Crow Jazz Read online

  My bread becomes whatever it or I desire, a round, a square, a flower, a naked lady. When people ask what is in a loaf, I reply, “Look in the fridge.” I may have leftover porridge, or chutney, or beer, or pesto sauce. Bread is life, and life is never the same.

  However, in bread as in life and poetry, patience is essential. Meditation is the precursor to enlightenment. The brick-like doorjambs that often turn up at dinner parties are the result of rushing. Bread, like women in lust, should not be rushed.

  My bread starts out with liquid at body temperature. That could be breast milk, beer, lemonade, mare’s piss (filled with estrogen), whatever. To that liquid, I add an egg or eggs depending on how many I have. For a chal-lah-type bread, up to a dozen eggs are mixed in. Sugar is important. That could be about a half cup of honey, sugar, molasses or jam to twoish cups of liquid.

  The leavening agent is always yeast. I use about four tablespoons for fourish cups of flour and two cups liquid. The sugar and yeast should be dissolved before adding flour. The “ish” is important. We are feeling our way.

  I add only half of the flour at the beginning to make what is euphemistically known as a sponge. Flour I stir in; and this is where poetry is important. A song, a poem, a significant number makes all the difference to the bread. The bread incantation is as vital as the one a mother chooses for childbirth. Think of the stirring as the labour. I enjoy the labour, knowing the results will be blissful.

  Now the bread rises while I dance with a stray cat, read a magazine or go out for lunch. Like my husband, it waits for me.

  When the sponge, covered by a damp tea towel, rises like the aforementioned lover, I add the rest of the flour, oil, salt, nuts, herbs, leftovers like porridge and beer, and knead. Kneading is what a cat does to get milk from its mother’s breast. I fold the flesh over and over, do my age, which I won’t reveal here. Suffice to say, it is enough.

  Now it is time to read another magazine and let the dough rise. By the time the bread is cooked, I will know all the celebrity gossip. The mud rises at least twice, and I “punch” it each time. It helps to think of the Deranged Rooster or meter maids writing parking tickets. Rage is helpful, and no one charges bread-pummelers with assault. The kneading and rising processes stretch the gluten. There is time to make love between risings.

  Several hours down the garden path, it is time for a final punch and the dividing of the loaves. I shape the dough and put on, or in, a well-oiled pan. I put herbs in the oil. They make a lovely crust. Sometimes I oil the whole loaf and cover it with rosemary (for remembrance), salt and garlic. A beaten egg makes a nice glaze, especially for a braided challah.

  It is time to turn the oven on to 375 degrees. A pan of water left in the oven makes a “crustier” crust. That is a matter of choice. When the bread is fully risen, I put it in the oven and do the dance of joy a neighbour performs every time his grandchildren leave. After fifteen minutes, I turn the temperature down to 350 degrees. In an hour, when the top is golden and a rap on the crust produces a knock, the bread is ready. It will be a work of art. Trust the sponge method and me. We are infallible.

  My real-life children were embarrassed about the oversized whole-wheat sandwiches in their lunch boxes. Everyone else at school had bologna on Wonder Bread. Wasn’t it bad enough that they wore short pants and sandals in the redneck town where we sheep-farmed? Wasn’t it bad enough that I put paintbrushes in their infant hands when all the other boys were given .22s for shooting rabbits and sometimes each other?

  But that is jumping ahead. As it turned out, I was lucky to be married at all. My father had warned me numerous times that girls who dared to compete with boys usually lost out in the matrimonial market. I was a hopeless bluestocking, and the crème de menthe frappés my brother and I whipped up when our parents went to cocktail parties and charitable events were my only indoor kitchen skill.

  The sidewalk where I laid out my mud pies was an altar. I had rituals—magical ingredients, a precise liturgy, incantations that ensured just the right amount of sunlight, and a worshipful congregation of kids who were awed by my infant poems and my baking.

  However, there was one little boy, one devil with a buzz cut, who questioned my sacrament.

  “It’s just dirt,” he said, poking my baking with a stick, threatening my doll.

  “Bugger off, mean boy,” I yelled, and a collective shiver told me the faithful were impressed with my syntax. In those days, kids got their mouths washed out with Dettol for using language like that. Their horror inspired me.

  My grandmother’s timepiece caught my eye. “Piss off, or I will clock you.”

  The crowd stood still. No one breathed. Stick Boy and I stood nose to nose in the ultimate game of boys against girls, which frequently ended in somebody taking down somebody else’s underpants and revealing the secrets that inspired the mandatory separation of boys’ and girls’ washrooms.

  I saw the pisspants bad boy’s lip quiver. His eye twitched. He wanted to run home to his mother. I could tell.

  “I dare you!” I said; the thrill shot an electrical current between my legs.

  The crowd sighed and compressed as the neighbourhood fiend raised his omnipotent twig and came down with a splat on my lovely loaves.

  “Ahhh!” If I had lit candles, they would have gone out. My pupils constricted. There was nothing left to do in the absence of light but retaliate. If I backed down, the feminist cause would be set back to the Dark Ages.

  I lifted my grandmother’s clock and brought it down on his head. The bad boy screamed; glass tinkled on the pavement. Blood gushed from his head.

  Never run away from a wild animal, I remembered hearing on a scary radio show. I backed off, slowly retreated up the path, up the steps and through our front door.

  My mother was busy not cooking. I ran past her, grabbed a pile of comic books and disappeared under my bed. My mother approached. All I could see were her feet in spectator shoes. She tapped her foot in an interrogatory pattern.

  “What’s up?”

  “Nothing.” My father was a lawyer. How many times had I heard him tell a client over the phone, “Say nothing?”

  “Nothing?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Then what are you doing under your bed?”

  “I just need a little time to myself.”

  “That’s my line,” she said.

  “Yes,” I replied. “That’s right.”

  My mother returned to the living room, sat down and flipped through Eleanor Roosevelt’s speech to the Appalachian coal miners. I could hear the pages slapping together, making almost as much noise as my panicked heart.

  After an agony of waiting, justice knocked at our front door, and there was a sharp exchange. The door closed. My mother’s spectator shoes made their way back to my bed and stood firm. I stopped breathing.

  “So, you clocked the little bully down the street.”

  “Yes.”

  “He had eighteen stitches.”

  “Good,” I said bravely.

  “Yes,” she said, “Good. Let’s have cookies and milk.”

  She didn’t spank me. That was for real crimes like sassing her back. I didn’t have to do hard time, even though my mother thought it would be a wise idea to stay indoors for a couple of days, just for appearances.

  I gave up on solar cooking, but the pleasure of mud never left me. On my birthday, my husband, who knows nothing about my proclivity for violence, took me to the Calistoga mud baths near his childhood home in Santa Rosa, California.

  These days, I cook the way I write. I gather life’s pleasure and some of its pain and dump it into a big mixing bowl. While I stir, I sing, recite, pray. The results are sometimes interesting. My husband calls my style “expressionist.”

  “What do you mean by that?” I ask.

  He is a musician who plays from the heart. I hope he will say “heartfelt.” He thinks for a moment, “Expressionism is an ordered chaos, a one-of-a-kind gestalt. Your cooking has order i
n that I can always guess what I am eating and chaos in that it is never the same.”

  I do not read instructions on packages. I do not read recipes. I will not be told how to think. I think that is a good thing. Surprise, some of my culinary results are stellar; and I am asked the inevitable question, “Can I have the recipe?”

  What am I to say? Rilke said we must “live our way to the answers.” Can my friends not live their ways to a heavenly soufflé (I am willing to say “Fresh eggs!”) or an angelic loaf of bread (“Let it rise slowly.”). When I taste something good, I close my eyes and accept it into my being. I learn music the same way. My husband, who is being much quoted in this piece and will probably experience a rush of ingratitude, says that playing music well is avoiding the wrong notes. Exactly. That is how to cook. Take risks, I say. Great art, great writing and great music don’t come out the same way every time.

  ONE MORE STORY

  The child is watching. She’s been here since sunrise, getting bolder by the hour. Now she is right in front of me.

  “Why are you digging?”

  “Looking for China.”

  “That’s silly. I don’t believe you. It would take forever.”

  What does she believe? Not in the tooth fairy or Santa Claus. This is a practical girl with a handsome, almost adult, face she will grow into. Oh how I wish for an afterlife that will allow me to witness this lovely child as an adult, going about the world dispensing kindness as she does now, taking her drawings, her homemade cookies and healing touch to the street and the rest home where her elder-friends are incarcertated. Stay kind, I say, when her little fists clench, when the world of television news assaults her. Turn the other cheek, but stay standing.

  “Forever is for fairy tales.”

  I have to blow her off with brevity. There’s no time to dispute the nature of being with an argumentative primary schooler. Digging is not an exact science, but I do need to concentrate.

  How many times have I said, Watch me, just as I did with her father, who has turned out to be a good father, a good cook, a reader and a good gardener, his male and female in balance. Write things down if you like, then chew up the paper and swallow. These are adaptable truths, my recipes. I tell her recipes evolve, change like crows imitating voices.

  I have changed, left fear behind, and that is a blessing. I think she is already fearless.

  There was a time when I believed my soufflés would fall and my words would fail if I let go of my rituals. When I whipped eggs or stirred the sponge for my bread, I would beat my age, no more, no less.

  Then there were other lists, for a while my phobias, a family joke. I went from ablutophobia to zoophobia and back. You’re wearing out the flour, they told me, stretching your gluten to the moon. It was true. I agreed my crusts were tough and my arms worn out, and I quit baking and knitting cold turkey, consoling myself with old movies and buckets of gin. My rituals are no longer about fear. They are simply parameters.

  “How many scoops in a bucket?” she asks.

  “I’m not counting,” I say.

  She’s laughing. They all laugh. Come on. I may be neurotic, but I am not stupid.

  “That’s rude.”

  They’ve noticed I’m anxious in a new way, can’t wait for the green bananas and long-playing records. My embedded rituals are, as ever, comforting: the tea at four with the spoon in the four o’clock position ritual, the eighty-six attacks on my tooth enamel and my thinning hair rituals. Damn, I’m going to be tidy when I meet my holy bridegroom.

  Now I’m a digger, no, not a not Protestant anarchist, but Voltaire’s disciple, God’s gardener digging to China, twenty scoops in a bucket, eighty-seven buckets, a bed. I love dirt. It is not dirty, not anymore. Now it is terroir, that beautiful word, stars fueling up for my backwards ride to the firmament, no longer the septic host to pernicious microbes. Now I fancy myself falling asleep in my luxurious dirt bath on the other side of the forest, future food for a vintage wine or everbearing strawberry, grass for hungry goats.

  I’m a small woman, slowly shrinking from formidable to adorable, now an apple doll of a person, something to cuddle rather than confront, going for a finite number. When I get to magic eighty-seven, the hole should be big enough, every load marked with my stick, just in case I forget, which is becoming all too common.

  I can’t remember the first word I misplaced, so I’ll go through the alphabet, all the way to polyanthus, then porcine—it can’t be phobia. Phobia is unforgettable, greasy movie hotdogs, sounds like throat boogers, the gob of anxiety, the one that gives people cancer and sclerotic arteries, the noun that keeps us alert. I miss my nouns. Sometimes I lie awake at night, naming things. How much longer will I remember them? That is the cruellest question.

  Phobias have been my little helpers, elves and fairies. Once upon a time, I knew the word for every one. I wrote them on Post-its, tacked them on my wall. Choose one and write a story, I said to myself. Draw a picture. Anxiety is helpful to artists, manifests in notes that push away fear, splashes of colour that frighten the devil and all his accomplices, spells that summon the angels protecting us.

  “Do you know the word for “fear of dirt”?” I decide to engage her, a little. We love to play dictionary, and she consumes words like a hungry puppy, but, although generous in other ways, she doles them out carefully as if she were in a child court of law, as if everything depended on thrift. Sometimes I worry the rest of the family talks so much there is no room for her, but she makes her own spaces. When she speaks, it matters.

  “You said it was meso something.”

  “Mysophobia. I’m over that one.”

  “We made mud pies, remember, when I got upset about dirt.”

  “And now you’re a real outdoor girl. Was that you spying on me yesterday while I was staking my bed? I thought I saw your yellow dress in the trees.”

  “That was me.”

  “I,” I say.

  Goddamn. My bad. Rule number one, thou shalt only correct a child’s grammar indirectly, by example.

  “Sorry.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Double sorry with sugar on top.”

  “I’ll forgive you if you tell me a story.”

  “OK. After this bucket.” Today she is wearing shorts and sandals. In the sixties, I sent my boys to primary school in shorts and sandals, with girl-shirts and bowl haircuts. They still haven’t forgiven me.

  “Nothing wrong with being a hippy,” I think out loud.

  “What’s that?”

  “Never mind.”

  “Hippos are nearly extinct. So are pandas, polar bears and pygmy elephants.”

  I put down my trowel and sit on the edge of the hole. “You’re a smart girl. Do you know what a zoophobe is?”

  “Someone who hates zoos. I hate zoos. They shouldn’t lock animals up.”

  “You are right and not quite right. Zoophobes are people who fear animals.”

  “I’m not afraid of any, any animal, not even wasps. They only sting you if you pester them.” She sits beside me, throws a handful back in, the tease.

  “I wasn’t always afraid. I didn’t want anything to hurt my babies. It wasn’t about me.” That was when I started drinking, I said to myself, but not to her. Too much information. She wouldn’t remember that.

  “I’m all about me,” she says.

  “That’s normal for your age, six, right?”

  “No, seven.” This is our inside joke. I keep telling her not to grow up too fast.

  “I’m almost eighty-seven.”

  “I know. Tomorrow’s your birthday.”

  Gerontophobia, fear of growing old. I didn’t have that one. That was gravity, the way to this very moment.

  “What are you afraid of, Geegee?”

  “Nothing now. Not a damn thing.”

  “What about people afraid of people?”

  “That’s the big one, the worst one of all.”

  “I’m not afraid.”

  “Me either.�
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  “Neither.”

  “Whatever. I’m almost done. I’m closing in on the magic number.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It doesn’t matter. I’m just done with worrying.” I survey the mound of dirt beside the hole and the hole itself, a single bed as it were, just enough room to lie back and enjoy the night sky, and a few sips. I brought my down pillow.

  “Have you ever tasted champagne?”

  “No, but I’d like to.”

  “I only have one mug.” “We can share.”

  “You bet we can. We’re from the same germ bed.” The first time I told her that was when she asked if it was safe to kiss me on the lips.

  “Is this kind of a sleepover?”

  “You could say that.”

  “I like sleepovers.”

  “Then I will tell you a scary sleepover story.”

  “I like scary.” This is new. Usually, she gets to choose between scary, funny and wonderland, and she has never chosen scary. She waits for me to start.

  “Once upon a time, a man and wife were on their honeymoon on the Playa del Este in Cuba. Playa del Este means eastern beach, where easterly winds make enormous waves in the sea and blow the sand around.

  “The husband loved his wife dearly, and kept touching their wedding rings because he couldn’t believe his luck in finding a bride and hopefully a mother for his children.

  “He would do anything for her, anything but swimming. He couldn’t go in the ocean with her, because he was aquaphobic, afraid of the water and sea creatures ever since he had a dream about drowning.

  “His wife thought that was silly. She was a ballerina in the water, so of course she went swimming without him while he sat under an umbrella and watched her perform her water wheels and oysters.

  “I know what those are.”

  “Of course you do. You are poetry in the pool.”

  “After only a few minutes, out of the blue, the sun disappeared behind dark clouds stirred up by easterly winds. That was some storm. The groom called his new wife in from the sea, and she swam back to the beach where he waited with his mind in an anxious knot.