1½ cups granulated sugar
6 tablespoons cornstarch
Pinch of salt
1 1/3 cups cold water
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
5 egg yolks
½ cup fresh lemon juice
1 tablespoon grated lemon zest
Prepare the pie shell. Meanwhile, combine the sugar, cornstarch, salt, and water in a nonreactive saucepan. Mix until there are no lumps, and whisk as the mixture gradually comes to a boil. Remove from the heat and add the butter.
In a separate bowl, whisk the egg yolks. Add a small amount of the hot liquid mixture and whisk until smooth. Add the egg mixture to the saucepan and bring to a boil over medium heat, continuing to whisk as it thickens, approximately 2 minutes. Remove from the heat and stir in the lemon juice and zest.
6 large egg whites at room temperature
Pinch of cream of tartar
Pinch of salt
¾ cup sugar
On low speed, beat the egg whites, cream of tartar, and salt until combined. Increase the speed and whip until they form stiff peaks. Beat in the sugar, 1 tablespoon at a time.
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Add the filling to the pie shell and top it with the meringue. Make sure you spread the meringue all the way to touch the edges of the crust. Bake for 10 to 15 minutes. Let the pie cool for about 2 hours, then refrigerate to prevent weeping.
Or just think happy thoughts.
Willow
March 2009
In school we have Hundred Day. It falls in late November, and we have to bring in a hundred of something, anything. When Amelia was in first grade, she brought in a hundred chocolate chips, but by the time she made it off the bus, she was down to fifty-three. Me, I brought a list of seventy-five bones I’ve broken and the names of twenty-five more that I haven’t.
A million is ten thousand hundreds. I can’t even think of ten thousand. Maybe there are that many trees in a forest or water molecules in a lake. Eight million is even more than that, and it is the number of dollars written on the big blue check that has been on our refrigerator for almost six months now.
My parents talk about that check a lot. They say that pretty soon the van will officially wheeze itself to death and we’ll have to use the money to buy a new one, but then they find a way to keep the old one running. They talk about how the registration deadline for camps for kids like me is coming up, and how they’ll have to send in a deposit. I have the brochures next to my bed. In them, there are kids in every color who have OI, like me. They all look happy.
Maybe that’s what happens to kids who go away somewhere. Amelia did, and when she came home, she had brown hair again and her own easel. She paints all the time-portraits of me while I’m sleeping, still lifes of coffee mugs and pears, landscapes in colors they’d never really be. I have to look really hard at her arms to see the silver scars, and even when she catches me looking, she hardly ever bothers to pull down her sleeves.
It was Saturday. My father was parked in front of the television, watch ing the Bruins. Amelia was outside somewhere, sketching. My mother was sitting at the kitchen table, playing solitaire with the index cards of her recipes. She had over a hundred (if only she was in the first grade!), and she’d decided to put them together in a cookbook. It was a compromise, because she didn’t have to bake all the time anymore like she used to for Mr. DeVille. He still stocked her pies and tarts and macaroons when she went off on a tear in the kitchen, but now her big plan was to publish the book, and give all the money she made to the Osteogenesis Imperfecta Foundation.
We didn’t need money, because ours was all tacked to the refrigerator.
“Hey,” my mother said, as I climbed onto a chair. “What’s up?”
“Nothing.” The mail, fanned out on the table like a bright scarf, caught my eye.
“There’s something in there for you,” my mother said.
It was a card-and inside was a picture of Marin with a boy who was probably around Amelia’s age. He had buck teeth and skin the color of chocolate. His name was Anton, and she had adopted him two months ago.
We didn’t see Piper, and Amelia and Emma weren’t friends anymore. The sign in front of the building that used to be her office didn’t have her name on it now. It said GRETEL HANDELMAN, CHIROPRACTOR, instead. And then one Saturday morning my dad and I went out to get bagels, and there was Piper in line in front of us. My dad said hello and she asked how I was doing, but even though she was trying to smile, it looked all wrong, like a wire that was bent out of shape and wouldn’t ever really be straight again. She told my dad that she was working part-time at a women’s free health clinic in Boston, and that she was on her way there right now. Then she knocked over the cup full of straws at the cash register, and she was in such a hurry to leave that she forgot to pay until the girl who had brought her her coffee reminded her it wasn’t free.
I missed Piper, but I think my mother missed her more. She didn’t really have any friends now. She didn’t hang out with anyone but me, Amelia, and Dad.
It was kind of sad, actually.
“Wanna bake?” I asked.
My mother rolled her eyes. “You cannot seriously tell me you’re hungry. You just had lunch.”
I wasn’t hungry, but I was bored.
She looked up at me. “Tell you what. Go get Amelia, and we’ll figure out a plan of action. A movie, maybe.”
“Really?”
“Sure,” my mother said.
We could treat ourselves to movies now. And we went out to restaurants. And I was going to get a sports wheelchair so that I could actually play kickball in the gym with my class. Amelia said the reason we could spend money all of a sudden was the check that was still on the refrigerator. At school there were jerks who said we were rich, but I knew that wasn’t really true. I mean, after all, my parents had never cashed the check. We still had a rusty old car and our little house and the same clothes. A lot of zeros didn’t mean anything, really, except security-my parents could splurge a little, because if their funds ran out, there was a backup. That meant they didn’t fight nearly as much, which wasn’t something you could buy at a store anyway. I didn’t know much about bank accounts, but I was smart enough to realize that checks didn’t do you any good unless they were deposited. My parents, though, didn’t seem to be in any great rush. Every few weeks my mother would say, I really ought to bring that to the bank, and my father would grunt in agreement, but somehow it never got done, and the check stayed tacked on the fridge.
I went into the mudroom to get my boots and my coat, my mother’s voice trailing behind. “Be-”
“Careful,” I finished. “Yeah, I know.”
It was March, but it was still cold enough out for my breath to make funny shapes through my scarf: one that looked like a chicken and another that was a hippo. I started down the slope of the backyard carefully. There wasn’t snow anymore, but the ground still crunched under the soles of my boots. It made a sound like teeth biting.
Amelia was probably in the woods; she liked to draw the birches because she said they were tragic, and that something so beautiful shouldn’t have to die so quickly. I dug my hands into my pockets and tucked my nose under the edge of my scarf. With each step, I thought of something I knew:
The average woman consumes six pounds of lipstick in her lifetime.