Stones for Bread

by Parrish, Christa

  “Dad.”

  We are close, he and I. Not as tightly knit as we were when I was a child, but better than those teenaged years when I railed against his earnest and imperfect attempts at loving me, despite my hostility and the blame I placed on him for my mother’s death. We can get no closer, though, because she is always there, a placeholder for the past.

  “I have some news,” I say. “I’m going to be on TV.” I tell him about Bake-Off and ask him to come to the taping, on July seventeenth. Five weeks away.

  “I wouldn’t miss it for anything,” he says.

  I want him there. But when he comes, she’ll be with him, her ghost inflated between us.

  Cecelia’s Dark Chocolate Pain au Levain

  Makes one loaf

  LIESL’S NOTES :

  If you haven’t been able to culture your own wild yeast starter yet, there are many places selling it commercially online, or you may want to check with a local bakery.

  INGREDIENTS :

  400 grams (3 cups) unbleached white whole wheat flour, organic if possible

  65 grams (½ cup cocoa) powder

  200 grams (1 cup sourdough) starter commercial or homemade (see page 45)

  100 grams (½ cup) sugar

  250–300 grams (1¼ to ½ cups) water

  6 grams (1 teaspoons) salt

  50 grams (¼ cup) chocolate, 70% cocoa, chopped very fine

  60 grams (⅓ cup) dried cherries (optional)

  EQUIPMENT :

  2 mixing bowls

  wooden spoon

  stand mixer with dough hook (optional)

  olive oil or nonstick cooking spray

  plastic wrap

  parchment paper

  broiler pan

  pizza stone or baking tiles

  serrated knife or razor

  DO AHEAD

  Combine ingredients, except chopped chocolate, in a large mixing bowl. Use a large wooden spoon and stir for 1 minute, until well blended; the dough should form a coarse, shaggy ball.

  Add chopped chocolate (and dried cherries, if using them). If using an electric stand mixer, switch to the dough hook and mix on medium-low speed for 2 minutes. The dough should stick to the bottom of the bowl but not to the sides. Or knead by hand for about 2 minutes, adjusting with flour or water as needed. The dough should be smooth and soft but not sticky.

  Use olive oil to lightly coat the inside of a clean bowl. Transfer the dough to this bowl, cover with plastic wrap, and let stand 8 to 10 hours at room temperature (overnight works best).

  ON BAKING DAY

  Gently transfer the dough to a lightly floured work surface, taking care to degas it as little as possible. To form a boule, hold the dough in your hands and sprinkle with more flour so it doesn’t stick to your hands. Stretch the surface of the dough around to the bottom on all four sides, rotating it as you go. When it’s correctly shaped, the ball will be smooth and cohesive. This should take less than a minute to accomplish. Rest dough on a sheet of parchment paper and proof at room temperature for about 3 hours, until double its original size.

  About 45 minutes before baking, preheat the oven to 550 degrees Fahrenheit or as high as it will go. On the lower shelf, put the empty broiler pan. Position the pizza stone on the shelf above.

  Just prior to baking, score the dough ½ inch deep with a serrated knife or razor. Transfer the dough to the oven, pour 1 cup of hot water into the steam pan, then lower the oven temperature to 450 degrees Fahrenheit.

  Bake for 25 to 35 minutes, until the loaf sounds hollow when thumped and the internal temperature is about 200 degrees Fahrenheit in the center. For a crisper crust, turn off the oven and leave the bread in for another 5 minutes before removing.

  Tee doesn’t show up for work the next day. I call the number on her employment forms and a woman answers. Her landlord. She tells me Tee is out of town for a family emergency, something about her sister’s unexpected death yesterday morning.

  I reheat the solyanka, and in yellow chalk Gretchen writes Hearty Sausage Dill under Soups on the menu board. It sells out before the lunch crowd finishes.

  Six

  Madness is a sugar cube dissolving in warm water. The sharp edges melt away first, then the white brick shrinks until nothing is left but a few crystals and fog. Eventually the water clears too, and looking at two glasses—one sweetened, one not—no difference is detectable. But the sugar is there, invisible, permeating everything, even though the sturdy, solid cube is long gone.

  I never see a sugar cube dissolve like this, not then. Not yet. All mine disappear into murky cups of tea, doubly hidden by a blanket of cream. I think if I had, I would recognize it better—my mother rounding off, melting away, clouding over.

  By the clearing, it’s too late.

  It takes a year for her to disintegrate. The sticky sadness only tightens around her, even with the pills, when she takes them. More than once, late at night when he thinks I’m asleep, I watch through the old-fashioned keyhole my father trying to wrestle the lithium into her mouth, one wiry arm restraining her, the other curling around her head to push the capsule through her lips. She doesn’t want it, insists she’s fine without it, says it makes her too tired and too slow and too fat. But she’s tired and slow without it. I come home from school and she’s asleep on the couch, all the shades pulled low. Or she’s in the bathroom, in the dark. Or the bedroom closet.

  My father stops reassuring me.

  There’s no one left to hold us together. My father, too worried and absentminded. He forgets to pay the bills—her job—and more than once I pick up the phone only to find it disconnected. He buys odd food at the grocery, jars of beets and frozen corn dogs and peanut butter. He doesn’t remember things like Q-tips or conditioner, and my hair snarls so badly I cut it off with my craft scissors, to my chin first, then my ears because I can’t get it even. I try to cook us supper using the ingredients in the pantry and fridge, cutting up chunks of salami and mixing it with the beets, serving it over still-crunchy elbow macaroni. Sandwiches are easier, but anytime my father buys a loaf of packaged bread, we find it in the garbage can the next morning, unwrapped, each slice mauled to crumbs. Even when he hides it in the Crock-Pot at the top of the linen closet.

  So we have no more bread in our home. Until one day I walk through the door and the entire kitchen is bread. Not like when Oma died. This is chaos. Deformed boules tumbling into the sink. Burnt loaves are stacked four and five high, shaky ziggurats beckoning the untidy gods of imprecision. My mother kneads with frenzy, sprinkling this and pinching that, rolling great blobs of dough through her hands. Help me, Liesl. There’s so much to do.

  For what?

  The party.

  What party?

  Why, the one I want to have. She laughs, loose and jangly and unconcerned. I’m frightened, because my mother’s entire world spins with concern. Everything is well cared for, everyone holds value to her. She is loving-kindness.

  This is madness.

  Maybe we should call Dad, I say.

  She slams the dough onto the counter. Spielverderber. Both of you, she hisses. Then she sweeps the car keys into her hand. You’re a teenager now. You can stay home alone.

  She leaves me. I’m not yet twelve, my birthday seven weeks away.

  Jude is Xavier in miniature. Narrow in the shoulders, tattered shorts cinched bag-like on his hips, thin-limbed and graceful. His features are finer but positioned the same, his mannerisms nearly identical. Jude has hair, though, a shocking mess of bright blue, and a silver ring at each corner of his bottom lip. And glasses, thick black plastic frames. He wears Adidas flip-flops and a white sleeveless undershirt every day.

  I expect a sullen, resentful teenager. What seventeen-year-old wants out of bed at three in the morning? But he works hard, and Zave is right—those hands. He has the fingers of a sculptor, twisting bread in ways I only see in glossy, oversized books on artisan baking. The designs he cuts into the crusts—birds and vines and abstract swirls—make my stick
-figure-drawing self bubble with envy.

  “Where did you learn to do that?” I ask him. “It’s just . . . wow.”

  Jude shrugs. “Tenth-grade ceramics studio, I guess.”

  “Zave, can’t we get some sort of, I don’t know, coating or sealer or something to put on these and preserve them? I’ve seen other bakeries do it.”

  “Don’t bother,” Jude says. “There’ll be more tomorrow.”

  “Well, maybe you should go up against Jonathan Scott.”

  He shakes his head. “It’s all just window dressing.” And he goes out the back door, down the street to the shiny blue public bench—nearly the same color as his hair—and smokes two cigarettes. I watch him puff and blow, stubbing out the butts on the sidewalk, sometimes tossing them in the trash, other times flicking them into the gutter. I think about tobacco residue slipping from the oil on his fingertips into the dough, but say nothing and charge nearly five dollars more for his designer loaves. They sell out before noon.

  Patrice Olsen has made certain every possible publicity outlet in a hundred-mile radius knows about Wild Rise and Bake-Off. All four local television news affiliates run stories, poking their cameras in patrons’ faces and taking some footage of Gretchen and me preparing dough. They promise to return for the contest, now less than two weeks away. The one daily and two weekly papers feature articles, as do the two big city newspapers. All the coverage increases business. We make thirty more loaves a day, closing most afternoons with no more than five left over. When Tee complains she needs more help too, Xavier volunteers Jude. She leaves him notes about what to prep each morning before she arrives; he chops carrots and marinates chicken and dices onions into tiny slivers while wiping the tears away. Tee dotes on him much the way she does with Cecelia, making him thick Panini sandwiches for lunch dripping with provolone and bacon. “You need to get fatter,” she says, bringing him desserts too, made at home the night before, perekladanets and fruktovykh ta horik-hovykh shtrudel. Or sometimes plain old chocolate chip cookies, big as saucers. Xavier delights in breaking off small pieces of the sweets and popping them in his mouth while she watches. She thumps him with every sort of utensil, across the knuckles or on the top of the head. “Only for the boy. None for the pigs.”

  Tee returned to work three days after the death of her sister without apology or explanation, though her landlady must have told her I phoned. She worked silently and efficiently, eyes downturned, taping to the cooler a list of ingredients she needed for the next day. We all let her be, even Xavier, until he decided she’d been sullen long enough. He took her favorite spatula, greased it with raspberry jam, and planted it, handle down, in a loaf of bread. “So it waves to her when she come in,” he said.

  “Zave—”

  “Trust me, my dear girl. She needs this.”

  When she saw the spatula, she shimmied it from the loaf and scoured it clean, saying nothing. She’s crushed, I thought. Under the weight of loss. Twenty minutes later Xavier couldn’t find his lame. He searched under towels, in aprons, in the cooler, even checking the bread baskets and the oven. The beginnings of a smirk whet Tee’s lips. We all noticed. “Tatiana, darling, you wouldn’t happen to have seen my razor, have you?” Xavier asked.

  “I believe, yes,” she said. “But my memory runs away from me. I think I forget.”

  He scored the dough with a serrated knife instead of giving her the satisfaction of borrowing mine. The next day he brought a half dozen, hiding them various places, even duct taping one beneath the worktable. He found the missing one several days later, submerged in the jar of raspberry jam.

  Tee was back.

  I, however, want to disappear.

  No one talks to me about the show. They tried to ask a question now and then, but each time were met with a caustic, short answer or an “I’m not talking about it.” Patrice Olsen sends e-mails almost every day. I read half of them, maybe, and respond to less. Others remain unopened, glaring at me in their bold print. I forward them to Xavier. Some he takes care of on his own. The ones requiring my attention he boots back to me. I don’t look at them.

  Finally, Xavier shows up at Wild Rise as I’m finishing for the evening.

  “We need to talk,” he says. “That Olsen woman and her crew will be here in four days.”

  “What? The show isn’t supposed to shoot until next Saturday.”

  “If you had read your mail, you would have learned the crew comes early for preproduction work.”

  “I can’t do this, Zave.”

  “Too late for that, my friend.”

  I press my fingertips against my closed eyes until it hurts and then blow a slow, flat stream of air from my nose, willing my body to deflate, to go limp and empty and slide off the wooden stool, slipping under the table where Xavier, if he’s kind, can roll me up and store me in some closet until the show passes. I avoid, like my father, plugging my ears and closing my eyes, singing, “Nana-nana-nana, I can’t hear you,” when facing something with which I don’t want to deal. Returning a confrontational phone call. Balancing the business checkbook when I haven’t looked at it in months. And lately, Seamus. Eventually, though, I force myself to face things, usually the day of the deadline or sometime within the grace period. Today is eventually for Bake-Off.

  Another deep breath. A thumbprint of warmth blooms in the cavern beneath my breastbone, a penny on the sidewalk in the sun. The Comforter. The sensation fills my chest and dribbles down my limbs, and a perfect peace comes over me for a moment. The guilt comes seconds later. I think of how few times I’ve been to church this year, about the dusty spiritual disciplines book on top of the toilet tank, my sporadic bursts of two-second prayer only when I need something. I don’t deserve comfort. And yet he gives it to me anyway, warmer and deeper, clearing out my shame until I can raise my head and say, “Okay, what do I need to know?”

  “You’ll bake for two challenges—”

  “Two? What do you mean, two?”

  “Yes, two. The first is a basic baguette—”

  “Baguette?”

  “—your choice of recipe. The second is a secret ingredient challenge—”

  “Are you joking? What ingredient?”

  “You won’t find out until the day of the competition. Hence, secret. And if you don’t stop repeating what I say in questions, I’m going to let you read all your messages and handle this on your own.”

  “Sorry.”

  “The competition will last seven hours, beginning at nine in the morning. You’ll have to close that day, obviously. You can have the dough prepared ahead of time and allow for the final rises on Saturday.”

  “We’re baking here?”

  Xavier nodded. “But they’re doing the tasting and judging in Centennial Park, since they’re expecting a crowd.”

  “And please shock me. Who’s judging? The mayor? Betty the crazy cat lady down the street?”

  “Seriously, Liesl. At least try to enjoy this a little. And give them some credit. They’re getting one of the bakers from King Arthur’s to come. And that chef who lives not far from here. Marianna Dutton? She has a couple shows on Good Food.”

  “And about a hundred cookbooks, lines of cookware, gadgets, and her own magazine.”

  “So, you’re impressed?”

  I bite my lip. “I suppose.”

  “Good,” he says.

  The Hebrews come into the bread eaters’ land with no bread of their own. It’s famine, and Jacob’s sons travel to Egypt in hopes of finding something to save their families. They find not only grain but forgiveness. Joseph is there, whom God takes from them so he can later deliver them. They find a new home. And they, too, find the miracle of yeast.

  Surely the descendants of Abraham bake their grains, mixing flour and oil and kneading it to dough. But this is uggah—a flat cake baked on hot stones or in the ashes, the same given to the Lord by Abraham when he visits and pronounces Isaac’s birth. Nomads have no time for fermentation, for waiting for dough to ripen. The
y have enough to carry from place to place. And they have no ovens, probably have never conceived of such a thing. Again, too heavy to move.

  So what must it have been like for them to see these risen loaves come from strange Egyptian baking containers? It becomes part of them, the first thing they cry out for in the wilderness, not any bread but that of those who enslaved them. The Hebrews have freedom. Instead, they want food, their bellies filled with the earthly comfort they know. And God, the heavenly Comforter, sends bread of a different kind.

  What is it?

  They call it manna. And it’s given to the wandering children of Israel, but not only for them. For us. For all who brush away the veil and will one day lay eyes on the true manna, a child they do not yet know will be born in Bethlehem, the house of bread.

  Seamus and Cecelia come for Saturday brunch, she in a yellow sundress with one strap stubbornly falling from her shoulder, he with his summer beard, not much more than stubble on his cheeks and a pom-pom of bristles hugging his chin. They’ve been regulars since May, since school ended. She orders the same thing each time, a cinnamon roll and hot cocoa, no matter how warm it is outside. He gets an off-menu sandwich; Tee gladly serves up anything he imagines, and I shake my head at his bizarre requests. This week it’s scrambled eggs, sautéed green bell peppers, and grape jelly on toasted rye.

  My poor bread.

  We all miss Cecelia’s presence at Wild Rise. She spends only one afternoon with us now during the week, and sometimes not that. The other day she said to Gretchen, “Daddy doesn’t like to in-pose on Liesl,” and then clamped both hands over her mouth as if a great secret accidentally snuck out. Gretchen promised she wouldn’t tell, but I overheard and knew I’d caused Seamus’s unease by my curt attitude toward him the past month. I haven’t been ignoring him, but close enough to it not to matter what my real intentions are.

  Tee slides Seamus’s plate onto the counter beside her. “You take to him.”