Bread Alone (18 page)

I for get to breathe through my mouth, and the smell almost makes me fall down. “That’s all I have.”

“I’ll have to get cash, then.”

“I don’t have ninety-four dollars stuffed in my cookie jar,” I say indignantly. “You didn’t mention that little detail when I called.”

“I assumed your check would be local. We don’t get a lot of half-cord deliveries to California.” He takes off the cap, pushes the hair back with one hand, replaces the cap. “How much cash have you got?”

“I’ll have to look.” I’m replaying Daisy’s warning about the isolation of this house, the fact that no neighbors can see the front door. I can’t even see the street in this fog. As if he can read my thoughts, he steps back, lounges against the porch rail while I raid my wallet. “All I have is forty-five dollars.”

He holds out his hand. “I’ll make up the difference for Rick and you can pay me tomorrow.”

“Is that okay?” I ask.

“It’ll have to be.” He folds the bills, stuffs them into the pocket of his grungy wool shirt. “I’m sure not going to load it back up and cart it out.” He’s looking past me at the Jotul stove. “Good stove,” he says. “You know how to work it?”

“Yes,” I say quickly. “The leasing agent showed me.” No way is he getting in my house. Aside from the fact that he looks incredibly seedy, I’d have to have the place fumigated.

“Then I’ll see you tomorrow. About ten.”

I wait till I hear the truck drive away before I go out to bring in some wood.

I’ve been reluctant to open a checking account here. As if it would commit me to something more permanent than an extended vacation. Apparently, the account services rep at Washington Mutual shares my unease. My California driver’s license engenders a deep suspicion of my worthiness to store money in her bank. When she finds out I’ve been gainfully employed for a week, she wants to know why I haven’t gotten a Washington license yet.

I smile pleasantly. “Because I don’t have a car.” She says I need to get a state photo ID card. “I’ll do that first thing tomorrow.” I think she knows I’m lying, but since I have my passport, she opens the account anyway and sends me off with my temporary checks and one hundred dollars in cash.

In the linen department at the Bon Marché to buy a down comforter, I discover that David has canceled my MasterCard. The clerk says he was asked by the authorization center to pick up the card. I write him one of my new checks, which he doesn’t like very much, but accepts because he can’t find anything materially wrong.

When I get home, I sit in my ugly plaid chair and dial David’s work number. “It’s me. Can you talk?”

“Of course. I’ve been trying to reach you all week.”

“You have?” My stomach lurches.

“I’ve decided to sell the house. I need to know if you want any of the furniture.”

My knees are wet cement. “So … does this mean you want—”

“No, Wyn, it doesn’t mean I want a divorce.” It’s the talking-to-a-retarded-child voice. “I just think that while we’re living apart, it’s best not to have the expense of a big house, particularly when I’m n—hardly ever there.” Then with exaggerated civility, “I hope that’s all right with you.”

“Fine.” Then I remember the reason I called him. “Why did you cancel my MasterCard?”

“Because you started piling up huge charges.”

“What huge charges?”

“Someplace called the Bon Marché for five hundred dollars.”

“Five hundred dollars isn’t huge. I bought a futon and a frame. And some kitchen stuff.”

“What the hell for?”

“Because I have my own place now. I couldn’t stay with CM forever.”

A brief pause. “You’re living up there?”

“Yes. For a while. I got a job.”

“Doing what?”

“Baking bread.”

“Baking bread?” He says it slowly, incredulously. “Wyn, for Chrissake. What are you trying to prove?”

“Not a damn thing. And I’m paying my own bills, so what difference does it make to you how much I spend?”

“I don’t want my credit involved with yours. In case you default. Since you’re working, you can get your own cards now.”

“At eight bucks an hour, I can hardly get the kind of credit I had.”

“Look, Wyn, I don’t want to argue with you about—”

“Of course you don’t. You just want me to quietly disappear.”

“Oh, for Chrissake. I do not.” He lowers his voice. “And I can’t be having these kinds of discussions at work. Why don’t you call me at home?”

“Because I never know who’s going to answer the damn phone.”

“Look, I’ve got to go. I’m late for a meeting. We’re going to have to talk about this later.”

“When, David?” I’m practically shouting, but he’s already gone.

I want to rip the phone out of the wall and heave it through the window, but I think that would be counterproductive.

A pounding noise wakes me. I don’t even know where I am at first. I stagger to the door and look bleary-eyed at a lanky, crew-cut guy in baggy denim overalls and a filthy sweater. “Yes?”

He says, “Hi. I’m Rick. Norwegian Woods. You got some money
for me?” He fishes around in his pocket for a dirty piece of paper. “Forty-nine dollars?”

“Oh.” I turn quickly, take the forty-nine dollars out of my wallet. He counts it before shoving it down into his pocket.

“Brought you some cedar.” He smiles, revealing a couple of missing teeth. “Just in case.”

I follow his gaze to about half a dozen small logs next to my pile of alder. “What for?”

“Kindling,” he says. “Cedar’s dry and splintery, and the bark peels off in nice, flat pieces. Perfect for kindling. Smells great, too. Like a campfire.”

“Oh. Thanks. Thank you very much.”

He hands me a business card that looks as if it’s been run over by a truck. “If you need anything else, give us a call.”

I watch him limp down the driveway, wondering what happened to the psycho-killer handyman.

On Thursday night, I no sooner get to work than I’m in the bathroom throwing up.

“If you’re sick, I don’t want you here,” Linda says in her most sympathetic voice. “I feel fine.”

Her eyes narrow. “Are you getting any sleep?”

“Well, it hasn’t been easy because I’ve been trying to get settled.”

“What time you been goin’ to bed?” She leans the big wooden peel against the side of the oven.

“Monday I went to bed at eight-thirty at night. Tuesday about noon. Wednesday at five. Today at two.”

“There’s your trouble, right there.” She folds her arms and gives me a disgusted look. “You gotta get your routine down, sleep at the same time every day or your body never will get used to flip-floppin’.”

“What time do you sleep?”

“Soon as I get home. I have some toast and tea and hit the sack. Get up about four.”

“What about on your days off?”

“Same thing.”

“But how can you have any kind of normal life if you’re up all night and sleep all day on your days off?”

“Who said bread making was any kinda normal life? I knew you wouldn’t like it.”

“It’s not that I don’t like it …” I feel my face heating up.

“You kids are all alike, never done a honest day’s work in your life.”

“First of all, I’m not a kid, and I don’t think you’re in any position to know about what I’ve done in my life.”

“Horsefeathers. Look at you.” She holds up her hand, lets her wrist go limp. “Little manicured nails. Polo pants.” She bats her eyelashes and it’s hard not to burst out laughing.

“What?” I look down at myself and the logo on my Ralph Lauren sweatpants looms upside down at me. “They’re just sweatpants.”

She turns away, as if I’m too painful to contemplate, heads for the storeroom.

“Think whatever you like,” I holler after her. “As long as I’m doing my job, you have no complaint.”

Eight

L
inda notwithstanding, I love my job. Even the tedium of doing the same breads every week is okay for now. Till I find the rhythm again. Till I can look at a bowl of flour and know how many cups or grams there are. Till I can grab a fistful of dough and say with certainty that it’s too wet or not wet enough.

I love getting off work at seven in the morning, walking home as the city’s just starting to hum and cats are slinking under porches. I love knowing that most of the people I pass are lock-stepping to their daily obligation and I’m done. The day belongs to me.

Taking Linda’s advice, I start going to bed right after breakfast. With a down comforter to keep me warm, my futon opened up in front of the woodstove, and blackout shades on the windows, I’m having my best sleep in years.

If it’s not raining when I wake up, I walk the neighborhood. I begin to recognize neighbors at work in their yards, mothers with their baby strollers, kids with their dogs. We smile, say hi or nice day or think we’ll get some rain tonight? I discover a tiny park at the top of the hill on Eighth Place and Highland, with a bench that has a 180-degree view of the Sound and the Olympic Mountains.

Sometimes I read; sometimes I just sit there, lost in the way the sun glints off the water like handfuls of diamonds. I watch the Washington
state ferries chug to and from Bainbridge Island through swarms of bright spinnakers. When the sun falls into that slot behind the mountains, the wind picks up and the temperature drops, but it’s worth the cold walk home to see the Olympics catch fire in the sunset or a huge white bank of fog unroll off the water.

Sometimes I manage to forget the reason I’m here. That I’m waiting for David to figure out what he wants. Whether the package includes me. I sit on my bench and have heartfelt imaginary conversations with him. He tells me he loves me, that it’s been a terrible mistake, he can’t live without me, he’s told Kelley it’s over. I smile sadly and murmur that I’m just not sure if it can ever be the same with us.

His voice cracks as he says, “Believe me, Wyn, I understand, but if you let me make it up to you, I swear you’ll never be sorry.”

Laundry has never been an issue for me in the great cosmic scheme of things. For the last seven years, Hildy, our housekeeper, took care of it along with almost everything else. Sheets, towels, clothes magically appeared in drawers, in closets—washed and ironed, folded or hung up. The closest I got to the process was buying more detergent whenever she said we needed it.

Now it’s a logistical thing. I have no washer, no dryer. So when I run out of things to wear, I stuff all my dirty clothes in a pillowcase and drag them down to the Queen Anne Launderland on Queen, across from the A & J Meat Market.

It’s a colossal waste of time. You have to sit there while your clothes go through the whole fill, wash, spin, fill, rinse, spin. Then you have to wait while the industrial-strength dryer makes
pommes frites
out of your Calvin Klein briefs. Yes, you can read. But if you get engrossed in a book and you don’t jump up and get your clothes the second the machine stops, you run the risk of some grimy-fingered guy waving your black push-up bra overhead and yelling, “Whose 38B?”

Okay, this might sound just a bit too fastidious, but I worry about germs. I have no idea what these people do in their clothes. They could
be out rolling around in nonbiodegradable toxic wastes for all I know. And then I have to put my stuff in the same machine?

After two forays into this alien culture, I finally figure out that the best time to go is early in the morning. I take my pillowcase/laundry bag to work with me and hit Launderland on my way home. Seven-thirty is too early for anyone else to be there except for one or two retired couples drinking their early bird half-priced coffee and clipping coupons, and some guy in a baseball cap who never even looks up from the notebook he’s scribbling in. Plus, at that hour you have at least the illusion that the place is clean.

The bakery officially closes at two, but Diane and Ellen are usually there with Jen and Misha, the day crew, till five or six, doing special orders, wholesale stuff, and prep work. I drop in one or two afternoons a week to hang out for a couple of hours.

I watch Diane put the finishing touches on cakes to be picked up early in the morning, and I help her wrap freshly baked layers for the freezer. Ellen plows through paperwork, makes entries in the ledger book that she keeps in her desk. Her actual baking time is limited, but she supervises the afternoon crew making cinnamon rolls, muffins, cookies, and Mazurka Bars, arguably the bakery’s most famous product.

Ellen invented Mazurka Bars—at least her version of them—when she lived in New Hampshire, and she brought the recipe out west with her, just like the pioneer women. Except she came in the seventies, driving her derelict Volkswagen Beetle instead of a covered wagon.