How to Bake a Perfect Life - Barbara O'Neal [95]
The only blessing was that Sofia had already left for college. She was in her first year at a teacher’s college in the western part of the state, a long, long drive that she made only every other month or so, and during the winter snows not even that.
It helped protect her from the ugliness.
It also left me completely and utterly alone. I couldn’t face the pitiful, or smirking, or even smug looks that followed me at work, so I turned in my notice. I kicked Dane out of the house.
And there I sat, most of the autumn, drowning in humiliation and loss. I’d seen uncles fall into bad habits with alcohol, so I didn’t indulge my desire to drink entire bottles of wine, but I developed other self-destructive behaviors. I stayed up all night playing games on the computer. I watched endless movies on cable. Twice, I went out with friends and ended up in a one-night stand, not something I’m proud of.
The only people from the family I would speak to were Poppy and my grandmother, who was weaving in and out of dementia, so she often forgot that I was getting divorced. Forgot, for that matter, that I had ever been born and mistook me for one of her sisters or daughters.
It was bread that saved my life. For the second time.
While I was throwing things out one night, I found my old notebook, Ramona’s Book of Breads. The sight of my hopeful handwriting on the cover, the memory of those dire days in an earlier part of my life—days I had survived, after all—went right through my gut. I sank down on the floor, pulled out of my dervish whirl, to open the cover. And remember.
Almost without thinking, I carried the book to the kitchen and pulled out those simple magic ingredients. Flour, salt, yeast.
But nothing had gone on in that kitchen for months. I’d been eating Lean Cuisines and peanut butter crackers almost exclusively. The flour had bugs in it, and the yeast was ten years old.
I pulled on my jeans, washed my face, and drove to an all-night grocery. With a genuine sense of delight, I bought white bread flour, and whole wheat, and a paper bag of rye. Instead of envelopes of yeast, I bought a brown jarful. Below it was kosher salt, looking so official, and I put that in my basket, too. Something I’d forgotten, something alive, stirred within me. I carried it all back home and dumped it on the counter.
I baked all night. Stirred yeast into sugar water and watched it grow, then stirred yeast and sugar water into flour and salt and dumped it all on the counter and kneaded it far longer than was required. My hands remembered things my brain had forgotten—the way to turn and fold, the feeling of dough going smooth and clammy below the heels of my palms.
When morning came, I called Poppy and asked her if she had any of her starters left. “Of course,” she said. “But you could get some from Adelaide today if you want it.”
“She probably hasn’t refreshed it regularly.”
“Get some,” she said, “and I’ll teach you to wash it.”
The starter was salvageable, but just. It had taken on the taste of disuse and the world narrowing in. I gathered the old crock and my grandmother from her house and brought her to mine, and even as I began to work, the mother dough lightened, began to sweeten.
I divided it into three sections. One I darkened with malt sugar and rye and my own sorrow. One I washed according to Poppy’s instructions, to bring it back to a version of itself that was as close to Bridget’s original as possible. The other I used to bake a loaf of bread that I buried in the backyard at Adelaide’s, to signify the end of this life and the start of the new one.
It was easier to care for my grandmother in her own home, so I sold my little house and moved in with her, and I continued to cook that whole long winter. My grandmother sat with me, sometimes staring with vacant