Making Piece
Beth M. Howard
When journalist Beth Howard’s young husband died suddenly, baking was the one things that still made her smile.So Beth hit the road in their old camper van, travelling across America and bringing Pie to those who need it most. Powerful. Courageous. Triumphant. This is Beth’s true story about finding strength, second chances and spreading the joy of pie.
“Strange is our situation here upon earth. Each of us comes for a short visit, not knowing why, yet sometimes seeming to a divine purpose. From the standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing we do know: That we are here for the sake of others … for the countless unknown souls with whose fate we are connected by a bond of sympathy. Many times a day, I realize how much my outer and inner life is built upon the labors of people, both living and dead, and how earnestly I must exert myself in order to give in return as much as I have received.”
~Albert Einstein
“We must have pie.
Stress cannot exist in the presence of a pie.”
~David Mamet
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
BETH M. HOWARD is a journalist, blogger and pie baker. Her articles have appeared in Elle, Shape, Travel + Leisure and Natural Health, among many other publications. In 2001, at the height of the dot com boom, she quit a lucrative web producing job in San Francisco to bake “pies for the stars” at a gourmet deli in Malibu, California. Her popular blog, The World Needs More Pie, which she launched in 2007, regularly receives national press that has included Better Homes and Gardens, the New York Times and NPR’s Weekend Edition. Beth lives in Eldon, Iowa, in the famous American Gothic House.
Making Piece
A Memoir of
Love, Loss
and Pie
Beth M. Howard
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
For Marcus Iken
Liebe meines Lebens
They say spirits read everything.
I say you didn’t just read this book, you helped me write it. Please consider it a love letter and apology to you … until we meet again and I can tell you in person.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
It takes a lot of people to tell a story. It takes a tremendous amount of support to recover from grief. These are the people, who, during the past two years, helped me through the most unimaginable darkness. Some of them are featured in the book, some read my early drafts, some knew Marcus, some were just really great inspiration or influence, some made me laugh, some even made me pie. Regardless of their direct involvement in Making Piece, these are the people who have touched my life and who deserve my public gratitude. This book would not exist without them.
Deidre Knight (my literary agent, a goddess and Steel Magnolia), Ann Leslie Tuttle (my compassionate and enthusiastic editor) and the staff at Harlequin Nonfiction.
Team Marcus (and the first three numbers in my speed dial): Nan Schmid, Melissa Forman and Alison Kauffman.
My grief counselor and godsend: Susan Hodnot (How did I get so lucky?!).
My family: my parents, Tom and Marie Howard; my sister, Anne (thanks not only for reading my manuscript, but for the supersoft pajamas, the “Daisy” perfume and Bach Flower Essence “grief drops”—that care package really cheered me up); my brothers, Tim, Michael, Patrick; Patrick’s family; and my aunt Sue and uncle Mike Finn.
In Terlingua: John Alexander, Cynthia Hood, Mimi Webb Miller, Betty Moore and Ralph Moore (three weeks of dog sitting while I was at Marcus’s funerals earns you a lifetime supply of Guinness and guitar strings, Ralph).
In Portland: Frank Bird, Arlene Burns, Bennett Burns and Andrew Rowe, Janine Canella, Colleen Coleman, Saumya Comer, Liz Heaney, Don Hofer, Stacy James, Thomas Lehman, Donn Lindstrom, Sylvia Linington, Megan McMorris, Marty Rudolph and Heather Wade. Ein besonderes Dankeschön to the Portland/Freightliner gang, in particular: Dayna and Gerald Freitag; Julia Hofmann, Joerg, Katrin and Nolan Liebermann; and Lyndsay, Andreas and Heidi Presthofer and Rachel Wecker.
In and around Eldon, Iowa: Priscilla Coffman; Meg and Jeff Courter and family; Linda Durflinger; Patti Durflinger (who delivered dinners to my back door to keep me writing); Don and Shirley Eakins; Cari Garrett; Brenda Kremer; LeAnn Lemberger; Allen and Rosie Morrison; Molly Moser (who holds the distinction of being the very first reader of my book and my salvation for getting through my first Iowa winter in thirty years and whose painting inspired my book title); Shirley and Gene Stacey; Carrie, Chloe and Tony Teninty; Bob and Iola Thomas; Jerome Thompson; and the ladies at Canteen Lunch in the Alley (Yvonne Warrick, Linda Grace and the rest of the crew).
TV Shoot in California: Janice Molinari (my coproducer—thank you for your laughter, your singing, your vision for the pie show and for giving me a purpose when I desperately needed one). Sunny Sherman and Martha Gamble of The Apple Pan, Natalie Galatzer of Bike Basket Pies, Bill Miller of Malibu Kitchen, Karen Heisler and Krystin Rubin of Mission Pie, Dorothy Pryor of Mommie Helen’s, the Law family of Oak Glen, Carlene Baime, The Doscher Family, Kathy Eldon and Amy Eldon Turteltaub, Prudence Fenton and Allee Willis, Susanne Flother and Anthony Scott, Elissa Harris, Jeff Mark, Thelma Orellena, Elana Pianko, Shanti Sosienski and Jane Windsor.
Pie People: Kathleen Beebout, Gina Hyams, Arlene Kildow, John Lehndorff, Tricia Martin (also my ace web designer), Mary Pint (the original “Pie Lady”), Lana Ross, Mary Spellman (my pie mentor, to whom I’m forever grateful), Mary Deatrick and Linda Hoskins of the American Pie Council, and Arlette Hollister, Patt Kerr and the food crew of the Iowa State Fair.
Friends, colleagues, readers, advisors and general hand-holders: Christine Buckley, John and Laura Climaco, Susan Comolli, Barbara DeMarco-Barrett, Julia Gajcak, Maggie Galloway, Angela Hynes, Steve Johnson, Jim Keppler, Ann Krcik, Dana Long, Patti Nilsen, Alayne Reesberg, Maria Ricapito, Jean Sagendorph, Andrew Salomon, Sue Sesko and Jonathan Wight.
My blog followers (who encouraged me to keep writing about my grief publicly): Chris Bauer, Sigrid Holland, Jeff “Prop” O’Brien, Kelly Sedlinger and Paul Szendrey.
Journalists (the people who discovered my story and wanted to share it): Jennifer Anderson (Portland Tribune), Mike Borland (WHO-TV), Steve Boss and James Moore (KRUU-FM), John Gaps III, Kyle Munson and Tom Perry (Des Moines Register), Lianne Hansen and Jacki Lyden (NPR), Kelly Kegans (Better Homes and Gardens), Katherine Lagomarsino (Spirit magazine), Ron Lutz (Our Iowa), Trevor Meers (Midwest Living), Meghan Rabbitt (Natural Health) and Peter Tubbs (Better TV).
Pie makers and pie lovers everywhere: you all help make the world a better place.
And last, but certainly not least: Banana Cream Pie.
PROLOGUE
I blame pie. If it wasn’t for banana cream pie, I never would have been born. If my mom hadn’t made my dad that pie, the one with the creamy vanilla pudding, loaded with sliced bananas and covered in a mound of whipped cream, the one that prompted him to propose to her, I wouldn’t be here. Think about it. The anatomical shape of bananas. The pudding so luscious and moist. The cream on top as soft as a pillow on which to lie down and inspire certain sensuous acts. My parents were virgins and intended to stay that way until they exchanged vows at the altar. That pie made wedding plans urgent. If it wasn’t for that pie, they may never have gotten married and had kids, had me.
If I had never been born, I never would have learned to make pie; not just banana cream, but apple and strawberry-rhubarb and chocolate cream and peach crumble and many others. If I had never been born, I never would have grown up to become a writer and gotten that job at the dot com that paid so well, but stressed me out so much that I quit to become a full-time pie baker in Malibu. If I hadn’t gotten that baking job, I never would have made pies for Barbra Streisand and Steven Spielberg, and I never would have taken time off to go on that road trip, the one where I ended up at Crater Lake National Park and met Marcus Iken that night in the hotel lobby.
If I had never met Marcus, never fallen in love with him and his almond-shaped green eyes, exotic German-British accent and those odd-yet-elegant leather hiking boots that laced up at the sides, I never would have invited him to join me at my friends’ wedding in Tuscany. And thus, I never would have taken the train from Italy to his apartment in Stuttgart, Germany, carrying that pie I baked him, the apple one heaped high with fruit, drowning in its own juices and radiating the seductive scent of cinnamon, the one that made him realize I was like no woman he’d ever met before and that he couldn’t live without me—the pie that prompted him to propose to me.
If it wasn’t for pie, I never would have been born. I never would have married Marcus and moved to Germany, to Oregon and then to Mexico with him. If I had never married him, I would not have been the one listed as the emergency contact, the one who got The Phone Call that day. I never would have learned how a call from a medical examiner can mean only one thing, how harsh the word would sound in my ears—“Deceased,” he’d said—and how that word would haunt me, change my life, change me.
If I had never been born, I never would have known what it feels like to lose Marcus, never known what his sexy, athletic body, the body I had made love to hundreds of times, looked like lying in a casket, cold, hard, lifeless, eventually cremated, his ashes buried, never to be seen again.
If only my mom hadn’t made my dad that banana cream pie. Fuck pie.
I am a pie baker and I live in the American Gothic House. Yes, the American Gothic House, the one in the iconic Grant Wood painting of the couple holding the pitchfork. It is the second most famous white house in the U.S.A., second only to the White House. Yes, the White House in Washington, D.C. The American Gothic House is nowhere near Washington, D.C. It is located in rural Southeastern Iowa in a sleepy, former railroad town called Eldon (pop. 928), and while the house is indeed white, it is decidedly smaller and humbler than the presidential one. Because it is famous and old—old as in “built in 1881” old—it is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. But one doesn’t need documentation or a plaque by the front door to know the age of this house. The slanted, worn, wide-plank floorboards, the rectangular shape of the nail heads handcrafted by blacksmiths and the cracks in the front door that let in the winter drafts speak for its many years of weathering a hardscrabble life on the windswept prairie.
Living in a tourist attraction (which must be where the expression “living in a fishbowl” comes from) takes a special person. And since I live here, I guess that makes me special in that I can handle the daily foot traffic tromping across my front porch, I accept how strangers, unable to restrain their curiosity, peer into my windows, and I politely offer to snap the occasional photo of a couple striking the prerequisite pose in front of the Gothic window.
Out of the hundred-plus places I’ve ever lived, this is the first and only one where I signed a lease requiring that the “tenant shall treat the public in a friendly manner.” And mostly I am friendly. Except when I’ve had too many faces pressed up against the glass in my kitchen window. In which case, the white cotton curtain gets yanked across their hungry eyes, and I retreat to the most private room in the house: ironically, the upstairs bedroom, the one immediately behind the house’s main feature, the Gothic window.
Legend has it that this window—and the matching one on the opposite end of the second floor—was purchased via mail order from Sears Roebuck. The triangular shape of the paned glass attracted Grant Wood’s attention when he visited Eldon in 1980. He found it incongruous, if not pretentious, that such a simple white wooden farmhouse would be adorned with such an ornate, if not religious, window. Wood was so intrigued, he drew a sketch of the front of the house, returned to his art studio in Cedar Rapids, convinced his sister and his dentist to pose as the spinster daughter and dour father to represent the stoic, roll-up-your-sleeves-and-just-do-it, Midwest stereotype, painted the three individual elements onto one canvas, and the rest, as they say, is history. The house—and its window—is so famous that it attracts over 10,000 visitors a year to its remote Iowa location.
It is behind this window and its lace curtain that I sleep, dream, read, cry, snuggle with my two small dogs and escape the peering eyes of passersby. The lease also states “tenant agrees to maintain South Window curtains similar to those featured in Grant Wood’s American Gothic painting.” This is no problem, as the lace curtains came with the house. In the upstairs bedroom window, the showcase one, I simply hung white sheers over the lace curtain, which maintains the original appearance for the tourists’ photo opportunity, but adds a layer of privacy from the outside world, and keeps at bay the blazing Iowa sun, which rises around seven each morning over the neighbor’s soybean field.
On the weekends, when the weather is good, I sell pies out on the lawn of the house. I can’t say if this has ever been done before at the American Gothic House. Out of the many families that have lived here—the Dibbles, the Joneses, the Smiths—mine are certainly not the first pies to be baked inside. That would be impossible, seeing as Iowa is the pie capital of America, where pies are a way of life, baked into the fabric of Midwestern existence. Eldon, Iowa, is full of pie bakers. (I know this because I’ve sampled Arlene Kildow’s coconut cream pie. It would win first prize at the Iowa State Fair if she would enter. And Janice Chickering’s apple pie, which I haven’t tried yet, must be delicious because it wins every local pie contest.) But setting up a pie table right outside the famous house, as if it were an Amish farm stand or a Girl Scout bake sale? That might be a first.
I didn’t move into the American Gothic House to sell pies. Moving into the American Gothic House wasn’t in my plans at all. In fact, until that hot, humid, late August day that I happened upon the road sign for the house, I didn’t even know of its existence. I will tell you how and why I came to live here, how I became known as “America’s Pie Lady,” how I became adopted by the mayor and other residents of Eldon, and most important of all, how my grief began to ease and my heart eventually began to heal. I will tell you all that and more. But I have to begin further back in time.
You will find my story is a lot like pie, a strawberry-rhubarb pie. It’s bitter. It’s messy. It’s got some sweetness, too. Sometimes the ingredients get added in the wrong order, but it has substance, it will warm your insides and, even though it isn’t perfect, it still turns out okay in the end.
CHAPTER 1
I killed my husband. I asked for a divorce, and seven hours before he was to sign the divorce papers, he died. It was my fault. If I hadn’t rushed him into it, I would have had time to change my mind, and I didn’t want to change my mind again. I was sure this time. I wasn’t good at being a wife and I was tired. Marcus and I still loved each other, still desired each other, we were still best friends. But in spite of best intentions, after six years, our marriage had become like overworked pie dough. It was tough, difficult to handle and the only option I could see was to throw it out and start over.
I was a free-spirited California girl, trying to mix with a workaholic German automotive executive. Too often, it had seemed like an exercise in futility, like trying to whip meringue in a greasy bowl where, with even the slightest presence of oil, turning the beaters up to a higher speed still can’t accomplish the necessary lightness of being. We needed to throw out the dough, I insisted. Chuck the egg whites, and wash out our bowls so we might fill them again. I was impatient and impulsive, overly confident that there was something, someone better out there for me. I was also mad at him. He worked too much. All I wanted was more of his time, more of him. Asking for a divorce was my cry for attention. And since I couldn’t get his attention, couldn’t get the marriage to work, couldn’t get the goddamn metaphorical pie dough to roll, I was determined to start over. It was my fault. He died because of me. I killed him.
August 19, 2009, Terlingua, Texas
I wasn’t even halfway through my morning walk with the dogs, but the sun had already risen high above the mesa of the Chisos Mountains. We should have left earlier, but every morning started with the same dilemma. Make coffee or walk the dogs first? I loved savoring my café latte on the front porch, taking that first half hour to shake off sleep and greet the day. But the window of dogwalking time was short, so the dogs always won. It never failed to amaze me how fast the sun rises in this West Texas frontier, how quickly a summer desert morning could transition from tolerable to intolerable, how a ball of fire that was welcome at first light so quickly became the enemy to be avoided, something from which to seek escape.
Other than the dogs’ needs, the heat made no difference to me, as I had made a commitment to staying inside no matter what the weather. My plan was to spend the summer in my rented miner’s cabin, chain myself to my computer and bang out a completed draft of my memoir about how I quit a lucrative web-producer job to become a pie baker to the stars in Malibu. How I used pies as if they were Cinderella’s slipper to find a husband, and finally did fall in love and get married, to Marcus. The book was going to be a lighthearted tale of romance, adventure and pie baking. It was supposed to have a happy ending.
As I scanned the path for rattlesnakes while Jack ran ahead on the dirt road that stretched for miles through the empty, uninhabited expanse, the only thing visible on the horizon was the heat, a thermal curtain rising up from the ground, waving like tall grass in the breeze. I looked for my second dog, Daisy, the other half of Team Terrier, as I affectionately called my four-legged companions, but her light hair was the exact blond color of the desert floor, so she was much harder to spot between the scruffy patches of sagebrush.
I had gotten into a routine of jogging in the mornings, but on this day I wasn’t feeling very strong. In fact, it wasn’t the sun baking me to a crisp or the sweat running down the back of my legs that made me want to cut the walk short. It was my heart. It was racing, even though I was walking slowly—so slowly my gait was barely a shuffle. This was not normal for me. I have the strong heart and slow pulse of a professional bike racer, so much so that I often get surprised looks from doctors when probing me with their stethoscopes.
Something was wrong with me. Was I having a heart attack? I needed to get home before I collapsed and became breakfast for the vultures who were already circling overhead. I called for my dogs, who reluctantly gave up on their bunny chase to come back to me. I looked at my digital Timex watch before I turned around. It was 8:36 a.m. Central time.
I made it back to my miner’s shack, a hundred-year-old cabin made of stacked rocks chinked with mud. It was primitive but stylish, rustic but elegant, clean and sparsely furnished with just the right touches of safari chic. Decorated by my landlord, Betty, a transplant from Austin, who lived next door, the cabin’s style was Real Simple meets Progressive Rancher. The place had running water with a basic kitchen, but the shower was in a separate wing, which could be reached only by going outside. And the toilet? The toilet was an outhouse, a twenty-five-yard walk from the house. While I loved this simple living by day, I wouldn’t go near the outhouse at night for fear of walking the gauntlet of snakes and tarantulas.
With the dogs safely back in the house—no one was going to get left outside to fry in the ungodly heat—I flopped down on my bed. My heart continued to race like a stuck accelerator, and I lay there, alone, holding my body still, thinking about how this was so unusual, so intense, so unlike any sensation I had ever experienced. I remember wondering if I was going to die. Would death come so early in my life? Really? I had just turned forty-seven, I had the heart of a bike racer, I was just out for an easy morning walk with my dogs, and now this? This was how and where it was going to end? I closed my eyes and tried to stay calm. I wasn’t afraid of death. I just didn’t think I was ready for it. Besides, if I died, who would take care of my dogs?
My BlackBerry in its rubber red casing sat next to my pillow. It rang and I glanced at the screen to see who was calling. “Unknown” was all it said. Marcus called me daily and he was the only person I knew whose number was “Unknown.” We were living apart because of his corporate job that had transferred him yet again, this time back to Stuttgart, Germany, where I had lived with him before but I’d refused to live there again. Marcus wasn’t in Germany now. He was in Portland, Oregon, taking a three-week vacation that was originally supposed to include coming to see me in Texas. But then I told him not to come. Oh, and then, after telling him not to come, I added, “As long as you’re going to be in the States, this would be a convenient time for us to get a divorce.”
I didn’t want a divorce. I just wanted him to stop working at his job so much and work more at our marriage. I wanted him to spend less energy at his office so he would have some left for me when he got home. I still loved him, we still talked every single day, and I always, always, always took his calls. Especially ever since we’d had the conversation where I let it slip that there had been a few times when I hadn’t picked up the phone when he called.
“Only when I’m writing and trying to concentrate,” I assured him. His feelings were so hurt I never had the heart to ignore a call from him again. But with my heart racing, my muscles weak and now my head aching badly, I didn’t feel up to talking to him or to anybody, so I let the call go to voice mail. It was just over two hours since I’d returned from my walk.
Twenty minutes later, I figured that if perhaps I wasn’t going to die, I should at least get my ass out of bed and go see a doctor. Terlingua, a ghost town with a population of 200, didn’t have a doctor per se, but there was a physician’s assistant at a local resort who might be able to diagnose what was wrong. Before I called him, I checked my voice mail.
The message wasn’t from Marcus.
If I could turn back the clock, if I could hit the reset button, if I could change the course of history and the unfolding of events, I would. I’d gladly sell my soul to go back in time to a date three and a half months earlier, the first week of May 2009—May 5, to be precise, our final day together—and start over from there. I was in Portland for a reunion with Marcus, who was about to begin a new one-year contract in Germany. It was the same day I got laid off from the job I had in Los Angeles, the one that I used as my excuse to leave Mexico, where Marcus had been posted for the past ten months. I had tried to be a good wife by following him to Mexico, after having followed him to Germany for almost three years and then to Portland for nearly two.
“Good wife” wasn’t a role that came naturally to me and I lasted five months with Marcus in Mexico, where I spent too many long and lonely days in our house on the pecan farm before I reached my breaking point. So I took a position as U.S. Director for a London-based speakers’ bureau, for which I would book famous people for public-speaking gigs at a rate of 120 grand for one hour of their time. The height of a tanking economy ensured I wouldn’t succeed, not when company meetings were the first budget items to get cut. No meetings, no guest speakers. Thus, six months later, the phone call from my boss in London with news of my termination came as no surprise. I’ve been fired from many jobs (let’s just say I’m a little too entrepreneurial in spirit to be employable) and I’ve never mourned the loss of anything that confined me to a cubicle in an office with sealed windows. I never looked back, because I always saw endings—fixable endings such as these, anyway—as opportunities for something new, something better. In this case, I used the free time and severance pay to travel to Texas to rent the miner’s cabin for the summer so I could write about quitting one of those cubicle-confining jobs to become a pie baker.
So during this first week of May, between the ending of Marcus’s Mexico assignment and the beginning of his new one-year contract in Germany, and coinciding with the termination of my L.A. job, we met up in Portland. Portland had been our home for almost two years, it’s where we still had a lot of friends, a houseful of furniture in storage and where his company’s North American headquarters was located. We spent four honeymoon-like days together, eating at our favorite French, Italian and Thai cafés, getting massages, drinking lattes at the hipster coffeehouses, having dinner with other couples and holding hands a lot.
We agreed we could manage the long distance with me in L.A. and him in Germany and still keep our marriage intact. We had done it before; we could do it again. We would see each other once a month and it would be a win-win, because he could continue his steady career climb, and I could avoid being a stay-at-home nag. After one year he would either find another position back in the U.S. or find a different kind of work altogether.
Our whole existence—all seven and a half years of it—was like that. It was about international airports, romantic hellos and tearful goodbyes, about job changes and job transfers. When asked what the biggest challenge of our marriage was, he would say, “Logistics.” (Though he used to say it was my lack of concern for stability, for things like health insurance and a retirement plan.) I would say the biggest obstacle was his job.
“My job provides a roof over your head,” he liked to remind me. “And health insurance.”
“I didn’t marry you so you could be my provider,” I argued. “I married you because I wanted a partner who would want to spend time together, do things together, participate in the marriage and not expect me to be the one to do all the housework while you go off to work like we’re some 1950s couple.”
“I’ll pitch in more when I’m not so busy,” he insisted. “And when you get a job.”
This made no sense to me, as there would never be an occasion when his work didn’t demand so much of his time. (In fact, it would only get worse.) And besides, as a freelancer, I wasn’t really looking for a job per se. My projects, which provided decent income, came and went, but in a “feast or famine” way—not the German way. Not the steadfast, loyal “Employee for Life” way that Germans revered.
I retaliated by applying for and getting full-time jobs. And since the only career-type work I could find was back in the U.S., I was the one being driven to the airport. This usually resulted in me getting fired and running back to my safety net, my rock, my man. I ran away, but I always came back. But once I got back, it was never long before I again faced the reality—and loneliness—of a mostly empty house and a life that was about dishes, laundry and shopping—and waiting for Marcus to come home.
His job demanded long hours, which he willingly gave, which inevitably drove me to look for something else to do. I needed to keep my brain busy, needed friends, needed to keep from getting angry with him for having moved my life halfway across the world only to feel so alone. Ironically, the only solution I could find meant living apart. It wasn’t what I wanted. I just wanted more time with him. Even if he couldn’t give me that time, I wanted him to at least acknowledge how his schedule was affecting our relationship, affecting me. I wanted him to apologize when he came home three hours later than he said he would be. Just a little “I’m sorry I was late” would have been enough. I wanted him to tell me he missed me when he was gone all day. But he said nothing. Instead, he accepted—or at least tolerated—the situation in stoic silence.
And so it went. I felt hurt, I left, I returned for happy, passion-filled reunions, the loneliness gradually set in and the cycle started all over again. It was a pattern we couldn’t seem to break.
At the end of our long weekend, Marcus drove me to the Portland airport so I could return to L.A.; he was flying to Germany the next day. I stood there in his arms, at the curbside drop-off, on a rare rainless Pacific Northwest morning, while the engine of his rented Subaru Forester idled.
Marcus’s brown hair was flattened under a tight wool cap, making his high cheekbones look even more pronounced and his almond-shaped green eyes appear even deeper. He wore a brown fleece pullover and Diesel jeans with clogs. He was secure in himself and, being European, his range of style went miles beyond an American baseball hat and sneakers. Clogs had become his signature footwear. They suited him in that ruggedly handsome way, though he could as easily transform from rugged to pure elegance and sophistication when dressed for work in his hand-tailored wool suits.
My head rested against his broad chest and I felt his breath on my neck. I breathed in his clean scent and felt his soft lips on my skin as his arms pulled me closer. “Have a safe trip, my love,” he said, in the British-German accent that I never tired of. The way he talked was so soothing, even when speaking his mother tongue, that more than once I made him read to me from a German washing-machine manual or DVD-player instruction book just to hear his sexy voice.
“And you have a safe flight to Germany,” I replied. “Let’s Skype later.” We parted with a tender kiss, our mouths touching lightly in a sort of half French kiss, until I felt self-conscious about people in the cars behind us watching and pulled away. He stayed by the car and waved until I disappeared through the revolving door. I looked back through the glass window and watched him get into his rented Subaru.
And that’s the last time I ever saw him alive.
CHAPTER 2
Three and a half months later on August 19, 2009, in Terlingua, Texas, I thought I was dying of a heart attack. I didn’t answer my phone because I didn’t have the energy to lift my head off the pillow. At 11:05 a.m., I finally checked my voice mail.
The message was from a man named Tom Chapelle, who apologized for having to call, but he didn’t have my address. Why would he need my address? Why would he need to come to my house? Hell, he would have a hard time getting to my house, seeing as I was a five-hour drive from the nearest airport in El Paso, a 90-minute drive from the nearest grocery store and I lived on a dirt road with a name not recognized by the post office.
In his message, Mr. Chapelle said he was a medical examiner and he was calling because I was listed as the emergency contact for a Marcus Iken. He used the article “a” as if my husband were an object. A car. A watch. A book. A husband. I clearly don’t watch enough television as I didn’t have the slightest clue what a medical examiner was. I scribbled down the phone number he left and my heart, which had finally slowed a little, revved right up again, double time. My hands shook as I punched the numbers into my BlackBerry.
I might not have known what a medical examiner’s job was, but instinctively I knew the call wasn’t good. Worst case, I was thinking Marcus might have been injured in a car accident. He was simply in the emergency room, waiting for a broken bone to be set. Or he had fallen off his bike and needed stitches in his head, and was unable to call me himself. During his vacation, he’d been riding his road bike a lot, going on thirty-mile outings. Surely it must have been something to do with his bike and he was going to recover from whatever injury he had suffered. He was going to be fine. I didn’t know that the job title “medical examiner” could mean only one thing.
In May, after I lost my job and Marcus flew off to Germany and I left Los Angeles for Texas, I prepared for my twenty-hour drive from L.A. to Terlingua by going to the library to check out some books on tape. Since I arrived at the Venice Beach branch five minutes before closing, I had to be quick, which meant I wasn’t able to be terribly selective. I just grabbed an armful of CDs with authors’ names I recognized. Among the titles I checked out was Joan Didion’s, The Year of Magical Thinking. I listened to it in its entirety as I drove through the tire-melting temperatures and endless shades of red-and-brown landscape, crossing Arizona and New Mexico, until I finally reached West Texas.
I couldn’t stand the reader’s voice, an affected British actress, who made poor old Ms. Didion sound like a spoiled snob instead of the devastated widow that she was. A widow. A grieving widow. The book was interesting, but it wasn’t anything I could relate to. I hadn’t lost my husband. My husband was young and fit. I hadn’t lost anyone close to me, except for my grandparents who’d lived well into their eighties when their aged bodies finally wore out. Death was not a subject on my radar. Still, I listened and the book’s opening lines stuck with me the way pie filling sticks to the bottom of an oven. “Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.”
I stood in the living room, next to my writing desk, my hand placed on the desktop to steady myself as the medical examiner’s phone rang. He picked up after two rings and I started shaking even more. “What is your relationship to Marcus?” Mr. Chapelle asked first.
“I’m his wife,” I answered. And I was. Barely. I’d asked for a divorce and pushed Marcus into starting the proceedings. We were working through a mediator in Portland who was drawing up the papers. I didn’t want a divorce. I wanted him to fight for me, for him to say, “No! You are the love of my life and I can’t live without you. I want to stay married.”
In my perfect world, he would have also said, “I promise to work less, worship you more and, above all, be on time.” He would have said, should have said—oh, why didn’t he say it—“My love, if you say you’re going to have dinner ready at seven-thirty, by God, I’ll be home at seven-thirty. I’ll even come home at seven, so I can make love to you first.”
Had it really come down to his long work hours and lack of punctuality? We had been married a few days shy of six years. That’s six years of cold dinners and hurt feelings. Six years of moving from country to country, continent to continent. Setting up a new house with each move; taking German lessons and then Spanish lessons; making new friends; saying goodbye to those friends and then making new ones again. Six years of trying to get Marcus to acknowledge me, what I needed, how much I wanted our marriage to come first and how his work, his schedule, his priorities were wearing me down.
Before we got married, during our year-and-a-half-long courtship, the majority of time I spent with Marcus was when he was on vacation. Europeans get six weeks of holidays, which meant six weeks with Marcus in laid-back mode, Marcus wearing jeans and reading books, not donning a suit, not checking his email, not coming home late. He cooked for me. He grilled steaks and shucked oysters. He did my laundry. He washed the dishes. And he made love to me for hours. It’s no wonder I wanted to marry him!
But that was on my home turf. When I moved to Germany, everything changed—Marcus changed. When he put on his suit and tie, he became a different person.
“What about me?” I pleaded time and again. “Our marriage centers only on you and your job, your promotion, your schedule. What about my career and my happiness? What about where I want to live? Why can’t we pick a place we both want to live, a place where I can speak the language and not feel so lonely, and just move there and we can both get jobs?”
We eventually moved to Portland and that helped for the year and a half we lived there. But then Marcus, thanks to his steady corporate executive career climb, got transferred to Mexico and we were right back where we started. My unanswered questions inevitably escalated into louder cries, harsher words. “I want to be in an equal partnership. Instead I feel like you just expect me to serve you!” I shouted. “I have a life, too!”
I had a life, all right. And now he didn’t.
Joan Didion’s suggestion that “life changes in the instant” might have been true for her. She was physically there in the room when her husband’s heart stopped and caused him to fall out of the chair and hit his head on the corner of the table on the way down. She saw him lying on the floor, unresponsive, his head bleeding. She had proof, evidence, visual aids. She could put her fingers on his pulse and feel he didn’t have one. She could blow air into his lungs and watch his chest rise. She could call 911 and watch the paramedics as they stormed into her apartment and hooked up their electrodes and squeezed their syringes. Being there, in person, absorbing the immediacy of the action, then yes, time must have felt compressed into an instant.
News—specifically bad news—when delivered over the phone causes time to take on a different dimension. With no visual cues, there is nothing for the mind to grasp but whatever is imagined—drama, gore, violence, struggle, pain—combined with fleeting, movie-clip-like flashes of memory. There is no proof. There is only the voice of a stranger on the other end of the line. Someone you don’t know, don’t want to know, don’t want to believe. Someone in a government building 2,000 miles away. Someone who has never met your husband, who sees the man you loved only as a corpse lying on the examination table, waiting for an autopsy.
With this one phone call, life as I knew it ended.
“Your husband is deceased,” he said, his voice deep and gravelly. He had the air of a military officer, serious, official, no emotion, detached. I could just picture the man sporting a crew cut, fleshy jowl, perfectly starched shirt, maybe even khaki in color, with the buttons pulling tightly across his ample belly. Deceased. The word didn’t register at first. Deceased? No, that can’t be. Injured is what I had expected him to say. Hurt in a car accident or from a fall off his bike, just out of surgery but recovering nicely. Not deceased. Not Marcus. Not healthy, robust, sexy, stubborn Marcus.
I would sell my soul to turn back the clock, to never get a call from a medical examiner and continue living in my happy oblivion to never even know what one was. I wish with every cell in my body to go back three and a half months earlier to May 5, the day Marcus dropped me off at the Portland airport. I wouldn’t get on the plane to L.A. I would fly to Germany with him instead, and worry about getting my belongings there later. Or I would turn the clock back even earlier. Five years, five months, it doesn’t matter. I’d settle for turning the clock back five hours. Maybe that way I could have saved him. I still want to save him. I still want him to be alive. Seven hours before Marcus was supposed to sign his half of the divorce papers, I killed him. I asked him for a divorce neither of us wanted and I killed him. To verify this, I asked Mr. Chapelle in a meek tone that didn’t sound anything like me, “Was it suicide?” The words snuck past my vocal cords and tiptoed out of my throat, which tightened with each passing second. It was the worst thing I could have asked; I was ashamed for asking it, but I had to know.
“No,” he answered quickly. “It was something with his heart.”
Of course, it was his heart. I broke it. He wanted to stay married and this was his way of making that happen. This was the second time we tried to divorce, and the second time we didn’t sign the papers. We were still married. And now we would be married forever. That’s a hell of a way to avoid divorce.
“The divorce almost killed both of you,” my sister said later. It hadn’t occurred to me, but she was right. During the hour he was struggling to stay alive after collapsing from a ruptured aorta, I felt my heart about to give out, thinking I would collapse in the middle of the Chihuahua Desert. I turned to go back home at 8:36 a.m.—that was 6:36 a.m. in Portland, the exact time Marcus was pronounced dead. Is it possible we were that connected? Were our bodies functioning in unison, joined by some inexplicable force? Was I feeling what he was feeling, the struggle of his heart to keep beating? While he was hit with defibrillator paddles and receiving epinephrine injections, I was enduring my own struggle, staggering with weakness back to my miner’s cabin with my dogs—our dogs.
I had a few hours to contemplate my death, but did he know he was dying? The details that were parceled out over the next few days concluded no, he could not have known. It was instant. He felt a cramp in his neck, got out of bed, took a few steps and collapsed on the hardwood floor of a friend’s house.
I imagined him having one of those out-of-body experiences, floating above his body, looking down and seeing himself lying unconscious on the floor, and saying, “What the fuck just happened?” This is a man who wanted to live. He had just invested in a new MacBook Pro and an iPhone. He had a pile of new books including The Passion Test, What Color is Your Parachute and What Should I Do With My Life? And he had bookmarked his favorite new website, “Zen Habits,” which was all about doing less to accomplish more. After years of my incessant nagging, he was actually exploring ways to trade in his corporate life for something more balanced. Back in Germany, he had also just bought a new road bike, a sleek and fast-looking LaPierre, which he had shown me via Skype. He sent me emails from his weekend bike rides in France, Italy and even Slovenia. This was a man with a lot of life left to live and big plans for the future. He was only getting started.
The autopsy determined he died from a hemopericardium (blood flooding the heart sack until the heart cannot pump any longer) due to a ruptured aorta. Marcus had a heart condition from birth, a bicuspid aortic valve, which means he had only two flaps to allow oxygenated blood to flow out from the aorta instead of the normal three. Blood pumping through the aorta is under high pressure. Having only two flaps creates a bottleneck and puts added pressure on the aortic wall. The wall had a weakening that eventually tore. Unless it happens when you are already in a hospital, a ruptured aorta is always deadly. There is no grace period. The blood moves too fast. The heart suffocates. And bam! Just like that. The man you love is gone.
His German doctors had always maintained his heart condition would never be a problem. Had Marcus known how endangered his life was, he would have taken precautions. He was that kind of guy: disciplined in everything he did, especially when it came to his diet (only the highest quality, organic, wild-caught everything for him). He didn’t smoke, he exercised regularly, doing yoga, biking and running, and he loved being outside in the sun breathing fresh air. This was a guy who was so health-conscious, he flossed his teeth three times a day. Who does that? No, he was not supposed to die. Not like this. Not at forty-three. Not ever.
My brain spun with centrifugal force after hanging up with Mr. Chapelle. I looked around the living room of my miner’s cabin in a wild panic. My body shook with convulsions. My eyes widened with disbelief. My breathing turned to hyperventilating. I paced back and forth between the desk and the daybed. I had no idea what to do. Did I really just get a phone call telling me that Marcus was deceased? Deceased. I hate that word. What a miserable word. If only I could have taken that word and shoved it through the phone line, stuffed it back into the mouth of the man who uttered it, crammed it all the way down his throat to extinguish it so he could never say it. If he couldn’t say it, then it couldn’t be true.
My first call was to our divorce mediator in Portland. “He’s in a meeting,” his secretary said.
“It’s urgent,” I told her. She must have heard the panic in my voice—high-pitched, sharp and forceful. She put me through.
“Marcus won’t be coming in for his one-o’clock appointment. He died,” I blurted out. “He’s dead. He had a ruptured aorta.” And then my composure crumbled. “I don’t know what to do! I don’t know what to do! I don’t know what to do! I don’t know what to do!” I kept repeating myself, practically screaming in hysterics, as I entered into full-blown panic. To say it out loud to someone else, to acknowledge that which I desperately did not want to be true, made it just a little more real. Was it really true?
I could detect Michael’s shock in spite of his attempt to calm me. He was a Catholic-turned-Zen Buddhist, which he had told us when we interviewed and subsequently hired him to help negotiate our separation. Marcus was in Portland and thus met with him in person several times. I was only connected by conference calls and had never seen him, but based on his gentle voice, relaxed manner of speech and his respect for Marcus’s and my determination to remain amicable, he seemed nice—for a former litigation lawyer. He had changed his career to mediation because it seemed, well, less litigious. “Take a breath,” he said. “Settle down. You’re going to be okay. Here’s what you do.”
He outlined the next steps for me. Someone had to instruct me, because I couldn’t think straight. I couldn’t think past the image of Marcus and his lifeless body lying in a morgue thousands of miles away. No! I could not, would not, picture that. My mind was still insisting he was alive. He had to be alive. This was all a mistake. This wasn’t really happening.
“Book your flight to Portland,” Michael said, snapping me back to the present. “Call his parents in Germany. And above all, take care of yourself. You need to make sure you are okay. Do you have someone there who can be with you?” I didn’t. Betty, my landlord, was in El Paso for a few days. I had only my dogs and I was already scaring them. Daisy was hiding under the bed and Jack kept trying to lick my face, something he was prone to do when he was insecure.
I wanted to fly to Portland that evening. There was a flight available, and even with the five-hour drive to the El Paso airport, I could have made it. But when I discussed it with Mr. Chapelle, he said there was no reason to rush. It wasn’t like I needed to get there in case Marcus might take his final breath. He was already gone.
I spent the entire night awake; first tossing and turning in my bed until finally, so disturbed, so much wanting to crawl out of my skin to escape the searing pain, I moved into the living room and lay on the concrete floor in front of the fan. My forehead, pressed into the painted cement, rolled back and forth, practically wearing a groove into the hard floor as I wailed and wailed and wailed. I never heard such loud, guttural cries emitted from so deep within my core, never knew noises such as these were possible. I sounded like a dying animal, moaning like a cow hit by a car and left for dead on the road, wishing for someone to shoot it and put it out of its misery.
And I did feel like I was dying. I wanted to die. My moaning, my wailing, my cries could have been heard as far away as El Paso. But no matter how much, how long and how hard I cried, I couldn’t get the pain out. This new form of agony—sizzling, burning, tearing at my heart with razor blades—was an alien being that took over my body, infiltrating every cell. I couldn’t hold still. I couldn’t cry hard enough. I couldn’t scream loud enough. I couldn’t get the emotional torture to stop.
Psychologists call it complicated grief. It was almost a relief, as much as I could fathom any inkling of relief, to learn a few months later that what I was experiencing had a name, a clinical term. I had a condition. I could be placed in a category, given a label. I could wear a sign around my neck that read “Caution: This woman is suffering from complicated grief.”
Complicated grief is when someone you are close to dies and leaves you with unresolved issues, unanswered questions, unfinished business. And guilt. Lots and lots of guilt. And pain. Bottomless depths of searing pain. Complicated grief is when you ask your husband for a divorce you don’t really want, and he dies seven hours before signing the papers.
I killed my husband. I was sure of it. It was my fault. I’m the one who pushed for a divorce. He didn’t want it, must not have wanted it, otherwise he wouldn’t have died. He was dead, we were still married, and that told me everything. Before leaving my miner’s cabin for Portland, where my husband was reportedly dead, before putting my dogs in the care of my British neighbor, Ralph, I rummaged through my toiletry bag and found my wedding ring. The ring, an exact match to Marcus’s, was a band of fine gold on the outside, with an inner ring of steel on the inside. The bands were connected, yet separate, and made a jingling sound when they moved against each other. We had our rings designed by a goldsmith friend of Marcus’s in Germany to represent us—our strong bond balanced by our independence—and our lifestyle, the contrast of our love for both backpacking and five-star hotels.
I slid the ring back onto my finger where my white tan line had turned brown in the Texas sun, and shook my hand until I heard the familiar jingling. The gentle rattle had become a nonverbal communication between Marcus and me. We would shake our rings in each other’s ears as a way to say, “I’m sorry, I still love you” after an argument, when it was too difficult or too soon to utter the words out loud. I had taken the ring off even before I asked Marcus for the divorce. I took it off because I was mad at him. Mad that I couldn’t fly to Germany for my birthday in June to spend it with him. Because the auto industry was forced to make job cuts, Marcus was working two jobs and therefore he was too busy for me to visit. He started his days at 6:30 a.m. and returned home—home, which translated as a guest apartment attached to his parents’ house—no earlier than 9:30 at night, night after night. He was exhausted. I could hear it in the irritable tone of his voice. I could see his fatigue when we talked via Skype. I felt bad for him, but I was also hurt.
“What about me? I’m your wife. Am I not a priority?” I continued to plead. I hadn’t seen him since May. June came and went. And then there was July, a month during which he developed a chronic cough. “Don’t be like Jim Henson,” I chided. “You know, the guy who created The Muppets. He was sick but refused to take any time off work. It turned into pneumonia, and look what happened to him.”
Marcus insisted he was fine. His doctor told him his lungs were clear, it wasn’t bronchitis, gave him an asthma inhaler and sent him home. If only the doctor had checked his heart, had used ultrasound equipment to inspect his aorta, checked the thickness of its wall, had seen that there was a weakening and performed emergency surgery to put in a stent. If only.
Marcus spent his 43rd birthday on July 2—having no clue it would be his last—buying his new road bike. He still had no time for me to visit. His August vacation was coming up, so we assumed we would just wait and see each other then. I was looking forward to seeing him. I missed him. I missed his body, his shapely soccer-player thighs, his perfect, round ass. I missed his scent, or lack of scent, maybe it was just his presence I longed for. I missed spooning against his smooth skin, his chest hair tickling my back. This was the longest stretch of time we’d spent apart since we met—and, no, Skype sex doesn’t count.
“Let’s make a plan,” I suggested.
“No,” he said. “Every minute of my life is planned out for work. I don’t want to make any plans right now. I’m too tired.” And that was it. That was my breaking point. He didn’t want to make plans for his August vacation—our vacation. I felt cast aside, not important enough for him to pencil me into his calendar. Work always came first. So I asked for a divorce. “You don’t want to make plans? I’ll make them for you. Instead of coming to Texas, you can spend the three weeks in Portland filing the papers.”
He still wanted to come to Texas. He said, “I’ll come there and we’ll talk through our issues.”
“If you come here,” I replied, “we’ll have a good time like we always do. We’ll drink lattes and wine, we’ll go hiking with Team Terrier, we’ll make love and then we’ll be right back to where we were.”
“Yes,” he said. “You’re right.”
Why, oh, why, OH, WHY didn’t I let him come? Why did I have to be such a hard-nosed bitch? “But what if he would have died in Texas?” friends argued. “It’s so remote, you couldn’t have even called an ambulance. You would have never forgiven yourself.” Forgiveness? I couldn’t forgive myself for any of this. I killed my husband. It was my fault. If only I had let him come to Texas, he would still be alive.
I don’t know what normal grief is like, but complicated grief? Complicated grief must be grief on steroids.
The physician’s assistant of Terlingua didn’t give me an appointment to check my racing heart—my heart which was also now broken, shattered beyond repair. Instead, he gave me a ride to the El Paso airport. We didn’t speak for the duration of the five-hour pre-dawn drive. He left me to my silence as I stared numbly out the open window, feeling the hot Texas wind in my face. I flew from Texas to Portland into the arms of my best friend from childhood. Everyone needs a friend like Nan. Nan is the friend who, when you tell her the news—the Very Bad News that you’re still having a hard time believing is true, but since Marcus didn’t call the entire day after Mr. Chapelle’s call, and he never went a day without at least sending an email, I was beginning to believe could be true—well, Nan takes charge.
“You don’t have to come to Portland,” I told Nan. She didn’t listen. Not only did she book a flight from New York, a rental car and a Portland hotel, she made sure her flight arrived before mine, so she could scrape me off the airport floor and carry me to the car.
Marcus and I had three weddings, so it seemed fitting that we had three funerals. We first got married at a German civil service in the picturesque village of Tiefenbronn, where we signed our international marriage certificate with Marcus’s parents as our witnesses. Next, we got married on a farm outside Seattle, Washington, not only to accommodate my friends and family, but also because I had been freelancing for the past year at Microsoft and therefore Seattle was my most recent U.S. base.
We saved the best for last and returned to Germany, where we took over the tiny Black Forest hamlet of Alpirsbach, booking rooms for our guests in all the charming inns, hosting dinners at cozy Bierstubes and walking down the aisle in a thousand-year-old cathedral, a towering beauty built of pink stone. Three weddings, three different styles, from basic to rustic to elegant. His funerals mirrored our weddings, albeit with a lot more tears—and definitely no champagne.
I didn’t see his body until I had been in Portland for five days. I was still going on trust to accept that he was actually dead and hadn’t instead plotted his disappearance to some tax haven where he was now living on a yacht with a supermodel. It wasn’t until the day of the Portland funeral that I laid eyes on him. I had already picked out clothes for him to wear—a black linen shirt, his favorite wool bicycle jersey tied around his shoulders, Diesel jeans and his clogs. He had to wear his clogs.
And then, there on Broadway and 20th, in the understated pink-and-beige-toned parlor of the Zeller Chapel of the Roses, two hours before the Portland service was to begin, I saw him. It was him, strikingly handsome and healthy looking, even when filled with embalming fluid. It was the man I had fallen in love with, was still in love with, the man I had married, was still married to. I saw him. I talked to him, begged him to wake up. I held his hands, bluish and hard. I ran my fingers along his forehead, bruised from his collapse. I leaned down into his casket and kissed his cold lips that didn’t kiss me back. Now I knew it was true. He was dead.
My tears cascaded down like Multnomah Falls and they didn’t stop for ten months. They ran and ran, creating permanent puffy eyes and altering my face with so much stress old friends no longer recognized me. The tears ran the entire flight to Germany, while I sat in business class and Marcus flew in a metal box in cargo. The tears flowed all through the week I spent in Germany, from the moment his grief-stricken, ashen-faced parents picked me up at the Stuttgart airport, to when they took me to the guest apartment where Marcus’s suits were hanging in the closet.
My tears kept on flowing through the German funeral, a formal and elegant church service, packed with Marcus’s coworkers, accompanied by a quartet of French horns playing Dvorak’s “From the New World” and presided over by the same pastor who’d married us. The tears gushed through the informal and quiet burial of Marcus’s ashes, and through the final meeting at the Tiefenbronn Rathaus, the place where we had signed our marriage certificate, and where I was required to sign his death certificate.
The tears came in endless waves. They came by day, by night. My tears did not discriminate in their time or place. From Germany, my tears followed me back to Portland, and then back to Texas, where I collected my dogs, packed up my MINI Cooper, said goodbye to Betty, goodbye to my miner’s cabin, goodbye to the desert that had nurtured my creativity all summer, goodbye to life as I had known it. The tears were ever-present, ever-flowing. It was a wonder I wasn’t completely dehydrated. There was only one thing that defined me now: grief. Complicated grief. Grief on steroids. It was something I was going to have to get used to.
CHAPTER 3
What I thought was a heart attack, or a cosmic connection to Marcus as his heart struggled to keep beating and then stopped, turned out to be a hyperthyroid. I had struggled with this autoimmune condition for a few years, it was the culprit that kept me from getting pregnant, but I had finally gotten it in check. (Marcus and I had accepted that having kids wouldn’t fit our lifestyle anyway. While we were in Germany, we got a dog, Jack, instead. Jack’s Mexican stepsister came later when Daisy followed me home one afternoon during Marcus’s assignment in Saltillo.) A simple blood test—along with the goiter in my neck that had exploded to the size of a grapefruit—indicated the hyperactivity had returned with a vengeance. My T-levels were off the charts.
Without any other purpose or sense of clarity to guide me, I let my medical problem determine where to go next. All I knew was that I couldn’t stay in my miner’s cabin in Texas. I spent two weeks back in Terlingua, recovering from the three weeks of funeral-related travel. Everything I had loved about the place before—the isolation, the vastness and emptiness of the desert wilderness—now threatened to consume me, and draw me further into a new world of quiet madness. I maintained just enough sanity to know I needed to be somewhere else, somewhere I could be around people. Normally I would have returned to L.A. That’s where my parents and two out of my four siblings lived; it’s where I had spent the bulk of my adult life, and it’s where I always fled to when Marcus and I hit a rough patch. But this time, in this new, debilitating, fragile, uncertain state of being, and because I didn’t have Marcus to run back to, I ran to the next closest thing: a place filled with memories of him.
Portland made sense for many reasons. First of all, I had no home anywhere else. Portland was affordable. Portland was where my trusted endocrinologist practiced and he could treat my over-active gland. Portland may have been the place where Marcus died, but it was still the place where we had lived and loved. And Portland was where our—er, my—furniture was stored.
Portland was where we—I—had friends, friends who knew both of us, knew us as a couple, friends who could lend support as I searched for meaning in life. Because so far, I couldn’t find any meaning left at all. I was so down on life, so lacking in any enthusiasm to face each new day as it dawned, I couldn’t even get excited about my morning coffee. Portland was where my memories of Marcus could help me feel more connected to him. In Portland, I would also attend a grief support group. I had already done my homework and found a free program. I couldn’t wait to get started. I couldn’t wait to stop feeling pain. Because if I continued feeling the way I was—which is to say lost, confused, angry and sad, oh, so very, very sad—I was going to be joining Marcus in the afterlife sooner rather than later. Impatient has always been my middle name. I didn’t know if I could ever feel good again, but if it was possible, like I’d heard it was possible from others who had lost someone they loved, I wanted to get going.
Wanting to make things right again and demanding immediate results was ingrained in my nature. When I was eight years old, I went to horse camp, the Bortell’s Bar-Rockin-B Ranch in Iowa, where my sister and I spent one full week learning to groom, saddle and ride horses. I was very excited. One of the first things our horse instructor told us was there would be an award given to anyone who fell off their horse and got back on to ride again. It was called the “Spurs Award.” That sounded nice—I nodded my head approvingly—but I wasn’t going to fall off my horse.
Of course, by the second day, I did fall off. I don’t remember how or why I ended up on the ground—those horses must have been the world’s tamest animals seeing as they were employed at a kids’ camp—but what I do remember is that I wanted to win the Spurs Award. By God, I was going to get back on and ride again. From the moment I realized I was on the ground and no longer in the saddle, I brushed myself off and went running after my horse, chasing it around the arena, so I could get back on—immediately. I was determined. I was going to win that award.
I chased old Brownie until he came to a stop and, grabbing the stirrup, climbed back on, breathless and proud. At the end of the week, at the closing ceremonies for camp, when all the awards were granted—for archery, for team spirit, for cleanest cabin—I was called up to receive my award, a paper certificate with my name on it: the Spurs Award. When the horse instructor handed it to me, he commented, “When we said get back on your horse and ride again, we meant sometime before the week is over, not ten seconds after you fall off.”
I wasn’t that eight-year-old girl anymore. I was forty-seven and wishing I was dead, wishing I had died instead of Marcus. And yet, somewhere in between the dark cumulus clouds of grief, I still had the will to live, the determination to get back on my horse. If I was going to be forced to grieve, then I was going to face it head-on. I was going to be the best student in grief school. I was going to get straight A’s. I was going to apply my usual tenacity and grit—and impatience—the way I did when I graduated early from both high school and college, and conquer my grief. I was going to run after the horse like Lance Fucking Armstrong and win the “Spurs Award for Grieving Widows.”
The day of my first grief support group meeting coincided with a rare phone conversation with my mother, who had been placed on my growing roster of People to Avoid While Grieving. One thing I learned very quickly after Marcus died was the outrageous comments people are capable of making when someone you love dies. It was as if certain friends, family members and acquaintances were suffering not from the grief or shock of Marcus’s death, but from verbal diarrhea. From day one, various people’s mouths ran awry with inappropriate and hurtful comments—words which came out like loose stool over which they had no control. They couldn’t manage to simply say, “I’m sorry for your loss.” Which is all anyone should say. Period.
But, no. They said things like: “You were going to get a divorce anyway, so I don’t know why you’re so broken up.” “The timing of his death was good; if it had been in October, it would have interfered with our party.” “I don’t believe in an afterlife; when he’s dead, he’s dead.” And, oh, here’s another good one: “I lost my mother last year and, believe me, it only gets harder.”
Those were only a few of the gems worthy of a David Letterman Top Ten list. The less outrageous but equally insensitive comments included: “It was his time.” I heard that one a lot. And “He’s in a better place now.” Really? You don’t think he’d rather be riding his new LaPierre road bike through the Italian countryside? How do you know what place he’s in and if it’s better? No. Not helpful.
My mom had contributed her share of questionable commentary, and it would take me many months to turn my anger toward her into compassion, which is why I was keeping my conversations with her to a minimum. It had been only one month since Marcus’s death, and I was not only angry with my crew of commentators and their unsolicited opinions, but also with myself. My own harsh words ran in my head like a heavy-metal song stuck in repeat mode. I couldn’t find a quiet corner anywhere. The outside comments were bad enough, but the noisiest ones were inside my own mind.
Just a few hours before my inaugural grief support group, I called my mom to check in. I was greeted with the same innocent question that anyone would ask in any given phone call. She simply asked, “How are you?” I know, I know. It’s a benign question, a conversation starter not meant to be taken literally. But I was not able to answer with the standard throwaway line, “I’m fine.” I couldn’t lie. Grief was like that. Grief was like truth serum that magnified each and every speck of life’s minutiae. Every little thing felt so important, so urgent, so serious. If Marcus had died so suddenly, then I could, too. Anyone could. Not only that death could happen, but that I wanted it to come; I wished for it. My desire to keep living was diminishing with each passing day. Life became so fragile. I was fragile. I was definitely not fine.
So instead of giving the standard answer, I said, “That’s just not the right question to ask.” Okay, so I could have been nicer. I could have—should have—just lied. I didn’t need to take my pain out on my own mother. I didn’t need to drag her down with me into my Grief Pit. She was quick to lash back and her response stung me like a scorpion bite. “Well, I just don’t know what to say to you anymore!” she snapped.
Another thing about grief is that it gives you permission to take care of yourself in a way you never knew how to before. My animal instincts kicked in and I recoiled into the safety of my shell. I was a grieving widow who needed to take care of herself. So with the sting still smarting, I did what any self-respecting, self-protecting widow would do: I hung up on her.
I found my way to the third floor of Good Samaritan Hospital with ten minutes to spare before the start of my first session in the grief support group. I had been to individual therapy off and on over the years, and I had hauled Marcus to a few sessions of marriage counseling, but I had never been to group therapy. I liked the idea of sharing my deepest, most intimate issues in a group setting about as much as I liked being a widow. But I was desperate for help. And it was free. I took a seat in the circle of chairs and waited for the two-hour session to begin. I was still upset by the aborted phone call with my mother. Hell, I was still upset about everything, about Marcus’s death ripping my life so irreversibly apart that I was now sitting with an assortment of strangers listening to their stories about death and dying.
One by one, going around the circle, they each took a heartfelt turn explaining how they were coping, how they were still trying to find meaning in life two years after their spouse was gone. What? Two years? I could still be sitting here two years from now, trying to get my life back together? I would rather be dead. Why couldn’t I have been the one to die? A man in his thirties, whose wife died a year earlier of a degenerative disease, finished speaking and then it was my turn.
“Hello, my name is Beth Howard. I just moved back to Portland after my husband, Marcus …” I didn’t get very far before the tears bubbled out like boiled-over pie filling. In a matter of seconds, I was choking on my own spit, globs of snot running down from my nose and into my mouth. I eeked out bits of my history. “And then, as if that wasn’t bad enough,” I continued between heaving sobs, “I hung up on my mother today.”
I was gasping for air, crying so hard, I could barely get the words out. I finally stopped talking and when I ventured a look around at a few of the faces in the circle, I was met with a round of solemn but compassionate nods. This was a knowing group who had all been there, done that, but they were all much farther along in the grieving process than me. No one else had lost it during their introduction like I had. They had all delivered their stories with composure and a detectable—an enviable—trace of detachment. I was a newbie. I was raw. Too raw. I didn’t belong in this group. I didn’t—couldn’t even if I wanted to—speak again after that. Eventually, as the spotlight got turned to someone else, I was able to scale back my sobs to the normal faucet flow of tears and sat quietly for the remainder of the evening’s discussion. When the session came to a close, Susan, the group facilitator, asked to see me. She led me to the far corner of the room, away from the others.
Susan was a roundish, middle-aged blonde with a quiet voice and gentle, calming energy. She was comfort in a burgundy-colored pant suit. She was a slice of warm apple pie. This grief counselor, this angel sent from heaven, looked me in the eyes—what little she could see of my eyes through my swollen eyelids—and said, “I’m worried about you. Are you going to be okay tonight? Do you have someone you can be with? Are you okay to drive home?” Oh, boy. Some angel. I was in trouble. I wanted to be the star pupil, ace the test, be cured of my sadness and depression in one, maybe two, easy sessions. The joke was on me. I wasn’t going to win the Spurs Award. I was going to be committed to the psych ward.
“I’m fine,” I insisted. I couldn’t tell my mom I was fine, but I was in no position to give any other answer to Susan. I wasn’t fine, and didn’t know if, or when, I’d ever be fine, but Susan didn’t know me well enough to know tonight’s breakdown was normal for me—or the “new normal,” as the grief books put it.
I wanted to throw those stupid, fucking grief books against the wall when they talked of this “new normal.” I wanted my “old normal” back. I wanted Marcus to be alive. I wanted to turn back the clock and be a better wife, to not get mad at Marcus for working so much, to complain less and love more, to have never asked for that divorce. I didn’t want to feel this way, to live in distress, walking through life in a daze, overly sensitive to some things, completely numb to others, to spend my days with a death wish. I was cognizant enough to know my “new normal” wasn’t healthy. It wasn’t something I could continue to live with. But after a month I had gotten somewhat accustomed to it. I was getting familiar with touching the void, plunging into the black hole of sadness. I knew what it felt like to flounder in the ocean of despair, to be pummeled by tidal waves of grief and held under in their suffocating darkness.
I wasn’t afraid. I was just … well, okay, I might have been borderline suicidal. I certainly thought about it, but I wasn’t going to kill myself. Not tonight anyway. My friends Alison and Thomas had dinner waiting for me and all I wanted was to get out of this hospital meeting room and back to the warmth of their home, eat a filet of grilled salmon served with pesto made from their garden, and drink a glass or three of wine while listening to Alison’s infectious laugh.
I convinced Susan to let me leave, unescorted, but she wouldn’t release me until I agreed to see her for private grief counseling. “Let’s start with twice a week,” she said. Private biweekly sessions with this cup of comfort? Yes. A thousand times, yes. It was clear that relief wouldn’t come instantly. Like any college degree, it would require hard work. And time. Grief was like deep-dish pie whose filling takes longer to cook; it cannot be rushed. But with Susan—dear, sweet, life-saving Susan—relief felt a little closer at hand.
Even though my desire to be alive, along with my energy level, was at an all-time low, I still had my dogs, Jack and Daisy, and they needed to be walked and fed. I appreciated how Jack could be oblivious to my mood at times, and demand a game of stick throwing. “Keep calm and carry on,” he seemed to be reminding me, like the British wartime slogan.
The dogs forced me to do just that. I couldn’t let them down. I couldn’t let Marcus down. The dogs were Marcus’s dogs, too. He had a lot of time, love and commitment invested in these dogs. He had a lot invested in me. If I was the one who’d died and he was still alive, he wouldn’t bail on life. He wouldn’t wallow in self-pity. He wouldn’t spend time thinking about how he would end it all. He wouldn’t consider the death-wielding potential of a paring knife, my favorite pie-making tool. But I couldn’t help thinking: if I were dead, I could go find Marcus, apologize to him, make love to him, make everything right. It was an attractive theory, but I had no idea if the afterlife actually works that way. There was no guarantee I’d find him, no certainty of a happy ending.
What if he didn’t want me chasing after him? What if he was happy with his independence in his new life? What if he had already hooked up with some new woman—some long-haired brunette in a white chiffon dress with a halo and wings? Then what would I do? I would have left a mess behind for other people to deal with. I would have left two dogs that depended on me, loved me, loved me in spite of my frightening and confusing behavior—my “new normal.”
I had responsibilities, damn it. And taxes due. Besides, I was raised with a strong Midwest work ethic. No matter how down I was, I couldn’t shake the stern voices of my upbringing: “Pull yourself up by the bootstraps.” “Don’t get down, get busy.” “If you don’t have the skills, go get the skills.” And, above all, “No whining.” Those were some of the whip-cracking nuggets of wisdom I was spoon-fed by my parents. I credit my ability to move forward to this hardwiring of tough love. I gave my bootstraps the best tug I could muster and got busy.
This grieving business was like making pie for the first time. One needs some instruction in how to do it—consult a recipe, make a grocery list and go after the goal with gusto. To keep myself organized, I made a list. I could barely get out of bed in the mornings, let alone keep my thoughts straight, but a list gave me some framework, and reminded me that I still had some purpose. After first establishing my grief counseling schedule with Susan, I made an appointment for my thyroid treatment with Dr. Vanek. Check. Next, in between long sessions of sobbing that made going out in public or even talking on the phone problematic, I would look for a place to live.
I was staying with our friends Alison and Thomas in their three-bedroom bungalow. The house was comfortable, welcoming, but it was also where Marcus had stayed during his vacation. His suitcase, filled with his travel clothes, bike gear, books and shaving kit, was still there. His deodorant and German brand of Zahnpasta (toothpaste) were still in the guest-bathroom medicine cabinet.
Seeing his things exactly where he’d left them, knowing he was unaware that he would never touch them again, had initially intensified the sense of loss and, naturally, sent me spiraling into yet another bawling spree. But after the initial shock, I got used to seeing his stuff—I was having to get used to a lot of things—and over the days found some comfort in being surrounded by these pieces of him, particularly his clothes. I searched for anything that hadn’t been washed—the dirtier and mustier, the better. I slept with his red plaid bathrobe pulled close to me, pressing my nose into the fabric to capture any remaining scent of him. I breathed in, long, deep inhales. I couldn’t get enough of his smell, couldn’t get close enough to him.
Apart from being the location of Marcus’s final visit, Alison and Thomas’s house was also where we had stayed during our four-day rendezvous in May. The upstairs bedroom was where we last slept together, wrapped around each other’s warm, naked bodies. It was the last place we made love, the last place we would ever make love. Being in this bedroom was good and bad. Good because in that room I believed I could be connected to him. I had become a recent and voracious fan of Ghost Whisperer, the soon-to-be-canceled CBS-TV series starring Jennifer Love Hewitt.
Besides watching that show, I also went to the Portland library and checked out as many books as I could find about life on the “Other Side.” I was convinced that if Marcus hadn’t “crossed over” yet—or, “gone to the light,” as they said on TV—then he might still be staying in that guest room. He would come and find me, maybe even talk to me, tell me how he was, why he died, tell me if he was angry with me and let me know if he would ever forgive me. There were signs he was there. The books all said ghosts hijack electrical appliances to get energy so they can stick around. Static on my laptop monitor, my iPod shorting out (it had never done that before), and an unusually intermittent Internet connection proved it. If he was hovering around, though, I couldn’t see him. I stayed awake at night, refusing to take the sleeping pills friends insisted I use, so as not to miss him if he appeared.
But staying in this guest room was also bad in a way. My friends were incredibly generous and patient, but I couldn’t stay there forever, waiting for Marcus, or his ghost, to materialize. I had already logged two weeks at their place—on the heels of Marcus staying there for almost three weeks before his abrupt and untimely departure. Not to mention, I wasn’t exactly fun to be around. I’m sure my sobbing was audible throughout the house, my late-night cries echoing off the hardwood floors. I needed to be in my own space, surrounded by my own furniture, my own bedding, my candles, my dishes, my bath towels and especially my pictures—framed pictures of Marcus. So I moved to the next likeliest place he might turn up: our old house on the opposite side of town. It wasn’t exactly our old house. It was the guesthouse next door to that place, and it happened to be for rent.
If Willamette Heights is Portland’s best neighborhood, then Aspen Avenue is its best street. Aspen Avenue is the last street at the top of a small mountain in Portland’s northwest corner, where industrial area meets city meets wilderness. The elevation provides awe-inspiring views of the snow-covered volcanoes Mount Hood and Mount St. Helens by day, and a panorama of city lights by night, a postcard-perfect scene accompanied by the sounds of the occasional blowing train horn or the clash of steel coming from the loading docks down below.
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 romantic 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.
Instead of using my nimble fingers to type emails to the coworkers sitting in the cubicles right next to me, I put my hands to use, making something tangible and mouth-watering to be savored and appreciated by others. Just as my dad taught us kids to moan with pleasure over each bite of banana cream pie, I relished the joy with which my pie-loving customers, rich and famous or not, consumed my homemade pies.
My transition from my workaholic life in San Francisco to pie baking in Malibu was surprisingly seamless. Upon my return to L.A., I discovered a new gourmet-food shop had opened in Malibu. The place was called Mary’s Kitchen and an article in the local Surfside News claimed it was known for its outstanding pie made by the café’s namesake, Mary Spellman.
Mary was a transplant from the Hamptons in New York, where she had run the Sagaponak General Store. She had been persuaded by a customer-turned-investor to move West.
And now, in the Cross Creek Shopping Center (your basic L.A. strip mall), wedged between a Starbucks and a swimwear boutique, here she was. The front of her shop was decorated with picket fencing and picnic tables covered in vintage flowered cloths. Entering through the screen door, you were met by the hot deli section displaying a plethora of comfort food—meatloaf, mashed potatoes, macaroni and cheese with the emphasis on the cheese. In the cold deli section, there were countless wedges of white, yellow, blue, gooey and hard cheeses, and an endless row of salamis hanging from the ceiling. In the bakery section, brick-size brownies, cookies as big as dinner plates and zesty-looking lemon bars radiating with California citrusy sunshine all beckoned. There was a lot of good food. But there was no pie.
On my scouting trip, I inquired of the elegant blonde woman working behind the counter, “Where’s the pie? I read that you have great pie.”
She nodded and asked me to wait. “Let me go check with Mary.”
A woman emerged from the kitchen in back, rounding the corner from behind the hot deli case. A six-foot-tall Amazon in a baseball hat, wire-rimmed glasses, black-and-white-checkered chef’s pants and a white apron smeared with various representations of whatever she had been cooking—this was Mary. “Can I help you?” she asked.
“I came for pie,” I said. “But you don’t have any.”
“We’re too busy to make it,” she replied in a brusque Long Island accent. Her voice was as powerful as her presence.
My response popped out like a premature champagne cork. “I’ll make it for you,” I said. When I had quit the dot com job and told my bosses I wanted to make pie, I originally intended the statement to be a symbolic one. I hadn’t actually thought it through. But the opportunity magically presented itself, the genie was here to grant my wish. (Note to self: watch it on the subliminal wishes; they’re always the most powerful ones.)
Mary stifled a chuckle. “What are your qualifications?” she wanted to know, sizing me up to see if I was serious. I hadn’t seen the moment coming, but when it arrived, I realized just how serious I was.
“I’m from Iowa,” I answered. I couldn’t say I was a web producer or a freelance journalist to get this job. “I come from the land of pie.” She just stood there, arms folded across her bosom. So I blathered on. “Actually, I learned how to bake from a pastry chef, a retired merchant marine. He taught me how to make apple pie when I was caught stealing apples from his tree.” Yes, I am fully aware that sometimes I can be a complete bumbling idiot.
“Okay,” she said with the hint of a smile. “Come back tomorrow and we’ll see how you do. Be here at one. Oh, and the pay is $7.50 an hour. Are you okay with that?”
Seven-fifty an hour? To bake pie and not sit in front of a computer sixteen hours a day? To work in a bustling, cozy kitchen by the sea instead of a cavelike cubicle in a hermetically sealed high-rise? Yes, I was totally okay with that.
Looking back, however, I admit it was a miracle that I lasted beyond the first day in Malibu. In spite of all those pies I’d made for boyfriends, I was very much out of practice. Or, in reality, my pie-making skills weren’t that polished in the first place. But Mary was an outstanding teacher.
When I showed up for my Malibu pie audition, Mary walked me over to what would be my work station, a small fluorescent-lit room off to the side of the kitchen packed with refrigerators, an industrial-size Hobart mixer, two convection ovens and a stainless steel table with flour and sugar bins stored underneath. A shelf above the table held a stack of dog-eared, stained cookbooks, and another shelf held a disarray of measuring cups and spice jars. The space was so tight you could almost stand in the middle and touch each appliance without moving.
“Let’s see what you can do,” Mary announced.
I froze. I hadn’t actually made a pie in … Oh, shit, I had no idea when I had made my last pie.
“Let me show you how I do it,” Mary said when it became clear by my catatonic state that I needed help. I stepped aside. She held a two-cup measuring cup in her bear-paw-size hands and scooped out flour into a gray tub, the kind normally used for bussing dishes. I counted along with her as she dumped twenty-two level cupfuls into the tub.
“I learned to bake pies from my mom,” she said, as she pulled several pounds of butter out of the fridge. “She ran a boardinghouse in the Hamptons and cooked for all the guests. Pie was her specialty. She made pies of every kind—coconut cream, chocolate cream, lemon meringue, blackberry, blueberry, peach, apple, you name it.”
She turned back to the refrigerator and pulled out a plastic bag full of something hard, white and greasy—like Crisco, only denser. “This is lard,” she explained when she saw the puzzled look on my face. “My mom used lard. Some people don’t like it, but that’s how we do it here—half butter, half lard.”
Using her bare hands, Mary worked the butter and lard into the flour. My eyes grew wide. “You use your hands?” I asked. “The merchant marine chef taught me to use knives.”
“Hands work better,” she said. “You work the fat into the flour with your fingers until you have the consistency of large peas.” She talked as she mixed. “This is enough dough for ten pies. We’ll just make one now, but you’ll use the rest of the dough later.” Next, she poured ice water into the flour mix. “The key here is to be light and gentle,” she said. Though there was nothing light and gentle about Mary physically, from the way her hands moved through the dough, it was obvious she possessed a tender, loving side. She lifted the flour from underneath, letting it fall from her fingers to let the water blend in without forcing it.
“Don’t overwork the dough. That’s the biggest mistake people make. They knead it too much. Remember, we’re not making bread. Pie dough only needs to be worked enough to hold it together. You work it too much and it gets tough.” She formed her soft dough into balls, patted them into discs the diameter of cup saucers, then stacked them up next to the tub. She sprinkled flour on each to keep them from sticking together.
“Can you hand me the rolling pin?” she asked, pointing a flour-covered finger toward the corner of the table. Three rolling pins of varying sizes competed for space in a large ceramic crock jammed full with other baking utensils—wooden spoons, rubber spatulas, metal spatulas, lemon graters. “The big one,” she said.
She moved the tub aside and sprinkled the table with flour. “Make sure you have a clean surface to start. The flour will keep the dough from sticking. The same goes for your rolling pin. You want to keep it clean. If the dough gets gunked up on it, scrape it off with a knife. You can also rub your rolling pin with flour.” She sprinkled flour on the top of her dough and started rolling. “Only roll in one direction, starting from the middle and working outward. Don’t roll back and forth. People like to do that and it makes the dough tough.”
As her dough began to flatten, she paused. “Now you want to turn your dough. Lift it up like this.” She demonstrated by picking up the now thinner and wider disc and flipped it over as if it were a pizza. While the dough was still airborne, she quickly ran her hand underneath, dusting the table with more flour. The dough landed on its opposite side, she sprinkled the new top side with flour, and went back to rolling. Her big hands worked quickly, expertly, and yet gently, until the dough was thin, flat and covering most of the table. “My mom had a striped vinyl tablecloth on her kitchen table. We rolled right on it and you would know your dough was thin enough when you could see the red lines through it.”
I leaned over and tried to picture the red lines. As it was, the stainless steel table had no markings to indicate her dough had passed the test, but after many years of pie making she instinctively knew when to stop.
“Do you see these white-and-yellow dots in here?” Mary asked, pointing to an irregular marbled pattern in the flattened dough. “That’s a good thing. You want that. That’s the butter and lard and it will melt into the flour as it bakes. It’s what gives your pie crust the flakiness.”
“That’s good to know,” I said. “My crust has a tendency to be a little hard.”
“That’s because you overwork the dough,” Mary responded.
“Yes. A friend of mine from Iowa, whose 104-year-old grandmother wrote a cookbook, accused me of that. Whenever we make pie together, she yells at me, ‘Don’t manhandle the dough!’”
“We’re going to make apple today. I’ll show you a shortcut that I learned from my mom. We’re going to put this crust in the pie plate now and leave it there. We’ll roll out the top later, when we’re ready for it.” Dough overflowed from the plate, draping over the edge of the dish and onto the table. Mary noticed me examining its droopy excess.
“I’ll show you how to deal with that,” she said, and came back with a large pair of scissors. “You can use a knife to trim it, or you can just use these.” She snipped at the dough with the confidence of a Beverly Hills hairdresser until she had gone all the way around the pie plate. “Leave an extra inch from the rim because we’re going to need it when we put on the top.
“Okay, Pie Girl. Are you ready to peel some apples?” Mary motioned to the boxes of Granny Smiths stacked up in front of the refrigerator. “Here, take a knife and have a seat.” She handed me a paring knife and grabbed another one for herself. We sat on milk crates in the middle of the tiny baking room with a giant silver bowl between us. I picked up an apple and started to cut out the stem. “You don’t have to do that. Leave the stems and I’ll show you the shortcut I was talking about when we’re done peeling.”
I took a breath and moved my knife around the apple, the waxy green skin coming off easily with the sharp blade. “I guess my knives at home must be pretty dull,” I said. “This one is working really well.” I put my one skinned apple into the bowl, next to the four Mary had already peeled, and started in on another.
“One pie takes about seven or eight of these large apples,” Mary explained as we filled the bowl. “Now here’s what I want to show you—the shortcut.” Taking an apple in her mama-bear hand, she sliced the apple directly into the pie shell.
“Don’t you slice the apples into a bowl and mix them together with the sugar and cinnamon?” I asked. “That’s what that old pastry chef taught me.”
“No, that’s the way most people do it, but this is what my mom taught me. It’s easier and faster this way. Make sure you slice them all the same size so they cook evenly. You don’t want them too small or they’ll bake down too fast. And if they’re too big, they won’t bake through. We’re going to put in half of the apples and half of everything else—sugar, cinnamon, pinch of salt and enough flour to thicken the juice—and then repeat it.”
She sliced, sprinkled and pinched. Then, just as she promised, she sliced more apples and dumped the remaining half of the other ingredients on top. “Don’t worry. It will all blend together as it bakes.” Reaching for a stick of butter, she cut off an inch and placed it on top of the apple pile. “Don’t forget a pat of butter before you lay the top crust over it.”
“That’s a lot of apples,” I commented on the slices stacked up into a mountain peak.
“You don’t want to be stingy, but you also don’t want your apples too high because they will shrink as they bake. The crust will stay high, and you don’t want to be left with a big gap underneath.” She rolled out another ball of dough until it was flat, round and a few inches wider than the pie plate.
“To pick up the dough you can fold it in half like this.” She lifted an edge and slowly brought it to meet its opposite side, ending up with a half-moon shape. “Or you can use the rolling pin by pulling the dough onto it and move it over to your pie.” She lifted the half-moon by its edges and dragged it over to the waiting pie without breaking it. She lined it up with the center and unfolded it, until it laid flat across the fruit-filled heap.
My previous pies never had that kind of excess dough hanging off the sides, nor had I ever managed to roll my dough as smooth as hers. My pie dough was always cracked and crumbly with jagged edges that barely reached the edge of the pie plate. My dough required an all-star wrestling match to get the top and bottom crusts to join together. But this pie already looked like a masterpiece—the outline of apple wedges visible, snugly tucked under their supple blanket of dough. And she wasn’t finished with it yet.
“I’m going to trim the edges.” Again, she grabbed the scissors and cut with abandon, trimming the overflow. She measured her progress by poking her finger under the rim of the pie plate. “We’ll leave about a fingertip’s worth of dough. Now we pinch the top and bottom crusts together to seal in the juices.” Her fingers raced around the perimeter, thumb and forefinger on one side, pushing the side of her index finger in between them from the other. The dough elevated with each pinch, creating a fortress from which no pie filling could ever escape. There would be no dripping of apple juice into her oven. The end result was a decorative fluted edge.
“Before it goes in the oven …” Mary stopped midsentence and said, “Will you make sure that top oven is set to 450?” I walked over and turned the knob. “Before it goes in the oven,” she continued, “we need to brush it with a beaten egg.” She painted the top crust with egg, using a small brush until it was shiny and yellow. “But don’t overdo it. You don’t want egg collecting in the little troughs. And now we poke holes in the top for the steam to vent.” Picking up her paring knife again, she said, “My mom always made this pattern, sort of like chicken feet and, because she’s a Christian, a little cross in the middle.” She punctured the dough until it was covered in slits, a set of chicken footprints that lined up as if marking where to cut the pie into quarters.
“Open the oven for me, will you?” I opened the door and got hit with a blast of industrial-strength hot air convection. She slid the pie inside. “We’ll set the timer for twenty minutes, enough time to set the crust. You want the crust to cook first, get it a little brown, then turn the temperature down to 375.”
Not caring any longer if I sounded like a novice, I asked the classic “Pie Baking for Dummies” question: “How do you know when it’s done?”
“You stick a knife in it. You want the apples to be soft, but still have a little resistance. If you overbake it, the apples will come out mushy, like applesauce. But you want to bake it until the juice bubbles, so you know the fruit is cooked.”
After twenty minutes, sure enough, the edges and top had transformed from white and doughy to brown and crusty. “We’ll turn down the temperature now and leave it in for another thirty or forty minutes.”
Time passed much faster in the crammed and hot kitchen than in my dot com cubicle. “Here, stick the knife in and see what you think,” Mary said when the timer went off. The knife gave way beneath my touch.
“I would say it’s done.” Even though the knife went in easily my confidence was tentative.
She took the knife from me to see for herself. “Yes, you’re right. It’s done.” She pulled out the commercial-size baking sheet upon which the pie sat. The pie. The gorgeous, golden brown, sky-high apple pie. Steam rose from its vents, bubbling juices pooled in the crevices of the fluted edge, the familiar sweet apple-cinnamon-butter scent filled the kitchen.
“It’s beautiful,” I said. I didn’t want to point out the one flaw I observed, but I couldn’t help but ask: “Do you think we should cut off that one edge that got a little darker than the rest?”
“No,” she snapped. “That’s part of this pie’s personality. Every pie is going to look different. Pie should look homemade.”
Pie should look homemade. What a concept. A pie made by hand will never be perfect, but it will be real. You will know that someone crafted it with their hands, putting their own unique signature on it the way an artist signs their name on a canvas. I leaned over the steaming vents to breathe in the apple and spice, a soothing, heartwarming scent I never, ever tire of.
With Mary’s mentoring, I found my way back into a healthy world again and, as a bonus, I perfected my pie-making skills.
I went on to bake some two thousand pies over the course of that year. I baked strawberry-rhubarb pies for Dick Van Dyke. I made coconut cream pies for Steven Spielberg. I watched Mel Gibson wolf down a slice of my apple crumble pie. I sold more than one peach pie to Robert Downey, Jr. And once, on a tight deadline, I whipped up a lemon meringue pie for Barbra Streisand, who had ordered it for a dinner party. (That pie, however, didn’t survive the trip to her house. Her driver took the speed bumps in Malibu Colony too fast and the meringue stuck to the top of the bakery box.) The biggest challenge came at Thanksgiving, when I pulled an all-nighter, baking two hundred pecan, pumpkin and apple pies in a twenty-four-hour stretch to fulfill all the customer orders, leaving me with sore muscles, swollen hands and bakers’ burns on my forearms. I still bear the scars proudly.
CHAPTER 5
It was because of this lifelong pie history—and the ease with which I had landed the pie-baking job in Malibu—that I assumed I could approach the bakeries and coffeehouses of Portland and have a job nailed down within a few days. And so, two months after Marcus’s life ended and my grief began, I set forth on my jobseeking mission.
Portland may be renowned for its food scene—its socially conscious cafés supplied with locally grown produce and free-range, hormone-absent meat, its proliferating gourmet food carts and its frequent glowing reviews in the New York Times—but at the time, Portland did not have any pie shops. Still, it had decent pie. Not mind-blowing-delicious pie, but there was pie all the same. And pie is what I needed. Like a gardener savors digging their bare hands in the earth, drawing energy from holding a clump of root-bound soil between their palms, I needed pie dough. I needed to bury my hands in flour and butter to evoke that grounding, energizing sensation. I made a list of the places where I would apply: Crema, Random Order Coffee House, Bipartisan Café, Grand Central Bakery, Baker and Spice. Out of five places, I was sure to get a job. After all, I was highly qualified.
At least by my definition I was qualified. Granted, it had been eight years since I worked at Mary’s Kitchen. But I had spent a full year there making pies, and my on-the-job training had to be as valuable as a culinary school certificate.
If my pies passed the test from Hollywood’s A-list celebrities, I was certain my pies would hold up to Portland’s precious culinary standards.
First, I applied at Crema, a hip little bakery in Portland’s northeast quadrant. I was attracted to the contrast of wholesome, hearty baked goods—scones, muffins, cupcakes and pie—sold in an ultramodern glass-front building with concrete floors. It’s what Marcus would call a “style-mix.” In truth, I went to Crema first because it’s a place Marcus and I liked. He had taken Alison there for a thank-you breakfast just days before he died. She told me about it later, about their conversation, about how sad he was over our divorce. I still had the receipt from their breakfast, which I found in his wallet, along with the other sales slips that tracked the movements of his final days. Even when I was not conscious of it, everything I did, everywhere I went now, was motivated by staying connected to Marcus.
I approached the twentysomething dude with the plug-pierced ears and scraggly beard behind the cash register. “Oh, man, sorry, we’re not hiring,” he said. “But you can leave your number.”
I didn’t scribble my number on the scrap of paper he offered. I left my card. I had come a long way since my baking days in Malibu. I took pie so seriously now I had a business card printed with “The World Needs More Pie” as my company name, complete with a red-and-white-checkered border and a steaming pie logo on it. Crema’s manager was sure to call me back. Not only was I professional in my approach, I was perfect for this place. The kitchen behind the bakery counter was calling to me. I was already visualizing myself pulling my gorgeous pies out of their ovens, joking and laughing with the other bakers, making friends with the pie-consuming customers, maybe even getting this cashier dude to help me peel apples. This was a place where I could relive the good old days of Malibu. They had to call me back.
Next, I went to Random Order Coffee House about a mile farther northeast. In the heart of the Alberta Street district, Portland’s grunge strip, the predominant feature of this tiny coffeehouse was its display case of handmade pies. Not cheap by any city’s standards, their pies sold for twenty-eight bucks each. Pretending I was looking for the restroom, I poked my head into their baking kitchen in the back. It wasn’t a kitchen exactly, it was more like a closet. A very, very small closet. They were baking all those pies in a bloody toaster oven. No, we weren’t in Malibu anymore. I inquired anyway. No. Not hiring. Whatever. I left my card.
Bipartisan Café is a longer trek east, as far opposite of my Grieving Sanctuary as you could get and still be in Portland. But their pie was as good, plain and simple as a grandmother—er, in my case, great-grandmother—would make. Their specialty was Northwest berry pies—marionberry, blackberry and raspberry—all served with a giant dollop of whipped cream. From what I could tell, the pies were baked right behind the counter, a space already congested with coffee machines and their harried staff members preparing soup and sandwiches. I stayed to eat a bowl of chili—one that actually had meat in it (surprising for vegetarian-centric Portland)—and after some subtle questioning of the waitress, I learned that they might be hiring extra help for Thanksgiving. Unfortunately, the baker was out of town for two weeks. I left my card.
After that, it was on to Grand Central Bakery. This was the biggest of the bunch. Grand Central Bakery was a chain started in Seattle, and had recently released an impressive new cookbook. Their wholegrain breads were sold in grocery stores, and they had started a new line of frozen pie crust and unbaked frozen pies. A burgeoning pie enterprise? They could use my help. Of their three Portland locations, the one closest to my house had a public viewing area to watch the bakers make bread in a warehouse-size kitchen. I watched. I liked. The bakers worked as a team, as one completed their task they passed the bread dough on to their coworker for another task, chatting and smiling all the while. I wanted to join in the camaraderie. I was even willing to change camps and make bread instead of pie. If they were hiring. My neighbor, Robin, worked there part-time as counter help. Even with her hand-delivering my application and putting in a good word for me, I never got a call back.
Baker and Spice, out in the suburbs, was my last resort. When I thought of getting a pie-baking job to help heal my grief, I had envisioned riding my bike to work, like I did in California. Those were heavenly days when I could pedal the forty-five minutes from Venice to Malibu along the warm and sunny coast, watching pelicans dive for fish and surfers catch waves.
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