Stones for Bread Read Online Free PDF

cheese is gone. That man ate it. I know he did to spite me. I spit on him.”
    Gretchen looks at me, hides a smile against her shoulder. “I can run to the Coop.”
    “No, let me. I need some air,” I say. “And I want to find out when Brent’s coming back.”

Three

    We vacation each year, somewhere small and coastal and boring. This year it’s Maine, a ten-hour drive and a rented cottage on a bluff overlooking the sea. Little for me to do but toss rocks into the ocean and poke yellow-green seaweed with dead sticks. I wish we can visit somewhere exciting, like Disney World or the Grand Canyon. Or even Lake George, where the neighbors go every year, coming home with T-shirts and taffy and sunburns, and already-broken prizes from the boardwalk arcade.
    The water is too cold to swim. I wear my suit anyway, sand creeping into it while I make castles; eventually I run home to bathe and change because it’s like wriggling on sandpaper.
    I wash and find my parents on the deck, sitting close, chairs touching, arms touching, maybe silent for hours, maybe silent only now that I’ve come. They soak one another in. I feel like an outsider, trapped in the intensity radiating from them, until my father makes room for me on his lap. He props his legs on the splintery gray railing. I rest my feet on his, curling my toes over his own, his nails scratchingmy skin. He kisses my hair. Mother offers me a sip of her wine, liquid jelly in a squat glass. Nur einen kleinen Schluck! She rarely speaks German in the home if Oma isn’t visiting, and never to me. I feel giddy and older than eight, and try not to pucker after I gulp down a sharp mouthful of purple. The coughing comes anyway, and my parents laugh. Sie glaubt, sie ist ein Fisch!
    Invariably, they tell me—again—how they met. More for them than for me.
    I wish I can say it’s in some tiny Parisian café or a neighborhood bakery in Brooklyn with the most perfect Jewish rye. But they meet in an appliance store. My father works there, twenty years old and earning money for city college. He and the other young salesmen wager to see who can get customers to walk out with items they never intended to buy. My father’s item this day is an electric fondue pot. The customer is my mother.
    Ice to Eskimos, boys. Ice to Eskimos , he says.
    She comes in for vacuum cleaner bags and leaves with only that. He loses two dollars to the guys but manages to get her phone number, which he feels is more than a fair trade.
    They marry three months later.
    I don’t understand them. Even as a child I see how different they are. Perhaps their unrequited passions glue them together, the daily failure to live lives other than ordinary. My mother puts aside her passion for baking to work as an elementary school secretary because we need the money. She buys cheap blenders and toasters from garage sales for my father to deconstruct in the basement. She always has dough crusted in her engagement ring. My father, a lunch meat deliveryman, works thirteen-hour days bringing black forest ham and logs of salami to grocery stores. A proprietor of three failed businesses. He’s a tinkerer, a connoisseur of spare parts. He builds metal whirlygig sculptures in the garden, much to the complaint of the families on our street.
    They live on crusts of what may have been.
    I’m hungry , I say.
    Let’s go out. It’s vacation , my father says. None of us like seafood so we find a near-empty Italian place, and when the hostess asks, Booth or table? my mother nudges me to answer and I pick the booth. My parents sit across from one another and I’m next to my mother, against the window, my bare legs sticking to the red vinyl. The air conditioner blows above my head, and I try to rub the gooseflesh from my arms. We order, and the waitress brings our salads and drinks—I have ginger ale, a rare treat—and a basket of bread.
    We all snatch a slice. The crust is thin and flaky, the crumb a blinding white pillow. My mother