How to Bake a Perfect Life (13 page)

“You like Cream?” the guy asked.

I didn’t know if it would be cool or not cool, but my dad was always saying that Eric Clapton was the best guitarist in the history of the world. But being cool hadn’t really gotten me very much, so I told the truth. “They’re okay, I guess. My dad likes Clapton.”

“How about you? What do you like?”

I lifted a shoulder. Now that I was a few steps closer, I could see his eyes were the color of honey, very clear light brown, and he had that way about him that said he’d been other places besides this. A quietness, a clean and generous curiosity. He was probably a music fanatic if he worked in a record store. “I don’t know,” I said finally, again telling the truth. “Everybody tells me what I should like.”

Something shifted in his face at that. “That’s how the world is sometimes.” His voice was great—not deep but echoey, kind of, as if it came out of the body of a cello, which I’d played for a couple of years. “What’s your favorite record?”

Here was where I should say the Rolling Stones or the Clash or somebody cool, but that would be a lie. I shook my hair out of my eyes. “I don’t think I can pick a favorite. I love Cyndi Lauper and Annie Lennox.” I lifted a shoulder. “And I really love Bruce Springsteen, and …” I thought about it. “Prince.”

His lips turned down at the corners as he nodded. “You have good taste.” He smiled, giving me a little wink. “Maybe not Prince, but the others.” He sucked his lower lip into his mouth, his hands turned backward on his legs, and he narrowed his eyes. He was skinny, with shoulders like a shelf. His shirt was a cream color with thin purple stripes. The sleeves were rolled up on his forearms. “How about Stevie Ray Vaughan? Ever listen to him? Elvis Costello?”

“I don’t think so.”

He came around from behind the counter and went down the aisle across from me. He was old, like maybe even twenty-three or so, but I still felt something funny circling around my spine, like iron shavings standing up all ruffled and alert. I pretended to flip through the records on my side, but I couldn’t have told you one thing in there.

“Here,” he said, and handed me an album. “You can take this home and listen to it, see if you like it.” Then he pulled it to his
chest. “You do live around here, right? You’re not just driving through on your way to Texas?”

“I’m living with my aunt this summer.” Almost without my permission, my hands pointed to my belly.

“Exiled, are you?” He said it with a twinkle in his eye, so I could smile back. For the first time all day, I felt like a normal person. I nodded, as if we were conspirators.

“Well, you take that with you, and come in next week and tell me what you think.”

I looked at the cover. Stevie Ray Vaughan. “Really?”

“Trust me.” He grinned with one side of his mouth and gestured to the empty shop. “I don’t think any of the customers will miss it.”

“I have to ask my aunt when we’re coming back.”

“Okay.” The phone rang and he headed to the front. “Who’s your aunt?”

“Poppy Callahan.”

“I know Poppy. She’s good people.”

I never liked that expression, and it took some of the sheen off his glow. “Yeah.”

He answered the phone and I returned to browsing, wondering what I could possibly get now that I had a Stevie Ray Vaughan album in my hand. What could I pick that wouldn’t make me look like a little girl? I flipped through the stacks, looking at the Cure and U2 and the other bands I knew the alternative kids liked, but what I really wanted was Madonna. And some voice said,
But he might think you’re an idiot
.

I thought of my aunt, telling me to sit up straight at the diner. I took the Madonna album up to the register, thinking only as I got there about “Like a Virgin.” Which I wasn’t anymore, but that’s not what the song is about exactly.

The guy was still talking on the phone. By the way he was writing on a piece of paper, I thought he was taking an order or
something. He repeated some names and prices back into the phone, spied me at the counter, and held up a hand, making a face to show that the person was talking and talking.

It wasn’t until he came over to ring me up that I saw his left hand was deformed. No, not deformed—messed up, like from an accident or something. The first two fingers were mostly stubs, and the remaining ring and pinkie fingers looked as if they had been shaved. I stared, shocked, then realized I was doing the same thing everybody did to me. And he hadn’t!

“I cut them off with a power saw last summer,” he said matter-of-factly.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to stare. Everybody has been staring right at my stomach, so I know how it feels.” I couldn’t look at him.

“Hey, don’t worry about it.” He took the album off the counter. “What’s your name, anyway?”

“Ramona.”

He chuckled, the sound low and rich. “I’m Jonah. We rhyme.”

It made me laugh, and again that mortification faded. I tried to think of something to say so we could keep talking but couldn’t come up with anything.

He looked at the handwritten label on the front of the album and wrote the numbers on a notebook page with a carbon beneath it. I noticed he had perfectly arched eyebrows, dark brown, and they gave his face an elegance. Music played, something wistful with heavy, slow drums. He was quiet, focused on his task.

“What’s your favorite album?” I asked suddenly. “You must know a lot of music, working in a music store.”

“That I do,” he said. His face looked sad—sad enough to cry. “I’ll save that story for another day.” The bell dinged on the door behind me. “There’s your aunt.”

“Hello, Jonah!” she sang out. “I see you’ve met my niece.”

“We’ve been talking music.”

“Did you get my order?” Poppy asked. “The Doors?”

He shook his head. “Next week, probably.”

“Good enough. I’ll bring you some bread.”

“I’d like that.”

“You ready to go, my beauty?” Poppy asked me.

I nodded. “But I haven’t spent all the money.”

She put her arm around me. “It’s all right. Let’s go home and have a nap, shall we?”

On the way out, I waved to Jonah. He lifted his chin and sat back down at his table with his ruined hand.

After we came in from gardening a few days later, Poppy said, “I have to bake. I could use your help.”

“I was going to read.” I was reading
Mistral’s Daughter
for the third time. It never got old, and I’d just started again, so I was in the part where the first woman was an artist’s model in Paris. It was very romantic. It made me want to go to Paris and drink absinthe, whatever that was.

“Well, I really need some help, and you’re what I’ve got. You can bake this morning, then read later. Besides, it’s good for you.”

“Why? You can buy bread in the grocery store. Twenty kinds!”

“None of it tastes like the bread made with your grandmother’s sourdough starter.” She plunked a jar of the foamy, smelly stuff on the table. “This has been in the family for more than a hundred years.”

“I thought you didn’t use hers.”

“Of course I do. But I like to experiment with my own, too.”

I turned the bottle around and around. “How can it last that long?”

“A mother dough like this can last for decades. Maybe even centuries. This one was carried from Ireland to Buffalo to the Wild, Wild West.”

I’d heard bits and pieces of the story from my grandmother. The starter was handed down from mother to daughter, generation after generation. “I don’t get how it keeps from getting spoiled.”

She scooped out a hefty measure of foamy pale-yellow-white starter and put it in a bowl. “Because,” she said, “we refresh it every week so it stays healthy.” She turned on the tap, testing the temperature with her fingers. “We add water that’s just barely warmer than your fingers.” When she got it right, she gestured. “Try it.”

I stuck my fingers under the stream. The water was the most bland temperature possible. Poppy filled a glass measuring cup and stirred it into the jar of starter. It foamed up.

“That’s kinda cool,” I said. “Like a chemistry experiment.”

Poppy gave me a half grin. “That’s exactly what it is. The yeasts are alive and hungry.”

“Do you have to have an old starter to make it work?”

“Not at all. Remember the one I was working on the first day? That’s new. I started it.” She beat a cup of flour into the mix, then scraped the sides of the container and poured the mass into a waiting clean quart jar, the kind you put peaches in. With a rubber band, she fastened a circle of cheesecloth over the mouth of the jar. “It needs to breathe,” she explained, “and a little time to grow. This evening I’ll put it back in the fridge.”

I bent over and inhaled the tangy scent of the starter in the bowl. “What am I doing to help, then? Mixing the bread?”

“I’ll let you work with the sourdough later, but for now let’s get some regular yeast breads going. Has your mother taught you any baking at all?”

“My mom? You’re kidding, right?” My mother considered cooking to be the devil’s way of keeping women chained to the home. Since my dad ran restaurants, she didn’t have to cook, and she didn’t. Ever. “I can’t think of a single thing my mom knows how to cook.”

“Oh, she knows. She just chooses not to. First step: Wash your hands thoroughly with soap and dry them on a clean towel.” She handed me one. “I keep the thin white towels for the bread and the colored terry cloth for hands.”

I followed instructions, watching as Poppy assembled ingredients on the big butcher-block island, which was as old as the house. Bags of flour, white and whole wheat and rye; salt and baking powder and yeast; oil and butter and eggs. “Your grandmother taught us both to cook. Your mother was very good, but she doesn’t like it.”

The phone rang, and we paused to see who it would be for.
Ring-ring! Ring-ring!
I thought of another kitchen, maybe down the block, maybe way down the road, and a woman picking it up. So weird. They were having a conversation right there.

I said, “My mom says that women shouldn’t do housework or cooking, that we need careers so we can be independent.”

“It’s good to have your own money, work you love,” Poppy agreed. “And if you don’t like to cook, you certainly don’t have to in today’s world. But I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the traditional female arts, either. They’re beautiful.” She measured out a cup of white flour and poured it over the starter. “Stir that in.”

Pleased, I used the sturdy wooden spoon and stirred the flour into the heady sponge, releasing the scent into the air. Poppy turned on the radio, and when “Glory Days” came on, we wiggled our hips. As we cooked and listened to the radio and talked, I was the happiest I’d been in ages.

So, naturally, God had to ruin it. A car came into the driveway, tires crunching over the gravel, and I felt Poppy shift. She gave a hard pat to the dough beneath her hands and wiped her palms on her apron. A woman came to the back door and knocked, even though she could see us looking at her through the screen. “Hello,” she called out. “I’m Nancy.”

Poppy rushed over to push the screen door open and let in a
woman made of long rectangles—long face, square shoulders, big rectangular hands. Her eyes were big and bright blue beneath hair cut so short it almost looked like a military cut. “Nancy, I’m so happy to meet you in person! Come in, come in!” With a rare fluttering breathlessness, Poppy waved at me. “This is my niece Ramona. Obviously she’s the pregnant one, not me.”

I frowned at Poppy, whose cheeks were bright red. Nancy smiled down kindly at her—way, way down, because she was very tall, and not just tall for a woman. She took Poppy’s hand between both of hers and said, “I’m glad to meet you finally.”

“It feels like we’ve been talking for ages off and on, doesn’t it?”

Nancy still stood there for a minute, smiling like a statue of a saint, holding Poppy’s hands. Then she turned to look at the counter. “Sourdough?” she asked, lifting the towel over the bowl to sniff. “Mmm! Magnificent!”

“It’s my grandma’s mother dough,” I said, showing off what I had learned.

“No kidding.” She inhaled again, deeply, then pointed at the jar with its foamy mass bubbling against the glass. “May I?” she asked Poppy.

“Of course!” She relaxed a little. “You look like you know your way around bread.”

“I ran away to Paris as a young woman. Ended up in a
boulangerie
for a couple of years. The baker was old-fashioned, baked everything with traditional
levains
. It was a lot of work, but the bread was fantastic.”

Poppy inclined her head. “I’ve experimented with the old-style starters, but, as you say, it’s a lot of work, and most people wouldn’t appreciate the subtle differences.”

Feeling left out, I said, “What is that? A
levain?”

“It’s a starter,” Poppy said. “Some are very stiff and intense. You really need a heavy mixer to work with them, and the risings
are very long. It can take a couple of days to go from mixing to baking.”

“Days?”

Nancy smiled at me. “It’s worth it. There’s a bakery in Denver that sells old-world breads. I’ll bring some down next time I come and you can taste it.”

The baby kicked me in the kidney, hard, and I said, “Ulp!” and slapped a palm to the place, rubbing, then rubbing in front. It seemed like sometimes the baby would move a bit if I rubbed his back. Her back. Whatever.

It. Its back.

Nancy gave me a smile—not all toothy and false but calm and easy. I thought again of the statues of saints at our church; the one I thought of was St. Joseph, with babies in his arms. “Is the baby nudging things out of her way?” she asked.

“I guess. Hurts sometimes, like a little fist is punching me inside.”

She came over and stretched out a giant palm. “May I?” she asked, hovering over my tummy.

I don’t know why, but I nodded. It was like she carried a force field of quietness and, when she came close, it wrapped around me. Her hand was warm. “I’m a midwife, Ramona,” she said, moving her palm. “Do you know what that is?”

“I’m not stupid,” I said with a scowl. I had read about midwives in my books. “You deliver babies.”