Bread Alone by Judith Ryan Hendricks Page A

called her an intellectual snob and said she was jealous of me. He never understood why I found that hilarious, and he never understood our friendship. For years I nurtured the hope that they’d learn to like each other, but mutual tolerance was about as good as it got.
Of course, if the truth be told, I was never overly fond of Neal, either. He was our graduate instructor in psych 101 and CM wasinstantly smitten. He’s attractive enough in that brainy/sexy way. Tall and lean, dark and brooding. He even wears a Van Dyck. He’s been a Ph.D. candidate in clinical psychology for as long as I’ve known him. CM thinks he’s brilliant. She says the reason he has so much trouble finishing his degree is that he keeps butting heads with the academic establishment. To me, he seems like the consummate bullshit artist.
Another reason I find him so irritating—aside from the fact that he’s continually making CM unhappy—is that he always wants to talk about my relationship with my father. Like he’s titillated by the possibility that there might have been something unnatural going on.
“Spare some change, lady?” A cigarette-raspy voice. A woman hovers at the end of the bench, shifting her weight from one foot to the other. She looks too young to be one of the hard-core homeless, but her skin has the leathery tan that comes from exposure and her eyes have that vacant hardness that eventually replaces hope. Spikes of dirty brown hair poke through holes in her red knit cap.
I hate looking at her filthy, ripped jeans and grimy parka, but I’ve never been able to just look away. David disapproves of giving money to panhandlers. “There are plenty of jobs around” is his standard line. He says I’m only encouraging them to remain dependent on handouts. I know there’s a certain amount of truth to that, but I always have a hard time saying no when I’m standing there in my hundred-and-fifty-dollar Donna Karan T-shirt and my Calvin Klein jeans and my Bruno Magli sandals.
I dig in my pocket for a crumpled dollar bill, press it into her hand.
“God bless,” she says.
It reminds me of running to put pennies in the Salvation Army Christmas kettles when I was little because I liked to hear the bell ringer bless me. Right now I suppose I need all the blessings I can get.

Four
O n the way back to the apartment, I have a sudden urge to ward off the loneliness goblins by baking bread. I don’t have a starter and it takes two or three days to get one really humming, but I still know a few tricks to give a plain loaf some character. Since CM’s idea of using a stove is to set her purse on it while she laces up her Reeboks, I stop by the Thriftway for supplies and lug them up four flights of stairs because the building’s creaky elevator is malingering today.
You don’t really need a recipe to make bread. It’s mostly about proportions—one package of yeast to six or seven cups of flour, two cups of water, and a tablespoon of salt—and Jean-Marc used to say that bread may not always turn out the way you intend it to, but it always turns out. Just the same, it’s been so long since I’ve done this that I use the recipe on the back of the flour bag as a jumping-off point.
Plain Old Bread
1 tablespoon (1 packet) active-dry yeast
2¼ cups warm water
1 tablespoon sugar
1 tablespoon salt
6 to 7 cups unbleached white flour
Most recipes want you to use a whole envelope of yeast. This means the first rising will take only about an hour and the second maybe forty-five minutes to an hour—particularly if you put it in a warm place, which is what they usually suggest. Some go as far as telling you to put the dough in a gas oven warmed by the pilot light.
That works fine. If that’s the kind of bread you want. Grocery-store bread. Wonder bread. Remember that? The stuff we ate when we were kids. It was white—a brilliantly unreal white—and it had the mouth feel of a damp sponge. When you took a bite, it left an imprint of your teeth