Home from the Vinyl Cafe (8 page)

“The starter?” said Dave. “On vacation?”

“We took it to Germany last March,” said Carl.

“To Germany?” said Dave.

“Gerta carried it in her suitcase. She was going to take it in her purse, but she didn’t want it to go through the X-ray machine. She was afraid the X rays might kill the enzymes.”

“You took the starter to Germany?” said Dave.

“Last summer we took it to the cottage, but it didn’t do well. We had to feed it commercial flour, and when we brought it back, it was pale … out of sorts.”

“You took it to the cottage?” said Dave.

“It has done three interprovincial trips and two international ones,” said Carl. “Plus a change of planes in Holland.”

Carl explained why he didn’t want to take the starter to Florida. “What if there’s a hurricane?” he said. “What if the power fails? I don’t want to be worrying all the time. It’s supposed to be a vacation.”

Then he told Dave what he wanted him to do. “The starter is in the fridge. In a Mason jar. There’s a bag of wheat flour on the counter beside the fridge. Once a week you put a tablespoon of the flour into the Mason jar. Okay?”

“Okay,” said Dave.

After supper Dave said, “What is starter, anyway?”

Morley looked at her husband and shook her head. She said, “Why did he choose you, of all people? Doesn’t he understand what he is dealing with? The idiot.”

Dave didn’t press the point.

The next day he went to Wong’s Scottish Meat Pies for lunch.

Kenny Wong said, “Making sourdough bread is like making yogurt. You need something to get it going. When you’re making sourdough, you use fermented dough from your last batch of bread. That’s the starter. In the pioneer days, when you couldn’t run to the corner store for a packet of yeast, sharing a starter was a true act of friendship. You should be honored.”

“He didn’t give it to me,” said Dave. “He asked me to look after it.”

“Still,” said Kenny. “If you don’t feed it, it will … you know …”

“No,” said Dave. “What?”

“It’s a living thing. I don’t know. If you don’t feed it, who knows. It might die or something.”

Dave’s first visit to Carl’s house was on Friday. When he got there, he couldn’t find the keys, and he panicked. Had he lost them? He phoned Morley.

“You never had them,” she said. “Remember? Carl was going to leave them under the garbage can.”

Dave let himself into Carl’s house and found the Mason jar of starter in the fridge. He pried the jar open and peered in. The starter looked like moist oatmeal. The pleasing sour aroma of fermenting yeast wafted up out of the jar and made Dave smile. He looked around for the bag of flour. The kitchen was full of ceramic knickknacks. The walls were covered with framed sayings, scrolls, tea towels from Germany and Arizona. The room had the feel of a souvenir shop. There was a set of ceramic containers shaped like dogs on the counter. They were lined up in descending order of size, each dog with a tag around its neck: SUGAR, COOKIES, TEA, COFFEE. The flour wasn’t on the counter where Carl had promised. There was a brown paper bag by the telephone. It was full of white powder. Dave dumped a spoonful into the starter and put the starter back in the fridge. Then he spent half an hour snooping around the Lowbeers’ house.

When Dave got home, Morley was in bed reading. He stood at the end of the bed and got undressed. “All his shirts are ordered by color,” he said as he pulled his sweater over his head. “All the blue ones together, all the white ones.” Dave rolled up the sweater and tossed it toward his bureau like a basketball. It landed in the garbage can. He sighed.

Morley said, “You went through his closet?” She kept reading, but she sounded shocked.

“Of course I did,” said Dave. “He has two pair of lederhosen. Can you imagine Carl in leather shorts?”

He was using his feet to push his clothes into the pile at the bottom of Morley’s closet that served as a laundry hamper.

“I can’t believe you did that,” said Morley. She was looking at him over the book. “Two pair? Really?”

“You know what I found in the bathroom?” said Dave.

Morley put her book down on the bed. She was sitting up. Looking at him.

The next Friday, when Dave went to feed the starter, he thought maybe it didn’t smell quite the same as it had the week before, but it was hard to tell. He didn’t want to touch it with his fingers, so he got a fork and poked at it. He decided it was just his imagination. He put another spoonful of the flour into the jar like before and went into the den to look at Carl’s books.

The third Friday he went directly to Carl’s on his way home from work. He was feeling good—happy because on Saturday he was leaving with Morley and the kids for Montreal. They were going to St.-Sauveur in the Laurentian Mountains for a long weekend ski trip. He was going to feed the starter and go home and pack. He fished the jar out of the fridge and gasped when he opened it.

He ran to the phone.

Morley answered on the third ring.

“The starter,” said Dave. “The starter.”

“Who is this?” said Morley.

“It’s me,” said Dave. “I’m at Carl’s. Something is wrong with the starter.”

Something was terribly wrong with the starter. Instead of resembling a bowl of moist oatmeal, it looked hard and dry.

“And white,” said Dave. “It’s all dried up. I think it’s dead.”

“You sound like you’re reporting a murder.”

“I am,” said Dave. “It’s dead. It smells.”

“It’s supposed to smell,” said Morley.

“Not like this,” said Dave. “It smells horrible. Like chemicals. Like a jar of solid smog. It smells like death. What am I supposed to do?”

When Morley arrived, it took her under a minute to figure out what had gone wrong.

“This is what you’ve been feeding it?” she said, holding up the brown paper bag Dave had found by the phone.

“Yes,” said Dave.

“Spackle,” said Morley.

“Polyfilla?” said Dave.

“That’s what it says here on the bag,” said Morley.

It was written neatly in Gerta’s handwriting.

Dave sat down and stared out the kitchen window.

The Lowbeers were due home Sunday evening. “What am I going to do?” said Dave.

“I don’t know, but it’s going to be interesting,” said Morley. She was standing by the counter opening the dog containers. “She has brown sugar in the Coffee dog.”

Later that night Morley was standing in her bedroom trying to stuff an extra ski sweater into one of the kids’ suitcases.

“You’re leaving,” said Dave. “No matter what—right?”

“Right,” she said.

“Right,” said Dave.

He went downstairs and stared at the phone. Ten minutes later, he called Kenny Wong.

“I think I have a recipe for sourdough starter,” said Kenny.

“I’m coming over,” said Dave.

When Dave got to Kenny’s restaurant, Kenny was waiting for him with a book, a bottle of buttermilk, a hair dryer, and a bottle of Scotch.

“We’ve got to get going,” Kenny said. “It takes three days to make sourdough starter.”

“We’ve only got two,” said Dave.

“That’s what the hair dryer is for,” said Kenny.

When they got to Carl’s, Kenny rubbed his hands together and said, “First things first.” He started opening cupboards
until he found the glasses. He poured two big tumblers of Scotch and propped his cookbook open on the kitchen counter. It was called
Cooking Wizardry for Kids: Learn About Food … While Making Tasty Things to Eat!

Kenny smiled and held up his Scotch. “I get all my best stuff from this book,” he said.

“You can’t be serious,” said Dave.

There was a moment of silence. Kenny and Dave stared deep into each other’s eyes.

By three in the morning Dave and Kenny were anything but serious. They were still at step one of the recipe—waiting for a cup of buttermilk to warm and collect bacteria from the kitchen air, as the recipe called for, in the natural old-fashioned way. Kenny had the hair dryer set up to blow over the buttermilk.

“Like forcing a tulip,” he said.

The bottle of Scotch was half-killed. Dave had discovered the Lowbeers’ polka records. Kenny was wearing one of Gerta Lowbeer’s aprons. There was a mop lying on the kitchen counter.

“Tired, my dear?” said Kenny to the mop. “It must be time to add the flour,” he said. “I figure six hours under a hair dryer is the same as three days in a warm place. What do you think?” He was still talking to the mop.

Dave was sitting on the floor. His head was in his hands. He was staring into the distance. He was remembering the disdain in Carl Lowbeer’s voice when he had told Dave about the Rutenbergs. “We gave them some of the starter because they said they wanted to bake bread, too. They killed it within six months. They’re fools.”

“I’m dead,” said Dave.

They finished at ten on Sunday morning. Kenny had slept in the Lowbeers’ bed, Dave on the living room couch.

When they left, the sourdough was bubbling like a pot of oatmeal.

“It looks sort of the same. It smells right. But it didn’t bubble like that,” said Dave.

“It’ll slow down in the fridge,” said Kenny.

“And there’s more than there used to be—there was only half that much,” said Dave.

Kenny picked up the Mason jar and scooped half of the new sourdough into the garbage. “How’s that?” he said. “Does that look about right?”