Third-Generation Apple Pie

At 2:30 PM on a Wednesday, I am at home in an empty house. The day before Thanksgiving, in a complicated nod to a holiday that the school district denounces as racist and offensive, traditionally ends one hour early. The classes, which are 45 minutes instead of 50, are not so much shorter that the day is rushed, but it magically wraps up at 1:15 PM. A miracle. Furthermore, since I have been showing a movie all week at the end of a writing-heavy unit, I have caught up in my work enough to sweep the floor, enter a handful of scores, and shut the door behind me with a sigh, several hours earlier than my usual departure at dusk.

Now I am sitting in front of a bowl of green apples, a Christmas movie playing in the background, as the cold, tart juice from the apple I'm peeling runs down my hands. Thanksgiving is tomorrow, and I am making the apple pie. This has become a ritual for me. For the last few years, as the large, quasi-family celebration grows with marriages and births, and those of us who were children about fifteen minutes ago grow up, get jobs, and move out, our parents have started entrusting us with corners of the menu. The corners are well-suited to us, custom-delegated by families who know us well. The one who can bake bread brings the rolls. The one who works at a coffee shop naturally gets to provide the decaf, after-dinner coffee. And I bake an apple pie.

It's been years since I graduated from the subcontracted grinder of flour and shortening to actually preparing the whole pie by myself, arduous apple-peeling and all. Some people like making food in groups, parceling out tasks and chatting as they fill a kitchen with steam and spicy smells. Though I admit that this is one of the loveliest times of community that I ever experience, preparing a feast with friends or family, this afternoon I am thankful for my empty house and the bowl of apples I'm peeling alone. I am at rest, not watched or scrutinized or even seen by the careful observers who fill my day. I once told them about a Thursday evening in which I came home, baked cookies, and ate them while watching The Office. They thought it was a little sad, given that they think that twenty-three is a wild gallop through bars and clubs, and firmly believe that the reason I'm not married is that I am not carefully searching for a husband in those same bars and clubs. Their sad teacher, going home to an empty house to bake for herself. I remind them that this is how I like to rest, in a quiet house with easy recipes and ingredients that generally do what I expect. They think this is pretty sad, also. Oh well.

But the truth is that I'm not quite alone this afternoon. As I throw away the apple peels and get out the many-wedged apple slicer for the next step, I remember one of my grandmothers, who would have shook her head, pursed her lips, and said, "Now, that's not how I do it, Kristi. What is that, anyway?" When I was a teenager, I actually used a Salad Shooter to slice the apples on several occasions, upon which she shook her head seriously and turned to chop up the pastry dough with two knives, milling it to a perfect consistency with her experienced hands. It was this grandmother, though, who melted a slice of cheddar cheese over a wedge of my first pie, took a bite and pronounced it just as good as hers. Even with all of the gadgets that had produced it. I never received a higher baking-related complement.

Later, I roll out the dough on my white formica countertop with a wooden rolling pin, and remember the tearful and deep-sighed times that my other grandmother spent teaching me to roll out the dough and then, maddeningly, roll it up back onto the pin and across the pie plate. I remember hours of this, of watching her do it perfectly and then trying to copy every nuance to that my dough wouldn't fall to pieces on top of my spinach pie. I remember crusts so moist that they stuck to the counter, or so dry that they crumbled back to dust under the rolling pin. This grandmother was always around to fix it, to magically coax the straw-colored dough into a smooth sheet over a pile of filling. She assured me that it only took practice while I uttered pre-teen wails and tore the pastry to shreds. Back then, I rolled out pie crusts on a grey marble countertop with a blue marble rolling pin, and this baking luxury follows me here to taunt me. Surely, I worry, this will be a disaster. I don't even have real tools, and I certainly don't have the right skills. The pie won't turn out, and I won't be able to go to Thanksgiving at all. Why would they trust me with this? It's apple pie! Grandma's in town. She should have made it.

I lift the crust nervously, and it is as if both grandmas are watching, nodding approvingly even as the dough tears and I look over my shoulder and pinch it back together. I pour in the apples and wonder if I'm doing it the best way. I chop up bits of butter to melt under the top crust, and realize that neither of them did this. I cut the top crust in the pattern that Grandma N. invented, and flute the edges like my mother and her mother showed me. I glaze the outside with egg to make it shiny, an addition all my own. When I'm finished, the pie is my family in a circle of pastry, four women's knowledge poured into a little blue pan and baked by the youngest of them.

As the pie bubbles cinnamon-apple juice in the oven, I think of my grandmothers, think of thanksgiving. Both in their eighties, one widowed thirty-five years ago, the other five months ago, they surprise me by the gratefulness with which they live. The everlasting thankfulness, even when some things, or everything, did not turn out as they had planned or hoped. I flip through the wise words they have written and said to me in twenty-three years, like a nursing student with a stack of index cards. Pie-making was just the beginning. They remind me now, the tired teacher unwinding from a day, a week, two months that have exhausted me mentally, spiritually, and emotionally, that love, God, and family are constant sources for thanksgiving. No matter how this third-generation apple pie turns out, the people who consume it will love me just the same.

And it is this love, unconditional and not attached to performance, that I will remember on Monday, holding onto it with the same white fingers that grip the rolling pin, when I return to a world of tests and standards, of relationships and individuals, of hopes and fears and decisions. The people for whom, in the end, I am still thankful.