Stories from the Alley

...and a peanut butter pie from Gus & Em

From Cook & Tell, September 1982

Some call the place “the alley” for the two-lane bowling alley installed there at the turn of the century. Others call it “Gussie’s” for the man who owns and runs it.

As the season opens each Fourth of July, Gus steps up to the grill, ties on an apron and prepares to serve—in addition to old friends—an increasing number of “strangers.” Artistry in sandwiches is his specialty and he does not wish to sacrifice good service for the sake of a full house. Wise Gus long ago established a unique modus operandi to cope with growing traffic. “I work at one speed,” he tells us. “Slow.”

The menu is not extensive: hamburgers, hot dogs, BLT’s, grilled cheese, the usual others. Sometimes we recognize the lettuce in a crabmeat roll, because we bring it from our garden to the lunch counter as often as possible. You’ll probably pay a different price each time you order a pickle to go with your sandwich, because the canny sandwich man sells them by the pound, not the piece. Each sandwich is served with (actually on) a paper napkin.

For dessert, Gus’s wife Em makes apple blueberry and rhubarb pies that he cuts into sevenths. With a yardstick flailing the air, he circumnavigates the pie, his thumb positioned somewhere between the three- and four- inch mark. Sixths or eights would never do. What’s the entertainment value of giving a pie three or four swift whacks?

Outside, Gus’s place doesn’t look like a restaurant at all. No sign identifies the old white clapboarded building set on pilings at the edge of one of the prettiest little harbors on the Maine coast. Inside, there are two bowling lanes (with hand-set candlepins), a gleaming wooden counter with eight revolving wooden stools, some wooden booths and a few ice cream parlor tables and chairs, all original with the place. Three booths upholstered in pink plastic are the only anachronism, but they are vintage Henry Aldrich and quite charming.

The nostalgia down at Gus’s is not coy; it is just so fetchingly out of step that it may be marching backwards. Instantly I am transported to every summer of my college years, which I spent waiting on tables at New Jersey and Maine resorts, including the fancy inn at the tip of this very island. You’ve been there in the summers of your dreams, breathing in virtual salt air off the waters of Cozy Harbor, conjuring up sailboats and imagining young skippers from the yacht club filing into the wooden booths after sailing class. Nothing changes, does it, from one imagined summer to another?

In the fall, when it seems the whole sky changes and the sun splashes diagonal shafts of light across the tables in the dining room booths, we almost prefer that brighter room to the now darker counter we’ve haunted all summer. On Columbus Day, another season will end and Gus will close.

Gus’s place is not a reversion to an ancestral past. It is our ancestral past, alive and well, rolling along gently at low speed from eleven to two, every day except Sundays from July to October, at Cozy Harbor.

Amie’s Headnotes

Last fall, I needed a break from a big writing project—prepping the launch of this newsletter, to be precise—so I took a road trip up north to an old friend’s and hijacked her kitchen for this recipe test. While I crushed Oreos with a juice glass for the piecrust, we discussed our favorite cookbooks and planned a trip to the local apple orchard for cider and donuts. The pie turned out to be a dreamy delight, as sweet and nostalgic as our friendship.

GUS & EM’S PEANUT BUTTER PIE

• Chocolate cookie crust (about 18 Oreos, crushed, mixed with 4 T. melted butter)

• One 8-oz pkg cream cheese

• 1 c. peanut butter

• ½ c. sugar

• 1 T. butter

• 1 t. vanilla

• 1 c. heavy cream

• Grated chocolate or more cookie crumbs for sprinkling

Press the pie crust mixture into a 9” pie plate. In a large bowl, combine the cream cheese, peanut butter, sugar, 1 T. butter and vanilla, blending thoroughly. Whip the cream and fold in. Spoon into the crust, sprinkle crumbs over top and chill.

Store in fridge or freezer.

Amie’s Endnotes

This love letter to my grade-school teacher, Mrs. Pratt (the “Em” of piemaking fame), originally appeared in Maine. The Magazine, Jan/Feb 2021.

You, with the sensible shoes—white, orthopedic, the kind worn by nurses—and your sensible hair, forever pinned in that 1940s Victory Roll; you, who taught penmanship and arithmetic and phonics to the thirteen of us in grades three through five, crammed the back room of the tiny island schoolhouse, air thick with the scent of paste and mimeograph ink; you, who gave us music lessons in the basement alcove, fingers perched above the yellowed piano keys as we readied our red-and-white flutophones for the Battle Hymn of the Republic; you, who put on book fairs each fall and supervised us skating on the school pond at recess; you, who swapped blueberry pie recipes and gossip with my mother at the lunch counter/bowling alley you and your husband, Gus, ran each summer for half a century; you, who survived a horrific accident involving a semi-truck and black ice; you, who unfurled the map that seemed to nine-year-old me the actual size of the world, drawn long before walls and borders and ideologies fell; you, who red-lined my fifth grade compositions; you, whose chalkboard sentence-diagramming lessons inspired my passion for language and grammar and words; you, who helped my mother overcome fear of flying to attend my college graduation, two decades and three schools in the making.

It was you who planted the seed that rooted me in writing. And you, who have been my muse all along, Mrs. Pratt. It all comes back to you.