by Sasha Martin
One enormous teardrop, then another, trembled at the corner of my eyes. Barely audible, I offered, “A hug would be nice.”
Greg didn’t move. “I’m sorry—I really am, but I don’t know why you’re here.”
The concrete step felt hard and cold. The tears came faster. When I dropped my face into my hands, he didn’t seem to notice.
Then he gave me a gift, the single best thing to come out of our relationship: “Sasha, I understand that your life has been a struggle, believe me. But you have to work through that on your own.”
He paused. “I never had time for my own problems when we were together. There was always something going on with you. You need to figure it out, Sasha—yourself.”
I caught my breath.
“Horrible things happened to you,” he went on carefully, looking over at me for the first time. His green eyes softened. “But you have to learn to fix your own problems, and not put them so much on other people. Like that afternoon when you bumped into Patricia … there’s nothing I could have done to help. You have to decide to be strong without her. No one can create peace for you.”
He sat there for a few minutes in silence as the winter sky turned orange. I stared unblinking at a small, gray pebble between my feet. Finally, he stood.
“OK,” I murmured.
He turned and walked back into the house, pulling the heavy door quietly behind him.
I drove back to culinary school in a daze. Greg had tapped into the heart of the matter. I’d hungered for peace for as long as I could remember, but it had been a mistake to think that someone else could fill the emptiness. I had to get over it. And I had to do it alone.
When choosing our summer internships, most of my classmates went with area restaurants. They slapped spatulas as line cooks or cleaved their way through ten-hour shifts of solid prep work. They were fast, skilled, and heat tolerant.
I didn’t want that sort of pressure. For my internship, I looked into food writing, food science, food styling—anything other than the front line. And with these jobs I’d have weekends off. At our school recruitment fair, I found my match with an international product development company called Bama Pie, headquartered in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Bama works for the biggest names in the fast-food world, and also has its own line of frozen pies and biscuits. I’d be working with their chefs and scientists on new product ideation, which was a fancy way of saying we’d be dreaming up new foods all day. As a bonus, I’d be halfway across the country, about as far from Greg as I could get.
Mom met the idea with her usual resistance.
“There are plenty of internships right here in Boston. Maybe you could bake bread with me at the convent.”
“Greg and I broke up, Mom. I just need some time to get away for a bit.”
Mom was silent. Then she said, “In that case I’ll go with you. You can’t do a big cross-country drive alone.”
“There’s not going to be much room. I’ll have my whole life in the car.”
“I don’t take up much room.”
“Can you limit yourself to one suitcase?”
“No problem.”
We crammed every inch of my life into my green Civic on the last day of school. My chef knives slid into long folds of cardboard. My clogs and flip-flops piled into baskets. My yard sale cookware filled three milk crates. My giant blue duffel bag and a few scattered trash bags held the rest. True to her word, Mom squeezed one tiny suitcase on the floorboards by her feet.
We began the drive early the next morning.
“Why did you decide to come with me, Mom? This is a big trip; don’t you have something better to do? I’m sure the nuns are going to miss their bread.”
“A mother knows when she’s needed,” she said, smoothing her pants. “Plus I need to get away from those nuns. They have more drama than we did with the courts in the eighties! Did you know that one of the nuns has been punching holes in my daily loaves of bread? They finally caught her in the act. They made her say 12 Hail Marys … hasn’t happened since.”
We both laughed. I should have left it at that, but I couldn’t.
“Why is someone always mad at you, Mom?”
She leaned back in her seat and closed her eyes. “Bad luck, I guess.”
“No one can have that much bad luck.”
“People get jealous. A nun saw I could make really great bread …” She shrugged her shoulders. “Nuns get mad and petty and jealous, just like everyone else.”
“I’m not buying it, Mom.”
She opened her eyes.
I went on, “You never tell me anything. Like that summer we lived together before my sophomore year, when I asked you about what you did while I was in Paris, after Michael died. You said ‘nothing,’ but then, in the next breath, you started to say there was someone you talked to. How can I trust you, if you can’t trust me?”
“We’re back to that?” she huffed.
“So who is the one person who had the privilege of talking to you?”
She sighed. “Gloria had a little gift shop on Beacon Hill with the cutest greeting cards, all kinds, for birthdays, anniversaries—funerals, too. She helped me with the card I sent you in Paris—the one you threw out.”
She met my eyes briefly; then we both looked back at the road. “She was the only one I could talk to about Michael. I visited that woman’s gift shop during my lunch breaks and after work every single week for two years after the funeral. In rain, snow—it didn’t matter. I went. Each visit I made some small adjustment. The photo never changed, but the card stock, the envelope, the font—it all went through so many changes. One day, probably after the 50th font change, I apologized to Gloria.”
Mom laughed softly. “I’ll never forget what she said: She told me designing that card was my way of working through Michael’s death. She’d lost a daughter many years back, so I guess she’d figured me out.”
I imagined Mom packing up at the end of a long day at the trial court—that same court, I realized with astonishment, in which she’d fought for us. I pictured her trudging through a downpour, along the cobblestone alleys to a little card shop on Beacon Hill just to look at Michael’s face in that coffin. I thought about how sick it made me to look at that photo for a few short minutes, and realized she’d done that to herself every week for two years—104 times.
The thought took my breath away. “You know, I don’t even remember our goodbye back when you gave us up,” I told her. “I don’t even know where we said goodbye.”
“I’m not surprised,” she said, staring at her hands, “the whole thing was so traumatic.” She looked me over and clasped her hands. “I’ll always regret not hugging you.”
“What do you mean?”
“I gave you a kiss, but I didn’t hug you kids. I don’t know why. We were in the vestibule of the apartment by the staircase when the caseworker pulled up. He beeped—I gave you each a quick kiss. You had your hands full with your little suitcases. You were so loaded down … it all went by so fast. A moment later, you were gone.”
I sat with the image for a moment; but even with her prompting, the shadows of this memory wouldn’t come to life.
The sun marked our progress toward Tulsa, rising and setting over a tapestry of towns. Some patches were green, others rusted and crumbling. Eventually waitresses began to assume we meant cold tea when we ordered it instead of the steaming hot cups we took for granted in New England. They spoke in lyrics, indiscriminately calling us honey, sweetheart, child. Every sentence became slow. Deliberate.
With each passing mile, Greg faded a little. But the release wasn’t satisfying the way I’d hoped. Instead I felt tearing, a shearing, an unraveling. As we snaked along the spine of the Blue Ridge Mountains, I gasped at every hairpin turn. We were one breath away from plummeting over the rippled mountains on either side.
“You need a break. Sasha, let me take over awhile.”
“I’ve got it under control,” I told her. No one is goin
g to drive me, I thought to myself. Not any more.
“You can’t do this totally alone, Sasha.”
“Of course I can. This is my car.”
Eventually the black soil turned red. We passed through Memphis and into the dusty center of the country. Quilted fields stretched into the horizon, fences so spread apart that cows and horses appeared to roam freely. Little else stirred. Finally we crossed a long, metal bridge. Three skyscrapers popped into sight—Tulsa.
As I took in the city’s scrawny profile, Mom leaned back in her seat, shut her eyes, and laughed, “You’re probably going to live in Tulsa forever.”
Something about her announcement felt a little too much like a premonition. “Yeah, right,” I scoffed as I looked over the ragged horizon, wondering what on earth Tulsa had to offer that I hadn’t already experienced in Paris, Luxembourg, or just about anywhere. “Spiderman would go out of business here, don’t ya think?” I said.
Mom laughed. But I couldn’t shake the eerie feeling her words had cast over me.
PART FOUR
Stirrings
“When one is in love, a cliff becomes a meadow.”
—Ethiopian proverb
CHAPTER 17
My Oklahoma
IRENTED A STUDIO APARTMENT on the west side of Tulsa—little more than two rooms right off the Arkansas River, tucked between the billowing smokestacks of the city’s industrial zone. Mom helped me set up my scattered belongings. We unloaded the car in less than 30 minutes: a milk crate of kitchenware on the counter, my old blue duffel bag heaved into the closet, my favorite pillows in a pile where the bed was supposed to be.
A veil of humidity hung in the air, sticking to my skin. Even the walls seemed to sweat. Setting up with Mom felt like a true mother–daughter moment and I realized, warmly, that many parents wouldn’t drive halfway across the country to help their kids settle in like this, certainly not at my age. In less than a month, I’d be 26 years old.
A few hours later, the furniture arrived on the backs of two horse-faced men. For $150 a month, I’d rented the bare minimum from a local furniture store: a bed, a twill love seat, and a round white lamp. The hungry apartment swallowed up these tokens, the empty rooms echoing and emaciated. It would have cost another $50 a month to get a dining table and chairs, coffee table, and nightstands. We made do by standing at the thin island counter for meals.
Mom had only two days before her flight back to Boston. The morning before she left, we drove down to the nearest big-box store and picked up a few necessities, like shampoo and a blanket. Mom also grabbed a ten-pound bag of Granny Smith apples and hoisted it into the cart.
“It’s almost your birthday. Let’s make an apple pie.”
“Like the kind we had when we were little?”
“It’s the only kind I know how to make,” she shrugged with a smile. She sent me down the aisles to grab a couple of lemons, brown sugar, a few sticks of butter, flour, and a glass baking dish.
“Don’t we need cinnamon and nutmeg?” I asked.
She patted her purse. “Never leave home without it.”
At the apartment I leaned over the laminate island and helped Mom peel the apples, then watched as she sliced them up. The knife landed with a dull thud against the cutting board, laborious and arrhythmic. Her cuts were nowhere as thin or as even as the chefs at the CIA would have required, but rather a mishmash of wedges, rounds, and blocks.
She squeezed an entire lemon over the pieces so they wouldn’t brown, and then tossed on a palmful of sugar and the spices. Almost immediately the sugar pooled onto the apples—a syrupy condensation. She used a fork to press butter, flour, and water together into a quick piecrust. First there was too much water, then too much flour. She worked more of each into the dough until it began to shape up, and then rolled it out with a bottle. It stuck in places, but she still managed to drape the now warm parcel across the glass baking dish. In went the apples, along with their juices. She used her knuckles to crimp the pastry crust together and popped the whole shebang in the oven.
I dug out my recipe journal to jot down some notes.
“I didn’t catch how much flour you used—what was the ratio?”
“Recipes are no good when it’s this humid,” she said, her voice pinging off the hard, tile floors. “You just have to wing it and hope for the best.”
I put down my pen and stared into the oven. “I can’t wait,” I said. “Michael always asked for this pie for his birthday, remember?”
She smiled at me. “I remember.”
Thirty-five minutes later, Mom pulled the pie out of the oven and heaved it onto a thin metal trivet with a clang. Cinnamon, nutmeg, and lemon floated through the air, the scent warm and sparkling.
“It’s too hot to cut into right now,” she said. “Let’s go for a walk.”
Mom unfolded four dramatic, wide-brimmed sun hats from her carryall, each more colorful than the last. I laughed, amazed that she owned headgear worthy of the Kentucky Derby, but even more impressed that she’d thought to bring them—and found a spot to squeeze them into her small suitcase. She chose a cherry-red silk hat to pair with her jean shorts and wide-neck sweatshirt. I chose a cream hat with long orange feathers. The feathers rose and fell with every movement, waltzing as I walked.
As we strolled along the river, all eyes were on those hats. At first the attention felt awkward, but soon I settled into the panoply. I could be whoever I wanted to be in Tulsa. Joggers dripped by us with the glow of a hundred-degree morning on their faces, yet I stayed cool.
Back at the apartment, Mom sliced into the still warm pie before either of us had taken off our hats. I stood at the counter and took a forkful. My eyes closed as I brought steaming apples to my lips. But instead of the glorious flavors I’d remembered from my childhood, I tasted a limp, chewy crust and slightly underdone fruit. The acid from the lemon juice made the inside of my mouth sour and my teeth hurt.
Mom looked at me, waiting. I took off my hat, smiling weakly while chewing, wondering what on earth to say.
Finally, I managed, “Wow, Mom—it’s good.” She beamed. I looked away, unable to keep the lie out of my eyes. I continued to eat. Slow. Deliberate. Dutiful. Eventually I scraped the juices off the plate. And truth be told, the pie wasn’t bad; it just wasn’t what I remembered.
Had the CIA ruined me, with its professionally perfect desserts? Was I expecting too much of my mother? Or had my memory been nothing more than wishful thinking?
Mom took a bite and chewed thoughtfully. “It’s pretty good, considering …”
I emptied my plate. Mom beamed and cut into the pie again, sliding a new, larger piece in front of me.
I ate the second slice, too.
Mom’s Apple Pie With a Twist
I’ve updated Mom’s recipe, so I can remember the past with feet planted firmly toward the future. Though Mom likes to add several Granny Smiths, I prefer my pie granny-free, on the sweeter side. I use Pink Lady apples, though many varieties will do, as long as they are firm. To catch the spiced apple drippings, I sprinkle steel-cut oatmeal on the bottom crust. Mom doesn’t thicken her juices, but I like some cornstarch for body. Either way is delicious. But there’s plenty to keep from Mom’s recipe, too—the bewitching “sin” of cinnamon perfuming the fruit, the touch of brown sugar, and the spirit of the thing—a dessert that gets made, in the face of—and perhaps because of—all odds.
For the pie dough:
3 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons sugar
½ pound (2 sticks) cold butter, cubed
A little ice water
For the apple filling:
4 pounds firm baking apples, such as Pink Lady
The zest and juice of 1 lemon
⅓ cup brown sugar, packed
⅓ cup white sugar
1 teaspoon cinnamon
½ teaspoon nutmeg
3 tablespoons cornstarch (optional, for thickening)
¼ cup steel-cut oatmeal (any kind that’s “ready in 5 minutes”)
Finishing touches:
1 egg white, beaten with 1 teaspoon water
1 teaspoon sugar
Make the pie dough by whisking together the flour, salt, and sugar, and then cutting in the butter with a pastry cutter (Mom used two knives held like an “X” and drawn across each other). When the butter is mostly pea-sized, switch to a large fork and drizzle on the ice water, tossing until a shaggy dough forms (6 to 10 tablespoons usually does the trick). Press the dough together and form two disks, one a little larger than the other. Wrap in plastic wrap, and refrigerate for about an hour.
Meanwhile, peel and cut the apples into ¼-inch-thick slices. Add to a large bowl and drizzle with the lemon juice and zest, then toss with the sugars, cinnamon, nutmeg, and cornstarch.
Preheat the oven to 400°F. Roll out the larger disk until several inches wider than the pie dish—15 or 16 inches. I like to work between two floured sheets of parchment paper so I don’t have to worry about sticking. Alternatively, dust a clean work surface with a bit of flour. Place this first round of dough on the bottom of the pie dish, sprinkle with oatmeal, and fill with apple mixture, being sure to scrape in all the accumulated juices. Press with the palm to flatten the apples (this reduces the air pocket created by an all-butter crust).
Roll out the second disk. Drape it across the apples and cut three vents in the center. Roll the top edge under the bottom edge to seal and crimp with the knuckles. Brush all over with just enough egg white to lightly glaze the pie. Sprinkle with sugar.
Bake for 30 minutes, then reduce the temperature to 325°F and bake another 30 to 35 minutes, or until the crust browns agreeably. Let cool on a rack for 3 hours before slicing. This gives the pie time to set up, though only refrigeration will make the slices perfectly firm. Serve warm, with a scoop of vanilla ice cream or, as Mom likes, a dollop of yogurt.
Makes one 9- or 10-inch deep-dish pie; enough for 8 to 10