Baker's Apprentice

by Judith Ryan Hendricks

  For the longest time, it seems, they stare at each other.

  “What the hell are you doing?” It feels as if he’s shouting at her, but it comes out a whisper.

  Her mouth turns down at the corners. “What does it look like I’m doing?”

  “It looks like you’re destroying something that doesn’t belong to you.”

  “Wrong about that,” she says. “It does belong to me. It’s my goddamn life you’ve got in this thing. Mine and a lot of other peoples’ in this town. Why the hell did you think any of us wanted to be in your stupid book?”

  “Bernie, it’s just a journal. I can write anything I want to in my journal. About anybody.”

  “Not about me,” she says calmly, throwing in the page she’s just ripped out. “You think you can just come in here and use people like lab rats. Watch us running around in our little holes and then you write about us. Who the hell do you think you are?” She rips out another few sheets and tosses them into the flames.

  “Stop it. You don’t know what you’re doing.”

  She raises her chin. “Says you. Anyways, I’m almost done here. What are you gonna do, hit me?”

  “No. Much as I’d like to.”

  “Have me arrested?”

  The thought had crossed his mind, at first, but of course it’s ridiculous.

  “Tell Granny on me?” she taunts. She throws the last two pages into the fire, and holds the empty notebook up by one side. “So how does it feel to be so pissed off and there’s not a goddamn thing you can do about it?”

  “I’m not pissed off.” Although the thought of slamming her against the wall does have a certain appeal.

  “Yes you are.”

  “Okay. I am pissed off. But I’m sorry, too.”

  She looks vaguely unsettled. “For what?”

  “For you. Because you really don’t understand the whole thing.”

  “What whole thing?”

  “That”—he gestures at the notebook cover—“had nothing to do with you. Nothing to do with anyone here.”

  Her eyes shift to the stove, then back to him. “You wrote stuff about all of us.”

  “Yeah, I know, but it wasn’t really about you.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about? You’re so full of crap. I’m out of here.” But she doesn’t move.

  “It wasn’t a book. It was a journal. It was really about me. How I saw things, what I thought about them, how I felt.”

  “Right.” She snorts. “Who the hell wants to read that shit?”

  “That’s sort of my point. No one, Bernie. Just me.”

  She twists her hands together. “Why would anyone do something that stupid? Write to themselves. Yeah, boy.”

  “You should try it sometime,” he says quietly.

  A wild laugh bursts from her chest. “I’m not that crazy.”

  “Actually, you are.” The stove’s heat is beginning to penetrate the heavy parka. He takes off his gloves, unfastens it slowly.

  “Screw you, McLeod. I’m outta here.” But she stands still, running the zipper head up and down the track of her open coat.

  “My family was kind of messed up, too. I started writing like this to help myself understand it. So I could live with it.” He eases out of the jacket and hangs it on the back of the chair.

  She peers at him through her thatch of hair. “Did it help?”

  “Some.” He shrugs. He finds her eyes. “But I’m not finished. I’ve got a long ways to go. You know what I mean, don’t you?”

  When she exhales, she seems to shrink, like a deflating balloon. She tosses the empty notebook on the table and walks past him without saying anything, disappearing up the snowy path she knows so well.

  At six A.M. he’s standing on the packed snow of the porch. Daybreak is still four hours away. He looks up. Orion’s gone down in the west. The dipper, big, bright, and low, has turned so that Arcturus seems to almost sit on top of Dawes Hill.

  He stamps his boots and turns reluctantly back inside. He lights one kerosene lamp, then the other, turning the wick up slowly so as not to crack the chimney. The pale light hovers over the table, gradually spreading into the dark corners of the room. He holds the thermometer where he can read it. Seventeen below.

  Opening the firebox door, he rakes up the coals, opens the vent, and lays on some kindling. When he closes the door, the fire snaps back to life. He goes to stand by the window. Nothing much to see except a small patch of yellow lamplight on white snow. Beyond that is only the dark, the cold. The cold he feels now has no temperature. It’s more the absence of something, a blankness that seeps into his bones like the cold, and settles there.

  The only thing left now is to begin. Again.

  twenty-one

  At Harrington High School in 1972, there must have been a rule that said girls had to wear miniskirts and boots or hip huggers and shoes that looked like they were borrowed from the football team’s place kicker. And it was also decreed that every girl should have long, straight hair, parted in the middle.

  Amanda Petrie was a girl who broke all the rules. She wore something called harem pants, loose and flowing and gathered at the ankle, and long sweaters. Or she wore knickers and knee sox and short, boxy pullovers. She had baby-fine blond hair, cut really short. She did it herself with cuticle scissors, she told me once, and it set off her face like a cameo. Fine and sharp. Her features were small, except for her big blue eyes, and pretty unremarkable. Until she smiled. The first time I saw her smile, it was like being punched in the stomach.

  I was barely fifteen. Too tall. Unbearably clumsy except on the soccer field. I had a weird little stubble on my chin that I kept hoping would become a beard. It was completely demoralizing that it took several days to get to the point where Suzanne would even notice it and tell me to shave. Kevin, who was sixteen then, was already performing the manly ritual of shaving every day and sported bushy sideburns. I was taller than he was, but his football and baseball workouts had shaped him into a wedge of solid muscle.

  He, of course, dated the prom queens, the cheerleaders, the baton twirlers, the class officers…and anyone else who caught his fancy. When he’d been through all the ones at Harrington, he started on neighboring districts. Girls were calling the house starting at about four in the afternoon. And since we usually weren’t home till around five or six from football practice or whatever practice, Suzanne took the calls. She was always threatening to get an unlisted number, but she never did. I think she rather enjoyed the spectacle.

  I didn’t date much. First of all, I couldn’t drive. I didn’t even have a learner’s permit. There was no way Suzanne was going to play chauffeur. Even if she’d wanted to, Kevin usually had the car. She said I should go with Kevin and his girl du jour, something she quaintly called a “double date,” but he didn’t want me tagging along, and there weren’t many girls I wanted to date badly enough to put up with him for an entire evening.

  Once or twice was enough.

  His behavior could range from charming to brutish, depending on the girl and the stage to which the relationship had progressed. At one time or another, I got to see the full spectrum. At the beginning he was always devoted, self-deprecating, funny, sincere. He got rowdier if he thought the girl would tolerate it, would exhibit jocklike tendencies toward practical jokes. But if she was intellectually inclined, he could be serious. Spend afternoons reading “real” books by Updike and Vidal and John Cheever. He could talk about the war, civil rights, ecology, if it was called for. I always knew when things were cooling off because he didn’t mind being rude, having a laugh at the girl’s expense, or flirting with someone else right in front of her. Eventually he would quit even pretending an interest. Quit calling. Refuse to take her calls. Pass her on the street without showing any signs of recognition. He had no qualms about humiliating anyone.

  Amanda was in Kevin’s class, a year ahead of me. She was studying art. She took all the painting and drawing and photography classes, but what
she really loved was sculpture. She wanted to take metal shop to learn to use a welder’s torch, but girls weren’t allowed in that class.

  So while she bided her time, waiting to graduate and get the hell out of Glen Bay, she did her own kind of sculptures with whatever materials came to hand. Rusty tools. Lint from the clothes driers at the laundry. Old silverware and dishes. Discarded clothing and shoes. Records. That’s how I met her.

  I was at one of my favorite record stores in the village of Glen Bay one afternoon, flipping through the used 45s when I looked up and saw this girl standing at the cash register, tapping her foot impatiently. The geek who worked the register on Saturdays came out from behind the counter with two shopping bags full of records, handed them to her, and she pulled what looked like a ten-dollar bill out of her purse and gave it to him.

  I was stunned. Even the used records cost more than that. This girl was either putting out, or she knew something I didn’t know. I sidled up to the counter and pretended to be looking at the album cover for some dorky Roberta Flack LP they were playing, all the while trying unsuccessfully to see what records were in the shopping bags.

  The only one I could identify was Little Richard. I was kind of excited. I didn’t know many girls in those days who were into Little Richard. Especially since he’d given up rock and gone back to singing gospel music, so his old stuff wasn’t getting much airplay.

  I was straining to read the back of the jacket, to see what songs were on the album, when I looked up into her eyes. There’s a line in The Maltese Falcon, where Hammett describes Brigid O’Shaughnessy’s eyes as “a cobalt prayer.” Suddenly that line was making sense to me.

  “If you’re that interested, go ahead and have a look,” she said. I couldn’t tell if she was serious, pissed off, or amused.

  “You like Little Richard?” I asked.

  “Who?”

  “Little Richard. You just bought his record.”

  She peered down into the bag. “So I did. I don’t know. Never heard of him. He looks weird.”

  “If you never heard of him, why did you buy it?”

  “I don’t listen to them.”

  “What do you do with them?”

  “Melt them.”

  My stomach lurched. “Melt them? Why?”

  That’s when she smiled and I surrendered. “To make sculptures.”

  I followed her out of the store, trying to explain that you didn’t melt records, because they were like books. They told stories in music. She was unmoved.

  “They’re cultural symbols,” she said. “I use them to make art.”

  “They’re already art.”

  That was the first thing I said that she really heard. She turned suddenly to look at me.

  “All right, then.” She gave me an appraising once-over. “You come listen to them with me. Then I’ll decide. I’m Amanda Petrie. What’s your name?”

  “Mac McLeod.”

  She lived in the neighborhood called South Shore. It was where all the doctors and dentists and attorneys and professors lived. The house was a contemporary, wood and glass, the front jutting out like the prow of a ship. Inside it was all angles and open spaces, soaring ceilings and weird hanging lights.

  “What does your father do?” I asked.

  “Not much. He’s dead.”

  I felt the blood rise up into my face.

  “What about your mother?”

  “She’s a doctor. A dermatologist. What about yours?”

  “My father’s dead, too. Suzanne works in a gallery.”

  “That’s your mother?” I nodded. “Why do you call her Suzanne?”

  “Because that’s her name.”

  She liked that answer.

  She got Cokes from the refrigerator and we went into a room she called the library and we started pulling LPs and 45s out of the shopping bags and putting them on her mother’s turntable. It was an expensive one, the kind that didn’t have a drop. You had to manually place the records on one at a time. She held them carefully at the edges, like she knew how. There were four huge speakers placed at appropriate angles in the corners of the room.

  After about an hour she said, “What does Mac stand for?”

  “McLeod.”

  She laughed. “What’s your first name, really?”

  “Matthew.”

  “Matthew’s a good name. You should use it.”

  “I like Mac better.”

  “Well, I go by Amanda. Don’t ever call me Mandy.” She made a little face. “It’s so dippy.”

  “I won’t.” I kept waiting for her to ask if I was Kevin McLeod’s brother. Everybody did eventually. She didn’t.

  Suddenly it was dark outside. I looked at my watch. “I guess I better go.”

  “Okay.” She seemed perfectly content to have me there, and just as content to see me off. There was an awkward silence while I tried to figure out how to ask if I could see her again.

  She was busy dividing the records into piles: keep or melt. I watched her, shifting my weight from one foot to the other. She picked up a stack of 45s and took them over to the desk under the window. She pulled a piece of paper off a memo cube, scribbled something on it, and handed it to me.

  “This what you’re waiting for?”

  I looked down at the phone number in my hand. “Yeah. That’s it.”

  “Okay, then.” She smiled at me again, and I walked all the way back to Grove Avenue without once feeling the ground under my feet.

  I wanted to spend time with her—lots of it—and while I didn’t think her enthusiasm was equal to mine, at least she didn’t seem to have any objections. More important, she didn’t appear to be interested in anyone else. She was the one girl I’d met who I could talk to about music. She didn’t always get what I was saying, and she didn’t always agree with my opinionated pronouncements, but she always listened, and she usually had something to say. We went to the teen dance clubs once or twice, but only if I knew the band. Even at that, we didn’t dance much. Especially not the fast ones, because I was about as coordinated as a frog in a blender. We went to see James Brown at an old theater in Brooklyn. We took the train to Manhattan and spent whole days in the Metropolitan Museum of Art or just roaming around Central Park and the Village.

  She liked to tell me about art, whichever artists intrigued her, whatever style or medium or school or period held her interest at the moment. She liked modern art and sidewalk art. She even liked graffiti.

  It was weeks later the first time I kissed her. After school, under the bleachers. Early spring, and it was so cold, I could hardly feel her mouth under mine. But just the idea of kissing Amanda was nearly enough to stop my heart.

  She put her arms around my waist and said against my chest so that it reverberated in my breastbone, “It’s about time, McLeod. I was starting to think you were gay.”

  We progressed fairly quickly after that—her mother was hardly ever home—from exquisitely painful make-out sessions in the library, after which I’d limp home, only to be greeted by Kevin’s smirk and his “Nice hard-on, Mattie,” to the day we finally ended up in her bedroom on top of the coverlet, completely naked.

  I’d never done it before, but I was horny to the point where technique was not my prime concern. And then she suddenly rolled away from me, breathing heavily. “We can’t,” she panted, and I thought I was going to die. “We can’t mess up my bedspread,” she finished.

  I started to laugh, and then she started to laugh. We got up and turned down the covers and then she fished in her nightstand drawer for a condom. I’d seen them, but I’d never used one before, and I was suddenly terrified that I was going to make a mistake here, on the doorstep of the rest of my life.

  I was pretty focused on my overwhelming need to do something about the ache between my legs and my simultaneous fear of looking like the virginal twerp that I was, so it didn’t occur to me that a girl who kept condoms in her nightstand would probably know how to use them. She graciously spared me the
embarrassment by putting it on for me.

  That summer Amanda went to Italy on some kind of exchange program to study painting. I turned my attention to the serious business of getting my driver’s license. I had my learner’s permit, but I would be sixteen in November, and I planned to cut school and go to the DMV that morning.

  So that summer Suzanne agreed to take me out every Saturday morning to practice. Kevin had his nose out of joint because he wouldn’t have the car, but for once, Suzanne held firm.

  “You can go wherever you need to go with one of your buddies, Kev. God knows you drive them all over creation. Or you can wait till after lunch when we get back. You’re going to be gone next year, don’t forget, and I can’t be chauffeuring Mattie around.”

  He tried not to be too obnoxious about it, because he was working on her to buy him a car to take to school.

  Those Saturday mornings in her old Dodge Charger—that was the only other time I recall having Suzanne all to myself, other than going to the city for my allergy shots when I was a kid. We never talked that much, just about things like right of way and using the high beams, but there was a certain level of comfort in it.

  I allowed myself to think that maybe when Kevin left for college, things might be different. I invented elaborate scenarios of me coming in late after soccer practice, her fixing my dinner and then leaning on the pass-through, asking me about my day. Or sitting next to me, smoking a cigarette, carefully blowing the smoke away from me, wondering how Amanda was, if I’d decided what to do about college, if I planned to work this summer.

  On a Saturday morning in August we’d gotten a later start than usual, and she really put me through my paces, even letting me drive on the expressway, out to Walton and back. We exited on Downey, near the high school, and when we were sitting at the light, she said, “Want an ice cream?”

  “Sure.”

  As if that weren’t enough of a departure from her normal behavior, she reached over and tousled my hair a little. I angled my head away from her hand, afraid somebody I knew would recognize the car and see us. I was embarrassed to be embarrassed, but she didn’t seem to notice.