The Apple House Rules

In the fall, I make pies. Apple pies. I’m aware that this is woefully unmanly, that if I’m going to be announcing my autumnal activities, I should talk about chopping wood or something. Like, I’ll bet Clint Eastwood doesn’t bake pies. And if he does, they’re probably cooked in the fires of Mount Doom, filled with dead hippies and broken dreams.

Me, I use apples.

There’s a ritual to this. I sit in front of the TV with a big bag of orchard apples, a cutting board, and a little razor-sharp paring knife. The apples have to come from an orchard,  I have to be on the couch, and I have to be watching the John Carpenter movie In the Mouth of Madness. Unbelievably, In the Mouth of Madness was largely panned at Cannes and Sundance. It’s about a horror author who writes his horrors into existence and thus drives the whole world insane. Much rubber cement was used by the special effects department to create monster slime.

So I sit, and I watch, and I make an apple pie. It’s an autumn thing.

If you put the cut apples into a solution of water and lemon juice, they won’t turn brown. It’s not at all masculine that I know this. If you cut slits in the top pie crust, it will lie flatter. If you cut these slits in an artsy way, the pie will look neat. Putting a pie on a windowsill to cool is an antiquated notion. If you do this for real, the pie will slide off, draw flies, or be toppled and eaten by your pets. In any of these cases, you pie’s aesthetic appeal declines substantially.

So I’ve got this routine, just like my routine of reading The Shining every winter. And the other day, my wife Robin and I go to the grocery store. And Robin picks up this big bag of apples. And — get this — she puts it in our cart.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Getting apples. To make a pie or something.”

“But the apples have to come from the orchard,” I told her.

“But they’re the same apples,” she said.

They were. They were in the paper bag with the little paper handle, set aside and marked as being “orchard fresh.” They were smaller than the big, waxy apples in the produce bins. Same apples, all right.

“But when you make pies, you have to get the apples at the orchard,” I said.

“They’re the same apples,” she said. “And the orchard is a half-hour away.”

She didn’t understand. The apples have to come from an orchard. They have to. And it’s not even like we get to pick them off the trees or anything. When you go to the orchard, you walk into a little store building and pick up the same apples in the same paper bag with the little paper handle and you pay for them at the register. The only real difference is that it’s a lot more crowded and you have to park on the grass.

So, despite the fact that Robin was absolutely right, she was so wrong. The apples have to come from an orchard. Yeah, well. This is the woman who will dissect a meal to remove any trace of tomato, onion, celery, beans, green pepper, red pepper, tuna, etcetera. After she’s done eating, she’s got this little cadaver pile of excised ingredients. I’ll make stuffed peppers and she’ll remove the pepper. She once asked me to make chili without beans or onions.

“So,” I said, “just the wet beef, then?”

This is the woman who’s afraid of cruise control like some technophobic octogenarian, who likes spaghetti sauce and pizza sauce and salsa but will send a salad back to the kitchen if a tomato has touched the lettuce. This is who’s telling me that it makes more sense to get the apples that are right in front of me instead of driving an hour to get literally the exact same thing. I mean, really.

“We can’t get those,” I said.

She did this really condescending thing with her eyes — the look she uses to convey the message that I am mentally impaired — and put the apples in the cart.

Later, walking by an empty display that said “Cider,” she said, “Oh damn, I would have liked some cider.” So I suggested another place to find cider and we put the apples back and I won the battle in the end.

Ha.

So I make my pies, and my dad tries to get me into making soup. You start with a bottle of wine and a few cans of chicken broth. You throw in a bunch of vegetables and herbs and spices, and it’s magically supposed to become gourmet. I make soup and it comes out tasting like Tang. Go figure. Dad can just throw things into a pot; I don’t know how he does it. And it comes out really, really good. So I told him about making pies, and about how the apples absolutely, positively, must come from that stupid little shop at the head of the orchard, and he agreed with me.

I come by this naturally, it seems.

The last time Robin and I went to visit my father, he whipped up his famous pasta sauce. It was great, as it always is. The next morning, over breakfast at this little greasy spoon diner, he’s got this remorseful look on his face and he apologizes for the pasta the other night.

“Why?” I said.

“It was horrible. I feel really bad about it.”

“You feel bad about what?”

“The pasta. I apologize. It was so bad, I just feel awful.”

And so on. He apologized a few more times for the pasta throughout the trip, totally serious. The other day, he told me over the phone that he had finally pulled the remainder of the batch out of the freezer (he cooks mess-hall style — a year’s worth at a time) and thrown it away.

“You know, that horrible pasta from when you came to visit last time.”

I was making turkey tetrazini. That word literally means “four zinis.” I had the phone wedged between my ear and my shoulder and was dumping broth into the two pots on the stove. That’s two, one-two, because the smaller pot was for Robin. You know — no onion, no celery.

“You’re still worried about that pasta?”

“It was like Franco-American.”

What was I supposed to say? I used to love Spaghetti-Os.

So Dad tells me about the pasta, insulting it posthumously now, and refers to it as being “Day-Glo orange.” And we talk about The Sopranos, which I don’t follow because I’m too cheap to get HBO. It’s like we were supposed to have been born Italian or something. I’m making tetrazini, wondering what’s tetra about it and for that matter what a zini is so that I can go get four of them. I hear Dad’s little espresso machine steaming up in the background. And I totally start to wish I could pepper my speech with, “Hey! Whatsamatta you?” and call people paisan. I make him an offer he don’t refuse.

There’s one piece of the last pie in the fridge right now. You’d think I’d get tired of the making new ones, of peeling apples, of watching Jurgen Prochnow as horror novelist Sutter Cane and Sam Neill as investigator John Trent. I don’t. It’s ritual. It’s like, I have to do it. You know? Capisce?

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