Bread Alone (7 page)

A punked-out kid named Tyler is the espresso
barista,
the youngest of the lot. She’s got blue hair and a nose ring, a tattoo of some Celtic knot design encircling her wrist. Lots of eye makeup and she dresses all in black. From her conversation with the other women, I gather that she just graduated from high school and is in career limbo. She works at the bakery in the mornings, dabbles in a few art classes late in the day, does the club scene at night. I wonder when she sleeps.

Diane is the resident cake baker and Ellen’s partner. She’s a Meg Ryan blonde, tall and skinny, with that coltish grace that’s all elbows and collarbone. Ellen needles her about her tendency to oversleep; she usually rolls in around nine o’clock to start baking the cakes for tomorrow and decorating the ones for today. I love to watch her designs take shape. She does wedding cakes with real flowers. She does birthday cakes with buttercream roses and daisies and ivy, fruits, animals, or toys, and the dedication in nimble, flowing script. She probably could have been a sculptor, but when I tell her that, she just laughs and says she likes being a baker because she can eat her mistakes.

On Wednesday, after I have coffee, I catch a bus down to the bottom of Queen Anne Hill and stroll south along the waterfront. The breeze off the Sound blows fresh in my face, snaps the colored pennants on the light poles. I picture CM at the studio, giving class, writing
grants, doing her own workout. Here we sit, both of us with a lapful of relationship disaster, and yet her life seems to have changed very little—at least superficially.

I wander out onto one of the wooden piers. Scents of creosote and diesel fuel merge in my nostrils with the iodine smell of seawater. Across the bay, the cranes and container ships of the working port look like an animated cartoon. I find a wooden bench that’s relatively free of seagull shit and turn my face up to the sun.

Okay, she’s not married, I am. She and Neal lived together less than two years; David and I for seven years. But that doesn’t explain it away entirely. As long as I’ve known CM, she’s seemed to have an inner compass that I lack. Even in grammar school, she knew she was a dancer.

While I was changing my major every year, she sailed through the UCLA dance curriculum and began getting work almost immediately, although not for much money. Sometimes I felt bad for her having to work two jobs, but she never seemed to find it any more than a minor inconvenience, a brief detour on the road to a destination that was never in doubt.

If I hadn’t married David, I’d probably still be teaching bonehead English to a bunch of teenage delinquents and wondering if I should go to grad school and taking aptitude-assessment tests. I guess the truth is that she’s driven and I’m drifting. But it’s never made the slightest difference in our friendship.

The closest we ever came to having a second fight was when I got engaged to David. His charm never worked on her the way it did on the rest of the female population. She found him insipid, almost beneath contempt, and never minded telling me so. She called him Pretty Boy. He called her an intellectual snob and said she was jealous of me. He never understood why I found that hilarious, and he never understood our friendship. For years I nurtured the hope that they’d learn to like each other, but mutual tolerance was about as good as it got.

Of course, if the truth be told, I was never overly fond of Neal, either. He was our graduate instructor in psych 101 and CM was
instantly smitten. He’s attractive enough in that brainy/sexy way. Tall and lean, dark and brooding. He even wears a Van Dyck. He’s been a Ph.D. candidate in clinical psychology for as long as I’ve known him. CM thinks he’s brilliant. She says the reason he has so much trouble finishing his degree is that he keeps butting heads with the academic establishment. To me, he seems like the consummate bullshit artist.

Another reason I find him so irritating—aside from the fact that he’s continually making CM unhappy—is that he always wants to talk about my relationship with my father. Like he’s titillated by the possibility that there might have been something unnatural going on.

“Spare some change, lady?” A cigarette-raspy voice. A woman hovers at the end of the bench, shifting her weight from one foot to the other. She looks too young to be one of the hard-core homeless, but her skin has the leathery tan that comes from exposure and her eyes have that vacant hardness that eventually replaces hope. Spikes of dirty brown hair poke through holes in her red knit cap.

I hate looking at her filthy, ripped jeans and grimy parka, but I’ve never been able to just look away. David disapproves of giving money to panhandlers. “There are plenty of jobs around” is his standard line. He says I’m only encouraging them to remain dependent on handouts. I know there’s a certain amount of truth to that, but I always have a hard time saying no when I’m standing there in my hundred-and-fifty-dollar Donna Karan T-shirt and my Calvin Klein jeans and my Bruno Magli sandals.

I dig in my pocket for a crumpled dollar bill, press it into her hand.

“God bless,” she says.

It reminds me of running to put pennies in the Salvation Army Christmas kettles when I was little because I liked to hear the bell ringer bless me. Right now I suppose I need all the blessings I can get.

Four

O
n the way back to the apartment, I have a sudden urge to ward off the loneliness goblins by baking bread. I don’t have a starter and it takes two or three days to get one really humming, but I still know a few tricks to give a plain loaf some character. Since CM’s idea of using a stove is to set her purse on it while she laces up her Reeboks, I stop by the Thriftway for supplies and lug them up four flights of stairs because the building’s creaky elevator is malingering today.

You don’t really need a recipe to make bread. It’s mostly about proportions—one package of yeast to six or seven cups of flour, two cups of water, and a tablespoon of salt—and Jean-Marc used to say that bread may not always turn out the way you intend it to, but it always turns out. Just the same, it’s been so long since I’ve done this that I use the recipe on the back of the flour bag as a jumping-off point.

Plain Old Bread

1 tablespoon
(1
packet) active-dry yeast

2¼ cups warm water

1 tablespoon sugar

1 tablespoon salt

6 to 7 cups unbleached white flour

Most recipes want you to use a whole envelope of yeast. This means the first rising will take only about an hour and the second maybe forty-five minutes to an hour—particularly if you put it in a warm place, which is what they usually suggest. Some go as far as telling you to put the dough in a gas oven warmed by the pilot light.

That works fine. If that’s the kind of bread you want. Grocery-store bread. Wonder bread. Remember that? The stuff we ate when we were kids. It was white—a brilliantly unreal white—and it had the mouth feel of a damp sponge. When you took a bite, it left an imprint of your teeth suitable for postmortem identification.

Then in the seventies everyone jumped onboard the organic/whole earth bandwagon, and started throwing every grain they could find into the mix, but the recipes called for way too much yeast and lots of oil and eggs and milk, because we all still craved that soft and tender stuff we grew up on.

It wasn’t until I went to France that I tasted bread that wasn’t full of additives and air. It was like a religious conversion for me. In fact, it’s kind of like sex—one of those things that everyone thinks they know all about and they tell you how great it is, but which is actually pretty uninspiring until you have it one time the way nature intended it to be.

So, the first thing I do is cut the yeast in half. You don’t want the dough to set a new land-speed record. What you want is a long, slow rise to build the kind of texture and flavor that make people think you paid $5.95 for this loaf at the European Gourmet Bakery.

I combine the yeast with the water in a large crockery bowl, stir in the sugar, and let it sit for a few minutes while I measure the flour into another bowl. Then I stir in the flour with the only big spoon I can find in this pitifully underequipped kitchen. When it clumps together and pulls away from the sides of the bowl, I turn it out on the counter and knead it for ten minutes, adding just enough flour to keep it moving. Then I knead in the salt. Dead last. Because salt strengthens the gluten and makes the dough fight you.

When it’s smooth and elastic enough to spring back when I poke it, I oil a big bowl, slosh the dough around in it, making sure the entire surface is oiled. Then I put a damp towel over it and set it as far from the stove as I can. Someplace like a wine cellar would be nice, but CM doesn’t have one of those. I put it on her dining room table.

With half the yeast, it’ll take twice as long to rise, so I pour myself a glass of sauvignon blanc and start scraping dough off the counter.

The scent of yeast hanging in the air reminds me of my
levain
and the day that David came to my apartment with the Nixon mask and a pizza. The sharpness of the longing I feel takes me somewhat by surprise. Maybe CM was right. Maybe I would be better off without him. But then why do I feel like howling right now? Why do I want to touch his face, smell him, feel his body against me?

I’d settle for talking to him. But I can’t call him at work. In a small company like JMP, everybody knows everybody else’s business as it is. We’re probably already fodder for the gossip mill.

I’ll call the house. He won’t be home, but I can leave him a message on the machine. Just to let him know I’m thinking of him. Maybe he’s lonely, too, and he’s embarrassed to call me after all the things he said. This way, he’ll have the excuse of returning my call to save his fragile male ego.

He’ll call me back tonight. Probably late, because he’ll be working late as usual. I’ll sit in the living room in the dark, and I’ll tell him about what I see—lights of the city, the ferries moving across the black water toward the shadowed islands. I’ll tell him I made bread today. I’ll tell him I miss him. We can start with that. Just “I miss you.” We can build on that. It’s not just him, after all; some of the blame belongs to me.

CM has one of those duck telephones that quacks instead of ringing. She calls him Dorian. I punch in our phone number on his belly. I’m expecting four rings followed by the recording, but after two rings there’s a click. He’s home.

“Hello.” A woman’s voice. I open my mouth but nothing comes out.
Unless I’m very much mistaken, it’s Kelley Hamlin’s voice. “Hello-o. This is the Franklin res—” There’s a rustling noise and then a ringing crash as the phone hits the floor. Then David’s voice.

“Hello.”

Dorian and I exchange a meaningful glance.

“Hello? This is David Franklin.” There’s a distinct note of panic under the heartiness.

I gently replace the duck in his cradle.

Five minutes later, Dorian’s quacking his brains out, but I let the machine pick up. “Wyn, it’s me. Pick up if you’re there.” Pause. “For heaven’s sake, Wyn, stop acting like a child. I know you’re there.” Pause. “Kelley and I are just working on some client files. Pick up the phone.” Pause. “Shit.”

The line goes dead.

I think I’m going to cry. Then I picture David’s face if he could hear his call being announced by Dorian Duck, and I laugh first, then cry.

When CM comes through the door at about six-thirty, I’m working my way through a 1.5-liter bottle of Robert Mondavi cabernet. She throws her purse on the couch.

“And which occasion are we celebrating tonight?”

I hold my glass up to the chandelier and squint through the ruby light. “Chapter two. The phone call. In which our unsuspecting heroine calls the handsome prince at the castle, and the milkmaid answers the phone.”

“I see.” She purses her mouth. “And what did the milkmaid say?”

“Hello.”

“That’s all?”

I retrieve a glass from the cupboard and pour some wine for her, sloshing a little on the counter. “That was about all she had time for before the prince yanked the phone away and it crashed to the floor.”

She drinks some wine before taking her coat off and draping it over the nearest chair. “And what did he say?”

A rather drunken giggle bubbles out of me. “I didn’t talk to him.
But he told Dorian they were working on some files. Wouldn’t you think an advertising prince could come up with a more original lie?”

She sighs. “Oh, Baby. I’m really sorry.” I think it’s the pity in her voice that undoes me.

Thursday morning my eyes are glued shut with dried tears. After I rip them open, I see that my tongue is still purple from the wine. Unfortunately, I remember most of the evening. Crying and laughing, drinking cabernet and something else when we ran out of that, walking to a diner because neither of us could drive, eating greasy hamburgers, arguing with some other drunk at the counter till the waitress told us to leave. Throwing up in the bushes on the way back. Poor CM had to get up and go to work today.