Baker's Blues

by Judith Ryan Hendricks

  As a teenager, my reaction to this kind of information was a barely concealed yawn. But tonight, here on the island, by myself, and thirty years older…the music feels friendly and familiar. I find myself nodding in time with the Scherzo. By the fourth movement I’m happier than I’ve been in months. I decide not to accidentally grind my heel into the foot of the jerk next to me who keeps looking at his watch.

  When the Allegro giusto—the finale—ends, I float out to the vestibule. . I pick up a flier for the chamber music festival, even though I know I won’t be here, and a glass of champagne at the bar to drink by the window watching a small yellow plane on approach to the airstrip.

  “I like your hair that way.”

  I turn quickly, sloshing a little champagne on my shoe. “Alex. I didn’t know you were a Schubert fan.”

  He laughs. “I’m not. Although that wasn’t too painful.” He drinks red wine from one of the two glasses he’s holding. “Where’ve you been? Ferris thought you were going to come build fires with him.”

  “I was. I am…it’s just…my dog…” Suddenly my eyes fill and my voice cracks and I feel incredibly stupid. “She died.”

  He hands me a cocktail napkin and waits for me to recover. “I’m sorry.”

  “I just haven’t felt much like—”

  “Hi, I’m Paulette Riley.” A tan and graceful hand with French manicured nails relieves Alex of the other glass. Paulette Riley is thirty-something, a vision in hot pink knit. She tucks a strand of chin length blonde hair behind one ear before extending her hand. “So, are we ready to sleep our way through Part Two?”

  I look at her. “I’m sorry?”

  A tiny frown troubles her smooth forehead. “I found it a bit tiresome, didn’t you? Not the performance, of course. The music. I mean, The Trout is sort of a dead fish. It’s been overdone, don’t you think?”

  My toes curl inside the black flats. “Actually I enjoyed it.”

  She takes a sip from her glass but doesn’t swallow.

  “Paulette’s a wine rep,” Alex explains, while she swishes the wine around in her mouth.

  For a minute I think she’s going to gargle and spit, but she chokes it down and then asks me what I do.

  “I’m a baker.”

  “Wyn owns a great artisan boulangerie in L.A.,” Alex says.

  “Oh, I love bread. Of course, I try to stay away from empty carbs these days.”

  “Me too. I’ve cut way back on the wine.”

  I think Alex wants to laugh. Probably the only thing stopping him is the fact that if he so much as smiles, his chances of getting laid tonight will be greatly diminished.

  Fortunately, the lights blink, signaling the end of intermission.

  “Nice to meet you, Lyn.” She links her arm through his and they head for the auditorium.

  I turn back to the window. The yellow plane is gone, leaving the sky empty. I drink the rest of my champagne, throw the plastic cup in the trash, and leave by the side door.

  Alex looks at his watch. “High Noon,” he says. “Let’s get started.”

  A trickle of sweat rolls down between my breasts and I give him a look, indicating that I hate him for talking me into this.

  He ignores me and favors his audience with a smile.

  “I think some of you know Wyn McLeod—but for those of you who don’t, I’ll just say that she’s about the best bread baker I know. Her boulangerie has been featured in the L.A. Times and she’s written articles for Food & Wine, Los Angeles Magazine and most importantly, The Orcas Sounder. So I’ll just stand over here and make like Vanna White while Wyn talks to us about artisan bread.”

  I swallow air. “Um…Thanks, Alex. Okay how many of you have made bread before?”

  All but two raise their hands. “Then you probably already know that there are a lot of different techniques. In the next few hours we’re going to talk about three that I think give particularly good results, depending on how much time you want to invest. Just keep in mind that there are others out there for you to discover if you’re interested. The three methods are on the hand-outs Alex gave you. I just put four loaves of the pain au levain into the oven, so you’ll start to smell it pretty soon and in a couple of hours we get to eat it.”

  Loud cheers. My neck and shoulder muscles start to relax.

  “I could have printed out more recipes and just demonstrated them for you, but I’m fairly sure you can all read, so I’ve convinced Alex—against his better judgment—that we need to actually get our hands in some dough. I bet most of you have been dying to get back there in his kitchen anyway—yes?”

  A petite woman with a precision haircut and a turquoise colored jogging outfit is waving her hand. “I didn’t really dress for cooking,” she says. “I thought this was going to be a demonstration class like the first two.”

  I smile and try not to sound annoyed. “Bread is a full contact sport. That’s why God created aprons. But feel free to abstain if you’re not comfortable.”

  Another woman—older, attractive, with lively blue eyes and long silver hair gathered at the nape of her neck—waves at me.

  “My name is Sarah and I was just wondering,” she says. “How does someone end up being a baker? I mean, is it something you were always interested in? Did you have other jobs? When did you first decide you wanted to have your own bakery?”

  She’s probably in her early sixties, dressed in retro hippie garb. I can imagine CM looking very much like her in another twenty years.

  “Well…”

  I can practically hear the pebbles knocking around in that hollow spot where my brain’s supposed to be. I glance distractedly down into my cardboard box of supplies, and sitting on top of everything is my ragged old paperback copy of the Tassajara Bread Book. I don’t even know why I brought it; I hadn’t planned on using it today.

  “That’s sort of a big question with a long answer, but there is one thing I can share with you…” I open it and read to them,

  “Bread makes itself, by your kindness, with your help, with imagination running through you, with dough under hand. You are breadmaking itself…”

  An old emotion wells up in my chest, surprising me, and I find myself wondering how it is that I’ve managed to get so far from this feeling. How did the bakery become a desk job? I’m not a real baker anymore; I’m a business owner.

  “I baked a lot of bread before I ever read that. But I think it’s fair to say that the first time I read it is when I became a baker.”

  The room feels different now. Quieter. The women are looking at me expectantly. A few of them are actually writing down the Tassajara quote. I smile at Alex.

  “Vanna, I think that’s your cue.”

  He laughs and circles the tables, doling out fresh white aprons. “Any other questions for Wyn before we head back to the kitchen?”

  The woman who’s afraid of flour waves her hand. “I just got a bread machine. Are you going to talk about making bread with a machine?”

  I set down the book. “In my admittedly biased opinion, bread machines are a tool of Satan. They defeat the whole purpose of making bread. If all you want is good bread to eat, you should be supporting your local artisan baker. If you want to make your own bread, then you have to be invested in the process, not just the product. A bread machine short-circuits the process and takes it out of your hands, which is where I think it belongs.”

  “But it makes the house smell so good,” she says.

  “If that’s all you want, you could get yourself some bread-scented room freshener.”

  A couple of people snicker.

  A woman with orange hair waggles her fingers at me. “But Wyn, you must use machines at your bakery?”

  “True. For certain things, machines are great. However, I assume none of you will be working with forty-five pounds of dough. At the bakery, the mixing and kneading are done in Hobart mixers that look like the mother of all KitchenAids. But for things that require finesse, these are your main tools.” I
hold up my hands “Human hands are amazing pieces of equipment. They’re so sensitive and flexible and they can do things and tell you things about your dough that no machine ever could. Even at the bakery, we do all the scaling and shaping and docking by hand.”

  “You do all the what?”

  “Scaling is weighing out the dough for each loaf and docking is making those slashes in the loaves of bread.”

  Someone pipes up, “Those slashes—why do you do that? Are they just for decoration?”

  “Have you ever had a piece of bread with a big hole under the top crust?”

  “Every time I bake bread,” someone else says, and they all nod and laugh.

  “That’s what happens when the crust sets before the steam can escape. The steam that comes from the moisture in the bread gets trapped under the top crust. Slashing prevents that. It also affects the bread’s shape and crumb. It tells the bread where to expand. And over time it’s become sort of an art form.”

  “I got one of those lame things that you do that with and all it did was mutilate my pretty loaf.”

  “Me too.”

  I hold up one hand to quiet them down. “There are a few tricks to docking. And I’ll show you how to do it when we get to that point. But we won’t get to that point if we don’t get back in the kitchen and get started.”

  In five minutes everyone is aproned and standing around the big prep island. I give them a few minutes to examine the huge black stove, the grill, the ovens, the prep sinks, the gleaming stainless pots and fire-blackened pans hanging overhead. I know how it feels. I remember the first time I stepped into the inner sanctum of the boulangerie in Toulouse. It was like a trip to fantasyland.

  “Hey, Alex, do you clean this place yourself?” someone calls out. “And if so, will you marry me?”

  They all erupt in raucous laughter.

  We divide them up into three teams and Alex gives each team their mise en place—pre-measured flour, water, salt and yeast. We walk through the first recipe, Professor Calvel’s white bread, and they dive in.

  The class winds up in just under five hours, every crumb of pain au levain has been devoured, and still no one wants to leave. I feel buzzed, like I’ve been on an espresso binge.

  I stand just inside the kitchen and watch Alex escort the last hold-outs to the door, clutching their plastic containers of dough to proof and bake off at home and smaller tubs filled with Orcas Island levain. These women clearly adore him. I always thought he simply accepted the attention as his due, but watching him now, it seems to me that he genuinely likes them as well.

  In a few minutes he’s back, holding two sweating glasses of a beautiful pink-gold wine.

  “Rosé?”

  “It’s a Côte du Rhone. Dry. Very refreshing.” He hands me a glass.

  “Did Paulette turn you on to this one?” I ask innocently.

  He laughs. “She’s not a fan of rosé.”

  The wine is cold and crisp with a stony undertone. I’m so thirsty I drink half of it before I set the glass down. I should probably not get drunk before we finish cleaning up. He fills a mixer bowl with hot soapy water while I gather up spoons, bench scrapers, measuring cups.

  “Here’s an idea. Maybe while you’re on island you could bake some bread for the café?”

  “I’m on vacation. Plus, you can’t afford me.”

  “You could work in the kitchen here. There’s not much going on in the mornings except deliveries.”

  “Sounds like fun, but I’ll pass.”

  “Did I mention free dinners?”

  “Alex…”

  “I could probably find a bread machine you could use…”

  I look up quickly and we both start to laugh.

  He says, “Tool of Satan, huh? I’ll have to remember that one. I wish I could be there when she goes home and tells her husband to junk the bread machine.”

  I study him for a minute as a completely different person than the one I’ve known all these years we’ve been coming up here. “Alex, you close down after Christmas, don’t you?”

  He nods. “Till April. I hibernate. Read. Sail when I can. Go to Seattle or Vancouver. Take the kids to Hawaii.”

  I set down my cleaning cloth. “I think you should do a culinary tour. In Europe. France, Italy, Spain…”

  He looks mildly amused. “Culinary tour.”

  “I was watching you with those women. You’re a natural.”

  “I can’t picture myself herding a bunch of women around to different restaurants—”

  “It’s not like you’re just taking them out to dinner. You’re teaching them about food. You’d take them to meet a lot of great chefs, bakers, chocolatiers, winemakers, cheesemakers, butchers—people they’d never have a chance to meet, places they’d never get to see on their own.”

  “Why would those people want me there?”

  “Because you’d be bringing wealthy people to their establishments to spend money, bien sûr. Winter can be slow for them, too. They’d be happy to see you.”

  He looks dubious. “It can’t be that easy or everybody and their brother would be doing it.”

  “Everybody and their brother is doing it. But people here know you. They’d go with you because they like you and they love your food. You could have some cool fliers printed up…’Join Chef Alex Rafferty as part of a small, select group to experience gastronomic highlights of Europe.’ ”

  Now he’s laughing.

  “I could set you up with Jean-Marc—”

  “Who?”

  “The baker I worked for in Toulouse. You guys would like each other, I think. He knows lots of food people in Gascony. And he knows bakers in other départments who’d know other food professionals in Burgundy, and the Loire Valley, Bordeaux, and—”

  “Whoa, whoa. And I want to do all this because…?”

  I give him an impatient look. “Because you get to travel and eat and drink for free as the group leader. Plus you get paid for your services—not those services—your group leader services. And then you could come back and promote your new seasonal menus ‘after a winter spent collaborating with great chefs of Europe.’ Fabulous idea, right?”

  “Where do you come up with this stuff?” He’s still laughing.

  “I was married to a marketing guy for 7 years.”

  He stops smiling and gives me an inquisitive look. “I didn’t know you were married before.”

  “Yes, believe it or not, there was life before Mac.” When I realize how that sounds, I pick up the dish cloth and start wiping down the Hobart.

  “Well, it’s something to think about,” he says.

  With the two of us working quickly, the kitchen is spotless in less than thirty minutes. He sweeps a few remaining crumbs into a dustpan and empties it into a garbage can, then leans against the work island watching me load my supplies and notes into the grocery store carton.

  “Thanks. For making me do the class. It was good for me.”

  “You did a great job. I don’t know why you were so nervous about it.”

  “It’s not just that. I mean, it helped me remember some things…I think the last few years I’ve been so caught up in running the business that I’d about forgotten why I wanted a bakery in the first place.”

  “Yeah…It’s a fine line,” he says. “I go through the same thing with the café.”

  “You do?” When I pick up my Tassajara Bread Book and turn to toss it into the box, one of my tortoiseshell hair combs slips out and lands on the floor.

  “Sure.” He stoops to retrieve it, wipes it on his towel.

  “Thanks. Just throw it in the box.”

  Instead, he reaches over to brush a loose strand of hair off my cheek, securing it with the comb. He does it with a sort of casual competence, as if fixing a woman’s hair is something he does every day. The way it slips gently against my scalp makes the hair rise on the back of my neck and I scramble for something to look at other than him.

  I reach for my empty wine glas
s and turn it upside down in a washer tray, take off the apron and toss it in the laundry basket by the door.

  “Why don’t you let me cook dinner for you,” he says.

  “Thanks for the offer, but I’m not very hungry. I just want to go home and put my feet up.”

  “Okay.” He puts his hands behind him on the edge of the table. “Don’t forget to make a reading list for me to hand out. If I don’t give them something next week, it could get ugly.”

  “I’ll do it tomorrow so I don’t forget to give it to you before I leave.” I blot the perspiration off my face with the towel.

  “When are you leaving?” he says after a few seconds.

  I move things around aimlessly in the box. “Friday. I need to go home and check on things. The bakery.”

  “Are you coming back?”

  “I don’t know. It depends.”

  I pick up the box before he can reach for it. “Can you just get the door for me? Good night, Alex.”

  eleven

  Four weeks. How is that possible? I’m supposed to be lonely. To miss Mac. To be worried about him. But the truth is, I missed him more and worried more and felt lonelier when I was at home.

  How strange that I barely registered the tension in our house, when it was there, day after day, wearing me down. It’s like not realizing you’ve been walking around with your teeth clenched until you finally relax your jaw. Suddenly I dread going back, re-submerging in that toxic fog.

  Thursday afternoon I get as far as dragging the suitcase out from under the bed and zipping it open. Then I stand there looking down into the empty compartment, thinking about packing my clothes, shoes, books, papers. Closing up the house and putting all my personal stuff back in the locked storage room. Getting up in the middle of the night to make the early ferry, traveling all day to get home, where there’s a train wreck waiting for me.

  I lie back across the bed and study the angled ceiling, the wooden beams, remembering what this place looked like when we first saw it. There was a hole in the ceiling right above where I’m lying, and a nest full of baby birds tucked up over one of the beams. The mother bird kept dive bombing us while we inspected the closet. Trying to put a good spin on it, the real estate agent said a bird’s nest in a new house was good luck. I remember Mac laughed. “Yeah,” he said. “Good luck for the roofers.”