The Women Behind the Pies

The women behind the pies did what they had to do. They got on with it. They managed.

My mother (right) and her sisters in the 1940s.

“The only thing certain in life is change.” This was a saying in my mother’s family, often attributed to my grandfather, Harry Cooley, a Vermont dairy farmer who was considered to be very wise. Change is inevitable; hence, you learn to adapt. Being adaptable in the face of change was one of the most useful virtues one could have.

After selling most of the farm and retiring to a little corner of it, Grampa Cooley ran for the state legislature. A prominent feature of his campaign was a lamb barbecue on Bennington Battle Day, at the height of berry season. He and his cronies roasted the lamb; my mother and the aunts did the rest. The rest included picking hundreds of pints of raspberries and turning them into pies. There was not a woman in the family who did not excel at making pies, which is all about the crust.

The women behind the pies were tough-minded and independent. They could be bossy and stubborn. You didn’t mess with them. They included:

• My grandmother, Gertrude Small Cooley, who raised five children during the Great Depression and sent them all to college;

• My mother, Idora Cooley Tucker, who got her masters degree and finished raising her kids after my father had a fatal heart attack on his way to work;

• My aunt Marian, who got her law degree after her husband was blinded in an explosion;

• My aunt Ruth, who championed the rights of children with disabilities and refused to pick up Uncle Harrison’s dirty socks, even if they lay on the carpet in the hallway for weeks;

• And my aunt Lois, who grew up in town but did her best to be a good farm wife, right up until the day my uncle sold the herd, without telling anybody until the deed was done. That was the end of the farm. Aunt Lois went back to school and got her teaching degree, then her masters, and taught art in the public schools.

  
  

The women behind the pies did what they had to do. They got on with it. They managed.

Harry’s mother, Anna, was an old, old lady when she tripped over her wash bucket, fell down the stairs, and broke a hip. After she left the hospital, she sold her house and moved in with Uncle Oscar, Harry’s younger brother, who lived in Ada, Ohio. Grandma lived to be 104 and made a bunch of friends in Ada, and we were all very proud of her remarkable adjustment. We always used that phrase—her remarkable adjustment—to speak about her life after she left us. The separation was a tremendous blow, especially to my mother, who had already lost her other grandparents and her mother, but this aspect of Grandma’s departure, the sadness of it, was rarely discussed.

Anna had spent her entire life until then in Vermont, and we all knew that Vermont was the best place to live, better than Ohio or any other state in the union, but Anna went without protest. She didn’t want to be a burden. That’s another phrase I heard a lot, growing up. Not wanting to be a burden, spoken in connection with old age.

Sometimes people were a burden anyway, Aunt Hilda being a case in point—we’ll get to her later. But the wisdom was, don’t be a burden. Be useful, eat what’s on your plate, take what fate dishes out, and don’t moan about it or ask if there’s any mustard.

What nobody bothered to mention was this: Adapting to change, big change, is an extraordinarily painful process. It is not tranquil and pleasant, like the opening of a flower. It is a violent wrenching.

Aunt Lois and I shared a certain appreciation for the theatrical nature of things. Her first gift to me was my name, Sara Lee, which she and my mother, both pregnant, thought up while drinking coffee at the farmhouse table. (At Green Mountain College, Aunt Lois had majored in retail marketing; Sara Lee all-butter pound cake was unknown at the time.)

The deal was, the first one to have a baby girl could bestow upon her this excellent name. So I got the name. Aunt Lois named her baby Peter.

*

The Unadilla Theatre is north of East Calais on a route that Aunt Lois hopes she remembers—it has been a long time. It is late September, and I am about to leave for France with my brand-new long-stay visa.

“You can spend far too much time cleaning,” Aunt Lois says. She says this not only to be polite—my car is encased in dust—but because she really means it. Peter had three siblings, all of them boys. Pity my aunt: Boys help with barn chores. Girls help with house chores. Boys bring dirt in, girls sweep it out. This is a simple equation: No girls means more dirt. You live with it.

Life can be rough on women who try too hard. On the farm, Aunt Lois was allergic to something in the air that made her itch all over. Then there was my uncle.

“If I used a peeler to peel a carrot he would say, ‘Why don’t you use a knife?’ And if I used a knife . . .” She trails off. There is no need to finish this sentence, but I do.

“He would say, ‘Why not use a peeler?’ ”

“Yes!”

By now we are far out in the country. I am driving. Aunt Lois is guiding. Our destination is the remote summer theater, closed for the season, where Aunt Lois performed many a role back when her memory was more reliable. She has driven this route hundreds of times, but suddenly she gets very quiet.

“None of this looks familiar,” she says. We pull over and consult the map.

“We’re good,” I tell her. “Anyway, don’t worry. There’s no way we can get very lost.” We both know this isn’t true.

A few miles on, we come to a turn.

“I remember this!” Aunt Lois trills. “Hang a right!”

We pass a white farmhouse with a blue door. “Wrong color door,” says Aunt Lois. We pass a field of turkeys. “Fifteen,” says my aunt. “You’re supposed to count them.” To whom she is going to report this turkey count she does not say. We come to a field of shaggy red cattle. “Scottish,” says my aunt. I get out and take a picture.

“Maybe I’ll have a cigarette,” says Aunt Lo. “I’m trying to quit.” She is eighty-three. “I won’t smoke in the car.”

“You can smoke in the car.”

“I can?”

“Sure, Patrick does it all the time.”

“I’m looking for an ashtray.”

“There isn’t one. Patrick said he didn’t need one because he wasn’t going to smoke in the car. That lasted about a week.”

“I’ll knock my ashes out the window.”

“There ya go.”

“I just hope no one notices.”

“Aunt Lois, there’s nobody on this road except the turkeys and the cows and some sheep.”

“You’re right.”

At the summer theater, no one is around, so we sneak in through the back door.

“Stay here,” I tell Aunt Lois—the footing is treacherous—and I grope my way through the darkness to the stage. The theater has the right nostalgic musty smell and a pleasant hollow sound.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” I say to the empty house. “Please give a warm welcome to Lois Cooley.”

Standing in the back of the house in a theater full of ghosts, my aunt breaks into a Sophie Tucker song.

Some of these days, you’re gonna miss your mama.

You’re gonna miss my huggin’. You’re gonna miss my kissin’.

You’re gonna miss your big fat mama.

Over the next three years, I said good-bye to the last of the women behind the pies and to most of the neighborhood moms who had raised their kids together, teaching us to blow bubbles in the river, to lace our ski boots tight, to put our best foot forward and to clean up our messes, to say “I’m sorry,” when we were mean.

I said good-bye to loved ones whose weddings, birthdays, and funerals I would miss. I said good-bye to the fields my great-grandfather had plowed, to the woods my father had logged, to the meadows my mother had roamed as a child. Good-bye to the country that had lured my ancestors when the Abenaki dipped their oars in Pitawbagok; today, its waters carry the name of a French explorer. Good-bye to the woods where a several-times-great grandmother chased a catamount out of her house with a fire poker. Good-bye to the land where my grandfather, as a boy, folded newspapers for fifteen cents a day and, as a man, dug potatoes by the truckload. Where my grandmothers turned thread into lace, made crabapple jelly, and inscribed their names on quilts. Where my father became a doctor and died too young. The country where my son took a girl to the prom and my husband sat on the back porch of my mother’s house with a small booklet, studying for his citizenship exam. Good-bye to the famous peak that I climbed with my father during one of his last summers. Good-bye to the backyard maple whose branches I swung up into as a child, and the silver maple that would fall, during a spring windstorm, next to a For Sale sign.

The warning about not overdoing the cleaning was the last advice Aunt Lois ever gave me. Two months after our last foliage drive, she went into a nursing home, much against her will, where I visited her for the last time. Returning to France a day later, I received a text from my cousin, saying that she had passed away.

—Excerpted from Becoming Madame Texier