A Commonplace Book of Pie (3 page)

I know the urge to shove your face into this cirrus-soft offer is sometimes stronger than stainless steel, but this is the table. You must maintain your composure. Try welding yourself to the sensible handle of a hotel fork. Say heaven is an all-night diner next door to the realm's best booze hall and pulltab lounge. Coconut cream pie is what sinners are served the moment before the manager stalks from the kitchen to eighty-six the lot of you.
Inappropriate!
he swears, sweat-faced. Glass doors yawn on their bells to unadmit you, to keep your pie. Sneaking in was worth a shot, I guess. If only a shave and a shower had the power to forgive. Then you'd be in business.

 

 

When Annie Dillard writes, “Any instant the sacred may wipe you with its finger,” she means key lime pie. Which is dust, which is bone, which (according to Dillard) smells like pie. With which finger does the sacred wipe? Don't ask the key lime pie-lover. He works fast so he might deserve rest, reads hard so he might invent stories, beats his own time in one-man pie eating contests so citrus will make the gutters of his mouth sing. The finger that wipes his lips is his.

 

 

Those who prefer mud pie also prefer jeans, but that much should be obvious. There's a horse or two in her past, a neighbor's whiskered grass chewer or a frizzy pony tethered on the wrong side of a chain link fence where she tests her fingers' reach, her unrotten apples. A goat won't do. When parents yell and sisters pinch, when safety locks her in the house all August until even her marrow is air conditioned, she thinks about that horse. The Amish have a saying,
If someone throws mud in your face, let it dry. It will fall off.
This pie-lover likes that idea. Not to turn the other cheek but to bore her gaze full into the slap, to wither it with attention, to ride that dirt into the ground.

 

 

In stilettos the raspberry pie-lover is Barbie-toed and steel-footed, a mystery of high heels and eyeshadow. Her talents have never been under her control, so she takes pride in them as often as she regrets what they are not, wears her confidence with a spike heel. She understands better than most how far a form can stray from its intended purpose once beauty gets involved, knows her mother's warning by head and by heart: wear the shoe long enough and it will bend the bones to fit.

 

 

You are an invention of the modern age,
sui generis
, or so you'd like to believe. Your precocious tongue ties birds to their beaks and scares the child you would protect with its lashings. The child is you, sweetness. Orange foam doesn't rhyme
with mousse à l'orange
, nothing does. Not garage, storage, fromage, hinge, geranium or ayatollah. Say “navel” with me ten times fast.

 

 

Only those who will live longer than they expected to can truly love pecan pie, which doesn't explain its status as death row's most requested last dessert, or why chopped pecans, corn syrup, directions from the Karo bottle's cherry-red side are what mercy tastes like to some. But there you have it. Carrie's cinematic pigs' blood was made of the same stuff (sans crust and nuts), plus a tub of pigment to sweeten her psychic gore. An outsider's inside story. Other pecan pie-lovers manage their fear of the future by playing as hard as they work. They distract themselves from the deadlines of birthdays with the sweetest of sweet pies, honey upon brown sugar, molasses upon fat. A pecan pie-lover prepares for the worst with dessert, and does not share.

 

 

When the mumbleberry pie-lover's non-compliance with narrative unity is outlawed by Turkish courts, she's thrown into a fantasy gulag with William S Burroughs and his jewelry box of multi-use needles. He sews her a coat from pages of
The Soft Machine
, stacks of which shove the ceiling from the wall and the wall from the window. It's cold down there, but better conversation can't be found. She believes in excessive moderation; he pastors his church of regret so poorly that nonbelievers press ears to the bars of his cell to reinforce their refusals to convert. Will you comfort me with apples? he asks his new roommate. Of course, she says. Slice by slice, we'll serve our sentences.

 

 

Bad bananas are like push-up bras—a promise of tenderness can deliver tasteless mush and we're not supposed to complain. And the filling. Will it be vanilla or caramel? Coconut or butterscotch? The difference is a matter of importance to our lover, indifference to everyone else. Banana cream pie-lovers appreciate the sum of their parts, so they enjoy the unphotogenic angles of their love: the crumb mess, the toothache wakefulness, warm nights of weakness spent sugarbuzzed. They think a full and quiet mouth is a statement of joy jeweled as a copper penny on the blue bottom of a June pool. When the banana cream pie-lover quotes “promises and pie crust are made to be broken,” he means bananas are forgivable, fallible as God intended, and cream is desire left over after what you expected proves to be smaller and closer than it originally appeared.

 

 

Says deathless Emerson: The eye can't satisfy unless it has a horizon. In the place you grew up, where was yours? How far could you see? Was there a road by your house? Where did it lead? To eradicate blackberry brambles, one must believe in rhizomes. What was your first encounter with a wild animal? How far were you allowed to roam? You'll know a plant is non-native if it's called invasive. In what sort of landscape do you feel safest? Where do you belong?