Chapter 10 With the Spongy Bread
WITH THE SPONGY brEAD
How was I only half an hour into my new life and already in trouble? I’d planned so carefully!
I’d risen at six after our first night in the apartment, with the help of Joe’s alarm clock.
He’d told me he slept until six-thirty, but when one is doing something unfamiliar, it’s best to give oneself plenty of time.
Dressing was easy enough; I wore the plaid dress, which was the only real option.
Trousers would have been more practical, though; the air was chilly and the apartment not clean enough by my German standards.
Everything needed a good scrubbing, that was clear, and for this, trousers are better.
There must be shops somewhere, for people certainly seemed to have plenty to wear.
I just needed to find them. For now, I pulled on my old sludge-green cardigan, the one that had belonged to Dr. Müller, and headed into the kitchen, closing the bedroom door behind me.
The wooden house was quite new, built perhaps fifty years earlier, and divided now into four flats. Ours was in the front, at the bottom. I could hear somebody walking around upstairs, which was odd; perhaps the floors were thin? Could floors be thin?
Right. Kitchen. Breakfast. I’d made Joe breakfast before, in Germany, and I could do the same here. Bread and jam and coffee, and I had all of them.
We’d gone to the supermarket yesterday, a terrifyingly large and shiny space with shelf after shelf of products, far more than I’d ever seen in my life, most of them in packets and tins.
We’d limited our purchases to bread and milk and margarine and something Joe called “iceberg lettuce” that looked like cabbage, because he’d said he had jam and marmalade in the refrigerator and coffee in the cupboard.
Said it so casually, too, as he’d picked up a dozen eggs—a dozen!
—packaged in a clever cardboard carton that provided a little nest for every egg, and put it into a rolling cart that one could push ahead instead of tiring one’s arms. Really, the Americans were very clever. No wonder they’d won the war.
We’d bought oranges, too, because I couldn’t resist them, and had ridden home. Yes, ridden, for this was Joe’s biggest surprise: he’d bought me a bicycle!
“It took me a while to find the right one,” he’d said.
“Most American girls are bigger than you, but some shrimpy senior was selling hers, and I snagged it.” I wasn’t sure what “shrimpy” meant—that one was like a shrimp?
Pink and curly? The bicycle was blue and very pretty, though, as shiny as if it were brand-new, and had a woven basket fastened to the handlebars, “so you can carry your shopping home,” Joe had said.
He had a bicycle, too, a black one, that he rode to the university, which was practical, and it had a basket, too.
“So I can help you haul things,” he’d explained.
“I use my Army backpack around school, though. Very handy for all those books. You can tell us vets that way; well, that and the fact that we look a few years older, feel about forty years older, and tend to jump at loud noises.” He’d smiled, though, so that was clearly a joke.
Now, I pulled everything out from its spot, memorizing the locations, for order was important.
A can of coffee granules, bread in a plastic bag patterned with cheerful colored dots, a jar of orange marmalade—because Joe had said he liked marmalade better than jam, and California was the place of oranges—and the margarine, and began my work.
Wait. First, I must make Joe’s lunch. He’d said, “Just make me a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich tomorrow, and a cheese sandwich with lettuce and mayo, and maybe toss an orange in there. That’s what I’ve been doing.
If you want to get more creative later on, I won’t say no.
” I didn’t know what “creative” meant, but I’d memorized what he wanted and resolved to ask him later what else he’d like.
I’d have time to learn, because he’d said I shouldn’t try to get a job yet.
“We’re good for now,” he’d told me. “Give yourself a chance to settle in.” What a relief not to have to depend solely on myself!
Right. Lunch. A sandwich, I now knew, because we’d eaten them last night at the deli—with so much meat in them!
—was two slices of bread with things in between.
I looked around for a place to spread out the bread slices and other items. The kitchen table, I supposed.
It had an oilcloth over it, but when I touched it, it felt a bit grimy.
I wiped it well with a wet, soapy cloth and felt rather proud of myself.
Cleaning my cooking area was something I did know how to do, from my time as a baker.
When the oilcloth was clean and dry, I set down the four slices of bread in a neat square. Very good; very orderly. The bread was odd: pure white in color and airy in texture. Spongy, in fact, not the substantial loaf I was accustomed to. Well, I couldn’t expect everything to be the same.
The margarine, when I opened the box, was a blob of white fat like lard in a plastic bag, but it came with a capsule that the package told me to place in the bag and knead with my hands.
Joe had told me yesterday that margarine was less than a third of the cost of butter, and taxed at much lower rates.
The dairymen, however, objected to it looking like butter, so it could only be sold undyed.
What a lot of opinions people had here, and all of them attended to!
It was an odd feeling, but rather pleasant, to knead the squashy stuff, and fascinating to press the capsule with a thumb to burst it and watch the dye within came out in ribbons of gold.
I kneaded and kneaded, putting the bag on the table so I could work my hands into it better, until it looked like butter.
It was still a blob in a bag, but a much prettier blob, and I felt a surge of satisfaction and thought, Can one bake bread here, too?
Is it possible to get yeast? I must find out.
I hadn’t seen a bakery anywhere yesterday, yet Palo Alto seemed a rather wealthy place, full of large wooden houses, green lawns, and trees.
Perhaps Americans didn’t enjoy marketing?
Oddly, though, despite the variety and quantity of food here, I missed my German bread.
It had been breakfast, lunch, and dinner, but I’d always been glad of it, and it wasn’t monotonous, for one could bake Pumpernickel, dark and sweet and dense, and rye, like we’d had last night—though it had been a bit dry—and potato bread, and oh, so many other varieties!
Right. Sandwiches. The peanut butter came in a jar and was a dense, sticky sort of paste.
Clearly, one would have to spread it on the bread with a knife as one would do with Quark, the thick sour cheese we’d enjoyed in the before-times, when one could get milk.
I’d put marmalade on top of the peanut butter, and the second slice of bread on top. Easy.
Except that it wasn’t. As soon as I attempted to spread the peanut butter, the bread simply ripped. It tore into two ragged pieces, in fact, and became a bit smashed, too.
Right. Try again. With my second attempt, I tore one of the halves in half again.
After that, I held the other half down at the crusts—if one could call them that; the bread was so soft that there was really no crust to hold—and dabbed a small amount of peanut butter onto a small part of the bread.
Success! Now to do that with the rest of the slice.
When I finished, I had five pieces of bread dotted with peanut butter.
They looked ragged and squashed and very unappetizing, like a dinner for dogs, but perhaps they were meant to look like that?
I tried spreading the marmalade on top of the pieces, and that was a bit easier.
The peanut butter was still sticky, but if I dabbed the marmalade rather than spreading it, it worked.
After that, I arranged the pieces sticky-side-down onto the undestroyed bread slice, like doing a jigsaw puzzle, and stood back to survey my work.
Well, I’d do better next time.
The footsteps walked around overhead again.
Two pairs, I thought. One pair broke into some kind of rhythmic step—dancing, maybe?
—and I heard faint laughter. A woman’s, and probably a young one; I didn’t think older people danced and laughed early in the morning.
One of our neighbors was a cheerful person. That was good.
I also heard the creak of bedsprings from around the corner.
Joe was awake already? I’d better fix coffee.
I filled an odd kettle that sat on the stove—it was heavy, and taller and narrower than normal, and had a basket at the top; perhaps for tea?
Which was clever, but how would you get the boiling water onto the tea leaves?
Did you take the basket out and set it into a teapot? That seemed very inefficient.