Sweet (21 page)

***

Andy appeared to him several more times, always at the bakery, always when he was alone and most easily startled.

Early on the morning of the fourth day, Jules sat at his desk, waiting for his doughs to rise. He’d abandoned bowls of half-mixed cake batter—just the dry ingredients, waiting for their eggs and milk—in order to sit at his desk and scribble recipe notes and a quick to-do list for the day. Over his shoulder, the light shifted in dappled yellow-green patterns as the trees outside shook in the wind. The radio tinned out a fuzzy doo-wop tune.

When the light disappeared and shifted to black shadow, he noticed immediately, and glanced up, thinking perhaps ‘Trice had, for once, come in quietly and early.

It was Andy, more solid than Jules had seen him in a long while, hunched over the bowls that lay waiting on the counter, his hands stirring above them in small circles.

“Hey!” Jules yelled, though he quickly thought better of it—knew it was ridiculous—and chose instead to lunge toward Andy’s figure. By then it was too late; Andy filtered quickly into the shifting sunlight and was gone.

Jules crept to the bowls and peered in: nothing appeared to be amiss. Just in case, he dipped a spoon into one and tasted the contents. Far, far too salty. He tasted the other: bitter.

The batches were ruined, so he dumped them and started again.

He had to throw out two more batches before he realized he could not let the batters leave his sight for one second; the moment he turned his back, they would grow sour, or salty, or bitter or too wet to use.

He dropped into the desk chair in the corner, hid his face in his hands, and cried.

*

Pastry-Whipped: Adventures in Sugar by a Dedicated Crumpet Strumpet

by Chef Jules Burns of Buttermilk Bakery

September 8: How to Blend But Not Break

Something’s wrong with my mojo. I just can’t get it right lately. Baking is, yes, chemistry and know-how, but it’s also a little bit about magic, a little bit about being charmed in the kitchen. It’s being able to soothe disparate ingredients and flavors into some kind of harmony, something wonderful. It’s being able to blend well. Essentially, it’s matchmaking. Being good in the kitchen means being a little bit of a yenta.

I need a good yenta in my own life, lately. I’m trying to juggle too many people I love, but they don’t blend together right. I need to figure out how to balance things. I need to find the right recipe for a kind of happiness that lets me keep everything.

When I first learned to bake, in a sweltering kitchen with my laid-back grandmother, there were no mistakes. We turned out lumpy, salty, frankly awful cookies and cakes together, but it was fun, and that was entirely the point. It was a way to be together. That’s where the blending happened.

During the days, it was just the two of us, and there were plenty of days I gave that woman absolute hell over not being my mother. I don’t think she was ever very thrilled about having to deal with a stubborn, angry child when in her golden years. “Haven’t I already paid my dues?” she used to cry, waving her hands in the air and looking heavenward in her best exaggerated imitation of Scarlett O’Hara. “I raised one little devil child already! As god is my witness, I should be on a beach in Sarasota!”

Now, I bake largely by myself, in a little kitchen in which the sunlight and sounds of the outside world filter weakly through three tiny street-level windows. In fact, my life has become like this: home life and baking life, personal and public, passion and duty, joy and pain, everything filtered tepidly together but never quite blending, never quite becoming one holistic experience of everything at once. I long to be overwhelmed with everything at once.

Baking has become a profession, and so I take it much more seriously than my grandmother and I did. It’s still about blending, of course, it’s still about balance, but not just when it comes to ingredients.

When I was a kid, it was me and my dad and my grandmother. Between my dad’s guilt and my grandmother’s hawk eye, I grew up expecting quite a bit of attention. I was, for a very long time, the center of my father’s world. I never had to learn to compromise with other
kids, or outsiders in general; some people might hear that and call me spoiled. I’m not patting myself on the back when I tell you that isn’t true. As the only child of a single man, I had to learn to compromise with my dad much more than other kids did. It was just the two of us all the time, so the pressure was on. I could never play one parent off the other, or blame any mess or breakage on a sibling. Balance
—
just the two of us and our love, like a fulcrum—was delicate and crucial. It was like living my entire life on a tightrope.

Then my father met a really lovely woman, Annette, and she moved into our house, bringing with her two teenaged sons, one of whom
was exactly my age, large, sweaty and football-playing, and my time with my grandmother diminished in favor of time spent with Annette and Zack and Nathan. I had to learn my lessons all over again. Suddenly, there were three times as many showers being taken, three times as many hands grabbing for the television remote, three times as many people with an opinion about what to eat for dinner. All my routines were upended. I had, quickly, to learn about compromise, and I had, very quickly, to learn how to incorporate these new people into my life, to make them my family, to love them as much as I loved my father.

I also became more, well, more
myself
, because I became more what my brothers were
not.
That’s how I thought of myself: the not-Nathan and the not-Zack. If Nathan was big and gangly, I was delicate and thin. If Zack ate hot dogs straight from the package with the refrigerator door open like a wild monkey, I became a thoughtful, loving cook with a refined palate. If Nathan and Zack dated lots of girls, I… well, you get the picture.

What I discovered, after many months of frustration and missed showers, was that the key was not to find a way to live as though Annette and her sons weren’t there—that was impossible, and even more so after I discovered Nathan’s house-quaking snore and penchant for draping wet towels over every surface and Zack’s habit of leaving his smelly, gondola-sized sneakers in airless rooms. They both had a
presence, my dad would say. I would say, more accurately, that they had a
smell.
The key was, instead, to find a way to blend my former life with these new additions. Blending meant not silencing any part of the whole, but allowing each individual note to sound and finding a way to make those sounds harmonize.

It took finesse and patience. And lots of air freshener.

Now, I use much the same skill when it comes to baking—I know you could see that one coming. But I also use my baking skill when it comes to people. I like to think of myself as a matchmaker, connecting the right person with just the right pastry, which can—as food tends to do—also connect him to memories of other people and places and experiences. It’s such a cliché to say that food brings people together, but I don’t mean it in the cliché way (the happy Midwestern family sitting around the dinner table, eating Mom’s pot roast); I mean that food connects us to our memories, to our lives, to love.

I remember an old cartoon that was intended to explain the “melting pot” of America. It used as its visual metaphor a big stew pot in which different kinds of people floated together and made a (presumably) delicious stew. But they got it all wrong. That’s not what a melting pot is.

The image of the melting pot comes from alchemy: You put all these different metals into the pot, melt them together and they become gold. Unlike the individual ingredients of a stew, which are supposed to retain their carrot-ness or onion-icity
, their potato-ish-ness or their celery-nature, the ingredients in a melting pot are supposed to blend and turn into something else entirely. They are supposed to stop being silver and chrome and brass, and become gold.

That seems like a radically different metaphor for blending. To blend, you become something entirely new and stop being the old thing completely. My family was what people call a “blended” family; we struggled hard—and usually failed—to be that melting pot. Zack and Nathan stayed very, well, Zack and Nathan, and Annette, bless her soul, in her daily struggle to adjust to her sudden life with five men, tried very hard to make me into her girlfriend. It all failed terribly, in my opinion—though everyone seemed happy enough when we were together, Zack and Nathan and I ran screaming in separate directions as soon as we’d finished high school. (Zack went into the military and got stationed overseas; Nathan went to L.A. to audition for movies and works, I think, as a Starbuck’s barista. I fled to New York City as rapidly as I could.)

My life now is failed alchemy. In fact, I’m not really convinced I want everything to blend and homogenize and become something entirely new, with no trace of the past. I love my past dearly; it’s why I am who I am in the present.

In fact, I know it: I don’t want an alchemical miracle; I don’t want a melting pot. I want to keep my present as beautiful and perfect and full of love as it can be; I want to keep my past as it is, as it haunts me, my memories pure and real as the smell of fresh-baked bread. I want to live at the fulcrum, which is the point in the center, but also that point which endures the most pressure. Balance, I remember a physical science teacher telling us in high school, is an active state, not a place of rest or stasis. It requires constant effort to maintain. The fulcrum, where I live now, is a careful balancing point between past and future, between rock and hard place, memory and hope.

***

We would be pleased to have someone of your caliber working at Sturm. Please contact Greta at your earliest convenience to discuss the next steps.

Teddy stared at the humming computer in his lap. Sturm was one of the larger firms to which he’d applied for work, an old behemoth of New York, staid and golden in its reputation in the business world. He’d approached them as a matter of course, never imagining that he’d be chosen to join their ranks. But he’d been offered a position in their accounting department.

It was everything he’d been looking for: a powerful, well-respected company; steady, predictable work; a too-big-to-be-true paycheck; a suit-and-tie tradition of gentility and excellence in everything they did.

He didn’t want it.

***

Jules stood patiently at the metal prep table in the bakery kitchen, waiting. ‘Trice had left long ago; the bakery been closed for hours. Every few minutes, he whispered, “Andy!” The sun drifted, orange, through the little ceiling-level windows; outside, cars slushed by in the rapidly deepening dusk.

“Andy, I can’t wait much longer,” Jules said. “Please, I need to talk to you tonight.”

There was a small noise near the sinks, and Jules turned to see Andy there, standing quietly with his arms folded.

“You came,” Jules said. Andy nodded solemnly. “I’m glad you came,” he added nervously, gesturing awkwardly. Andy didn’t move, but tilted his head, listening.

“I need you to stop doing things to what I bake here,” Jules said. He was terribly nervous, and Andy’s silence, however expected, made it worse. “I need things to taste like they’re supposed to, or I’m going to have to close the bakery.”

Andy tilted his head the other direction; the expression on his face gave nothing away.

“Look, I miss you a lot, but I have to keep on going, and that means baking and selling what I bake so the store stays afloat, and that means bringing Teddy home and keeping our dog healthy and happy, and letting Teddy and our dog love each other, and generally living a good life without you, much as that hurts.”

Andy nodded, but started to flicker.

“No. Don’t go, please, yet. I’ll make you a deal.”

He paused for effect, and Andy rolled his eyes and put his translucent hands on his translucent hips, waiting.

“I’ll make you a deal,” he repeated, stalling. “You can stay here, and we will talk every day, and I’ll keep remembering you and loving you and telling you about everything, as long as you stay here, don’t hang out at the apartment, and don’t mess with anything—not what I bake, not the customers, not me and not Teddy.”

Andy nodded again, and the flickering became more off than on. He spread his hands open, palms up, as if he were offering something, and then he flickered out and was gone.

“Andy?” Jules asked the dark kitchen.

He called again, then again in a whisper, but there was no reply.

***

“I need to talk to Teddy,” Jules told ‘Trice the next morning, when she shuffled into the kitchen. He stopped sifting and wiped his hands down the front of his apron, as a way to make clear how desperate he felt: He
never
wiped his hands on his apron. That was for slobs and unprofessional people.

“Tough break, kid,” ‘Trice said. “I’m neither his nanny nor his booking agent.”

“Would you please just tell him for me? He won’t pick up his phone. Tell him the apartment’s empty now.”

“I’m not in the middle of this,” she said, washing her hands.

“You look like a wrung-out rag today,” Jules said bitterly. “What happened to you?”

“Another half a bottle of tequila, so I
feel
like a rag, un-wrung,” she said. “I’m not your go-between, you lovers, but I’ll pass on your message, just to make the tequila rampage stop. I’m getting too old to do this. I’m losing my youthful glow.”