I slide my hand into the clammy yellow bag. It’s been left open again. I am reminded of four preadolescent boys whose apathy regarding the cost of dozens of ruined loaves once extended to frequent invasions of my privacy. Little brothers are not the culprits this time, though. I imagine Lauren dancing and singing her way through the kitchen; she is scrounging up whatever she can find to put together a decent breakfast. A small smile creeps over my lips. She often gets so caught up in the cooking process that she fails to see the trail of breadcrumbs left in her wake. I seem to have caught this loaf just in time though.
It’s hot today and the plastic sticks to my skin. I wrestle with the sack before I finally lure out two slices. The moisture on the bread cools as the unfamiliar air hits it. The bread has a spongy texture, supple and porous. It is still soft and pure, and has not yet been marred by the maladroit touch of hasty fingers. The doughy smell of the pre-sliced loaf invites me back to balmy summer days when I would walk through the street, the aroma of baking bread from the Stroehmann’s factory permeating the air.
That was a summer of firsts and of feeling like an adult. It was the first summer I spent in a house so close, mere blocks, from the bread factory. It was the summer before I left for college. It was the first summer I would spend entirely with friends instead of the usual month at my dad’s house in Jersey. The first summer my mom would have somewhere to go and leave me with an empty house for a week. It was the summer my best friend would come back from living with her sister in the South. The summer I would begin to recognize one aspect of my sexuality, but end up exploring another. It was the summer I would meet my first real boyfriend.
My fingers trace over the delicate pillow of dough. My touch is soft, like a lover’s. The bread rebounds back to its original shape, largely unharmed save for small craters where my fingers pressed a little too callously. I think again of how this loaf was almost lost to the indifference of those who have yet to earn their keep, like the assorted boys who fumbled their way through my mind and into my pants, the girls who I bed under the guise of friendship.
I spent the better part of a week that summer vying for Brandon’s attention. My mom was in one of the Carolinas with her boyfriend visiting his daughter for the entire week so I held a string of parties. One night we stayed up until sunrise.
“Remember those alien things from Sesame Street?” I asked.
“Which ones?”
“The ones with the mouths. Yip yip yip… something like that.”
“Oh, yeah,” Brandon said. He looked at me. “Do it.”
“Yip yip yip yip…” I started, unsure of how it sounded. “Meehaw, meehaw.” I was nervous, unused to being so candid around anyone and by the second ‘meehaw’ I was ‘meehahaha-ing’. My mom had always told me told be able to laugh at yourself so that others will be laughing with you, not at you.
I laugh at myself now, thinking of how I acted, and drop the two slices into the red plastic toaster and pull the lever down until I hear it click snugly into place. My mom gave us this toaster for Christmas. Red, to match our color scheme and because my mom is always looking for new ways to show me she loves Lauren too. Our toaster doesn’t pop up loudly like my mom’s white Betty Crocker. Sometimes it doesn’t pop up at all. Instead, if I listen closely I’ll hear an almost inaudible click when the heat shuts of.. The bread just stays in the toaster and waits for me to push it up. There were more than a few instances of cold toast in the beginning. It took some getting used to the change, but I’ve come to appreciate it.
Lauren and I had been dating for nearly a month before she had the chance to display her culinary aptitude. I’d grown up perfecting the toaster, but she’d long ago mastered the toaster oven. I’d only used one a few times, after my dad remarried, but I could never really get the hang of it. It was a foreign concept to me
One day she made ham and mustard sandwiches. I was a little disgusted at the idea, but since I had grown up alternating between bologna and ketchup or cheese and mayonnaise sandwiches I figured I had no room to judge. I watched curiously as she stuck four slices of bread into her roommate’s toaster oven, two of them piled with ham and yellow mustard. She turned the little dial then grabbed me by the hands to twirl me around their cramped kitchen. We laughed at the nervous face I made each time she attempted to dip me backwards. I wasn’t sure yet if she could keep a hold of me and I hesitated each time she tried to push my weight toward the floor. The ding of the toaster oven interrupted one last downward scoop and when she handed me a plate full of sandwich I could still feel the heat of laughter on my cheeks.
I liked the foreign taste of it.
-
“Would you fall in love with a guy like him?” I can’t make the question stop bouncing around my head. Lauren and I had been watching In Her Shoes last night. The man was charming, sure… but he was also genuine. He cared about the woman, was willing to let her go to figure herself out. Her buckteeth and flat hair were unattractive and far from Hollywood’s standards of beauty but this seemed to lend a radiance to her that was oddly appealing. In all honesty, I wouldn’t have been able to pick between either one.
One of Lauren’s biggest insecurities is the fear that I will someday leave her for a man, like her ex did.
“What if,” she went on to say, “there’s somebody perfect and I start to get busy with work all the time?”
“So maybe there is. I don’t really care though, because I already have something with you. I don’t want to go through all of that new stuff with someone I could potentially be perfect with when I already know I have it with you. I can be Me with you. I don’t open up like this with very many people, especially new people.”
“You did with me.”
“That was just talking,” I said.
I want to tell her again, but I’m standing alone in the kitchen. I think back to that first night.
“Are you gay?” she had asked me. I hadn’t been expecting such frankness. We were all at a friend’s house. The four of us had been talking about whether or not college was necessary while everyone else in the house danced or smoked. I had been about to argue how a degree is necessary for me when the girl with the blonde hair and the guitar interrupted me.
“I’m bi,” I told her. She patted the seat next to her. I had no idea what to expect.
She was my first real girlfriend. I had tried dating a girl in high school, but she ended up finding a boyfriend. I had a sobering make out session with my best friend after she told me she’d been in love with me for years, but she too ended up with a boyfriend soon after. Dating boys was a familiar routine. I didn’t know how their minds worked, but they were often more direct than girls. Clumsier too, I would come to find out.
I had stood there, wondering why I hadn’t expected this. Something always gets broken in the movies, especially when the parents are away and unaware that their child has invited dozens of friends over.
“Seriously, I’ll replace it. How much do I owe you?”
I smiled and told Joel not to worry about it. It had been an accident, after all. The boys made it a habit of running through the house and coming to a quick stop on the oval rug, riding it a few feet across the hard wood floor. I hadn’t seen it, but I know Joel would have had barely enough time to catch himself on the desk behind him. It would have been quite impressive if he had caught the small green banker’s lamp even if he had been sober.
“It cost like ten dollars at WalMart. It’s not even a huge deal.” It may have been the small buzz kicking in, but I was far from concerned about replacing the lamp. I smiled to reassure him. Still, he kept offering to remedy the situation.
“No, I insist. I’m not leaving until I can make it up to you.” His eyes were nearly shut. Round after round of beer pong had finally done him in and he swayed a little. I wondered how much harder it was for him to stay balanced than it would be for someone who wasn’t six foot seven. “What if I give you five and take you out to dinner tomorrow?”
I laughed, mistaking his offer for a joke. I wasn’t used to getting asked out on real dates. My experience consisted solely of friendly flirtations morphing into cuddling and leading to inexpert groping. I looked down at the scattered chunks of green glass. He swore he’d be back the next day with a solution, but I waved him off. He was too drunk to remember any of this.
When a friend and I left the next day to meet up with Brandon at a diner, I found a brand new lamp, the same lamp my mom had bought just months before, in the same packaging, sitting just inside my front door.
I had another party at my house that night. Brandon was there.
“I found a video of the Martians. The ones from Sesame Street.”
“I will definitely have to take a look later,” he said. I wasn’t sure what to make of that. It wasn’t quite the answer I’d been hoping for, but it wasn’t entirely a brush-off.
He sat on the couch talking to someone on one end of the room and Joel sat on the other. I found myself sitting in a chair between both of them but closer to Joel, so I turned to him and thanked him for the lamp.
“I really wasn’t expecting you to replace it and I just wanted you to know what it meant that you did.” I was nervous. Rambling even, because by now I had figured out his intents from the night before and I didn’t know how to flirt with someone who had intentions.
Joel must have responded but I was distracted by a tap on the shoulder.
“I’d like to see The Martians.”
-
When I lived and made toast at my mom’s I had plenty of opportunities to examine her old toaster. She’s had it for years. With four boys she can barely keep up, and the toaster has let itself go. It’s filthy. Dirt and grime line the formerly unspoiled crevices where once upon a time the plastic was fastened together on an assembly line. It looks greasy, though I’ve always refrained from investigating this further.
Old and new, like dating.
-
Brandon and I talked about movies. He wanted to make them. He spent all of his extra money compiling a collection of worthy DVDs. Brandon was serious about movies. In the theater or at home, nobody could talk once it started. The previews were even off-limits, though we had that much in common.
Our definitions of what made a classic movie drastically differed. He obsessed over movies like Ghostbusters, Clerks, and Shaun of the Dead. They were a few of my favorites too, but my dream threesome involved Cary Grant and Grace Kelly.
My eyes rove the counters in my kitchen as I think of how my movie-watching habits have been forever altered. The kitchen looks like a tornado of children passed through it, but I’m trying to remember the last time I didn’t sit all the way through the rolling credits of a movie.
A grad school internship led Brandon to New York City and ended our relationship. I tried rationalizing that the bread might’ve burned had I not fretted over the decision to pull the lever up and prematurely pop the toast. I tell myself I’d have been ready for that, but I don’t know that that’s true.
Why did I still watch the toaster? Why did I stand there when I knew the impact of the pop would send me inches into the air? I knew the moment I walked away the toast would pop and I would have lost. Too stubborn to admit defeat, I could not give that kind of power to a dirty plastic appliance. It was only after Brandon and I broke up that I allowed myself to see where the toast had begun to burn. I couldn’t admit it to myself at the time, but I saw the end coming months before it popped.
He stayed in the city after graduation, found an apartment in Brooklyn, and a job where he gets to meet celebrities. I’m not sure what he does, but when Heath Ledger died Brandon was at Sundance Film Festival and got the call from E! News asking if he knew where to find Michelle Williams.
We still talk sometimes, usually about his blogs, Dennis Lehane’s next movie and the people he sees on the subway who are dressed in drag. He knows Lauren and I are moving, and Lauren knows he lives in Brooklyn and she knows we’re friends. I’ve told her I plan to see him on occasion. She’s slowly getting used to the idea.
“Are you gonna hang out with me when you move here?” He asked me one night. “Because you should. Because I only hang out with gavin, and I live with him.”
The truth is I don’t know how to hang out with Brandon. Now that he’s not in my life as much I haven’t been following the movie news and I seldom know the B movies he references. The world of writing and the movies are so closely related, but at the same time worlds apart.
My olfactory nerves interrupt my thoughts, telling me with a hearty fragrance that the bread is nearly toast. I can imagine the color turning slowly from white to a golden-brown. The air even smells warmer. I can almost hear the scorched surface just begging me for bits of cold solid butter that it can liquefy into submission over its fragile surface.
The coiling of my intestines feels leaden and becomes increasingly noticeable as I wait apprehensively for the toast to pop up. I know it’s coming soon. I can feel it. But I know this toaster, the one that is actually mine, doesn’t have the same temperamental nature. I can coax this one to work with me, to not just act of its own accord.
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