American Pie

by Rebecca Schoenkopf

I am baking a motherfucking pie. It is from scratch, from The Good Food Cookbook my mother bought me when I went to college, before you could just Google up several ingredients you might have in your pantry and see what Cooks.com came up with for you. It has apples, and crust, and sugar, and Crisco. It is an American pie, because I am an American. (Love it or leave it!)

I had been craving pie for weeks, but every time I went to the grocery store, pies were $6.99, and I would get angry and not buy the pie. I am unemployed. I cannot afford pie.

I probably spent $6.99 on this motherfucking pie anyway, between the organic apples and the Crisco. It had better be delicious.

There is a Patty Griffin song called “Making Pies.” It is the saddest song in the world, about an old woman whose boyfriend died and now she just makes pies and goes to church to see Father Mike and makes more pies and goes to her sister’s and is generally pathetic and will make you cry. I suspect it’s in D-minor: the saddest of all keys, I find. [A minor, I think; another depressing key. - Ed.]

In my son’s 14 years, we’ve probably baked cookies four times—I feel about it roughly as Secretary of State Clinton once did. Now my house is too clean, and I am baking a pie. I am scaring myself with this Suzy Homemaker bullshit, but the alternative is looking for a job, and that scares me more. I am a woman of limited skills, and any prospective employers will find a load of websites with the word motherfucking attached to my name. As far as I know, Lenny Bruce is not currently hiring. Scaring me even more than that? I’m baking a pie and Jonah Goldberg is right about something: The Democrats are being hypocritical about their taxes, and we do call the GOP out for its hypocrisy rather than for the underlying acts. As Goldberg put it with uncharacteristic zip, the GOP is “challenging stall mates to robust Greco-Roman wrestling in airport bathrooms.” Am I the only one who feels like I’m taking crazy pills?

My mother has much advice in her. For instance, she instructed me over the phone how to “cut in” the Crisco with the flour and the sugar (she neglected to advise me though about flouring my rolling pin). For instance too, she thinks I should call my boyfriend my “lover,” because “boyfriend” connotes duty and commitment and no fun, and my boyfriend will flee! “And how is your lover?” she asks me after the pastry crust tutorial. I think my mom thinks I am a gay man.

If I keep my lover stuffed full of pie, my mother and I suspect he will love me. As a feminist, I am for my lover loving me. And really, like a boob job, the pie’s for me.

Last week, Lisa Schiffren at National Review Online vomited up a deliriously stupid piece about Michelle Obama being a fraud because she used a personal chef service in Chicago. “The orchestrated deception,” she wrote, “—the pretense that this family did it all themselves, living a low-key life just like most upper middle class Americans, working hard and taking care of the necessary, sometimes tedious requirements of home life as well as they seemed to have done—is a little more troubling.”

First, a United States senator and a university vice president earning several hundreds of thousands of dollars a year (not counting Barry’s sweet book sales) are only “upper middle class” if you accept John McCain’s formulation of “rich” as five million a year. Second, I doubt there’s a woman in the country (who isn’t on the payroll of National Review Online) who would begrudge a working mother an awesome chef service; it falls into that category of aspirational richness that people think makes total sense, and would love to afford themselves. (Even middle-middle class working mothers often have housekeepers at least a couple of times a month; if they could afford to upgrade their Boston Market takeout to a properly prepared duck breast with fennel, do you think they’d demur?) Third, Tom Daschle is pissing me off; the Obamas’ chef service may be aspirational richness, but the car and driver are just fucking unseemly. PAY YOUR GODDAMN TAXES ON THEM, ASSHOLE. Fourth, Michelle Obama needs to get in the kitchen and bake a motherfucking pie—someone please tell her to flour the rolling pin—unless of course she’d rather not. Pastry crust is a bitch.

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