by Elizabeth Cohen
Kasterbrot. Granary Cob. Malted Current. Lardy bread. Soak the yeast in a little water, measure out one of the 26 specific flours you have ordered online. And stir. Stir with all the muscle you can muster. Get ripped.
By noon, the house fills with it, the deep, ancient scent of dough, baking into a soft pillow bounded by a crusty skin. Bake into three loaves you will wrap up and stuff in your backpack. Take two of your creations with you on your bike, pull off a hunk for the ride, head down the mountain.
Two stops.
Stop 1. Nana’s
Stop 2. Mauricio’s.
Nana is always waiting in her favorite chair. It can recline in three different positions, plus jiggle, heat, and charge up a cell phone. You got it for her right after it happened, so at least she could be comfortable physically. It even has a little side pocket perfect which is for a cell phone, which she says is perfect for the rosary. It is a chair that can do almost everything, except bake. And bring back the dead.
But that’s ok because Nana has lived a long time and is wise. She knows nothing can bring back the dead. And she also knows that every week, you will head over to bring her bread. “What is it today?” she will ask, and you will report back: French. Multigrain. Soda. Whatever.
She brought your line into existence when she birthed your mama. You bake her bread.
Second stop: Mauricio’s.
There he is, front yard, wife beater shirt, hood open on his 1967 turquoise blue Chevrolet Apache short bed. Cigarette hanging off his lip.
You always ask the same question: “Hey, how are you?” He always answers, “Okay.” Then you go inside his house and do it. Afterwards, you hand him the bread.
You used to be a regular person. Worked in a regular office, vacationed in regular places: Florida, Virginia Beach, San Juan, ran 5k’s. Invested in a 401K. All the regular life stuff. You were even engaged, thought of having a family—little babies in bonnets and onesies. Once you painted your whole house ecru. That’s a Martha Stewart color. You had plans. Regular life plans.
Seasonal allergies, aging, political unrest, war—there is some serious crap out there even a regular person can learn about on the internet. Sometimes it was quite upsetting and on that one day, it all ganged up on you and chased you down that alley on your bike. You were riding to get away from all the dark. But the darkness had other plans for you. That was the day you found mama. Right there, in that alley.
The detective says things like “we’re working on it.” And “try to get on with your life.”
Easy for him to say in his grey three-piece with his Paco Rabanne cologne and file cabinet of murders, he just files them away. Alphabetically. Your mama went missing one April and a whole year went by, and her file just sat there in the M file, for Miller. We are talking, spring, summer, fall, winter and another spring. Then things changed when you got the map. A map! Silver envelope. Red ink.
On your bike you followed that map. You rode over the Castleton Bridge to East 19th street. To the alley behind the abandoned theater. That’s where mama was. She popped out of her life there and into the M file. Into plastic bags.
Nobody wants to hear about crap like this. Even the detective doesn’t like to discuss it. What they think happened to Mama and six others.
Everyone got maps. Mine was in Crayola. The detective analyzed it. “Sure enough,” he said, “Crayola,” like that was some big revelation.
I gave up on regular after that.
First to go was the fiancée. Yeah right. Like we are gonna’ plan a wedding here. Next went the job. Like I care about diversified portfolios. Cancelled Ibiza. Cancelled new carpet. Cancelled book group; cancelled kayak lessons; cancelled intermittent fasting. Which is pretty interesting, because if you think about it, fasting itself is cancelling food. You cancelled cancelling food.
One day, you meet the others. The other six. One is wearing a yellow dress and this annoys you. A year earlier, you’d cancelled yellow. Another woman has dyed red hair. It is actually more like burgundy. Imagine, dying hair, you think. Why? A man drives up in a newer model BMW SUV and he seems way too something, but you can’t put your finger on it. “How do you get through the days?” he asks the group who are sitting around a table at a café downtown.
“It is the nights,” says yellow dress. “I’m struggling with nights.”
BMW man talks about his partner. “He left me last week,” he says. Everyone nods. All the partners have left. Nobody wants to be connected to this. Being connected to you is being connected to it. Yellow dress says she’s started gardening. “My mother loved flowers.”
Everyone shuts up. All the mothers loved things.
Then Mauricio speaks up. He is standing by the door. He has on a tee shirt that shows off his muscular arms, covered in tattoos. His actual mom—her picture—is tattooed on his arm and her name is written in slanty script on the other arm. Mauricio is the one who says it: “the pieces of them”.
Nobody says a thing after that. When you hear that you freeze.
You collected up your mama in a series of numbered garbage bags. But she was too much to carry. You had to leave parts of her behind. You took home the rosary that was still clasped in the #4 bag, the “hand bag”. You stood with your Nana at the side of the little lake your mama loved and handed her that rosary. “What is the point of anything?” your Nana asked.
You wept and your weeping dissolved into the side of the lake. Soon, you were inside the lake. Your Nana was saying “why, why,” and that made you join you weeping, dissolve too. Soon, you realized that you were powdered like Kool-Aid, stirred into the water. Then you were completely gone. You were just lake.
The next time you meet with them, those six, you and the group get serious. You try to make some decisions. What will you choose? A memorial garden? A plaque? College fund? You cannot pick. You all walk away having decided on one thing alone: not to meet again.
Except Mauricio, on the way out. “Come to my place?” he asks. You nod. You will go to his place.
It is a wordless thing, you and Mauricio. Since the day of that final meeting of the group, you have begun to go to his house once a week on your bike. There is a silent communion then, of your bodies. You keep your eyes closed the whole time. It’s like you are creatures that once together, camouflage. Are you really there? Are you not there? Passion can be translucent. Passion can be silent. You and Mauricio are all about what is not said. You never mention your mother; he never mentions his. You both know about the other’s mother. They were there in your lives and then they were put into numbered garbage bags. The investigation is nowhere—this was some clever shithole that did this.
One time you do talk, however. You tell Mauricio something. You tell him about the lake. Your mother’s lake. How you dissolved into it. He tells you he has become the soil in the ravine beside his mother’s apartment complex. He goes there and lies down in it. Someday he will be buried there. He is practicing.
“Have some more bread,” you say, in a cracked voice, almost whispered, like a prayer in church.
“What kind?”
“It’s the seeded rye.”
You bake on Saturdays. The smell of bread fills the emptiness. You remember once, your mother, making gingerbread. Her hands covered in the dark dough. “Lick the spoon?” she offered.
You took the spoon from her. You took it into the tv room and licked it slowly while watching Bewitched. In the kitchen you could hear her humming, washing the dishes. During a commercial she appeared in the doorway. “Beaters?” She handed you the beaters, the spatula, the bowl.
Was that your real life? Sometimes you wonder. Is this your real life? Are you still alive? Or is this like the movie the Sixth Sense, and you have died too, but do not know it yet. The absence of her is right beside you, all the time. Especially when you are baking, there is the spoon. The beaters. The spatula. The bowl.
Russian Black Bread. Pistoulette. Foulatte. Pain et Chocolate. You put some back into it. It’s a workout. Build some upper body strength. Meet someone on a walk someday, you don’t want to end up in garbage bags.
Bake, visit Nana, do Mauricio. Your life is like those quiz shows—the curtain, the box, the envelope. Three options.
It also reminds you of an application for grad school, where you have to explain yourself by checking boxes and writing short paragraphs. Only you cancelled grad school, right after you cancelled the new carpet and the trip to Ibiza. People in stores, you keep wondering, do they really see you? The scent of bread baking seems more real than other things. Bread has taste, smell, texture, all the alive things. It is made with yeast, which is alive, thought very small.
But then “bread” rhymes with “dead”, you note. The world is messing with you.
One evening before you visit Mauricio, you bake rosemary focaccia, a bread that is flat and pocked like a mattress. The next time you visit, you cannot help but notice it is still sitting there, not a piece cut off, not a bite taken. It lies untouched on the counter. What is that about?
Answer (circle one). Are you really alive? Did you really make bread?
Yes. No. Not sure.
© 2024 Elizabeth Cohen All rights reserved.
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