“Amelia!”
They didn’t look at each other; as far as I knew they hadn’t spoken since this afternoon. I wondered if they realized that they could be on opposite sides of the globe right now, and still be having this dinner conversation, and it wouldn’t make a difference.
You squirmed away from the fork Mom was waving in front of your face. “Stop treating me like a baby,” you said. “Just because I broke my shoulder doesn’t mean you have to treat me like I’m two years old!” To illustrate this, you reached for your glass with your free arm, but you knocked it over. Milk landed in part on the tablecloth and mostly smack in the middle of Dad’s plate. “Goddammit!” he yelled, and he reached toward me and ripped the headphones out of my ears. “You’re part of this family, and you’ll act that way at the dinner table.”
I stared at him. “You first,” I said.
His face turned a steamy red. “Amelia, go to your room.”
“Fine!” I shoved my chair back with a screech and ran upstairs. With tears leaking out of my eyes and my nose running, I locked myself in the bathroom. The girl in the mirror was someone I didn’t know: her mouth twisted, her eyes dark and hollow.
These days, it seemed as if everything pissed me off. I got pissed off when I woke up in the morning and you were staring at me like I was some zoo animal; I got pissed off when I went to school and my locker was near the French classroom when Madame Riordan had made it her personal mission to make my life horrible; I got pissed off when I saw a gaggle of cheerleaders, with their perfect legs and their perfect lives, who worried about things like who would ask them to the next dance and whether red nail polish looked trampy, instead of whether their moms would remember to pick them up from school or be otherwise occupied at the emergency room. The only times I wasn’t pissed off, I was hungry-like right now. Or at least I thought it was hunger. Both felt like I was being consumed from the inside out; I couldn’t tell the difference anymore.
The last time my parents had been fighting-which was, like, yesterday-you and I were in our bedroom, and we could hear them loud and clear. Words slipped under the door, even though it was closed: wrongful birth…testimony…deposition. At one point I heard the mention of television: Don’t you think reporters would get wind of this? Is that what you really want? Dad said, and for a moment I thought how cool it would be to be on the news, until I remembered that being a poster child for dysfunctional family life wasn’t really how I wanted to spend my fifteen minutes of fame.
They’re mad at me, you said.
No. They’re mad at each other.
Then we both heard Dad say, Do you really think Willow wouldn’t figure this out?
You looked at me. Figure what out?
I hesitated, and instead of answering, I reached for the book you had in your lap and told you I’d read out loud.
Normally you didn’t like that-reading was just about the only thing you could do brilliantly, and you usually wanted to show it off, but you probably felt like I did at that moment: like there was a big Brillo pad in your stomach, and every time you moved, it grated your insides. I had friends whose parents had divorced. Wasn’t this the way it all started?
I opened to a random page of facts and began to read out loud to you about unlikely and gruesome deaths. There was a Brink’s car guard who was killed when fifty thousand dollars’ worth of quarters fell out of a truck and crushed him. A gust of wind pushed a man’s car into a river near Naples, Italy, so he broke the window and climbed out and swam to shore, only to be killed by a tree that blew over and crushed him. A man who went over Niagara Falls in a barrel in 1911 and broke nearly every bone in his body later on slipped on a banana peel in New Zealand and died from the fall.
You liked that last one best, and I’d gotten you to smile again, but inside, I was still miserable: how could anyone ever win when the world beat you down at every turn?
That was when Mom came into the room and sat down on the edge of your bed. “Do you and Daddy hate each other?” you asked.
“No, Wills,” she said, smiling, but in a way that made her skin look like it was stretched too tightly over the edges of her face. “Everything’s absolutely fine.”
I stood up, my hands on my hips. “When are you going to tell her?” I demanded.
My mother’s gaze could have cut me in half, I swear. “Amelia,” she said in a tone that brooked no argument, “there is nothing to tell.”
Now, sitting on the edge of the bathtub, I realized what a total liar my mother was. I wondered if that was what I was destined for, if you could inherit that tendency the same way she had passed me the ability to double-joint my elbows, to tie a cherry stem into a knot with my tongue.
I leaned over the toilet bowl, stuck my finger down my throat, and vomited, so that this time when I told myself I was empty and aching, I would finally be telling the truth.
Blind Baking: the process of baking a pie crust without the filling.
Sometimes, when you’re dealing with a fragile dough, it will collapse in spite of your best intentions. For this reason, some pie crusts and tart shells must be baked before the filling is added. The best method is to line the tart pan or pie plate with the rolled-out dough and place it in the fridge for at least 30 minutes. When you are ready to bake, prick the crust in several spots with a fork, line the pie plate or tart shell with foil or parchment paper, and fill it with rice or dried beans. Bake as directed, then carefully remove the foil and the beans-the shell will have retained its form because of them. I like seeing how a substance that weighs heavily can, in the end, be lifted; I like the feel of the beans, like trouble that slips through your fingers. Most of all, I like the proof in the pastry: it is the things we have to bear that shape us.
1 1/3 cups all-purpose flour
Pinch of salt
1 tablespoon sugar
½ cup + 2 tablespoons cold unsalted butter, cut into small pieces
1 large egg yolk
1 tablespoon ice water
In a food processor, combine the flour, salt, sugar, and butter. Pulse until coarse. In a small bowl, whisk the egg yolk and ice water. With the processor running, add the yolk mixture to the flour and butter until a ball forms. Remove the dough, wrap it in plastic, flatten to a disk, and chill for 1 hour.
Roll the dough out on a lightly floured surface and place it in a tart pan with a removable bottom. Chill before baking.
Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F. Remove the tart pan from the fridge, prick the crust all over with a fork, line the shell with foil, and fill with dried beans. Bake for 17 minutes, remove the foil and beans, and continue baking for another 6 minutes. Cool completely before filling.
Sweet Pastry Dough tart shell-blind baked
2-3 apricots
2 egg yolks
1 cup heavy cream
¾ cup sugar
1½ tablespoons flour
¼ cup chopped hazelnuts
Peel the apricots, slice, and arrange in the bottom of a blind-baked tart shell.
Combine the egg yolks, cream, sugar, and flour. Pour over the apricots and sprinkle with the hazelnuts. Bake in a preheated 350 degree F oven for 35 minutes.