Faye Kellerman - The Garden Of Eden And Other Criminal Delights

As a small child, I was often put to bed before Dad came home. As an older child, I remember watching TV with him. He didn’t talk much except to ask me if I had yet guessed the plot of the latest Streets of San Francisco or, at the very least, the quarterly subtitles given after each commercial break during the hour show. Heart-to-hearts were nonexistent, but some sort of primordial communication-that of father and young daughter-did exist.

Dad staked out his claim by renting space in independent food markets. Usually, he ran just one operation at a time. Occasionally, he managed two locations. His booth consisted of a fresh delicatessen with all the traditional meats, cheeses, salads, and, of course, lox and pickled herring. He also took on a small bakery that catered and complemented items sold in a deli. His breads included loaves of soft yellow egg challah, caraway ryes, savory onion rolls, kaiser twists covered with poppy seeds, and oh, those aromatic fruit and cheese Danish and coffee cakes. Dad’s kiosk had everything needed for the perfect Saturday picnic or the in-law Sunday brunch. I loved the food, and I loved everything that went along with it. Because I loved my father.

When my older brothers reached double-digit age, they worked in the deli on weekends and helped our father out. When I was eleven, no such demands were made of me. This, of course, angered me. If Dad wasn’t going to require it of me, I’d simply require it of myself.

When I announced that I was going to work at the deli, Dad said that was fine, although I was sure it wasn’t fine at all. But that didn’t stop me.

He didn’t know what to do with me. Being short and slight, I didn’t fit the job description. There was a physical component to the work that called for muscle mass. I had none. The most skilled chores required an adeptness with sharp objects-meat slicers, cheese slicers, knives for trimming and cutting lox. I had small hands and fingers-way too little to handle industrial equipment that could slice a digit as easily as a corned beef.

There was the retail side-the greeting and the waiting on customers-but I was too short to be seen above the countertops. To the consumers on the other side, I was more or less a floating head. My father was constantly dodging me because I was underfoot and the operating space behind the counters was minimal. The starched white apron my father gave me for protection was way too big. It dragged on the baseboards, picking up sawdust around the hemline. Occasionally, I’d trip on it. When that happened, I hiked up the cloth. Eventually, it would fall down again.

I’m sure I was a disaster. I’m sure I got in Dad’s way. But he never said anything to me about it.

Dad knew I couldn’t remain an ornament. He had to give me something to do. My first assignment was shoveling the three most popular salads-potato, cole slaw, and macaroni (this was prior to the urban elite pasta salad)-from the cooler into pint or half-pint containers. This job was a snap because the salads were priced by the pint. A pint of cole slaw was X number of cents. A half pint totaled X/2. I was a math whiz in school. I had absolutely no trouble figuring out how to halve things.

Having mastered salads, I was given my next assignment- the weighing and wrapping of dill pickles. This, to my surprise, turned out to be a very tricky affair.

I was given a stool in order to see and read the scale. But first I needed to learn how to read a scale. Back then, before the advent of LCD and the digital revolution, watches were analogs, and scales were mean critters consisting of columns of prices and rows of weights-a veritable crisscross of numbers that bounced up and down with a spring weight. To find out how much something cost necessitated finding the correct intersection between price and weight along a skinny red line. I’ve known adults who never mastered the art of reading this kind of scale, just as I’ve known those who never got the hang of a slide rule.

It took me some time. For the first week, all my pickle prices magically came out in pounds, half pounds, or quarter pounds because-being a math whiz-I could divide the price by factors of two. Anything in between was rounded off to the nearest whole number divisible by two. In order to please the customer, I usually rounded down. I’m sure I cost my father some pocket change.

If he noticed it, he never said anything.

Eventually, I vanquished the scale. It was a proud moment that should have been worthy of some kind of certification. But knowledge has its own rewards. Reading the scale now allowed me to weigh things-items like lox and precut cheeses and meats, fishy pickled herring and the wonderfully oily Greek olives.

With two skills mastered, I was determined to crack an-other-wrapping. Origami enthusiasts needn’t have worried. Still, I was proud of my neatly swaddled packages with just the right amount of sticky tape on them. And when I wrote the word “pickles” or “Swiss” on the white paper in my own handwriting, no one could have been more pleased than I was.

My weighing and packaging skills had been honed to such an extent that Dad took an enormous chance. No, I was still forbidden to use the meat slicers, but he let me try the bread slicers.

For those unschooled in the literature on bread slicers, I shall explain. To slice a whole loaf of bread, one usually places the bread against a back bar, then turns on the machine. With a manual handle-which the operator slowly pulls toward him or her- the bread is advanced and forced between a series of moving parallel blades until it emerges out the other side in neat, perfect slices.

Immediately upon exiting the blades, my first rye fell apart, the slices fanning out like a deck of cards. Spotting the trouble, Dad once again explained to me that as the bread advances between the blades, it is necessary to secure the loaf on the other side with your hand. This must be done with care, as fingers are not supposed to get close to the blades. Was I up to the challenge?

Indeed I was. After a couple of failures, I was finally able to produce a successfully sliced loaf of rye. I was even able to hold it aloft, vertically by the heel, as the experts did.

Alas, it was the next step that tripped me up. I placed the rye directly into the white waxed-paper bag. Needless to say, again the rye fell apart.

As I apologized profusely, the customers just laughed it off.

Isn’t she cute?

C’mon, guys. I’m trying to do a job here.

Of course, the crucial error was not housing the rye in a tight plastic bag and securing it with a flexible steel tie before I placed the loaf in the white waxed-paper bag. Of course, that step necessitated opening the plastic bag while still holding the rye in the air.

Not an easy task of coordination. A few of my loaves ended up as fodder for the sawdust floor.

More waste.

If it bothered Dad, he never said so.

Eventually I mastered the coordination necessary for packing the ryes. And not just ryes but loaves of challah and wheat bread as well. These were a challenge unto themselves, because challahs and wheat breads are much softer. They required a delicate touch with the bread slicer.

Not one to rest on my laurels, I demanded more. Dad must have felt that I was up to the ultimate challenge, because he put the entire bakery under my charge.

The entire bakery, and I was only eleven.

This was monumental.

Faye the bakery lady.

Take a number, please!

There I was, wearing a hairnet, slicing breads, twirling plastic bags with a flourish, and handing out free sprinkle cookies to toddlers.

The coup de grâce came when Dad started taking me to the wholesale bakery to pick out items for our little bakery. We chose the usual rolls and breads and bagels and Danish. But now, since Dad had a genuine bakery lady, he began to invest in more coffee cakes, coffee rings, babkas , and cookies.