Flotsam

I started making pies when I was seven. Not by myself, of course. Seven-year-olds don’t make pies by themselves. My mother and grandmother divested apples of their peel in sinuous, perfect strips. I was given a spork-like implement, the safety-scissors version of a paring knife, and subtly mocked for my inability to produce perfect spirals of apple-outside. By my ninth Thanksgiving I made pumpkin pies unassisted—a simple affair of Libby’s, condensed milk, and spices—but apple pie remained, like coffee, canasta, and gin, the province of adults.
I have always thought of adulthood as something that happens whether you’d like it to or not, like an earthquake or flash flooding—an act of God, so to speak. The way female hips suddenly stretch, science-ficticiously, at the onset of junior high. But suppose you find yourself growing inexorably older without any corresponding increase in, say, financial or emotional stability? What if you were the only girl in the eighth grade still changing for gym with her shirt half on? Where, exactly, is the portal that separates waking up mid-afternoon to hit the water-bong in your dormitory common room from loosening the tie around your neck, exhausted from paying insurance premiums, understanding mutual funds, caring about the Yen V.S. the Dollar?
After college, I got a lot of bills. Bills, bills, bills, as Beyonce might say. Can you pay my bills? Can you pay my telephone bills?
I couldn’t. Even now, when I receive an envelope from Qwest I shut it into a drawer of my desk, hoping that light deprivation will cause it to wither and disappear.
I have been legally an adult for years now, and I am still waiting for my act of God.
Five years ago I bounced a series of small checks. $22.50 here, $11.67 there. They bounced because I had insufficient funds in my checking account. I’ll bet you were clever enough to deduce that yourself. Why, then, did my bank think that adding $50.00 or $100.00 fees to each check would expedite my payment? A girl who does not have $11.67 most assuredly does not have $111.67. Math is not my strongest subject, but even I am able to appreciate this logic.
Anyway, during this dark period, I had occasion to spend some time on the phone with a combative young lady from a collection agency.

“You need to grow up and pay this account,” quoth she, “You’re an adult, and this is your responsibility.”

When I was young, during my apple pie apprenticeship, I used the leftover scraps of crust dough to make wobbly, continent-shaped cookies sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar, cookies I named, in a burst of originality, “Pie crust.” The manufacture, decoration, and baking of “Pie crust’ was overseen and executed solely by me. I remember the feeling of superiority I had over other, Oreo-buying seven-year-olds.
“Oh these cookies? In my lunch box? I made them, actually. From scratch.”
I spoke of flour and dough and preheating with the same feigned nonchalance with which I imagine Prometheus examined his nails in the flickering light of the flames before him, as a crowd gathered.
“Oh, this old thing? It’s just Fire, that’s all. Something I whipped up in my spare time, you know, to heat things.”

I scrabbled my way out of debt. I figured out how to file taxes for my freelance jobs. I adjusted the ratio of shortening to butter in my piecrust. I tried to have relationships with men whom I didn’t want to kick out of my apartment after sex—I even let one of them spend the night, and he’s been here for years. You should see me peel an apple—it’s all in the wrist, as it turns out.
I make the best apple pie in the world. Ask anyone–It’s true. You could make apple pie from some other recipe, if you wanted to, but it would taste like interned brioche dropped during the execution of Marie Antoinette and later unearthed by filthy-handed archaeologists, compared to the apple pie I make.
I like to think that this makes up for all of the other ways in which I am less successful at being a grown-up. When I feel uncertain of my status in the real world–when I try and fail to understand something like my company’s 401K plan or the appeal of sensible shoes–I glance at my well worn pie plate and feel reassured that I am, in fact, an adult. It helps me believe that I will be allowed to have children despite the fact that I turned my underwear from yesterday inside out and wore them to work this morning, all in order to avoid doing laundry. Not many people make apple pie from scratch these days, you know. It is becoming a lost art, like blacksmithery or lute-playing.
And how many child-blacksmiths do you know?