybe no one will see me.

I smack my legs, the sting snappier because of the lotion. I hit myself again and again, harder each time, the moisturizer thinning and opening to show speckled red below.

And then I slap my face.

I’m stunned. My cheek radiates heat, buzzing like a neon sign. Bright, dim, bright. Dim. Fading. I try to hit myself again but cannot seem to make my hand apply the same amount of force as the first time, my body protecting itself.

A door opening upstairs. I pull on my pants and wipe my fingers on the top of the couch cushion, flipping it over to hide the stain.

Xavier knows about the television show when I find him the next morning, already pulling baguettes from the oven. I reach for a basket to help, banging my hip on the corner of the counter. “Ow.”

“Slow down, dear one,” he says, swinging the peel with grace through the air and sliding the hot loaves into the basket on his own. They stand perfectly at attention, thin pointed sentinels of wheat. “Save some of that enthusiasm for Mr. Scott.”

“Ha-ha.”

I rub my hip and, turning from Xavier, lift the corner of my shirt and peer down my jeans. A bruise greets me, puffed up and purplish-blue, a color I’ve only seen artificially induced in a grape snow cone. Lovely. I snatch the lame from Xavier’s apron and give each unblemished round of dough four cuts across the top. I’m in no mood for dainty.

Xavier notices. “Remind me to stay out of your way.”

“I’m going to do the show.”

He wrinkles his forehead. “Glad I’m not a betting man.”

“There’s prize money. Ten thousand dollars.”

“Paris,” he says.

He sees through me like glass.

Xavier has been to France a dozen times. He’s charmed me with stories of bread, but more so of people. Of
Jérôme
, the Gaelic-music-promoter-turned-boulanger because he wanted to save a beloved building from demolition. He has one of the first LeFort ovens in his basement and only uses pre-1800 bread recipes. Or Marthe, who owns a small inn close to the northern border of France, who accepted Xavier’s gift of bread as if it were from the Magi.

“Tell me I’m a sell-out.”

“I’ll do no such thing. But I do have a favor to ask.”

“What’s up?”

“I’d like to take on an apprentice.”

“Zave, I can’t pay anyone else.”

“I know. You don’t have to worry about that.” He hesitates. “My grandson is living with me.”

“Since when?”

“Since yesterday. He showed up on my front porch. It was either my place or the street, I imagine. Things haven’t been good with Jude for a while. He’s always struggled in school, failed his junior year. Says he’s not going back. No interest in anything. His parents told him to get a job or get out, so he hitchhiked over to good old Vermont. I spoke to his father last night. Bill, my middle boy. I guess there are . . . many things Jude’s dealing with now.”

I wait for Xavier to elaborate but he stays silent. I suck my lips together and a puckering sound escapes. “Can he bake?”

“Not a lick,” he says. “But, Liesl, he has the hands. I just know it.”

Bread plays favorites.

From the earliest times, it acts as a social marker, sifting the poor from the wealthy, the cereal from the chaff.

The exceptional from the mediocre.

Wheat becomes more acceptable than rye; farmers talk of losing their
rye teeth
as their economic status improves. Barley is for the most destitute, the coarse grain grinding down molars until the nerves are exposed. Breads with the added richness of eggs and milk and butter become the luxuries of princes. Only paupers eat dark bread adulterated with peas and left to sour, or purchase horse-bread instead of man-bread, often baked with the floor sweepings, because it costs a third less than the cheapest whole-meal loaves. When brown bread makes it to the tables of the prosperous, it is as trenchers—plates—stacked high with fish and meat and vegetables and soaked with gravy. The trenchers are then thrown outside, where the dogs and beggars fight over them. Crusts are chipped off the rolls of the rich, both to make it easier to chew and to aid in digestion. Peasants must work all the more to eat, even in the act of eating itself, jaws exhausted from biting through thick crusts and heavy crumb. There is no lightness for them. No whiteness at all.

And it is the whiteness every man wants. Pure, white flour. Only white bread blooms when baked, opening to the heat like a rose. Only a king should be allowed such beauty, because he has been blessed by his God. So wouldn’t he be surprised—no, filled with horror—to find white bread the food of all men today, and even more so the food of the common people. It is the least expensive on the shelf at the supermarket, ninety-nine cents a loaf for the storebrand. It is smeared with sweetened fruit and devoured by schoolchildren, used for tea sandwiches by the affluent, donated to soup kitchens for the needy, and shunned by the artisan. Yes, the irony of all ironies; the hearty,
dark bread once considered fit only for thieves and livestock is now some of the most prized of all.

He picks up Cecelia earlier today, not quite four yet, his one arm sunburned because he hangs it out the window as he drives. It’s summer now, so he wears work boots with his socks pulled up nearly to his knees, shorts, a gray t-shirt with a logo on the chest so faded I wonder if it’s actually there. I won’t stare to find out. It’s the first day I’ve seen Seamus’s limbs uncovered, his forearms surprisingly narrow, his calves bulgy, pumped full of Popeye’s spinach.

“Business good today?” He asks this almost every afternoon.

“A little slow.”

“Just wait ’til that show rolls out.” Something akin to disappointment discolors his words.

“We’ll see.”

We stand watching his daughter, the bottoms of her pigtails matted with saliva from chewing them, spray water onto a chair and wipe it. “Every little spot,” Gretchen tells her, and Cecelia scrubs quicker and harder to finish before her, and they race to the next table and start again.

Seamus rakes his top teeth through the hair on his chin. “Her last day of school is tomorrow.”

“She told me.” I take a deep breath. “I can’t have her here all day. I’m sorry.”

“Oh no. ’Course not,” he says. “I found her a place, at the Y. Gave us a scholarship, or whatever they call it so you don’t feel like a charity case. It’s just . . . look at her. You don’t know her outside of here, except when we were on the farm. The shy girl you saw there, that’s more what she’s like everywhere else, with everyone else. The Cecelia she is when she’s here . . . it’s the most like the one she was before Judy left. This is her magic place.”