Your hands don’t work quite how they used to; I see it in the strain of your tendons, outlines jutting out from beneath your skin, rumpled linen. Still, you knead the dough with all the delicate care you reserve for women’s work, the respect you prescribe to it. To you, it was never demeaning, only necessary, and besides, I always thought you got the last laugh, anyway. Grandfather eats at the head of the table but can’t reckon at all the work that went into how his plate came together. Without you, I think he’d likely starve.
“I
hate to see you leave empty-handed,” you say, the way you always have. Born to
fuss, to peddle. The clothes from your back, if nothing else. I used to think
it was polite to refuse, dictate my aversion to bothering you, “next time,” I’d
say, “there’s always a next time.” I know better now. I know to tell you I’d
hate to leave that way, too, and you give me that look, a mockreprimand for my
ill manners, that wordless admonishment so patented to you by the rest of our
family, and you lead me to kitchen without another word.
Your
wedding ring gets caught on the billowing skin of your knuckles, so you can’t
take it off to bake anymore. Little diamond imprints freckle the dough,
pockmarks of history. If not for a wedding sixty years ago, there would be no
bread baked freshly here today. A million ways the universe can remind you of
the precarity of it all, of all the little fragmented pieces strung along to
write a story, penned by generation after generation. Countless ways a loaf can
collapse in on itself while it rises, and yet.
Often, I wonder what you were like as a mother, young and afraid. I can’t imagine you holding a new baby without kneading it like dough; that’s the shape love takes in your hands, that’s the action it inspires. All my life, I watched my mother rise like bread, resilient, without collapse. That was you, moulding her with fluid wrists before everything in your body went arthritic.
When
you’re finally satisfied, you put the bread in the oven to bake, offer me a tea
to sip while we wait for it to rise. Sitting side by side, we drink together.
You used to take yours with milk, but since the lump was removed from your
colon, you find nothing sits right anymore, your stomach too easily unsettled.
I take mine black and tell you it’s in solidarity, but really, it’s because I
don’t want to think about who’s old and who isn’t. Drinking black tea together makes girls of
the both of us.
There’s
a dream you had once, you tell me, about a man in a field who was
simultaneously your husband and not, someone who emerged from the forest
wearing his clothes, his face. He came to greet you, and you went frigid as he
got closer, the sun snuffed out like a candle on a birthday cake. It all looked
right; it was in your body where it felt wrong.
“What
do you make of that?” you ask me.
“That
you’re having too much milk before bed,” I reply.
“Maybe
you could make a story out of it,” you say. That’s how I know it’s important to
you, the meaning. You only need help parsing it out, sift through it like
powdered sugar, catching and extracting the lumps.
“Maybe
it was God,” I try again, now that I know it’s serious.
“Things
are rarely that simple,” you reply.
The smell of warm, sweet yeast leaks
from the oven when you open the door. When you send me home, it’s with the loaf,
but an old jacket, too, and bundles of embroidery thread. Whenever I visit, I
notice the house is a little emptier.
You’ve sealed the bread in an airlocked container, but the smell of it
is stuck to my hair, my clothes. With every step, it curls up into my nose.
At
home, there’s a pile of identical containers I keep in the corner, all of them
once yours, all of them I used to keep meaning to return, before I stopped
kidding myself, before I realized exactly what it was you wanted. I add the
latest top of the stack, see how the different shades of faded plastic bleed
into the next, a discordance of watercolour.
In
the corner, a rocking chair, fabric smattered with tulips, and a matching
footrest that sways in tandem. They used to belong to you, before you gave them
to my mother, who gave them back to you, who gave them to my sister, who gave
them back to you, who gave them to me, the family circuit. I have no intention
of returning them to you, either; you’ve finally won, and I’m more than happy
to concede.
History
clings to the fabric like old smoke, comes up in loose clouds every time I sit
down. I run my hand along the upholstery and hope the leftover smell of yeast
bleeds in so someone might smell your bread from generations away. It’s my
favourite chair, my favourite of most anything I own, and it’s where I go to
write, in general, but also for you. There’s a feeling I get while sitting
there, being among everything that’s come before while making something new,
that makes the work feel more tangible, more worthwhile, that I could hold it
in my hands and someday trace its impact like lineage.
You
want the story of the man written out for you in a way you can digest, but
everything is hard on your stomach, and therefore on my conscience. I could
make him God, but I already know you think that’s the easy way out. I could
make him a stranger, but there’s no excitement in that, no satisfaction. I
could make him you, but that only seems patronizing, like a lesson. Part of me,
the petulant part, bratty as you’ve always called me, wants to call you and ask
what you
want me to do with it, this
unformed thing in my hands, parse it out of you, find out how it wants to be
kneaded. After all, it’s yours, or it will be, the final version of it, so why
shouldn’t it be tailored to your whims instead of mine? What do I know, what
wisdom do I possess, that isn’t something you taught me yourself?
But
you were young once, too. It was years before the monster arrived that you left
Miramichi, but it still burdened you just the same. It’s a small town, and you
share your maiden name with the lead reporter on the case; no blood relation,
but bound together just the same by shared history, boots on the ground with
the same soil caked in the soles. What it must have felt like, I can only posit
at. These days, it seems we’re all well-acquainted with fear, and unease, and
the unknown, but back then everyone was a neighbour. Everyone’s face was
familiar, everyone wore familiar clothes.
You
keep a couple of the reporter’s books on a shelf, but you never read them.
Sometimes, when it rains, you feel the ache in your dialknob joints and almost
reach for a distraction, the overcast sky evoking a body memory of a different
place, but you always stop yourself, turn to the kitchen instead. It’s the part
of the story that hovers, impalpable, but that you’ve never put the words to.
Still, decades later, the miasma spills in through your ears and tarnishes your
dreams.
When
my hands start to write, it’s because they know the story is there, waiting to
be uncovered, veiled by the mist of your memory. I work at it like you work at
dough, smoothing and straightening and rolling and moulding, until it comes out
shaped like a trajectory. And the next time I see you, I’ll have the papers in
hand, strung together with twine, and you’ll read the story of the man with a
familiar face, this man who could have been anyone, and you who could only be
yourself, and he’ll come to you, and you will be afraid, but in your hands
you’ll find a loaf of bread, and something wills at you to give it to him, and
he will take it, break it like communion, and with each piece that passes his
lips, finally he will start to look like himself; your love is all it takes to
recognize him.
