Domestic Affairs Read Free Page B

yours.”
    Steve traveled light into our marriage. (Few childhood possessions remain. His parents moved often while he was growing up, and always, when they moved, held yard sales to dispose of excess baggage.) I move through life weighted down with possessions: every Barbie doll I ever played with, and all of their outfits. Junior-high poems. Letters from camp. My collection of fifty-odd salt and pepper shakers. The family Christmas ornaments, including a virtually shattered, nearly forty-year-old egg with a Santa face drawn on that my mother made in the first year of her marriage to my father. (When my parents divorced, the Christmas decorations all came to me.) Like her, and like her mother, I cannot bear to part with things.
    Still, it occurs to me, it isn’t things, chiefly, that will be my inheritance (or my bequest). When I am most likely to think of my mother, when my mother is most likely to think of her mother (and when my children will be most apt to think of me, I suspect), is in the kitchen. Baking. Baking pies, especially.
    I make a good pie crust. I make pies fast, and often; my freezer’s full of last summer’s berries, and I’m never without a backup can of Crisco on the pantry shelf. At six o’clock on a Thursday afternoon, if I suddenly get the idea to invite a couple of friends over for dessert, pie is what I’ll bake; forty-five minutes later I’m ready, and all the guests need to do is maybe pick up the whipping cream on their way over. I particularly like the moment when I take the pie out of the oven and set it on the table, cut the first slice, watch the steam rise.
    Later, as we’re sitting with our coffee, picking bits off the edges of the crust to straighten it, or forking up stray raspberries from the bottom of the pan, someone is likely to ask for my pie crust recipe. I could write it down for them, of course, but the truth is, there’s no such thing as a recipe for good pie crust. There are the novelty crusts, made with cream cheese or spun up in a Cuisinart. There are the classic debates—vegetable shortening or butter?—and there are state-of-the-art tools: rolling pins you fill with ice cubes, acrylic slabs on which to roll out the dough. But really, the secret to good pie crust is all in the hands, and not something any cookbook I’ve ever read has properly conveyed. I guess it must be possible to make good pie crust without having had a mother who makes good pie crust, whose mother before her made good pie crust. It’s just a little hard to picture.
    I use one of my mother’s rolling pins when I make a pie, and a 1940s Pyrex dish of a weight and design she has always claimed superior to modern equivalents, and a wooden-handled pastry blender meant to duplicate hers. In my mind my mother is inseparably linked with her pies—the smell, the taste, the score of little rules she laid out for me long ago, beginning with how she assesses the baking day’s climatic conditions, right on through to the unthinkableness of serving a cold pie or failing to have whipped cream or vanilla ice cream on hand to accompany it.
    It’s sometimes a mixed blessing, this maternal heritage of flaky pie crust and soup from scratch. I remember a day, a few years back, when my friend Kate was up from New York visiting for the weekend, and we sat together on stools at the kitchen table while she sipped a beer and I made pie crust. She took notes, said she’d never been able to bake a decent pie, and when I asked about her mother’s cooking (because therein hangs the tale) she laughed, describing a childhood full of cold cuts and canned tuna.
    We had spent the earlier part of that day climbing a nearby mountain—she and the man she eventually married, my husband, our daughter and I. There had been a moment, coming back down, when we were sitting in a grove of trees and Kate’s boyfriend, Greg, had picked her up, was throwing pine needles in her hair and down her shirt, and the two of them were rolling