The Mother
Wójcik’s Bakery on Polish Hill has used the same sourdough starter since 1911. In the trade you call a starter a “mother,” because every loaf you bake comes from it. You keep it alive by feeding it flour and water every day, and it ferments and bubbles and rises, and you take a piece off to make your dough, and feed what’s left. A good mother can live forever if you look after her. Some bakeries in San Francisco claim theirs go back to the Gold Rush. Ours came over from Kraków in a stoneware crock in a steamer trunk, and it lives in that same crock, on a shelf in the back by the ovens, under a cloth and a wooden lid.
I started working nights there when I was twenty-three. I’d done two years of pastry school and a year at a hotel in Cleveland, and I needed a job near my mother, who was sick. The owner was Mr. Kazimierz Wójcik, eighty-four, the grandson of the man who carried the crock across the Atlantic. He hired me in the front room over a cup of tea, and then he walked me into the back and showed me the crock and told me the rule.
“Two o’clock,” he said. “Every night. You feed her at two.”
I asked whether it had to be exactly two.
“Two o’clock,” he said again, as if I hadn’t heard him. He wasn’t smiling. “Not two-thirty. Not one-forty-five because you’re bored. Two. You take off the cloth, you lift the lid, you feed her, you put the lid back. If you’re sick, you call me and I come. If I’m dead, you still feed her.” Then he smiled, finally. “She’s very old. She’s used to her schedule.”
The night shift was me, alone, from eleven to seven. Mixing, shaping, proofing, baking. By six, the racks were full of rye and sourdough and kaiser rolls and the poppyseed rolls the old ladies came in for, and Mr. Wójcik came down from his apartment upstairs to open the front at seven. It was hard work and I loved it. The back of a bakery at three in the morning is the warmest place in the world.
I fed the mother at two. Every night. I set an alarm on my phone. Equal weights of flour and water, from the bin marked in Polish, stirred in with the wooden paddle that hung beside the crock. It was a beautiful starter, honestly. Thick and pale and glossy. It smelled like apples and yogurt and something deeper, like a cellar. When I stirred it, it pulled at the paddle in long ropes.
The only odd thing was how fast it rose. A normal mother, fed at room temperature, doubles in maybe six hours. This one doubled in an hour. By three it would be domed up against the lid. By four it would have pushed the lid up a half inch, and you could see it under there, pressing, pale and swollen, like a face against a window.
I mentioned it to Mr. Wójcik once. He said, “She’s hungry. She’s always hungry. That’s why we keep her on schedule.”
My mother died in February. I took two nights off. Mr. Wójcik did the shifts himself, at eighty-five, with his bad hip, and when I came back he didn’t say anything about it, just put a loaf of rye in my hands with a ribbon round it.
The third night back, I fell asleep.
I’d been up for most of two days. I finished the rye at about 1:20 and sat down on the old couch in the back corner, the one bakers have been napping on since before I was born, with the alarm set for two. I don’t remember lying down. I remember the warmth of the ovens and the smell of caraway. And I didn’t hear the alarm. Later I found my phone had died. I hadn’t charged it since the funeral.
I woke up at 3:40.
I knew before I opened my eyes, because of the sound. It was very quiet in the bakery except for the ovens ticking, and under that a soft, wet sound, like someone breathing through their mouth with a cold. In, out. Slow. Close.
I opened my eyes.
The mother was out of the crock.
The lid was on the floor. The cloth was on the floor. And from the shelf, down the side of the cabinet, across the floor tiles, toward the couch, there was a pale, glossy rope of dough, thick as my arm, flowing the way thick batter flows. It had come across six feet of floor. Its end was about a foot from my shoe, lifting and settling in a slow rhythm. Rising, falling.
Breathing. That was the sound.
It wasn’t fast. That’s what I remember. It wasn’t a horror-movie thing. It was patient. It was the way dough moves, the way it slumps and spreads, only it was going somewhere, in a straight line, toward the couch. Toward me. And in the cold air from the alley door it was sending up a little steam, as though it were warm, warmer than the room.
I got up very slowly. I stepped around it. It didn’t move toward me any faster, but the end of it turned. It turned toward my foot as I moved, like a plant following the sun.
I got the flour. I got the water. I didn’t weigh anything, I just dumped it, a big double handful of flour on the floor in front of it and the water over that, and I stirred it together with my hands, on the tiles, a wet gray paste, and pushed it toward the tip of the thing.
It stopped. It sort of folded over the flour. It took it in. And then, slowly, over about twenty minutes, while I sat on the couch with my knees up and my arms around them, it drew back. Across the floor. Up the cabinet. Into the crock. It left a glossy wet trail, like a snail’s.
At 4:15 I put the lid back on. My hands were shaking so badly I couldn’t line it up.
Mr. Wójcik came down at six-thirty, not seven. He walked into the back and looked at the floor, where I’d scrubbed and scrubbed, and at me. He didn’t seem surprised. He sat down beside me on the couch with a groan, and he told me.
In 1938 his grandfather’s apprentice, a boy of sixteen, had fallen asleep on the same couch. In the morning there was no boy. There was the couch, and the crock, and the mother, which was twice the size. In 1974 it was the bakery cat. In 1991 it was nearly Mr. Wójcik’s own father, who was ninety and had come down in the night, confused, and sat on the couch, and been found at dawn with the dough over his feet and his ankles, up to his shins, warm, and his feet very pale. He’d lived. He never walked well again.
“Why do you keep it?” I said. “Why don’t you get rid of it?”
He looked at me with his watery blue eyes. “Get rid of it how?” he said. “Throw it out? In the trash? Pour it in the river?” He shook his head. “She’s alive, Inez. She’s very old and she’s very alive and she is ours. My grandfather carried her over the ocean because his grandmother told him she should never be left alone. If you throw out a mother, she doesn’t die. She just doesn’t have anyone feeding her anymore.”
Mr. Wójcik died last August. He was eighty-six. He didn’t have any children. The bakery closed; the building’s been sold to a man who’s going to make it condos.
He left me the crock.
There’s a letter with it, in his careful handwriting, which says only: You were late once and you fed her anyway. That’s all she needs. Two o’clock. — K.W.
I live in a one-bedroom on Liberty Avenue. The crock sits on my kitchen counter, under its cloth and lid. I bake for a café now, days. I could sleep normal hours. I don’t. I sleep from eight to one-forty, and then I get up and go into the kitchen, and at two o’clock I feed her. Flour and water and a stir with the wooden paddle. I’ve tried putting her in the refrigerator, which slows down any normal starter. She doesn’t slow down. She just gets warmer.
She’s never gotten out again. I’ve never been late again. But I have a dream about it, sometimes. In the dream I’m asleep in my own bed, and it’s 2:10, 2:20, and the phone’s dead, and from the kitchen comes a soft, slow, wet sound, breathing.
I wake up and the clock says 1:38, and I lie there in the dark and listen.
And some nights, from the kitchen, very faintly, I can hear the wooden lid of the crock rattle against its rim. Just once. Like somebody tapping a spoon on a table. Like somebody who’s very old, and very patient, letting me know she’s awake.