by Amy Thielen
Just like before, we drove around a lot, Aaron taking photos of abandoned buildings to hang up on his studio walls. We still received our mail at the Osage post office, about eight miles to the southwest, and every few days we drove there to retrieve it, sometimes going the long way to stop at the cemetery where Aaron’s brother, Matt, was buried. We never went anywhere without throwing our garbage into the back of the truck to dispose of at the Osage dump.
Maynard, the suspendered dump attendant, sat in a building not much larger than a phone booth, just big enough to hold a chair and a small wooden desk with a pad of paper on it. He heaved his round belly out of the doorway to get a better look at the contents of our truck bed before assigning some odd value to its disposal. A bag of garbage and an old broken nightstand might cost us “A dollar sixty-three.” Four bags and two grocery bags of recycling: “Three eighty-eight.” It was random like that, as if he were using some sort of complicated penny-calculation system to keep his mind sharp. More likely it was to allay his boredom, although his delivery was perfectly deadpan. The ease with which he kept up his ongoing joke seemed to me like country-living candy, our weekly treat.
After grabbing our mail, we hit the Osage grocery, attached to the post office. The store wasn’t much—good for basics like sugar and butter and second-rate VHS videos—but it had a decent selection of meat. With or without a stop there, getting the mail always had a way of eating up an afternoon.
I held a piece of scrap paper on which I’d sketched a plan for the next two days’ cooking, but nothing was set in stone. I loitered at the meat counter just as my mother had done before me, considering the heavy question of dinner. Steak on the grill? Rubbed with anchovy and rosemary? Or should I make teriyaki chicken legs, glazed with mirin and soy? A woman in a long plaid shirt next to me was doing the same thing, holding a pack of thin pork steaks in a loose grip but still peering into the shiny, plastic-wrapped abyss. Pork butt was on sale, ninety-eight cents a pound. We glanced at each other’s hands and silently agreed: It didn’t get much cheaper than that. Standing there, marinating in the salty brine of my childhood, I remembered how it felt to be a side-child, an accomplice to my mother’s indecision. Now I was the unsure lady of my own house. The plaid stranger and I stood there like players in a reconstructed grocery-store drama, making me think that the whole town was doing this, and had always been doing this, calculating pounds and pennies.
On the way home, as the bag of groceries with the pork butt in it rolled around the back of the truck, we saw something in the distance in the middle of the road. It was an animal. No, a kid. Finally we drove close enough to make out an elderly lady crouched on the asphalt, digging in a hole in the middle of the dotted line.
Before we had even fully pulled our truck onto the shoulder she stood up and shouted, gesticulating toward Aaron, “Young man! Young man, you can help me pull this up!”
When we got out, we could see that the hole’s bottom was deep and black. She puffed out the words: “We’ve got…to get…this thing up! Just…you try it.” She sat back with a huff and handed him a pair of pliers.
“That’s my house over there,” she said, pointing to a white one-story across the road. Two of the biggest apple trees I’d ever seen stood like bulldogs in the front yard.
“I’ve lived there all my life. I know my borders. And now that guy”—she pointed her elbow toward a beige new construction—“is circulating a different story.”
Her feistiness clued me in to who she was. This lady, wearing a trim pair of pedal pushers and a doughnut-size bun, had to be the one who wrote long letters of great opinion to the Park Rapids newspaper, signing them “Margaret Sexton—Osage.”
Eventually we understood the problem: Margaret was trying to pull up a buried property stake and move it a few feet up the road. Turned out that every few hundred feet there was a buried metal property stake dividing the imposition of the road’s footage fairly between owners. Like invisible buttons connecting one piece of property to the other. The stake seemed pretty permanent to me, but Aaron was now embroiled in her mission, his body curving back over his heels, all of his weight pulling on the pliers. He caved forward.
“This stake isn’t going anywhere.” He looked behind him to see if any cars were coming, but I’d been keeping watch. There’d been no movement in either direction for the past five minutes.
“No!” Margaret howled. “The stake has to come up and then it needs to go back down right here!” She scooted eight feet up the road and slapped her blue Keds sneaker on the hot tar.
A semitruck approached and we slid to opposite sides of the road. When it left, we crossed and I held out my hand to shake good-bye.
“I’m sorry we couldn’t help you,” I said.
The high rounds of her cheeks drooped suddenly and the lines in her face deepened into pleats. She looked into my eyes and said, “Now you need to come to my house for some pie.”
I had a strong feeling that she made very good pie, probably from strong-smelling apples she gathered up from the ground, pared by hand into small, worried c’s, and then cut crosswise into sunlight-yellow triangles. Old-school ladies like her made pie from what they could find around them; they didn’t buy fruit for it. Not just because store-bought fruit was contrary to their thrift, but because they knew that commercial fruit had long since been bred to be sweet and complicit. Compared to the homegrown, store fruit had lost much of its essential fire, its acidity, and its attitude—all of which Margaret had in spades.
“Just some pie and a cup of coffee. I have apple pie. And wild blueberry,” she pleaded. “I make the pies two at a time and freeze them and it would take just half an hour to thaw one in the oven.”
My eyes locked with Aaron’s. As much as I wanted to sit at her kitchen table among the paraphernalia of her life, and as much as I loved to let a day unspool loosely into the evening, Aaron and I simultaneously decided against hanging around to wait for a pie to thaw.
“Another time,” I said, sincerely regretful, shaking both of her hands, light and downy like little animals. We turned toward our truck.
I spun back around after she started yelling.
“You need to come for pie! I mean it! You come back!” She stood in the middle of the road, one foot on either side of the line, bent forward with red-hot hospitality.
In the way that you never claim your rain checks like you should, we never did stop that summer and ring her doorbell for pie and coffee. Not long after that we saw her obituary in the paper. Sadly, we failed to make the time, on even the blankest of days, to enter her world.
As I stood in my cool, dim kitchen after lunch I let the dawning truth of my continual, confusing attraction to this place wash over me. The rural life was bossy, like Margaret, in a way that I craved. There were real food limits here. Seasonal deprivations. Provisions you had to go after yourself. You need water? Pound down into the ground for it. Hungry? Go down to the garden and pick it. Need heat? Make a fire in your woodstove. And heat was heat. If the stove was already going, you might as well use it to dry out apple slices, or herbs, or tomatoes. The full sheet pan of cherry tomatoes I set on top of the woodstove, mooning about in a bath of oil, garlic, and herbs, took about eight hours to shrink into powerful nuggets the size of cranberries and barely filled a pint. I thought of them as summer’s gold coins in a jar, and for weeks afterward I spent them carefully: a few dropped into my chicken salad, a few more spooned out over sautéed blue gills.
In the dark of the afternoon, I whipped together a pie from my own limited resources: the first crab apples that had grown on our tree. I was coming off a five-year standoff with pie. My crusts, which had turned out for me since I was in my teens, had grown tough, as I’d discovered with the twenty-five Thanksgiving pies I’d made at Cru. It was the revenge of beginner’s luck.
So I returned to not measuring anything, just as Grandma Dion had taught me. I cubed coolish butter and added a pawed-out scoop of Crisco for good measure—Crisc
o being my inaugural piecrust fat. I mixed some sugar with small, fragrant chunks of crab apple, peels and all, until they tasted sweet enough, then added enough flour to make a milky fluid that I hoped would bind in the oven.
When I pulled out the pie, the nut-brown crust swelled with thickened juice, and its crimped edge felt as sturdy/delicate as wet beach sand. After it had cooled, I transferred the first slice to a plate and sucked in my breath until it made it there in one fragile, perfect piece. The crab apples, whose skins had dissolved, leaving a deep coral-pink fruit with a flowery fragrance, were a dead ringer for baked quince.
The gaps in my Midwestern culinary education were as obvious to me at that moment as Margaret Sexton’s gaping pothole in the middle of the road—which, the last time we drove by, was still open to the problem stake. Headcheese, rendered lard, homemade cottage cheese, I had yet to make any of these things my grandma had so rapturously described, the rural recipes that had originally drawn me to this place. I wanted to try them all. Maybe if I pushed my brain out of the way, as I had with the pie, my hands would know just what to do.
18
MORBID SUGAR
One morning toward the end of that summer in Two Inlets, I walked to the outhouse hiding a suspicious bump in my robe and took a pregnancy test: the pink plus sign in the white window glowed a hallucinatory neon against the rough wooden floor.
True to form, neither Aaron nor I could see how having a child would change our grand master plan. As we walked down our driveway on a cloud, trading potential names, we also discussed our new future, agreeing that we’d stay in Brooklyn while our kid was young, summer in Two Inlets whenever we could swing it, and move back home for good eventually.
“Maybe we’ll move back when he or she goes to school,” I speculated, because even the childless had heard stories of the epic hassles involved in finding a home for your kid in the New York public school system.
My career was a little more in doubt, but after Cru I’d turned the lock on the fine-dining brigade. I was at a crossroads. I couldn’t see too far past my belly to think ahead, anyway.
Yet our next move virtually cemented our future in the country: We called our neighbor Ron Schultz, Vern’s brother, who came over and poured an enormous silver pad of concrete next to our one-room house for a future addition. When it dried, we walked around it eagerly, marveling at its size. It would make our house twice as big as our Brooklyn apartment. Using a two-by-four board like a giant ruler, we plotted out the rooms and marked them in weatherproof construction pencil, moving walls and doorways and going from room to imaginary room until the flow felt natural.
“This second bedroom is huge!” I said, viewing the modest ten-by-fourteen space with eyes accustomed to Brooklyn small-scale. “If we someday have two kids, we can just divide it in half.”
“Totally!” Aaron agreed.
“You’re sure we don’t need an architect?” I frowned, suddenly doubtful that the pencil lines would remain over the harsh winter.
“Nah,” Aaron said as he measured out five windows in our bedroom and rubbed their specs onto the cement. “Vern’s as good as any architect. In the spring, he’ll just follow these lines.” (Remarkably, that’s just what he did.)
When we finished sketching out the addition, Aaron unfolded two lawn chairs in our future bathroom. After years of trekking out to the outhouse, I’d decided to make it huge, and Aaron insisted on putting three windows around the tub so that we could open them to the summer breeze, out of fondness for the years we showered outside.
“Maybe we’ll stay until middle school,” Aaron said.
“What are you talking about now?” I replied.
“Maybe we can stay in Brooklyn until our kid reaches middle school. I’m sure the elementary schools are fine, some of them probably better than the one in Park Rapids.”
I cocked my head and murmured assent. I was no longer surprised by the guy who sat in the shadow of his new construction and talked about leaving it. He was a hardened dreamer. He really believed that we could go back and forth forever.
—
This time when we moved back to Brooklyn we avoided the quicker straight-shot, Interstate 80/90, and took the same slow route we’d taken the first time, the high road that snaked through Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, into Canada, then by ferry across Lake Erie to Tobermory, and then to New York, leisurely stopping to eat fried perch at small cafés the whole way.
As we drove the curving ribbon of midnight-blue tar from upstate New York toward the city, our truck slurping up the yellow middle lines like someone mindlessly mawing fries, I calmly faced facts: My cooking career as I knew it was probably over. Well aware of what kind of a cook I was—a complete control fiend—I realized that my conception of cooking and motherhood were totally incompatible. Other women chefs did it, and I admired them for it, but I knew I wouldn’t want to work the eighty hours a week, or even fifty, that my brand of cooking required. I wanted to be present for my baby’s first year—at least. I swallowed a small pill of regret: My perfectionism had done me in. I’d chosen to keep my head down in fine-dining brigades, at hedonistic close range, for too long, past the point when I should have been scanning the horizon for opportunities to helm my own kitchen. Before I’d left New York the last time, I dreamed of doing just that, of finding a chef job in a small place, maybe somewhere in Brooklyn, where restaurants were sprouting up like mushrooms and were in search of chefs with résumés like mine. But now I couldn’t see it. I couldn’t imagine not being pregnant; my devotion to our baby was instant and fierce. Indulging myself in a moment of mourning, I conceded that I might never hold the title chef that I’d worked so long to earn.
Back in our Brooklyn apartment, I searched my computer for catering jobs, temporary test-kitchen jobs in food magazines, anything temporary, with growing despondency. I had worked so long with outrageous, blunt, bawdy restaurant people, in restaurants that pulsed with electric energy; restaurants were my home. Two weeks later, like the homing pigeon I am, I beat my familiar footpath to Cru and asked Shea for a job.
In the Cru office, I informed him of my new condition. He looked shocked, as if I weren’t a woman of childbearing age, and said the first thing that popped into his head: “You look pregnant.”
I wished I’d replied “Are you going to throw me a baby shower, Chef?” but I wasn’t quick enough. I mumbled, “Thanks,” and looked down at my small paunch, hardly visible.
I wanted to cook for the next five months, but I didn’t want to work nights. Being that Cru was closed for lunch, I put the pressure on him to take me on as an extra cook—on what the guys and I referred to as “special teams.” Remembering my time working on the Danube cookbook, Shea hired me to spend my days in R and D, cataloging the recipes for both the VIP tasting menu and a future cookbook of his own. We met daily in the dining room and he filled my prep list with ideas swirling in his head: a bunch of different pickles, flavored butters, a new sauce for the scallop crudo, methods of cooking vegetables he’d never had the time to try himself. Without the pressure of an impending dinner service, and with my creativity on a long leash, I’d never been happier in the kitchen.
That first week back, my pregnancy shocked the crew, as if I’d crossed some invisible line that changed my species. When I walked in that day, exaggerating my small belly with a slight pregnant waddle, the guys on the line remembered that I was in fact female. The Spanish-speaking porters smiled and all ceremoniously offered to carry my full bus tubs up the stairs. “Oh, mami, mami, please let me do that for you.” Their kindness was touching, but as the weeks passed, it proved unsustainable. My trips were just too frequent. They looked over at me with sympathy as I softly trudged my tubs up the stairs, trying not to rest the bottoms on my growing gut.
Setting up my work area on the wide marble-countered wine station, I let my freak flag fly. I cooked dishes that straddled the line of too-caramelized or too-incongruous until one or two toppled over the peak of weirdness into o
riginality. I fried hen-of-the-woods mushrooms in garlicky oil past the point of reason, until they were like mushroom jerky, and then crumbled them over roasted scallops. Shea liked them. “Toss these with torn mint,” he said, “and make me a batch for tonight’s VIP menu.” Emboldened, I ran my workstation like a communal experimental space for the line cooks to swoop by and drop commentary. Walking past, they pinched clumps of dandelion greens that I’d braised and topped with an anchovy Caesar-style dressing, to mixed reaction.
“Cooked dandelion gets way too bitter,” Todd commented.
Peter, the meat entremet, agreed. “But it’s an addictive bitter. Feels so good when it stops it makes you want more.”
They were unanimous about my milk chocolate pine-nut financier, though, lobbing chunks of it into their mouths until the batch was reduced to crumbs.
“Fucking good.” Rich looked at me incredulously. “Why didn’t you make that when you were in pastry?”
—
As my baby grew from a normal-size squash into a prizewinning pumpkin, the divide between me and the other line cooks grew, as did their curiosity. At a time when most pregnant women are conspiratorially sharing their baby names with their girlfriends, I was throwing mine by this crew.
“How about Sven for a boy?” I said. “Sven Spangler.”
“Sounds like a Norwegian bachelor farmer,” said Todd, who was from Minnesota. “Too Prairie Home Companion.”
“Vote for Sven. Sven rocks!” Jason called out from the crudo line where he was blowtorching a kombu-wrapped yellowtail loin.
“Okay, what do you guys think of Adeline for a girl?” I said as I poured a curried carrot-juice reduction into a pan of steaming mussels. I wondered, Should it have both dill and cilantro on the finish, or just dill? “I like it on a little girl, but when she grows up…I mean, is Adeline sexy enough? A twenty-five-year-old Adeline? Or an Addie?”