Making Piece

by Beth M. Howard

  The houses are mostly hundred-year-old huge Victorians, mixed in with newer, smaller, woodsy bungalows. But the selling point wasn’t the houses, the view or the proximity to the boutiques and cafés just down the hill. The draw for Marcus and me when we moved to this neighborhood two years earlier—and one of the reasons I was drawn back—was that Willamette Heights butts up against the five-thousand-acre Forest Park, a lush, dense expanse of woods with forty miles of hiking trails. Trails on which I had before, and would again, spend long hours clad in raincoat and rubber boots, hiking with Team Terrier.

  The guesthouse was an A-frame studio above the detached garage belonging to the modern three-bedroom house in which Marcus and I had lived before moving to Mexico. In fact, had the guesthouse been available when we moved away, we would have rented it to keep as a home base. “It’s the perfect writer’s studio,” Marcus had said. He must have foreseen I wouldn’t last long south of the border. While the guesthouse was small (as in 400-square-feet), it was also airy with hardwood floors, white walls and high ceilings. Most important, factoring in the damp Pacific Northwest climate, it was well insulated, warm and dry. A place where I could sit by the fire and read my stack of books like, How to Go On Living When Someone You Love Dies, while listening to the steady rain falling on the skylights. Nestled in a stand of tall cedars, it was also very private. The one-room abode had the feel of a tree house—or, as I called it, The Grieving Sanctuary.

  Of moving into the guesthouse, my German friend Joerg asked, “Are you sure that’s a good idea? You will be reminded of Marcus every time you walk in and out of that house.”

  Joerg, who was based in Portland and had worked with Marcus, had become my go-to guy ever since I called him the day Marcus died and asked him to do the most difficult and undesirable task one could ask a friend: call Marcus’s parents in Germany and tell them their son—their only child—was dead. I speak a little German, but there was no way I would have been able to provide them with a coherent explanation of what had happened, especially since I couldn’t yet believe it myself.

  Joerg, ever gracious and refined, complied and I was forever indebted to him. With this in mind, I was gentler in my reply than I might have been had it been anyone else asking the question. I didn’t get snitty and say, “Yeah? And I’m not reminded of him every time I drive past the Legacy Emanuel Hospital? Or how about when I hear the sirens from those American Medical Response ambulances? Those frickin’ ambulances are everywhere in Portland.”

  Instead, I told him, “This place is full of good memories, Joerg. This is where I need to be. I know it.”

  CHAPTER

  4

  Number four on my to-do list—after Grief Counseling, Thyroid Treatment and Apartment Hunting, but before Figure out What to Do with Marcus’s Stuff—was Get a Job. Not a stressful job. Not my usual PR, or web producer, or journalism career-type job, but a peaceful, part-time, nurturing kind of job. I knew just what I needed to do. Bake pie.

  Eight years earlier, in 2001, I had left a grueling, lucrative web-producing job to become a minimum-wage-making pie baker. I had traded in my Banana Republic suits and high-rise office in San Francisco for an apron, overalls and a small, steamy kitchen in Malibu. Over the course of my yearlong “pie-baking sabbatical” my bank account dwindled down to nothing (try living on minimum wage in Southern California), but the joy, the friendships and the fulfillment I gained were something money couldn’t buy.

  I recognized that the amount of pie therapy required to recover from the blow of Marcus’s death would be significantly greater than what I needed after my dot com job. But I still had faith that the healing powers of baking—the Zen-like calm induced by rolling dough, the meditative trance achieved while peeling apples, the satisfaction of seeing a pale crust turn golden brown—could once again be effective.

  I hoped to recreate the restorative days of Malibu, where we had been a team of women making our various handcrafted specialties. British baker, Jane Windsor, whose wicked sense of humor and fabulous accent rivaled the deliciousness of her scones and brownies, had been the leader of the gang. We gabbed as we peeled, chopped and stirred. We had formed a small community, our own kind of support group, based around the comfort of cooking—while making comfort food. During those days, when I wasn’t caught up in the plucky conversation, I got lost in my own world, transported by the process of creating edible works of art in my tiny corner of the kitchen, lulled into tranquility by the constant hum of the convection ovens.

  That Malibu baking job was a salve on a fresh scar. I’d been working eighty hours a week at a cutting-edge dot com at the height of the boom, where the environment was competitive and cutthroat. In this new Internet world, the race was on to create The Next Big Thing. To go public. To have an IPO with shares valued at $200 each. To become the next millionaire under forty. I worked so much that I was eating carryout dinners in Styrofoam containers at my desk and sleeping with my cell phone next to my pillow. At least it proved I was capable of hard work.

  I stayed with that San Francisco grind for over a year and a half, so it also proved I could hold a job longer than my previous record of eight months. This was saying a lot for me in normal cubicle hell conditions, but as a serial freelancer, sticking it out in this atmosphere, the extreme sports of workplaces…well, I was proud of myself. I was stretching and growing, but I was like a deer in the headlights with the daily challenges. I had to learn the language of computers, a vocabulary that increased with new terms faster than I could memorize them. And I was tasked with managing a team of young web designers who didn’t want to be managed, let alone show up for work before 1:00 p.m. Yet I was as caught up in the frenzy as the next person, wanting to succeed. Who doesn’t want to be a millionaire? I was also burning out faster than the cash from the company’s last round of funding.

  The thing that tipped me over the edge was not a matter of politics or sleep deprivation. It was philosophical. The company’s oxymoronic mandate was to create more and more realistic virtual environments.

  “Make the audience believe they can feel the salt water spray on their face,” my bosses insisted of the sailboat event I produced. “Make them think they are on the rock face, right there with the climber,” they said of the mountaineering expedition I worked on.

  “It’s a computer monitor, guys, not a national park,” I wanted to remind them.

  Then new orders came down from the chief executive officer. We were to get people to spend more time on their computers. Stickiness was the Word of the Day. But this was an outdoor-adventure website. And seeing as I was a journalist whose personal mission was to use my writing to motivate people to actually go outdoors and exercise as a way to empower themselves, my bosses and I had a fundamental difference of opinion. We were a mismatched couple with irreconcilable differences. So I told them to take my six-figure job and shove it.

  “I’m going to go do something real, something tactile,” I told them during my exit interview. “I’m going to go work with my hands. I’m going to make pie.”

  Why pie? Answering that is about as easy as explaining why seemingly healthy Marcus dropped dead at the age of forty-three. If only the answer was as easy as “It was his time.” An answer which is about as inane as a mountain climber explaining he climbs Everest “because it’s there.”

  But pie? Pie was practically programmed into my DNA. Pie was the reason my parents got married. My mom can still describe how it happened in detail, how she and my dad were both living in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. How my dad was studying to be a dentist and she had just graduated from nursing school. She lived with five other nurses in a one-bedroom apartment above my dad’s favorite bar. My mom had considered becoming a nun, but then she met my dad—a charming, funny, handsome guy, who played an impressive game of pool downstairs and who loved banana cream pie. Six months into their courtship, she saw her window of opportunity and invited my dad over for dinner. She kicked out her roommates for the evening and prepared a rom
antic feast of tuna casserole, red JELL-O “salad” and a made-from-scratch banana cream pie.

  My mom put her heart and her hopes into that pie. If she wasn’t going to become a nun, she was going to get married—to my dad. First, she blind-baked the crust. She stirred the milk, sugar and eggs on the stovetop, cooking the vanilla custard. She sliced the ripe bananas and covered the whole lush thing with a generous portion of fresh whipped cream.

  The candles burned down as the two prospective mates enjoyed their meal and, finally, after the last bite of pie had been swallowed, my dad leaned back in his chair and said to my mom, “Maureen, that was the best pie I ever had. Will you marry me?” No matter that he called her by the wrong name—her name is Marie, but his hearing was challenged even then—she said yes. The pie sealed the deal.

  Pie went on to play a role in my childhood. After my parents got married, they left Wisconsin, spent two years in San Diego (where I was conceived) and eventually settled in my dad’s hometown of Ottumwa, Iowa. I was born third in line out of five kids. My mom was so busy shuttling us to our piano, cello, swim, tap, ballet, gymnastics, tennis, pottery and sewing lessons, there was no time left for baking. Therefore, my first pie of record—a slice of banana cream, forever my dad’s favorite—was consumed at an old-fashioned diner called Canteen Lunch in the Alley in Ottumwa.

  It was on a Wednesday. I remember the day of the week, because as a dentist my dad had Wednesday afternoons off. Instead of escaping to the golf course like other medical professionals did, he picked up all five of us kids from elementary school in his little white Mustang and took us to the movie theater. We went to matinees and saw films inappropriate for our age, like Dirty Harry and Taxi Driver. We didn’t care. We got to be with our dad. And eat popcorn. And get away with something we knew our mom would not approve of. She would inevitably find out.

  “To-om,” she would reprimand him when we got home, dragging out the syllables of his name. We always giggled when he got in trouble, thrilled to play a role in his game of defiance, a game I learned well and continue to play.

  After the movie, he always took us to the Canteen Lunch in the Alley, a hole-in-the-wall, squatty, square-shaped, cinder-block building that, as the name implies, is situated in an alley. The Canteen, opened in the 1930s, was where my dad had developed his love for pie as a child and where nothing had changed since. Nothing. Not the speckled Formica countertop, the red vinyl-covered bar stools, the red-and white-checkered curtains or the pie safe, full of creamy and fruity homemade pies.

  My dad lined up all five kids around the Canteen’s horseshoe-shaped counter, each of us sitting on our own swivel stool, and we proceeded to pig out on loose-meat burgers called “Canteens.” Our burgers were followed by pie. We each got our own slice. No sharing was required. My dad understood the importance of pie. He believed that no matter how stuffed our small bellies, there was always room for a whole slice of banana-cream goodness. He taught us to have reverence for this dessert, to start at the tip of the triangle with our forks and work our way back toward the crust. To let the meringue dissolve slowly on our tongues. And to moan with pleasure with each and every bite. We ate. We moaned. And we groaned from being so full.

  Part of this pie initiation was also the lesson of saying thank you. We had to be reminded after the first few outings, but we eventually grasped the idea.

  “Thank you, Dad,” we all chimed immediately after our burger and pie feasts.

  Gratitude and pie. I never could have fathomed at age seven just what a critical role the combination of these two concepts would play in my future.

  By the time I was old enough to learn any baking skills, we had entered the era when modern conveniences—like packaged pudding mix and premade pie dough—were the rage. Even my Midwestern grandmothers bought into these newfangled shortcuts, as they both had full-time jobs, and didn’t have time to make, let alone teach me, any of their old-fashioned recipes, pie or otherwise. At least my mom granted us kids full access to her kitchen, where we took turns making JELL-O 1-2-3 and no-bake cheesecake from a box. I also had my Suzy Homemaker oven, in which I baked minicakes by the heat of a lightbulb, but not pies.

  Pie didn’t feature prominently in my life again until I was seventeen. I was on a bicycle trip, heading down the West Coast from Vancouver, British Columbia, toward San Francisco. I was traveling with a fellow camp counselor from Iowa after our summer session at Camp Abe Lincoln ended. Pedaling down Washington State’s dark and mossy Olympic Peninsula, we came upon a rare and welcome opening in the thick forest and feasted our eyes on an apple orchard. It was early September, so the trees were loaded with red, ripe fruit. The branches, so heavy-looking from the weight of all those juicy apples, seemed to be begging for relief. For two young and hungry cyclists, this was an open invitation to stop for a free snack. Besides, with all that bounty, who would miss a few? We got off our bikes, leaned our mighty steeds against the log fence and began to help ourselves. We had picked only three or four apples before an old man came storming out from the crumbling white farmhouse across the acreage.

  “Hey! What are you doing on my property?” he shouted. His hair was white and uncombed, his face covered in gray stubble. His jeans were baggy and dirty, and he wore a grubby T-shirt yellowed from years of wear. He appeared unsteady on his legs, yet he charged at us with so much force we reeled back. For all our first impressions of him, he must have equally had his own ideas of us. He had every reason to be suspicious, dressed as we were in our black Lycra shorts, tight nylon shirts with rear pockets bulging with gear—and now apples—and funny little pointed shoes. Then again, given the thick lenses of his horn-rimmed glasses, he probably couldn’t see us very well.

  “We’re riding our bikes down the coast,” we said. “We’re so sorry. We didn’t mean to trespass.”

  He looked at us more closely, sizing up our tanned, athletic bodies and our cherubic faces. And then he softened. “Well, in that case…” The next thing we knew we were inside his home—making pie with our stolen apples. This grumpy old man, it turns out, was a retired pastry chef from the merchant marines.

  The inside of his farmhouse was dusty, with stacks of old books and magazines piled up next to his threadbare sofa. The presence of kerosene lanterns and absence of lamps around the living room indicated that he didn’t have electricity. We moved into his kitchen, where a large, round table crowded the room. Collecting his ingredients from the deep, dark cupboards, he dived right into what would be my first pie lesson.

  To make the dough, he used two dinner knives, moving them against each other in opposite directions, to cut the butter into the flour. He added just enough water to hold the flour together. Then, he used his craggy, weathered seaman’s hands to form two dough balls, and put the dough in his propane-powered refrigerator. While the dough was chilling, we helped peel and slice about ten small apples, saving the peelings for his compost and putting the slices into a bowl with the juice of a fresh lemon.

  Dusk approached and he lit the kerosene lamps, so we had to finish baking by the dim lantern light. He rolled the chilled dough on his wooden slab of a kitchen table, first heavily flouring the surface, then flattening the dough into a circle with a heavy wooden rolling pin. We helped arrange the sliced apples in the pie dish. He added a cup of sugar, a few tablespoons of flour, a few shakes from his cinnamon jar, and placed a pat of butter on top. He covered the apple heap with the top crust. His hands crimped the crust’s edge, moving around the circle with the deft and speed of a seaman coiling ropes. Whatever marines he’d sailed with were lucky to have him on their ship; spending months at sea were certainly made much nicer accompanied by his homemade pies.

  As our pie baked in his propane-fueled oven, gradually the musty smell of his house was replaced with a heavenly apple-cinnamon-butter scent. We fell asleep that night in our sleeping bags on his living-room floor, content and nourished by pie. From that moment on, banana cream, be damned. Apple pie was my thing.

  I’
m not saying it pays to steal, but thanks to the apple-thievery incident, I continued to make pies throughout my college years and beyond. Whenever I encountered apples, I made pie. Because I went to college in Washington State—where forty-two percent of America’s apples are grown—I made a lot of pies. Whenever I encountered a prospective husband, I applied my mother’s strategy and made pie. And because I was a warm-blooded young woman—a fallen Catholic, no less—I made even more pies. I made an apple pie for every eligible bachelor I set my sights on. For Scott, the sexy chemistry teacher who lived in a tree house near campus. For Chris, the Hollywood screenwriter. For Rick, the environmental lawyer. For Mike, the surfer/entrepreneur. For Adam, the bike racer. For Kenny, the trust-funder. For Yoshiyuki, the macadamia-nut farmer. For Scott, the blind-date billionaire. For Matthew, the hockey player. For Dion, the banker. Jesus, I made a lot of apple pie—or, as I liked to call it, “lust in a crust.”

  “Delicious pie,” they would all say. “No one has ever made me a pie before.”

  And yet, while two did propose (though, sadly, not the billionaire), none of these pies resulted in marriage—well, not until Marcus’s pie, but that didn’t come until much later. In spite of my pie prowess, my love life up to that point was like a greased pie plate—nothing stuck.

  It wasn’t until I quit the dot com job in 2001—when I said, “Goodbye, cubicle” (and “Goodbye, big paycheck”)—that I shifted my pie intentions. Pie was no longer a wily attempt to impress guys. Pie became a way to restore balance. To soothe my tired, overworked soul. To get grounded after spending too much time in front of a computer and too little time interacting with people. Pie was a vehicle to transport me back to a time before computers and cell phones, when neighbors still stopped by unannounced for a back-door visit.