Plain Jayne (13 page)

I really did wish things were better with my family. The early nights at the Burkholder farm gave me lots of time to think about how much in my life I wanted to change.

But when it came to my mom and sister…what could I do? I couldn't be the daughter my mom wanted. She wanted the traditional good girl. I couldn't be that girl. She nearly had a heart attack when I drew on my Converse sneakers in ballpoint pen as a teen. My shoes didn't look like the other daughters' shoes. At least, they didn't look like the shoes worn by her friends' daughters.

I didn't care what they thought. Her friends' daughters smirked at me and whispered behind my back about the streak of purple in my hair and the band T-shirts I wore as they strutted around in their Tommy Hilfiger outfits.

Even though I grew out of the Converse-sketching, hair-dying phase, I don't know that my mom ever noticed.

And Beth…

I didn't know how to reach her. I didn't know how to be her sister.

What would it be like to live in a family like the Burkholders? To have my family mean so much to me that I changed careers to be near them, like Levi?

I dreamed about pie that night.

Odd, considering my fear of ovens and accidental pyromaniac tendencies. But the pie looked really good. I think it was a nectarine raspberry pie. I don't know where that came from. I don't think it's possible to have nectarines
and
raspberries together in a pie. Either way, it sounded really good. It sounded good as breakfast food. Pie was pretty close to toast and jam, wasn't it? Maybe more like toast, jam, and some fruit chunks, but it still sounded good.

Really good.

To my disappointment, Martha had not read my mind that morning. There were potatoes, sausages, and a steaming mound of cheese-topped scrambled eggs, but no pie.

I couldn't blame her, though. She'd made, like, a billion pies the day before. Maybe she had pie elbow, or whatever you call a pie-induced injury.

I helped clean up the breakfast dishes after the men left for work. “I was wondering,” I said, as I scrubbed plates, “if you could teach me how to bake.”

“What kind of baking?”

“I don't know. Bread—I've never made bread. The cobbler you made the other day was really good. Or,” I paused artfully as I removed a stubborn bit of cheese, “there's pie. I don't know how to make pie.”

Martha stopped drying dishes. “You don't know how to make pie?”

I shook my head.

“Your mother never taught you to make pie?”

“I wasn't much interested in baking when I lived with my mother.”

To say the least. I couldn't be bothered to make toast at the time.

“The most important thing about the crust is not to make the shortening bits too fine.”

And so it began.

When the last dishes were put away, Martha insisted that I measure out the flour myself, even with my injury. I dipped the cup measure into the flour bag, filled it, and then clumsily tried to scrape off the excess mound of flour on the top with my sore arm.

Martha shook her head. “You can't scoop like that. Dump it out.”

Startled, I obeyed.

She removed a spoon from a drawer. “If you scoop, you may get air bubbles and your amounts won't be right. Use a teaspoon to add a little in at a time.”

I tried to follow her instructions, but maneuvering the spoon and cup measure with my brace proved too difficult. Martha stepped in and offered to fill it, now that I knew the correct method.

After all the flour made it successfully to the mixing bowl, Martha taught me how to cut in shortening using two butter knives, drawing them across the bowl in opposite directions. “Many recipes tell you to continue until the mixture resembles coarse sand, but they're wrong. Only mix until it looks like little peas. Your piecrust will come out flakier that way.”

After she rolled out the crust—another task I couldn't complete with a brace—she turned back to me. “What sort of pie do you want to bake?”

I bit my lip. “A fruit pie?”

“What fruit? We have apples, canned apricots, frozen berries…”

Apricots were kind of like nectarines. “Apricot? And raspberry?”

Martha lifted an eyebrow. “Never done that before.”

We rinsed the apricots and let them dry a bit in a strainer. The raspberries remained frozen when we stirred them with the apricots, some flour, a little sugar, a half-teaspoon of cinnamon, and a pinch of nutmeg. After we poured the filling into the pie pan, Martha showed me how to fold over the top sheet of pie pastry and crimp the edges shut.

“Now you have to cut vents,” she said, handing me the knife. “You could cut slits or make a design. You can also use your scrap crust as decoration.”

I cut two hearts out of the leftover piecrust, and then I cut a heart in the crust itself as a vent. “How's that?”

“Good. Now put it in the oven.”

Uh-oh. “Is the oven on?”

Martha gave me a blank look. “Yes. The oven must be hot when you put the pie in, or the pastry won't bake right.”

Hot oven, hot oven. Oh, dear. “Um…”

“
Ja?
”

“Er…I don't think I can do it.”

“You can't…”

“Lift. I can't lift the pie pan with one hand.” I let out a forced chuckle. “Too heavy. Lot of fruit in there.”

Never mind I removed the meringue the day before. But wasn't meringue lighter because of all that air?

“Oh.” Martha grasped the pie with one hand and yanked the oven door open with the other. A wave of hot air greeted my face. She set it perfunctorily
on the rack, closed the oven, and eyed me up and down. “You should eat more. Strengthen you up.”

Leah wrinkled her nose. “What kind of pie is it?”

I tapped her kapp. “Apricot raspberry. Doesn't that sound good?”

“I ain't never had apricot raspberry pie.”

“There's a first time for everything.”

“It smells good,” Elizabeth said. “It smells like pie,” Samuel corrected decisively.

“Who wants a slice?” I asked.

The pie had waited, uneaten, untasted, until the children returned from school. They greeted it with the enthusiasm reserved for strange things like sweetmeats and marzipan.

I cut into the pie with a knife, the crust still slightly warm under my fingers. After cutting the first wedge, I tried to lift it out with the flat edge of the knife.

What landed on the pie plate looked less like pie than it did a fruity train wreck.

Leah squinted at the plate. “I think you need a pie server.”

“Oh. Right.” I started fumbling through the drawers in front of me, but Leah pulled one out from a drawer across the kitchen.

“Here you go.”

“Thanks.” The next slices came out much prettier. I passed out forks and led the troops to the kitchen table.

My first bite melted in my mouth with an explosion of flavors. The tartness of the raspberries contrasted with the muskiness of the apricots.

Did everyone's first pie come out like this? I hadn't baked since I was in middle school home economics, and even then my muffins had collapsed like my mother's dreams for my future.

But the pie? The pie was special. Even as I devoured the rest of my slice and scraped the last bits of goo and crust from the plate, I wondered what other things I could learn to do while I was here.

Gideon took me aside after dinner that night.

Your daughter wants to leave your family to become a fashion designer
, I thought.

“We'll be going to church at the Lapps' home, day after tomorrow,” he said.

Clearly, he couldn't read minds. I had to think for a moment and shift gears. Was it Friday already? I'd completely lost track of days since my arrival.

“Sunday. Church. Okay,” I said after I'd oriented myself in space and time.

“We don't allow outsiders into our church services.”

“Not ever? I mean, observing the service would show me a lot about your culture. And I wouldn't talk. I could sit in the back—”

Gideon held up his hand. “No outsiders. I don't want to bring trouble to my door.”

Trouble? What would that look like? Images of Amish men carrying pitchforks flashed through my mind.

“We follow the
Ordnung
,” Gideon said.

I nodded. “I've heard the term.”

“We must follow the
Ordnung
at all times. And we must never give anyone cause to be thinking that we're not.”

“Okay…”

“Some people don't much like that you're here, is all. We see nothing wrong with it, but we don't need the bishop at our door for anything but a friendly dinner.”

“I understand. That's fine,” I said.

But inside I was disappointed.

Sunday dawned cold and drizzly. While the woodstove in the living room emitted a fair amount of heat, my feet still ached with cold. I put serious thought into turning on the oven in the kitchen, pulling up a chair, and reading a good book.

Maybe not my most brilliant idea, but thinking is tough when your feet are blue.

While I contemplated the state of my chill, the Burkholder family prepared
for church. Their preparing for church resembled in no way my family's preparation for church.

In my family, there was a lot of rushing, arguments over bathroom space, and encouragement to finish breakfast quickly.

The Burkholder process resembled clockwork. Each child dressed and prepared himself or herself. The boys, including Amos and Elam, wore newer-looking pants and crisply pressed shirts. All the girls wore dresses I hadn't seen yet, in lighter colors and nicer fabrics. Where bedlam reigned in the Tate household every Sunday morning, the Burkholders moved with a peaceful sense of routine.

The routine continued until the family filed out the door, looking a bit like the von Trapp family.

From inside, I could hear their steps halt and the tension heighten.

“Daddy,” Elizabeth asked, “where's the buggy?”

I stood up from the rocking chair and peered out the door, over the children's shoulders. The shed doors were open and the buggy was nowhere to be seen.