How to Bake a Perfect Life

by Barbara O'Neal

  I said, “My mom says that women shouldn’t do housework or cooking, that we need careers so we can be independent.”

  “It’s good to have your own money, work you love,” Poppy agreed. “And if you don’t like to cook, you certainly don’t have to in today’s world. But I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the traditional female arts, either. They’re beautiful.” She measured out a cup of white flour and poured it over the starter. “Stir that in.”

  Pleased, I used the sturdy wooden spoon and stirred the flour into the heady sponge, releasing the scent into the air. Poppy turned on the radio, and when “Glory Days” came on, we wiggled our hips. As we cooked and listened to the radio and talked, I was the happiest I’d been in ages.

  So, naturally, God had to ruin it. A car came into the driveway, tires crunching over the gravel, and I felt Poppy shift. She gave a hard pat to the dough beneath her hands and wiped her palms on her apron. A woman came to the back door and knocked, even though she could see us looking at her through the screen. “Hello,” she called out. “I’m Nancy.”

  Poppy rushed over to push the screen door open and let in a woman made of long rectangles—long face, square shoulders, big rectangular hands. Her eyes were big and bright blue beneath hair cut so short it almost looked like a military cut. “Nancy, I’m so happy to meet you in person! Come in, come in!” With a rare fluttering breathlessness, Poppy waved at me. “This is my niece Ramona. Obviously she’s the pregnant one, not me.”

  I frowned at Poppy, whose cheeks were bright red. Nancy smiled down kindly at her—way, way down, because she was very tall, and not just tall for a woman. She took Poppy’s hand between both of hers and said, “I’m glad to meet you finally.”

  “It feels like we’ve been talking for ages off and on, doesn’t it?”

  Nancy still stood there for a minute, smiling like a statue of a saint, holding Poppy’s hands. Then she turned to look at the counter. “Sourdough?” she asked, lifting the towel over the bowl to sniff. “Mmm! Magnificent!”

  “It’s my grandma’s mother dough,” I said, showing off what I had learned.

  “No kidding.” She inhaled again, deeply, then pointed at the jar with its foamy mass bubbling against the glass. “May I?” she asked Poppy.

  “Of course!” She relaxed a little. “You look like you know your way around bread.”

  “I ran away to Paris as a young woman. Ended up in a boulangerie for a couple of years. The baker was old-fashioned, baked everything with traditional levains. It was a lot of work, but the bread was fantastic.”

  Poppy inclined her head. “I’ve experimented with the old-style starters, but, as you say, it’s a lot of work, and most people wouldn’t appreciate the subtle differences.”

  Feeling left out, I said, “What is that? A levain?”

  “It’s a starter,” Poppy said. “Some are very stiff and intense. You really need a heavy mixer to work with them, and the risings are very long. It can take a couple of days to go from mixing to baking.”

  “Days?”

  Nancy smiled at me. “It’s worth it. There’s a bakery in Denver that sells old-world breads. I’ll bring some down next time I come and you can taste it.”

  The baby kicked me in the kidney, hard, and I said, “Ulp!” and slapped a palm to the place, rubbing, then rubbing in front. It seemed like sometimes the baby would move a bit if I rubbed his back. Her back. Whatever.

  It. Its back.

  Nancy gave me a smile—not all toothy and false but calm and easy. I thought again of the statues of saints at our church; the one I thought of was St. Joseph, with babies in his arms. “Is the baby nudging things out of her way?” she asked.

  “I guess. Hurts sometimes, like a little fist is punching me inside.”

  She came over and stretched out a giant palm. “May I?” she asked, hovering over my tummy.

  I don’t know why, but I nodded. It was like she carried a force field of quietness and, when she came close, it wrapped around me. Her hand was warm. “I’m a midwife, Ramona,” she said, moving her palm. “Do you know what that is?”

  “I’m not stupid,” I said with a scowl. I had read about midwives in my books. “You deliver babies.”

  “Right. Your mother and Poppy thought you might be most comfortable with a woman, somebody who has experience with very young women having babies.”

  “Oh.” My heart sank. “Midwives deliver babies at home, right? I don’t want to have it at home. That would be gross.”

  Nancy laughed softly. “It’s kinda gross no matter where you have it, honestly, but that’s fine. If you want to go to the hospital, I have privileges at all the area hospitals.” She straightened. “Do you think you’d be comfortable letting me examine you?”

  I looked at Poppy, who nodded. “Okay,” I said. I hadn’t really thought about this part. “Like when?”

  “How about now?” She gestured toward the door. “I brought my bag with me. We can go to your room or your aunt’s room, wherever you like.”

  So that’s what we did. I went to my room and Nancy spread a plastic sheet over my bedspread, then covered it with a cotton one and asked me to lie down. She looked between my legs with a metal thing, which I thought would be terrible and wasn’t, because she told me everything she was doing, step by step. It felt weird and it was really embarrassing, so I just looked at the ceiling, where the plaster had been shaped into long petals around the light fixture. When Nancy was done, she pressed her palms into my belly and took out a measuring tape to see how big I was.

  She slipped off her gloves. “Everything seems to be completely normal, right on schedule. The baby should be born around August twentieth.” She wrote something down, then looked at me. “Why don’t you get dressed and come downstairs and we can talk a little more?”

  “About what?”

  “I want to find out more about how you’re eating and exercising and your plans for the baby when it’s born. Keep it? Allow it to be adopted? What do you have in mind?”

  “Keep it?” The idea sent scattershot shards of shock through my upper back. “I’m only fifteen. I can’t be a mom yet.”

  “Okay.” She stood. “I can take you to meet some great people who match babies with good families. We need to do it soon, though, so let’s go down and include your aunt in the discussion, okay?”

  My heart felt hollow all of a sudden. I nodded and she left, but then I just lay there, staring at the ceiling, my hands over the baby inside me. Who would be her mother? I tried to imagine and couldn’t.

  Within me, the baby somersaulted in a lazy, happy way, turning and turning. Under my palm, some knobby body part—elbow, maybe, or shoulder or heel—moved in a slow, long sweep. For the first time it seemed weirdly incredible that there was a person inside me. A person with eyelashes and lips and fingernails.

  To avoid crying, I stood up and put my panties and jeans back on, then went downstairs to talk about my “options.”

  All I could think about was getting back into my jeans, going to school in September as myself, forgetting this whole mess.

  Nancy and Poppy mostly talked while I listened, discussing things that didn’t even make any sense to me—or maybe I just didn’t want to hear them. After a while I left them at the counter, Nancy joining in with the kneading so Poppy didn’t require my help anymore. I went to the sunroom—which was shady in the afternoon—and stretched out in the hammock to read. If I left my foot out, I could reach the windowsill and keep the hammock rocking back and forth. The air started to smell like bread, all fresh and homey.

  I wasn’t concentrating on the book. Outside the window, a plane left a long white trail across the sky, and I wondered what it would be like to go somewhere like Paris and work in a bakery. Or go to India like my aunt. Most of the people I knew were born and raised and died right in the same town, although one of my mom’s friends, a realtor who had divorced her husband and wore too much makeup, sometimes went on cruises.

  Bu
t Paris sounded so romantic. I had travel posters in my bedroom: of Paris and the Eiffel Tower and a loaf of bread and a bottle of wine; of Venice, which also seemed magical; and of Ireland, because we were Irish, and sometimes, when specials came on TV about the Great Potato Famine, it made me sad to think of my ancestor Bridget boarding that ship with a crock of starter in her hands, sailing away to a faraway land and never seeing her family again. I liked to imagine sailing back and stepping on Irish land. It seemed as if it might make my ancestor happy. It looked beautiful with all those green, green, green hills.

  Paris, though. Dreamily, I kept nudging the windowsill with my toe to keep the hammock swaying. The baby was quiet, and I rubbed the top of my stomach as if I was rubbing her back, glad for a rest. For no reason I could pinpoint, I suddenly wondered if she would look like Armando. I knew Armando was the father, but I lied to my parents and everybody else about it, saying it was a boy at a party, nobody I knew. Which might shock you, and it sure shocked them, but I just couldn’t stand to tell them the truth.

  Armando came to work in July, the hottest part of the summer. He was slim but wiry, and quiet at first—like a cat, one of the other girls said. Careful and observant. He washed dishes, which is why we started talking, since I was a busgirl. He flirted with everybody, but it was obvious that he really liked me, liked my red hair and white skin, he said. He had come from Mexico to stay with his uncle, and his English was broken into charming little phrases. He gave me the first nickname I ever had: Zorra, which means fox, for my hair.

  Armando. He had the whitest teeth I ever saw and a way of smiling at me that made me forget about the ugly busboy uniform and feel like I was a model—even though he was too old for me and he was flirting with everybody in the whole place.

  One of the waitresses, Ginny, a woman with a mouth like a string pulled hard across her face, and acne scars she tried to hide with Cover Girl, started having an affair with Armando. She was too old for him, and she was married, which shocked me, though her husband was a long-distance trucker and not very nice. Part of me was jealous, but part of me was relieved. It didn’t entirely stop me from thinking about him before I went to sleep at night, his long eyelashes and white teeth, his hands. In the darkness I imagined him lying on top of me, kissing me, our chests naked and pressed together, skin slipping and sliding.

  When school started, I had to cut back my hours to weekends only. Armando and Ginny broke up, he was promoted to line cook, and I didn’t see him as often.

  Until the Christmas party. I wasn’t even thinking about going, because it wasn’t the official party, which we’d had the week before. This one was for the adult people at the restaurant; they had it every year. A server threw it in her house in Old Colorado City, which was a slightly seedy place if you got away from the main drag.

  If there were such a thing as a do-over for that night, there is a long list from which I would pick. I wouldn’t go to work on Friday night, because it was snowing so hard and I was staying with my grandma, who wouldn’t be able to drive if it got worse.

  I wouldn’t listen to the other bus kids about the party or let them talk me into piling into the car that one of the servers was driving over there. I wouldn’t change into my new blouse, which was green and sparkly and slid off my shoulders to show a lacy strap beneath it, and I wouldn’t wear my tight blue jeans with the fuzzy soft green leg warmers, and I wouldn’t let my hair down so it fell all the way to my butt.

  It was new, getting looked at. I liked it.

  I would change things now. I wouldn’t go to the party but would ask to be dropped off at home. I wouldn’t give in to the heady, bubbly sense of power that came with the guys coming over to talk to me, and I wouldn’t take a beer to look cool. And when Armando came over to talk to me, I would tell him he was too old for me.

  But I didn’t do any of those things. When Armando asked me to dance, I let him teach me a two-step, which put our bodies close together. After a while, somehow, we were making out, and it gave me the hottest feeling all through my body, up and down my spine and at the base of my skull. Everywhere he touched me, little explosions went off. When he skidded his hands up my thighs, I thought I would faint. He kissed my neck and my chest over the top of my blouse, and then he led me into a bedroom.

  I made him promise we would only make out, and that’s all we did. For a long time. First in our clothes, and he rubbed my breasts and crotch through them; then he said we should take off just our shirts. I left on my bra, but the heat of his bare skin and his slow, long kisses were more than I could stand, and I took off my bra on my own. That was the moment it was all lost, because his mouth on my nipples was like a comet or an angel coming down with a tablet from heaven—it was the best feeling I’d ever had. I could have stayed there and let him do that forever. Forever.

  Then we were both bare, all the way, and he was easing into me, a little at a time, talking to me in a low voice. It was like he always knew exactly when I was going to freak out, because he’d stop pushing into me and kiss me, and lick my neck and stroke my nipples, and I’d relax again.

  How long did it take him to get all the way in me? A long time. And let me tell you, all the girls said sex hurt, but it didn’t hurt me. Not one bit. It felt good. I even made a sound when he started to move, and he swallowed it with his mouth. “Shhh,” he said. “Shhh.”

  He moved and moved and moved, and a bunch of heat worked its way into my body, but I couldn’t seem to figure out what was going on until he started moving really fast, rubbing himself against me, and then my body exploded. Everything was all wet down there, but I didn’t care. His body was heavy on my chest and I felt his naked skin, and I didn’t think, Oh, man, I’m an idiot for having sex.

  I thought, Wow. I get it.

  He whispered things to me that I didn’t understand, kissing my face and my neck. Then we were getting dressed, and he combed my hair down and we went back to the party, holding hands.

  And that was the last time I ever saw him. He got into a fight after the party and pulled a knife on somebody; he was arrested and then deported. Bye-bye.

  What was humiliating was to find out after he left that he had had sex with almost every woman in the whole restaurant, including a lady who was pretty much the same age as my mom and had wrinkles around her eyes. I didn’t say a word, and nobody, as far as I knew, realized we went all the way while we were making out.

  Now he was in Mexico somewhere, probably having sex with twelve million other girls, and I was going to have a baby. Who was half Mexican, and that might not please some of the people who wanted to adopt.

  I would have to tell the truth. But that would mean admitting it was Armando, and that was so embarrassing I could barely stand it.

  The farmers’ market in Castle Rock started in early July, and Poppy was in a fever getting ready for it. I worked right alongside her, harvesting strawberries and lettuces and spinach. We tied thyme and dill into bundles with yellow string and made chive vinegar with the blossoms that stained the vinegar a reddish purple, making it look like a magic elixir.

  And we baked. Muffins; quick breads that we cut into individual slices; whole-wheat rolls; long, thin loaves that my aunt called baguettes, which we made out of my grandma’s starter. We carried it all into town in the back of her station wagon at five a.m. on a Thursday morning, and I found myself feeling both apprehensive and excited. I had discovered that I liked being up so early in the morning—liked the hint of dew still hanging in the cool air and the sound of birds getting breakfast and the fact that nobody else was around. Nobody in my family liked getting up early, so unless I was at my grandmother’s house, I went along with their schedule. Poppy said I was a lark, just like her, and we didn’t have to chatter while we got up and going. We drank tea, split one of the big blueberry muffins, and loaded up the car.

  It was fun to be doing something so early, but I was also worried about how the townspeople would look at me. I could hide behind the table for a while,
but that would get boring. I mulled it over all the way into town.

  “What’s on your mind, Ramona?” Poppy asked as we pulled into the parking lot behind the courthouse.

  I shrugged, but my hands gave me away, rubbing the growing hill of my belly.

  “You don’t have to stay for the whole morning. You can go to the library or over to the record store.”

  My heart gave a little jump. Last week I’d taken the record back to Jonah, and he had given me some more records. He was busy that day, so we didn’t get to talk much. He did ask me what I thought of the music. I wasn’t sure and told him so. He nodded. “Let me work on it.”

  Maybe he’d be around today and could give me more suggestions.

  I worked with Poppy until the crowds slowed down at around ten-thirty, and then she sent me on an errand to get her coffee, which I bought at a café truck parked on the street. I bought orange juice for myself and carried the change back to Poppy.

  Nobody said anything to me, and if they were giving me the evil eye, I decided I didn’t want to notice it, so I just made change and helped Poppy hand out food. I even answered questions about the breads sometimes and proudly reported when asked that I had been helping. I could make plain white bread fairly well now and was working on wheat rolls.

  When I brought the coffee back, Poppy was talking, so I put the cup on the table and waved to her. When I turned around, there was my mom. It was such a shock to see her that I almost coughed up my orange juice. She wore a white culottes set with a jaunty scarf tied around her neck and gold buttons in her ears. “Mom!”

  “Hi, Ramona,” she said, and hugged me. I smelled hairspray and cigarettes and Juicy Fruit gum, and the combination nearly made me burst into tears.

  But then I remembered her stony face when she dropped me off four weeks ago and stiffened, pushing her shoulder away from me. “What are you doing here?”

  “Your birthday is coming up. I thought we could go to Denver and do some shopping.”