Making Piece Page 15

  “I have to tell you who I just saw.”

  I opened the door and she told me the story. “Remember the director of the play I did ten years ago about Tallulah Bankhead?” I nodded, wiping my nose and pulling myself together. How could I forget? Nan had written and starred in one of the best musical theater productions I had ever seen, but her director tried to claim he wrote it—so she fired him. “I just saw him. I recognized his voice, so I hid behind the RV. I heard him say ‘What? You’re giving away free pie?’ What a bitter asshole he is. But then he came back ten minutes later and got a slice.” She was giddy and breathless, in that just-dodged-a-dangerous-bullet kind of way.

  From her point of view, the best part of the story was that she avoided contact with him using The Beast for cover. From mine, the better part was how he scoffed at our altruistic efforts but then changed his mind. Maybe pie could save the world after all.

  “There are only a few pink boxes left,” Nan said, reaching out her hand to pull me up. “Which means it’s almost time to open a bottle of red wine. Come on. Let’s give these last pies away and go to my house for cocktail hour.”

  CHAPTER

  13

  When I was twenty-four, fearless and invincible, I went to Nairobi, Kenya, to work on a coffee farm. I had just gotten fired for the first time—I had been living in Chicago, recruiting students for an outdoor education program, where never before or since have I experienced this degree of nonprofit politics. My disgust and disappointment over the in-fighting was one reason why the words “We have to let you go” were the sweetest sounding ones I had ever heard. But the other reason was that the moment the reality sunk in, a vision of a huge ball of sun setting over the Dark Continent popped into my mind. I had been having this vision since childhood, longing to see the land where “Born Free” was made, and where all those fascinating pictures in National Geographic were taken.

  “Good,” I thought as I was handed the proverbial pink slip. “Now I can finally go to Africa.”

  Following a series of connections that began with an old boyfriend whose family was in the coffee business, saving up money from three part-time jobs and applying an extra dose of my God-given chutzpah, I landed an invitation to learn the Kenya coffee business firsthand, with the intention that I would apply my knowledge afterward to help promote the country’s number one export crop. I worked on the coffee farm for a month before getting a case of acute amoebic dysentery, combined with sunstroke (I had had the genius idea to work on my tan in the high-noon equatorial sun, while everyone else sat in the shade). A wealthy coffee exporter I had met was concerned about my illness. He insisted, “You need to move off that farm if you’re going to get better.” He scribbled a phone number on a blue page torn from his elegant appointment book and said, “Here, call this woman. She’s American and she takes people in all the time.”

  That woman was Kathy Eldon, a vibrant redhead, whose energy and polka-dot skirts whooshed like a gust of wind across the savannah whenever she entered a room. She invited me to stay for a few days, but within minutes of meeting each other we discovered we were both from Iowa. I ended up staying a whole year. Kathy was a journalist, married to a debonair British businessman, and she convinced me that I shouldn’t rush back to the U.S., that I could just start my coffee business in Kenya. Spurred on by her contagious enthusiasm, I designed a zebra-striped tin, contracted with a local roaster, and my Livingstone Provisions brand of coffee was born.

  Fast forward twenty-two years later, I no longer sold coffee (that career lasted an impressive three years) and Kathy no longer lived in Nairobi. She had divorced, remarried and now lived in a sprawling, white-washed beach house just north of Santa Monica. And Janice and I were headed there to interview her about pie.

  Being from Iowa, pie played a role in Kathy’s background. Her Grandma Knapp in Cedar Rapids, who lived to 106, had written a cookbook full of pie recipes. Kathy and I made many pies together over the years. She was the one who always reprimanded me, shouting, “Don’t manhandle the dough.” Which made her a sort of pie mentor. So it seemed fitting she be part of our pie documentary.

  Sadly, the other thing that united us was grief. Her son, Dan Eldon, was a photojournalist killed in Somalia, stoned to death by an angry mob while covering stories of famine and war for Reuters. He was only twenty-two. Kathy swears I helped her deal with her loss. All I remember is that I sent her an essay I wrote about him after he died. In it, I described how I had babysat him and his younger sister, Amy, when I lived with them in Nairobi. Dan, the aspiring artist, had spent his time making short films in the backyard with his G.I. Joes or hibernating in his room, creating elaborate photo collages. I wrote about how, later, when he came to stay with me in L.A., he would dress in an aviator’s cap and safari vest to sell African bracelets on the streets of Beverly Hills at night. He almost got arrested, but the police let him go when he told them in his suave Kenyan accent that his airplane was parked around the corner. Sharing and recording memories of him was my gift to her; it was all I had to give.

  Likewise, she had been there for me. I remembered her phone call as I sat on my bed in the Portland hotel room the day before Marcus’s funeral. I traced my finger along the swirled patterns of the bedspread as she coached me.

  “Don’t blame yourself,” she said. “You mustn’t blame yourself. It is not your fault. You really need to believe that.” I hadn’t told anyone about my guilt, about how I thought it was my fault Marcus died. But she knew. People who have grieved the kind of loss she had always knew.

  Kathy didn’t waste time blaming herself with the “what ifs” and “whys”—“What if I hadn’t let him go to Somalia? Why did I ever agree to move to Africa?” She and her daughter, Amy, got busy and built an entire empire around Dan’s legacy. They made an Emmy-award-winning documentary about photojournalists called Dying to Tell a Story. They published books, several featuring Dan’s art, as well as a grief journal called Angel Catcher. They created a foundation called Creative Visions that inspires and funds young people to become “creative activists”—like Dan—to help change the world through media and other creative humanitarian projects. Kathy had taken a bushel of tragedy-bred lemons and made the world’s largest lemon meringue pie.

  Janice, anxious to get filming, set up her equipment outside on the sundeck. She positioned Kathy and me around the teak table, pinning minimicrophones to our shirts. The ocean sparkled in the background, salty air mixing with the apple pie we ate, as Kathy and I talked and Janice taped. While we tried to keep on topic, aiming for pithy quotes about how pie could help heal the world, we didn’t come up with anything that was usable. We were like a big and little sister with a long and difficult shared history too complicated to distill into a three-minute segment for a pie show.

  When Janice finally relieved us of our on-camera duties, Kathy changed subjects.

  “I’m worried about your eyes,” she said. “One of L.A.’s top plastic surgeons lives next door. Let’s walk over there and ask him about this.”

  “Yeah, okay,” I shrugged and, leaving Janice behind, followed Kathy obediently to the plastic surgeon’s beach house. It was a Sunday morning and he came to the door, wearing plaid flannel pajama bottoms, his face unshaven.

  “It’s not from crying,” he said, pressing on my upper eyelid as we stood in his doorway. “It’s fat. Your hyperthyroid caused the eye muscles to thicken. That’s what makes your eyes bulge. It’s a common symptom of hyperthyroidism. You lost a lot of weight, right? So you also lost fat around your eyes. When you gained the weight back, the thickened eye muscle took up the space where the fat had been, and now the fat has nowhere to go. That’s what’s causing the puffiness. We could do surgery, but you’d have to wait a year to see how things settle back into place. But, as you age, you need that fat to protect your eyes, so I don’t recommend it.”

  “Thank you so much,” I said. “I’ll make sure you get some pie before we leave.” He may have offered the diagnosis f
ree of charge, but he wouldn’t go unpaid. For the man who already had enough money to buy all the houses on the beach, pie was something he would truly appreciate. I wouldn’t have gone for the surgery, even if he had insisted on it. But at least I knew that my swollen eyes weren’t caused by my constant crying. I could stop getting down on myself for that.

  We returned to Kathy’s to pack up our gear and say our goodbyes. Amy had stopped by after a brunch, so I got to see her and her bulging belly. She was pregnant with her second boy—and this one was going to be named Dan, after her brother. Seeing her maternal glow caused the pang, the one that had hit hardest in the first weeks after Marcus died, to flare up again. Marcus and I had tried to have a baby and had eventually reconciled that it just wasn’t going to happen. But now that he was gone, and there was no legacy left behind, the impact of not having kids with him compounded my sadness. I was always quick to remind myself of the flip side of the equation: his death would have left me as a single mother. To see that Amy had a doting husband and a full-time nanny and still had her hands full eased the pang, sending it back into remission.

  Over the twenty-some years I had known Kathy, she often preached a Scottish proverb she had learned when growing up in Iowa. “What’s for you won’t go by you.” Every damn thing was going by me now. I didn’t know what was left for me.

  Janice and I restocked the RV with coffee and milk for our morning lattes, and whole-grain bread and Nutella for our breakfast, loaded up Team Terrier and headed four hundred miles north to San Francisco.

  Lumbering up the long, straight stretch of Interstate 5 under rain-threatening skies, I kept my eyes on the road, stealing glances at Marcus’s visa photo every so often. Janice had dubbed Marcus and his mug shot as “Advance Security,” assuring me that he was looking out for us and our safety during this TV shoot. With the only incident being the ding I put on the RV roof, Marcus was definitely doing a good job. I jingled our wedding rings to say thank you. Janice didn’t notice. She was petting Jack—who, out of all the comfortable places in the RV, refused to sit anywhere else but on her lap. They were both looking out the passenger window, watching the endless expanse of golden grass fields roll by.

  Our first San Francisco interview would be with Natalie Galatzer, a twenty-six-year-old who just started a bicycle-delivery pie business. I had learned about her during my pre-production research by stumbling upon a small article about her on the Internet. We were still trying to figure out how we could follow her on her bike route. Aside from solving our logistical puzzle, I was still mulling over the phone conversation I had had with Natalie that morning. She explained how her dad died only ten months earlier, and that she was dedicating her work to him, that even though he was gone, she was still motivated to make him proud.

  “Janice, have you noticed the common thread in this shoot, besides pie, I mean?” I asked. “It’s like death is following us to every interview. There was the thirtysomething’s pie party with Elissa and her two husbands that died of cancer. The first thing Dorothy Rose Pryor told us was how she missed her mother and sister since their passing. The reason the matriarch of Oak Glen moved to California is her first husband died in World War II. Even on National Pie Day, at the fire station, they talked about how they risked their own lives every day to save others—and they didn’t always survive. And, of course, there was Kathy Eldon’s son… Seriously. What the hell? Wasn’t this shoot supposed to take my mind off of that subject?”

  Was it me? Was I attracting these stories of death, of loss, of grief? Or was death just a huge part of life that I had always overlooked, because it had never impacted me? Until Marcus, that is, when it hit me like Freightliner semi. It was as if all these people had a hidden life, a loss that wasn’t revealed until I started blabbing about my own grief. Given my grief was so fresh and unresolved, it was something I wanted—and needed—to talk about. But others seemed relieved to talk about their losses, too, a chance to share, to connect, to heal—with pie acting as an unwitting catalyst.

  “The thing that stands out for me is how we’ve met people from all different walks of life,” Janice replied, “but we all share common threads. There’s a bonding that happens around grief because it touches everyone at some point in their lives.

  “Your grief is not my grief, but somehow it’s a shared experience. Being inside your grief allows me to revisit mine a bit. After my dad died, I came to Santa Monica and stayed with Melissa for a week. Being in the company of a friend who just let me breathe, cry, stay silent or talk when I needed was a time in my life when I felt most deeply listened to. And we all need that for healing. Not someone who is going to talk and soothe but someone who truly hears you.”

  We drove in silence for a long while after that, lost in our own thoughts and reflections. The only sound was the occasional rattle from the RV’s oven when we hit the frequent bumps of California’s ragged roads, and Daisy’s snoring coming from the bed in the back.

  Bike Basket Pies may have been the name of Natalie’s business, but when we arrived at her baking facility—kitchen space borrowed from a Thai restaurant during its downtime—we found that her baskets were actually panniers—bright orange, waterproof saddlebags mounted on her rear wheel. Natalie, dressed in a fluorescent yellow rain jacket, looked up at us from her bike with a perky smile and a mop of brown curly hair, looking wild from the wind and dampness. She was loading her wax-paper-wrapped mini pies into the panniers. In spite of the drizzling grey sky, San Franciscans were going to get their morning snacks—the day’s flavors included apple kiwi, Shaker orange and mushroom quiche—delivered to their office doors. In the end, we just parked the RV (which took up two parking spaces and, with two meters to feed, required a hunt for extra quarters) and staged a few moving shots with Natalie pedaling toward Janice, who dodged honking cars in the name of good footage.

  While in the city, we also visited Mission Pie located, as the name suggests, in the Mission District. The dynamic duo of Karen Heisler and Krystin Rubin teamed up to do something good for the community: make pie. But they don’t just make outstanding pastry out of locally grown ingredients, they hire at-risk youth from the local high school, give them their first job and train them in everything from pie dough to customer service. I was so enamored, not only with Mission Pie’s do-good efforts but with the warm atmosphere in the pie shop, that Janice teased me after our visit.

  “I thought you were auditioning for a job there,” she said as we sat down for one last dinner stop at In-N-Out Burger.

  “Maybe I was,” I replied, letting my mind wander back to their warm and lively kitchen where Krystin and her assistant, Danielle, had been laughing and talking while rolling crust after crust. “Yeah, that was definitely a cool place. The world needs more pie shops like it.”

  From San Francisco, we returned to L.A.—and drove straight to The Apple Pan. It was the first place I researched and the last thing scheduled for the shoot. And we barely made it. We had arranged with the owners, mother–daughter team Martha Gamble and Sunny Sherman, to arrive at nine, to have time to set up and shoot before the diner opened at eleven. We had parked overnight at a truck stop half way between San Francisco and L.A., I set the alarm for 4:00 a.m., drove in my pajamas and parked the RV outside The Apple Pan at 9:15 a.m. We would have been on time had I not had to change clothes. As it was, Janice saved us a few minutes by walking the dogs while I put on makeup.

  Martha, the mother-half, radiated the glamour of an old-time Hollywood star from a Western or maybe Dallas. Bright beaming eyes lined with mascara, a big white-toothed smile and dripping in chunky turquoise jewelry, her spunk defied her grey hair, which was pulled back in a girlish ponytail. Her daughter, Sunny, was equally stunning. Sunny’s highlighted long hair swept up with curled tendrils framing her face, blush-tinted cheeks and pink-glossed lips and matching denim vest and jeans combined to make the statement, “I’m just heading to the ranch in my new Cadillac,” not “I run one of L.A.’s oldest burger and pie joints
and you can find me adding up receipts in my tiny, cramped office in the far corner of the hot kitchen.”

  While we were inside, interviewing them about their family history, how Martha’s parents had opened the diner in 1947 and how she had worked there as a waitress (and not as the actress or model I swore she could have been), customers were already lining up outside the door. Some were pulling on the locked door to see if it would open, others were knocking in hopes of getting in before the rush. The staff inside was used to this; they weren’t going to cave in to the demands. Finally, as the hands of the clock struck eleven, the door was unlocked, the masses poured in and within two minutes every bar stool was occupied. Burgers were eaten, pie was ordered, coffee cups were filled. It was just another money-making day at The Apple Pan.

  Janice interviewed a few customers. The words of one of them, a man in his early forties, who was there with his preteen son, stood out as they encapsulated Apple Pan’s formula for success: tradition and nostalgia. “My dad used to bring me here,” the man said. “My grandparents used to bring my dad here. And now I bring my son.” Funny, there was that circle-of-life thing again, generations of life cycling through, but instead of relating to death it was about pie. “The apple pie here is our favorite,” he added. His son nodded enthusiastically, fully in agreement.

  Earlier, we had taped the pie baking in the back, where a stainless steel table was loaded with topless berry, chocolate cream and banana cream pies—none of them had received their final layer. A Mexican man with a mustache and a mischievous smile was busy dousing the assembly line, covering each with piles of whipped cream. Another, adjacent room was reserved just for the apple pie. In it, another smiling Hispanic man with happy, glistening eyes, named Jose, was rolling dough. Behind him, I counted twenty-five pies cooling on a rack with twenty more in the oven. Yes, that kind of productivity—along with that steaming cinnamon scent—would make anyone enjoy their job.