Chronicles of a Radical Hag (with Recipes)

by Lorna Landvik

  She served me a bowlful from a stove pot on slow simmer, and after my first spoonful of the orange soup, I said, “Oh, my.”

  “If I make something, I make it well,” she said.

  “What is it? It’s so good.”

  “Sweet potato bisque. The sweet potatoes are from my friend Carl’s farm. So is the cream.”

  I nodded, wanting to use my mouth to eat rather than talk.

  “When I consider the damage canned soups have done to the American palate.” SuZell shook her head. “Well, it’s just like everything else. Convenience has overthrown quality as king.”

  The thick-crusted bread was homemade, and she used something called “a French press” to make our coffee. Dessert was light-as-air meringue cookies.

  “I always kept a tin of these in my fitting room,” she said. “Fairly low calorie, fairly big flavor. The stars loved them.”

  We talked through the afternoon, SuZell answering my questions thoughtfully.

  Everything started, she said, when she flipped a coin in the chicken coop after she and her brother had finished collecting eggs.

  “Heads was for New York. Tails was Hollywood. Tails won, and I packed a suitcase that night.

  “You know that old song, ‘How ya gonna keep ’em down on the farm’? My dad sang that at the supper table when I told them I was leaving.” SuZell’s face softened. “Dad and Mama were my biggest fans.”

  She talked about how the Hays Code put an end to the sensual gowns and dresses designers were making. “After that, the undergarments were like trusses.” She talked about how confidence levels rarely went hand in hand with beautiful faces and figures. “In the end, it’s all about feeling loved, isn’t it? First and foremost by yourself.”

  When I asked again why she had returned to Fargo after all those decades in Hollywood, she shrugged. “It just tired me out. When they decided I was too old to work, what did that place hold for me? The family farm—now my nephew runs it—is only a couple miles west of town, so I see my brother and his family a lot—and I still have high school friends here. And of course, Helmer.”

  “Who’s Helmer?”

  The sudden migraine look flashed on her face, but it was quickly softened with a smile.

  “Only the man who makes Clark Gable and Cary Grant and Gary Cooper look like two-bit stand-ins. The man the girl stupidly left behind, but the one the woman wisely came home to.”

  When I left, she gave me the kind of pin cushion you wear around your wrist like a bracelet.

  “You always want to work smart,” SuZell said. “Never take the shortcuts that will shortchange you, but if there’s a shortcut that will get you there easier, take it.”

  May 6, 1964

  To the Editor:

  Having grown up in Fargo, I really enjoyed the piece on my old friend Susan Elias. We were chums from the time we first met in school, and I can’t tell you how many fashion tips she dispensed throughout the years! “Why go for ordinary,” she told me, when we were in the coat section at Orlandson’s and I tried on a practical plaid mackinaw, “when you can go for extraordinary?” SuZell’s success made all of us proud.

  Mrs. Mildred Baccus

  P.S. I wound up buying the plaid wool mackinaw anyway.

  Among other reader responses was the one from the Ramblin’s by Walt columnist, whose crabbed penmanship simply declared, “Still puking!” but Susan (who, Caroline teased, would be “SuMac like the shrub,” if she combined her first and last names) chose not to publish it, nor did she print his response to Haze’s following column—“This one drove me to the crapper!”

  May 11, 1964

  Evans’s Epistle*

  In the small town in western North Dakota where I grew up, we had Crazy Days, a weekend set aside for all Main Street merchants to offer deep discounts, free samples, and giveaways. Anyone visiting Grudem’s Shoes got a shoehorn, the five-and-dime gave children balloons, and Mr. Nelson of Nelson’s Hardware handed out yardsticks. That was on Saturday; Sundays the stores were closed and instead replaced by kiosks selling ice cream and cotton candy, and there was a parade, whose participants were encouraged to dress, well, crazy. Playing in the bandshell were Cy Shelby and The Swingers, a quintet composed mostly of farmers, whose rehearsal studio was Cy’s cow barn. (It was local legend that Cy’s serenaded Guernseys produced extrasweet milk.)

  As exciting as Crazy Days were, they could hardly prepare me for the launch of Granite Creek’s first Nordic Fest.

  Dreamed up by the civic-minded visionaries of the Women’s Auxiliary and our local Sons of Norway chapter, the festival kicked off with a breakfast Saturday morning in the basement of St. Peder’s Lutheran Church with lefse and the thick, rich Norwegian porridge that is rommegrot. The coffee was so strong that three days after the festival, I’m still up.

  The Nordic Fest parade (more toned-down than that of Crazy Days) featured a contingent of women in their “bunads,” the traditional Norwegian costumes representative of the area from which the wearer’s ancestors came. Playing the fiddle, Ole Siggurson, served as a pied piper of sorts, leading the women, whose long skirts, jackets, vests and/or aprons featured beautifully intricate embroidery.

  There was a bit of a lull after the parade, with no more events scheduled until the Swedish meatball supper that evening, hosted by Our Savior’s, another of Granite Creek’s Lutheran churches. Danish pastries were offered for dessert, which inspired one congregant to say, “Thank goodness, Denmark gets a little recognition in all this hullabaloo!”

  Once the plates were cleared, we were encouraged to go into the sanctuary to hear Ardis Amdahl on the piano, accompanying her sister Gladys in a concert of Swedish folk music.

  “Next year we hope to have more events for the children,” said Avis Blake, president of the Ladies Auxiliary. “Maybe some clowns.” At that point she turned to Dolf Romsaas, president of the Sons of Norway.

  “Do they even have clowns in Scandinavia?”

  *I’m having trouble coming up with a name for my column! All suggestions sent in will be considered!

  3

  “This is stupid,” says Sam.

  Susan breathes deeply—in her yoga classes she’s learning the importance of breathing—before forcing her mouth into a fake smile.

  “Sam, we’ve been through this. We—you and I—agreed you needed a summer job. It’s already mid-July and—”

  “I’ve been working at Dad’s!”

  “Yes,” says Susan, trying not to react to his belligerent yet whiny tone. “On Saturday mornings, occasionally. That leaves you plenty of time for another job.”

  “Jack never had to work at the paper.”

  Susan smiles, to tamp down her simmering anger. “He was a paperboy for years, remember? But you’re right, he didn’t work in the offices, because he enjoyed working with your dad so much.” She doesn’t add, “And your father didn’t find him napping in the RV he was supposed to be cleaning.” Her smile grows bigger and more fake. “You’ll see, it’ll be fun. I’ve told you how much I enjoyed working at the paper when I was a teenager.”

  “Yeah, well, your idea of fun is a lot different than mine.”

  Again she chooses to smile rather than grit her teeth.

  “And you’re coming at the perfect time. We really need the help.”

  Sam rolls his eyes and rests his elbow on the passenger door frame. He and Jacob were going to ride their bikes down to the lake (whose narrow strip of beach is sure to be crowded with girls in bikinis) but no, he’s got to go with his stupid mother, who’s trying to ruin his summer vacation by making him work at her stupid paper.

  WITH AN ALMOST SNARLED “Morning,” the receptionist “greets” them, and this cheers Sam; he likes when adults don’t try to cover up how miserable they feel.

  He didn’t tell his mother, but he’s excited over the prospect of making money. Like Jack, he had been a paperboy, but Sam was not the wizard his brother was on a bicycle, riding no-handed as he flung papers on the st
eps of Gazette subscribers. No, Sam was much slower on his route and managed to get hit by a car—not hard enough to get hurt but hard enough to rattle his mother, who put an end to his delivery career.

  His friend Jacob works part-time as a bag boy at the FoodKing, and Sam put in an application, or at least he told his mother he did. Jacob says it’s easy enough and sometimes people tip him, but Sam doesn’t like the stupid long red aprons the bag boys have to wear.

  Stopping at the vending machine, he shoves in quarters, smirking at the annoyance his mother struggles to keep out of her voice as she says, “I’m sure there’ll be water in the conference room.” Out of the million things she bugs him about, she’s been bugging him not to drink so much pop; all that sugar and empty calories, blah blah blah.

  The Gazette has been running Haze’s columns for only a couple days, and if Susan weren’t aware of the crisis in the newspaper industry, she’d be convinced there wasn’t one. Going by mere reader response, she’d assume the paper had a circulation with a couple more zeros added on to its actual number.

  “Hey, Sam!” Caroline’s voice is so bright and friendly it almost knocks him out of his sullenness. He can’t quite bring himself to make eye contact with her (she’s so pretty!) but responds with what he hopes is a businesslike nod.

  Mitch, the managing editor, mimics his nod and says, “Welcome aboard, Sam!”

  As she seats herself and nods toward Sam to sit down, Susan takes a yoga breath when her son takes his time settling into a chair opposite of the one she indicated.

  “All right,” says Susan, scooting her chair in closer to the conference table. “As you all know, the response to Haze’s old columns has been phenomenal.”

  Mitch chuckles. “Shelly’s about ready to unplug the telephone console.”

  Normally a few minutes might have been spent on joking about the sour receptionist, but not wanting to expose Sam to petty office gossip, Susan says again, with a little more emphasis, “all right,” her preamble to getting down to business.

  “The thing is, we have to figure out, where do we go from here? Caroline, you and I were talking yesterday about the order of the columns. So far, the few we’ve run have been in the order Haze wrote them—is that the way to go?”

  Sam feels his ears redden as his mother looks at him. Does she expect him to talk at this stupid meeting?

  “For me,” says Caroline, “it’s been really fun to read Haze writing as a young woman. Judging from what the readers are saying, they agree too. But I don’t think we have to reprint every single column in order.”

  Susan chuckles. “Because that’d take us forever!”

  Addressing Sam, who looks confused (or mad—it’s hard for her to tell the difference), she adds, “Haze wrote two, sometimes three columns a week for fifty years.”

  Sam, who likes math, calculates the numbers in his head: two columns a week for fifty years would be fifty-two hundred; three columns a week for fifty years would be seventy-eight hundred. He can’t help but say, “Wow.”

  “Wow is right,” says Mitch. “She makes everyone else look like a slacker.”

  The phone on the console behind the table lights up, and after answering it, Caroline tells Mitch that Orin Mueller’s stopped by to see him.

  “Can’t keep our biggest advertiser waiting,” says Mitch, smoothing his tie as he gets up to leave.

  “How about if we move ahead chronologically,” says Susan, “but we can certainly skip weeks, months, even years. The content’s the most important thing.” She stands up. “I should say hello to Orin too. Caroline, why not get Sam started?”

  Sam feels his face go red after his mother leaves and he’s alone in the room with his mother’s assistant.

  “So, your mum’s putting you to work, huh?” she asks, and Sam nods, knowing that whatever he said would sound totally stupid.

  The only thing Sam can hear in the long silence that follows is the way-too-loud beat of his heart.

  “Well, then,” Caroline says, “how’d you like to work in an editorial capacity?”

  “Huh?”

  Caroline’s smile is like an invitation, and Sam feels his muscles, which seem brittle with tension, ease just a bit.

  “We could really use some help with figuring out what columns of Haze’s to reprint. We’ve been reading the ones she wrote the first summer she was here, and we’ve picked some out to print. Did you read the one in today’s paper?”

  “Uh, no,” says Sam, adding to himself, as if.

  “She started off writing about the secrets contained in a woman’s purse and somehow wove that into a story about a guy with a cello on a bus and then finished it by thanking readers for sending in names for her column. She listed a bunch of them—‘From Haze’s Hut,’ ‘Huddling with Haze,’ ‘Heavens to Evans’—but in the end she decided to just have her name be her column heading.”

  Sam can’t think of anything to say so he says, “Oh.”

  “Believe me, it’s a lot more interesting than I made it sound,” says Caroline with a laugh. “So how about you read through some columns? You can jot down the subject of each one, and maybe which ones you especially like.”

  Sam takes a swig of his pop—too big a swig. It feels like a rock and takes a long time going down his windpipe.

  “I don’t know,” he says finally. “I don’t know if my mom would think that’s . . . something I could do.”

  “Well, she told me to get you started, didn’t she?” She pushes a file toward Sam. “This one begins in September. Enjoy!”

  ALONE IN THE CONFERENCE ROOM, Sam texts, “HELP,” to his girlfriend, Elise. “TRAPPED IN MY MOM’S OFFICE.”

  There is no response because he sends the text to himself. He knows it’s stupid/psycho, although he’s only doing what the counselor his mom made him see for a while advised—expressing his feelings. He’s just not relaying them. He and Elise have gone to school together for years; they’re acquainted, but only in his dreams is she his girlfriend. Still, he likes pretending he’s having a conversation with her, even though it’s totally one-sided. He also has occasionally texted/not sent to the singer Lorde, whose music he loves, and writers whose work he admires, and whenever he gets what he thinks is an innovative idea (like programming ice skates/roller blades to balance for kids learning how to skate), he’ll text/not send to Steve Jobs, even though he’s dead.

  To lose his phone, to have someone discover these weird/psycho one-way texts is a fate he doesn’t even allow himself to consider.

  Leaning back in his chair, Sam puts his feet up on the conference table. Caroline had told him she had to get back to her office, and he worries that his supreme dorkiness sent her running. He sniffs his pits. Unoffensive (inoffensive?)—whatever, they don’t smell as far as he can tell.

  He wonders what he’ll do with his first check. Maybe he should start saving for a car? His dad’s friend Mac keeps a classic 1967 Mustang blanketed in his garage—maybe he can buy that? He’s got to wait until he’s fifteen before he can get his permit—who wrote those lame stupid laws anyway? It’s got to be a panel of mothers, he thinks, uptight, freaky mothers who have nothing better to do than worry about their kids rolling through a yellow stoplight or going two miles over the speed limit. He considers taking his shoes off—man, his feet are big! When did his feet get so big?—but his mother would probably run in with a can of air freshener, spritzing the room while yelling at him to try and act professional.

  Sam sighs. His feet thump to the floor, and he leans forward, untying the string wrapped around a brown folder. His long sigh is a flag wave of defeat and surrender, and he opens a manila file and begins to read.

  September 10, 1964

  Back to School!

  Her dress was red plaid, with a white bib bodice dotted with red buttons, and she didn’t walk down the sidewalk so much as she skipped and hopped and danced across it.

  “Come on, Petey! We don’t want to be late!”

  It appeared that’s e
xactly what Petey wanted, lagging behind his big sister like a roped calf.

  “Petey, come on! First grade’s even better than kindergarten!”

  Doubting this, the little blond boy burst into tears, and his sister put her arm around him, offering consoling words about a classroom gerbil and recess games of “Duck, Duck, Gray Duck” as well as a reminder not to eat paste, and then her voice was lost in the flurry of shouts, cries, and greetings of children racing into the school’s entrance.

  I hope Petey was entranced by the gerbil and recess games, and I certainly hope that if he did indeed eat paste, it was only a curious sampling and not of a quantity forcing a visit to the school nurse.

  Never mind January 1; the first day of school has always been my first day of the year, when the possibility and excitement of whole new worlds crack open. There was an unofficial day, usually the last Friday of August, when my mother would take me to Engelman’s five-and-dime for school shopping, an event I looked forward to with nearly the same anticipation as Christmas. My brother, Tom, and my sister, Vivienne, were older than me by ten and nine years, respectively, and so it was a holiday I celebrated only with my mother.

  Oh, the delight of examining each notebook for quality of paper and uniformity of lines, of sliding open and shut the cover of a pencil case, of debating the merits of a pink rectangular eraser versus the little blunted-arrow ones you pushed onto the end of your pencil. Mother was a patient woman, but Job would get antsy with my methodical shopping, and she soon learned she was better served by situating herself at the soda fountain counter with a cup of coffee and an issue of Photoplay or McCall’s.

  After the selection of school supplies, I would pick out the special notebook to be used for the year’s journal. No froufrou leatherette book with gilt-edged pages for me! I needed a workmanlike notebook to contain my deep and serious thoughts, ones I wouldn’t address to “Dear Diary” but to a person I thought worthy of such deep and serious thoughts. (After all these decades, I still address my journal entries to this person, whose name shall remain anonymous . . . just because I don’t have to share everything!)