How to Bake a Perfect Life

by Barbara O'Neal

  It made me feel sick to my stomach, but I said, “Okay.”

  The café was across the street from the courthouse, which had a domed roof. Some people sat on the benches under big trees, and others hurried as if they had some important reason to go inside, maybe to get somebody out of jail or maybe only to get some new license plates. I liked a drugstore around the corner from the courthouse, because it had a bunch of art supplies and notebooks and lip glosses. That would mean crossing the street in full view of all those people and parading right down the whole block.

  Hold your head up.

  I stood on the sidewalk in the shade, eyeing the bright sunshine across the street. Pickup trucks passed by. A young guy leaned out the passenger window of one of them. “Hey, mama!”

  I blushed and marched like a nutcracker, all stiff and sober, down the street in the other direction. I didn’t know where I was going. Off the street, out of sight, at least until I could get my courage up again.

  Then I heard Aunt Poppy’s voice in my head. Walk all over downtown like it belongs to you. I straightened up and tried to walk naturally—as naturally as a person could, anyway, with that weight right there in the middle of me. I passed by the dry cleaner’s and smelled the starch and scorch of the irons and by the narrow drugstore that always seemed to only stock things for old people—denture creams and elastic bandages and canes. An old man came out of the door as I was going by; he glanced at me but didn’t seem to notice or care about my belly, so I kept walking. At the end of the block, I’d cross the street and go around the courthouse on this side, which wasn’t as busy, then go to Russ’ Drug.

  I couldn’t really think of anywhere else to stop before that. I wanted to save something for the record store. So I walked down the sidewalk like I belonged there and then turned to cross the street. Traffic was steady enough that I couldn’t just dash across—you might not think a little town like that could have so many vehicles, but everybody has to drive on the same street—and I was standing in the sun. A trickle of sweat came out from under my hair and ran down the back of my neck. The baby kicked me, as if he was getting cranky in the heat.

  A truck slowed down in front of me and stopped right there, in the middle of the street. It was the same guy who’d yelled at me a few minutes ago. He was way older. The truck bed had a lot of construction tools in it, wheelbarrows and shovels and dusty tarps, and the guy looked as if he’d been working hard. He had light-blue eyes and long hair, and I took one step back.

  “What’s your name, honey?”

  I shook my head, checked to my left as if I was getting ready to cross the street.

  “You’re not from around here,” he said. “I’d remember that hair. You’re as pretty as a little angel.”

  I turned away, ignoring him, hoping for some help from an adult who would tell him to move along. Nobody was around.

  “C’mon, sweetie, I won’t bite,” he said. “My name is Jason. What’s yours?”

  Finally somebody behind the truck honked. “See you around,” the guy said, and pulled away. He hung his head out the window like a dog pretending he couldn’t stop staring at me.

  The person who’d honked was a woman in a nurse’s uniform. She waved for me to cross the street, and I waved back, thanking her, then hurried across.

  I made it to Russ’ Drug without any more trouble. The air-conditioning felt good after the hot sun outside, and I had twenty whole dollars to spend. There were some people in the store, but I pretended I didn’t see any of them, that I was completely invisible, and headed for the stationery aisle.

  There were all kinds of things I liked here. Mechanical pencils with their fine, perfect line; labels for jars and file folders; paper for every use—onionskin for typing, Big Chief tablets, spiral notebooks, and, my favorite, sketch pads, which I somehow used only when I was at Aunt Poppy’s house. There was something about the place that made me want to draw. Even now I was thinking about the blue bottles and plants on her kitchen window. It seemed like something that would make me feel better, drawing or maybe painting that. I gathered a sketchbook and mechanical pencil and was dithering between the watercolors or pastel crayons when the pharmacist in his white coat came down the aisle. “Can I help you with something?” he said.

  “No, thank you,” I said politely. “I’m just thinking.”

  He didn’t go away.

  “Is there something wrong?”

  “Somebody thought you might be shoplifting.”

  My face burned bright red, all the way up past my eyebrows and around the edges of my ears. “Why? Because I’m pregnant and that makes me a criminal?”

  “Now, now, there’s no reason to get all excited. Why don’t you show me what’s in your pockets and we’ll be fine.”

  For a long, hot second, I stared at him, sure it was a mistake. “I come in here all the time with my aunt Poppy. Don’t you remember me?”

  “ ’Fraid not.” He shifted, folded his hands one atop the other like a deacon. Waiting.

  Fighting very hard not to cry, I put back the sketch pad and the pencils. Deliberately, I pulled my pockets inside out, displaying the twenty dollars and a tube of Chapstick. Before he could ask, I pulled the lid off to show it was used. “I’ve had this.”

  “Okay, then, we’re square. You want to come up to the front, I’ll ring those up for you when you’re ready.”

  He walked off calmly. The devil girl inside me shoved everything off the shelf and left it on the floor for him to pick up. I saw it in my mind’s eye over and over, twenty times while I stood there, smarting and stinging, with my pockets hanging out beneath my belly and a twenty-dollar bill in my right hand.

  The real me tucked my pockets back in, put away my money, and left the store. I hate you, I hate you, I hate you, I chanted in my mind. And I didn’t mean the pharmacist.

  I meant Armando, who didn’t even know he’d done this to me. And probably wouldn’t care if he did.

  Out on the street, I considered trying to find Poppy and clinging to her until it was time to go home. If I told her what had happened, she would be sympathetic.

  But the record store was only two doors down, and I had the whole twenty to spend now that I wouldn’t buy anything from that guy, not even a fire extinguisher to put myself out if I was on fire. I wanted the art supplies, but maybe we could get them somewhere else, or we might go to Cinderella City one of these days. They at least had a Walgreens there.

  I walked to Blue Fish Record Store. It had been there since the hippie days, and looked it, with dusty paisley curtains and a giant jade plant in the window. A yellow cat sunned himself on the windowsill, and I stopped to pet him. He blinked and started purring. “Aren’t you hot, cat?” I asked.

  “Cats never get too hot,” a voice said behind me.

  Warily, I turned around. The guy behind the counter was maybe college age, with hair that was long and dark brown, pulled back from his face into a ponytail, like an artist or something. He said, “They’re desert animals.”

  He had a very calming voice. Or maybe it was the music, which was some kind of flutes and drums or something. The air smelled like cinnamon and coffee. “I didn’t know that,” I said, and then I remembered. “Oh, yeah, like Egypt. They were really a big deal in Egypt.”

  His smile was kind. “Right.” He was writing on file cards, drinking out of a big ruby-colored cup. “You looking for something in particular this afternoon or just in to browse?”

  I shrugged. “Browse, I guess.”

  “I’ll leave you alone, then. If you want some help, I’m here, okay?” His eyes were direct, and for the first time all day, I felt as if somebody saw me instead of my belly.

  “Thanks.” I wandered around the bins, flipping through the albums for something I recognized. My dad was a big music fan. He collected records from the fifties and sixties, all kinds of rhythm and blues and rock. I saw covers I recognized—Cream and the Rolling Stones and Albert King.

  “You like Cream?”
the guy asked.

  I didn’t know if it would be cool or not cool, but my dad was always saying that Eric Clapton was the best guitarist in the history of the world. But being cool hadn’t really gotten me very much, so I told the truth. “They’re okay, I guess. My dad likes Clapton.”

  “How about you? What do you like?”

  I lifted a shoulder. Now that I was a few steps closer, I could see his eyes were the color of honey, very clear light brown, and he had that way about him that said he’d been other places besides this. A quietness, a clean and generous curiosity. He was probably a music fanatic if he worked in a record store. “I don’t know,” I said finally, again telling the truth. “Everybody tells me what I should like.”

  Something shifted in his face at that. “That’s how the world is sometimes.” His voice was great—not deep but echoey, kind of, as if it came out of the body of a cello, which I’d played for a couple of years. “What’s your favorite record?”

  Here was where I should say the Rolling Stones or the Clash or somebody cool, but that would be a lie. I shook my hair out of my eyes. “I don’t think I can pick a favorite. I love Cyndi Lauper and Annie Lennox.” I lifted a shoulder. “And I really love Bruce Springsteen, and …” I thought about it. “Prince.”

  His lips turned down at the corners as he nodded. “You have good taste.” He smiled, giving me a little wink. “Maybe not Prince, but the others.” He sucked his lower lip into his mouth, his hands turned backward on his legs, and he narrowed his eyes. He was skinny, with shoulders like a shelf. His shirt was a cream color with thin purple stripes. The sleeves were rolled up on his forearms. “How about Stevie Ray Vaughan? Ever listen to him? Elvis Costello?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  He came around from behind the counter and went down the aisle across from me. He was old, like maybe even twenty-three or so, but I still felt something funny circling around my spine, like iron shavings standing up all ruffled and alert. I pretended to flip through the records on my side, but I couldn’t have told you one thing in there.

  “Here,” he said, and handed me an album. “You can take this home and listen to it, see if you like it.” Then he pulled it to his chest. “You do live around here, right? You’re not just driving through on your way to Texas?”

  “I’m living with my aunt this summer.” Almost without my permission, my hands pointed to my belly.

  “Exiled, are you?” He said it with a twinkle in his eye, so I could smile back. For the first time all day, I felt like a normal person. I nodded, as if we were conspirators.

  “Well, you take that with you, and come in next week and tell me what you think.”

  I looked at the cover. Stevie Ray Vaughan. “Really?”

  “Trust me.” He grinned with one side of his mouth and gestured to the empty shop. “I don’t think any of the customers will miss it.”

  “I have to ask my aunt when we’re coming back.”

  “Okay.” The phone rang and he headed to the front. “Who’s your aunt?”

  “Poppy Callahan.”

  “I know Poppy. She’s good people.”

  I never liked that expression, and it took some of the sheen off his glow. “Yeah.”

  He answered the phone and I returned to browsing, wondering what I could possibly get now that I had a Stevie Ray Vaughan album in my hand. What could I pick that wouldn’t make me look like a little girl? I flipped through the stacks, looking at the Cure and U2 and the other bands I knew the alternative kids liked, but what I really wanted was Madonna. And some voice said, But he might think you’re an idiot.

  I thought of my aunt, telling me to sit up straight at the diner. I took the Madonna album up to the register, thinking only as I got there about “Like a Virgin.” Which I wasn’t anymore, but that’s not what the song is about exactly.

  The guy was still talking on the phone. By the way he was writing on a piece of paper, I thought he was taking an order or something. He repeated some names and prices back into the phone, spied me at the counter, and held up a hand, making a face to show that the person was talking and talking.

  It wasn’t until he came over to ring me up that I saw his left hand was deformed. No, not deformed—messed up, like from an accident or something. The first two fingers were mostly stubs, and the remaining ring and pinkie fingers looked as if they had been shaved. I stared, shocked, then realized I was doing the same thing everybody did to me. And he hadn’t!

  “I cut them off with a power saw last summer,” he said matter-of-factly.

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean to stare. Everybody has been staring right at my stomach, so I know how it feels.” I couldn’t look at him.

  “Hey, don’t worry about it.” He took the album off the counter. “What’s your name, anyway?”

  “Ramona.”

  He chuckled, the sound low and rich. “I’m Jonah. We rhyme.”

  It made me laugh, and again that mortification faded. I tried to think of something to say so we could keep talking but couldn’t come up with anything.

  He looked at the handwritten label on the front of the album and wrote the numbers on a notebook page with a carbon beneath it. I noticed he had perfectly arched eyebrows, dark brown, and they gave his face an elegance. Music played, something wistful with heavy, slow drums. He was quiet, focused on his task.

  “What’s your favorite album?” I asked suddenly. “You must know a lot of music, working in a music store.”

  “That I do,” he said. His face looked sad—sad enough to cry. “I’ll save that story for another day.” The bell dinged on the door behind me. “There’s your aunt.”

  “Hello, Jonah!” she sang out. “I see you’ve met my niece.”

  “We’ve been talking music.”

  “Did you get my order?” Poppy asked. “The Doors?”

  He shook his head. “Next week, probably.”

  “Good enough. I’ll bring you some bread.”

  “I’d like that.”

  “You ready to go, my beauty?” Poppy asked me.

  I nodded. “But I haven’t spent all the money.”

  She put her arm around me. “It’s all right. Let’s go home and have a nap, shall we?”

  On the way out, I waved to Jonah. He lifted his chin and sat back down at his table with his ruined hand.

  After we came in from gardening a few days later, Poppy said, “I have to bake. I could use your help.”

  “I was going to read.” I was reading Mistral’s Daughter for the third time. It never got old, and I’d just started again, so I was in the part where the first woman was an artist’s model in Paris. It was very romantic. It made me want to go to Paris and drink absinthe, whatever that was.

  “Well, I really need some help, and you’re what I’ve got. You can bake this morning, then read later. Besides, it’s good for you.”

  “Why? You can buy bread in the grocery store. Twenty kinds!”

  “None of it tastes like the bread made with your grandmother’s sourdough starter.” She plunked a jar of the foamy, smelly stuff on the table. “This has been in the family for more than a hundred years.”

  “I thought you didn’t use hers.”

  “Of course I do. But I like to experiment with my own, too.”

  I turned the bottle around and around. “How can it last that long?”

  “A mother dough like this can last for decades. Maybe even centuries. This one was carried from Ireland to Buffalo to the Wild, Wild West.”

  I’d heard bits and pieces of the story from my grandmother. The starter was handed down from mother to daughter, generation after generation. “I don’t get how it keeps from getting spoiled.”

  She scooped out a hefty measure of foamy pale-yellow-white starter and put it in a bowl. “Because,” she said, “we refresh it every week so it stays healthy.” She turned on the tap, testing the temperature with her fingers. “We add water that’s just barely warmer than your fingers.” When she got it right, she ges
tured. “Try it.”

  I stuck my fingers under the stream. The water was the most bland temperature possible. Poppy filled a glass measuring cup and stirred it into the jar of starter. It foamed up.

  “That’s kinda cool,” I said. “Like a chemistry experiment.”

  Poppy gave me a half grin. “That’s exactly what it is. The yeasts are alive and hungry.”

  “Do you have to have an old starter to make it work?”

  “Not at all. Remember the one I was working on the first day? That’s new. I started it.” She beat a cup of flour into the mix, then scraped the sides of the container and poured the mass into a waiting clean quart jar, the kind you put peaches in. With a rubber band, she fastened a circle of cheesecloth over the mouth of the jar. “It needs to breathe,” she explained, “and a little time to grow. This evening I’ll put it back in the fridge.”

  I bent over and inhaled the tangy scent of the starter in the bowl. “What am I doing to help, then? Mixing the bread?”

  “I’ll let you work with the sourdough later, but for now let’s get some regular yeast breads going. Has your mother taught you any baking at all?”

  “My mom? You’re kidding, right?” My mother considered cooking to be the devil’s way of keeping women chained to the home. Since my dad ran restaurants, she didn’t have to cook, and she didn’t. Ever. “I can’t think of a single thing my mom knows how to cook.”

  “Oh, she knows. She just chooses not to. First step: Wash your hands thoroughly with soap and dry them on a clean towel.” She handed me one. “I keep the thin white towels for the bread and the colored terry cloth for hands.”

  I followed instructions, watching as Poppy assembled ingredients on the big butcher-block island, which was as old as the house. Bags of flour, white and whole wheat and rye; salt and baking powder and yeast; oil and butter and eggs. “Your grandmother taught us both to cook. Your mother was very good, but she doesn’t like it.”

  The phone rang, and we paused to see who it would be for. Ring-ring! Ring-ring! I thought of another kitchen, maybe down the block, maybe way down the road, and a woman picking it up. So weird. They were having a conversation right there.