If I had never met Marcus, never fallen in love with him and his almond-shaped green eyes, exotic German-British accent and those odd-yet-elegant leather hiking boots that laced up at the sides, I never would have invited him to join me at my friends’ wedding in Tuscany. And thus, I never would have taken the train from Italy to his apartment in Stuttgart, Germany, carrying that pie I baked him, the apple one heaped high with fruit, drowning in its own juices and radiating the seductive scent of cinnamon, the one that made him realize I was like no woman he’d ever met before and that he couldn’t live without me—the pie that prompted him to propose to me.
If it wasn’t for pie, I never would have been born. I never would have married Marcus and moved to Germany, to Oregon and then to Mexico with him. If I had never married him, I would not have been the one listed as the emergency contact, the one who got The Phone Call that day. I never would have learned how a call from a medical examiner can mean only one thing, how harsh the word would sound in my ears—“Deceased,” he’d said—and how that word would haunt me, change my life, change me.
If I had never been born, I never would have known what it feels like to lose Marcus, never known what his sexy, athletic body, the body I had made love to hundreds of times, looked like lying in a casket, cold, hard, lifeless, eventually cremated, his ashes buried, never to be seen again.
If only my mom hadn’t made my dad that banana cream pie. Fuck pie.
I am a pie baker and I live in the American Gothic House. Yes, the American Gothic House, the one in the iconic Grant Wood painting of the couple holding the pitchfork. It is the second most famous white house in the U.S.A., second only to the White House. Yes, the White House in Washington, D.C. The American Gothic House is nowhere near Washington, D.C. It is located in rural Southeastern Iowa in a sleepy, former railroad town called Eldon (pop. 928), and while the house is indeed white, it is decidedly smaller and humbler than the presidential one. Because it is famous and old—old as in “built in 1881” old—it is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. But one doesn’t need documentation or a plaque by the front door to know the age of this house. The slanted, worn, wide-plank floorboards, the rectangular shape of the nail heads handcrafted by blacksmiths and the cracks in the front door that let in the winter drafts speak for its many years of weathering a hardscrabble life on the windswept prairie.
Living in a tourist attraction (which must be where the expression “living in a fishbowl” comes from) takes a special person. And since I live here, I guess that makes me special in that I can handle the daily foot traffic tromping across my front porch, I accept how strangers, unable to restrain their curiosity, peer into my windows, and I politely offer to snap the occasional photo of a couple striking the prerequisite pose in front of the Gothic window.
Out of the hundred-plus places I’ve ever lived, this is the first and only one where I signed a lease requiring that the “tenant shall treat the public in a friendly manner.” And mostly I am friendly. Except when I’ve had too many faces pressed up against the glass in my kitchen window. In which case, the white cotton curtain gets yanked across their hungry eyes, and I retreat to the most private room in the house: ironically, the upstairs bedroom, the one immediately behind the house’s main feature, the Gothic window.
Legend has it that this window—and the matching one on the opposite end of the second floor—was purchased via mail order from Sears Roebuck. The triangular shape of the paned glass attracted Grant Wood’s attention when he visited Eldon in 1980. He found it incongruous, if not pretentious, that such a simple white wooden farmhouse would be adorned with such an ornate, if not religious, window. Wood was so intrigued, he drew a sketch of the front of the house, returned to his art studio in Cedar Rapids, convinced his sister and his dentist to pose as the spinster daughter and dour father to represent the stoic, roll-up-your-sleeves-and-just-do-it, Midwest stereotype, painted the three individual elements onto one canvas, and the rest, as they say, is history. The house—and its window—is so famous that it attracts over 10,000 visitors a year to its remote Iowa location.
It is behind this window and its lace curtain that I sleep, dream, read, cry, snuggle with my two small dogs and escape the peering eyes of passersby. The lease also states “tenant agrees to maintain South Window curtains similar to those featured in Grant Wood’s American Gothic painting.” This is no problem, as the lace curtains came with the house. In the upstairs bedroom window, the showcase one, I simply hung white sheers over the lace curtain, which maintains the original appearance for the tourists’ photo opportunity, but adds a layer of privacy from the outside world, and keeps at bay the blazing Iowa sun, which rises around seven each morning over the neighbor’s soybean field.
On the weekends, when the weather is good, I sell pies out on the lawn of the house. I can’t say if this has ever been done before at the American Gothic House. Out of the many families that have lived here—the Dibbles, the Joneses, the Smiths—mine are certainly not the first pies to be baked inside. That would be impossible, seeing as Iowa is the pie capital of America, where pies are a way of life, baked into the fabric of Midwestern existence. Eldon, Iowa, is full of pie bakers. (I know this because I’ve sampled Arlene Kildow’s coconut cream pie. It would win first prize at the Iowa State Fair if she would enter. And Janice Chickering’s apple pie, which I haven’t tried yet, must be delicious because it wins every local pie contest.) But setting up a pie table right outside the famous house, as if it were an Amish farm stand or a Girl Scout bake sale? That might be a first.
I didn’t move into the American Gothic House to sell pies. Moving into the American Gothic House wasn’t in my plans at all. In fact, until that hot, humid, late August day that I happened upon the road sign for the house, I didn’t even know of its existence. I will tell you how and why I came to live here, how I became known as “America’s Pie Lady,” how I became adopted by the mayor and other residents of Eldon, and most important of all, how my grief began to ease and my heart eventually began to heal. I will tell you all that and more. But I have to begin further back in time.
You will find my story is a lot like pie, a strawberry-rhubarb pie. It’s bitter. It’s messy. It’s got some sweetness, too. Sometimes the ingredients get added in the wrong order, but it has substance, it will warm your insides and, even though it isn’t perfect, it still turns out okay in the end.
CHAPTER 1
I killed my husband. I asked for a divorce, and seven hours before he was to sign the divorce papers, he died. It was my fault. If I hadn’t rushed him into it, I would have had time to change my mind, and I didn’t want to change my mind again. I was sure this time. I wasn’t good at being a wife and I was tired. Marcus and I still loved each other, still desired each other, we were still best friends. But in spite of best intentions, after six years, our marriage had become like overworked pie dough. It was tough, difficult to handle and the only option I could see was to throw it out and start over.
I was a free-spirited California girl, trying to mix with a workaholic German automotive executive. Too often, it had seemed like an exercise in futility, like trying to whip meringue in a greasy bowl where, with even the slightest presence of oil, turning the beaters up to a higher speed still can’t accomplish the necessary lightness of being. We needed to throw out the dough, I insisted. Chuck the egg whites, and wash out our bowls so we might fill them again. I was impatient and impulsive, overly confident that there was something, someone better out there for me. I was also mad at him. He worked too much. All I wanted was more of his time, more of him. Asking for a divorce was my cry for attention. And since I couldn’t get his attention, couldn’t get the marriage to work, couldn’t get the goddamn metaphorical pie dough to roll, I was determined to start over. It was my fault. He died because of me. I killed him.
August 19, 2009, Terlingua, Texas
I wasn’t even halfway through my morning walk with the dogs, but the sun had already risen high above the mesa of the Chisos Mountains. We should have left earlier, but every morning started with the same dilemma. Make coffee or walk the dogs first? I loved savoring my café