“Just some pie and a cup of coffee. I have apple pie. And wild blueberry,” she pleaded. “I make the pies two at a time and freeze them and it would take just half an hour to thaw one in the oven.”
My eyes locked with Aaron’s. As much as I wanted to sit at her kitchen table among the paraphernalia of her life, and as much as I loved to let a day unspool loosely into the evening, Aaron and I simultaneously decided against hanging around to wait for a pie to thaw.
“Another time,” I said, sincerely regretful, shaking both of her hands, light and downy like little animals. We turned toward our truck.
I spun back around after she started yelling.
“You need to come for pie! I mean it! You come back!” She stood in the middle of the road, one foot on either side of the line, bent forward with red-hot hospitality.
In the way that you never claim your rain checks like you should, we never did stop that summer and ring her doorbell for pie and coffee. Not long after that we saw her obituary in the paper. Sadly, we failed to make the time, on even the blankest of days, to enter her world.
As I stood in my cool, dim kitchen after lunch I let the dawning truth of my continual, confusing attraction to this place wash over me. The rural life was bossy, like Margaret, in a way that I craved. There were real food limits here. Seasonal deprivations. Provisions you had to go after yourself. You need water? Pound down into the ground for it. Hungry? Go down to the garden and pick it. Need heat? Make a fire in your woodstove. And heat was heat. If the stove was already going, you might as well use it to dry out apple slices, or herbs, or tomatoes. The full sheet pan of cherry tomatoes I set on top of the woodstove, mooning about in a bath of oil, garlic, and herbs, took about eight hours to shrink into powerful nuggets the size of cranberries and barely filled a pint. I thought of them as summer’s gold coins in a jar, and for weeks afterward I spent them carefully: a few dropped into my chicken salad, a few more spooned out over sautéed blue gills.
In the dark of the afternoon, I whipped together a pie from my own limited resources: the first crab apples that had grown on our tree. I was coming off a five-year standoff with pie. My crusts, which had turned out for me since I was in my teens, had grown tough, as I’d discovered with the twenty-five Thanksgiving pies I’d made at Cru. It was the revenge of beginner’s luck.
So I returned to not measuring anything, just as Grandma Dion had taught me. I cubed coolish butter and added a pawed-out scoop of Crisco for good measure—Crisco being my inaugural piecrust fat. I mixed some sugar with small, fragrant chunks of crab apple, peels and all, until they tasted sweet enough, then added enough flour to make a milky fluid that I hoped would bind in the oven.
When I pulled out the pie, the nut-brown crust swelled with thickened juice, and its crimped edge felt as sturdy/delicate as wet beach sand. After it had cooled, I transferred the first slice to a plate and sucked in my breath until it made it there in one fragile, perfect piece. The crab apples, whose skins had dissolved, leaving a deep coral-pink fruit with a flowery fragrance, were a dead ringer for baked quince.
The gaps in my Midwestern culinary education were as obvious to me at that moment as Margaret Sexton’s gaping pothole in the middle of the road—which, the last time we drove by, was still open to the problem stake. Headcheese, rendered lard, homemade cottage cheese, I had yet to make any of these things my grandma had so rapturously described, the rural recipes that had originally drawn me to this place. I wanted to try them all. Maybe if I pushed my brain out of the way, as I had with the pie, my hands would know just what to do.
18
MORBID SUGAR
One morning toward the end of that summer in Two Inlets, I walked to the outhouse hiding a suspicious bump in my robe and took a pregnancy test: the pink plus sign in the white window glowed a hallucinatory neon against the rough wooden floor.
True to form, neither Aaron nor I could see how having a child would change our grand master plan. As we walked down our driveway on a cloud, trading potential names, we also discussed our new future, agreeing that we’d stay in Brooklyn while our kid was young, summer in Two Inlets whenever we could swing it, and move back home for good eventually.
“Maybe we’ll move back when he or she goes to school,” I speculated, because even the childless had heard stories of the epic hassles involved in finding a home for your kid in the New York public school system.
My career was a little more in doubt, but after Cru I’d turned the lock on the fine-dining brigade. I was at a crossroads. I couldn’t see too far past my belly to think ahead, anyway.
Yet our next move virtually cemented our future in the country: We called our neighbor Ron Schultz, Vern’s brother, who came over and poured an enormous silver pad of concrete next to our one-room house for a future addition. When it dried, we walked around it eagerly, marveling at its size. It would make our house twice as big as our Brooklyn apartment. Using a two-by-four board like a giant ruler, we plotted out the rooms and marked them in weatherproof construction pencil, moving walls and doorways and going from room to imaginary room until the flow felt natural.
“This second bedroom is huge!” I said, viewing the modest ten-by-fourteen space with eyes accustomed to Brooklyn small-scale. “If we someday have two kids, we can just divide it in half.”
“Totally!” Aaron agreed.
“You’re sure we don’t need an architect?” I frowned, suddenly doubtful that the pencil lines would remain over the harsh winter.
“Nah,” Aaron said as he measured out five windows in our bedroom and rubbed their specs onto the cement. “Vern’s as good as any architect. In the spring, he’ll just follow these lines.” (Remarkably, that’s just what he did.)
When we finished sketching out the addition, Aaron unfolded two lawn chairs in our future bathroom. After years of trekking out to the outhouse, I’d decided to make it huge, and Aaron insisted on putting three windows around the tub so that we could open them to the summer breeze, out of fondness for the years we showered outside.
“Maybe we’ll stay until middle school,” Aaron said.
“What are you talking about now?” I replied.
“Maybe we can stay in Brooklyn until our kid reaches middle school. I’m sure the elementary schools are fine, some of them probably better than the one in Park Rapids.”
I cocked my head and murmured assent. I was no longer surprised by the guy who sat in the shadow of his new construction and talked about leaving it. He was a hardened dreamer. He really believed that we could go back and forth forever.
—