MERINGUES

MERINGUES
I made meringues. It was already nine o’clock, and meringues take forever, but I had a craving, and beating the egg whites until glossy white and stiff was suddenly all

Photo by Katerina Lunyova on Unsplash

I wanted to do—so I stood there with the beater in my hand and watched four transparent nondescript egg whites get thick and shiny and thicker and shinier and stiff and stiffer, adding sugar and more sugar and beating until not a single peak drooped when I finally raised the beaters up from the yellow bowl. God I love meringues. Then I needed a cookie sheet. All of my cookie sheets have clay faces on them, which keeps them safer than lying around loose. I chose a small one, only had to take nine faces off and put them on the bookcase. Next I cut a piece of the whatchamacallit paper to fit the cookie sheet, and put blobs of egg white on top of the paper I forget the name of that keeps everything from burning, and stuck them in the oven at 200 degrees. It’s less about baking, more about drying. You want a meringue to shatter in your mouth. Then I made a soft custard out of the egg yolks. Around midnight I turned off the heat, took four perfect meringues off the cookie sheet and ate them with custard spooned on top, leaving the rest in the oven to keep dry. Heaven. Went to bed. This morning I ate four more for breakfast and now I’m in the middle of culling faces from the hundreds I’ve made, keeping only the ones that have something terrified or funny or hopeless or furious or puzzling going on. Or sexy. Sexy is rare. There is one with a very nice mouth set in an interesting smile. I think he’s a singer. He lives on the coffee table next to where I sit at night. How cool is it to make a face with your own two hands of a man you would love to fuck if he were big and alive? Very. I know I’ve said this before, but damn. It bears repeating. Oh hell, it is getting hot. Warnings and heat advisories all over the place. Three meringues left and I’m eating them right now. Why wait? I could drop dead any minute. Might as well die with a mouth full of sugar.