All That's Left to Tell(60)
“So we got dressed then, and went out into the day. And Genevieve, it was one of those magical mornings. The kind you always remember even years later, maybe even when you’re very old. The air had that fragrance, you know? That smell of moisture and warmth that I’d lived long enough to know was how things turned green. The patches of grass in the row houses down our street weren’t winter dead anymore, and we could see bulbs pushing out of the ground where a few of the older people who still lived in the neighborhood had planted them. A man was walking a puppy, and I remember watching how it sniffed at every melting and fragrant thing, all those smells released by the cold, and yeah, there was some garbage, and yeah, dog shit in people’s yards, but it didn’t matter. I liked how everything seemed released, and we saw a couple walking up the street, on the other side, opposite to us, holding hands, and it was like we recognized each other, recognized ourselves as mirrors of each other, and the girl even smiled at me and gave a little wave.
“Near the main drag through that part of town, so many people were out. Some of them in overcoats, even though it was sixty degrees, but out of habit, you know, because it had been so cold. But also boys in shorts and basketball jerseys. And all the sounds were amplified. People’s conversations, the roar of buses, the flap of pigeons near the library steps. And Seth and I, we hadn’t intended to go to the bakery. It was too expensive for us, and we saved our money for drinking, though I don’t think we ever said that out loud to each other, but the smell of bread that was hovering near the door—the proprietor had propped it open; it was one of the last original bakeries in the city, and he knew how to draw people in. He was old, and he ran the shop with his wife, and I think it was only a month or so later that they closed.
“Anyway, Seth and I went in. Several customers were inside. They still had people take numbers, and we took one, even though Seth had only a couple of dollars in his pocket, and that might have been enough for a single salt roll. When it was our turn, I smiled at the man behind the counter. He was short, Italian, and you could tell he was full of the spring day, too. He spread his arms as if he was offering everything in the glass case in front of him. Beside the loaves of bread were beautifully glazed cinnamon rolls and these almost shimmering nut rolls and muffins that seemed more blueberry than muffin.
“I remember saying to him, ‘I’m sorry we’re taking up your time, but we have almost no money. Would it be okay if you held up one of those beautiful loaves of bread, and I could just take a deep smell of it?’ On another day, maybe he might have told me no, and asked me to leave, but he smiled at me, and said, ‘Sure, no charge,’ and he pulled a loaf from the rack and held it out over the counter in his gloved hands, and I brought my face close, and breathed it in. When I pulled my head away, I said, ‘Thank you so much,’ and he laughed, and I looked at Seth and said, ‘What?’ and he rubbed his finger across his own nose. ‘You got a little flour there. You took a little too big a whiff.’ I turned to the baker and said, ‘I’m sorry!’ but he was already sliding the loaf in a paper bag, and then setting it on the counter, and saying, ‘On the house, my girl,’ and when we walked out of there, he called out after us, ‘Enjoy the bread! Enjoy your youth!’ and Seth held my hand as we walked home, except when we were tearing away pieces of the loaf. It was so good. The sun on our faces. The warmth of that bread in our mouths.”
She kept hearing drops of rain pelt the lot, but none had landed on her yet, and she couldn’t see them falling in the streetlight.
“When we got home, and back up to the apartment, I stood at the window again, and I was nibbling at a crust of the bread. But I remember how it seemed, standing there, that by going back upstairs, I’d been removed from the day. And Seth came up from behind me again. And he wanted to make love, and of course we hadn’t been drinking, and if we had made love, maybe that would have been the first time without it. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t. He kept telling me he loved me, which he usually didn’t tell me in the daytime, in the morning, and I didn’t want to hear it. I kept thinking of the men in the fantasy he’d described the night before when we were drunk, and the boy with the soccer ball, and the baker and his springtime gift to us, and I kept wondering why Seth wanted to be bleeding in an alley while I was raped, and why this man would want to give us this bread, and how there could have been no baker without the men in the alley, how the boy couldn’t have kicked the ball without Seth being hit with the brick, and that wasn’t literally true, I knew, but it was in my head, and the rest of that day I wouldn’t let Seth come near me.”
She stopped then, having slid into the space between remembering that time, remembering Seth, and the place she was now lying next to Genevieve. She thought of how, sometimes, when it rained, a breeze would come up with the first wave of raindrops, and she often wondered why that happened, why everything would seem still, and then when the breeze arrived, she wondered if it was being pulled by the rain or if the wind was carrying the rain over her. But this night was airless, and the few drops that had hit the ground had now passed. She wanted Lucy. She wanted to see her sleeping in her bed at home in order to dispel the closeness of the night.
“So maybe you should stop right there,” Genevieve said. “And tell me the rest tomorrow in the car. It’s late, and we have a long drive.”
“All right, Gen,” she said.