The Day I Ate Whatever I Wanted (27 page)

Are you ready for the crust? Now here comes my top-secret secret: You must not let the crust know you’re afraid of it, which you will be the first few times. You must steel yourself inside like your little child is in danger of falling off a high place, he is right on the edge, and you mustn’t startle him but rather speak calmly to make him turn around and come to you. You might be nervous on the inside, but outside you keep calm as rain. That summer rain I mean that is so quiet and matter of fact and falls straight down like a curtain.

Now I recommend you use one of those stainless steel bowls if you can, I switched to them a while back and you know there is a lightness to them and you can turn them around with one hand, while you are making the dough, seems like the dough likes to spin a bit, leastwise it makes it easier to mix. But once again I am ahead of myself.

So for the crust, first get your bowl out, and get out a coffee cup and put a bunch of ice cubes in it and add water, that will be your ice water that you add later. Into the bowl put a nice big glob of Crisco, maybe it is a cup, and twice as much flour and a big pinch of sugar and a little pinch of salt. Now use a pastry blender or a fork if you must but a fork is not as good. Nor are the new pastry blenders as good as the old ones, you might could find a good one at an antiques store, the old ones have the wooden handles painted
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red or green. They are the ones you put your hand on and right away you can feel the history of other hands on them. It lends a comfort and they are just better dough mashers anyhow.

So there you are, and you turn the bowl around with one hand and mash together the ingredients until you have what look like little pea-size blobs. Casually add a bit of ice water, maybe a quarter cup or so, how much water you need will depend on how much humidity is in the air that day. Add enough so that the dough sticks together.

NOT TOO STICKY. Make it sticky like it makes you want to play with it. When you have a nice ball of dough, divide it. Then sprinkle flour lightly over the place where you’re going to roll the piecrust out. You need a heavy wooden rolling pin and you need one of those ribbed cloth covers for it, you can still find them, and you can roll out on purt near anything, I used to use that old flowered tablecloth, but it’s nice to use a pastry cloth which you can also still buy, they have not corrupted them. Put the dough in the middle of the floured pastry cloth and shape it with both hands into a round shape. This lets it know what you expect of it. Flour your rolling pin a bit and then start rolling out the dough. People will tell you you must roll in one direction only. Not necessarily. What’s most important is a quick, even pressure, roll that thing out evenly until it is slightly larger than the dish you’re going to bake the pie in. Then gently roll the dough around the rolling pin, and unroll it over the dish. You will feel like the Queen of Sheba when you do this, it works out so nice. Pat the dough into the pan and trim off the excess so that you have just a nice little overhang. Now is where you put the apples in and you are almost done. Put the apples in, put a little more butter on the top, and give a good whiff. It should 210

t h e d a y i a t e w h a t e v e r i w a n t e d like to make your toes curl. Now roll out the top crust as above and put it over the apples. Crimp the crust, which I’m sure you remember that part at least don’t you? I often used to let you do it. You pinch those edges together for a pretty design. And you need to vent the top crust, and for that you can just stick fork tines in here and there or you can make a shape. You one time made the shape of an apple with a leaf on one of my pies, I hardly helped you at all. But you know you can do anything, you can spell out a person’s name or make autumn leaves or a dog with a bone or whatever you want, it is your pie, and there’s the value of making your own as if the taste weren’t enough. Sprinkle the top crust with cinnamon sugar, and you can roll out the extra dough and put butter and cinnamon sugar on it and then roll it up to make what I called roly-polies. I see now that some folks cut out shapes from the extra dough to put on top of the pie but that is in the bakeries where the pie costs around twenty dollars, which if everything else wasn’t conspiring to give me a heart attack that about would.

Let me read this over and see did I forget anything. Oh.

You should use about six good-size apples, put that part up top. You will have a pretty high pie when it’s raw, but the apples will bake down. Use a nine-inch pan. Then the apples don’t cook down so far from the crust that it looks like the Grand Canyon in there when you cut into it. Bake at 450 degrees for ten minutes and then at 350 degrees for forty-five. Go and do something else and soon the smell will come and find you and you will feel a great satisfaction.

Some people make a caramel apple pie where they mix butter and brown sugar and chopped nuts and put it on the bottom and then of course you use less sugar in the filling,
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that is a nice touch and a little surprise. Some will only eat apple pie with ice cream, and I have my doubts about that unless it is the real ice cream you can only find at a few parlors anymore and then I understand. Pie à la mode and a cup of coffee has done a lot for many. It wouldn’t hurt to serve the pie on some pretty plate. A piece of homemade pie should never see a paper plate. You might consider polka dots or flowers of any kind, but as for me I always had a soft spot for violets.

Well, Ruthie, that is it and I hope it makes sense, it is as good as I can do. I will say that there has been an unexpected pleasure in passing this along to you, you know I have no family left now Terrence is gone and I hear you have a husband and two girls, one married for heaven’s sake. So I hope you will make your own pie and pass the recipe on to your own family through the years. We have lost a lot these days from everything being done for you and fake. I suppose I’m getting old and cranky though most days I still feel in love with the world. I still feel like a young woman on the inside, too, it’s the oddest thing. I still feel like Flo with the high-heeled shoes that little Ruthie used to shuffle around in, dreaming of the day she’d be a grown-up. I hope being a grown-up turned out fine for you, honey, you were always a very nice little girl with apple cheeks and a pretty singing voice, and sometimes you sat in my lap like you were my own. You had a kindness about you which I hope remains, it is one thing about us that needn’t wither or quit working and thank goodness for that since everything else sure enough does, ha ha.

I’ll go out and mail this now. Take my constitutional. It looks like rain. I spect I’ll make it back before it hits.

Happy birthday, Ruthie, though I think the gift here 212

t h e d a y i a t e w h a t e v e r i w a n t e d was one you gave me. Here in your old town is someone who keeps you always in her heart and was glad to be reminded of you today.

Your former neighbor lady,

Flo

P.S. You might could put some foil around the edges of the crust if it gets to browning too soon. Move that up where it belongs.

sin city

For years now, Rita has been living a half-a-banana life.

Half a banana, half a muffin, half portions at restaurants, half-price movies that she goes to in the daytime, always feeling strange when she comes out of the theater and into sunlight. She doesn’t like going to movies in the daytime, but it’s safer and cheaper. And you don’t have to listen to the half-naked teenagers slouched down in their seats and flinging epithets around; it seems they can’t get through a sentence without the F-word. Just the other day, at the mall, Rita saw a pretty young woman come upon an apparent friend and say, “Fuck me,
hi
!”

Rita is sixty-seven and lives in a retirement community in Edina, Minnesota. Her husband, Ben, moved them there when they were only fifty-nine, after he took an early retirement. Then he promptly had a massive heart 214

t h e d a y i a t e w h a t e v e r i w a n t e d attack and died. What could she do? She lives there alone; it’s a nice place, everything on one level, a fair amount of privacy, a grocery store and a post office on the complex, a golf course and pool, too, though Rita neither golfs nor swims. Ben did that, but Ben’s not here.

She has taken to wearing modest, monochromatic dresses bought at Loehmann’s, and grinding stale bread up for bread crumbs. She saves tinfoil and plastic storage bags—not just clean pieces, she has begun washing the dirty ones. Although this might be seen as a “green” thing to do, an action for which Al Gore would pat her on the back, it’s not for the environment that she does such things. Rather, it is because of the creeping influence of her neighbors, many of whom also save rubber bands and twist ties and every return address label they receive in the mail. They fold grocery bags neatly and store them in the cracks alongside their refrigerators to use for trash bags and for mailing packages and for lining cupboard shelves.

They bring home shower caps from motels to cover bowls of leftovers, and wrap thinning bars of soap with net bags from onions and voilà:
scrubbers!
Scrubbers for what, Rita has no idea. Why ask? Ask, and she’ll get a half-reasonable answer and then she’ll start making
scrubbers!
too. Just like she has started wearing “their” shoes, a light gray ortho-pedic model that makes bowling shoes look like Jimmy Choo. Oh, she knows she can’t wear stilettos anymore, but what a comedown! So to speak. She has even begun to em-ulate her next-door neighbor, Elsie, whose perfume is the samples that come on foldout paper strips in magazines.

And don’t get Rita started on these people’s idea of entertainment. Their idea of a good time is playing bocce ball and managing their money so as to be able to leave their children a fortune. Going into the city on the bus to
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hear the symphony, where most of them will fall asleep.

Any theater they see comes with overcooked chicken and undercooked baked potatoes and a salad a rabbit wouldn’t eat. Dinner parties start promptly at six.

Peer pressure, that’s what all this is. She might as well be back in high school, where she felt obliged to wear multiple crinoline petticoats under her full skirts, and a big wide belt around her midsection. Oh, she hated wearing those uncomfortable things. But you had to! You had to wear those rabbit-fur collars with the pom-poms hanging down. You had to wear nickels in your loafers. You had to wear red lipstick and curled-under bangs and spit curls, and if you went steady, you had to wear your boyfriend’s ring on a chain around your neck and his letter jacket over your shoulders. And now Rita feels she’s only moments away from getting an elevated toilet seat and storing it in the front hall closet, just so it’s there when she needs it—that’s what everyone else does.

Well, enough is enough. She is far too young to be living like this, and she is going to bust out. She’s going to start spending her children’s inheritance. She’s going to buy wild salmon and jumbo cashews and Vosges chocolates, and she’s going to travel—alone, thank you, not in the company of a bunch of slow-moving people who block her view of whatever it is she’s supposed to be seeing and ask each other loudly, “Did you get that? Some guide, you can’t hear a word she’s saying!” so that Rita herself hasn’t a chance of hearing, either. Once, a sweet-faced woman who wore glasses that made it look as though she had com-pound eyes actually pinched Rita, so exasperated was she by not being able to hear. “Do you
mind
?” Rita asked, and the woman said, “What?”

Rita is going to start buying designer clothes and real 216

t h e d a y i a t e w h a t e v e r i w a n t e d jewelry. She might even move into some hip loft residence in the city and start wearing jewel-colored scarves like babushkas, and she might start drinking espresso. She doesn’t like espresso, but if she moves to a loft, she’ll probably start liking it.

This decision for radical change came suddenly. Rita woke up this morning and there it was, a psychic billboard:
Your life must go in a totally different direction. Now.
She supposes a mild discontent has been festering inside her subconsciously for a long time, that’s the way these things go for her. She’s not the kind of person to engage in endless self-analysis, and she is bored by those who do. But on occasion, she surprises herself by doing something completely unexpected that, in retrospect, was not so very shocking after all. As a senior in high school, she had promised Don Trevor one night that she’d marry him the day after graduation, and she meant it with her whole heart and her whole mind and her whole soul. She went to bed that night dreaming of guest lists and simple white wedding gowns, of how their children might look. She was so happy, she cried. Then, months later, she awakened with a sudden clarity that had her breaking up with Don by lunchtime, no regrets on her part, and not even very much guilt. Once she knows, she knows.

She pours another cup of coffee and plans her day.

First, she’s going to get her hair permed—Dyan Cannon, she’s thinking, although she has short hair and looks nothing like Dyan Cannon—and buy a bunch of new clothes; and then she’s going to pack a bag and hire a town car to take her out to the airport, where she will get on the next flight to Las Vegas. She’ll buy a ticket right there, no matter the cost. She’s never forgotten a friend of hers, Patty Obermeier, who drove her friend Linda Schultz to the air-

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port in 1970. Linda was moving to San Francisco, and while they were sitting at the gate waiting for Linda’s flight to board, they both started crying—they were going to miss each other so much. Linda said, “Oh, come with me, why don’t you. Just go and get a ticket.” And Patty did.