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, 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 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 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 orthopedic 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 emulate 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 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 compound 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 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 r
egrets 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 airport 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. She called her sister to come and get the car—left the keys under the seat—and she wrote a bad check for a ticket and went to San Francisco with nothing but her purse. She called in to her job on Monday and said she wasn’t coming back and told them to mail her last paycheck to an apartment she’d found in the Haight. She got a great job at an investment banking company and did very well, and then married some watercolor artist and then Rita lost touch with her. Rita has always loved that story.
Well, now it’s her turn. She isn’t going to move to Las Vegas, but she is going there by herself for the weekend. She is going to Sin City, where what happens will stay there. Rita has always thought it disgusting to call a place Sin City and to say that what happened there, stayed there. But now that she’s going, she thinks it’s kind of exciting. It’s not really Sin City. Lucifer will not be standing there, twirling his mustache. She will not do anything for which she will have to ask forgiveness. She’s just going there to put a hand up and stop this noose from tightening. She’s going there to remind herself that she’s still a young woman. More or less. Well, she’s going to remind herself that she’s not that old. Some of the women in the retirement center work in nursing homes to prove to themselves that they’re not that old, but Rita could never do that. She would feel too bad for the patients, with their little figurines lined up on their windowsills. And she would come home smelling like pee.
In Las Vegas, she’s going to try to stay at that pyramid hotel, she thinks there really is something to the belief that pyramids have great power, but she’s planning to gamble at Bellagio. Just quarters in the slot machine, but that’s fine. She happens to be a very lucky person. She anticipates winning a fortune. And eating breakfast from those buffets that go on for miles, and if you think she’s eating Egg Beaters from them, well, forget it. She might go horseback riding in the daytime, if she can find a place that has an old reliable mare. Yes, she might buy a string tie featuring silver and turquoise to wear with a new white blouse and go horseback riding; she bets she can still ride a horse, look at Ronald and Nancy Reagan. And she’ll go to a Wayne Newton show and get a front-row seat and wear diamonds and drink Manhattans. One sentence she adores is “Oh, waiter, I’ll have a Manhattan.” She whispers it to herself now, as she stands at the sink washing her breakfast dishes, and both her big toes jump up.
As she wipes off the toaster, “Danke Schoen” is playing in her head. Bette Midler is in Las Vegas now, too! Rita will go and see her as well. She hopes Bette will sing “The Rose.” If she has enough Manhattans, she might go and see A Musical Tribute to Liberace. A musical tribute. What other kind of tribute could it be?
At a fancy dress shop in the Galleria mall, Rita sits on the little brocade bench of the dressing room trying to read the numbers on her purse-size calculator, which a Lilliputian couldn’t read. Well, if she buys what she wants to—the black bathing suit with the pretty pink and black paisley print robe for covering up, the lime green pantsuit with the matching silk shell, the silver sparkly top and sweater and black silk pants to wear to shows, the two wrap dresses that actually look very nice on her, the soft-as-cloud light blue pajama ensemble, the gray jeans and white blouse and black blazer for horseback riding, as well as the denim jeans and jean jacket in case she decides the other outfit is too nice to ride in—she’ll spend about a thousand dollars. And she hasn’t even gotten shoes or jewelry yet. For a moment, she considers walking out of the store and forgetting the whole thing, but no. No! She has almost two hundred thousand dollars squirreled away here and there. Why should she hold on to so much? So that her children can get talked into buying a finer coffin for her? Or, more likely, so that they can get talked into buying a finer flat-screen TV for themselves? No. She will buy every single item, and then she will hurry and buy some kitten heels. She looks at her watch. Twenty of twelve. She’s not sure how many flights there are a day to Vegas. Maybe she’ll buy the jewelry at one of the hotels on the strip, that might be fun. She’ll buy it with her winnings so that, really, it will be free.
When she puts the calculator back in her purse, she sees a small piece of paper stuck to the bottom. She really must clean out her purse. She’ll do that on the plane, she likes to have projects to do on the plane so that the time passes more quickly. She used to embroider until needles and sewing scissors became weapons. She wonders what would happen in a face-off between embroidery scissors and five ounces of toothpaste.
Rita pulls the paper out of her purse and squints at it: it’s a ticket stub of some kind. She moves it closer to the light on the dressing room wall and sees that it’s from a tour she and Ben took of the birthplace of John Kennedy. So many years ago now, but Rita remembers the day clearly: it was cold and rainy, and after the tour they went to some deli in Brookline that had wonderful matzo ball soup. They’d been a little depressed after the museum; whatever you thought of John Kennedy, his regime did at the time seem like Camelot; Bush Senior, who was in office at the time, just didn’t compare. And Barbara Bush next to Jackie O? They’d talked about Jackie for a while, and Ben had told Rita she was every bit as beautiful as Jackie. She wasn’t, but Ben really believed she was.
She sits back down on the bench, holding the ticket as though it’s Ben’s hand. She had loved Ben, but they should never have been together. When they met, she told him she loved Elvis and he said he favored Pat Boone: there were their differences in a nutshell. She liked things a little wild, and he liked them Christian. In the way of the times, when men wore the pants in the family and women were subservient to their husbands’ preferences, Ben dictated a life that was always too tame for her. And she gave in to it because she thought she had to, but also she wanted to, because she loved him so. A friend once described him as “friendly as yellow mustard,” and he was, that was exactly the right way to describe him. And oh, his mild blue eyes. His earnestness. His sentimentality. The way he fathered their children, he had been a wonderful father. Too wonderful, perhaps. For the bulk of Alice’s and Randy’s childhood, Rita had felt that she was on the sidelines of parenting while Ben ran the plays. Oh, they agreed on things generally, where the kids were concerned, but it was Ben who made the kids pancakes every Sunday and Halloween costumes every year. (The things that man could do with a simple cardboard box! One year the kids were dice; another year Alice was a wrapped present, ribbons spilling from her hair, while Randy was a weatherman on television, wearing a shirt and tie and congenial smile, climate maps pasted behind him.) Ben checked their homework and coached their teams and was the last to say good night. When they moved out, he offered financial advice, and when each of them decided to get married, it was Ben whom they told first. What bothered her most was when they were little and got hurt and ran to him for comfort.
Once, when the kids were ten and eight, Rita told a good friend that she felt her children had drawn a bad number in the mother lottery. She said she had all the flaws of Dorothy’s traveling companions in The Wizard of Oz: straw for brains, no courage, and not enough heart. And her friend put her hand over Rita’s and said, “Sweetheart, that’s just not true. Don’t be so hard on yourself!”
That night, Rita got in a nasty argument with Ben, and she ac
cused him of stealing the children’s love from her—co-opting their affections by never giving her the chance to respond to them first. “Rita,” he said, “are you jealous? You sound like you’re jealous.” And she admitted that she was, and he asked what he might do to help and she said nothing, it was too late, and she spent the rest of the night drinking from that bitter brew. But the next morning, she kissed the kids and sent them off to school and wiped off the breakfast table thinking, Well, isn’t it lucky that they love their father so much? Isn’t it good to have a man so open with his emotions, so warm and loving, when so many men keep their feelings so tightly bound they can’t even reveal themselves to themselves? Ben was a good man, through and through, and was that rarest of things: perfectly content with an ordinary life. It comes to her now that he would be horrified at what she is about to do. She feels, for the first time, a rush of guilt, of shame; she has a thought that what she is doing is completely inappropriate, wacky, even—is she getting wacky? People who live alone sometimes do.
Well, she’ll ask Ben. She often talks to him in her head, and he often answers her. She closes her eyes and thinks, Should I go to Las Vegas? And she hears, Have a ball, kiddo. He used to say that all the time, “Have a ball, kiddo.” That was him, all right, he’s tuned in to her today. She’s going to Las Vegas! But she really will have to hurry, now. She puts the ticket into her wallet, tenderly.