Janska finishes my manicure and asks to see my closet. “I’m wardrobe too. Did you have any thoughts about what you wanted to wear Saturday?”
I shrug, gesture to the clothes I have on now, linen-look drawstring shorts and a sleeveless blouse. “I don’t know. Something like this?”
“Do you have anything more . . . fun?”
“No.”
“Let’s take a look anyway.”
She opens the bedroom closet and stares at the few things I own. “What about this?” she asks, removing a gauzy tunic-style shirt with a bold, violet geometric design tumbling over it. “The tag is still on.”
“I bought it on clearance a couple years ago, but every time I put it on I just feel too . . . I don’t know. Too purple, maybe?”
“It’s perfect for the camera. With these.” She takes a pair of dark capri jeans, cuffed beneath the knee, off the hanger. They are hand-me-downs from Gretchen. “Great. That was simple.”
León beckons me back to the kitchen, to the waiting chair at the sink, where he removes the foil from my hair, rinses it, and buffs it until damp. Then I’m coated with a plastic cape and he cuts a part in the middle of my head and combs my hair straight against my cheeks. Seaweed, I think, reminded of my time at the ocean as a child.
“What do you think of bangs?” León asks, twisting chunks of hair into alligator-mouthed clips.
“I haven’t had them since I was ten.”
“They’re making a comeback. On you, anyway. You have too much forehead without them.”
My cheeks burn. “Oh.”
“I’ll keep enough length for you to be able to pull it up out of your face still.”
“How much are you taking off?”
“To the shoulders. A smidge more.”
“That’s how long it is already.”
“Oh my. Janska, we pegged her right. She doesn’t look in the mirror.”
He begins to snip. I close my eyes and listen. I rarely use the mirror for more than making sure my hair isn’t too lumpy when I tie it into a ponytail. I brush it through in the shower to save time. The lighting in the bathroom is so poor, I can’t see much anyway. Sometimes I lean close to tweeze a stubborn prickle of hair from my chin, or to pinch away the blackheads from my nose when they become large and dark and tempting. Otherwise, I’m grab-and-go. And if I leave my hair down, as I do occasionally on winter Sundays when my neck is too cold and I don’t want to wear a scarf around the apartment, I still fasten back the front and sides in a single tiger-striped Goody barrette at the horizon of my skull, that place where the top begins curving into the back, the same way I’ve done since junior high.
León shoots a puff of mousse into his palm and rakes it through my freshly sheared hair. Then the blow dryer; he brushes and tousles and finally finishes. “Peek-a-boo now or after Janska has her way with you?”
“Now,” I say, at the same time Janska says, “After.”
She opens her bag, black with trays of shadow and gloss, and rummages until she finds tweezers. I know she’ll attack my eyebrows, but the pop of each filament releasing from my skin is oddly comforting. Then she shakes my cosmetics pouch. “It was on the bathroom counter.”
“I wear makeup. Sometimes.”
She unzips the cracked plastic bag, given to me as a teen by someone at the church my father attended for a while, a white elephant gift at a ladies’ Christmas tea. Shakes the contents onto the table. “You’re better off without it,” she says, and sweeps it all into the trash can.
“Wait—”
“Your mascaras are expired and none of those are even remotely good colors for you. I’ll replace.”
Janska winds paintbrushes in her hair, knowing the position of each particular size and plucking them out as needed. She explains to me each step, though I won’t remember, lightly dusting my skin with mineral powder, highlighting my eyes at the corners and the brows, adding color to the top lids and liner to the bottom. “Focus on your eyes. They’re small but amazingly vivid. Making them seem larger is easy.” My lashes are thickened. My lips are glazed. She tells me to smile big and finishes with a few strokes of blush. “There. Go peek in the mirror.”
I do. And I look beautiful.
I shake my head, my hair airy and layered around my face. I’m not used to it against my skin, but I resist the urge to tuck it behind my ears. The makeup reminds me of those five-minute miracle routines boasted in every issue of Cosmopolitan or Woman’s Day, the ones I tried but always failed to make look anything like the glossy, airbrushed photo. I don’t want to be so pleased. I’ve always considered myself above such nonsense, the idea that denim or hair or lipstick can—or should—make someone feel better about herself.
I can’t help it.
“So, what do you think?” Janska asks when I return to the living room. Both she and León are packed and ready to move on.
“It’s nice. Thank you.”
“Nice?” León clutches his chest. “I am wounded. But never fear. León always survives. It’s what all artists must do. Now,” he says, holding up his cell phone, “Miss Patty-Cakes is gonna want some evidence of your transformation.”
“You don’t call her that to her face, do you?”
“Seriously, girl? You think I have a death wish? Patrice Olsen may look like she’s off to the PTA bake sale, but she’s one sly cupcake, that one. Smile pretty for the birdies.”
My mouth twists and I blink with the flash. León sighs and snaps one more photo. “Good enough.”
I thank them again and show them the door, then resist the urge to run back to the bathroom and stare in the mirror again. I’m thirsty, but don’t want to smudge my lips. After five dry minutes, I go downstairs to the kitchen. Everyone stops and stares.
“Liesl,” Gretchen says. “Holy cr—”
“You look lovely.” Xavier.
“What are you doing here?” I ask. It’s twenty minutes until six.
“I called him and Jude ’cause I didn’t know when you’d be done,” Gretchen says. She still looks stunned.
“Oh, thanks. I can take over from here.”
“We’re nearly finished,” Xavier says. “Let us do it. You, I believe, have plenty of other things needing your attention at the moment.”
I nod. “Okay.”
My plan is to skim through the binder Patrice gave me and perhaps sort the e-mails previously sent. But once in the apartment again, I’m too airy to read. Or sit. Can split ends weigh a person down so much? Foolishness, I know. Suddenly I want to be outside. I want—heaven forbid—to be seen. I check my face again and add a little more lip color; Janska gorged my plastic pouch with samples. Then, with only the leanest pause, I slip into my only dress, a little black knee-length thing I bought for a wedding when I lived in the city. Baby-doll style with a rounded neckline, the kind that can be dressed up with rhinestones and shiny shoes. Or dressed down, like I do now, with a single silver bangle and turquoise flip-flops.
I leave the building, turning away from the window of Wild Rise, and go quickly down another street, in the opposite direction either Xavier or Gretchen travels home. I walk toward the park, where families feed the ducks after supper and eat ice-cream cones and young couples twist around themselves on blankets under the trees. I walk, and feel eyes on me. My shoulders straighten; usually I hunch into myself, disappearing into my bland, midsized clothing. I make eye contact, smiling at the young mothers wrangling their toddlers, nodding and responding, “Yes, it is,” to the hunched, wrinkled couple walking arm in arm, the husband saying, “Beautiful night, isn’t it?” as I pass. I engage the community around me, something I reserve almost completely for within the four walls of the bakery. I feel, for a few minutes, a part of something outside me. As if I can belong somewhere, can root myself without having my hands trapped in dough to keep me from drifting away.
I am more beautiful than all my pieces allow—ankles and elbows powdered with dry skin, bony shins, knees turned in, bread-puckered thighs ne
atly hidden beneath my dress, no breasts to speak of, lips stretching to invisible when I smile. And stirring within is that distinctly feminine tickle, an awakening, an acceptance of how I’m made.
I want Seamus to see me this way.
Some evenings he goes to this park with Cecelia. I sit on a stone bench by the fountain so I don’t look lost and scan the area for them. Of course they are not here. I stay a few more minutes, hoping with a kind of hope more like prayer they will appear. I don’t pray it, though. For all my religious shortcomings, I do take faith more seriously than lamp rubbing for God-the-Magic-Genie to come grant my three foolish wishes.
They don’t show up.
I can drive there, to their home, invite them out to a movie, or a milk shake at Friendly’s, or simply tell them I missed them.
Him. I miss him.
I won’t go. All the hair dye in León’s enchanted suitcase can’t hide my true color, that of a woman who chooses bread over all else, who refuses to allow people too close. I walk home, the dress and mascara and admiring glances losing most of their luster, and instead of preparing for Bake-Off, I eat the supper of the spinster—Lean Cuisine pasta primavera and an entire bag of chocolate-coated, peanut butter–filled pretzels—and scrub my face with a washcloth until it burns.
Eight
There’s a difference between the air of a house that’s occupied and an empty one. I’ve always been able to tell, waking up on Sunday mornings and knowing, as soon as awareness washes over me, whether my parents are downstairs or in the backyard. Or gone, as is the case recently with my mother’s strange behavior. Mania.
My father says her new pills are working.
It’s because of the vibrations. We inhale and exhale, sending ripples out around us. Our bodies radiate heat, another silent wave jostles the air. Perhaps even the sparks jumping from one neuron to the next leak from our skin, electrifying the atmosphere. However it happens, the world around us quakes with the living. Stillness comes only in the empty spaces. Or death.
I’m home from school, and as soon as I’m inside I know I’m alone. The door is unlocked. “Mom?” I call, not expecting an answer. A tingle of apprehension smolders in my pelvis.
The garage is closed. I saw that as I stepped off the bus. We have a one-car garage and no electric door opener. My mother’s Buick stays in there; Dad parks his work truck in the driveway. When she goes out, the door gets left up until she returns.
I know I’m alone, but I check each room anyway, beginning upstairs. Unoccupied, all of them. In the kitchen, dough rises in the trough on the counter, a blue checkered tea towel blanketing it. And then I see it. The shade is drawn on the door leading out to the garage. It’s never down. Sometimes my mother closes the yellow half curtains, but the shade always remains tightly rolled behind the valance. The fear grows. I don’t want to, but my arm moves of its own volition, tugging the thin rod at the bottom of the shade. It retracts, shooting up with a slapping sound.
My eyes are closed.
And then they’re not.
The Buick sits in the garage; it’s not running—not now, at least. The hose from our vacuum has been taped to the exhaust pipe, pulled tight over the hood, and threaded through the driver’s side window, which is open only enough to trap the hose in the glass. A towel hangs from the window too, pink with seashells printed on it, from our guest bathroom. Another is on the ground, crumpled next to the front tire. My mother’s body slumps against the steering wheel.
I float to the sofa—I must have because I have no recollection of my legs moving—and sit on the center cushion. The ghost of a thought comes to me, that I should call my father or an ambulance, but it’s gone so quickly I wonder if it was even there at all. And then nothing is there but the sensation of everything inside my head—the me I was when I jumped off the bottom step of the school bus, over the puddle, before opening the front door of my house—melting from between the wrinkles of my brain and dripping, dripping, dripping down, pulled by gravity. Down the back sides of my cheekbones, my throat, my chest cavity, coating my stomach like Pepto-Bismol in the commercials, into my pelvis. It doesn’t move to my thighs, though; they are straight out, and the laws governing the universe won’t allow these memories to go anywhere but down. But all the old me must escape somehow, and it does, through the baby fat of my puberty-swelled backside, through my pores, soaking into the couch cushion beneath me.
I am completely emptied, ready to be refilled by a life without my mother.
We’ve settled into a routine, the three of us. Or maybe more so, Jude has settled into ours. He knows I always move to my right when I’m bringing the dough to the cooler, no matter where I begin in the kitchen. He knows Xavier begins whistling two minutes before the bread is due out of the oven; Jude watches the clock, waiting for sixty more seconds to tick off, and then stands with peel in hand before his grandfather reaches for the door. The bread dance. My mother had it perfectly choreographed with Oma; I never learned the steps. I used to think I would have, if I’d been given more time with her. At eight, nine, ten, I still knocked over measuring cups of water and tripped over the edge of the rag rug in front of the sink, falling against my mother as she weighed the flour. But even now, as I still sometimes bump into Xavier and I see how seamlessly Jude glides around us, I wonder if it’s a giftedness I don’t have.
It’s more than grace of movement, though. He has a sense of bread I cannot fathom. I’m not certain Xavier expected so much either. He reads flour, senses its properties, knows which grains to use to achieve his desired results in texture and flavor and body. I offered him several books on baking science and artisan recipes, and he shook his head, saying, “Thanks, but I don’t read so well. And I can’t figure those dumb formulas to save my life.” His experimentation isn’t random and driven by emotion, like his grandfather's. He simply knows.
I admit a little envy.
Not even my mother could do what he does. She toiled, and there was a pride in all the hours she devoted to cultivating and improving and becoming. My grandmother, perhaps, baked on instinct. Children only understand so much and memories metamorphose as they’re replayed over and over, but I think I saw Oma sprinkle this and pour that, and somewhere in the recesses of my mind I dust off snatches of conversation, times my mother told me how my grandmother could make bread from sand. Talent like that must skip a generation or two.
Once the first batches of bread are taken from the oven, I ask Jude to open and work the counter. Already a small line has formed outside. “You sure?” he asks. “They’re coming to see you.”
“They’re coming to be on TV.”
“Okay then.” He strips off his white, sweaty tank and buttons on an oversized tent of a Hawaiian shirt.
“In my kitchen? Really?” I say.
He shrugs and smiles in this four-year-old way. “Sorry.”
“Tropical doesn’t seem your style, if you don’t mind me saying.”
“It’s borrowed,” he says, and then, “Pops, heads,” while throwing the balled-up shirt at Xavier.
The older man catches it and checks the tag. “So is this.”
“I don’t have anything clean.”
“Washer’s in the basement.”
“Yeah, I know. But your dresser’s just a few steps from my bed.”
Xavier throws the shirt back at Jude as he scuttles out into the café. “Teenagers.”
“How’s he doing?” I ask, picking up the shirt between two fingers. “This is gross.”
“Give me.” He crams it back into Jude’s canvas bag, washes his hands. “I don’t know. About the boy, I mean. He’s quiet. We talk, but not about what made him leave. I’m not certain it was a particular event, but everything leading up to it heaped onto him and he finally suffocated.”
“You were right, though. About his hands.”
“If his father—” He stops. “Yes, but not nearly as right as I thought I was.”
And there’s stillness as Xavier wedges betw
een his son and grandson, loyalties tangled like the metal Slinky I played with as a child, invariably knotted beyond mending after a few ill-fated tumbles down the stairs.
When the silence goes on long enough to make me think he’s burrowed too far into his own thoughts to come back without an interruption, I say, “Oh, I forgot. Patrice Olsen said something yesterday about photos?”
Xavier blinks. “Of your mother. And grandmother, if you have any.”
My arms go cold. “What on earth for?”
“Backstory,” he says, circling his shoulders until one pops. He lifts the corner of a damp towel, checking the dough, his work carrying him away from the sadness still graying his eyes.
“What did you tell her?”
“Nothing. She’s read your website. You mention baking with your mother. That Olsen woman likes the intergenerational aspect.”
“What about the quitting my day job aspect? Fleeing the big, bad city for the mountains of New England.”
“Won’t resonate the same way with viewers, I’m afraid.”
“How would you know?”
“It’s what I was told when I suggested the same.”
“You tried to get me out of it.”
“That I did.”
I shake my head, flicking my hair from my face. I washed and dried it this morning and rubbed in a blob of gel from a tube I found in the linen closet, in the basket where I toss all those things I buy for a certain occasion and use only once—wart removal pads, Nair, gauze bandages, melatonin capsules, Tums. The new style makes me dress differently too. It’s fine to slump around in shapeless clothes with my hair tied back in a rubber band, but nice hair requires accessories, so I wear beaded earrings and a coordinating necklace. The earrings distract me; I keep brushing them away, thinking some insect is crawling up my jaw. “I guess I’ll go look for them now.”
Stones for Bread Page 9
