The Bakery Lady

by Grace Andreacchi

The writer’s life is, essentially and not incidentally, a lonely one. You shut yourself up in a room, ignore the tempting sunshine, unplug the phone, and even refuse to come to the door when you’re ‘working’. You keep unsociable hours, skip meals, refuse invitations all in pursuit of the grand illusion. A consent to the absurd proposition that the reality inside your head is, for the duration, more important than the ‘real world’ is the sine qua non. All of this can get to be a bit much.

For a while I lived in an apartment on the Anzengruberstraße in Berlin, directly over a bakery. There were many advantages to living over a bakery. The bakery lady was everything a bakery lady should be, she was round and smiling, pink-cheeked and maternal. When I stopped in towards the end of the afternoon for my daily Brötchen she’d often insist on giving me two of three for the price of one. ‘You need to eat more,’ she’d say, shaking her head. ‘Too thin!’ Germany was ahead of the curve in the world obesity epidemic (this was the mid-nineties), and my naturally slim frame was rare enough to be considered exotic. In my lonely pursuit of the chimera it was enormously comforting to have this bakery lady looking out for me.

On those nights when I’d lost all track of time and lingered, bent over the page (we still wrote on paper in those far-off days) till the wee small hours, when that hour arrived when the world seems not so much asleep as dead and the over-active imagination begins to fear – there is nobody else on the planet left alive, I’m the only one… at that terrible hour when the blood freezes, ghosts walk, and fear eats the soul, at that very hour the bakery lady and her husband would arrive downstairs. I’d hear them clanking about as they opened the shop to begin another day of mixing and kneading and baking the bread, rolls and cake for the hungry hearts and stomachs of the neighbourhood. So I’m not the only one left after all, I’d think. The bakery lady is here. And with a sigh I’d lay down my pen and crawl into bed, drifting off to sleep to the elemental odour of baking bread. If you ever have the chance to live over a bakery, jump at it.

Copyright © 2008 Grace Andreacchi Hadas

Grace Andreacchi was born and raised in New York City but has lived on the far side of the great ocean for many years – sometimes in Paris, sometimes Berlin, and nowadays in London. Works include the novels Give my Heart Ease, which received the New American Writing Award, and Music for Glass Orchestra, and the play Vegetable Medley (New York and Boston). Stories and poetry appear in both on-line and print journals.Her work can be viewed at http://graceandreacchi.com.