How to Bake a Perfect Life - Barbara O'Neal [47]
Poppy stood. “I bet you’re starving. How about a grilled cheese and a salad?”
“That sounds good.” I rubbed my eyes, and the afternoon flooded back to me, erasing anything that happened to my mother a million years ago. “How am I ever going to look Jonah in the eye again?”
“Well, it might not be much of an issue, because she doesn’t want you hanging out there.”
“He’s just my friend.”
“You’re really vulnerable right now,” she said. “And, honestly, sweetheart, so is he. Let it be.”
I fell forward, dropping my forehead against my arms, tears flooding the space below. With misery, I asked, “Why can’t I stop crying today?”
She came over and rubbed my back. “You’re pregnant, honey. It sometimes makes a person kind of crazy.” She gave me a paper towel, then pulled out the skillet and a loaf of hearty, grainy bread and the cheese I liked—Gouda, with a hard brown rind. She fixed the meal and I poured a giant glass of water to drink with it. When I demolished every crumb, Poppy said, “You know what I think would make you feel better? Bake some bread.”
And for the first time all day, something like relief worked through my limbs. I nodded.
She gave me a recipe and helped me gather the ingredients, then turned the radio to the station I liked. “I’m going to watch TV. Holler if you need anything.”
In the purpling evening, with crickets whirring and the radio playing Top 40 songs, I started the bread. My thoughts fluttered around my brain like crazy moths, banging into one another, then flying away, and I let them. I didn’t chase a single one.
Instead, I measured. I stirred. I gave the bread space to rise while I sat on the back porch with a barn cat, who leaped on crickets in the grass and then came over and sat on my foot, purring. Soft.
Darkness fell. I went back in to knead the dough, and I could feel that the whirling insanity in my blood was slowing. I pressed the heel of my palm to the fold of the pale-brown speckled ball of dough, over and over, in a steady pattern that worked the stiffness out of my neck as it worked the stiffness out of the dough. Everything crazy drained away, and I was just me again. Ramona.
Changed forever. But still me. I shaped the loaves and set them on the stove where the pilot light helped them rise a little better.
When Poppy and I went to Denver the week before last to get her special flours, I’d bought a good looseleaf notebook and some markers and, on a whim, sheet protectors, slippery and attractive. Now, as the loaves rose, I used the markers to write on the front: RAMONA’S BOOK OF BREADS. In the best handwriting I could manage, I copied the white-bread recipe that had been the first one I’d figured out, then I included the one I made tonight.
After that I added dividers to the notebook and labeled one of them Experiments. On the following sheet of paper I wrote, Experiments with levains, and faithfully recorded my two failed starts. #3 started on June 20, 1985.
I put down my pen and waddled over to the counter, where I’d left the new starter. I smelled it, and for the first time there was the faintest hint of sourness. I stuck my little finger into it and tasted it. Still pretty floury, but was that a tiny hint of something else? Something more pleasant?
Cheered, I recorded the observable changes, then put my loaves in the oven and sat in a kitchen smelling of bread until the moon was high in the sky. When the bread came out, hot and rich and perfectly brown, I cut a giant slice for the baby and me, buttered it, and ate it outside under the stars. It was the best thing I had ever tasted in my life.
Only then, alone in the darkness, with bread I had created with my own hands, did I allow myself to think of Jonah and the sharp, sweet thing that had sprung up between us that afternoon, something as wild as an invisible yeast and just as powerful.
RAMONA’S BOOK OF BREADS
SOFT AND DELICIOUS WHEAT BREAD
If you are pregnant or overwhelmed or full of disaster, this bread will cool your overheated spirit. Start it in the late afternoon on a waxing