How to Bake a Perfect Life (16 page)

But the urgent need to pee took over. I ran into the bathroom and peed like a big horse, on and on and on and on. My disappointment seemed to drain right out of me, and I felt as if I’d eaten that enchanted apple in my dream. My head was filled with gauzy splashes of color.

Poppy was in the kitchen, drinking a glass of tea with floating mint. “Well, hello there, stranger!” she said.

“Did my mom leave?”

“She did, sweetie, but she will come back on Saturday. I think you needed sleep a lot more than you needed a trip to Denver.”

I slumped in the chair. “I guess.”

Poppy folded up her newspaper. “This gives you both a chance to calm down, too.”

“She humiliated me.” I pressed the heels of my palms into my eyes. “Completely.”

For a long minute she didn’t say anything. I could hear the drip of water in the sink. “Even mothers have wounds, Ramona. Your mother—”

“What?”

Poppy inclined her head. “You must promise never to let her know that I told you.”

“I promise. What, was she pregnant, too?”

“Not until later, and you know about that already, little love child.” It was true—I knew that my mother had been pregnant with me when she married my dad. It was a romantic story.

“What, then?”

“Promise?”

“Cross my heart and hope to die.”

“You know those scars on her thigh? She says they’re a burn, right?”

Something in me felt sick suddenly. “Yeah.”

“Our mother found out she’d had sex and beat the holy hell out of her. She was fifteen, and it left a scar on her heart, too, baby. She was worried about you today. She’s been worried about you all year.”

“Wait. My grandmother did that?”

Poppy nodded. “I told you, she was a different person then.”

My stomach felt upset. “That’s terrible.”

“It was terrible, and you will hurt your mother if you let on that you know, okay?”

“Okay. I promise.”

“Don’t be mad at Adelaide, either. Her life was no sweet walk in the park, either.”

I loved my grandmother. I didn’t want to be mad at her, but I would have to think about this. It was almost impossible to imagine her in such a fury that she would beat her daughter. “With a belt?”

Poppy stood. “I bet you’re starving. How about a grilled cheese and a salad?”

“That sounds good.” I rubbed my eyes, and the afternoon flooded back to me, erasing anything that happened to my mother a million years ago. “How am I ever going to look Jonah in the eye again?”

“Well, it might not be much of an issue, because she doesn’t want you hanging out there.”

“He’s just my friend.”

“You’re really vulnerable right now,” she said. “And, honestly, sweetheart, so is he. Let it be.”

I fell forward, dropping my forehead against my arms, tears flooding the space below. With misery, I asked, “Why can’t I stop crying today?”

She came over and rubbed my back. “You’re pregnant, honey. It sometimes makes a person kind of crazy.” She gave me a paper
towel, then pulled out the skillet and a loaf of hearty, grainy bread and the cheese I liked—Gouda, with a hard brown rind. She fixed the meal and I poured a giant glass of water to drink with it. When I demolished every crumb, Poppy said, “You know what I think would make you feel better? Bake some bread.”

And for the first time all day, something like relief worked through my limbs. I nodded.

She gave me a recipe and helped me gather the ingredients, then turned the radio to the station I liked. “I’m going to watch TV. Holler if you need anything.”

In the purpling evening, with crickets whirring and the radio playing Top 40 songs, I started the bread. My thoughts fluttered around my brain like crazy moths, banging into one another, then flying away, and I let them. I didn’t chase a single one.

Instead, I measured. I stirred. I gave the bread space to rise while I sat on the back porch with a barn cat, who leaped on crickets in the grass and then came over and sat on my foot, purring. Soft.

Darkness fell. I went back in to knead the dough, and I could feel that the whirling insanity in my blood was slowing. I pressed the heel of my palm to the fold of the pale-brown speckled ball of dough, over and over, in a steady pattern that worked the stiffness out of my neck as it worked the stiffness out of the dough. Everything crazy drained away, and I was just me again. Ramona.

Changed forever. But still me. I shaped the loaves and set them on the stove where the pilot light helped them rise a little better.

When Poppy and I went to Denver the week before last to get her special flours, I’d bought a good looseleaf notebook and some markers and, on a whim, sheet protectors, slippery and attractive. Now, as the loaves rose, I used the markers to write on the front:
RAMONA’S BOOK OF BREADS
. In the best handwriting I could manage, I copied the white-bread recipe that
had been the first one I’d figured out, then I included the one I made tonight.

After that I added dividers to the notebook and labeled one of them
Experiments
. On the following sheet of paper I wrote,
Experiments with levains
, and faithfully recorded my two failed starts.
#3 started on June 20, 1985
.

I put down my pen and waddled over to the counter, where I’d left the new starter. I smelled it, and for the first time there was the faintest hint of sourness. I stuck my little finger into it and tasted it. Still pretty floury, but was that a tiny hint of something else? Something more pleasant?

Cheered, I recorded the observable changes, then put my loaves in the oven and sat in a kitchen smelling of bread until the moon was high in the sky. When the bread came out, hot and rich and perfectly brown, I cut a giant slice for the baby and me, buttered it, and ate it outside under the stars. It was the best thing I had ever tasted in my life.

Only then, alone in the darkness, with bread I had created with my own hands, did I allow myself to think of Jonah and the sharp, sweet thing that had sprung up between us that afternoon, something as wild as an invisible yeast and just as powerful.

RAMONA’S BOOK OF BREADS

SOFT AND DELICIOUS WHEAT BREAD

If you are pregnant or overwhelmed or full of disaster, this bread will cool your overheated spirit. Start it in the late afternoon on a waxing moon and let the evening spirits whisper you into stillness. Such a hearty bread requires a long kneading time, which will dispel a good deal of darkness from even the heaviest heart, and the scent of the baking will untie knots of misunderstanding.

¾ cup milk

1 T honey

½ cup lukewarm water

1 tsp dry yeast

¾ cup water

1 T salt

1 cup sourdough starter

¹
⁄
₃
cup oil

2 cups white flour

6–7 cups whole-wheat flour

Scald milk and let stand until lukewarm. Meanwhile, in a large bowl, mix honey into lukewarm water and sprinkle yeast over the top. Let stand for 10 minutes. Mix milk with ¾ cup of water, add salt, sourdough starter, and oil. Pour into yeast/water mixture and stir well. Add white flour and stir, then begin adding wheat flour 2 cups at a time. When a rough ball has formed, cover with a damp towel and let stand for 20 minutes.

Turn the dough onto a floured surface and begin to knead with firm, sure strokes, until the dough feels smooth and elastic, about 12–15 minutes. Put the dough into an oiled bowl and turn until the entire surface is oiled. Cover with a damp towel and put in a draft-free spot to rise until doubled in bulk, usually an hour to an hour and a half.

Turn the dough out again onto a floured surface and punch it down. Let it rest for 20 minutes, then knead again for 5–8 minutes. Divide into 2 large-size loaves and put each into a well-oiled pan to rise again for another hour. Bake in a 350-degree oven for 1 hour, or until loaves are golden brown and pull away from the sides of the pan. Tip out onto wire racks and let cool.

  M
y mother came back on Saturday, a few days before my birthday, as promised, and took me to shop at Cinderella City mall, which had a whole area in the basement where the shops all looked like a medieval village. I loved it down there, and my mom knew it. I didn’t want clothes, so she let me pick out earrings, some cute socks with toes, and two records, which I was pretty sure was a way to tell me she was sorry for her fit in the record store with Jonah, not that she said so. I bought Cyndi Lauper’s
She’s So Unusual
, and then, thinking about what Jonah had said about his favorites, a Rolling Stones album with a zipper on the cover. My mom said, “I love that record,” which almost made me put it back, but I didn’t.

She never said a single thing about our big fight, or the fact that I was now talking seriously with two couples about adoption, or even if I could come home on my birthday, which was the next Wednesday. Every year, my birthday was always the same: a big party at the pool, then tacos and strawberry shortcake with everybody. I kept wondering if she was going to take me home as a surprise, but when we got back to Poppy’s, she hugged me really hard and said, “I can’t wait until you’re home again. I love you.”

I managed not to cry until she was out of sight down the
road, and then, because I didn’t want even Poppy to know how stupid I was for hoping, I went to the garden. There were squashes now, yellow and green, and tiny balls of pumpkins along the fence, and cherry tomatoes and big green tomatoes. I kicked at weeds with the toe of my sandal, and pretty soon one of the barn cats came out—stalking me through the corn, reaching out to spat my foot, then dashing into the shadows. It was a little orange-and-white ball of fluff with the prettiest face you ever saw. Some of the barn cats were skittish, but this one didn’t mind being picked up. I captured him and put him on my shoulder, listening to him purr.

It was July. The baby would be born at the end of August and I could finally go home. In four days, I would be sixteen.

I could not imagine being lonelier.

Poppy made my tacos and strawberry shortcake on the big day. Nancy came down from Denver to share the celebration, and her present to me was a book about Paris breads and an apron with
Boulanger
—which meant “baker”—embroidered across the chest in script. I pretended to be cheered up by their singing and presents and by opening the gifts my mother had left. There was a bracelet Steph wove at camp and a small statue of a cat from Ryan. My baby sister Sarah, only eight, drew a picture of a unicorn, and Liam made a doll of Popsicle sticks covered with a lot of glue and glitter, which almost made me cry. He’s still so little!

My dad signed the card but didn’t write anything else, just
Love, Dad
. I guess he’s mad at me, too.

Sixteen. Big deal.

That weekend was a festival for the town’s jubilee or something. At midday, Poppy and I took a picnic supper into town so we could watch the fireworks from the top of the rock, which didn’t look like a castle to me but just another mesa rock like the billions of others around here. I wanted someday to see a real castle, but I was pretty sure it wouldn’t look like that.

Anyway, she let me stop at the library first while she went around to meet some of her friends for coffee. It had been so hot that I sometimes read a book a day. We got up early, worked in the garden, baked, or canned, then I read through the afternoon and through the clockwork thunderstorms that rolled in every single day. Nancy brought big fat books she thought I’d like, and I peeled through those, too. Poppy wanted me to read “better” books, something like
Anna Karenina
, but Nancy rolled her eyes. “Please. Krantz is going to feel a lot better right now than Tolstoy.”

At the library, I stocked up on glitz and stuffed them all into my backpack and wandered out into the heat of the late afternoon. Black clouds bore down from the west, flashing threads of lightning. Walking rain, smeary against the horizon, marched toward us, and a wind swept my skirt right up to my nose. I grabbed it with one hand and my hair with the other and closed my eyes against a second blast, turning my back to it.

“Better get inside!” a man called, slamming his car door.

Guiltily, I gauged the distance between me and the record store, wondering if I could make it before the rain caught me. Nearly two full blocks, but straight downhill. If I wasn’t pregnant, I could have dashed that distance in half a minute. Now probably not.

But maybe only a minute and a half. Twisting my hair, I tucked it under my backpack straps, then kept my skirt in my hands and hurried down the street. I had to stop for traffic at Main Street, and the first of the rain started pattering toward me, splashing on the hot sidewalk and sending up that hot, salty smell. The first drops on my skin were startling and cold. A truck clattered by, and I took the chance to dash across the street.