Rescue #10 August 24th & 25th

Two little girls come into the bakery with their father this morning.

The older sister lingers by the door, using the short water cups we stack by the sugar and salt, to water the flower pot out front. 

I never noticed we had flowers until now. I can't even tell you what color they are.

“Look,” I nudge my coworker, interrupting the story she’s telling me about a cute guy at her night-job—a restaurant nearby. She's the new hostess there. Her eyes are green but also gray but also gold. “Last night it was just the two of us. Him. And me."

She is making more cardboard boxes, lining up three or four cut-outs at a time on the counter, then bending them at the seams. As she transforms their flat surfaces into an architecture that can hold four, maybe five scones, her movements feel like they’re happening in front of a mirror somehow. Like hands combing their own hair.

“She’s watering our flowers.” The girl is still there, on her third cup now.

Even though my observation is innocent, changing the topic feels like pushing against something large and already in motion; like trying to bend something stiff.

“Aww—that’s nice.” She tilts her head towards the front window, as you might tilt your head down at a stranger's baby in a stroller. Aww.

The little girl's ringlets are falling in her face as she leans over. She is trying to make sure the water reaches the roots, the soil. She holds her hands steady, upturning the cup, sensing fullness and emptiness and everything in between by feel.

I can't remember what the girls and their father bought, what I gave them in little blue and white bags. But I remember the three of them huddled by the display case, low to the ground in negotiation; the father crouched ear level with his daughters' hmms and uh-uhs and nuh-uhs. It felt so democratic, so important. So intimate.

When I was five, my father kneeled on the rough rug of my kindergarten classroom. I stood in front of his bald, shining head, wobbling on the outer edges of my bald, shining, Mary Jane shoes. 

I remember feeling bigger than him, the rainbow logo of my school sweatshirt in line with his shoulders. I don't remember his face, but I remember a fragility and also a fullness there. Like a cup, brimming. In his words, something handed to me that I couldn't hold. “I love you. I have to go.”

The next time I saw him I was eleven. He met my sisters and me at a diner in the late morning—a joint that used to be on this same street, but is now a bar.

We ordered omelets, and he ordered, "A bowl of oatmeal. And two packs of honey. And an extra plate."

I remember watching him unpeel then upturn each of the honey packets onto the fresh plate, so that their amber slime coated the ceramic. I remember him tipping over and letting fall the bowl of steaming, paper mâché oats on top of the honeyed plate. And finally, I remember his hand with the spoon, scraping the mixture into his mouth.

My father didn't show any signs of self-consciousness as he carried out this ritual. Instead, our sister knees pressed each other hard under the table, like palms over mouths—omg omg. His daughters, our bodies, held the embarrassment, the strangeness, for him.

 . . .

When I go outside for my lunch, I exit through the back door, where the pile of cardboard recycling fans onto the sidewalk. A man is sitting on a park table beneath a grove of redwoods.

It's the same man I saw yesterday, and the day before that. Maybe he's homeless, or maybe he's like all of the people at the cafe, searching for shared space, without the laptop, without the latte.

Every day he listens to a small radio, Spanish echoing into the treetops. When pedestrians pass with their pastries and picnic blankets, he nods.

Yesterday, when I was pulling out of the lot in my Subaru, I saw him and almost re-parked. I had three pecan-coffee cakes in my lap, leftovers that, after a day of experimenting for the new autumn menu, Mario (the head baker) said I could take home.

Whatever you want, he always says that to me. Whatever you want.

Each cake was a little different: One is moist and pumpkin-orange inside with a light caramel pecan top that stretches in strands of golden brown instead of breaking, when you slice it.

Beneath that one was a cake of a lighter dough, truer to our house coffee cake, which we've taken off the menu temporarily and replaced with a poppyseed peach—I have more peaches than I know what to do with–the owner’s reasoning.

The last was much smaller and stacked high with a sticky crown of crunchy pecans. This one was much darker, and reminded me of the sticky buns I used to get from the farmer's market every Wednesday in elementary school when, instead of running the mile around the angry Civic Center geese, our P.E. teacher would lead us like ducklings to the farmer's market, where we'd buy pastries with the money our mothers had given us.

I put on my hazards. The man, I could see through the trees, was sleeping now, his head resting on his forearms. I could just leave it there, while he sleeps. One cake. Anonymous. Easy.

I had the urge to call my mother. Maybe her generosity, her own history of helping others, of stopping to give what she has to someone, to anyone, would reach me now, push my body out of the car.

Or maybe she would say, not anymore, Martha, and remind me of Psyche on her path; how much better it would have been if she’d just kept going.

. . .

The last time I spoke to my father, almost two years ago now, I was at a park down the street from here—a grassy area with a communal garden. When he called, my dog Alfredo was trotting along the perimeter, scratching his back against the rough hedges, his harness getting stuck on a branch, making him stop, pull, turn around.

“I have no car. No groceries. Can you help?”

Weeks earlier, I'd told him I didn't want to continue a relationship. I didn't explain anything. I'd wished him well.

He’d never responded. Was this his response?

No. This was nothing dialogic or relational. It was isolated, it was desperate. It was a child's hand, reaching across the counter, to see what he could touch; what the woman might give.

I could barely hear my father's voice over the waves. He was walking at Rodeo beach again. Or that’s where I imagined him. The only place where, according to him, he wanted to find himself at the end of the day. “The ocean. Where I am weightless,” he’d said to me once.

I can't remember what I told him that day at the park, on the phone. What tangle of sentences amounted to my no? Had I simply hung up?

If he had been sitting in front of me, on a park bench, what would that have changed?

As with the oatmeal, my father’s inability to support himself was nothing he tried to hide. Instead, he dangled it in our adult faces, played its siren song in our cell phones while we walked our dogs, carried our children, tended to the ones who were right to depend on us, who never needed to ask.

But sometimes I feel that, by saying no to a relationship with him now, I have done something more radical, more disruptive, than he ever did in the twenty-six years he didn't call, visit, or ask after us.

On some level, I still believe it is my job to give. His, to take.

My job to feed. Men's, to be hungry.

At the bakery I hand old, hungry men food all day long.

Somedays, this is my ocean. The incessant roar of please give me and I want and I’ll take that. Here, on this shore, I can barely hear what I think, what I want, where I am going. Here, I am whatever you want. Here, I feel weightless.

 . . .

Today I have brought a small slice of the pumpkin pecan cake, the orange one, out to my lunch. It has a layer of caramel pecans on top like the other loaves, but these pecans are lighter, caramelized in the oven for less time; for this, they are still gooey, like pecan pie. If you tried to break your piece in half to share it, it would not break clean at all, just stretch and stretch, thin and then thinner filaments of caramel strands webbing between your hands, across the distance.

When I sit at the bench near the creek, the pecans glisten in the sun, and look almost wet. The sponge is bright, exactly the color of my dog's eyes when he was younger, when I first rescued him and he would run off into the hills to chase deer, leaving me in a panic for fifteen minutes at a time—the color of hunting eyes. Now, his corneas have thickened into a dark brown. These irises say: Help. Show me what's there.

The homeless man—I can hear him from where I am sitting— has a bag of chips in the middle of his table, and is now offering them to two other men who are now joining him.

¿Quieres chips?

He is telling everyone at the table a story, but all I can make out is the beginning of each sentence:

“Me dijo que . . . me dijo que . . .” 

(He said to me, he said to me . . . )

Someone told him something. And it is worth saying again.