Don Pond, a stickler? She wouldn’t believe it. Swiftly, Melba changed the subject.
“I had an idea for a new kind of pastry,” she said, brightly. “Instead of using ingredients, I would use quintessence. I would combine the quintessence of multiple things, quail, I think, for one, and custard, and I’d make a glaze of course and sprinkle nonpareils on top, either whole nonpareils or their quintessence, I’m not sure.”
Don Pond’s expression did not change, but Melba reassured herself that his face was still quite cold; she couldn’t expect it to flex readily just because she’d said something fascinating. She gathered garlic sticks and brownies and presented Don Pond with a large bag.
“Thank you, Melba,” said Don Pond. He took the bag and held it awkwardly, and Melba watched him closely, moistening her finger with her tongue. She waited impatiently for him to open the bag and begin to speak, rapidly, self-loathingly, waving a garlic stick from which salt and garlic chips would shower down. She held her moistened finger at the ready. But Don Pond did not open the bag. Don Pond looked around the bakery as though he had no status there at all, as though he were not the first customer, as though he were not even finite, and therefore had no ascertainable value whatsoever.
“I’ve been talking with some of the other men,” said Don Pond. “Melba, you’re not safe here in the bakery. What’s that on the floor? Never mind. Don’t look. It’s better not to look. Listen, Melba, I’m not blaming you. Some employees try to get themselves killed at work. They say they’re fetching the stepladder to change a light bulb and the next thing you know, they’ve let the ceiling fan take their heads off. That’s not you! What’s happening here is beyond your control. Melba, you need to leave the bakery at once.”
“I wouldn’t want to say that you and the other men are wrong, Don,” said Melba. “But I know that I’m safe in the bakery. Once I cracked an egg on the side of the mixing bowl and a chick fell out. That was startling and I felt shaky for some time afterwards, but I finally came to terms with it and accepted that there’s an explanation. I mean, eggs are supposed to be eggs and not chickens, but there is a point in the genesis of eggs and chickens when they’re the same thing. In the bakery, I have things I do when I feel afraid and they really help. I’ll show you.”
Melba ran through the swinging door. In the depths of the bakery, the air had turned hot and acrid. Melba squinted in the dull orange light and sniffed. Something inside the ovens was definitely burning. The top shelf of the oven billowed smoke. Melba finished squinting and didn’t pause a second longer. She considered herself a veteran of such situations, situations in which nothing can be saved. She had no qualms about allowing whatever it was inside the oven to burn itself off. She rushed past the oven with her hands over her nose and mouth. No, she would not open the oven door. Why create a mess out of false sentimentality? She pulled a heavy bucket from beneath the long table and struggled back toward the front of the bakery through the smoke. A moment later, she was heaving the bucket around the counter, dropping it by Don Pond’s feet. She yanked off the lid.
“Salt,” panted Melba. She ducked behind the counter, rummaging, and returned holding a wooden dowel. Crouching beside the bucket, she thrust the dowel into the salt. For several quick, shallow breaths, she stirred the salt in the bucket with a wooden dowel, then she stirred for several slow, deep breaths, and, finally, she released the dowel and sat motionless on the bakery floor, her elbow in the bucket, the top four inches of the dowel pressing against her inner arm. She looked up at Don Pond. He was looking at the ceiling.
“You don’t even have a ceiling fan,” he said.
“Don,” said Melba. “Maybe I can’t trust this sensation, but I feel wonderful right now, warm and confident. My palms are even tingling. I couldn’t feel half so good if I were somewhere else, if I weren’t in the bakery, if I were in my bedroom, for example, thrashing on the floor between rolled-up balls of tights. Even if I kept buckets of salt in my bedroom, and installed a tower of ovens, I’d always feel more imperiled in my bedroom than in the bakery.”
The essential nature of Melba’s bedroom differed from the essential nature of the bakery in ways she couldn’t quite pinpoint, but that brought her vivid apprehensions of impending doom.
“If I had to describe my bedroom to someone, not to a future tenant, to a disinterested party, to you Don, I would say that my bedroom has a demented, disconsolate nature. Have you ever discovered voles in your pillowcasings?”
“Of course, Melba,” said Don Pond, but he was still looking at the ceiling, shifting from foot to foot.
“I’ve made you uncomfortable!” cried Melba. “I shouldn’t be talking about my bedroom, but Don, it’s so frightening. Maybe you and the men are right about the bakery. Maybe I don’t notice how unsafe it is because I’m always comparing it to my bedroom, and the bakery is a kind of Elysian Field compared to my bedroom, not to sound snobbish,” added Melba, who could be shy about her admiration for the classical world.
Don Pond was no longer looking up. His head was sinking between his shoulders and he looked stricken. Melba knew she had to stop speaking. She pressed her lips together and clutched the dowel with both hands, stirring as she mastered herself.
There was something essentially upsetting about her bedroom, she thought, assured by the pressure of the dowel on her palms. It was as though her bedroom had been built on the site of an ancient burial ground. The walls were a sickening, fertilized color, lush and waxy. The carpet fibers broke easily between her fingers, just as hairs would break after centuries of neglected grooming.
Melba disliked the way bakery customers white-gloved the bakery, fingering the refrigerator, the counter, the walls, the window, and even the linoleum, zinging her with their haughty observations about dusts, greases, and molds, but at least the bakery customers usually had the good manners to hurry, shouting orders as they charged the counter and rebukes as they barreled out the door. There was something affirming about their outrage. The bakery’s customers seemed to harbor a belief in standards. They seemed to believe that excellence existed, that it was attainable, by Melba herself, if she just applied herself more vigorously and with greater attention to sanitary procedure. The visitants to her bedroom, on the other hand, were silent and unhurried and their abuses could not be attributed to ideals. These visitants circled her bed in rotting smocks, displaying flesh of disturbing translucency, brindled here and there with rope burns. They often huddled on Melba’s stomach, compressing her diaphragm with heels and clammy buttocks. That would never happen in the bakery! Her bedroom was a different order of place, a place that emanated malignancy, and Melba had wondered on occasion if this emanation fell under the purview of her landlord, Mark Rand, or if the emanation was beyond his jurisdiction.
Melba’s pulse hammered so hard in her temples that she jerked up, gripping the dowel as hard as she could manage, swirling the salt until her palms chafed and she turned away from the bucket, scooting to lean her back firmly against the counter.
“This can’t go on,” said Don Pond, shaking his fist, and for the first time Melba noticed that his inflexible features had a steely quality. “If it were just me who thought so, I’d never say,” continued Don Pond, “but there’s a quorum, and because I’m the first customer, the men wanted me to be the one to tell you. I told them I didn’t ask to be first customer, or even try in particular, and I never make much of it. How do you even know that I hold that distinction? I asked the men, and they gave no satisfactory answer. But I assure you they knew. Listen, Melba, no one would suggest you go to your bedroom and sleep, not now. But why don’t you come to my house, Melba?” Suddenly, Don Pond stiffened, and Melba leapt to her feet.