The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup

by Susan Orlean

  LIKELY FUTURE DEVELOPMENTS IN AFRICAN-AMERICAN HAIR AND SOME FINAL COMMENTARY: Ms. Terry thinks that the next trend in hairstyling will probably be baldness. “Toxic chemicals, pollution—no one will have any hair left or any time to fix it,” she explains. “In the meantime, I’ve figured out a way to restore hair to bald heads. I’m forever trying to maximize what people have. I couldn’t help but look at someone like Pearl Bailey and think, After all those years, wouldn’t you expect her hair to be longer than that? That dinky little inch or so? I know I could have done something for her. During your celibate years, you come up with great ideas.”

  ON DISPLAY

  STEVEN JENKINS’ GRANDFATHER Adolph Mayer has a big beefsteak tomato named for him. “The Adolph Mayer is a really wonderful tomato,” Mr. Jenkins told us the other day when we dropped in at Fairway, the busy produce market on Broadway near Seventy-fourth Street, where he is one of four junior partners. “My grandfather helps the University of Missouri test new vegetable seeds, so they honored him by naming one after him.” Being immortalized anywhere, especially in association with an appetizing vegetable, would probably please almost anyone, but for Mr. Jenkins that kind of recognition has special significance. “Would I like a cheese named after me, the way my grandfather had a tomato?” he asked himself. “That sounds great. You bet I would. You bet.”

  Mr. Jenkins’ specialty at Fairway is cheese, but his real passion is writing chatty and enticing signs for all the store’s products. A few of the Fairway signs just do their job—they say something simple, like NEW CROP YAMS or CRISPY WESTERN ICEBERG SOLD AT COST PRICE—but those are made by the other Fairway partners, who figure that a sign’s a sign, especially when you’re in a hurry and there are crowds stretching from the cash register to the back door. Mr. Jenkins’ signs have become something like required reading among shoppers in the neighborhood—they can be informative, argumentative, comic, autobiographical, or sassy—and whatever time he finds between checking cheese orders he spends making them.

  The signs are about five by seven inches and are made of white tagboard. Mr. Jenkins hand-letters them with bright-red or orange or blue or purple laundry markers. One of his signs that day said:

  HOOP CHEESE: NO FAT! NO SALT!

  AN INTRIGUING MARRIAGE

  OF WET COTTON AND LIBRARY PASTE

  “I’m very opinionated about cheese,” he explained to us, and he pointed out another sign, which said:

  MIMOLETTE: HARD, BLAND. DE GAULLE’S

  FAVORITE,

  WHICH FIGURES. I DON’T KNOW WHY,

  IT JUST DOES.

  WE STOCK IT BECAUSE IT LOOKS LIKE

  CHEESE.

  His all-time favorite sign is no longer in service, but Mr. Jenkins was so pleased with it that he saved it for display. It’s stapled to the store’s back wall, and says:

  RAW SEX

  FRESH FIGS

  SAME THING. 69 CENTS

  Some of Mr. Jenkins’ signs acquaint shoppers with people who supply choice items or who figure in his interest in food. On signs here and there throughout the store are mentions of Ted and Sally (makers of Wieninger cheese), Laura (California chèvre), Jane and Bo (pie bakers), Nana (Mr. Jenkins’ grandmother, who introduced him to kohlrabi), Dr. Scott Severns (his dentist), and Al Grimaldi (bread baker). “I think it’s important to know where food is from—that’s why I name some of the suppliers,” he said. “I wanted to write about my grandmother because she really taught me about the value of fresh foods, and my dentist just asked me to order sorrel for him, so I thought I’d mention him, too.” Some signs have won Mr. Jenkins gratitude from customers. His treatise NEVER WASH A MUSHROOM! was very popular, for example. Other signs, however, have been controversial. A sign on some Illinois goat cheese asserting that the cheese was exciting but Illinois was really boring offended so many shoppers that for a while he had to post a note beside it admitting that he was from Missouri and considered it even more boring than Illinois.

  Mr. Jenkins, who is late-thirtyish, curly haired, blue-eyed, and barrel-chested, told us that he moved to New York fourteen years ago to become an actor. His career went well—he played the Dean & DeLuca counterman in Manhattan and had a shot at a major role in the soaps—but he soon realized that his day job as a cheese man was making him happier than his acting did. He decided to get serious about food, and he discovered that the thing that made him happiest of all was driving around Europe looking at food and finding the villages that his favorite wines and cheeses were named for. He also liked finding towns famous for their sauces. He more or less gave up acting, and seven years ago he joined Fairway. Today, Mr. Jenkins has credentials in cheese—he is America’s only Master Cheesemonger, which means he’s an elected member of the Guilde des Maître-Fromagers, Compagnon du Saint-Uguzon—and he manages to satisfy his hunger for an audience by making signs. He recently described this professional odyssey in a sign for cornichons:

  WHEN I GOT STARTED IN THIS BUSINESS

  13 YEARS AGO, I

  THOUGHT CORNICHONS WERE LITTLE

  CORN COBS.

  AND NOW LOOK AT WHAT A GOURMET

  I’VE BECOME.

  MY GOD, LIFE IS AMAZING.

  “I think the best way to show off food is to have a big, huge, untethered pile of stuff,” he said as he tidied up around his department, straightening a sign that chided the makers of Pecorino Toscana sheep cheese for charging so much. “Then you stick a big, funny, outrageous, eye-catching sign in the middle of it. You say everything there is to say about the product. There are several schools of food-display signs. One is the fancy-shmancy school, where you have a tiny little sign that says ‘One-Hundred-Year-Old Quail Eggs, Eight Thousand Dollars a Dozen.’ Another school, which is the one I’m in, is where you take a garish sign and staple it to a big stick and you wedge it into the pile of food. It’s a real peasant way of life, making your living from food, and I enjoy the peasant quality of putting a sign on a stick into the food. My partners are always yelling at me for spending so much time on my signs, but I love to do it. You can tell the ones I didn’t make. They’re rather terse.”

  As he walked past a sign that said:

  HANDMADE STUFFED PEPPERS: WOW!

  HOOO!

  STRANGE BUT TRUE!

  FROM RHODE ISLAND. . . . CRAZY

  AMERICANS!

  he spotted a woman in the checkout line clutching a bottle of olive oil. “Hey, you’re not going to buy that, are you?” he asked her. She eyed him nervously. “There’s another brand that’s better and it’s seven dollars less,” he explained, pointing toward a shelf. Then, to us, he said, “I do have an urge to communicate. The truth is, my ideas about food are not necessarily commercial, but I think they might help people know more about what they’re getting. I think people should come into the store to have fun and learn something. If you’re not going to learn something, why get out of bed?”

  HER TOWN

  A DAY BEGINS IN THE VILLAGE OF MILLERTON, New York. A man pauses while shaving and says to his wife, “I think I will run for mayor.” Down the road, a cow expires mysteriously. A shopkeeper in town has labor pains. The corn begins to tassel, earlier than usual. The agenda for the village zoning board meeting is copied, collated, stapled, and stacked. A family, over breakfast, decides to give up farming and sell its land. A mutt gives birth to ten puppies and then abandons them. Someone makes the high school honor roll. A lawsuit is filed. A guy dies. A barn burns. A car skids. These kinds of things get reported in the town’s weekly newspaper, the Millerton News. A woman cracks her husband over the head with an inexpensive piece of pottery. This will probably not be reported in the Millerton News, unless she kills him. If she does, it will indeed be big news in Millerton, and big news in the Millerton News—bigger than some recent stories like TEENS UNINJURED WHEN CAR CATCHES FIRE AT INTERSECTION and RASHES RUNNING RAMPANT DURING BAD IVY SEASON and KENNETH HANLEY NAMED JIFFY LUBE MANAGER, but less enduring than the Pet Parade (a photo spread of adoptable pets, whic
h runs in every issue of the paper) or the local crime blotter (every issue) or the Seniors Menu at the community center (most issues) or the list of the new books at the library (anytime any new ones come).

  The village of Millerton is two hours north of New York City, in the town of Northeast, in the northeast corner of Dutchess County, and is set in the middle of slumpy hills and wavy alfalfa fields and pastureland as soft and rumpled as someone’s lap. The houses in the village are solid and modest. Many of them have gardens blooming with fat, old-fashioned, costume jewelry flowers, like dahlias and peonies and mums. In the village, you can sometimes pick up Manhattan radio stations, but you can also shop on the honor system for tomatoes and honey and pattypan squash that people leave on stands out in their yards. About nine hundred people live in the village and about two thousand more in the surrounding area. They are dairy farmers, prison guards, antiques dealers, schoolteachers, organic-vegetable growers, mechanics, store owners. Overwhelmingly, they are Republican. Once, a woman visiting in town gave birth ahead of schedule, and the baby grew up to be the famous Chicago White Sox second baseman Eddie Collins, whose major-league career began in 1906, but other than being the accidental birthplace of a Hall of Famer the village has never rocked the outside world. On the other hand, the people of Millerton have given birth, argued, voted, married, grown things, built things, burned things, and died often enough to fill their own newspaper for the past hundred years.

  The reporting staff of the Millerton News has usually consisted of one person. The front page of each week’s edition features seven or eight stories and two or three photographs. Each story has a byline, and each photograph has a credit. The front page of the June 15 edition carried these stories:

  ELEMENTARY STUDENTS

  LEARN ABOUT DIVERSITY

  by Heather Heaton

  MORE ANSWERS NEEDED

  ABOUT ASSESSOR’S JOB

  by Heather Heaton

  EGG ROLLS, BAGELS

  COMING TO RR PLAZA

  by Heather Heaton

  FESTIVAL WAS JUST THE BERRIES!

  by Heather Heaton

  WEBUTUCK BOARD ADDRESSES

  CONCERNS RAISED AT WORKSHOP

  by Heather Heaton

  DOC BARTLETT REMEMBERED

  AS “ALL-ROUND GOOD MAN”

  by Heather Heaton

  FUNDS STILL NEEDED

  FOR FIELD REPAIR

  by Heather Heaton

  There were also three photographs: one of second graders dressed as leprechauns and fairies; one of a fake thermometer indicating how much money had been raised so far to restore the town’s Eddie Collins Memorial Park ball fields; and one of little kids eating strawberries and ice cream at the Strawberry Festival in the nearby town of Amenia. The shots of the second graders and of the Strawberry Festival were credited to Heather Heaton. This meant that there were nine mentions of Heather Heaton on the front page of the paper—the Millerton equivalent of having your picture appear on the Sony Jumbo-Tron in Times Square. I have been a reader of the Millerton News for several years, and that day, somewhere between the berry festival story and the obituary for Doc Bartlett, I realized that the big news was that someone named Heather Heaton had just become the incarnation of the Millerton News.

  Recently, I went to Millerton to spend a week with Heather. It was the thick of summer, just after the raspberry season and just as the sweet corn had started to ripen, shortly after the local American Legion post’s chicken barbecue and not long before Millerton Days, the annual town celebration, which was dedicated this year to Eddie Collins. I’d thought it might be a week of dog days, but Heather told me that all sorts of things were going on: The elementary school principal, Steve O’Connell, had resigned unexpectedly; the Millerton Gun Club was testing a new trapshooting machine; McGruff the Crime Dog was going to visit the village swimming pool; a local man had been killed by a train on the railroad tracks south of town; a cold front was about to collide with a warm front and create a gigantic thunderstorm; the author of a book about ponies was coming to speak at Oblong Books & Music, on Main Street; a woman whose family had been dairy farming in Millerton for three generations was submitting a request for rezoning so she could turn part of the farm into a gravel mine; and executive sessions of the village government would continue to be held downstairs in the town hall rather than upstairs, because one of the commissioners had a sore hip. Also, the village clerk had just quit, and the mayor, who owns an accounting practice in town, was refusing to comment on it. Unexpected things would probably happen, too. I’ve spent many summer weekends near Millerton, and it had always struck me as a tiny, quiet place, but knowing that all these things were happening made it seem to swell and expand like one of those pop-up sponges.

  BY NOW, almost everyone in Millerton knows what Heather Heaton looks like, because anyone who appears on Main Street more than a couple of times gets noticed by almost everyone else in town. Heather is leggy, lean, and a little pigeon-toed, and she has a peachy complexion, a scatter of freckles across her nose, and fine brown hair with loose, loopy curls, which she wears pulled back from her face. When she blushes, which is often, she blushes from above her eyebrows all the way down the front of her neck. Her gaze is mild and disarming, and her voice is wobbly and sweet, like Tweety Pie’s. The day I met her, she was wearing a long flowered jumper and a cotton top and a pair of beige sling-back sandals. The next day, she wore a pair of cutoff sweatpants and a T-shirt. The day after that, she wore a blouse and a dotted skirt, and after work that day she was going to be fitted for a firefighter’s uniform, because she serves as a volunteer on the squad in Canaan, Connecticut, the town where she lives.

  Heather is twenty-two years old. She grew up in Amherst, New Hampshire, which is not much bigger than Millerton, and graduated this May from the University of Connecticut, in Storrs, where she majored in journalism. She had interned at the Hartford Courant and had imagined that she would work for a big daily after finishing college, but then one of her professors told her about the opening at the Millerton News. She had never been to Millerton until the day she came to be interviewed for the job. She started work in early June. The first few nights, she went back to a room she rents in a farmhouse in Canaan and felt like crying. Since then, she has fallen in love with one of the other Canaan volunteer firefighters, has met a good proportion of the people in Millerton, and has written about sixty front-page stories for the News. Her EGG ROLLS, BAGELS COMING TO RR PLAZA article is framed and displayed on the counter at the Bagel Café. Heather still hopes to work on a big-city daily someday, but she’s afraid she may be spoiled by all the exposure she’s getting on the front page of the Millerton News. In the meantime, she’s getting settled in Millerton. Once, while we were talking in her office, I could hear the rasping of an emergency services scanner in the background, and I asked her what was being reported. “Bee sting in Staatsburg,” she said. “But I wasn’t really listening. After all, it’s not my town.”

  THE MILLERTON News used to have its offices on Main Street in Millerton. In 1972, the owner of the Lakeville Journal, a weekly in Lakeville, Connecticut, which is just a few miles to the east, bought the Millerton News. The two papers are now like Siamese twins: They share an office in Lakeville, and their dozen or so inside pages are virtually the same mixture of community announcements, columns, service articles, church news, and advertisements for tractor dealerships, horse farms, and plant nurseries, but the front pages are different, depending on which town the papers are being distributed to.

  Though Lakeville and Millerton are only four miles apart, they are not much alike. Lakeville is rich and sleek and full of summer houses; Millerton is more of a working town. They are connected by Route 44: It is Main Street in Lakeville and then Main Street again in Millerton, and, in between, it is a sharp-curved two-lane country road with a view to the north of a huge dairy farm. After the road crosses the Connecticut–New York state line, it passes the Millerton Burger King, a car wash, a fancy restaur
ant called the New Yorker, and a house that Heather pointed out to me because the woman who lives there displays a collection of dolls on her lawn; Heather said she plans to write a story about her someday.

  On the first day of my week with Heather, we drove from Lakeville past the dairy farm and the doll lady’s house and into Millerton. Heather has a big brown beater of a Pontiac with bumper stickers lauding her college soccer team. As she drove, Heather told me she had decided against living in Millerton because she wanted to volunteer on the fire and rescue squads wherever she lived, and she felt that if she was on the Millerton squads she wouldn’t be able to write about them objectively. Living in the town you cover has its perils. Once, there was a Millerton News reporter who lived in the village, and his girlfriend came to visit him, bringing along her pet six-foot-long python. During the visit, the snake got loose and wiggled its way into the walls of the house where the reporter was renting a room, and his landlady became loud and hysterical until the snake was found. The incident gave rise to some local discussion. Not long afterward, the reporter quit and left town.