How to Find What You're Not Looking For

by Veera Hiranandani

  How to Burn a Loaf of Bread

  After school, you decide to walk to the bakery instead of taking the bus. You avoid Jane because you aren’t ready for hard stuff yet. You want to coast a bit longer on this feeling. Talking to your class was so different than writing things down. You’ve never spoken about a topic you actually cared about. It’s filled you with something new and powerful.

  Halfway through the walk, your body wants to run, so you do—all the way to Gertie’s. The breeze blows through your curls, and your schoolbag seems as light as a cream puff. You burst in through the bakery door.

  You’ve decided that you’re going to tell your parents about your presentation. You’re also going to ask them about the bakery and why they’re selling it. You don’t have to be so afraid. Maybe you’ll even give them the same presentation at home and change their minds. You’ve never been so ready for anything.

  Gabby, who is working at the counter, calls out your name, but you just smile, wave, and keep on going. You give the swinging door a big push with both hands and swish into the back.

  “Ma, Daddy,” you say, dumping your bag on the ground. “I have something important to tell you!”

  But what you see doesn’t add up, and it flattens out your smile. Ma is sitting on a stool, slouched and small. She looks at you, startled. Her eyes are red. Has she been crying? Ma never cries about anything.

  The first thing you think about is Leah. Is she all right? Did something happen to her baby, to Raj?

  “Ari!” Daddy says. “You’re back early.”

  “I am?” Because you’re not. Normally you take the bus.

  “Have a seat. We need to tell you something.”

  But, wait, you want to say, me first. The expressions on Ma and Daddy’s faces, though, tell you not to move. Daddy points to another stool. Ma isn’t wearing her apron, which means she hasn’t been baking.

  “What?” you say, all that good energy turning into bad energy, into panic. “Tell me. Is it Leah? Is she okay?”

  Daddy and Ma blink for a minute, and you do the same, as if adjusting to new light.

  “Oh, yes. I mean, I think so,” Daddy says. He seems surprised that you’re even bringing her up. Ma takes a tissue out of her pocket and blows her nose.

  “We have some difficult news,” she says. Daddy puts his hand on her shoulder. She looks up at him and stops talking. You search her face for that part of her that keeps on rolling out the dough no matter what. It’s something in her face, a crease in her brow. You don’t even know exactly what it looks like, but it’s not there.

  “We hoped that it wouldn’t come to this, but we have to sell the bakery,” Daddy says.

  At first you’re relieved. At least you don’t have to bring it up.

  “I know,” you say before thinking about it.

  Ma straightens up a bit.

  “You know? How?” Daddy asks.

  You wish you could take your words back. Now you have to explain that you were snooping in Ma’s purse, looking for a letter from Leah, and they’ll think that you’re just a bad girl sneaking around, not someone grown-up enough to hear the whole truth. But then Miss Field pops into your head again, beaming and clapping. The fearless energy from the day finds you again.

  “I saw papers in your purse,” you say to Ma, squaring your shoulders. “The contract, about selling the bakery. I was looking for a letter from Leah.”

  Daddy opens his mouth to say something.

  “You little mazik,” Ma says.

  “I’m sorry,” you say. “I should have told you.”

  “Yes,” Ma says. “But it’s okay. It’s better that you know.”

  “Why, though? Why do we have to sell it?” The sweet-and-sour scent of yeast from bread baking fills the air. Your stomach grumbles. You barely ate lunch. But the smell becomes too powerful, a burning smell.

  “Oh no,” Daddy says, and he runs over, pulling open the oven door. They do most of the baking in the morning, but sometimes Daddy does special orders in the afternoon. You and Ma spin around and watch him pull out a tray of eight loaves, dark brown to black, with his bare hands. “They’re all burnt. Ow!” he yells as the tray slams on the counter. You jump. A few loaves fall off the tray and break apart on the linoleum floor, leaving a scattering of burnt chunks of bread. He holds his fingers. “Damn it all to hell,” he yells and walks out the back door.

  “Max,” calls Ma.

  You start to follow Daddy. Ma sighs. “Leave him for a moment. Come here,” she says, motioning to you. You walk over to her slowly and stand before her. She puts a hand on your shoulder and then lets it go.

  “We’ve been trying too long to stay afloat with the bakery, and now we have a lot of debt. If it were just up to me, we would have made this decision a year ago,” Ma says, the edge returning to her voice. “But why should anyone in this family listen to me?”

  Daddy comes back in, and Ma stops talking. He looks calmer. He runs his fingers under cool water to soothe the burn. You and Ma watch him.

  “But, Daddy, I thought the bakery was your dream. I thought—” Your throat catches, and you stop. Daddy looks at you, but his eyes are empty. He clears his throat and manages a small smile.

  “Dreams are for the young,” he says. “They’re fairy tales. The sooner you learn that, the less of a shock it will be.”

  “So grown-ups can’t have any dreams?” you ask.

  “Sure they can.” Ma suddenly perks up. “It just depends on if you want to deal with reality or live in a fantasyland.”

  Daddy continues without looking at Ma, just at you. “I went to Caruso’s. They need a bread baker. When we close, I might work there for a while until we figure out the next step.”

  “Oh, Daddy,” you cry. “You can’t work at Caruso’s!” Caruso’s is an Italian bakery in the next town that sells ten different kinds of cannoli—the most delicious cannoli, and rainbow cookies almost as good as Gertie’s . . . almost. Caruso’s was Gertie’s main competition.

  “Well, tell Caruso’s that. They seem happy for me to work there. And there’s one more thing,” he says, running his hand through his hair. He looks at Ma. There are a few seconds of silence.

  Ma takes a deep breath. “We’re going to have to move,” she says. “But we’ll find a nice place, don’t worry.”

  “Move?” you ask. More secrets.

  “They raised the rent again,” Daddy says. “I’m so sorry, Muffin. We’ll start looking at places soon. It still won’t be the house we thought we’d get when we moved to the suburbs, but we’ll find something nice. Maybe with a patio.”

  But if money is the problem, how would your parents find a nicer apartment? The ground starts feeling unsteady, like you’re on a ship. You become light-headed. It seems like all of this has to do with Leah leaving, like she was the thing holding your life together.

  “Does Leah know?” you ask.

  Your parents are silent again. They glance at each other and back at you.

  “So she doesn’t,” you say, your voice getting angrier. “Are you going to tell her?”

  “That’s between us and Leah,” Ma says, hard and serious again.

  “But you’ll tell her?” you ask, biting the inside of your cheek. “You wouldn’t just move and sell the bakery and not tell her.”

  “It’ll be okay,” Daddy says in a stern voice.

  “It doesn’t sound okay,” you say, shaking your head. “I don’t feel good. I want to go home.”

  “Wait for Ma. She’ll walk with you.”

  “No. I don’t want to wait. We can’t just move and not tell Leah. What if she comes home and finds us gone?” You imagine Leah coming back to surprise you, maybe with her baby. She goes to the bakery and finds it dark and closed. She goes to the apartment and knocks on the door. A stranger answers. You, Ma, and Daddy are in some other apartment
without a clue. You back away from your parents, who are starting to feel like strangers. The smell of burnt bread still hangs in the air. You need to get out of the bakery.

  “That’s not going to happen,” Ma says.

  “How do you know?”

  Ma and Daddy just stand there, silent.

  “How do you know?” you say again, louder, the anger filling your body. How could they take this much away? First your sister, then the bakery, and now the apartment. They’ve even taken what happened today away, the first good thing that has ever happened in school. But there’s no point in telling them now.

  “These are adult decisions, and you don’t need to worry about them,” Ma says through a stiff smile.

  “What kind of parents are you?” you yell and go right through the back door. It slams, and you run all the way home. After school you were running toward something, but now you want to run far away.

  How to Be Alone

  You aren’t hungry for dinner, so you lock yourself in your room, something you’re not allowed to do. You lie on Leah’s bed, which has become your bed, and hope that Ma or Daddy will come knocking. You wish they would come and pull you out of your swirling mess of thoughts. If they don’t, it will mean that you’re right, that they don’t love you as much as you thought, either.

  They probably think you’re just a silly kid with no real problems, that you’re just feeling sorry for yourself. Maybe it’s true. They’ve had harder things happen to them. Did they ever lie on their beds like this, feeling sad and alone?

  You think about how Daddy’s family left Poland years before the Holocaust; they were lucky. But then your grandparents died within a year of each other when Daddy was only seventeen. Daddy once said something about your grandfather having heart problems, and you’re not even sure why your grandmother died. Your grandmother on Ma’s side died of cancer when you were only a baby. Her name was Gertrude. They named the bakery after her.

  You only have one grandparent left, Grandpa Myron, but he lives in Miami now, and you don’t see him very much. He’s the one who didn’t like Daddy because he wasn’t Jewish enough for Ma. But these stories feel more like sad legends from broken and faraway places rather than a part of your life. Now it is only going to get worse. More broken things.

  You pick up your notebook and chew on the eraser end a little bit, thinking. Then you write.

  Broken

  My parents

  have handed me

  something broken,

  with so many pieces

  I can’t tell anymore

  what goes where.

  Am I even the one

  who’s supposed

  to put it back

  together?

  You look at your poem, and the lines are slanting down the page, the letters big and wavy. You stand and tear up the poem into little pieces. Then you sit back down. Before the summer, you thought there was the truth and there were lies—nothing in between. Now the truth seems like something your parents pick and choose, like fruit in a grocery store. What they decide on seems to change all the time.

  There is a knock. You freeze.

  “Can I come in?” Ma’s voice trickles in under the door. She tries the doorknob.

  You get up and throw the pieces of the poem in the garbage.

  “Ari? Please open the door,” she calls.

  “Coming,” you say and undo the lock.

  Ma stands there, looking shorter somehow. You can see the dark roots in her blond hair.

  “Ma,” you say, and she hugs you. You hug her back, tight. Maybe she does love you as much as you think. She smells like Chanel perfume and fried onions, and you cry a little into her shoulder. She lets you for a minute. Then she straightens up. She takes a tissue out of her pocket and hands it over.

  “We’ll all be okay, Ari. I promise. We’re doing this so we don’t lose everything. We’ll get a good amount for the bakery, save money on rent, and decide what to do next.”

  “It’s so sad,” you say. “I thought Gertie’s was forever.”

  “Nothing is forever,” Ma says. “But we’ll get through it. We’re strong.”

  You think of both your parents and all the kneading, stirring, lifting, and slicing they do. When Ma wears a sleeveless dress, you can see the muscles in her arms. Daddy’s hands could knead through iron. But it’s a different kind of strength she’s talking about.

  “What about Leah?” is all you say.

  Ma frowns but takes your hand and holds it. “Someday when you’re a mother, you’ll understand.”

  You want to tell her that you’ve tried hard to understand, but you just can’t. You know she wanted Leah to marry a Jewish man and have Jewish children, and you don’t know what’s supposed to happen when a couple is different religions. But isn’t Leah being her daughter the one thing that is forever? You also want to say that if she doesn’t tell Leah, you’ll find a way to tell her.

  She lets your hand go and walks out the door, closing it behind her before you can say anything. You stare at the door as you hear her footsteps get quieter and farther away. It feels like the door separates you from everything and everyone else: your parents, your sister, the bakery; Jane, Miss Field, Chris Heaton; the whole twisting, turning world.

  The next day on the bus, you can sense the warmth from Jane’s leg an inch away from yours. You and Jane have gone days without talking. After your parents’ news, your brain is extra mixed-up, extra farblondjet. Sounds are even louder. Your limbs feel heavy and slow. Your bag is full of crumpled papers on top of papers, and you haven’t done any homework in days.

  You and Jane still sit together on the bus, because there’s nowhere else to sit other than next to Charlie Stewart, who smells sweaty and is always drumming annoyingly on the back of the seat in front of him. The weird thing is, you’re not even sure why you’re still mad at each other or why you got so mad in the first place.

  Jane is reading a book, but not a book from school. You can’t see the title, but you can tell it’s a Nancy Drew mystery from the yellow spine. Other than magazines, she only reads Nancy Drews. She has at least twenty of them lined up in her room.

  This gives you an idea. Jane must have picked something up from all those mysteries. Maybe she can help you find your sister? But even if she can’t, you still want to be friends again. The difference between having one friend and having no friends is a lot bigger than you thought. It’s the difference between never feeling alone and always feeling alone.

  “I didn’t mean to get mad,” you say. Jane doesn’t look up. You wait another minute and try again. “I know you were just trying to help.”

  Jane turns to you. “Okay,” she says and goes back to her book.

  “So can we be friends again?”

  She stops reading and turns to you, her eyes squinting a little.

  “Please?” you say, your voice cracking.

  “Okay, fine,” she says again and then goes back to reading. That’s it. You don’t want to rush her, but your heart leaps. You ride the rest of the way in silence with a little smile on your face.

  After school, the last thing you want to do is go to the bakery, but that’s what you do every day after school. You think of just going home and calling Ma, saying you don’t feel well, but then she would worry or tell you to stop feeling sorry for yourself. Strangely, the bakery has never been busier, like it knows something, like it’s trying to hold on to Daddy, to Ma, to you.

  When you get there, Daddy is spreading raspberry jam on Linzer cookies.

  “Where’s Ma?” you ask, putting your bag down.

  Daddy doesn’t answer you for a second. “Daddy,” you say again, louder.

  “Oh,” he says, startled. “Didn’t see you there.”

  You sit down on your stool and watch him for a few minutes. He spreads the jam o
n each half so fast, the edges perfectly clean, going through ten cookies in a minute. Whenever you do it, your jam always gets on the sides, on the bottom, and all over your fingers. Just as you’re thinking about how perfectly his hands work the cookies, one breaks.

  “Your lucky day,” he says, putting one broken piece over the other, jam in the middle, and holding it out to you.

  You hop off the stool and take it. It’s still a little warm. Each separate flavor—the raspberries, the vanilla, the butter, the lemon zest, the crushed almonds—stands out but also blends into something even better.

  “Thanks,” you say, wiping a few sticky crumbs off your lip. “So where’s Ma?” you ask again.

  “At home. She’s having a migraine,” he says while he fills more cookies. He doesn’t look at you.

  “She gets them a lot,” you say.

  He stops spreading and finally pays attention. “Yes,” he says. “This has been hard for her. She’s worn out.”

  He doesn’t say which this he means, but you know what’s probably making her head hurt the most.

  “Maybe if she talked to Leah, she’d get less headaches,” you say, examining your broken cookie, the raspberry jam taste fading on your tongue.

  “We’re not discussing that,” he says, his face turning cold. Last night, you asked them when the bakery will be sold. They said the closing date was three months from now, the date when they have to turn over the keys and the bakery isn’t theirs anymore.

  The people who want to buy the bakery aren’t bakers. They’re butchers. In a few months, Gertie’s will be filled with slabs of raw meat in the cases instead of cookies, cakes, and pies, just like before Gertie’s. It will be like Gertie’s never happened.

  “I got an A on my presentation at school,” you say, puffing out your chest a little, trying to change the subject. Miss Field handed you her grading sheet today with a big blue smiley face on it under the A. It’s the first A you’ve ever gotten.

  “Really? That’s wonderful,” Daddy says, still spreading the jam, but he doesn’t even look up. You shrink down again. He doesn’t ask what the presentation was about. He doesn’t even seem surprised, which is good in a way.