Good Stuffs Bakery

            My girlfriend Annabelle gave me my favorite baseball cap two and a half years ago, after I had broken my leg skiing on spring break.  It is a Chicago Cub’s cap, a blue one with a big white C embedded in the center.  I wear it almost every day, but not when I am at work, because my boss always makes a big deal about uniform and etiquette- rule number one: collared shirt; rule number two: no jeans; rule number three: no hats; and that applies to girls, too, to those that want to cross the masculinity barrier and wear baseball caps. 

            I had to work that morning.  I felt sick as a dog and was considering calling in, but I knew that Good Stuffs Bakery wouldn’t be the same without me.  My buzzer went off more or less thirty times before I smacked it with the palm of my hand, threw my covers to the floor, and grabbed my hat and covered my greasy brown hair with it.  My cellphone was glowing; Annabelle had called.  She always called when I couldn’t get to the phone; when I was at work, at baseball practice, babysitting for my cousins that lived across the street, but then when I wanted to talk to her, distraction free, she was out with James or Beth, wreaking havoc, making new tire marks down Kloc Street, adding to the level of noise pollution of our Parkwood.  Our schedules conflicted like two magnets, so that when we did get together we savored every moment, because, soon, all clichés aside, they would be our last, as college was approaching.

            Work was work.  It was a Saturday night, so I was planning on going out with my friends.  The last time we had gone out Annabelle picked me up after work with James and Beth in the backseat.  Her car reminded me of a dream I had one time, where I was in a roller coaster seat, except that it was a completely enclosed car and there were purple-tinted windows, and the people that were supposed to check your seat belts before you left went with you in the car.  I woke up before the thing actually started to move.  Annabelle’s car has one of those family bumper stickers- where there are stick figures, of four people in descending size, and then something that looks somewhat similar to a dog.  When I asked her why she had it on her car she told me that it was because she thought it was funny.  I told her I hoped she didn’t have plans of having kids with me any time soon, then she hit me on the shoulder, and that was the end of the conversation.

            That Saturday night we didn’t know what to do.  We went around in circles trying to think of some intriguing and worthy event of our time together.  James said we should hit up the hot dog place that was on the other side of town.  I told him that it was completely obscene to travel so far just to pick up some food that we could obtain anywhere else around the very location that we were in at the moment, and he rebutted that the hot dog stand had a jukebox with swing music.  “Swing Kids rejoice!” Beth shouted, throwing her hands out the window.  Half a second later Annabelle and I said “No” in unison, and the options for the plans for the night were on the table again.  This pattern circulated a few more times, while we drove through Parkwood, over Parkwood River, and through the woods of the forest preserve, until we decided to return to Parkwood Plaza and get some pizza at the Little Caesar’s. 

            Parkwood Plaza is quite the gemstone.  Good Stuffs Bakery is smack in the center of it, with an old fashioned sign that must be at least fifty years old.  Goods Stuffs Bakery is italicized in black, bold letters and a there is a design of a lump that could be considered a piece of bread or a roll, with lines rising from it.  When I was younger James and I would always joke that it was “dog poo,” but now the joke just seems feeble.  Near the bakery is a store where a middle-aged Chinese tailor works, whose accent is so thick that one time, after visiting her, I just gave her a twenty after  having to ask five times what the price of a tailored shoe was.  There was also an Ace Hardware, and a workout place that I had never been to, and a chapel that Beth and I had walked into one time as ten-year-olds on a dare.  It was empty except for a religious lady that wore a huge crucifix around her neck.  She took us by the hands forcibly and told us to kneel down and pray to a statue of the Virgin Mary.  I just knelt there with my eyes closed, until she gave us a pin of the cross and told us to pray for our sins.  As a child, I was totally creeped out, and I haven’t returned since, but every time I pass it I feel like walking in and telling the lady I am sorry for not having cared.

            Anabelle, Beth, James and I sat on a concrete bench outside of the Little Caesar’s with two boxes of pizza in our laps; cheese and mushroom, five bucks each. 

            “This is what my meager baker’s salary can provide to my family,” I say to my friends, looking throughout the circle.

            “You’re not a baker, you pass out cookies and slice loaves of bread,” Beth said sarcastically while smiling, her dimples showing.  Annabelle and James laughed and chewed pizza at the same time, leaning back in the spirit of the uncontrollable.

            “You, missy,” I said loudly, taking my hat off of my head by the lid and placing it onto Beth’s, “Are worthy of the hat on this night.”

            “Wow, I am so honored,” Beth said with even more mockery, her twisted smile looking something like the crescent moon above.  Each night that we went out as a group of friends, I gave someone my hat to wear, in representation of companionship. 

            “Why is that hat so important to you, anyway, Brendan?” Beth asks.

            “Because Annabelle gave it to me,” I said.  Annabelle got this expression like she might pass out.  Her eyes turned cartoonish, and she smiled so much that her cheeks formed perfect spheres, and she stood up and ran to me and sat on my lap and took my hands and wrapped them around her.  I rocked her back and forth, humming along to the radio that was softly playing from the radio of a car in the parking lot of the plaza, until the pizza ran out.

            Annabelle and I had been an item for a long time, since junior high, when people used to just say that they were going out as a social statement. Now it was more serious, and I felt like I was just going through the motions with her.  I felt like I was her boyfriend, and she was my girlfriend, and that’s how it was, and I didn’t know what would happen next.  Sometimes when I would sit up at night doing homework or watching the news, I would think of having a relationship with someone on a level in which I had never had before, on a level on which I couldn’t imagine because it would be so deep and intimate and meaningful and I would need that person that I was meant to be with to figure out what it means to be happy, to find out what true happiness really is.  I wanted to meet that girl that would drive me crazy, that I could tell anything, and that I could fight with, and it would still be ok.  Annabelle was great, she was, but she was too ordinary.  I wanted someone that was out there, someone that was looking for me too.

We sat and talked about life and stuff, until college came up.  Beth had her heart set on Stanford, she wanted to be a journalist.  “Reporting the truth is easy,” she had once told me, “It’s being honest when being creative that’s tricky.  That’s why I admire you.”  I want to be a writer.  I haven’t always wanted to be one.  I’m getting a baseball scholarship at Northwestern, and my parents couldn’t be happier about it.  I’ve played baseball ever since I was a little kid; I was in little league, and varsity throughout a lot of high school.  When my acceptance letter came from Northwestern my parents put it on the refrigerator with a baseball magnet, one that I got from winning a tournament when I was younger.  My parents’ have never asked me what I want to do with my life, they just have assumed because I am good at baseball that I should pursue it, but, I think, I’m not sure.  And it’s my life.  All I do know is that when I sit down at a computer and get in the zone and get out my ideas and say what I want to say, instead of all the bullshit that people are feeding me, it’s great.  Maybe this isn’t the only thing that would make me happy, but it’s what I know right now, at this point in my life.  I don’t work for the newspaper, and I don’t belong to the poetry group at school, but I’m in AP English, and when we do creative writing exercises and I can read my stuff out loud, it makes me really happy.  But my parents don’t know this, because I don’t know how they would react.  I don’t know if they would support me if I chose to go through with something that doesn’t have a definite future, like baseball.

            The day after the next I had work.  I rolled out of bed, probably after the thirty-first buzz of my electric green alarm clock.  I hadn’t washed my hair in a week so I hopped in the shower.  My mom had bought me strawberry shampoo, but I wanted to use the Head and Shoulders because I had a feeling dandruff might be a problem. The words strawberry or Head and Shoulders- baseball or writing ran through my mind abstractedly until I was fresh and ready to go.  It was a twenty minute walk, over the highway bridge and along the busy streets of Daren and Main.  Whenever I’m at Parkwood Plaza I always feel a heavy sense of nostalgia, of riding on my bike on the sidewalks as a kid, through the sprinklers of summer, to the park, or just through the neighborhood, with no destination or direction.  The plaza has so many old signs and stores, it’s like walking around in a flash back from the seventies or even the sixties, except the parking lot is infiltrated by Mercedes and cars with moon roofs, and the Jewel-Osco, a store that while on the outside may seem old-fashioned, categorizes their foods by section on the receipts. 

            Good Stuffs Bakery seems really small when you walk in as a customer, but it has an enormous backroom, where everything is made and baked.  You can see all of the made products through the glass windows; there are cookies (my favorite), cakes, loaves of bread, and random specialties that fluctuate from day to day.  My mom likes the cherry slices.  Sometimes I’ll steal a few for her, when no one is looking, place them in a box and then stash them in my back pack, although then, on the days that I work before class, my locker smells like cherries.  The customers are usually neighborhood folk, the dailies, or the weeklies; sometimes there are the elderly folk who will come in and ask me to slice up a loaf of wheat bread for them, sometimes a mom or a dad with kids will ask for the big sugar cookies with yellow frosting and brown smiling faces across them.  My boss tells me to give the young kids free cookies, the small kinds of cookies with a bit of frosting and sprinkles on them, though I don’t see how this serves the purpose of supply and demand, because most of the time the kids that come in are with parents that are regulars.  When I mentioned this to my co-worker, Amanda, an older lady with black hair and wrinkled skin, she just shrugged and said in her thick Northwest accent, “Whatever makes the kids happy.” 

            I was rounding the corner of Main and Kloc, and the bakery was in sight.  It was like any other day, and I was about to cross the street until I was sideswiped by a white van with graffiti on the side.  In that very moment, I feared for my life and stopped in my tracks, as the driver hung out of the passenger window, shouting, “Watch out, will you?”  I was too shocked to say or do anything, I just stood there, staring at the van passing.  Before the words became illegible, I read them.  It read, “Love is Free.”  The words were thin and red and in the type of graffiti-cursive that you see on the sides of apartment buildings in the city, messy but unique. 

            Yet another entity of shock opposed my entrance of work that spring Monday morning: a beautiful girl.  There were actually two of them, but the one stood out to me.  She had curly brown hair and brown eyes.  Her hair was in a fury around her face, and her jacket was too big on her, so the thought that it must have been her boyfriend’s crossed my mind.  It was a letterman’s jacket from the public school of the next town over, Deerfield.  The kids at Parkwood and Deerfield don’t mix.  We don’t usually talk, or get together.  We aren’t enemies, but we aren’t friends.  We just don’t know each other.  We are two different units. 

            She was standing next to a car with her friend, who wore her hair in a ponytail with a headband with shamrocks on it.  They were next to an old car with a rusted bumper.  Both of them were leaning against the doors, the brown-haired girl against the driver’s side car, and the blonde against the passenger’s car.  They talked and leaned back in laughter as I watched them while I was walking towards Good Stuffs Bakery, until I was a few feet in front of the entrance.  Suddenly the blonde girl turned her head, and she saw me.  She turned back to her friend and pointed to me, and her friend looked to me, too.  She smiled, a genuine, shy smile, like she was sharing a secret with me.  I looked away quickly, and then I realized I probably wouldn’t get an opportunity like this one again, so I looked back.  She was still looking at me.  She waved.  I waved back and almost walked into the pillar in front of the bakery.  Then I gathered myself, quickly. Calmly, I walked into the store, and wondered if I would ever see her again.

            I worked for a while, with a sense of peace in that I had seen the girl of my dreams, and a sense of disparity in that I may never see her again.  She had been in the parking lot where I work though, right? I thought. So not all hope was lost.  The next thirty minutes went by normally; someone had bought three lemon scones and someone else bought five pastries.  The bell rang, a customer walked in, the bell rang again, a customer walked out. 

            The bell rang again and I looked up, and it was the two girls from the parking lot.  The brown haired girl walked in front of the blonde haired girl, both unmethodically, without any sense of emotion on their faces, until they saw me behind the counter.

            “It’s you!” the brown haired girl shouted, pointing to me.  The bakery was empty except for us. Amanda was on her break, so I could talk to them. 

            I was struck senseless.  “Yep, it’s me,” I said.

            The brown haired girl looked at me with sparkling brown eyes.  She had dimples and freckles on her cheeks, kind of like Annabelle, except she had a glow to her. 

I knew I should say something.  “What are your names?” I asked.
            “I am Abigail,” said the blonde-haired girl, placing her hand over her heart, “And this is June,” she said, pointing to the other girl.

“Ahh, June, like the summertime,” I said, feeling like an idiot.  “How beautiful.”

“Thanks,” she said, laughing.

I could see the “D” on the left side of her jacket more clearly now.  It was a brand, a mark.  I didn’t know how she’d react if I told her that I was from Parkwood, but she must have known that I didn’t go to Deerfield.

“So,” I said, putting my chin in my hand, and my elbow on the counter, “You go to Deerfield?”

“Yep,” she said, looking out the window.  “Do you go to Parkwood?”

“Yep,” I said.  I smiled and looked June deeply in the eyes.  “So,” I said, slightly raising my voice, “How would you girls like some free cookies?”

“Sure,” June said.  Abigail and June looked through the glass window.  June pointed to a sugar cookie with orange icing and red and blue sprinkles, and Abigail wanted a shortbread cookie with green icing and pink sprinkles.  I took a sheet of paper and picked up the cookies and handed them to the girls.

“How is it,” I said, “living in Deerfield?”

They looked to each other as they chewed the cookies, like they knew something I didn’t.  “It’s different.  How is it living here?”

“I don’t know, I’ve never lived in Deerfield,” I said.

June took a twenty dollar bill out of her pocket.  “Could I buy that cake in the corner?” she asked, pointing to the cake in the right hand corner.  I took the cake out from the show window, put it in a box and we exchanged the money with the cake.

“Thank you,” she said, “Maybe I’ll see you again soon.

“Maybe,” I said.

            I chose to emulate the story “Ask Me If I Care,” from the book A Visit from the Goon Squad, where teenagers get together and hang out in their adolescence.  Also I wrote about a character who has one of his first jobs, as do many characters throughout Egan’s book, like Sasha and Benny.