Making Piece Read online

  Sometime before eleven, we unloaded the pie supplies into Melissa’s old kitchen and began making a big mess in it. The clock was ticking. Six hours wasn’t a lot of time to make fifty pies, especially when you included the one hour of baking time for each batch. Even with all the help, it was going to be a stretch. Nan, Carlene and Thelma took their positions at two counters, peeling 150 pounds of apples, while Jane and I set up our work station at another.

  With my hands once again submerged in a soothing bowl of flour and butter, and with Jane working right next to me, memories of our old baking days came flooding back. The easy banter, and her British accent, took me back to a happier time—happier compared to the days since August 19 anyway. Back then, my biggest worry was how to pay the rent on my meager pie baker’s salary. Now my concerns were how to stay alive and not succumb to the madness and confusion caused by the existential question Marcus’s death had raised: What is the meaning of life—and why bother sticking it out?

  Once we had enough dough rolled and pie plates prepared, Jane and I sliced apples. We didn’t have our age-old argument about whether it was better to use a paring knife or a vegetable peeler—she swears by the veggie peeler—because the apples were already peeled. But we had a new issue.

  “Slice them thinner,” she instructed me. “They’ll bake a lot faster that way.”

  “Um, excuse me, missy, but who taught you how to make pie?” I was quick to retort. That’s right. Me. At Mary’s Kitchen, Jane was the baker for everything else but pie. After I quit, I went to her house one evening and passed along the lessons Mary had taught me. She was right, though. The thicker the apple slice, the longer the baking time. And since we were pressed for time, I acquiesced.

  We filled the ovens with our first batch of pies, squeezing in eighteen at once. Jane took charge of monitoring the baking progress as I continued to roll dough, assemble pies and crimp crusts.

  Without giving me notice, Janice went around the room with her camera, conducting documentary-style interviews. “What was Marcus like?” she asked Jane.

  Jane said, “Marcus was a good chap. I only met him once, when he and Beth came up to my house in Malibu for dinner. He was very polite and polished. And he had lived in London, so we had a lot to talk about. What I remember most is how much he loved Beth. You could see by the way he looked at her. She may have complained about him, as we all do about our husbands—they bloody well deserve it—but I could tell they were in love.”

  I pretended to be busy crimping my crust edges, but I was listening intently.

  The next question was for Nan. “What do you wish for Beth as she moves forward in her life?”

  Nan’s face turned wistful and she said, “I wish for my Pumpkin to stop feeling so guilty about Marcus. She worked hard at her marriage. I’ve never seen anyone so determined. Marcus was a great guy but he was German, like me, so I know.” She laughed, but quickly became serious again. “It will take time for his death to really register. It seems like he’s just in Germany and that’s why he’s not here. I wish I could take Beth’s pain away, but she’s amazingly resilient and she’ll find happiness again. Someday.”

  The answers were heartfelt, but the psychoanalysis made me uncomfortable—especially when it came to Melissa’s Q and A.

  “How does Beth seem to you?” Janice asked Melissa, aiming the camera at her face.

  “Weird,” answered Melissa. “I don’t know what’s going on with her, but she’s been acting very strange lately. I miss my old friend Beth. She is an important person in my life and I don’t know if it’s something I did, or if it’s just that she’s so lost in her grief over Marcus. I am trying to be patient, waiting for her to emerge again.”

  The room was filled with an awkward silence. Not knowing quite how to respond, Janice clicked off the camera.

  I knew what Melissa meant. I had been staying at her house and the lack of privacy and blurry boundaries had been wearing on me. I was torn between her insistence that I sleep on the couch, which was very comfortable, and my desire to sleep in the RV, which was not only comfortable, it was my home. To be polite, I slept in the house—because I knew Melissa wanted to take care of me. And I wanted to let her. But her little girls used my bed as their morning playground, jumping all over my down comforter with their dusty bare feet. After they bumped my coffee cup, causing it to spill, I yanked my bedding out from underneath them in a huff.

  “We can just wash it,” Melissa said as the girls hopped back up on the couch.

  “NO! We can’t!” I wanted to scream at her, holding my bundle tighter. The comforter and its orange-and-yellow plaid duvet cover was the one Marcus had used during his Portland vacation. It was one of the last things to touch his body before he died. It was my security blanket. And I was never going to wash it again if I could help it.

  So yes, Melissa was right. I was being weird. I was lost. I definitely was not my old self. I couldn’t control my feelings, couldn’t predict my reactions, couldn’t get a handle on life. I was unsteady, even in the company of my best friend and her innocent preschoolers.

  I went over to the oven to check on the pies and pulled out the top rack, pulling a little too far as the rack tilted down and a pie slid off. I couldn’t stop its trajectory. It flipped and landed upside down on the oven door with a resounding, “Splat!” Apple filling oozed off the surface and dripped, along with hunks of crust, onto the floor.

  “Pie down! Pie down!” Melissa shouted from the other side of the room. Janice picked up her camera again and zoomed in on the action.

  Pie down. That’s exactly what I was. Once intact and so delicious, bubbly and full of promise, I had, in an unforeseen and sudden change of life circumstances, flipped and landed upside down, splattered on the hardwood floor. But this was no time to contemplate pie-grief associations as we had an even bigger mess to clean up now with only minutes left on our five-o’clock deadline. Thelma, who still worked part-time at Melissa’s old house, knew where to find the cleaning supplies, saving our asses from the wrath of the ex. As for the rest of the unmade pies—there were still at least a dozen—we took them to Melissa’s house, and finished baking them in her shiny new oven.

  I told Melissa about the duvet later. “I was wondering why you reacted so strongly,” she said. “Especially when I have a washing machine. But I understand.” She always understood, no matter how strange or out of character my behavior was.

  We were finally ready to hand out free slices of pie to strangers on the crazy streets of Los Angeles.

  The closest I had come to this was when I had my own Kenya coffee import business at the age of twenty-five. I was living in New York City and on the weekends I dressed up in jodhpurs and pith helmet, offering free samples of brewed coffee. My motive was to sell my highly priced tins of coffee. Now, the only purpose to giving away free pie—and not just stingy samples but whole, generous slices—was to make people happy. And, oh right, to record these happy moments on tape.

  The Beast had never been so fully packed. The apple crates in the shower stall had been replaced by a tower of pink bakery boxes, multiple rows stacked all the way to the ceiling. The RV had also never smelled so good. We had taken on other supplies, too—paper plates, plastic forks, napkins, knives, pie servers, serving gloves and a folding table on loan from my parents. We also had signs. I bought foam-backed poster board and stick-on letters to spell out Free Pie and a smaller one that read “Honk If You Love Pie.”

  After fueling up at Starbucks, we started off the day at the historic Fire Station Number 39 in Van Nuys, in L.A.’s San Fernando Valley. “We” were now Janice, Nan, Melissa, Melissa’s boyfriend, Jeff, and me. “We” were not Team Marcus or Team Beth; we were Team Pie.

  We called ahead, so the firefighters were expecting us. We parked the RV in front of the vanilla-colored stucco building, so clean and well-kept you could eat pie off the sidewalk in front. Inside, we were met by a group of fourteen hungry men and women who had skipped lunch in an
ticipation of pie. They were lined up along a bench at their dining table, holding forks and looking as if they would pounce on the pie the same way they would a fire. As Jeff and Melissa sliced up a few pies and Nan handed out plates, one of the firemen pulled out a five-gallon tub of ice cream.

  “We have a tradition around here,” he explained. “Anytime a rookie has a first—a first car fire, a first cat rescued out of a tree, a first house fire—the rookie has to buy ice cream.” He dished up scoops for everyone and finally took one for himself. As he shoveled bites of apple pie into his mouth, the butter crust dissolving together with the ice cream on his tongue, he offered, “But we’ll have to change that tradition now. The rookie will have to bring pie.”

  When they had finished, we got to climb on the fire engine like a bunch of excited third-graders and, afterward, watch the guys slide down the fire pole. They also tried impressing us by climbing back up. As Janice recorded everything, I interviewed the captain about the work he and his team did. He told us stories about men they had lost, about the 911 calls they answered. “People trust us. They open their doors for us when we rush to the scene to help,” he said.

  His genuine goodness and his desire to help others choked me up so much, I couldn’t stop myself from oversharing. “911 was called when my husband died. I know they did everything they could to save him. So please know I, for one, appreciate what you do.”

  Janice loved this. I could tell by the way she swung her camera around to get my tears on tape. She was a sucker for emotion, the more sentimental the better. Not that she was opportunistic about capturing drama—my drama—to make for sensational reality TV. She was a deep-feeling soul, a real softie under that sports-loving persona. And if she had her way, we’d aim to sell our show to the Hallmark Channel, not the Food Channel.

  After the fire station, we moved a few miles down Ventura Boulevard to Sherman Oaks, parallel parking The Beast at a random spot on the busy thoroughfare. Nan set up the folding table for our Great Pie Giveaway, placing pies on it, while I stood on the street, holding up the “Free Pie” sign. No cars were stopping and foot traffic was light, so Nan and I used the downtime to sample the goods.

  “You know, I do love apple pie,” I said after polishing off my piece in four quick bites.

  “And I love you, Pumpkin,” Nan replied, still working on her slice.

  “I’m glad you’re here, Pooh. I couldn’t do this without you.” I still called her by her childhood nickname, and could sometimes still picture her as my freckled twelve-year-old friend with braces.

  “Yes, you could,” she said. “You’re a lot stronger than you think.”

  “Well, I’m still glad you’re here, honey. Now, if you’re not going to finish that, I’ll eat it.”

  We waited and waited for people to walk by. In this city of ten million, where were all the pie-loving people? It was a Saturday. The streets should have been full of shoppers. Well, the streets were full—with people driving to malls in their cars.

  We agreed we should move our pie stand, but first we spent twenty minutes deliberating the wide range of locations L.A. had to offer. Who would appreciate free pie more—people in swanky Beverly Hills, seedy Hollywood, pristine Pacific Palisades or funky Venice Beach? Venice won, so we headed to the beach and parked on the trendy Abbot Kinney Boulevard. I had become highly skilled at parallel parking my big rig in city traffic. The small accomplishments added up to big confidence boosters. Until I misjudged the tree branch overhead and cracked the plastic casing around the air-conditioning unit on the RV’s roof. Oh, well. Sorry, Marcus.

  If you bake it, they will come. They came in droves. The next three hours became a blur of pie plates being passed out to one pedestrian after another. Word had traveled down the block as passersby saw the smiling faces of other people carrying plates of pie, and so more people came. Melissa and Jeff couldn’t slice fast enough. I kept going back inside the RV to unload more pink boxes, handing pies to Jeff through the side door, while Nan managed sidewalk traffic, trying to keep people moving. The people didn’t want to move. They wanted to stay and talk and share pie stories. They wanted to converse with the other people there eating pie, meet each other, form friendships with their pie-loving neighbors. A New Age-type girl who had just moved to Venice from San Francisco was talking to a homeless man whose clothes were as oily as his hair. But they had something in common—they were both eating free pie and enjoying it.

  Happiness was growing exponentially all around us. Except that the bottleneck we had created was pissing off the owner of the antique shop we parked in front of. I made it my mission to placate him with pie. Not just a slice. This guy had one of those impenetrable stonewall attitudes that took a whole pie to get through. But I did it. I didn’t quite get him to smile, but at least with the help of an apple pie, I convinced him not to call the police.

  If he would have just observed what was happening right outside his door, he never would have made such a threat. Besides, even if he did call the cops, we would have just paid them off with pie, and they’d have left happy—hopefully.

  I hung back a little, observing rather than engaging in conversation with everyone. It was too overwhelming, too emotional, too Hallmark. Janice was on fire, she was doing great without my help, getting quotes on tape. And none of the pie eaters needed prompting. They were interviewing us.

  “Why are you doing this?” they asked. I heard this question and their subsequent ones over and over until it became a predictable cycle.

  Nan, Melissa and Jeff took turns answering. They had the routine down pat after the first half hour. “Because it’s National Pie Day.”

  “Is there really a National Pie Day?”

  “Yes, it’s today.”

  “Who’s sponsoring you?” This one made me shake my head. I enjoy the benefits of capitalism as much as the next guy, but getting people to grasp that good deeds are not always driven by marketing dollars was more difficult than I had realized.

  I watched the stunned faces as they got the unexpected answer. “No one is sponsoring us. We are doing this because we want to give something back to the world. We want to make people happy.”

  Team Pie was making me so proud.

  As the forks moved in and out of these strangers’ mouths, their hurried, tense expressions on their faces softened. “Mmm, this is really good,” they said, their eyes closing to savor the taste. And, “This is as good as my grandmother’s pie.” But the best comments were, “This makes me want to do something nice for someone else.”

  One young woman said, “Pie makes people happy. If everyone ate pie all day, the world would be a better place.” Then, talking with her mouth full, she added, “After this, I’m going to go home and do the dishes for my roommate.”

  Another guy, who was eating his apple pie while holding his dog’s leash, announced, “Now I’m in a good mood, I’m happy, so I’m going to pick up after my dog.” With that, Janice panned her camera down to his short and squatty, brown-and-white bulldog.

  Janice let out a laugh from deep within her core, signaling that she was thrilled with this sound bite. “Did you see the size of that dwawg?” she chirped after he and his pooch walked away. “We should be giving this guy pie every day.”

  I loved seeing Janice happy. I loved seeing all these strangers happy. I loved being with my closest friends and seeing them happy. But I couldn’t contain all this happiness. I couldn’t process it. I knew this day was a crucial step forward in my well-being. It showed me that there was still so much goodness to be found in the world. That glass I used to see as half full had become bone dry. But on National Pie Day, my cup was about to runneth over. I was so grateful to Janice for wanting to do this pie shoot. If not for her, we wouldn’t be here on Abbott Kinney Boulevard, standing in the California sunshine, wearing T-shirts in the middle of January, making all these people smile. With pie.

  It was a simple formula, like a message straight from the Bible—the Golden Rule with a s
light spin: if you want to feel better, do something nice for others. Or, as the Scottish proverb goes: “Shared joy is a double joy; shared sorrow is half a sorrow.”

  Feeling overwhelmed but strangely buoyant, I ventured into the crowd, stepping into the midst of the Pie Love Fest, and said hello to some people. One was a woman I guessed to be in her late fifties, who was with her husband and another couple. “How do you like the pie?” I asked.

  “Oh, it’s wonderful,” she said. “Thank you so much. Are you the one who lost her husband?” She had obviously given Team Pie more than the standard line of questioning.

  “Yes, he died five months ago.”

  “Thank you for sharing your story. You are so brave to be out here doing this,” she said. “My husband was just diagnosed with terminal cancer.” She looked in his direction and I followed her eyes over to the tall, handsome, seemingly healthy man in the leather jacket. He was chatting with his friends, and they were all eating pie. This man had just been handed a death sentence—and he was smiling. “So it means a lot to me to be standing here,” she continued. “I’m so glad I got to meet you, and have a piece of this lovely pie you made. God bless you, sweetheart.”

  Fuck. It was too much. My emotions were already in overdrive. I couldn’t take it anymore. All I managed to say to this dear woman was, “I am so sorry.” We exchanged a hug and then I quickly escaped her embrace. I elbowed my way back through the crowd as fast as I could to get into the RV, where I locked myself in the bathroom, curled up on the floor, and let the tears pour out. Yin and yang. Life and death. Happiness and sorrow. I was a damned yo-yo in this push-pull game and my string was about to snap. I stayed in the safety of the windowless bathroom until Nan knocked on the door. “Pumpkin, are you okay?”

  “Yeah, I’m all right.”