Everybody talks about all this crazy, wild passion, he said. That’s how it goes, in the songs. Your mother was like that. She was in love with love. She couldn’t do anything partway. She felt everything so deeply, it was like the world was too much for her. Any time she’d hear a story about some kid who had cancer, or an old man whose wife died, or his dog even, it was like it happened to her. It was like she was missing the outer layer of skin that allows people to get through the day without bleeding all the time. The world got to be too much for her.
Me, I’d just as soon stay a little bit numb, he said. Whatever it is I’m missing, that’s OK by me.
I WAS GOING HOME FROM THE LIBRARY one day—a place I hung out often, during the months I lived with my father and Marjorie. It was a holiday weekend—Columbus Day maybe, or more likely, Veterans Day. I remember the leaves were off the trees by this point, and it got dark early, so that by the time I’d return to the house for dinner, the lights would be on throughout the neighborhood. Riding my bike home—or, as I was that night, walking—I could look in the windows and see the people who lived inside, doing all the things people do in their houses. It was like moving through a museum with a whole row of brightly lit dioramas, labeled something like How People Live or Families in America. A woman chopping up vegetables at the sink. A man reading the newspaper. A couple of kids in an upstairs bedroom, playing Twister. A girl lying on her bed, talking on the phone.
There was an apartment building on this street—an old house that had been turned into condominiums, probably—where I always looked up. There was this one particular apartment whose windows I liked studying, where the family always seemed to be sitting down to dinner at just about the same hour every day, which happened to be when I was passing this particular corner. It was sort of a superstition with me, you might say, that if I saw the three of them—the father, the mother, and the little boy—gathered around the table, as I generally did, nothing terrible was going to happen that night. I think the person I was worried about not getting through the night, at that point, was my mother. Who would be sitting at her table alone right about then. Having her glass of wine, reading her Good Life book.
This family just always looked so happy and homey was the thing. More than any of the other family dioramas in the How People Live museum, I wished this was the one I was coming home to. You couldn’t hear what the people were saying, naturally, but you didn’t have to, to know things were going well in that kitchen. The conversation probably wasn’t especially earth-shattering (How was your day, honey? Fine, how about yours?) but something about the feeling around that table—the soft yellow light, the nodding faces, the way the woman touched the man’s arm, and how they laughed when the little boy waved his spoon around—gave you the impression there was no place else they’d rather be at that moment, or anyone they’d rather be with than each other.
I guess maybe I’d forgotten where I was, and I was just standing there. It was a cold night—cold enough that I could see my breath, and see the breath of the person coming down the steps of the apartment building, with a little dog on a leash, so little she might have been walking a feather duster. Smaller than the smallest poodle, even.
Even before I recognized her face, I understood I knew the person walking the dog, I just didn’t know from where. All I could see was skinny legs under an oversize black coat, and high-heeled boots, which people didn’t usually wear in our town. Never, actually.
It was plain that she hadn’t taken this dog on very many walks before tonight, or if she had, she had an unusually stupid dog on her hands. Because he kept on getting tangled up, twisting his leash around her legs and jumping up and going from one side to the other—pulling tight on the leash one second, releasing altogether and sitting motionless a moment later.
Heel, Jim, the voice said.
This had about as much effect as if I’d told my mother, You should get out more. Make new friends. Take a trip. When the voice said this, the little dog went crazier than ever. He must have bitten her leg or something, because she let go of the leash, or lost control completely anyway, so now the dog was tearing down the sidewalk—Jim? Who names their dog Jim?—and straight for the corner, where a truck was barreling down.
I dove to catch him. Somehow, I did. The person with the skinny legs came running up to me then, dragging a very large purse and wobbling in the high-heeled boots. She had been wearing a hat—a wide-brimmed hat, with a feather or something sprouting out the top, and that had fallen off, which made it easier to see her face. This was when I realized it was Eleanor. Now here she was, tottering down the street, straight in my direction.
In those first weeks after that Labor Day, when the world was simply spinning, I couldn’t think clearly about anything. When I felt anger—and I did—it was all directed at myself. That never went away, but after a while, I recognized another object for my anger, and that was Eleanor.
It was the first time I’d seen her since that day we’d met for coffee when she’d jumped on top of me. She had not enrolled in my school that fall, and since nobody knew her, there was nobody to ask about her, even if I’d wanted to. I figured she’d gone back to Chicago, to stir up trouble there. She would have found someone to have sex with by this point, probably. It was so clear, from our brief acquaintance, that not remaining a virgin for even ten more minutes was one of her goals.
She might have ignored me—bent to pick up her hat and kept on walking—except that I had her dog. He was pressed up against my chest, and even through the fabric of my jacket I could feel his heart beating fast, the way it used to be with Joe the hamster back when he was around.
That’s my dog, she said, reaching out for him, like a shopper waiting for her change.
I’m holding him hostage, I said. Normally, I would never have made a remark like that. It just came out.
What are you talking about? she said. He’s mine.
You told the police about Frank, I said. Until now, I had never acknowledged this, even to myself, but suddenly I knew.
You basically ruined two people’s lives, I said.
I want my dog, she said.
Oh yeah, I told her. Now that I was started, I was in the zone. I might have been channeling Magnum P.I. or someone. What’s it worth to you? I asked her.
If you must know, Jim is a purebred shih tzu. He cost four hundred and twenty-five dollars, not counting the shots. But that’s not the point. He belongs to me. Give him back.
Up until this moment, when I’d thought about what Eleanor had done, the part I focused on was how mad she’d been at me, for not making mad passionate love to her by the swings that day she took her underpants off. I was enough of a dope, I hadn’t even paid much attention to the part about the reward. Now—a year after it happened, probably, maybe two—hearing her mention her four-hundred-and-twenty-five-dollar puppy, that I’d just rescued from getting run over, it came to me.
I guess a person that got ten thousand dollars for ratting out someone’s mother can spare a few hundred for a furball, I said.
My father gave him to me, she said. He’s taking care of Jim while I’m away at school.
So you got to go to your fancy arts academy after all, I said. I still had my hand around the little dog’s belly. It had sunk in now, where his name came from. Maybe the dog was trying to do himself in, along the lines of his namesake, I said. When heroin’s unavailable, getting squashed by a truck might have to suffice.
You are so sick, she said. No wonder you don’t have any friends.
I don’t suppose you care, I told her. But the man the police took away that day was probably the best person I know.
I made this statement for effect, but after I said it, I realized that this was actually true. Just hearing the words, I did something I hated. I started to cry.
This was definitely the moment for her to come back at me with her old standby—that I was a loser. There wasn’t any doubt now, she was getting her dog back. I wasn’t what you cou
ld call an intimidating person at that point.
She didn’t move. She just stood there in her high heels, holding her ridiculous hat and her oversize purse that looked like something she’d taken from the dress-up box. She may have been even thinner than ever—it was hard to tell, with her coat on. There were dark circles under her eyes, and her mouth had a pinched quality. I no longer believed she could have had sex with anybody. She looked like someone who, if you touched her, might snap.
I didn’t know, she said. I just wanted something to happen. She was crying too.
Well, it did, all right, I told her. I handed her the dog. Although I had only been holding him about a minute, he had started licking my hand. I got the feeling he might have preferred staying with me. Even a dog would know—maybe a dog, most of all—that Eleanor wasn’t the type of person you’d want to hang around more than absolutely necessary.
I SAW HER AGAIN A FEW YEARS LATER, at a party given by a guy at my school, who was in the drama crowd. She had a little silver amulet type of thing that she wore around her neck, with cocaine in it, and she was putting some on a mirror and snorting it, and some other people were doing that too, but I didn’t. She was still thin, but not like before. She had those same eyes, with the whites showing all around. She pretended not to know me but I knew she remembered, though I had nothing to say to her anymore. I’d said enough—way too much—already.
I finally went to bed with a girl in junior year. I probably could have done it sooner. The opportunity came up, as it had with Eleanor, but I had this idea that seemed a little old-fashioned at the time, that I shouldn’t do it with a girl unless I loved her, and I wanted her to love me too, which Becky did. We were together right through graduation, and the first half of freshman year at college, until she met some boy she was crazy about, and evidently she married him. I thought for a while I’d never get over her, but I did, of course. You think many things will be true, when you’re nineteen years old.
My mother continued to sell MegaMite over the phone, now and then, from our kitchen table, and she believed forever that it was my own regular dose of the stuff that had been responsible for my attaining the height of six foot one, though neither of my parents could have been called a tall person.
You are the tallest person I know, my mother told me once.
No, actually, she said. That isn’t true. We both knew who she was thinking about then, though nobody said his name.
SOMETIME AFTER I LEFT HOME, my mother got what Marjorie might have termed a real job. Not that it paid any better than selling vitamins had, but it got her out of our house, finally. Maybe it was my leaving that made her know that she needed to get out more.
She took herself down to the senior center in our town. She offered her services, teaching dancing. Fox-trot, waltz, two-step, swing—all the old partner dances, though given the ratio of women to men at that place, a lot of the women had to take the man’s part when she taught. She turned out to be a great teacher, and another good thing about the senior center was that you hardly ever saw any babies there.
She was so popular with her students that pretty soon they had her running their entire activities program at the center. This included crafts projects and game nights, and sometimes she’d set up a totally wacky scavenger hunt that the geezers could do even in wheelchairs. Working with the old-timers that way seemed to make my mother younger again. Seeing her with them, sometimes, when she was demonstrating a waltz turn or a fancy move in the Lindy—trim as ever; she never lost her figure—I could see a faint trace of the look I remembered from that handful of days back when I was thirteen. The long Labor Day weekend that Frank Chambers came to stay.
CHAPTER 22
EIGHTEEN YEARS PASSED. I WAS thirty-one years old—losing my hair, or starting to—living in upstate New York. Living, then as now, with my girlfriend, Amelia, the woman I would marry that fall. We had a little rented house overlooking the Hudson—uninsulated, so sometimes, when the wind came up off the river in winter, the only way to stay warm was to light a fire and sit there with a blanket over us, holding on to each other. Nothing wrong with that, Amelia said. If you don’t want to rub up against a person, why would you want to be with them in the first place?
It was a lucky life. Amelia taught kindergarten and played the banjo in a little bluegrass band that also included—surprisingly—my stepbrother, Richard, on stand-up bass. I’d finished culinary school four years earlier. I had a job as a pastry chef in a small town nearby, in a restaurant that had recently started getting a surprising amount of attention. That summer we’d be heading to New Hampshire for the wedding—just our families and a dozen friends.
The summer before, a writer from New York City, on the staff of a glossy food magazine of the sort that only people who hardly ever have time to cook can afford, had paid a visit to the restaurant. This magazine seemed to specialize in articles about parties people held in their apple orchard or on an island in Maine, or on the shore of some lake in Montana, where the hosts caught their own fish but somehow, miraculously, had ten friends nearby who were all tall, good-looking, and totally cool, to come over and share it with them on a harvest table set up along the banks of the trout stream where the fish had been caught.
The idea was to show beautiful pictures of amazing foods people grew on organic farms, or dishes some great-grandmother nobody ever really had might have prepared in an old wood-fired oven, though the people they tended to feature in their photographs didn’t resemble anybody’s relatives that I knew, or live the kind of lives people who grew this produce and created these dishes in the first place actually had.
This particular writer had heard about the restaurant where I was dessert chef, and paid a visit. The recipe she decided on, to feature in the magazine—a full-page photograph—had been my raspberry-peach pie.
Some things about this pie were my invention. The use of crystallized ginger in the filling for instance. The addition of fresh raspberries. But the crust was Frank’s. Or, as I explained it in the article, Frank’s grandmother’s. So was the choice, for a thickener, of Minute tapioca, over cornstarch.
I didn’t explain, in the pages of Nouveau Gourmet, the exact circumstances under which I’d learned my piecrust technique. I said only that a friend had taught me, and that he had learned at the elbow of his grandmother, on the Christmas-tree farm where he’d grown up. I said I was thirteen years old when I first learned to make pie, and I mentioned in the article the particular serendipity of having been presented with a bucket of fresh peaches that day, and the challenge of preparing piecrust in the middle of a heat wave.
It’s important to keep your ingredients chilled, I said.
It’s easier adding water than taking it out. Never overhandle the dough.
Never mind all that expensive equipment they sell in catalogs, I said. The heel of your hand is the perfect tool for patching crust.
About placing the top crust over the fruit: here was the one act in the process where the baker must simply plunge into the unknown. The one thing you must never do here: hesitate. Flipping that crust over is a leap of faith, I said. Like jumping out a window—twelve hours after undergoing an emergency appendectomy, perhaps—and believing, as you leapt, that you would land on your two feet.
After that article came out, I was invited to appear on a local morning television program in Syracuse, as Chef of the Week, to demonstrate my piecrust technique. I got a surprising number of letters from readers of the magazine, and then viewers of the television program, asking for advice about their own piecrust issues. It seemed everybody had some. I don’t know another food that seems to inspire stronger emotion—passion, even—than that most humble of desserts, pie.
As Frank had warned me once, the topic of shortening inspired the greatest controversy. One woman who’d read in the magazine that I used a combination of lard and butter for my shortening wrote to tell me all about the evils of lard. Another woman took equally strong exception to my use of butter.
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Meanwhile, the restaurant, Molly’s Table, was doing better than ever. Amelia and I put money down on a house, and I put up storm windows. The owner of the restaurant—Molly—hired me to run a specialty pie shop next door, where I supervised a staff of five bakers, all making pies to the specifications passed on to me from Frank.
Almost a full year after the article ran in the magazine, I received a letter with an unfamiliar postmark, from someplace in Idaho. The envelope was addressed in pencil, and the return address featured not a name, but a long series of numbers.
Inside, on lined notebook paper, in very neat and precise handwriting, but very small—as if the author of the letter had been conserving paper, which he probably had, by necessity—was a letter.
I sat down then. Until this moment, I hadn’t understood, but now it came back to me, like a blast of cold air when you open the door in a snowstorm, or the heat from a five-hundred-degree oven when you open it to check on—what else?—the pie. It all came back to me.
Though nearly two decades had passed, I could still see his face as it had been the day I met him in the magazine section at Pricemart—the bones of his jaw, those hollow cheeks, the way he looked me square in the eye, with those blue eyes of his. Young as I was, small as I was—a boy who longed to discover what might lie within the sealed packaging of the September 1987 issue of Playboy, who had to settle for a puzzle book instead—he might have seemed like an intimidating person. I could see him now, looming over me as he did that day—such a tall man, with those big hands and that impossibly deep voice. But I had felt, the moment I first met him, that I could trust this person, and even when I was angriest and most fearful—that he might take my mother away, that I’d be left alone, displaced—that sense of him as a fair and decent man had never left me.
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