How to Bake a Perfect Life (31 page)

At the porch steps, I turn to look up at him, feeling suddenly without words—or maybe with too many words, all crowding
in, tumbling over themselves. “Everything I’m thinking of to say sounds false.”

He picks up my hand and kisses my knuckles. “Don’t say anything.”

I nod. He releases me and I say, “Good night, Jonah.”

For a moment he stands quite still. Overhead, a nightingale whistles in the trees, and moonlight filters through the branches, dappling his face, his hair. I want to take him inside and tuck him close, smooth away that sorrow I now understand, but it could ruin me.

“Good night,” he says, and walks away.

Inside, I sink down on the bottom stair and let the shivering take over. It feels as if I have been fighting. Bending my head, I hear the mournful sound of his sonata, and it makes me dizzy. This is better, that we should be only friends. He is too much, the feeling is too much, and if I fell from such a distance, I don’t think I could bear it.

On legs that feel wobbly, I turn and go upstairs, to the things I can believe in. My cat. A young girl who needs me. My daughter, who might even now be writing me an email.

But as I sink into my bed, what I think of is the way his mouth tasted, the smell of his skin. How do you stop a thing once it begins?

STEP FOUR

When the dough has doubled, the belly filled with carbon dioxide and madly multiplying yeasts contained by the skin of gluten, the baker must punch it down. This is not an actual fist, a true punch, but rather a deflation. Turn the dough out onto a hard surface and gently press down to let the air out. The excess carbon dioxide is gently squeezed out, and the yeasts are more fully distributed through the dough so that the loaf can be shaped and set to rise into the true shape of the bread it will become
.

Ramona

  T
he second time bread saved my life, I was again nursing wounds inflicted by a man.

I didn’t date much after I had Sofia. There wasn’t time, for one thing. I was busy with school and work, and any hours I had left between those things were spent with my daughter. By the time she started kindergarten, I had saved enough to buy us a small house not far from my grandmother’s, and I was the assistant operations manager for the Gallagher Group, a job that paid well even if it was boring. It earned me a place in the family business. I had great benefits for Sofia and me. All around me, I saw people who had far less. If I hated my job, I was only one of billions, and at least mine was clean, honest work. Outside work, I was a classroom mother, I baked elaborate and beautiful things for Sofia’s parties, and I read a lot in the evenings.

Dane came to work for the company when Sofia was seven or so, and I didn’t pay him much attention. I didn’t pay attention to any man, and that’s why they mostly left me alone. Once in a while I dated somebody for a bit, but there were always conflicts with my job or my daughter or my own finicky tastes. My mother urged me to find a husband, to be less judgmental, but it seemed to me that unless a man was on the level of the greatest
soul mate of all time, the complications he would bring would be too much.

Dane joined the Gallagher Group as general manager. A tall, charismatic man with a failed marriage behind him in California and a cheery good nature, he almost immediately raised the profits in the company by 10 percent, and by the end of two years that number was 30 percent. But it was his personality that made him such a star. He counterbalanced the Irish furies and tempests generated by my family. He had a way of smoothing even the fiercest of disagreements, easing difficult chefs and my father with the grace of a medieval diplomat. I noticed this quality first, when he managed to defuse a furious clash between my father and a distributor he felt had done him wrong. I gave him a thumbs-up in the kitchen afterward. “Good work.”

He lifted a brow. “She speaks!”

“Very funny,” I said, but that was the start of it. Once he found my weak spot, he pursued me in a way that was flattering and heartening. His zest for life was practically irresistible, and I was as drawn to him as everyone else in the business was. He was like a cool, burbling fountain in the midst of our tropical passions.

He was good to me. Sofia adored him, as all children did, and he loved her in return. My parents approved. I liked him and I thought he was sexy, but here’s the thing:

We had sex. A
lot
of sex.

I was hardly a virgin, considering my status as a mother, but there I was in my mid-twenties, with every hormonal juice pumping through my system urging me to get physical and have a billion babies, and I just wasn’t.

Dane swept me into a deliriously sexual relationship. He was a terrific lover, as thoughtful and sensitive to the needs of a woman as he was to the emotional needs of chefs or distributors. There are some people who have a genius for giving you
what you need, and Dane is one of them. He knew my grandmother loved to be flirted with. He knew my mother loved to be thought the most intelligent person in the room, that my father respected hard work and didn’t trust anyone who came from money.

We married when Sofia was almost ten, in a ceremony with lilacs filling the air with their heady perfume. Sofia was my maid of honor, and my mother, Stephanie, and Sarah were bridesmaids. It says something that my brother was one of his groomsmen. Liam didn’t care.

The only person who never approved was Poppy. She tried to keep it to herself, but when I announced we were going to marry, she sat me down and tried to talk sense into me. She all but said she suspected it would be impossible for Dane to be faithful, that he was not the kind of man who would make me happy for the long term, but I couldn’t hear her. I was swimming in a juicy fountain of great sex and had somehow won the approval of my family, as well. Not only that, Dane loved and cared for my daughter as his own and didn’t mind that I wasn’t interested in having more children at the moment.

We married.

We were happy.

Or maybe that’s a lie. Maybe I always knew, on some subtle level, that we had struck a bargain. His income helped create a good life for my daughter—buying clothes and trips and experiences that she could not have had if I had remained a single mother. He agreeably nourished my appetites for attention and good sex and facilitated the ease between my family and me.

In return, I never noticed that he sometimes disappeared for a very long time. That he took business trips rather a lot. That certain women seemed to dislike me for no real reason.

I don’t know. That sounds so cynical. Maybe I did just like being married. Maybe, as hard as it is to admit it, I honestly did love him.

No. I didn’t. I have never loved any man, not really. It’s my failing and my protection.

Either way, it turned out that Poppy was right. It was impossible for Dane to be faithful, as his first wife had discovered. One of his lovers—yes, there were evidently several over the years—would not let him go when he gently tried to break it off. She went nuts and showed up at our door, stalked me and him for a month, and generally made a nuisance out of herself. She made it impossible for me, or Dane, or even my family, to sweep it all out of sight and pretend it had never happened.

The only blessing was that Sofia had already left for college. She was in her first year at a teacher’s college in the western part of the state, a long, long drive that she made only every other month or so, and during the winter snows not even that.

It helped protect her from the ugliness.

It also left me completely and utterly alone. I couldn’t face the pitiful, or smirking, or even smug looks that followed me at work, so I turned in my notice. I kicked Dane out of the house.

And there I sat, most of the autumn, drowning in humiliation and loss. I’d seen uncles fall into bad habits with alcohol, so I didn’t indulge my desire to drink entire bottles of wine, but I developed other self-destructive behaviors. I stayed up all night playing games on the computer. I watched endless movies on cable. Twice, I went out with friends and ended up in a one-night stand, not something I’m proud of.

The only people from the family I would speak to were Poppy and my grandmother, who was weaving in and out of dementia, so she often forgot that I was getting divorced. Forgot, for that matter, that I had ever been born and mistook me for one of her sisters or daughters.

It was bread that saved my life. For the second time.

While I was throwing things out one night, I found my old notebook,
Ramona’s Book of Breads
. The sight of my hopeful handwriting on the cover, the memory of those dire days in an
earlier part of my life—days I had survived, after all—went right through my gut. I sank down on the floor, pulled out of my dervish whirl, to open the cover. And remember.

Almost without thinking, I carried the book to the kitchen and pulled out those simple magic ingredients. Flour, salt, yeast.

But nothing had gone on in that kitchen for months. I’d been eating Lean Cuisines and peanut butter crackers almost exclusively. The flour had bugs in it, and the yeast was ten years old.

I pulled on my jeans, washed my face, and drove to an all-night grocery. With a genuine sense of delight, I bought white bread flour, and whole wheat, and a paper bag of rye. Instead of envelopes of yeast, I bought a brown jarful. Below it was kosher salt, looking so official, and I put that in my basket, too. Something I’d forgotten, something alive, stirred within me. I carried it all back home and dumped it on the counter.

I baked all night. Stirred yeast into sugar water and watched it grow, then stirred yeast and sugar water into flour and salt and dumped it all on the counter and kneaded it far longer than was required. My hands remembered things my brain had forgotten—the way to turn and fold, the feeling of dough going smooth and clammy below the heels of my palms.

When morning came, I called Poppy and asked her if she had any of her starters left. “Of course,” she said. “But you could get some from Adelaide today if you want it.”

“She probably hasn’t refreshed it regularly.”

“Get some,” she said, “and I’ll teach you to wash it.”

The starter was salvageable, but just. It had taken on the taste of disuse and the world narrowing in. I gathered the old crock and my grandmother from her house and brought her to mine, and even as I began to work, the mother dough lightened, began to sweeten.

I divided it into three sections. One I darkened with malt sugar and rye and my own sorrow. One I washed according to Poppy’s instructions, to bring it back to a version of itself that
was as close to Bridget’s original as possible. The other I used to bake a loaf of bread that I buried in the backyard at Adelaide’s, to signify the end of this life and the start of the new one.

It was easier to care for my grandmother in her own home, so I sold my little house and moved in with her, and I continued to cook that whole long winter. My grandmother sat with me, sometimes staring with vacant blue eyes into the far distance, where perhaps she saw to the other side. At times she kneaded with me, her veined hands and crooked fingers still finding comfort in the shaping of loaves.

Poppy arrived one Sunday evening, alone, and found us in the kitchen. She halted at the doorway. In her hands were two Bell jars of starter—one pale and smooth, the other brown and full of holes. She stared at her mother without moving for a long time, long enough that I wondered if she would turn around and leave. The only time I could remember them speaking was the day everyone came to Poppy’s farm when I was pregnant. I still didn’t know why, but I could guess it had to do with Poppy being gay, with Adelaide’s fearsome unhappiness as a mother, or both.

Adelaide was having one of her lost days. I’d given her a chunk of dough to press and fold, and it occupied her for hours. Like me, she seemed soothed by the smell of yeast and baking crust, and she loved the classical music I played. We often worked side by side in that kitchen for hours and hours without even speaking.

“Grandma, look who’s here,” I said.