Making Piece

by Beth M. Howard

  I dropped by my parent’s house. “It’s awful, isn’t it?” I asked my mom rhetorically, pulling at the choppy, uneven layers. “And it’s not even straight.”

  My mom didn’t argue. “It’s not the best cut,” she said.

  “I’m calling the salon. I’m going to make them redo it. I can’t go to the meeting with my hair looking like this.”

  The salon manager gave me a damage-control appointment for the next day. Which would mean another two or three hours in the chair. I was already hating this whole TV show business and I still hadn’t found a makeup artist. When I called my sister, who is an actress, and a few other friends for recommendations, estimates for a professionally painted face came in at three hundred dollars and higher.

  I finally ran to Nan’s house. She was still there for her play—opening night was in a few days. Her dog, a border collie named Olive, had just been diagnosed with inoperable tumors in her stomach. Nan’s anxiety was running higher than mine. So we did what best friends from childhood do in difficult times. We went shopping.

  “You really need that pink cashmere sweater with the dog on it, honey,” I told her.

  “And you have to get that necklace with the big blue daisy,” she told me.

  And so we spent our money and bought ourselves materialistic tokens of happiness.

  “Now, let’s go to that Thai massage place across the street,” she insisted afterward. “It’s only forty bucks for an hour.”

  We locked arms, swung our shopping bags by our sides, and the world felt a little sunnier and safer—and saner—being with my best friend.

  On the morning of my TV meeting, I went to Sephora and used all their tester samples to decorate my face with the prerequisite glamour. I wasn’t spending another penny on this damn effort. I was representing a pie show, not “America’s Next Top Model.” As a clever move, I had baked an apple pie for the meeting, so they weren’t going to be looking at me anyway; they were going to be ogling over the real beauty in the room. Pie was going to be the star of this show.

  The parking lot of the production company’s warehouselike building was packed with Porsches and Land Rovers, so I had to park the RV down the block. It would never get seen. So much for all that extra gas money I spent driving The Beast down from Portland. Still, I loved having my own space and sleeping in my own bed. Team Terrier liked it, too.

  I waited in the reception area for a few minutes, nervous but confident that I had done everything in my power to make a good impression. Eventually, my pie and I were ushered into the glass-walled office of the Vice President of Development. The VP’s name was Dan. He had an immaculate desk, a scruffy beard, a plaid, flannel shirt and an artist’s intensity. He was like that Desserted Island pie from the Seattle Pie Company—a quirky mix of everything that somehow all fit together and tasted surprisingly good. Especially good when our small talk led us to the discovery that we were both from Iowa.

  “I’m from Sioux City,” he said.

  “No way!” I replied.

  Before I could make my show pitch, we were interrupted by the company’s CEO, a young, slick executive in jeans. “I heard there was pie.” His eyes scanned the room until they landed on my pie. Dan called his assistant. When she arrived in the doorway, he asked her, “Will you take this to the kitchen and cut slices for everyone?”

  Finally our meeting got under way. Dan was intrigued with my idea, about traveling in the RV and interviewing people around the country about pie, but I wasn’t expecting his first question.

  “Why pie?” he asked.

  That answer was easier than getting my hair cut and colored, which, now that I was in their casual, laid-back office, seemed completely unnecessary. I explained my pie-as-metaphor philosophy, about how pie represents generosity, community, healing and could lead to world peace. I delivered the answer smoothly. So far so good. But then he grilled me on a more challenging topic: the chronology of my life.

  As he sat behind his desk, eating forkfuls of apple pie, while my slice just sat there on the desk, untouched, I talked at rapid-fire pace about how I went from the dot com job in San Francisco to the pie-baking job in Malibu, to moving to Germany to marry Marcus, to moving to Portland and then Mexico for Marcus’s job. Then I got to the part where Marcus got transferred back to Germany last summer and how I didn’t go with him. And tears began leaking out from my eyeballs.

  I should have been able to tell my story without crying by this time. Sometimes I could, but not always.

  So as I sat there in the VP’s office, with my newly lightened and shortened hair, wearing my new pink lipstick—unsuccessfully fighting back my tears—I blathered on to the development executive. “Not going with him will always be one of my greatest regrets. After Marcus moved back to Germany, I never saw him again. Until he was lying in his casket.” I sniffled and added with a half laugh, “Good thing I’m wearing my waterproof mascara.”

  Dan was unfazed. “Why do you want to make this TV show?” he asked.

  “So I won’t have to get a job that confines me to a cubicle,” I said. I could tell by his raised eyebrow that he wasn’t buying my flippant sarcasm. I continued, a little too honestly perhaps, explaining, “Because I need to get busy. When we were shooting the pilot, I was so interested in all the people I met, good people, and all because of pie. Plus, the shoot and travel schedule kept me completely engaged. It was the best I felt since Marcus died and gave me a purpose to keep going. I want to recreate that feeling.”

  Then, clearly trying to sabotage any chance of ever working with this company, I spelled it out for him. “If Marcus hadn’t died, I wouldn’t be sitting here right now. And I would rather have Marcus alive than trying to sell you some fucking TV show.” The tears spurted out even faster, making little water stains on my skirt. The only upshot to this was that I was pitching a reality-television company. And if grief over losing one’s far-too-young-to-die husband wasn’t reality, I didn’t know what was.

  I wiped my eyes and continued my nervous chatter. I was running off at the mouth so much it was as if someone slipped truth serum into my coffee that morning. I couldn’t edit myself and my inappropriate comments. I just kept right on going.

  “But then, you see?” I held up my hands to him, moving them up and down to demonstrate unbalanced weight on two scales. “TV show or suicide? Okay, TV show.”

  I don’t know why he didn’t call 911 right then. Maybe because the pie was so good.

  When the meeting was over and I stuck out my hand to shake his, he pushed it aside and said, “No. Let me give you a hug.” So I hadn’t scared him away after all. Still, if I could have repeated the meeting, I would have scheduled it for a week when PMS wasn’t looming around the corner. “We want to work with you,” he continued. “We’ll call you to discuss next steps.”

  I wasn’t the only one to get promising news that day. I called Nan to tell her about my meeting and she in turn told me the first reviews of her play, “Jawbone of an Ass,” had come in.

  “We got ‘Pick of the Week’ in LA Weekly. And even the Los Angeles Times had good things to say.” She had worked hard and deserved the accolades. But the good news was tempered by her dog’s failing health and her own dislike for the plastic beauty of L.A. “One more month here, then we can go back to New York. I just want to get Olive back, take her to the cabin upstate, so she can live out her last days where she is happiest.”

  Yin and yang. Good news, bad news. Life and death. Six months later, Nan would be both preparing to take her play to the Edinburgh Festival and grieving the death of her dog—a sweet, energetic, athlete of an animal who was like a child to Nan and her husband.

  If I thought that selling this TV show was going to make my grief disappear, I was wrong. The ordeal of the trip had left me exhausted.

  “Don’t underestimate grief,” Susan had cautioned me. “Grief is hard work. Even when you’re staring at the wall, you’re doing the work.” I wasn’t staring at many walls these days
with the recent flurry of travel. I didn’t want to go back to Portland, to its dark skies, endless rain and muddy trails. I wanted to be done with Portland. I wanted to be done grieving. But grief wasn’t finished with me yet. I couldn’t get the rest I needed in L.A. So I pointed the RV north again. I-5 was becoming so familiar to me, I had every pit stop planned, every Starbucks, every In-N-Out Burger, and the best rest stops for Team Terrier.

  Going back to Portland wasn’t such a bad thing. Alison had emailed me the news that Sauvie Island Farm U-Pick was open for business.

  “Strawberry season has arrived,” Alison wrote. “We have some pies to make.”

  “On my way,” I wrote back. Strawberry pie did sound very tasty. And I missed Alison’s laugh. Maybe going back to Portland wouldn’t be so bad. For a while.

  My mind may have been in manic pie mode, but my body was having nothing to do with that. It went on strike, shutting down all work operations. I spent most of the month of June in bed with bronchitis. When I wasn’t coughing, I was sleeping for hours on end. I celebrated my forty-eighth birthday—my first birthday since Marcus died—in a Nyquil-induced stupor.

  One year earlier, I had celebrated my birthday in Terlingua, Texas, and had thrown a little party for myself. My dad had flown in from L.A., so naturally we served martinis at the gathering. And pie. Banana cream for him and a fresh strawberry one, just because strawberries were in season. Betty, my landlord, had said, “You don’t want to spend your birthday making pie. You should get out and do something fun.”

  “Making pie is fun,” I told her. “It’s exactly what I want to be doing on my birthday.”

  “But it’s so hot, especially in the kitchen.”

  “I don’t mind. Pioneers didn’t have air conditioning and that never stopped them from making pie.” I enjoyed pie making so much I barely noticed that the kitchen in my miner’s cabin was at least 110 degrees.

  Marcus called me from Germany that afternoon; it was bedtime on his side of the world. “Happy birthday, my love,” he said, then sang the birthday song, his voice breathy, softer and even sexier than his normal speaking tone. “Say hi to your dad for me. And tell him I look forward to having one of his martinis next time I see him.”

  About a dozen new friends showed up that evening, the women dressed in skirts and heels, and the men in clean, crisp shirts instead of the usual shorts and Teva sandals. We drank our cocktails and ate our pie on the porch of my rock shack, the hot wind blowing fine, white Texas dust into our drinks.

  I have a picture of me taken at the party. I’m in a cotton paisley sundress, standing proudly in front of the pies I made, hands on my hips, smiling brightly and confidently at the camera. Whenever I look at that photo, I see the person I used to be. That was my life before, I think. Before I asked for the divorce. Before The Phone Call.

  Ten months. That’s how long he’d been gone. I had secretly given myself a one-year grace period to grieve. That’s how they did it in the old country. Widows were expected to grieve for one year. And wear black. And accept sympathy and assistance from others. It was a tradition that dated back to the ancient Romans. (What a coincidence—the origins of pie also dated back to that time, when pie crust was used as a sort of storage container, like Tupperware, to preserve and transport meat. They called pies “coffins” back then. Oh, the irony.)

  Grief didn’t work like that in the new world. Or in my world. We didn’t even wear black to funerals anymore. And mourn for a whole year? We might mourn five years or ten years, but, God forbid we show anything but a happy face in public. The day after the funeral, you pretended everything was normal. You went back to work. If you had a job, that is. Which I didn’t.

  I hadn’t given up on the Spurs Award. But this grief business was a lot harder than summer camp. I had not just fallen off the horse. I had been bucked, kicked, thrown, flung across the arena. I had been trying to catch that horse ever since. Ten seconds is all it took to get back on when I was eight, but at forty-eight, here I was at ten months and counting. I had been sprinting when I should have paced myself for a marathon. The Europeans were right. A year was needed. At least. Then again, Islam allowed widows only four months and ten days to grieve and Hindus didn’t believe in expressing sorrow or excessive mourning for longer than thirteen days. They felt it hindered the departed spirit from moving forward on its journey.

  Was I doing it right? Was I grieving the right way? Was my grief over the top or was it appropriate? I had asked Susan in my most recent session, as soon as I got back from L.A.

  “Grief is an individual thing. Everyone experiences it differently,” she said softly. “Yes, you are doing just fine.” If anyone would know, it was her. So I took her word for it.

  I had plenty of time to think about all this, especially during my lucid dreaming moments in between fever-ridden naps. From my bed, I spent hours looking through the rain-blurred skylight, mesmerized by the cedar branches swishing back and forth in the wind. I wanted the year to be over. Even though I had two months to go, I was ready to get out of Portland—needed to get out—so I started making plans. Ideas began to germinate from my sick-bed. I would move back to L.A., I decided. But first I would take a month-long road trip to Iowa. Iowa was my home state, a place that might help me feel grounded during the one-year anniversary of Marcus’s death. Even better, the Iowa State Fair coincided with that dreaded day.

  In my outline for the pie TV series, I had included the Iowa State Fair as a stop on the cross-country route. If anyone had pie, it was Iowa. And if there was any pie contest to rival the National Pie Championships, it was the Iowa State Fair. I would volunteer to be a pie judge.

  The more I recovered (that is, the less I coughed), the faster I laced up my running shoes, so to speak. My horse was still out there on the loose.

  CHAPTER

  18

  Once I had made up my mind to leave Portland, I had a renewed sense of purpose. All my belongings (and Marcus’s) would go into storage and not straight to L.A., as I didn’t quite know when or where I would land there. Regardless, my mother was already forwarding advertisements for apartment rentals.

  “There’s a brand-new building across the street from us,” she said. “They have bike storage and they take dogs.”

  “How much?” I asked.

  “Eighteen hundred.”

  “For a studio,” I stated flatly. That it was one room wasn’t the issue, doubling my rent while still unemployed was.

  “It’s brand-new. And they take dogs.”

  “Yeah, you already said that, Mom. I’m going to wait until I get back from Iowa. I may get there and want to keep going, maybe drive all the way to New York and see Nan.” It was enough that I had made the decision to leave Portland. I didn’t want to be rushed into any new commitments. L.A. would be there—when I was ready.

  After storing my belongings and arranging for my friends from Switzerland to drive the RV to L.A., I met with my endocrinologist, who gave me an A on my health report card and a refill on my prescription for the thyroid-replacement hormone I would have to take every day for the rest of my life.

  The big finale in Portland—and ultimate health inspection—was meeting with Susan. I drove one last time to her office across the river, passing the Legacy Emanuel Hospital emergency entrance on my way, which given its prominent location next to the bridge, was unavoidable.

  I still pictured taking Marcus to Legacy Emanuel for stitches in his finger. He had broken a glass salad bowl while washing dishes one morning before work. I humored him while we waited for the doctor, telling him funny stories and stroking his arm. Our most tender and loving moments were the ones like these, when we took care of each other. After the hospital, we got lattes and croissants at St. Honore Boulangerie before I dropped him off at work with his splinted finger. Good memory. But the picture turned dark when I envisioned him being rushed to the same hospital in the ambulance on August 19, wheeled into the emergency room on life support, life that would last on
ly another few minutes. Those stitches were the reason the hospital had my name on file as the emergency contact. Bad memory.

  I parked in my usual guest spot in the covered garage and walked the fifty feet, past the smokers taking a tobacco break, to the building’s main entrance. Susan was waiting, like always, in a chair next to the double security door when I arrived. She ushered me into her ground-level office, which I had come to know so well, the one with the dried flower arrangements and the multiple boxes of tissue within arms’ reach no matter if you were sitting on the couch or on one of the straight-back chairs. “How’s everything going for you?” she asked in her butterscotch-pudding voice. God, I was going to miss that soothing lilt.

  I was moving away with only a vague sense of my plans—judge pies at the Iowa State Fair and then what? I couldn’t say for sure. Was I ready to leave my nest? No, I was still crying a lot, still immersed in guilt, still missing my husband, still having an impossible time understanding why he died. Ready or not, I had given myself one year, and that was that. Time was up. I was determined to catapult myself forward and put this grief behind me once and for all. But this was Susan, my savior. She had invested many hours in my well-being and I didn’t want her to think she was turning me out into the cold prematurely. So I lied. “Everything is great,” I said.

  She shot me a sympathetic smile and paused before replying. “I am feeling a sense of urgency from you,” she said in her slow, deliberate style.

  This is what I loved about my grief counselor. She was good at her job. And she had X-ray vision. She saw right through my bullshit.

  I looked up at her and laughed nervously. I had been caught. “Yes, I am aware of that,” I admitted. I wanted the grief to go away, immediately. Even if it meant leaving a safe place. All I wanted was to outrun the grief that continued to plague me, to escape its talons. I told her, “I remember sitting in your grief support group eleven months ago, listening to people say they lost their spouse one or two years earlier and thinking That will not be me. I won’t be grieving a year from now and needing some support group. I was wrong.” What had been almost a year since Marcus died felt more like a month. Susan nodded, her eyes so full of compassion she was virtually hugging me with them.