Lemon Meringue Pie

My mother's lemon meringue pie should have been in the revolving glass case at Minnie's House of Pies, its sweetly-stacked white and yellow layers calling like sirens to unsuspecting diners. Patrons would have been hypnotized by the spinning lemony wheel, their plates soon licked clean, sunshiney smiles playing on their lips.

The pie was a beauty--unevenly peaked with wisps of pale meringue, golden tips whisked under the broiler, the topping hiding the translucent citron promise of a center. When my mother took the pie from the refrigerator, I'd gently pop the tiny pearls of moisture beading the surface with my little finger. The meringue stood stiffly on the wedge of cut pie, but the clear yellow filling shook a little, still feeling the movement of the knife. Each bite was a wafer-thin slice of meringue, quivering lemon, and crust, the sugary citrus creaminess coating my tongue.

I know my mother cooked dinner for us most nights, but I can only see my father stirring pots at the stove, suspenders crossing the back of his plaid shirts. Navy cook style, he served up plates of chicken and dumplings, stuffed peppers, and spaghetti. In my mind, though, I see my mother's finely-boned fingers coated with flour, the result of her mixing and rolling always delicate sweetness. An expert turn of the spritz cookie tube, plopped doughy shapes on the sheet underneath. Her cookies were finished with pale blue, pink, and yellow icings--dotted sometimes with little silver balls.

During Christmas, holiday tins were stacked in our fruit cellar, each one holding cookie layers separated by rounds of wax paper, carefully cut after tracing the lid for size. Long after my father died, we continued the tradition, even taking a cookie class together at the local high school where we learned how to roll ladylock dough around metal forms and crush almonds into batter that would be topped with raspberry jam and powdered sugar. In late November, my mother would arrive early one weekend morning, and we'd begin to mix dough, placing each plastic-wrapped log into the refrigerator to wait for its turn in the oven. My husband would watch our boys while my mother and I rolled, cut, and sugared. At the end, we'd divide our cookies into my mother's tins, sitting together for a cup of tea at the table finally wiped clean.

When I was around ten or so, my father took me along on a visit to his brother's home. I wanted my mother to come along, as I hated to think of spending a long day sitting quietly on my uncle's front porch. So many years later, it's easy to understand why she stayed at home. My uncle's remarriage to a straight-backed woman named Vera had changed the tone of our family visits. I remember Vera's face the most, colorless lips pulled naturally downward, hair pulled up into a relentless bun. On this visit, Aunt Vera seemed delighted to have me to herself, as she pulled me into the kitchen where she'd laid out the ingredients for a pie--a lemon meringue pie.

"Oh! Lemon meringue is my favorite," I told her. "My mother makes the best!"

"We'll see, won't we?"

Of course, she went around it all the wrong way. She planned on using lemon pudding for the filling, and a box mix for the crust sat on the counter. I knew that my mother's crust involved leveling cups of flour with a knife and her secret ingredient--a creamy oil called Whirl. The part of the pie I loved the most, though, was the filling. A milky pudding center just wouldn't do.

I tried to help Aunt Vera by instructing her on my mother's recipe, including a vivid description of the tiny beads of moisture on the meringue. "It's just perfect," I summed up.

"Well, I'll tell you something that's not perfect about your mother," Vera responded. "She wears too much lipstick, and she's going to lose all the color in her lips because of it."

"I wear lipstick sometimes," I retorted, lying in solidarity with my mother.

"Only cheap women wear lipstick."

I had a vision of my mother's face, red hair bobbed to her shoulders, pink lipstick framing her lips. My face felt hot, and I moved to the doorway. "My mother isn't cheap," I told her, "and your lemon pie will never be as good as hers."

Finding my father on the porch, I sat next to him on the old green striped glider. I waited for Vera to come after me, but she didn't. My dad and I kept perfect rhythm, our heels pushing off in tandem. It never occurred to me that Vera might have been just as afraid as I to share our conversation with my father.

In the last years of her life, my mother didn't cook much of anything. While she was still able to get out on her own, she ate out for as many meals as she could, even when she had to eat alone.

"I stopped for a bite," she'd tell me when I asked what she'd had for dinner. She carried coupons in her purse just in case.

I'm not sure when things shifted, and my mother began spending most of her time in the blue corduroy chair in her den, seated next to the large humming oxygen concentrator. Going out meant hours of preparation: a bath the night before since the exertion was too much on the day of the outing, laying out an outfit on the wicker chair next to her bed--many trips in socked feet between the closet and the dresser drawers, getting up three hours before we'd leave so she could have a little orange juice with her pills and sit down between all the parts of getting dressed. Mostly, that last year, I'd take her to the Giant Eagle. If we had time, we'd stop for a late breakfast at Bob Evans, "where they knew how to cook eggs."

Going to the Giant Eagle wore me out, too. After I helped my mother down the four steps from her hallway and across the lobby, I'd dash across the parking lot to the car. I'd pull up in front of her building, jump out of the car, help her get settled, then slide back into my seat. I'd follow the same routine at the restaurant, and again at the Giant Eagle. After I loaded my trunk with her groceries, I'd retrieve her in front of the store and buckle her into the front seat. Back again in front of her apartment building, I'd unload her and the groceries. We'd struggle up the four steps with our respective baggage--her oxygen tank on her shoulder, my knuckles creased white from the handles of plastic bags. Opening the door with a shaky hand, she'd lurch into the blue velvet chair closest to the door. I'd lug the remaining bags up the steps, divide the groceries between the cupboards, refrigerator, and freezer, and sit for a few minutes chatting. Later, I'd complain about the drawn-out process to my sister, my husband, my children.

"Mom, why don't you let me run to the store for you?" I'd ask, promising how quickly I'd be there and back with all the items on her list.

"I'll think about it," she'd always say. "Next week, maybe."

The next week would find us back in the Giant Eagle, her knobbed fingers fumbling with her carefully clipped coupons. Most weeks, she needed something from every aisle. I ran interference for her, matching coupons with cans and boxes. Her cart was stocked with convenience foods.

Our last stop was always the frozen dessert cases. She'd pull six or seven coupons from her envelope for waffles, ice cream sandwiches, slices of pie. The last week we shopped together, just four days before she went to the hospital, just seven days before she died alone in a single room, she chose a pie-shaped box containing a single slice of frozen lemon meringue pie. When my sister and I cleaned out her refrigerator after the funeral, most of the groceries we'd purchased during that trip were uneaten. There was no pie-shaped box of lemon meringue pie in the freezer. I hope she enjoyed it; I hope it had a lovely clear lemon filling.

Recently I made a pie for a Sunday dinner with my son and his girlfriend. I layered apples and dried cranberries with sugar inside of a refrigerated pie crust. Andy said it was the best pie he's had in a while. My father-in-law says I make the best pumpkin pie he's ever tasted.

I've never made a lemon meringue pie.

When I Grow Up

Part of me aches for her all the time: my mother hands yearning to smooth back silky hair, my arms twitching to enfold her, even against her struggle. My body does not forget.

I have the following conversation at least once a week, most often in the grocery store, the place I am likely to encounter people who know us. The exchange of pleasantries varies, but the rest goes like this:

"Is Laura still out in...uh...in..."

"California? Yes, yes she is."

"Is she still playing...um...still playing..."

"Lacrosse? Well, yes she is."

"Gee, I really have to hand it to you. I could never let my daughter go so far away." The translation of this last line reads "I love my daughter too much to send her 3,000 miles away."

Part of me agrees with the grocery store crowd. How could I give up those weekend visits, basking physically in her space, brunching at the local eggery with her roommates? The other part of me asks "How could I not?" This is my daughter's life, I remind myself, not mine to be measured out in coffee spoons, to be lived cautiously within the rigid boundaries I've set for myself.

The calm way I go about my life, teaching my classes, reading, deciding what to eat for dinner, camoflauges the void that used to be Laura-filled. When Rachel, her younger sister, completed a second-grade project about the family, she drew a picture of a tornado next to Laura's name. It happens like this: Laura walks in, and the lights dim. The air is full of static, crackling with her presence. At the camp in Japan where she worked last summer, the others dubbed her "genki," meaning crazy, full of life.

The way it works when you sign your child over to a Division 1 sports team is that everything else now comes first, before you, even before her. Workouts, practices, games, team meetings, study time fill up every little blue line in her planner. This past weekend, we were fortunate to have a little time at breakfast, three hours one afternoon, and a half hour at the after-game tailgate. We drove 500 miles to see her, leaving after work, both of us bleary-eyed already, arriving in Connecticut just after three a.m. For the last 50 miles of the trip, I drove lurchingly in the right lane over curving roads nearly covered by a canopy of ghostly tree branches arching from both sides. At the exit, I turned left into the hotel driveway, nearly hitting a barrier there.

Nothing mattered, though, except that we would be sleeping in the same hotel as she, that when my alarm went off at 8:00 a.m., I would fling open the door, pound down the steps into the breakfast room, where she would be, miraculously, my daughter, mine.

That first day I was lucky. Laura had the afternoon off--the promise of three unclaimed hours!, and we spent it in our hotel room, seeking some semblance of home life, she and I sitting hip to hip on the sofa--me ursurping the spot next to her. We watched television, flipping channels to find a show we'd once watched routinely together, creating a false scene of familiarity. Shortly before she had to leave, we woke up, her head heavy against my shoulder.

I don't know how to explain what happens between us. Perhaps my voice loses its precarious balance, the slipping of an octave indicating disapproval. Maybe I am just too much up close and in person, pressing Laura to remember that I'm really not an everyday force in her life. As a baby, she fought against the highchair, kicking and drumming until she was released, the rest of us bouncing her on our laps while we finished dinner one handed.

At school sometimes, I have to close my office door, so I can work, although I'd really rather not. Perhaps my leopard rug extends an invitation, and students and faculty alike wander in, drifting to the chair in the corner, telling me about their days, inviting me into their lives. We laugh everyday while my children look down from their pictures on the shelves. A photograph taped directly in my line of vision shows three hands piled on top of each other, each wearing the beaded beach bracelet Rachel buys for us. We wear them until they fall off, and we compare stories of longevity. I've worn them on my ankle some years, giving presentations before the faculty in slacks just long enough to cover Rachel's bohemian gift. All for one, and one for all our picture promises, a solidarity of Sunday women, a trio who once sat in wet bathing suits on sandy picnic benches at Le Bec Rouge.

By the next morning of our visit, I was an irritant, so much sand under her tongue. Chatting about her Chicago internship this summer, I wished aloud about a weekend visit, one for me that promised a sunny city adventure in a place that we could reach by car. Ever since I heard about her acceptance, a comforting mantra ran through my head...she'll be closer...she'll be closer, the Chicago location making real the possibility that if I had to, I could get in the car and find her, fall out of the car into her world, nothing between us but a day's drive.

"I want to have time for my friends," she said. "When I was in Japan, I had so much fun with the people I met there...I just want to have time. It will all go so fast."

Blinking, I look away, but Laura's words throw me back 30 years to when I was her age, packing for a semester abroad in Spain. My mother paced the room, making me nervous as I tried to calculate what I might need for a new life.

"Maybe I'll come visit you in March," she began hopefully. "I've been looking at some brochures about Marbella."

"Can't you just leave me alone?" I sputtered, physically recoiling, gasping for breathing space. "This is my life, not yours. You've already lived your life. Now it's my turn!"

My words were full of such an obvious desire to be free from her, from the small life I thought she lived, that I don't know how she survived them. I can do nothing now to change that day--no matter how many times I revisit it desiring to sponge those words from her brow. Instead I carry the words with me like the polished stones Jews leave in the cemetery for remembrance.

That afternoon, we sat in the stands watching Laura on the field, the cold sun picking up lines of gold and copper in her hair. My heart wants to burst when I think of her sweet and open approach to the world. She is so good, so good. I want to be just like her when I grow up.

Missing her wells in me, rough waters threatening to pull me under. At the sound of my morning alarm, I imagine her still asleep, curled on her side, three hours behind me. We are connected by phone lines, divided by time differences. She calls me while riding her bike home, my mind tangled in the three lanes of traffic she has to cross with a phone held to one ear. Sometimes she calls me while in line at Starbucks, saying "Bye...love you" as she reaches the register.

When we talk, I tamp down the gray froth of worry that skirts our conversation. I make an effort to brighten my tone, sometimes patting myself on the back for how well I conceal the sum of her absence, hiding my sorrow that she's not closer so we could sit over lunch. I lock away the vision of our heads bending toward the steam rising from our coffee.

"Be happy, Mom," she tells me. "Are you happy?"

After the game, I waited with her father and brother, leaning against our car, chatting with other parents about all that is our daughters. Arriving at a trot, with a quick embrace for her men, she caught the eye of another mother, one she sees far more often. Heads together, arms around waists, they nodded knowingly at each other's words, walking easily together toward the food table.

Where did I belong then? I stood conspiciously alone, the miserable figure on the fringe of a movie set, my red coat too bright. It's how she survives, I tell myself, a strong young woman so far from home in a world that asks so much from her.

But how do I?

On Being Married to a Scientist

At work, I'm surrounded by writing couples, poets and novelists and writers of creative nonfiction living together in what I assume to be a perfect harmony of the arts. I imagine writing desks set in the middle of gardens swelling with blue hyrdrangia, coffee in thick hand-thrown pottery, wordy conversations in worn leather airchairs set by the fire-- a world in which getting it down on paper takes priority over the mundane.

Me, I'm married to a scientist, who is such a good man. This morning he sat at our breakfast table, spooning up Honey Nut Cheerios and blueberries, while discussing the inevitable pollution from Marcellus Shale drilling. It seems that the rivers have been rising since the drilling began. Those in the Marcellus Shale camp identify road salt runoff as the culprit. My guy, wrinkling his brow in concentration, says "There's a spike in the bromiated compounds, and that doesn't come from road salt." When I ask him to explain, he uses words like hallogenated along with a couple of abbreviations like THM's.

"You are speaking in a language I don't understand," I tell him. His clear blue eyes register surprise, and he begins again, patiently seeking to enlighten me.

We've been married for a long time, long enough to include the growing of four children, the death of parents, and plenty of worse along with the better. He still looks like the boy I fell for in high school, a broad-shouldered, strong-limbed athlete. I'm sure I look less like the girl I was then, although that's who my husband still sees when he looks at me. One of the remarkable surprises of my life is that he's loved me unconditionally every day, even when I am wild-eyed with worry, spouting recriminations, sobbing until the pale skin around my eyes splotches with red welts.

Who am I to him, I wonder, in the deep quiet of his soul. I hope I am his soft place to fall, although sometimes I make myself small, threatening invisibility. He listens happily to my classroom tales, my curriculum plans, my department news. One night, while waiting to pick up our youngest daughter at the movies, we sat in the mall restaurant, drinking Tangqueray martinis, outlining a novel...me making notes, he urging the ideas past dark marks on a napkin.

At dinner the other night, I mentioned that one of my former students had messaged me on Facebook after reading one of my blog posts. "Would it be lame," she wondered "to tell you that you are really good at writing?"

"What did you tell her?"

"Ha! I told her I wrestle with confidence in my writing every day. Tell me! Tell me more!"

He chuckled as if he had no doubt that Sarah was right, but the truth is that my husband doesn't read what I write. He has no explanation.

"You don't read what I write."

"I know," he says with a duck of his head.

If I'm jealous of writing couples, sharing of my work tops the envy list. Of course, in my fantasy, there is no other editorial will influencing my own expression, no questioning voice or red pencil. In my marriage, my husband is innocent of infringing on the creative me, simply respecting that his wife writes. He's proud of my choice to teach, even though I've compromised our finances by turning away from much more lucrative positions to stay in the classroom. For my birthday, he bought me an e-reader so I'd never be without something to read.

After all these years, we live inside each other, boundaries now blurred between us, with almost a single will moving us forward. But yet, a watery shadow steps out of the us, taking on a separate flesh when my words meet paper.

Paper Armor

The words grew up around her, intertwining with her legs and arms, braiding through her hair. They protected her, creating a paper armor made of twenty-six letters, crisp in their blackness against the white page. She could live inside them if she had to.

Sometimes she did, pulling words over her head like sheets, burrowing into them in a refusal to rise and take on the day. Words had always comforted her; as long as she could remember, she'd held a book in her hands, safe passage ready at the moment the pages fell open, although she hadn't always needed them as much as she did now.

And so she sat still, letting the words sprout from her skin, the tender shoots sending twirling, burrowing tendrils.

Learning My Lesson

I've been wrestling with this piece for years. I wrote it from the heart, snapping words onto the page like so many aces, but that initial winning streak ended quickly. Once out of my imagination, taking form in black Times New Roman on the standard-size page, the subject resisted me, wiggling its form, flipping over just out of my reach like the rat snake that lives in the corner of my garage.

In its first incarnation, this piece was about reading Truman Capote's In Cold Blood when I was 11 years old. Capote's words marked me as a writer, giving me a direction I wouldn't understand until many years later, and I wanted to send up flares to light my path. So, first, I wrote about what I remembered best--encountering the book on top of my father's stack of reading material in our blue-tiled bathroom.As I wrote, I was temporarily content with the word picture I'd created of the precocious reader I'd once been. I revelled in the pictures created by my words, the snap of one lego-like word into the next.

So the piece waited, patiently stored in my computer docs. Years later, after reinventing my creative nonfiction course at a new school, I had the thought to turn my Capote piece into a discussion of essential truth in modern nonfiction. I wrote and researched, pulling in quotes and examples, highlighting the great Oprah Winfrey/James Frey debacle caused by Frey's "lies" in his memoir A Million Little Pieces. Mixing creative nonfiction techniques with scholarship, I created a hybrid of sorts that pushed the boundaries of conventional form. When our scholarship committee sent out a query for writing to be workshopped, I volunteered and sent my Capote piece off for reviewing.

I don't know what I expected. Academics don't always do creative nonfiction well. Brilliant colleagues have been known to lean against my office door, asking "How would you define creative nonfiction again?" Suggestions were made at the scholarship group that I should rework my writing to be more instructional, less emotional.

Ahh...and I knew better, too. A cardinal rule for writing workshops in my classrooms is to follow where the story takes us; so, if a well-intentioned criticism from a well-intentioned participant will derail your story, ignore it! Shortly, most of the creative nonfiction lay on the cutting room floor, and the pathetic remains went back to the document waiting room.

Those who know me well understand that Capote is just under my skin, so this troublesome piece of writing hasn't been far from my creative thoughts. I decided recently to give it another try, this time going back to the original. Then came the query from a former creative nonfiction student, now taking a class in online publishing, for a "piece of creative nonfiction, one" I "might have just lying around" that he might publish in the creative nonfiction section.

I thought the Capote piece might just do the trick, as it indeed has been "lying around." The problem is that I'm a different person now, and I'm finally arriving where Capote has been leading me. Words that sync together with a vaccuum "whoosh" aren't enough anymore. As I write, I the advice I give my students grates in my ears:

Show, don't tell.
Sometimes we don't know what the focus is until we find it.
There must be layers, vertically and horizontally.
The reader must be able to find your personal discovery and a universal discovery.

I am stuck in the mire of my own philosophy.

My piece is no longer straightforward. It has been deprived of sunlight, its leaves a sickly yellow, its twisted roots now drawing strength from the dark underground. My story has becomes less about Capote and more about my father's alcoholism. Bruised images of sponges being stuffed into weeping mouths flicker behind my eyelids, and I write about the shelter words built over me and around me.

I'm stuck in the quicksand of my own writing, my own life, and no matter how hard I try to pull my weighted legs from the muck, I struggle vainly, sinking, sinking, sinking until the wet sand stops my breath.

Yes, Michael?

"Yes, Michael?"

I'm expecting an insightful comment from one of my youngest creative nonfiction writing students. We'd been discussing a rather stressful piece by David Mamet, "The Rake," a well-crafted recounting of physical and emotional abuse doled out to Mamet and his sister, calmly and systematically, by their mother and stepfather. Each time I sink into Mamet's words, my heart freezes as I stand a helpless witness to the thud of a slender back against a hooked shelf, the sharp crack of a brush against a cheekbone. the pool of blood amassing in a dinner plate. I wonder what the students think.

"I was just thinking..."

"Yes, Michael?"

"Well, I just remembered that if I don't call the police in the next ten minutes, there may be a warrant out for my arrest."

"I guess you'd better go call the police, then."

Blushing a bit, he bolts from the classroom, only to return a few minutes later with a smile.

"Are you going to be arrested?" I ask.

"No."

"Is this for the parking ticket you got in the Morgantown Mall parking lot?"

"Yes," again with a grin.

So,this is what I know about Michael. He got a ticket in the Morgantown Mall parking lot for failing to stop at the end of a traffic aisle. The ticket was a big one. He might have been arrested, but he wasn't.

Sometimes he looks uncomfortable in his seat, his long frame compacted into a sharp angular configuration of beige plastic and shiny metal legs. He moves around a lot, probably futilely seeking a better position. Sometimes I worry that my words aren't making their way across the classroom to him, getting stuck in the heads of the girls who sit in front of him. Are my words not interesting enough, either professorly or creative-writerly enough? Am I repeating what he already knows? Have I not blown enough helium into my ideas for maximum byoyancy? Maybe I'm not enunciating clearly, dropping a syllable here and there, so the entire message can't reach him. It's possible that he's a poet, and creative nonfiction leaves him cold. Then again, perhaps these questions are more about me and my rambling insecurities than about him.

For he is a friendly, earnest student. We all look toward him expectantly when he speaks. What might Michael say?

Yesterday, we all learned something else about Michael. We were workshopping student drafts, and I asked "So, what are you thinking, Michael?"

"What am I thinking? What am I thinking?" Pinking inward from the sides of his face, he said "Well, actually I'm thinking that my computer has 17% battery, and it's about to die any minute."

He did go on to share his useful thoughts about the piece of writing we were discussing--stopping in the middle to show us how his computer screen had indeed gone blank, but none of what he said was nearly as interesting to me as contemplating the places Michael's mind travels to while his body is sitting in room 321.

Listening to Annie Dillard

Written after reading a passage from Annie Dillard's On the Writing Life to a creative nonfiction writing class.

When I write, I often do stick to the path, careful not to step on the cracks, to break my mother's back--carefully excavating, mindful not to nick the sidewalls or hit the unstable pocket that will cause the cave-in, the moral collapse of what I know to be true.

Isn't it better to wear my headlamp and carry a backpack full of emergency measures for stopping the holes than to worry, than to turn down--fall down--the shaft with no light?

Light keeps me steady when I follow the direct, marked path. Darkness plunges me into uncertainty--do I turn left or right?--and my words become clumsy in their blindness.

If I stay centered in the floodlights, I can brick my path with molded words, all pointing dutifully to my predetermined discovery. My writer's soul is safe, moving in that predictable pattern, and I will have written well enough.