The Storyteller (3 page)

I left the loaves like abandoned babies on the thresholds of the offices of professors I admired, of the dorm rooms of boys with smiles so beautiful that they stunned me into awkward silence. I left a finial row of sourdough rolls on a lectern podium and slipped a boule into the oversize purse of the cafeteria lady who pressed plates of pancakes and bacon at me, telling me I was too skinny. On the day my academic adviser told me that I was failing three of my four classes, I had nothing to say in my defense, but I gave her a honey baguette seeded with anise, the bitter and the sweet.

My mother arrived unexpectedly one day. She took up residence in my dorm room and micromanaged my life, from making sure I was fed to walking me to class and quizzing me on my homework readings. “If I don’t get to give up,” she told me, “then neither do you.”

I wound up being on the five-year plan, but I did graduate. My mother stood up and whistled through her teeth when I crossed the stage to get my diploma. And then everything went to hell.

I’ve thought a lot about it: how you can ricochet from a moment where you are on top of the world to one where you are crawling at rock bottom. I’ve thought about all the things I could have done differently, and if it would have led to another outcome. But thinking doesn’t change anything, does it? And so afterward, with my eye still bloodshot and the Frankenstein monster stitches curving around my temple and cheek like the seam of a baseball, I gave my mother the same advice she had given me.
If I don’t get to give up, then neither do you.

She didn’t, at first. It took almost six months, one bodily system shutting down after another. I sat by her side in the hospital every day, and at night went home to rest. Except, I didn’t. Instead, I started
once again to bake—my go-to therapy. I brought artisan loaves to her doctors. I made pretzels for the nurses. For my mother, I baked her favorite—cinnamon rolls, thick with icing. I made them daily, but she never managed a bite.

It was Marge, the facilitator of the grief group, who suggested I get a job to help me forge some kind of routine. Fake it until you make it, she said. But I couldn’t stand the thought of working in broad daylight, where everyone would be staring at my face. I had been shy before; now I was reclusive.

Mary says it’s divine intervention that she ran into me. (She calls herself a recovering nun, but in reality, she gave up her habit, not her faith.) Me, I don’t believe in God; I think it was pure luck that the first classifieds section I read after Marge made her suggestion included an ad for a master baker—one who would work nights, alone, and leave when customers began to trickle into the store. At the interview Mary didn’t comment on the fact that I had no experience, no significant summer jobs, no references. But most important, she took one look at my scar and said, “I’m guessing when you want to tell me about that, you will.” And that was that. Later, as I got to know her, I’d realize that when she gardens, she never sees the seed. She is already picturing the plant it will become. I imagine she thought the same, meeting me.

The only saving grace about working at Our Daily Bread (no pun intended) was that my mother was not alive to see it. She and my father had both been Jewish. My sisters, Pepper and Saffron, were both bat mitzvahed. Although we sold bagels and challah as well as hot cross buns; although the coffee bar attached to the bakery was called HeBrews—I knew my mother would have said:
All the bakeries in the world, what made you decide to work for a
shiksa?

But my mother also would have been the first to tell me that good people are good people; religion has nothing to do with it. I think my mom knows, wherever she is now, how many times Mary found me in the kitchen in tears, and delayed the opening of the bakery until she helped me pull myself together. I think she knows that on the anniversary of my mother’s death, Mary donates all the money raised at the
bakery to Hadassah. And that Mary is the only person I don’t actively try to hide my scar from. She isn’t just my employer but also my best friend, and I like to believe that would matter more to my mother than where Mary chose to worship.

A splat of purple paint drops on the floor beside my foot, making me look up. Mary’s painting another one of her visions. She has them with staggering regularity—at least three a year—and they usually lead to some change in the composition of our shop or our menu. The coffee bar was one of Mary’s visions. So was the greenhouse window, with the rows of delicate orchids, their flowers draped like a string of pearls over the rich green foliage. One winter she introduced a knitting circle at Our Daily Bread; another year, it was a yoga class. Hunger, she often tells me, has nothing to do with the belly and everything to do with the mind. What Mary really runs isn’t a bakery, but a community.

Some of Mary’s aphorisms are painted on the walls:
Seek and ye shall find. All who wander are not lost. It’s not the years in your life that count, but the life in your years.
I sometimes wonder if Mary really dreams up these platitudes or if she just memorizes the catchy phrases on
Life Is Good
T-shirts. I guess it doesn’t much matter, though, since our customers seem to enjoy reading them.

Today, Mary is painting her latest mantra.
All you knead is love,
I read.

“What do you think?” she asks.

“That Yoko Ono is going to sue you for copyright infringement,” I reply.

Rocco, our barista, is wiping down the counter. “Lennon was brilliant,” he says. “If he were alive today / Can you
Imagine
?”

Rocco is twenty-nine years old, has prematurely gray dreadlocks, and speaks only in Haiku. It’s his
thing,
he told Mary, when he applied for his job. She was willing to overlook that little verbal tic because of his prodigious talent creating foam art—the patterned swirls on top of lattes and mochaccinos. He can make ferns, hearts, unicorns, Lady Gaga, spiderwebs, and once, on Mary’s birthday, Pope Benedict XVI. Me, I like him because of one of Rocco’s other
things
: he doesn’t look people in the eye. He says that’s how someone can steal your soul.

Amen to that.

“Ran out of baguettes,” Rocco tells me. “Gave angry folks free coffee.” He pauses, counting syllables mentally. “Tonight make extra.”

Mary begins to lower herself from her rigging. “How was your meeting?”

“The usual. Has it been this quiet all day?”

She hits the ground with a soft thud. “No, we had the preschool drop-off rush and a good lunch.” Getting to her feet, she wipes her hands on her jeans and follows me into the kitchen. “By the way, Satan called,” she says.

“Let me guess. He wants a special-order birthday cake for Joseph Kony?”

“By Satan,” Mary says, as if I haven’t spoken, “I mean Adam.”

Adam is my boyfriend. Except not, because he’s already someone else’s husband. “Adam’s not
that
bad.”

“He’s hot, Sage, and he’s emotionally destructive. If the shoe fits . . .” Mary shrugs. “I’m leaving Rocco to man the cannons while I head up to the shrine to do a little weeding.” Although she’s not employed there, no one seems to mind if the former nun with the green thumb keeps the flowers and plants in good form. Gardening—sweaty, machete-hacking, root-digging, bush-dragging gardening—is Mary’s relaxation. Sometimes I think she doesn’t sleep at all, she just photosynthesizes like her beloved plants. She seems to function with more energy and speed than the rest of us ordinary mortals; she makes Tinker Bell look like a sloth. “The hostas have been staging a coup.”

“Have fun,” I say, tying the strings of my apron, and focusing on the night’s work.

At the bakery, I have a gigantic spiral mixer, because I make multiple loaves at a time. I have pre-ferments in various temperatures stored in carefully marked canisters. I use an Excel spreadsheet to figure out the baker’s percentage, a crazy math that always adds up to more than 100 percent. But my favorite kind of baking is just a bowl, a wooden spoon, and four elements: flour, water, yeast, salt. Then, all you need is time.

Making bread is an athletic event. Not only does it require dashing around to several stations of the bakery as you check rising loaves or mix ingredients or haul the mixing bowl out of its cradle—but it also takes muscle power to activate the gluten in the dough. Even people who wouldn’t be able to tell a poolish from a biga know that to make bread, you have to knead it. Push and roll, push and fold, a rhythmic workout on your floured countertop. Do it right, and you’ll release a protein called gluten—strands that let uneven pockets of carbon dioxide form in the loaves. After seven or eight minutes—long enough for your mind to have made a to-do list of chores around the house, or for you to replay the last conversation you had with your significant other and what he really meant—the consistency of the dough will transform. Smooth, supple, cohesive.

That’s the point where you have to leave the dough alone. It’s silly to anthropomorphize bread, but I love the fact that it needs to sit quietly, to retreat from touch and noise and drama, in order to evolve.

I have to admit, I often feel that way myself.

 • • • 

Bakers’ hours can do strange things to a brain. When your workday begins at 5:00 p.m. and lasts through dawn, you hear each click of the minute hand on the clock over the stove, you see movements in the shadows. You do not recognize the echo of your own voice; you begin to think you are the only person left alive on earth. I’m convinced there’s a reason most murders happen at night. The world just feels different for those of us who come alive after dark. It’s more fragile and unreal, a replica of the one everyone else inhabits.

I’ve been living in reverse for so long now that it’s not a hardship to go to bed when the sun is rising, and to wake when it’s low in the sky. Most days this means I get about six hours of sleep before I return to Our Daily Bread to start all over again, but being a baker means accepting a fringe existence, one I welcome wholeheartedly. The people I see
are convenience store clerks, Dunkin’ Donuts drive-through cashiers, nurses switching shifts. And Mary and Rocco, of course, who close up the bakery shortly after I arrive. They lock me in, like the queen in Rumpelstiltskin, not to count grain but to transform it before morning into the quick breads and yeasted loaves that fill the shelves and glass counters.

I was never a people person, but now I actively prefer to be alone. This setup suits me best: I get to work by myself; Mary is the front man responsible for chatting up the customers and making them want to return for another visit. I hide.

Baking, for me, is a form of meditation. I get pleasure out of slicing up the voluminous mass of dough, eyeballing it to just the right amount of kilos on a scale for a perfect artisan loaf. I love how the snake of a baguette quivers beneath my palm as I roll it out. I love the sigh that a risen loaf makes when I first punch it down. I like curling my toes inside my clogs and stretching my neck from side to side to work out the kinks. I like knowing there will be no phone calls, no interruptions.

I am already well into making the one hundred pounds of product I make every night by the time I hear Mary return from her gardening stint up the hill and start to close up shop. Rinsing my hands in the industrial sink, I pull off the cap I wear to cover my hair while I’m working and walk to the front of the shop. Rocco is zipping up his motorcycle jacket. Through the plate-glass windows, I see heat lightning arc across the bruise of the sky.

“See you tomorrow,” Rocco says. “Unless we die in our sleep. / What a way to go.”

I hear a bark, and realize that the bakery isn’t empty. The one lone customer is Mr. Weber, from my grief group, and his tiny dog. Mary sits with him, a cup of tea in her hands.

He struggles to get to his feet when he sees me and does an awkward little bow. “Hello again.”

“You know Josef?” Mary asks.

Grief group is like AA—you don’t “out” someone unless you have his permission. “We’ve met,” I reply, shaking my hair forward to screen my face.

His dachshund comes closer on her leash to lick at a spot of flour on my pants. “Eva,” he scolds. “Manners!”

“It’s okay,” I tell him, crouching down with relief to pat the dog. Animals never stare.

Mr. Weber slips the loop of the leash over his wrist and stands. “I am keeping you from going home,” he says apologetically to Mary.

“Not at all. I enjoy the company.” She glances down at the old man’s mug, which is still three-quarters full.

I don’t know what makes me say what I say. After all, I have plenty to do. But it has started to pour now, a torrential sheet of rain. The only vehicles in the lot are Mary’s Harley and Rocco’s Prius, which means Mr. Weber is either walking home or waiting for the bus. “You can stay until Advanced Transit shows up,” I tell him.

“Oh, no,” Mr. Weber says. “This will be an imposition.”

“I insist,” Mary seconds.

He nods in gratitude and sits down again. As he cups his hands around the coffee mug, Eva stretches out over his left foot and closes her eyes.

“Have a nice night,” Mary says to me. “Bake your little heart out.”

But instead of staying with Mr. Weber, I follow Mary into the back room, where she keeps her biker rain gear. “I’m not cleaning up after him.”

“Okay,” Mary says, pausing in the middle of pulling on her chaps.

“I don’t
do
customers.” In fact when I stumble out of the bakery at 7:00 a.m. and see the shop filled with businessmen buying bagels and housewives slipping wheat loaves into their recycled grocery bags, I am always a little surprised to remember there is a world outside my industrial kitchen. I imagine it’s the way a patient who’s flatlined must feel when he is shocked back into a heartbeat and thrown into the fuss and bustle of life—too much information and sensory overload.

“
You
invited him to stay,” Mary reminds me.

“I don’t know anything about him. What if he tries to rob us? Or worse?”

“Sage, he’s over ninety. Do you think he’s going to cut your throat with his dentures?” Mary shakes her head. “Josef Weber is as close as you can get to being canonized while you’re still alive. Everyone in Westerbrook knows him—he used to coach kids’ baseball; he organized the cleanup of Riverhead Park; he taught German at the high school for a zillion years. He’s everyone’s adoptive, cuddly grandfather. I don’t think he’s going to sneak into the kitchen and stab you with a bread knife while your back is turned.”