After high school, she used to scour the sidewalks for dandelions. That was when she was helping to support the family by working at Canter’s. She ran the deli’s ancient cash register, and on her walks home she’d seek out a dandelion so that she could make a wish. She’d recently charmed her way into the kitchen, and the head baker was letting Frida shadow her, teaching Frida how to make bagels and rugelach and that banana-chocolate cake with the word BANANA in yellow icing across the top. Ingredients were getting expensive and hard to keep in stock, and so she was also taught recipe substitutions, how to make a little go a long way. These lessons happened after Frida’s shift and didn’t pay, of course. Most of the time Frida was wishing on her dandelions for a permanent reprieve from her insipid register duties, a way into that kitchen for good, so that she could start a proper grown-up life. Not that she was in a hurry; things were tolerable at home, and it wasn’t like anyone her age was leaving the nest.
But most of the people her age weren’t like Micah, who was smart. Brilliant. A kid who needed to get out of L.A. so he could return to save it. The whole Ellis family, not just Hilda and Dada, but Frida, too, expected Micah to solve this mess the world was in. Her mother had met a Plank alum at a party. “A man so shy he was rude,” she said. But he was also very smart and successful. “He’s working to fix the water crisis,” she said. “You know, how to make sure we still have some in the years to come.” Their mother thought Micah could become a water man and solve the city’s problems. Plus, the college was free, and not so far away.
This was what Dada liked, that it didn’t cost anything to attend. There would be no other option for someone like Micah, who couldn’t afford the private colleges. Scholarship was an endangered word. Back then, some people were still getting into college, but fewer and fewer were going; it was becoming a path reserved for the very rich. When Frida had started her senior year, she told her parents she didn’t want to go to college, and they were relieved. Why bother with all that schooling if there wasn’t a job waiting for you when you finished? “You don’t need college,” Dada had said, which seemed like a compliment at the time.
Her brother, though, he was different. He did need it. By then, UCLA and Berkeley had shut down, as had all the other public universities worthy of Micah’s attendance. “Budget problems: the understatement of the decade,” he liked to say. He was fucking brilliant, and he’d been born at the wrong time.
It took a single Internet search to learn about Plank’s all-male student body. Frida was convinced her mother had kept this fact out of the story because it would scare Micah off. Girls liked Micah, and he liked them right back.
But then one night at dinner, her brother came to the table, his face held solemnly, and said, “I’m applying.” That was all. Frida realized then that his beard, which he’d just started to grow, and the books on homesteading and animal husbandry that he’d recently downloaded, were making him into the kind of man Plank would accept. That morning, he’d quoted Thoreau, and she hadn’t thought anything of it. But he was preparing. He was cunning, her brother.
It wasn’t until Micah moved to Plank that she realized he’d gotten away. She was still in L.A., still living with their parents. Meanwhile, her brother had gone to live a grown-up life.
Cal liked to describe Micah as a prankster at Plank, but Frida didn’t see him that way. She would say he took on dares, and with that bravery he defied you to take on your own. Plank was a dare. He would become a person who could live without women, who could work a farm, who could live in the past. “And you will give up that stupid deli job,” he told Frida, “or you’ll ask them to hire you in a different capacity. No more validating parking tickets at the register, for fuck’s sake.” Frida waited until Micah left for Plank, and then she took his advice. She asked to be put in the bakery, or she’d quit. To her surprise, they promoted her right away.
Frida smiled now at that tiny coup and from her bag brought out the laundry soap. The Millers had left it. She had a feeling its ingredients had come from August, but until they ran out, she wouldn’t ask. Frida actually looked forward to making detergent herself; she thought it might remind her of baking: the measuring and mixing. It made her heart ache a little. She had been so good at her job.
She remembered writing to Micah about her promotion. She had sent him a letter, because Plank didn’t allow email. In reply to her news he had said, “I knew you could do it, Freed. When I’m home this summer, can you give me a few lessons? Our head bread maker is graduating in June, and Cal says the position should be mine.”