Making Piece

by Beth M. Howard

  Besides Mayor Shirley welcoming me with her homemade peach pie (which I still salivate over whenever I think about it) and encouraging me to open a pie shop, Priscilla Coffman turned up with two lawn chairs for me to use until my furniture arrived. Priscilla was a poet and retired schoolteacher who served as the current chairman of the visitor center. Then there was Patti Durflinger, a special-education teacher with a big-city haircut and tailored clothes, who came by to welcome me with a gift basket the size of a grain bin, filled with brownies, hand lotion, candles, kitchen towels and more. Her parents, Bill and Joanne Maynard, dropped off a bouquet of roses from their garden. Allen and Rosie Morrison delivered an even bigger bouquet, an arrangement of daisies from the garden store across the highway. And then there was Bob and Iola, my eighty-year-old neighbors to the rear, who were celebrating their sixtieth wedding anniversary this year. They walked over with a loaf of zucchini bread. Don and Shirley Eakins, who lived one house closer to me, came by too with offerings of help whenever I needed. Oh, and I would need it in winter and spring as Don owned a snowblower, a garden tiller and a heavy-duty truck to tow my MINI out of the mud.

  Every morning another neighbor, Linda Durflinger (Patti’s sister-in-law), walked the bike path that cuts in front of my house. The first time the short, feisty woman introduced herself, she said, “You’ll never remember my last name.”

  “Yes, I will,” I assured her. “Durflinger was the name of my husband’s boss in Germany.” Linda didn’t know I had lived in Germany. She may not have even been aware that Iowa sits smack in the middle of America’s German belt and that hers wasn’t the only surname of Germanic descent in town. Other neighbors, the Allmans and Snyders, and even my grandma on my dad’s side—the one from Ottumwa, whose maiden name was Rater—had Teutonic roots.

  Linda, a retired high school secretary and now a city-council member, was partly responsible for initiating the idea for the American Gothic House Center. She had rallied the townsfolk to raise money to build the visitor center and museum to support the famous house, as there was previously nothing but a signpost and a muddy parking lot. They collected over $63,000 by holding bake sales. Basically, they created this beautiful, well-built facility with handicapped-equipped everything, a paved parking lot and landscaping with wildflowers and grasses to recreate the native Iowan prairie—all by selling pie. Amazing. My instincts were right. I had landed in the right place.

  In Eldon, I was witnessing hospitality, generosity and community pride like I had never experienced before. Anywhere. These people were nothing like the father and daughter depicted in the American Gothic painting. They were not stern-faced and stoic. No. They were always smiling.

  Word soon spread beyond Eldon that a pie baker had taken up residence in the American Gothic House. A week after my furniture arrived, I got a call from Kyle Munson, a columnist for the Des Moines Register, Iowa’s main newspaper.

  Could he drive down from Des Moines the next day and interview me, he wanted to know. Apparently it was statewide-worthy news that the historic house had finally been rented.

  “Sure, okay,” I said. “Will you be here in time for lunch? Because I was invited to City Hall for ham balls and you can come with me.” I was about to experience one of many firsts in my initiation to rural life and figured Kyle might as well join in.

  Ham balls, contrary to what the name implies, are like meatballs, only they are made with ground pork, ground beef, some mysterious thing called ham loaf, Campbell’s tomato soup, graham crackers and a whole lot of brown sugar. And as I would learn, they are delicious but because of their bulk they must be eaten in moderation.

  The lunch at City Hall, attended by the mayor, Carrie the City Clerk, the public works crew of three (which included Carrie’s husband, Tony), Kyle Munson and me, was served promptly at noon. They call it “dinner,” not lunch, a colloquial distinction that had already caused me confusion when I originally marked my calendar for 5:00 p.m., the favored Midwest evening meal time, which in these parts is known as “supper.” This dinner was another fine example of Mayor Shirley’s country cooking. We scooped out her homemade ham balls from the Crock-Pot, piled scalloped potatoes and cooked carrots (drowning in margarine) on our plates and helped ourselves to puffy white bread rolls. We polished off the feast with the homemade apple pie I had brought. Reminiscent of a Thanksgiving-induced food coma, my stomach was so full, so stuffed, so heavy, that I could barely answer Kyle’s questions when we sat down to do the interview afterward. And I could barely eat for two days.

  On Monday, October 11, when Kyle’s article came out—on the front page of the newspaper, no less, with a photo of me—it was titled, American Gothic House Meets America’s Pie Lady. America’s Pie Lady? I found this a little too grandiose for my taste. I wouldn’t, couldn’t claim to be Eldon, Iowa’s, Pie Lady, let alone the whole nation’s. Whatever. It was a refreshing change from my lingering status as Grieving Widow. But not only had Kyle, with the swish of his pen, anointed me with a new identity—an identity which, like it or not, took hold—he had declared to the world, or at least to all of Iowa, that I would be selling pie. I was suddenly and officially committed. I needed to get busy.

  I drove to Des Moines, where I went on a shopping spree. After dropping $300 on supplies I loaded up my covered wagon, I mean, my MINI Cooper, and made the two-hour trek back to Eldon. The whole drive back, I wondered a) how many apple pies I should make, b) how much I should charge for pie slices, whole pies and the Starbucks French Roast that I would serve by the cup (there would be no weak diner coffee served with my pie!), and c) if I had lost my mind by moving to a remote corner of Iowa and starting a pie business. For one thing, many people in this town of 928 already make damn good pie. And several residents, like Arlene Kildow and Janice Chickering, are legendary, blue-ribbon-winning pie bakers. (I had finally sampled Arlene’s coconut cream pie when Kyle and I went to lunch at City Hall. With its mile-high toasted meringue, thick and creamy pudding and generous amount of coconut, it was, in a word, perfect.) They certainly didn’t need me, some highfalutin West Coast pie baker-to-the-stars, to get quality pie in these parts. Besides, I would have to sell quite a few pieces of pie to recoup my $300 investment. I also had to consider that with winter coming, meaning fewer tourists as pie customers, I could be in the red until next summer.

  What Kyle Munson didn’t mention in his article was my business plan—or lack thereof. Kyle had asked me how much a slice of pie was going to cost. That was a good question.

  I had squirmed, shrugged my shoulders, looked down at my feet, I had done everything but answer him. Then turning my gaze high up on the kitchen wall, I said, “My problem is this.” I pointed to my huge foam board sign, decorated with a red-and-white-checkered tablecloth border, emblazoned with the huge letters that read “Free Pie.” It was the sign from the TV shoot that had found a new home as a wall decoration in my kitchen. “I don’t think I’ll ever make a good businessperson, because I like giving pie away. If you came to my pie stand, feeling down, I would say, ‘Oh, it looks like you could use a piece of pie to cheer you up. Here you go. No charge.’ Not a great business strategy.”

  But seeing as the numbers in my savings account had dwindled in direct proportion to the number of months since I had been employed, I wasn’t going to allow myself any guilt over charging three dollars a slice. Anyway, since Marcus died, my guilt account was already full.

  Guilt can be a good way to gauge your moral compass, like a warning signal when something is off balance. Guilt can force you to ask yourself “What part of this situation am I responsible for? Am I acting in the best, most upstanding way possible? Am I behaving like a good, caring person?” But apart from using it to get that initial bearing, guilt—as I was still learning—doesn’t serve any other useful purpose. At the end of the day, one needs to be mindful of one’s own needs without constant self-incrimination.

  Since Marcus died, I hadn’t allowed myself to feel guilty over letting go of certain
friendships that felt negative, for turning down invitations to dinner parties or for treating myself to the occasional massage in spite of having no income. Being a widow gave me a legitimate excuse for being selfish—er, I mean, for practicing self-kindness. I figured those were good steps, even if just baby ones, toward kicking guilt to the curb. But fourteen months after Marcus’s death, after a year of grief counseling and working hard at forgiving myself, guilt still reared its ugly, energy-draining, unproductive head. That asking people to pay for my labor-intensive, high-quality baked goods made me feel guilty underscored just how susceptible I was to this human condition.

  In spite of the uncertainty, I refused to give in to guilt or doubt or any other self-defeating notions. The wheels of my pie stand had already been set in motion. Front-page articles had been published. Money had been spent. I was going to make—and sell—pie.

  Besides my investment in the hard goods, I needed a Home Baking License from the Wapello County health department. This required filling out a one-page form, writing a check for thirty bucks and having a health inspector visit my kitchen, ensuring I was practicing good hygiene. Considering I had just moved in and, with Carrie’s help, had scrubbed the place to the bone, I not only passed inspection, I exceeded the standards.

  Finally, after everything else was in place, I required ingredients. The nearest grocery store was twenty minutes away—in my old childhood hometown of Ottumwa. The place I thought I’d never return to after my nostalgic trip to the Canteen Lunch in the Alley. Right. Just like when I graduated early from high school at seventeen and vowed I was never coming back to Iowa to live. Oh, boy.

  Aldi is a German-owned discount grocery store chain in both Germany and the U.S. (Aldi U.S. has 1,000 stores in 29 states. And, a little-known fact, Aldi also owns Trader Joe’s.) Marcus introduced me to Aldi in Stuttgart when we were still dating and I had found their prices were beyond cheap. After we got married and I moved to Germany, I made almost daily trips to Aldi. I was as in love with Aldi as I was with my husband, so much so that Marcus’s grandma, Oma Inge, used to tease me.

  “Du hast Aldi Fieber,” she would say. Aldi Fever.

  Yes, it was true. I was delirious over the organic produce, the variety of dairy products, spicy sausages, fresh roses and the German specialty foods (like Maultaschen, Spätzle and Rote Grütze), and—my favorite—the weekly, rotating offerings of nonfood items like Turkish bath towels, bicycle gear, sheepskin slippers, raincoats, DVD players, juicer machines, flannel sheets, pajamas, running tights, ski gloves and so on. All high quality for very low prices. If there was anything I loved in life, it was a good bargain.

  So when I moved into the American Gothic House and discovered the closest place to do my grocery shopping was—why, yes!—Aldi in Ottumwa, fifteen miles away, I was thrilled. Until I walked in the door.

  Not only did the Aldi in Ottumwa, Iowa, look similar to the Aldi in Stuttgart, Germany, it carried many of the same brands. I made it two steps down the first aisle when I saw the chocolate display with the Moser Roth label. That’s the same chocolate we bought in Germany, same name, same box, same everything. Then, because it was a German store after all, there was a display of sauerkraut, red cabbage, pretzels and even Spätzle (egg noodles). I laughed at the sight—and at myself. I had not liked living in Germany, and yet now I was practically doing cartwheels over finding German food—and the rock-bottom prices—in rural Iowa.

  I wanted to call Marcus at work and tell him where I was and what I was putting in my shopping cart. He would love to hear this and would tease me about my change of heart toward anything related to Germany. For a moment I actually thought I could call him. But in the split second I forgot, I also remembered again. I lost my breath, along with my composure, as reality struck like a hay baler barreling over my chest. “I can’t call him. He’s dead.” It was the first time that lapse had happened to me.

  I stood there in that first aisle, tears streaming down my face. What a strange site I must have been to the other Ottumwa shoppers. “Why is this girl crying about chocolate? Or is she crying over the egg noodles?” they must have wondered.

  I managed to wheel my cart over to the produce section and my mood was buoyed by the apple selection. I could get Granny Smith apples for about fifty cents a pound. I filled my basket with sixty pounds worth. Enough for twenty pies. I bought bags of flour and sugar, tubs of the store-brand shortening and butter—pounds and pounds of butter.

  When I got to the checkout, I wished I could tell the clerk—or anyone in the store who would listen—my story. My story about how I had been married to Marcus and had shopped at Aldi in Germany. How shopping here was a powerful connection between my past and present. How I was born here in Ottumwa, had lived all over the world, and now, as if by some divine intervention, I was back. Would this clerk know that Aldi’s first U.S. store was right here in Southeast Iowa? Would she even care? Would she or any of the other shoppers appreciate the ability to buy these wonderful European goods here in rural America?

  As the cashier pulled my purchases off her conveyor belt, I wanted to tell someone how Marcus taught me that sauerkraut is full of vitamins, and how he pronounced vitamins the British way, with a soft i, and how he could make something as mouth-puckering as sauerkraut sound delicious and sexy. But gushing my jumble of thoughts to her would have only confused her and embarrassed me further, so I left as quickly as I could.

  Like everything associated with grief, this was just another step in the conditioning process. The first anything was the hardest. I had made it through an entire one-year cycle: the first holidays, birthdays and anniversaries. I had made it through my first trip to Aldi. I had made it far enough and long enough that I could see my progress. I was adapting. I was surviving. I was crying less and living more. I was building a new life. And I was shopping for pie ingredients for my new business.

  In Ottumwa, Aldi wasn’t the only connection to my past. When I needed to get my thyroid prescription refilled, I found myself at the South Side Drug on Ottumwa’s Church Street. The pharmacy is one block down from my dad’s first dental office, which is still there, across the street from St. Patrick’s Church, where I was baptized. My Grandpa Lyle, an architect, had designed both the church and my dad’s office. As kids, after getting our teeth cleaned by our dad, we would walk to the South Side Drug for milkshakes from the drug store’s soda fountain.

  South Side Drug is, like Canteen Lunch in the Alley, old and unchanged. And, unlike many of Ottumwa’s other buildings, well preserved. In fact, not only is the soda fountain still intact—along with its seemingly fixed 1960s prices (milkshakes made with hand-scooped ice cream are only $1.75!)—the people working there are the same. One older woman working behind the counter said, “I remember you from when you were this tall,” holding her hand down to the level of her knees. “I still have that crown your dad put in for me thirty-five years ago.”

  I shook my head at the incredulity of it, of this living history. It was hard to imagine my life that long ago. It was a good reminder that my life hadn’t always been about grief. It had been about riding my purple Schwinn Hollywood up and down East Golf Avenue, feeling the wind in my face. It had been about learning dance routines and dressing up in tutus to perform those dances on stage. About daring each other to jump off the high dive at the swimming pool. About shoveling snow off the golf course pond so we could ice skate. It had been about cross-country family road trips to Disneyland in the station wagon back when we could sprawl out on sleeping bags and not be restricted by seat belts.

  Life had held such promise of adventure. Of career. Of love. And I had gone out and found it, experienced it fully. I was lucky to have parents who gave me the freedom to leave home, parents who gave me the foundation on which I continued to build. I went to a college in Washington State (as far from Iowa as one can go and still be in the U.S.), and kept venturing farther and farther out from there, to Europe and Africa and Asia. And now…strangely, unexpectedly back t
o Iowa.

  Grant Wood was quoted as saying, “I had to go to France to appreciate Iowa.” Yes, I got it. I felt the sentiment completely, especially as I continued discovering roots that I had no idea were still there, and still so important to me. Roots I had never fully appreciated. Until now.

  I met Steve Siegel, who, because he is a board member for the American Gothic House Center, comes to meetings next door to my house every month. When he introduced himself, he told me, “I live in your grandparents’ house on North Court. I bought it from them thirty-one years ago.”

  “You knew my grandparents?” I thought my heart had burst—in a good way. I pictured them still alive and active, before they got cancer, accepting a check from Steve for the sale of their beloved old house. I had a flashback to sliding down the wooden banister, looking through my grandpa’s collection of painted rocks and trying to snoop in my grandma’s pantry, which she called the “Off Limits Closet.” I wondered what Steve and his wife kept in that closet now. And if the house still smelled of mothballs and green beans.

  “I worked with Genny down at Ottumwa City Hall when she was City Clerk,” he continued. “My wife and I will have you over for dinner sometime.”

  “I would love that,” I said.

  And then, of course, there was Canteen Lunch in the Alley. After my lunch there that hot summer afternoon following the state fair, I thought I’d never see the place again. Now I was eating there whenever I could coordinate my grocery shopping trips to Aldi with the Canteen’s hours and my hunger pangs. And while I loved their loose-meat burgers, it wasn’t always the Canteen’s food I was specifically hungry for. I was feeding a hunger for my past, for my innocence, for the simplicity of those childhood years. Which is to say, I was eating at the Canteen regularly. I quickly became recognized and whenever I would come in, the women behind the counter would say, smiling, “Oh, it’s the Pie Lady. How are things in Eldon?” Their friendliness was a contrast to my first trip back to the Canteen in August, when I had tried to make conversation and was greeted by an air of gruffness and suspicion. I didn’t take it personally. I had been a stranger in town then; I was a local now. I liked being remembered for who I was as a child. But even more important, I was being welcomed for who I had become, for who I am now. And that felt good. Really, really good.