Atticus NFT Collection: 2.1
“The Bread Winner”
by Meg Thompson

With Art by Adriana Quezada

The bread winner had a girl. She stared at the baby’s face all night, as if it were the moon in a dream.

She feels like she is still dreaming sometimes, even though that first baby just turned nine. The pediatrician asked at the annual exam if the girl had started her cycle yet. The bread winner’s son, sitting on her lap, asked, the cycle of what?

No, she told the pediatrician. Her daughter had not started her cycle yet.

As a matter of fact, she still carries her baby dolls to their blow-up pool and dresses herself up like Moana, pretending an orange, plastic rake is an oar. From the kitchen window, the bread winner watches her daughter standing upright in the middle of the pool. With her back to the bread winner, paddling with her oar, it looks like she is sailing away. In the midst of playing, her daughter slips one of the dresses from her dolls onto their dog that, at eight pounds, is fully grown. A newborn, forever.

//

When her children were quite small, not even school-age, the bread winner used to walk into the bathroom, kneel on the floor, put her face in her hands, and cry. She could hear them playing off in the living room, but she cried as silently as possible anyway. She kept it short, only a minute or two, knowing they would eventually toddle into the bathroom, looking for her.

Her mother-in-law texted her once while she was crying, as if she knew, and asked her how she was doing. The bread winner stared at her phone, understanding exactly what the question meant, but not knowing how to answer.

The bread winner always rubbed cold water on her eyes before she walked back out to the living room.

Lay down, Mommy, her children said. We need to hear your heart beef.

The bread winner lay down on the rug. Her son pounded on her chest with a plastic mallet. Her daughter pinched the tip of her nose with a pair of toy tweezers. Both children were breathless with laughter. The bread winner moved her head almost imperceptibly to look at the clock, something she only let herself do a few times a day. It was 8:30 in the morning. She closed her eyes.

//

The bread winner had always been a very specific sort of person, and she had crafted her life around this idea of herself. She never dreamed of being a mother. She never dreamed of being anything. The idea of naming a dream job felt like a dream itself, a hopeless wanting, or a classroom activity for a preschooler. Who do you want to be when you grow up, little girl? Her own husband tells her she is the least romantic person he knows, something the bread winner takes pride in. Once, at a job interview, one of her future colleagues asked if she wanted some coffee. Yes. Thank you.

How do you take it?

Black, someone answered for her. Look at her.

//

The bread winner helped her son brush his teeth before bed. He wiped his eyes, and she realized he was crying. When she asked him what was wrong, he said he didn’t want to go to bed.

Why not?

Because I’m going to miss you.

//

Someone is standing on the bread winner’s front porch with a clipboard in his hands. The bread winner wipes her hands on her apron.

When she opens the door, he comments on her Guns N’ Roses t-shirt. Wow, love that band so much. You look way too young to know who they are. You ever see them in concert?

The bread winner’s children loll on their iPads. She can feel the cookie dough starting to dry on her hands as the salesman points at her gutters. She nods, standing half in her living room, half on the porch, balancing the weight of the door against her hip.

The salesman clicks his pen. What’s a good phone number? Is your husband home? Would he be angry if we came back?

//

Her son starts first grade. Now both of her children are gone all day, in the shadowed halls of the elementary school down the street, leaving the bread winner at home. The bread winner didn’t cry until one of her friends texted her How are you doing.

She sits in the living room. She keeps thinking about the sound of the clock ticking, which seems so much louder than before.

//

What was it, the bread winner wondered, that I was actually supposed to do? She knew she never should have asked herself this, not even rhetorically, but she couldn’t help herself. Everywhere she looked, she saw landmines, full of critique, someone waiting to tell her what she should be doing.

Have you tried applesauce?

Try putting blueberries on her plate everyday. Eventually, she’ll eat them.

Just let her have an accident at school. She’ll get made fun of so much that she’ll figure it out.

//

The greatest loaf of bread is sourdough. Humble, unassuming, ancient in its traditions, sitting in a plastic bag at a bakery like a relic from a long-ago stone kitchen. The bread winner stares at it and dreams about being able to make her own. Or a rye, heavy and bright, almost tart with seeds, the kind she used to mound with cream cheese when she was a girl. Or a honey wheat, striking the mysterious balance between fluffy and chewy. Or maybe even Japanese milk bread, toasted, with butter, the kind she had with her sister, hungover, in Tokyo, arguably the best bread she ever tasted. The bread winner imagines pulling each separate loaf out of her oven and resting it on a cooling rack on her table next to a white dish of butter, salted and whipped up into a cone as light and soft as foam.

//

Mommy, can I ask you sumpin?

Yes.

Is your job to drive us around?

Yes.

Do you wike it?

Yes.

Did you ever have anudder job?

Yes.

Do you miss it?

Yes.

//

The bread winner listened to an interview with Terry Gross, illustrious host of NPR’s Fresh Air for over forty years, but this time Terry Gross was actually the one being interviewed. The interviewer asked her what it was like growing up, and Terry Gross explained that her mother had a job until she became a mother, and that, well, she doesn’t mean to be unfair to her mother or to the women she knew, but they “seemed to be living very circumscribed lives where it was just basically about staying home and cleaning, and raising the kids and being very protective of the kids, even when the kids wanted out. It just didn’t seem like the most fulfilling job in the world.”

//

The bread winner immersed herself in the world of platitudes when she started baking bread. The language soothed her, the way it must feel if you are entering a 12-step program, or a cult. One old chestnut that the bread winner really took to was that the most important ingredient is time. She found herself repeating it, like a mantra, when she would look down into the jar at the concrete-like blend of flour and water. TikTok assured her that maintaining a vigorous sourdough starter, much like weight loss and cleaning her entire house, was easy.

She felt her collar pull in toward her neck. She looked down at her son, tugging on her shirt. Mommy.

One of the bread winner’s friends gave her a sourdough starter which the bread winner promptly killed. For a year, the bread winner tried, and failed, to get her own starter going. She knew it was possible, she just had to acknowledge this addiction. Eventually, the bread winner changed her handle to Sourdoughender on Instagram. What does that mean, her sister asked.

//

The bread winner stares at a worksheet her son brought home from school. She has to force herself to remain calm when she helps him do his homework. She wanted to home school her children because of worksheets like these. They appear innocuous but are designed to smolder every last fiber of creativity that exists in the mind of a child. The language of the worksheet is ambiguous, but only to her, she knows, based on the way she can feel her husband looking at her, concerned, from across the living room. She sits at the kitchen table running her hands through her hair.

Write yes or no to answer each question below

Is a master usually very young?

Can an opinion be proven with evidence?

Would you describe a tiny blade of grass as magnificent?

//

The bread winner asked her daughter if she wanted to try a candy cane.

No, she said. I don’t like food that is bent.

//

Mommy?

Yes.

Can I tell you bout a dream I had?

Yes.

We were all standin outside and we were watchin dees whole bunch of animals that were runnin to us from far away. It was a stampede. You know dat word mommy.

Yes.

Day kept gettin cwoser and cwoser until day got wite up cwose to us! Day were deer.

Yes.

Day all stopped and wooked at us. Den, one of dem wooked at you and I knew you had to go. Day were takin you. Because you are good with nature. And I knew I would never see you again.

//

One of the bread winner’s friends had a baby girl. The friend has a high-powered position where she sits at a big desk in the city. She took leave just long enough to push her baby out, feed her with her own body, and watch her open and close her eyes. The husband posted a picture of his beautiful wife leaving for work one morning, kissing their baby. Look at this rock star! he wrote as the caption. Our baby will grow up with a mother that sets a great example for hard-working girls everywhere!!!

#girlboss

#girlpower

#whorunstheworld

#workingmoms

//

The bread winner understands anti-vaxxers in a new way after she takes both children in for their shots.

The screaming begins as soon as the car turns in an unfamiliar direction. Her daughter is hyper-aware, like her, but in a way that is robustly unnerving to be around. Her daughter remembers everything. A scraped knee when she toppled off her bike cresting an uneven ridge in the sidewalk. The house with the loud dog in the window. The bush with the snake. The hot pan. It breaks the bread winner’s heart that her daughter lives on the edge of fear that something bad will happen.

The bread winner’s son cries because his sister is crying. She has to heft both of them through the doors and practically sit on top of them in the waiting room to keep them from running away.

The crying borders on theatrical and rings in the bread winner’s ears for hours, even when they are sitting at McDonald’s afterwards, her children suspiciously content, almost jubilant, eating Happy Meals as if nothing has happened while the bread winner grips a black coffee and stares out the window.

The bread winner had to spread her body on top of her son while the nurse got the needle ready. The bread winner pretended that she wasn’t there, that she couldn’t hear her daughter wailing. She couldn’t hear her son begging for all of it to end. She was somewhere else, a nameless place that she refers to as Away. She repeated it: away, away, away. The bread winner floated there on a small cloud. She was still on the small cloud when she lifted herself off her son and pulled her daughter out from under the table and asked her to think about something happy.

The nurse had to call for back-up. Another nurse came in to hold down the lower half of her daughter while the bread winner held down the top half. The bread winner smoothed her daughter’s hair, the way she used to do when her daughter was a baby. She would pet her daughter in the same motion, over and over, until they both fell asleep.

As the needle went in, her daughter bellowed in long, ragged sobs, I’m thinking about a unicoooooooooooorn.

//

Mommy.

Yes.

Do you want to hear me spell yellow?

Yes.

Y. E. Eleven. O. W. Is that right?

//

The bread winner asked her mother-in-law to watch her children for a few hours one night so she could go out to dinner with her husband. When she told her son that his grandma was coming over to watch him and his sister, he looked at her. Watch me do what?

//

The bread winner developed a sourdough starter. It didn’t die. She dwelled on how long it took, a process of days, then weeks, which seeped into months, as she learned how to keep it alive. It is like raising children, the bread winner thought, standing alone in her quiet kitchen on a Tuesday morning, staring at a jar. All of a sudden, it happens.

When they aren’t in school, her children mill around the house, moving in and out of her line of sight, making little jokes about the starter, like asking her what she is going to feed it. They think that it eats dinner, like a person, like she will serve it a plate of food with a knife and fork and the starter will consume it. She named the starter Breadna.

The bread tasted like it did in her dreams. Blistered crust, delicate tang, she ate it all summer in the form of thickly-layered tomato sandwiches with mayo and crunchy French sea salt. Her sister, sitting in the kitchen with her, asked how she finally got it to work. The bread winner turned her head to look in the living room, where her son was swinging a plastic sword and watching SpongeBob. Then she looked the other way, out her back door, where her daughter was floating in her pool. The kitchen was very quiet, except for her and her sister.

That’s how.

//

On the way to pick up her children from school, the bread winner drove past the local fire station. Out front, they had a sign that said:

Smoke detectors work!!

So can you!

//

Mommy.

Yes.

Sometimes I try to think about nothing, but it’s hard. I can’t do it. Do you know what I mean?

Yes.

So when I can’t think about nothing, I just think about blankness. And when I can’t do that, I think about a tiger, running. And when I can’t do that, I think about the void.

Did you just say you think about the void?

Yes.

//

Like mist coming off a lake in the morning, her husband continued to rise in his company. She watched him go, up and up, and hoped he wouldn’t disappear into a management position. This has always been her fear, that she would have to share him even more with everybody else. In this way, she was Michelle Obama, who felt the same internal struggle about watching Barack in his early days. When the bread winner caught herself worrying about this, she thought about the Obamas. They seem to have done alright, she told herself.

The bread winner’s husband makes more money than she ever did. His health insurance is better, and he gets more vacation days. So when the bread winner left her job, it felt as if she were merely making her life more compact. Functional. She was picking up all the misfit clumps of Play-Doh and, cupping them in her hands, shaping them into one smooth, round ball. What’s the big deal? Why does everyone make such a fuss about this? She just left a job that she had a Master’s degree in, that gave her a rich sense of fulfillment, and that she traveled around the world doing.

What?

//

One night the bread winner and her husband couldn’t get either of their children to fall asleep. It was as if the children had agreed a few hours beforehand that tonight they would take turns, every thirty minutes or so, coming to one of their parents with a full-blown anxiety attack. At one point her daughter came to her, tears in her eyes, terrified there was a monster hiding in her room. The bread winner tried everything she could think of to convince her daughter there was nothing in her room that was trying to hurt her, but her daughter did not believe her, and kept pacing around their small house, clutching a stuffed rabbit, sobbing. Finally, the bread winner grabbed her by the shoulders and knelt in front of her. She launched into a long-winded rant about how daddy would sooner die than let anything bad happen to his family and that everything he does, in some way or another, is about protecting his home and the people inside it. The bread winner hated giving in to this patriarchal narrative, but it calmed her daughter. At the end, finally, when the bread winner said daddy’s job was to protect her, her daughter looked up and asked, I thought he was in sales?

//

The bread winner was reminded on a near constant basis when her children were very small that she would miss these days when they were gone.

No one tells her that anymore.

//

One day, while her children were at school, the bread winner prepared a bath.

For herself.

//

The bread winner’s children stared out the living room window, waiting for their grandparents. After they arrived, the children played on the living room floor while the adults perched on the furniture in unnatural seated positions. When the bread winner’s daughter spit into her own hand to clean off an errant marker smudge, her grandmother congratulated her for her savviness, telling her she was ready to be a mother. Her daughter smiled and walked over to fumble around in the toy chest. The bread winner felt her jaw tighten. She stared at the wall in front of her, practicing the language she learned in her overpriced meditation app. Her thoughts were interrupted when her daughter stopped what she was doing and looked back at her grandmother. By the way, she began, I’m not going to be a mom. I’m just going to be a person.

//

The bread winner’s daughter had a nightmare that they were all in the living room, watching daddy die on the floor. They were all screaming, trying to help, but his skin was falling off. Breaking, her daughter described it, like glass. And then, when he started to bleed, the blood arced into the air, like rainbows.

//

The bread winner scrolled through Instagram. She saw a post from one of her Peloton instructors, a gorgeous blond with a body so perfect even the Greeks would have been like, damn, someone sculpt that ass. She was wearing one of those long, pleated skirts that only look good on seven people whilst looking back at the camera and drinking an iced coffee in Brooklyn. This particular Peloton instructor’s key to success is that she is gorgeous and struggles with depression. This makes her relatable to other beautiful women that have nothing wrong with them except that they live in a world run by men. The Peloton instructor included a quote in her caption from Nayyirah Waheed. The quote did that thing to the bread winner’s head that Emily Dickinson said lets you know you are reading poetry. But when the bread winner googled Nayyirah Waheed, she saw that she was labeled as an Instagram Poet. For fuck’s sake, the bread winner thought. For fuck’s sake.

//

One afternoon while the bread winner was pumping gas, staring at the sky, her children asleep in the car, she thought she heard gunshots. Rapid fire. It’s coming from above, she thought, in an instant, it’s just like the Vegas shooter. But before she could debate hurling herself on top of her children to protect them versus having the time to drive away, she realized it was just a worker with a nail gun on the roof of the gas station.

//

The bread winner and her sister got their kids together at their mother’s house. While the kids played, the adults sat in the kitchen and drank coffee. During lunch, the bread winner’s niece came up to her and told her about her dreams, which she calls eye-stories. After she ran off to play, the bread winner’s mother said that she never dreams. Ever. She has never had one dream in her life.

//

The bread winner took her bread to the county fair and won Best of Class with her Herbal Crusty White.

She won four dollars.

//

In the kitchen of her home, the bread winner enjoys making dinner for her family. Look at this, she thinks sometimes. Look what I can fucking do. She and her family listen to music. She drinks wine. Her children dance around the table. Her husband reads on an iPad.

The song “Wild Heart” by Bleachers is playing. I love this song, her husband says. It reminds me of someone.

Her son stops dancing. Who?

Someone with a wild heart.

Who has a wild heart, daddy?

Your mother.