We won’t deconstruct your choice of casserole: it may simply be the only ovenproof dish you have that is big enough. If you think cooked fruit adheres stubbornly to baking dishes, you can rub the inside of the casserole with a congealed fatty substance. When you put the fruit in the dish, you might want to arrange it in concentric circles. Then again, you might not.
You may now mix the following optional substances with the fruit or, if you’ve arranged the fruit in a pattern, pour them on top of it.
Tart liquid: Fresh or bottled lemon or lime juice, frozen orange juice concentrate, or vinegar. Do any of these choices make you uncomfortable? Why?
Spice: Cinnamon, nutmeg, and allspice are conventional; cardamom, clove, ginger, or mace are more daring. Using all of them is foolhardy.
Thickener: Flour, cornstarch, or instant tapioca. Mix this well with the fruit. If you’ve arranged the fruit in a pattern, skip the thickener, because it will lie glutinously in a layer, like the economic benefits of tax breaks for the rich.
Sweetener: Your most ideologically sensitive decision. Sugar (white, brown, raw, turbinado), honey (processed, raw, comb), maple syrup, molasses, brown rice syrup, barley malt extract, Karo syrup (light or dark), sorghum syrup, treacle, fruit preserves, raisins, dates, or gummi bears. (Do any of these disgust you? How come? Health? Politics? Class or ethnic origins? Age-group? Trendiness-index?) Add as much or as little sweetener as you can tolerate. For assistance, consult your priest or shaman, or in an emergency, call 911.
Now we come to the crunchy stuff. You really have an opportunity to express yourself here. (“You was always crazy, Thelma,” said Louise. “You just never had a chance to express yourself before.”) Below are some of your choices.
Flour: Bleached white, stoneground whole wheat, defatted soybean.
Nuts: Almonds, walnuts, pecans, hazelnuts, cashews, peanuts, shredded coconut, sunflower seeds.
Cereals: Rolled oats, wheatgerm, granola, cornflakes, anything that comes free in the mail with a 25-cents-off coupon.
Crumbs: From stale bread or cake, graham crackers, cookies, macaroons, or those salt-free Triskets that somebody brought to your New Year’s Eve Party in 1987.
Oil or shortening: Butter, peanut or safflower oil, sesame oil, even (gasp!) Crisco. (But not olive oil! No! No! No!)
Salt: Sea salt, kosher salt, iodized free-flowing table salt, salt-free salt.
Okay. You’ve made your choices and baked your dessert. Now choose what you’re going to put on top of it. Whipped cream? Yogurt? Crème fraîche? Yaourt? Tofu-based frozen dessert-supplement? Yoghourt? Cool Whip? Yoghert? Ack! Maybe I’ll just have a Pepperidge Farm cookie and a glass of milk.
Spring Conditions
Mia pushed herself slowly to the top of the rise on her long, narrow skis. She was still hung over and wrung out from last night, and though the hill was not steep, it required all the effort she wanted to give. When she got to the ridge, she waited there for Zeb.
The day was wet and too warm, the forest dripping, fog-muffled, monochromatic. The snow, heavy and granular beneath her skis, was still three or four feet deep. Dead sticks thrust out of it. Light rain fell with a distant murmur, like the sound of a silk shroud.
The top of the hill was only sparsely covered with trees, and she could see further ahead, where the trail sloped down to a small, snow-covered pond. It was darker down there, and a damp breeze was rising from the pond. Mia shivered. Warm air moves uphill; she had read that somewhere. Warm air moving uphill can be a storm signal in the Sierras. Or was that just at night?
They’d have to start back to the lodge soon, but maybe they’d have time to check out the pond. It would be a nice place to hike to later in the spring, but, like the woods along the trail, it was sad and decayed now. The death of winter is the first sign of spring in the Sierras, but winter here doesn’t die easy.
Mia felt a small death in her, too: the first indication, perhaps, of a rebirth. Skiing, solitary, ahead of Zeb, she had come to a decision. Her anger of last night had dissipated, but like the alcohol that had fed it, it had left her feeling sick. They had fought so many times before, over such insignificant matters. It was time to put an end to it.
Zeb skied up beside her. Brown, bearded, not unfriendly in spite of their fight, he was a welcome sight, but Mia hardened her resolve.
“Porcupine tracks back there,” he said, slightly out of breath. “Like someone dragged a broom across the snow.”
“I’ve made a decision,” said Mia. “I’m getting out of LA. Maybe go to Oregon.” She looked away from him, between two scraggly lodgepole pines, toward the pond.
Zeb stared at her warily. “It wasn’t that bad a fight,” he said. “I’m sure the staff at the lodge has forgotten all about it. There’s no need to leave the state.”
Mia smiled slightly, against her will. “I’m serious.”
“We shouldn’t throw away our time together so casually.”
“You mean we should stick it out like a cat and dog tied tail-to-tail?” Mia didn’t want to face him. Her eyes sought the distance, the dark woods beyond the far edge of the pond.
“We don’t have to fight,” said Zeb. He was still looking at her. “I don’t even understand what we fought about last night.”
Mia forced herself to turn to him, and the courage of honesty came to her. “I don’t know, either. There’s just something in me that lashes out at you. That’s why I want to go. There’s something in me that fears and hates and fights, and I have no control over it with you. It’s happened before, too, with other people.”
Now Zeb searched the forest, refused to meet her eyes. “This is no place to have a serious conversation. We’ve got to get going anyway, if we’re going to make it back to the lodge before dark.”
“I want to get a closer look at the pond,” said Mia, relieved to drop the subject. She pushed forward on her skis. The corner of the pond that had been hidden by the pines came into view. The surface of the ice was broken, and there was a jagged circle of brown water, as though someone had fallen in. She called out to Zeb.
He came up beside her, and gave a puzzled grunt. “No footprints, no ski tracks. No sign of an animal. Kind of far from the trees for a limb to have fallen in.”
The air coming up from the pond was wet and clinging. Mia shivered again. “Maybe something’s breaking out,” she said. Zeb looked at her blankly; that didn’t make sense. “Let’s go,” she said. “It’s getting cold and dark.” As she turned to go down the slope the way they’d come, she thought she saw something move in the dark gap of the pond. “Wait.” She swung back to see what it was. In the dark brown water, something was bobbing slowly, just under the surface. It was pale and bulky, like a badly wrapped package. A body?
“If it happened before the last snow, there’d be no tracks,” said Zeb.
As they watched, the package broke the surface slowly and gently, like a bubble rising in oil. It bobbed uncertainly and rotated. A bare foot, white as chalk, appeared from underneath. The stench of rotting flesh drifted like mist up the slope. There was someone in there, past any help they could give.
“My god,” whispered Mia. But Zeb was already heading down the hill to the pond. “What are you going to do?” she shouted. He didn’t answer, and she pushed off after him, their argument already far in the past.
She caught up to him quickly. They stopped at the bottom of the hill, by the edge of the pond. They couldn’t see the body any better than they had from the hill. Was it wearing a tan parka? The foot had sunk back down below the water: it wasn’t visible. The smell of putrefaction was stronger now, almost overwhelming.