Far-Flung Read Free

it.”
    “Congratulations,” I said. “That’s great.”
    “Yeah, well it could have been better. I’m a DON’T picture.”
    It was warm in the Bakery, especially in the long Pilgrim dresses we had to wear, but I liked the job. I started to forget all about the Peace Corps and indigenous fertilizers and New York and Daria, and the simple routine of bread baking—mixing the dough, letting it rise, punching it down, shaping it, setting the moist unbaked loaves out on the paddle, pushing them into the oven, removing them an hour later, and then selling warm slices to the tourists for a quarter—seemed like the best job in the world. Some mornings I’d take an early bus out and just walk around the deserted village, up and down the wooden sidewalks, past the herb garden and chicken yards, across the dirt road and around the Village Green, past the Butcher’s and the Seamstress’s and the Blacksmith’s and the Apothecary’s, then into the Bakery, where I’d start sifting and measuring the flour. Then I started staying later at night: The Bakery closed at 4:30, but I’d walk around in my Pilgrim costume, smiling at the tourists, sitting on the benches, letting them take pictures of me holding their fat fragrant babies, waiting for dark and the fireworks display they had every night. And I’d ride the late bus home, still dressed like a Pilgrim, and walk to Curly and Louisa’s house, and inside they’d be lying on the couch, watching Spanish TV, and I’d walk upstairs past Dido’s room, where he slept in his crib, softly illuminated by the Virgin Mary night-light, up another flight past Curly and Louisa’s room, up, up into the dark, hot attic.
    One day when I came back from my morning break, Becky, the Pilgrim who ran the Bakery, told me a woman had come in and asked for me. I knew it must be my mother. About noon she reappeared with a man. They both were wearing jumpsuits and sunglasses.
    “Darling,” my mother said. “This is Henry, my manager.”
    Henry nodded. He ate one of the twenty-five-cent slices.
    “Can you come out for some lunch with us?” my mother asked. “I can’t talk in this place.”
    “I’ve got to wait a few minutes. I have some bread in the oven.”
    “I’ll take the bread out,” said Becky. “You can go.”
    “Thanks,” I said. I took my apron off and walked outside with my mother and Henry.
    “Can’t you take that costume off?” my mother asked.
    “I change at home,” I said.
    “Where’s home?”
    “I’m staying with some people in Medford. Should we go to the pub?” I asked. “It’s really the only place to eat here.”
    “Can’t we go to a normal restaurant? Henry has a car.”
    “I’m not supposed to leave the Village,” I said. “Plus I only have half an hour.”
    Henry said he wanted to take a look at the working windmill, and headed down Main Street. My mother and I went into the pub. From outside it looked like an old English pub—thatched roof, gables, and leaded glass windows—but inside it was set up like a cafeteria. We both got a chef’s salad and sat at a plank table.
    “I’m performing tonight at the Mansard House, a private clinic for alcoholic women,” my mother said. “I’d ask you to come, but I don’t think I’m ready to perform in front of family yet. I’ve drawn on quite a lot of my unhappy experience with your father, and it might be painful for you.”
    “What do you do?” I asked. I couldn’t picture my mother as a performance artist. After she left my father, she decided to become an actress, and I saw her once play Mrs. Cratchit in an off-Broadway musical based on A Christmas Carol. She sang a song called “Another Sad Christmas, Another Sad Goose.”
    “I really can’t talk about it,” my mother said. “A performance can’t be explained, it has to be experienced.”
    “Oh,” I said.
    She looked at me. “Darling, I hate to see you like this. All dressed up like a Pilgrim with no place to go.” She laughed,