I wriggle quietly through the door as the message ends. Several weekday customers gesture, so I weave through the tables and make small talk with them and others. “Liesl. Liesl,” a small voice calls, and I look around until I see a bobbing blond girl at the back, waving her arm in the air.
Cecelia.
She sits next to her father, that sloppy lug of a truck driver. What was his name? Something odd and Irish, I think. Ryan stands behind them; he motions to me too.
“Liesl, I take it you’ve already met Seamus Tate and his daughter, Cecelia?”
“I have, yes.”
“The Tates moved here not too long ago and have been attending Green Mountain Community for the past month,” Ryan says. He notices a young family making their way to the front door. “Excuse me, would you?”
Seamus takes a quiet bite from the corner of his sandwich. Cecelia plucks a purple grape from the fruit salad and begins tearing the skin from it. “Do you like green grapes or purple ones better, Liesl?”
“Green, I think. Are you peeling that?”
“I don’t like the skin. And once it’s off, it feels like an eyeball.”
“Oh. Have you felt many eyeballs?”
“No, but once in preschool there was a Halloween party and we had to stick our hands into boxes but we couldn’t see what we were touching. One box was s’posed to be eyeballs, but they were just grapes without the skin on. I peeked.”
“Oh.”
Cecelia stood up on the chair then, tall enough to whisper loudly at the side of my face, “Daddy doesn’t like Halloween and we don’t go trick-or-treating, but he let me go to the party anyway.”
“Honey, sit. And stop talking Liesl’s ear off,” Seamus says. He looks at her, not me.
“Sorry.” She jumps to the floor. “What are you doing today? Do you have to bake more bread?”
“Not today,” I tell the girl. “But later I’ll prepare some dough.”
“How much later?”
I shrug. “Probably close to your bedtime.”
“Oh, good,” she says, clapping twice. “Then you can come with us.”
Seamus glances up now. A crumb clings to his beard. Not my bread. The packaged kind used by whoever made the sandwiches. “Cecelia, don’t bother Liesl. I’m sure she’s plenty busy today.”
“Oh, please, please, let her go. Please, Liesl.”
“Um, go where?”
“To the farm. For the fiber tour.”
“The what?”
“It’s this thing where people involved in the artisan fiber industry open their farms and businesses to the public to learn more about it,” Seamus says. “I’m sure it wouldn’t interest you. I’m sorry for Cecelia’s exuberance.”
“She’d like it, Daddy. We get to pet sheep and see alpacas and sometimes there’s cotton candy too. If she wants to go, can she? Please, please, please?”
He narrowed his eyes at the girl in that way parents do when their children force them into an awkward corner and they can’t escape without either looking like a fool or breaking their little ones’ hearts. As soon as the expression comes, however, it softens. He itches his beard and the crumb falls away. “Of course she can. If she wants to, she can.”
Cecelia turns her face to me. It shines with hopefulness, and that part of me that I don’t want to exist, the one that needs people, the one that comes awake on these Sundays, drinks in her light. And it says to me, More.
“Sure,” I say. “Why not?”
Yeast. The word comes to us through Old English, from the Indo-European root yes—meaning boil, foam, bubble. It does all those things, and more. And would it not be the Egyptians, who construct the largest, most sophisticated buildings in the land, to also harness the tiniest microbe?
Of course, they know nothing of yeast. To them, it is magic.
They are called the bread eaters. “Dough they knead with their feet, but clay with their hands,” Herodotus wrote with derision. The Egyptians do not care. They understand their bread is from the gods, for king and peasant alike. They invent ovens to bake this new, breath-filled dough because it cannot be cooked like the flat breads they know first. They construct clay vessels to hold it. They watch it rise in the heat. They add butter and eggs and honey and coriander, and save soured dough from one batch to add to the next. They eat.
They live.
It becomes a symbol of morality; a beggar is never to be denied bread. It becomes the cornerstone of their society, their currency. The poor are paid three loaves a day, the temple priests nine hundred fine wheat breads a year. Pharaohs have an abundance for this life and the next.
But the ancient bakers are not only magicians. They are artists, creating shapes limited only by imagination. Spirals and cones and shells. Fish and birds and pyramids. Does each shape have significance, each flavor its own power? Perhaps. Or perhaps even the ancients created only to create, celebrating beauty for beauty’s sake.
And what is lovelier than warm bread?
Seamus insists on taking his truck, so I struggle into the front seat after Cecelia. She wriggles into the center, sticks her hand deep into the cushion to fish out the belt. “Here’s one. And here’s two,” she says, metal fasteners clanging. She clicks the seat belt into place and pulls the end.
“Not tight enough,” Seamus says. He gives the strap another tug.
“I can’t breathe.”
“Any looser and you’ll slip out.”
She squirms and tugs at her waist. “Daddy.”
“Okay, okay,” he says, “just a little.” He unlatches the belt, pretends to lengthen it, and buckles her in again. “Better?”
She fills her belly with a deep gulp of air. Exhales. Nods. “Much.”
Seamus meets my eye, the thinnest smile at one corner of his mouth. He starts the truck; it wheezes like an old man, emphysema in the exhaust. Cecelia drapes her legs on my side of the gearshift; they don’t stop moving, her sandaled feet constantly scraping up against my leg. Dirt smudges my pants. I try not to reach down and rub it away.
They’re my favorite pair.
The truck rattles around us. Conversing is an effort, the words vibrating into pieces difficult to hear. Seamus and I try to exchange a few polite sentences, but after a few minutes we fall into a concentrated silence—him staring out the windshield, me counting trees on the side of the road. Cecelia talks enough for all of us, about anything and everything. Kindergarten. Her rabbit she gave away when they moved from Massachusetts. All the things she wants to do this summer. And then, her mother.
“She left us.” Her legs jiggle faster.
Seamus tightens his grip on the shifter, skin thinning over his knuckles until I worry the bones will burst through.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“Daddy says she doesn’t know how to love us ’cause she never learned it.” The girl’s cheeks tremble. “I didn’t know loving was something you hafta get taught.”
“My mother died when I was young,” I tell her. “It still hurts not to have her around.”
“Did she love you and your dad?”
“Very much.”
Cecelia chews the end of her ponytail. She pokes the buttons on the cassette player without turning the radio on. Fiddles with the tuning knob and opens the vents, blowing her bangs back with stale, barely cool air. “Have you been married before? I know you’re not now.”
“Oh really?” I give her a little pinch in the side. She giggles. “How, may I ask, do you know that?”
“Because you don’t have a ring on. Daddy says you always hafta look for the ring.”
“Okay,” Seamus says, his fleshy ears glowing pink. “We don’t have to tell Liesl all our secrets at once.”
We turn, and turn, and turn again, each time my elbow banging against the metal door, on farm roads now where the pavement has been all but driven away. The truck bounces us through ruts and potholes, churning loose stone up beneath it.
Cecelia continues her chattering, now about
the small garden she planted all by herself, stressing those words. All. By. My. Self. She has snap peas and two bean bushes, a couple of cucumber vines, and one tomato plant. Leaning close to me, she holds her hand up to her mouth and whispers, “I didn’t grow the tomato from a seed. Daddy bought it for me from the market. Does that still count?”
“Absolutely.”
“Okay, everybody,” Seamus says, coming to a stop on the shoulder, a steep embankment on my side of the truck. “You might want to get out over here.”
“I’m good,” I say, pushing open the door. It swings wide, handle out of reach, so I cling to the seat belt and lower myself into the tangle of grass below. Cecelia scrambles out backward on her father’s side and he catches her. With them out of sight, I take a moment to brush at the scuff mark on my pants. It doesn’t come off.
Outside the cab of the truck, silence grows over Cecelia, thick as ivy on the walls of a manor house, and she melts into her father’s thick body, behind it the stone wall surrounding the home. The sparkling, talkative girl from the previous hour is gone, replaced with this nearly invisible one.
We wander around the farm for a little while. Cecelia feeds the goats, cranking quarters into the red machines and catching handfuls of pellets for the billies to nibble from her fingers. Then we move on to the sheep, who seem bored with all the attention they’re receiving, the petting and baby talk animals inevitably bring. They chew and stare in calm, ordered lines against the fence. “Aren’t you a pretty girl? Yes, you are. So pretty,” coos the woman next to me.
“Gross,” a boy with her says. He’s about twelve. “They smell like sh—”
“Gregory.” The mother grabs the skin of his upper arm and twists. “Watch your mouth.”
The boy pulls away. “Ow, geez, Mom. Don’t be so psycho.”
Quietly, Cecelia lifts her hand from the ewe’s back and creeps it up toward her face. Wrinkles her nose. Her father pumps liquid sanitizer into her palm. She rubs and then flaps her hands in the air.
“What next, pumpkin?” Seamus asks. “Thirsty?”
“Not yet.”
We pass a gray-haired woman at a spinning wheel. Its compact style and blond wood look nothing like the wheel next to it, one of those tall, thin antique ones. The woman pumps both feet against the pedals and smiles at Cecelia. “Want to try?”
She shakes her head.
“How about you?”
“Me? I don’t think so,” I say.
“Yes, Liesl, you try,” Cecelia says.
It did look soothing, the subtle swaying motion of the woman’s head, the rhythmic up-and-down of her naked feet against cool wood. I think of the home I grew up in, the sheen of pine and oak and maple all around us because my mother loved it so much.
“Okay. Sure.”
I sit. The woman points at the wheel and throws out terms—maiden, flyer, staple length, double treadle—then gives me the wad of gray wool. It’s coarser than I expect, slightly greasy. My hands rebel at the unfamiliar texture, fingers curling too tightly into it. I push my chest forward, arching my back, settling my tailbone into the stool. “Now,” she says, “you want to stretch and feed the roving onto the bobbin in one smooth motion.” She turns the wheel manually; my feet move with the treadle, and I try to draft the wool but I only understand dough. My hands are too clumsy for spinning. The yarn is so fat in some places it won’t fit through the eye, so thin in other places it simply falls away like cotton candy. “You need to breathe,” the woman instructs. “And be gentle. Don’t strangle the fiber.”
Cecelia is giggling behind her hair, which she’s wrapped over her mouth. “You’re making faces, Liesl. Like this.” She shakes her ponytail away and crosses her eyes, brows and nose scrunching together. Even Seamus tries not to laugh.
I hold on to the roving too long and it spirals around itself until it snaps.
“That’s it. I give up.”
“It takes practice,” the woman says, “sometimes.”
“I think Daddy should try,” Cecelia says.
“That’s a great idea,” I say. “Let’s see how you do, Mr. Delivery Man.”
My words hurt him. His shoulder twitches and he slides his eyes away from mine. But he nods and says, “Sure,” and waits for me to stand. Then he takes my place, his booted feet as large as the treadles. The woman stutters a few words of warning, clearly worried this bull of a man will crush her precious wheel.
Gently, he begins spinning. One perfectly drafted ply of yarn twists from his giant hands, as if he is Arachne’s son, human or spider it doesn’t matter, it comes away from him lovelier than even the demonstrator herself can make.
“You’ve done this before,” the woman says.
“A few times.” Seamus unseats himself, pulling the legs of the stool out from the ground, having sunk under his weight.
Cecelia, so pleased her father has surprised his audience, wraps her arms around his waist and hugs her face into his stomach. He presses her head deeper into him.
“Did you know he could do that?” I ask her.
Her eyes crinkle in impish delight. “Uh-huh.”
“Okay, missy, I see how you are.”
She simply laughs, her shyness freed a little in the shared victory with her father. “Can I feed the goats again?” Seamus fishes a handful of quarters from his pocket and she takes them, palms cupped together, before walking down the dirt path toward the animal enclosure.
I look at him. “Well.”
“Sorry,” he says, and he smiles so I know he’s beyond his annoyance. “But you were asking for it, kind of.”
“I suppose I was.”
He motions toward Cecelia, who keeps glancing back at us. “We should head down there. She’s getting better, but she’s still worried she’ll lose me.”
We walk, and Seamus waves at the girl. She waves back and plunks another coin into the machine. Even from here, I can see more feed falls to the weeds below than into her hand. I find an elastic hair band in one of the cargo pockets of my pants and gather my hair into it; it feels dry, tangled from the farm dust and the wind.
“So, you’re not going to tell me?” I say finally.
“You mean the spinning? It’s no big deal. My parents were hippies in the seventies and eighties. We lived on a commune with a bunch of other back-to-self-sufficiency types and one of the men taught me.”
“Were hippies? I take it they’re not anymore.”
Seamus buzzes his lips in amusement. “Heck no. My folks divorced right after I graduated high school. Dad left my mother for some actress-slash-model-slash-waitress and went to LA. I hear from him once a year at Christmas. I stayed in New England, bumped around for college and work. Mom moved just outside Nashville and opened a dog grooming parlor. She lives in a condo and votes Republican now. Whoever would’ve thunk it.”
“People change.”
“That they do.”
Sometimes right in front of your eyes.
We meet Cecelia and she says, “Someone gave me a bag to use,” holding up a small Ziploc she’s filled with pellets. “Take some too, Liesl.”
I do, offering the mound to the goat on its back legs right there next to me. I feel its tongue, rough and slick. But my eyes are on Seamus, kneeling behind his daughter, their heads so close they’re touching as he holds his hand beneath hers to catch any wayward feed. She pulls her arm back as soon as she’s nuzzled, wiping the saliva on her shorts. He kisses her cheek, and she wipes it away before patting his unruly beard. Their silent ritual. Seamus raises his equally wild brows and then tilts his chin into her neck, rubbing it back and forth as she laughs with her entire six-year-old body. And the goat at the fence continues to lick between my fingers, cleaning away every crumb of the old Seamus, the inconsiderate, sloppy, truck-driving oaf who tracked dirt through my bakehouse, leaving only the Seamus who spins wool better than Athena herself and who loves his little girl with abandon.
Four
I’m older, ten, old enough to sense
sadness the way only a woman can, though it takes me longer than one who has been through all the things yet to come to me—cramps and discharge, nine months of swelling, birth, forever good-byes, the casual, careless words of a lover slicing all the way through to tendon. My intuition isn’t sharp yet. That sensitivity comes with years, sprouting like the first tiny hairs under a young girl’s arms, the ones she only notices when some boy teases her about it while she dangles from a tree branch, and immediately she knows she’s passed into some new realm.
The kingdom of Womanhood.
It’s in the air when I walk in, but before I notice it, I see the bread. It covers the counters, the top of the refrigerator, the table. My mother stands in the center of the floor, facing me. I open my mouth to make a joke, something clever about exploding loaves, but the smell of mourning overpowers the crustiness in the air and I stop. What’s wrong?
Your grandmother is dead.
I’ve never heard my mother speak in this tone. It’s utterly flat, like paper, and so blank I almost miss it as the words float past me. The corner of the hard d hooks my ear, though, and the rest of the sentence stops with it as my brain does the deciphering, winding each letter in.
I snap.
I grab one loaf after another from the counter and smash them against the floor, grind them beneath my feet. No, I scream, and the words are not flat or blank. They blaze with a pain I have never experienced before.
My mother takes me against her. I still hold a boule, and as she squeezes me I dig my fingers into the soft bread and imagine it’s my own face I’m tearing apart. No, no, no, I repeat until the bread disintegrates between us and my voice runs out. Mother finally unwraps me and wipes my face with her apron. I drop the remaining loaf, my body swaying with weakness as my emotions drain away.
She leaves the room, only for a moment, and I hear the closet in the hallway open, shut. She returns with the broom and dustpan. I reach for her, but my hand closes around the broom handle and I accept that instead, lean into it, and it holds my body upright.
It’s grief, my mother says. All of it.
Stones for Bread Page 4
