Ten Past Ten
My name is Qinghe Tao. I am forty-three, and I run quality control at the central kitchen of a bakery chain in Los Angeles. Every morning at half past four I am the first person through the kitchen door. I do not look at the thermometer first. I smell. Whether the first batch has turned a shade too sour, whether the yeast slept ten minutes too long last night — my nose knows before the instruments do, and by twenty to five, the bread in seventeen shops across the city is already decided by what I found. My work coat pockets carry three pens and a probe thermometer at all times. My colleagues joke that my nose files its report before anyone else is awake.
That day was a Friday. My mother had called at noon: Saturday's family lunch was off, my father had gone fishing with an old friend, and she was happy to have the quiet — I should take the day and rest properly. I said yes, a little too quickly. At ten that night I was sitting in my own car in the alley behind the kitchen, engine off, the smell of butter still on my hands after three washes, an apron balled up on the back seat. That was when the reminder lit up my phone. I had set it myself, three years earlier: one line, set to repeat every Friday. When there is time, go and try that once.
The strange thing was, that weekend was already full. The family lunch was cancelled, but there was still my mother's blood-pressure medicine to drop off, the mint and basil on my balcony to water, the Saturday specials at the market to catch. Sitting in the car, I ran the two days through my head, and when I reached the end I noticed there was not one block in them that was mine. I live twenty minutes from the kitchen, alone, in a flat with very little in it; the fridge always holds eggs and a bunch of scallions going soft. Tired is a word I rarely say out loud. There is no one to hand it to. My mother would only say, go to bed earlier, then. And I do go to bed early — eleven o'clock, and awake at twenty past four, ten minutes before the alarm, lying there watching it get light.
Both Doors in My Hands
I knew exactly what "that" was. A private care studio for women only. No sign on the door, no address published, and an application that asked more careful questions than any quality form I had ever filled in: how had I been sleeping, were there old injuries, were there scents I could not stand. I had heard about it three years before, from a supplier's wife, smiled, said when there is time, and saved the note when I got home. In three years it surfaced over a hundred times, and over a hundred times I swiped it away with the same thought: next week, when it is quieter. Anyone who works with bread can tell you — there is no quieter next week.
That night I did not swipe it away. I sat in the car and filled in the application. Where it asked if there was anything they should know, I typed and deleted and typed again, and in the end wrote: I work with my nose. Places that smell of too many things at once are hard for me. I laughed at myself as I sent it — what kind of requirement was that. Underneath, the page said plainly that I could change my mind any time before confirmation, no reason needed. I looked at that line for a while. I even tapped cancel once, and went back. That was the moment my shoulders came down: the way in and the way out were both mine to choose. The confirmation came at eight the next morning — one street corner, and a note that the exact spot would be sent once I arrived. My schedule runs in ten-minute blocks: check the ovens, sign the sheet, release the batch. In the ten o'clock block that Saturday, where I had written "sleep in," I crossed it out and wrote the name of a street corner.
I slept more deeply that night than I had in weeks. I was at the kitchen by half past four as always; the first batch came out, I leaned in — sour, wheat, the toastiness of the bottom heat, all correct. Signing the release sheet, my pen stopped and the ink bloomed into a small dot. My apprentice asked if something was on today. Nothing, I said. But my hands finished the day's work forty minutes early: I watched the second batch myself, signed the warehouse orders before noon, even closed the accounts I usually leave for the afternoon. At twenty to ten I changed out of my work clothes, hung the apron in its place, and redid my hair in the locker-room mirror. Then I took it down and tied it again, lower. No makeup. I just refreshed my lipstick.
Delete
The room was quieter than I expected. The light was kept low, the curtain drawn, one seam of morning coming through. I read the air the way I read a kitchen: cedar first, then sweet orange, then a little ginger. Nothing harsh, nothing piled on — somebody had blended it with care, and my nose signed it off before I did. When I lay down, my shoulders sank on their own, the left one first, and I understood that my left shoulder sits higher than my right: sample boxes, sacks of flour, the first crate of bread into a new shop — I carry everything on the left, fifteen years of it, and nobody had ever told me. The hands that settled on my back were in no hurry at all. They stopped where my breathing tangled, and waited. A hot towel came down across my shoulders; I weighed it in my mind out of habit, and then, for once, I stopped weighing things.
In the second half, warm oil worked its way down my legs, from the ankles to the calves, place by place, as if someone were walking back over the week's road for me. My feet live in kitchen safety shoes all year; the soles are more calloused than my palms. When the hands reached the tops of my feet I realised I had been waiting the whole time — for the next check, the next call, the next signature. In the kitchen I am both the person everyone waits for and the person always waiting on a result. Here, there was no next thing. My nose stung, absurdly, and I turned my face a little into the pillow.
Somewhere in the middle I drifted — asleep, not asleep — while a car passed slowly outside, and later passed slowly back. I thought about the rest of that list in my phone, a dozen more lines starting with when there is time: learn to swim, go and look at the sea, clear the balcony at last. Three years they had been queuing, and the queue had not shortened by one. At the end I was handed a cup of warm water with ginger in it, and the warmth travelled all the way to my fingertips. Outside, the sun was properly up. I sat in my car at a red light, ninety seconds, and deleted the three-year-old note. It did not take a grand reason. I am finished using the word "when" to schedule myself. In next month's calendar there is a Saturday morning I have already taken, and the note on it says only two words: keep empty.
On the way home I stopped at the market. I usually shop with a list and I am at the till in fifteen minutes. That day I pushed the cart slowly, stood a long while in front of the fruit, and bought a box of the expensive strawberries and a bunch of small white flowers I did not know the name of. The girl at the checkout said, have a good weekend. I said, I will. I have answered that sentence many times. That was the first time it was simply true.