How to Bake a Perfect Life Page 7

  He nudges his nose under the covers and makes a soft “whuff.” Katie remembers that he doesn’t have any way to go to the bathroom unless she takes him. Abruptly, she sits up. Merlin backs away, leaping lightly and jerking his head toward the door. It makes Katie laugh. She puts on a sweater—Ramona was right: It’s cold in the middle of the night here!—and clips Merlin’s leash to his collar. Barefoot on the wooden steps, Katie follows him down, down, down, through the house kitchen and down the back steps into the backyard.

  She unleashes him there and stands in the darkness with her arms crossed over her chest. The grass is damp beneath her feet, and it smells like flowers, the purple flowers on the bushes all along the yard. She never knew flowers could have so much smell or that they could be so perfect and beautiful. Even in the darkness, when they are pale gray, she thinks she can see an edge of blurry purple in the air.

  Two squares of light fall on the grass from the bakery kitchen, and Katie wanders over curiously. Two women, maybe about the same age as Sofia, are dressed in white chef’s coats, with their hair caught back beneath scarves. One is taking care of a big bowl being mixed up by a machine, while the other is shaping dough into long tubes on the metal counter in the middle of the room. Katie’s stomach growls.

  Ramona comes into view, too, her hair tightly braided away from her face, the same white coat on. Her pants are green and loose, and she’s wearing those stupid plastic shoes. Who wears stuff like that? Katie’s mother would make fun of her.

  But Ramona seems happy, moving around the room, gathering bowls and spoons and stuff, laughing with the other two. Even in the middle of the night.

  For one long, pained minute, Katie thinks of her mother in the middle of the night. Two weeks ago. Three. Her face had gotten real bad lately, with scabs and one open spot that got all pussy and disgusting, until Katie brought her mom into the bathroom and poured hydrogen peroxide on it. It bubbled and bubbled and got a little better the next day. But her mom was so skinny that Katie could see there were two bones in her forearms, and she didn’t even have any breasts anymore. All she wanted, all she wanted, no matter what, was more crank.

  Katie realizes she is biting on the inside of her cheek again and makes herself stop. Her mom will get better. She’s cleaned up before. Katie can remember how pretty she used to be, when she did her hair and put on lipstick, or even when she was in her dress uniform.

  She lets go of the fists she made and turns around to look for Merlin to bring him inside. He’s sniffing around in the garden.

  Ramona had asked how Katie found him, but Merlin had found her. He just appeared on her front porch a couple of hours after her mom got arrested. Katie saw the police coming and ran out the back door to hide in the alley so they wouldn’t put her in a foster home. When she came back to the house, everybody was gone. She was scared by herself with no electricity, and all she had to eat was a loaf of white bread and a can of Vienna sausages she’d bought with pennies and dimes she scrounged in the gutters. She had no idea what to do. Where to go.

  Then, like an angel or something, Merlin wandered onto the porch and came over to her and licked the tears off her face. She opened the sausages and he ate one, very, very politely, and ate some of the bread, then drank water out of the toilet. She thought he would go then, back to the homeless camps near the railroad tracks, but he didn’t. With a sigh, he curled up next to her and went to sleep. He didn’t even mind that she wanted to hold on to him.

  Now he’s digging a little in the flower beds, and Katie is pretty sure Ramona won’t like that very much, so she walks over and tugs on his collar. “Come on, Merlin. I want to go back to bed.”

  He snorts and sneezes, planting his feet in the dirt so he can keep smelling. “Merlin!” she cries. “Come on!”

  He doesn’t move.

  Behind her, the back door opens. “Katie?” Ramona calls. “Is everything okay?”

  “No! He won’t come in!”

  “It’s all right. I’ll watch him and bring him up when he’s done. You go on back to bed.”

  “That’s okay. I said I would take care of him.”

  Ramona comes outside, wiping her hands on a cloth attached to her belt. “It’s really okay, I promise. We’ve started baking, so I’m awake. You’re a growing girl. You need your sleep.”

  Katie is afraid Ramona will put an arm around her, but she doesn’t. “Okay,” Katie says. “I’ll leave my door open.”

  Ramona

  I go back inside to my baking, peeking through the window every so often to keep an eye on Merlin. He wanders the perimeter, noses through the garden, and finally sits with his paws crisscrossed in front of him in the very center of the small square of grass. Moonlight illuminates his white patches.

  “When did you get a dog?” asks Jimmy, an earnest young woman who loves baking bread nearly as much as I do.

  “He belongs to Sofia’s stepdaughter.”

  “Cute.”

  “Yeah,” I say, and oil the loaves on the table, then set them aside to rise one more time. Automatically I glance at the big clock on the wall. “These should go in the oven at five.”

  “Got it. Extra steam?”

  I nod and glance out the window again, but Merlin isn’t sitting in the grass anymore. I lean to one side to see if I can see him along the fence, but he’s not there, either. Frowning, I untie my apron. “I’d better check on the dog.”

  In chef’s clogs, I clump through the back door and down the old wooden steps. “Merlin!” I call, but he probably doesn’t even know that’s his name yet. I whistle, hands on my hips. There are deep shadows under the lilac bushes, and I think I see him in one. “Come on, baby,” I call quietly, mindful of neighbors asleep all around.

  Nothing. The first ripple of concern moves down my spine. “Here, puppy! Come on, Merlin. Where’s a good dog?”

  When he doesn’t come out of his hiding place, I go back inside and get a piece of cheese. All dogs love cheese, according to my sister who doesn’t speak to me anymore. I am the cat person of the family.

  Standing in the yard, I hold it up, wondering how the heck he’ll know it’s cheese. Maybe dogs smell things like this, I think, and wave it around, making figure eights in the mild night air. “Come on, puppy, where are you?”

  A racket breaks out in the back of the garden, and a squirrel bolts out of a honeysuckle bush, chattering in terror. He streaks across the yard and scrambles over the five-foot fence, Merlin following at full speed. The dog is sleek and lethal and doesn’t even pause for a breath as he runs for the fence and clears it.

  “Crap!” I race for the gate, the clumsy clogs slapping against my heels. By the time I make it through the gate to the gravel alley, Merlin and the squirrel are gone. Looking left, and looking right, I see exactly the same thing: empty darkness.

  “Merlin!” I cry, as if he would pay any more attention to me now than he did three minutes ago.

  My heart is pounding in my ears. I have to make a choice: I run to the left, out to the adjoining street. No dog either direction, and I can see a fair distance, so I turn around and run to the other end of the alley, past sleeping Victorians, a small parking lot for a clothing boutique, trash cans, garages. The smell of lilacs hangs thick and deep in the air.

  At the end of the alley, all I can see are empty sidewalks. Streetlights cast an amber glow through the tree branches. “Merlin!” I call quietly. “Where are you, you stupid dog?”

  All I can think of is Katie’s face. She trusted me. I’ll just go around the block. Surely he’ll be somewhere.

  But he isn’t. I walk up and down the side streets, calling for him, until the edges of the eastern horizon begin to lighten. Defeated, I trudge back home, my arches hurting from the sprints, my body sweaty. Lights are starting to come on here and there. A man with jangling tools on his belt heads for his truck, giving me a nod.

  How will I tell Katie her dog is gone?

  Another man is sitting on his front porch with a cup of
coffee. “Good morning,” he says as I pass. His voice sounds oddly familiar, skates along my nerves in a way that makes me take a second look at him. His face, too, seems strangely familiar.

  “You haven’t seen a dog, have you?”

  “I haven’t been up very long.” His voice is lovely, resonant and calming, like a bow pulling across the strings of a cello. “What kind of dog?”

  “He’s a mongrel, a tramp. Gold and white, completely charming and wretched.”

  “I’ll keep my eyes open. Where would I return him?”

  “Are you familiar with Mother Bridget’s Boulangerie? The bakery about five blocks down?”

  “I haven’t been here very long,” he says apologetically. “I’ll keep my eyes open.”

  “Thanks.” I wave and head back to face the music. Overhead, pink light kindles on the contrails curving over the sky, and, as if to mirror them, the bare pink granite of the mountaintops blazes. As I approach the bakery that was my grandmother’s house, the scent of bread curls out into the morning. I think of Katie, asleep upstairs.

  Bring him home, I think. Please.

  I stand on the sidewalk, my hand on the gate, looking back and forth down the street, praying to saints I haven’t spoken to in decades—St. Joseph, because he looks after children, and St. Francis, who is in charge of animals, and Mary, who looks out for mothers.

  Soon I will have to help the girls get all the loaves into the cases, start the coffee, write the specials of the day on my neon and black board.

  I am still standing there when Katie slams outside. “Where’s Merlin?” she demands, her voice already certain that he is gone. “Where is he?”

  Taking a breath, I turn to her. “He jumped the fence, running after a squirrel.”

  Her fists clench. “Is he dead?”

  “No! I chased him as long as I could, but he’s running the neighborhood. When the Humane Society opens, we’ll call and they’ll pick him up if they see him.”

  “How could you?” she cries. Tears are running down her face. “I trusted you with him!”

  I expected this, but it’s still terrible. “Katie, I was standing right there, and he jumped so high—he cleared the fence in the backyard. We’ll have to figure out a way to keep him in.”

  “I hate you,” she says without energy, shaking her head. “I. Hate. You. He was all I had left.”

  “He’s not dead, Katie. He just ran off. We’ll find him.” I say it aloud as if to bring weight to my desire, as if speaking it so firmly will make it so. I skitter away from the idea of Colorado Avenue, a busy street, and from the idea that if he was wandering on the railroad tracks when Katie found him, maybe he’s just a hobo of a dog and we’ll never see him again. “We will find him.”

  Her shoulders sag. “Things don’t work out like that for me.” She bows her head and opens the door, and I can’t stand the sight of her shoulder blades sticking out like folded wings from her back. Leaping up the steps, I put my arms around her, hugging her from behind. “I’m so sorry, Katie.”

  For one long minute she allows it, then she flings my arms away from her and goes inside.

  Now what? I think. But the bread is waiting to be sliced. Customers are even now walking toward us.

  For me, always, there is the bread. Which has saved my life more than once.

  STEP TWO

  Before the advent of commercial yeasts, bakers could make a fresh loaf of bread each day only by relying on the levains and starters they had been keeping according to their traditions. Some of those starters were stiff and required a good deal of water and work to release their essence into the day’s mix of flour and water and salt; others were as soft as breasts, divided from the dough of the day before and left in a warm place overnight.

  In some villages, making bread was seen as such a sensual act that only the most devout could perform the task without falling to sin; in others, the bakers were required to go to confession before they baked each day, in order to avoid polluting those who would eat the bread with their desires and failings.

  There are many traditions, many flours, many forms, but all have in common their power to seed the fresh ingredients of the new day, to make a ball of flat ordinary powder grow as tall and plump as a mother’s belly. Out of such simple ingredients—only flour and salt and wild yeast and fresh water—comes the miraculous holiness of bread.

  Ramona at Fifteen

  The first time bread saved my life, I was fifteen and six months pregnant. I’d hidden the belly as long as I could, petitioning every saint I thought might help to make something happen—not make me lose it, because that would be a sin, but make my period come like it should. I looked up herbal remedies at the library but never could bring myself to try them. No matter how little I liked church, a mortal sin was slightly more terrifying than having a baby out of wedlock.

  My mother drove me to my aunt Poppy’s in her Pontiac in early June, the day after school got out for the summer. We didn’t talk much. She smoked one cigarette after another, L&M Menthol 100’s with white filters and a green pack. I rolled the window down every time, but it still made me sick to my stomach, and I leaned on the door frame, feeling the rattle in my teeth. At least nobody smoked at Poppy’s house. She’d quit years and years ago.

  Poppy, my mother’s older sister, lived in a tiny spit of a town between Castle Rock and Denver on the old Littleton highway. I had stayed there many times, loving the freedom of her childless household, the relaxed rules, her bohemian decorations from her travels—statues of elephants and strings of bells and the tapestries she had on the walls. We made trips to Cinderella City, a big mall in Englewood, and played miniature golf in Castle Rock in the cricket-y coolness of summer nights.

  But I couldn’t imagine staying there all summer, all by myself, away from my friends and my sisters and my bedroom and my cats. My mother was so angry she’d hardly spoken directly to me since the day she stopped me in the kitchen, put her hand on the belly I was trying so hard to hide, and said, “Oh, Ramona, what have you done?”

  We left the interstate at Castle Rock, where Poppy would sometimes bring me to shop at Russ’ Drug, have lunch at the B&B Café, and pick up supplies at the single tiny grocery store with its wooden floors and musty smell. A butcher chopped meat at the back, his white apron bloodstained. It made me want to never eat meat again, but Poppy said he was a good butcher and that was worth a lot. There were a few other things in town. A record store, an old-fashioned dress shop—which never had a single customer, that I could tell—and a library in an old school.

  Eight miles west of Castle Rock was Sedalia, which wasn’t even really a town. There was a gas station and a café on the corner, which was often filled with rough characters, bikers and the like. Before that summer, I wasn’t allowed to go there on my own.

  From Johnson’s Corner, you turned left on the highway, traveled down a handful of small blocks with old houses on them, and then finally came to Poppy’s place, which was two stories tall and ancient, with big fields around it. She had a party line—her ring was one long, one short, so you had to listen to find out who was getting phone calls—and I loved thinking of people talking about all kinds of things, right through the phone next to me, while we ate supper or drank our tea or made bread. I sometimes tried to eavesdrop, but the talkers always seemed to hear me pick up the phone, so I’d have to apologize and say I was just going to make a call.

  As my mother and I drove up the gravel path to the kitchen door, Poppy came out on the porch. I could tell she was a little sad. Shame pressed down on me again, heavier by far than the belly I’d been hiding. She was short and round, with long hippie hair and a skirt made of India cotton swirling around her legs. She wasn’t wearing a bra, and it shocked me; I didn’t know any grown women who ever came out of the house without a bra, and she had rather a lot of chest.

  A wave of resistance crushed me. “Mom, why can’t I stay home?”

  “Because,” she said. “It’s bad for your
siblings to see you pregnant. You’re the oldest. You’re supposed to be a good example.”

  I wanted to cry. Beg. It was only one time! I wanted to say. Once! How was I supposed to know?

  My mother nudged me, and I climbed out of the car. Behind me, she grabbed my bag and slammed the door closed. “Hello!” she called to her sister. “We made it at last.”

  “I’m so glad to see you,” Poppy said, looking right at me, smiling. She came down the steps and put her arms around me, kissed my cheek. I allowed it, but her breasts squished into my chest, and it was embarrassing. She quickly moved away, only patting my arm.

  My mother hugged her with more exuberance, and they rocked back and forth, both of them with closed eyes, as if they were absorbing some magic thing from each other. They were sisters and often seemed at odds to me. Everything about them was different—my mother in her slacks and short hair streaked elegantly, so that it seemed to match the liquid gold jewelry she was so fond of. Unlike Poppy, Lily was always tanned and slim and put on her makeup.

  Poppy had run off to India after college in the sixties and spent six years traveling in Europe and even Africa, working when she needed to. She had cooked a thousand kinds of food all around the world, which gave her kitchen an exotic smell.

  “How about a grilled cheese sandwich?” Poppy asked when my mother drove away. “I’ve got to get moving on my sourdough or put it back in the fridge.”

  “I guess.”

  She drew me into her kitchen, a room with big windows pouring sunlight into the sink and splashing it onto the table. A collection of blue bottles, large and small, was lined up on the windowsill. Sandwiched between them were small clay pots filled with herbs. When the sun was on them, like now, they made the air smell like root beer and Thanksgiving morning. A rotary fan sat atop the fridge, moving the air around over our heads. Poppy poured me a glass of sweet iced tea with pieces of mint from her garden floating in it.