How To Make Unicorn Pie.

Esther M. Friesner.

Building up a high fluted rim, prepare in a 9-inch pie pan, baked flaky pastry crust. Whisk in thoroughly

1 smallNew Englandtown

2 searching hearts

1 astute observer

3 possibly-mythical animals.

Fold in Esther Friesner's distinctive sense of humor, let simmer. Read at leisure and enjoy. Delicious!

I LIVE IN THE TOWN OF Bowman's Ridge,Vermont, founded 1746, the same year if not the same universe asPrincetonUniversity. But wherePrincetonhas employed the intervening centuries to pour forth a bounteous-if-bombastic stream of English majors, Bowman's Ridge has employed the same time to produce people who are actually, well, employable.

Bowman's Ridge is populated exclusively by three major ethnic groups, the two most numerous of which are Natives and Transients. I've lived here for twenty-five years, in one of the smaller authentic Colonial Era houses onMain Street. It has white clapboard siding, conservatively painted dark green shutters, the original eighteenth-century well, a floral clock, a flouris.h.i.+ng herb garden, a rockery, and a paid-up mortgage. Local tradition claims that Ethan Alien once threw up here.

I'm still just a Transient. That's how the Natives would have it, anyway. On the other hand, at least I'm a Transient that they can trust, or perhaps the word I want is tolerate. Just as long as I don't bring up the unfortunate subject of how I earn my living, everything is roses.

You see (and here I ought to turn my face aside and drop my voice to the requisite hoa.r.s.e whisper reserved for all such disgraceful confessions), I...write.

UNCLEAN! UNCLEAN!.

Someone get a firm hold on the carriage horses lest they stampede and make sure that no pregnant women cross my path. I wouldn't like to be held responsible for the consequences.

No, I am not taking on unnecessarily. I've seen the looks I get on the street and in the stores. I've heard the whispers: "There goes Babs Barclay. She writes." (Uttered in the same deliciously scandalized tone once applied to prim old maids with a secret addiction to overdosing on Lydia Pinkham's elixir, cooking sherry, vanilla extract, and hair tonic.)

To the good folk of Bowman's Ridge, having a writer in their midst is rather like having a toothless, declawed cat in the chicken coop. The beastie may look harmless, logic may insist that in its present state sans fang and talon it is by fiat harmless, but the biddies still huddle together, clucking nervously, because... You never know.

I know what they are afraid of. It's the same fear that's always plagued small towns condemned to harbor the Pen Pushers from Planet Verbiage. It's the ultimate terror, which I first saw voiced by a secondary character in one of the Anne of Green Gables books when the heroine began to garner some small success as an author: What ii she puts us in one o/her stories? Not a direct quote, but it'll do.

Forget what you think you know about fame. Not everyone wants his or her allotted fifteen minutes' worth. The people of Bowman's Ridge want it even less than the people of Avonlea, orPeyton Place, or any other small town that had the poor judgment to allow writers to burrow into the wainscotting and nest for the winter. They are simple, honest, hardworking folk, who will take a simple, honest tire iron to your head if you so much as hint that you're going to make the outside world aware of their existence. (I think that the surplus of deferred fame-bites gets funneled into an offsh.o.r.e account where Donald Trump's ego, Michael Jackson's manhood, and Madonna's uterus spend much too much time making withdrawals. I could be wrong.)

It doesn't do me a lick of good to explain to my friends and neighbors that their fears are for naught. I write romances. Historical romances. Books with t.i.tles like Druid's Desire and Millard Filmore, My Love. The only way I'd write about anyone from Bowman's Ridge is if they were romantic, famous, and dead.

Why, they could no more get into one of my books than a taxman into heaven, a linebacker into leotards, or a small, sharp sliver of unicorn horn into a nice big slice of Greta Marie Bowman's apple pie.

"Ow!"

It was a snoozy afternoon in mid-November and I was seated at the counter in the coffee shop when it happened. The coffee shop in Bowman's Ridge is the nexus for all manner of social interaction, from personal to political. I'm afraid my Transient heart doesn't get all revved up over the Planning and Zoning Commission's latest bureaucratic brouhahaha or the Women's Club's plans for yet another authentic Colonial weekend to honor the memory of our own Captain James Resurrection Bowman C1717-1778). I go there because the coffee is good but the apple pie is downright fabulous.

Or so I thought, until I found the figurative needle in the Northern Spies.

Carefully I put three fingers into my mouth and drew out the thing that had stung me, tongue and palate. I pulled it between my lips to clean off any adhering fragments of cooked apple and flaky crust. I have no idea why I went to the trouble. Would it make any difference to my throbbing mouth if I got the barb clean before seeing what it was?

I might as well have saved myself the effort and simply spit it out. Even clean and wiped dry on a paper napkin, it was nothing I could put a name to. About as long as the first joint of my little finger and one-quarter as wide, it caught the light from the coffee shop overheads and s.h.i.+mmered like the inside of an abalone sh.e.l.l.

"Something wrong, dear?" Muriel's shadow fell over the object of my attention.

Muriel and her husband Hal own and run the Bowman's Ridge coffee shop. I like to think that they belong to some mystic fraternal order of interior decorators -- the Harmonic Knights of the Cosmic Balance, Fabric Swatch and Chowder Society -- for the way they keep the place charming without being cloying. Anyone who's dallied in small town Vermont knows how easy it is for an eatery to sink into the La Brea Cute Pits. Either the management heaps on the prat-a-porter antiques, or wallows in frills and dimity, or worst of all, beats it with the Quaint stick until it catches a case of Terminal Rusticity from the knotty-pine paneling and dies.

Hal and Muriel just serve good food, never patch the vinyl counter stools with duct tape, adorn the place suitably for holidays, and periodically change the basic decor according to the grand, universal imperative of We Felt Like It. Oh!

And they never shop at Everything Guernseys, thanks be to G.o.d, Jesus, Ben and Jerry.

Muriel has never treated me like a Transient and she sees to it that all the waitresses know how I take my coffee (black, two sugars) without my having to tell them every time. She even awarded me the supreme accolade, posting a Happy Birthday, Babs message on the whiteboard where they display the daily Specials.

This privilege is as good as telling the world that I might not be a Bowman's Ridge Native, but I was one of the Transients they could take out of the attic on visiting days to show the neighbors. I like Muriel a lot.

So of course I lied to her. "Nuh-uh," I said, hastily clapping my hand over the extracted sliver. "Nothing's wrong, not a thing, great pie."

Muriel gave me a searching look, but all she said was, "Yes, Greta Marie said she's gotten some superior apples this season." Then one of the waitresses came up to tell her she was wanted in the kitchen and she was gone.

Left to myself once more, I uncovered the sliver and picked it up delicately between thumb and forefinger. It twinkled with all the hues of prism-shattered light, but it was made of no substance I could name. The man on the stool next to me cast a curious glance at it, but promptly went back to reading his newspaper. People in this town don't pry. Why bother, when every sc.r.a.p of local news scoots around faster than a ferret on amphetamines? Sooner or later, everyone knows everything about everyone else.

Well, I thought, it's very attractive, whatever it is. I'll bring it home; maybe Rachel can make something out of it. Rachel is my teenaged daughter. She has discovered the Meaning of Life, which is to make jewelry out of any object you find lying around the house, yard, or munic.i.p.al dump, and pierce another part of your body to hang it from. At least this object was pretty, and I always say that a good soak in Clorox will clean anything, up to and including Original Sin.

I was so fascinated by the way the light played off my little bit of found art that I didn't notice Muriel's return until I heard her say, "Uh-huh. Thought so."

Caught in the act, I tried to cover up my sorry attempt at willful misdirection by dropping the sliver onto the open pages of the magazine I'd brought into the coffee shop with me and slamming the glossy cover shut on it. Slapping my hand over the bare-chested male model on the cover, I gave Muriel a sickly smile. "Dropped a contact," I said. "I don't want it to fall on the floor."

No dice. You can't fake out a woman who can tell good tuna salad from bad at fifty paces. "Honey, who are you trying to protect?" she said. "Greta Marie? You don't even know her."

That was true. Greta Marie Bowman belonged to the third and smallest segment of Bowman's Ridge society: Eccentrics. As my dear mother would say, an eccentric is what you call a lunatic who's got money. Mom was speaking from the jaded, materialistic perspective of big city tile, however. In places like Bowman's Ridge, we realize that money doesn't excuse abnormal behavior. You don't have to be rich and crazy to be cla.s.sed as an eccentric; you can be poor and crazy, so long as you're also the scion of one of the town's oldest families. Or in Greta Marie Bowman's case, the scionette.

Yes, she was the descendant of that Bowman. And yes, she was living in what: the Victorians referred to as genteel poverty. Whatever mite of income she derived from her ancestors' surviving investments needs must be eked out by the sale of apple pies to the coffee shop. This was one of those cold, hard facts that everyone knew and no one mentioned. A Mafia don brought up to follow the steel-jacketed code of silence, omerta, is a harebrained blabbermouth next to a resident of Bowman's Ridge who's got something not to say.

"Look, it's nothing," I said. "I may not know her, but I certainly don't want to get her in w ,, "Trouble?" Muriel finished for me. She sighed. "Babs, you want to know the meaning of the word? That thing you just found in your pie, what do you think would've happened if someone else had found it?"

"Not much. Everyone around here knows Greta Marie and no one would say anything that would--"

"Think that goes for the Summer People?"

Na-na-na-naaaaah. Cue the sinister chords on the pipe organ. The only critters lower on the Bowman's Ridge food chain than Transients are Summer People. I don't know why the Natives despise them so. They are the single best thing to happen to the local economy since maple-leaf-shaped anything. They swarm up here every June, July and August, with a recurring infection come leaf-peeping time, and pay top dollar to stay in spare rooms that would otherwise be mold sanctuaries. They attend church bazaars and rummage sales, fighting to the death to buy the nameless tin and wicker doohickeys that the Natives clean out of Aunt Hattie's attic, taunt Hattie could never tell what the h.e.l.l that bug-ugly obiet al'awful was either.) And of course if you've got any piece of house-trash, no matter how old, no matter how dilapidated, all you have to do is stencil a pig or a sunflower or a black-and-white cow on it and it's outahere, courtesy of the Summer People.

On the other hand, serve them a slice of pie that's packing a concealed s.h.i.+v and they'll bring the Board of Health down on your head faster than you can sell them a busted b.u.t.ter churn.

"I see what you mean," I said. "But the season's over, the Summer People are all gone, and -- "

"Skiers," Muriel reminded me. "Snowmobilers."

"Oh." I'd forgotten that, like weasels, when winter came the Summer People changed their coats and returned to our little town in swarms.

"It really would be a kindness to tell her." Muriel patted my hand in a motherly way. "Won't you please?" "Ummmm. Why don't you?"

"Oh, I couldn't!" She laid her hands to her bosom. "She'd just simply fold up and die if I did. She doesn't take criticism too well, poor child." Only Muriel would refer to a spinster pus.h.i.+ng fifty-five as poor child, bless her. "She'd stop baking pies for us altogether. She needs the money, though she'd never admit it. What would become of her then? It'd be plain awful."

In my heart I agreed with Muriel, though more out of my love for the pies than any concern for the pie-maker's welfare. "But if she doesn't take criticism well, how could I say- ?" I began.

Muriel pish-tushed me like a champion. "But it's different if it comes from you, Babs."

I didn't need to ask why. Wasn't it obvious? I was a Transient. My cautionary words concerning unidentified opalescent objects in the pastry wouldn't shame Greta Marie the way a Native's would. In fact, if I were to go to Greta Marie's place and accuse her of using the fat of unborn goats for piecrust shortening she could live it down. So I went.

Greta Marie lived out on the Old Toll Road. This was a stretch of highway so narrow, frost-heaved and G.o.dforsaken that the fact that someone had once collected real American money from travelers to allow them the privilege of breaking their axles in the ruts and potholes was a testimony to Yankee ingenuity, to say nothing of Yankee gall. There was hardly enough room for two cars to pa.s.s, unless one climbed up onto the shoulder at a forty-five degree angle, b.u.mping over the gnarled roots of pine trees flanking the way. Luckily, the Old Toll Road had gone from being a throughway leading to Montpelier to a dead end leading to nowhere when the bridge over Bowman's Gorge collapsed in 1957. The town decided it would be a waste of money to rebuild it, since by then everyone took the State highway anyway, and that pretty much put an end to the two-way traffic problem.