WEEK
39
A Lot of ‘Splainin’ to Do

The ingredients for bread were always the same: flour, yeast, water, and salt. But the difficulty was that there were ten thousand ways of combining these simple elements.
— Julia Child, My Life in France, 2006

“I think I’m sleeping in Zach’s room tonight,” I said with feigned nonchalance, carrying my bathrobe and pillows out of our bedroom.

I waited till I was just out of sight before adding, “And maybe tomorrow night as well. Maybe for a while.”

There. It was out.

Anne wordlessly followed me into Zach’s room, then shadowed me back into what used to be our room as I returned to get some things. I decided it’d be best if I didn’t transfer too many of my possessions just yet. Anne’s shadowboxing, meanwhile, required a response.

“It was Julia’s idea,” I said clumsily.

“Julia?”

As Ricky Ricardo used to say, “Lu-ceee, you got a lot of ‘splainin’ to do.”

Let’s start with Julia.

I’m referring, of course, to the late Julia Child.

I had been reading her memoir and had learned that Julia and her husband went through an astounding 284 pounds of flour in order to perfect the baguette recipe for volume 2 of Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Like me, she’d struggled with the crust. Like me, she’d tried all kinds of ways to create steam in the oven before finally finding a solution: dropping a hot metal ax head into a pan of cold water! (You can just picture Julia, wearing a welder’s helmet and asbestos gloves, holding a pair of tongs with a red-hot, glowing ax head at the other end.) Also like me, she had eventually discovered slow, cool fermentations, autolyse, and even Raymond Calvel. In fact, she’d returned to France to meet the professor when she’d reached a dead end in her baking. After a single afternoon in which Calvel revolutionized her approach to bread, Julia returned home “euphoric” and redoubled her efforts to bake the perfect baguette.

Why? In her own words, because “I was simply fascinated by bread and determined to learn how to bake it for myself. You have to do it and do it, until you get it right.” I’d found a soul mate. I’ve always adored Julia Child—at least her television persona, which is all I know—and now I felt as if I had a companion on my journey. With the benevolent spirits of Beard and Child smiling down on me, how could I fail? I resolved to soldier on.

Soldiers need sleep, however, which is why I had my pillows tucked under my arm. Julia had also given me the courage to do something I’d been thinking about for some time: moving into a room of my own. I’m a finicky and featherlight sleeper, and an early riser. Anne, meanwhile, was often writing up her patient charts late into the night and coming to bed after I was asleep, and no matter how quietly she tiptoed, I’d wake up. On the other hand, how Anne slept in the same room as me was a mystery, as age had brought a third companion into our bedroom, my increasingly heavy snoring.

With Zach back at college, we had a bedroom with a desk available for my home Office. Why not move in? I’d broached the subject once before—we also had a tiny guest room—but Anne had vetoed it out of hand, using silly words like “intimacy” and “marriage.” This time, though, I showed her Julia Child’s passing reference to the house she and her husband had built in France, with “my bedroom on the left . . . and Paul’s bedroom on the right. (He was a sometimes insomniac, and I was known to snore. We decided it was best to spend nights apart . . . ).” Anne raised her eyebrows but didn’t argue. Not only was she as much a fan of Julia’s as I was, but apparently she was ready for a good night’s sleep as well.

Sleeping arrangements out of the way, I faced the next problem: taking my bread—and its baker—to the next level.