Joy For Beginners by Erica Bauermeister Page B

made a perfume that was the essence of bread, but even then, how could you get it to cover one person so evenly, to sink into hair, hands, the warm expanse of a chest?
    But it was in her, too, she realized, holding her wrist up to her nose. She burrowed in closer to Henry and inhaled the scent at the base of his neck.
    “How are you?” he asked.
    “Happy,” she said.
    “Bread does that to people,” he commented with a grin.

    DARIA’S LEGS STRADDLED the potter’s wheel, her hands cradling the mound of clay set at its center. Outside it was raining lightly, the drops falling in harpsichord notes down the gutters, running out to the kitchen garden, tilled under for the winter. The CD that Henry had given her whirled in the old, beat-up CD player on the counter and she heard a woman’s voice singing, almost a man’s, deep and low, like gravel on a dirt road. At some point the line between music and emotion was ground away and it rolled out, unrestrained—the joy of a child, the mourning of a widow, the anger of man in a world where only the exit doors opened.
    Daria kicked the wheel and felt the clay moving between her wet palms. She worked the mound, raising it up, pushing it down, feeling its flexibility, the solidity. She opened the base with her thumb, and then started to pull the shape up and out, into a bowl.
     
    A SUNDAY IN JANUARY, the cold air pushing against the windows, hanging low and foggy over the water outside Henry’s houseboat. Daria pulled two loaves from the oven, reveling in the warmth of the kitchen and the heat that came through the hot pads in her hands. The tops of the bread were brown, full and mounded.
    Over the past few months she had become more adept at making bread, although the seagulls had been well fed on her first attempts. But she loved weekends now, the wonderful merry-go-round of kitchen and bed as the bread evolved through its stages—her favorite part when the dough went into the oven and she and Henry would lie in bed in the loft, her head on his shoulder while he told her tales of kind strangers and daring adventures, stories of his travels filling the houseboat along with the smell of baking bread.
    “Can we go sometime?” she would ask him. And they would talk of places they would go, people they would meet, their words enfolding her like blankets.
    Somehow Henry always managed to finish a story just as the bread was ready in the oven. Today’s loaves were perfect, Daria thought, looking at them; she finally had it right. She heard the phone ring and Henry talking softly in the loft.
    “That was Marion,” Henry said as he came down the ladder into the kitchen. “She called looking for you. Your mom is in town and Marion wanted to know if we would come to dinner. I said yes.” He said it casually, like a robber explaining that he had simply confused the bank vault with the men’s room.
    Daria’s spine went tight. “What?”
    “I think it’s a good idea.”
    “You don’t answer for me.” She picked up the loaf of bread. The texture was firm, the color evenly brown. She went outside.
    She pitched the loaf on the deck and the seagulls moved in, screaming ecstatically.
    Henry came up behind her. “Maybe it’s time to give her a try,” he said.
    “You don’t know,” she said, her voice hard. “You travel—you meet people. Then you leave. They don’t follow you around for your whole life, stuck to you. You don’t have to see them again.”
    “Because you’ve seen your mother so recently.” Henry’s voice flashed cold. He stopped. “I’m sorry.” He went back into the house.
    When Daria came back in, Henry was cutting a slice from the second loaf, his back to her. He spread butter across its surface and handed the slice behind him without looking. Daria took it, feeling the warmth in her hand.
    “I figured you weren’t ready for honey on that yet,” he said.
    “I’m sorry,” she said. “This is why I don’t want to go. This is what I turn