Louise Erdrich - The Antelope Wife

“Yes,” says Rozin. “Yet…”

“… yet. I know what you’re thinking.”

“I can’t explain her.”

“I can’t explain her either,” says Cecille. “Do you know I’ve followed her? To try and figure out if her tracks change?”

“And did they?”

“She walked the whole time on sidewalks and streets. So no tracks. But she walked miles in stilettos, which to me seems inhuman.”

“I couldn’t do it,” says Rozin.

“No woman I know could do it, or at least she’d be limping, which Sweetheart wasn’t.”

Rozin nods, thoughtful. “I have this feeling…”

“Exactly,” says Cecille. “It’s not the heels, the tracks, nothing you can put your finger on. Yet. It is no accident that Klaus brought Sweetheart Calico here. Her presence is meaningful. History is at work.”

“History is random events, not fate, or coincidence.” Rozin shakes her head.

“How do you know?” says Cecille.

Frank’s Bakery

The bakery has huge steel witch ovens and a concrete floor slippery with grease. There is a dough-pounding table of blocky wood covered with sparkle-shot linoleum. The high windows, coated with years of flour dust, look to Rozin like something from a fable or a movie with their tiny blocks of glass. A tulip, gold stem and leaves, bursts fierce red in the pane. It is an old bakery, much loved and tunneled to by rats, floors creaky with shadows. The doors all set crooked or stuck. There is a built-in deep-fry pit, too, which can be zapped up to bubbling or left to glaze over. It takes up one entire corner of the kitchen. There is a wonderful scent that rises when the grease is fresh. Frank slips in the little slabs of dough and they bob there, bubbling, reminding Rozin of back home at powwows and sweating ladies at the fry-bread stands laughing, pushing those gold rounds at you, hot and welcome.

Rozin, Cecille, and the girls stay in the shop to help Frank the next day. He is absorbed, melting and beating at some transparent substance in his treasured copper pan. The girls asks questions. They can’t help but ask questions. They ask questions even though it takes him so long to answer that they have thought of about twenty more before they manage to pierce his distraction.

“What’s that pan made of?” Cally asks, just a question to warm him up. But he takes a long time even to answer this.

“This pan is made of spirit metal,” he says at last.

“What’s that?” Deanna says immediately, so he won’t lose his train of thought.

“Miskwaabik,” he mumbles, absent in his work. “They say the thunder people sent down this red stuff, put it in the ground.”

“Why’s it your favorite pot?”

“Conducts the heat real good.”

“What about those bowls?”

“Smooth the batter out.”

The answers are getting closer, quicker.

“What are you making?” Rozin herself asks, even though she could look into Frank’s sweat- and butter-stained recipe notebook, a tattered spiral-bound, and find out for herself. He won’t answer for a long while, though, and this makes Rozin naturally curious. So she peeks over his shoulder at the notebook, sees a word she has never seen before, although she has heard of it. Blitzkuchen. Written on top of the lined paper in tired ink.

Blitzkuchen! All of a sudden, he gets talkative. Frank sets the egg timer. He is always timing — this, that — because of course there always is something in the oven to rescue or to check. Anyhow, that day, Frank is working again on his life project. The cake of all cakes. Early in his life, says Frank, he tasted it — light as air with a taste of peach. A subterranean chocolate. Citrus. Crumbled tears. Sweet lemon. A smooch of almond.

“It explodes on your palate,” he says, eyes fixed and grave.

“Oh, gimme a break,” says Cecille, who has heard this before. “Stick with our daily bread. Or daily doughnut.”

Frank considers. An aura of furious effort. Concentrated baker’s conversion of heat, light, energy.

“I make the staff of life,” says Frank in a dignified and measured voice. “That is my calling. But I will never stop attempting the blitzkuchen.”

He’s trying to reconstruct the recipe. Trying to capture time. Or at least the punch line of an old family story. The cake is a fabulous thing, he says. The cake is holy. Extraordinary with immense powers of what sort nobody knows. He calls it the cake of peace. The cake of loving sincerity.

Rozin looks at him in wounded skepticism. This is a very different Frank. He has never spoken this way. He has always been down-to-earth. That is something she likes about him. This streak of mysticism, over a cake of all things, makes Rozin nervous, makes him suspect.

For years, he says, he has searched and tested for the exact recipe. In fact, the hunt for this recipe could be called his life quest. Always, between other concoctions, even inventions like his popular rhubarb sludge bars, when he has a little moment to himself, Frank makes a trial cake. Attempts a variation on the length of time he beats the batter. Amount of ground hazelnuts. Type of sugars and butters. Whatever.

“Of exquisite importance,” he says to Rozin, waving a darkly wrapped bar of chocolate now, his wide-boned, pleasant face remote and concentrated. “Cocoa content seventy-seven percent. Strong and dark.” He writes this in his notebook, scrawls it, and sighs over the batter he is now whipping in the bowl.

“Perhaps,” Rozin says, “it is all in the stirring.”

He frowns, lost in concentration now, and doesn’t answer for the longest time.

“Hey, Frank,” Deanna says, wanting to break the spell and change the subject, “why don’t you do the nose trick?”

He looks at the twins, shy.

“Come on, Frank.”

Frank can push his nose all the way to one side and tape it there. He can also pop his joints, vibrate his ears, and roll back his eyelids. He was the high school clown. He used to be ironic and jolly, always with a sly humor and a broad goofiness. But his fear of losing Rozin has made him serious.

Humor or the suggestion of it reminds him that he might say something to offend Rozin. He is stilted, stunted, stymied by his need to win her. Jokes puzzle and panic him. Put him in a sweat. Like right now, just thinking of a stupid old funny trick that made him look like a big dork, he gets upset. He thrusts his smooth hands deep in the flour barrel. Looks like he’ll cry until a teary dough forms around his fingers. Maybe, Rozin thinks, watching him knead and sugar and tenderize, this is how he works through the unresolved grief that Cecille says sociologists have begun to suspect every Indian is born with. Rozin has no idea he has lost his humor because of her.

KLAUS AND RICHARD have medicine breath from the family-size bottle of Listerine they are drinking. They are sitting by the art museum, half asleep in the heated shank of the day. The air is stifling. The heat is very unseasonable. It is April and should have been cool, but the heat gags thought. The heat makes everyone uneasy. Cars rush by on the other side of the bench.

“Nice to get that breeze from the traffic!” says Richard. “That carbon monoxide. Ah.” He takes a deep breath, sits up, and hits his chest. Klaus, a red bandanna wrapped around his head and a T-shirt torn from collar to waist, lies curled, booze-thin, his legs folded neatly as a cat’s, his arms a pillow. He opens his eyes and croaks.

“Nibi. Nibi.”

“Oh shut up. I got no water, Klaus. Go to the drinking fountain.”

“Where’s it at?”

“Over there.”

They both know it is dry, always is. No fountains work in this part of the city. They share out the last of the Listerine. Richard screws the black cap carefully onto the empty bottle. He sets the bottle on the margin of grass beside the museum steps.