“And the wear and tear on your arm muscles,” Earlynne said. “It has ten speeds.” She demonstrated by turning a button, and the beaters sped up. “You can even take the mixer off the stand, if you want to use it that way. You’ll have to get used to using it, Mildred.”
Mildred wasn’t sure about this, for the same reason she didn’t like her cousin’s electric sewing machine, which whizzed along so fast you couldn’t see where the fabric was going. It made her shiver to think what would happen if she accidentally got her fingers under the needle, or in the beaters. She peered into the mixing bowl. “What are you making now?”
“A batch of Christmas cookies,” Earlynne said. “These have just five ingredients, so they’re easy. And cheap,” she added, switching off the mixer. “And since they’re cookies, they’ll keep for our grand opening. When you’ve got them decorated, you can put some of them in the display in the front window and the rest into our new glass pastry case. I’m going to make some sweet potato cookies. They don’t cost much, either. And some simple gingerbread houses. They’re easy, and when you’ve decorated them, they’ll look swell.”
“Cheap is definitely good,” Mildred said, remembering how much money she had spent on her shopping trip to Mobile the day before. The car had been so loaded with bags of flour and sugar, tins of shortening, and all the other supplies that it had nearly dragged its bottom along the road. She gave Earlynne an inquiring look. “I’m decorating cookies? And gingerbread houses?”
“I thought you’d want them for your holiday window,” Earlynne said primly, plumping the cookie dough onto a floured board and starting to roll it out. “When I get through with these, I’m going to bake some pecan cupcakes. They’re nice because they keep so well.” She smiled blissfully. “Baking all day is pure heaven.”
Mildred made an impatient noise. “If you want to take a day off from paradise, you can go shopping with me in Mobile. But I can decorate the cookies—although you might have told me earlier.”
She paused, then added cautiously, “I know you like to do pastries and sweet things more than anything else, Earlynne. And the scones are certainly delicious. But it seems to me that we’re going overboard on all that stuff. How many different items are you going to make?”
“As many as I feel like making.” Earlynne tossed her head. “A batch of this, a batch of that. We need a lot of different things in that display case, Mildred. Things that look as good as they taste. We want to tempt people to spend a little extra on impulse, you know.”
Mildred gave an impatient huff. “Haven’t you ever heard the phrase ‘too much of a good thing’? In my opinion, we’re going to have way more of those sweet and savory items than we need.” She lifted her chin. “What about bread?”
“What about bread? What about it?” Wielding her rolling pin, Earlynne scowled down at her cookie dough. “Really, Mildred, I wish you would stop harping on bread.”
“Harping on it?” Mildred asked sharply. “Pastries are fine, Earlynne, but bread will be our most important item. Plain white sandwich bread, like Wonder Bread, but fresher and better-tasting. We’ll sell more bread than anything else, and it’ll keep customers coming back.”
Earlynne whacked the cookie dough with her rolling pin but said nothing.
Mildred went on. “I’m figuring we’ll sell maybe fifteen loaves a day the first week or so. That’s mostly to our friends. If they like it and tell their friends about it, we’ll sell twenty a day the next week. Or maybe more—especially after the Vanity Fair plant opens and people have a little more money.”
“Twenty loaves?” Earlynne stood stock still. Her eyes widened and she gave a little gasp. “That many—every day?”
“That many,” Mildred replied emphatically. “So you have to decide on one basic recipe and be sure you’ve got it right. Then you can branch out and bake whatever different breads people want—rye, pumpernickel, sourdough, whatever you like. But for now, let’s focus on plain, ordinary white bread and be sure we’ve got it right. Okay?”
Earlynne squared her shoulders and took a deep breath. “Well, you’ll be glad to know that I’ve baked three different test loaves, just for you,” she said stiffly. “They’re over there on the bottom shelf. You’ve been making such a fuss about the bread—I thought you could give them a taste test and tell me which of the three you like best. In your expert opinion,” she added, with a clear hint of sarcasm.
“Well, fine,” Mildred said, with her own hint of sarcasm. She couldn’t pretend to be an expert baker, like Earlynne. In fact, she had never baked a successful loaf of bread in her life—it was just too much trouble. But she had been eating bread several times a day ever since she was old enough to say “peanut butter and jelly.” She knew what bread was supposed to look like—and how it was supposed to taste. “I’ll check them out right now, before I start on the cookies.”
She took a bread knife out of the drawer and put the three loaves on the pine-topped worktable. Studying them critically, the first thing she noticed was that they were not the same shape or size, and that none of the crusts were evenly browned. They were not at all pretty, she thought, trying to picture how they would look in the display case. Obviously, Earlynne was going to have to work on producing uniform loaves.
The crust of the first loaf was fairly soft and easy to slice, but the bread was dense and heavy at the bottom—soggy, almost. The crust on the second loaf was rock hard, and the inside was distinctly doughy. The top of the third loaf was flat and slightly sunken in the middle, while the inside was pocked with irregular holes and—worse!—laced with ribbons of unincorporated flour.
“Well?” Earlynne put down her rolling pin. “How do they taste?” she asked hopefully. “Which loaf do you like best?”
“We’ve got a problem, Earlynne.” Mildred gestured at the loaves. “Actually, three problems—and I haven’t even tasted them yet.”
Earlynne came over to look, and for once in their long friendship, she didn’t get all defensive and tell Mildred to go fly a kite. She stared at the loaves for a few moments. Her shoulders slumped. And then, to Mildred’s enormous surprise, she dissolved into tears.
Mildred stared at her. She had known Earlynne since they were girls, and she had never seen her cry—not even when Laurabelle Rombauer was named Homecoming Queen and Earlynne had to be content with second runner-up. Her instinctive response was to snap, “Stop crying and pull yourself together, Earlynne Biddle. Nobody cries over bread.”
But instead, she found herself putting her arms around her friend and holding her, patting her back awkwardly. “It’s okay, Earlynne. Really—I’m sure you can figure out what went wrong. Maybe the yeast didn’t work. Maybe you ought to knead it a little less—or more, maybe? Or let it rise longer, or bake it at a lower temperature, or . . .”
She ran out of possibilities and stopped. “But what do I know?” she said with a sympathetic laugh, smoothing Earlynne’s brown hair out of her eyes. “You’re the expert baker.”
But at that, Earlynne gave a despairing wail and burst into tears all over again. Mildred led her to a chair at the worktable, then went to the stove and poured two cups of coffee. She put Earlynne’s cup down in front of her and handed her a tissue.
“Wipe your eyes and blow your nose,” she commanded, “and tell me what’s wrong.”
Earlynne wiped her eyes, blew her nose, then blew her nose again. Then she crumpled the tissue in her hand and just sat there, staring despondently down at it.
At last, in a very small voice, she said, “I am a fraud, Mildred. A complete fraud.”
Mildred was taken aback. Earlynne was always supremely self-confident, especially about her baking. “A fraud?” she asked in astonishment. “What in the world is that supposed to mean?”
Earlynne sighed. “I was hoping I could . . . That is, I thought I could get by without anybody finding out—” She broke off, shaking her head miserably. “But I guess it’s time to come clean.”
“Com
e clean?” By now, Mildred was feeling very impatient. “Come clean about what?”
“Those loaves—” Earlynne took a deep breath. “They’re the best ones.”
“The . . . best ones?” Mildred asked, aghast.
Earlynne bit her lip. “The other six are in a bag in the pantry. I thought I would give them to Liz to feed to her chickens. I didn’t want you to see them.”
Mildred began to feel desperation welling up inside. “But Earlynne,” she began, “surely, if you had a little more practice—”
“The truth is that if you judge my baking by my bread, I’m a failure,” Earlynne said dramatically. “I have never in my whole life managed to bake a halfway decent loaf. Not one!”
“You can’t . . . ” Bewildered, Mildred felt for a chair and sat down, hard. “You can’t bake bread?”
Earlynne shook her head. “I can make all kinds of wonderful things—rolls and tarts and sticky buns. I bake the most marvelous angel food cake, and my éclairs are out of this world. Really, Mildred, you won’t believe my éclairs! When I told you I wanted to open a bakery, that’s what I was thinking about. It didn’t even occur to me that we would have to sell bread. Especially not when Mrs. Hancock has shelves and shelves of Wonder Bread, with every loaf looking perfect—exactly the same as every other loaf. I couldn’t make bread like that in a million years!”
“But I don’t understand,” Mildred said. “Bakers always get their start baking bread, don’t they? If you have never baked a loaf of bread, how can you call yourself a baker?” Her voice was rising. “How could you possibly imagine—” She fought down the urge to cry, thinking of all the money she had invested in this ridiculous project—and what Roger would say when he found out. “How could you even imagine opening a bakery, if you can’t bake bread?”
Earlynne sniffled into the tissue. “To tell the truth, I didn’t even think about bread until you started bringing it up. All I thought of was making pastries.” She leaned forward eagerly. “The thing is, Mildred, I’m so good at that, and I love it. Macaroons and beignets and Napoleons—oh, I make the most wonderful Napoleons. They’re even better than my éclairs.” She closed her eyes and clasped her hands. “Layer upon layer of the thinnest, flakiest, most delicate puff pastry and the most delectable pastry cream, topped with—”
“Stop!” Mildred commanded. “I am not disputing your ability to make Napoleons. But you can’t solve our problem by waving your hand and saying, ‘Let them eat pastries.’ You have to get up from that chair and start making bread.” She pounded her fist on the table, punctuating her words. “Right now—do you hear? I don’t care what recipe you use. Just choose one and do it. Plain white bread can’t be that hard, can it? All you need is practice. Over and over. Until you get it right.”
Earlynne’s shoulders slumped. She was the picture of dejection. “It’s no use, Mildred. Believe me. I have tried to make bread for years and years, and that—” She pointed to the three failed loaves. “That is the very best I can do. There is absolutely no sense in going through the exercise again.”
“Well, hell, damn it,” Mildred said, between gritted teeth. “We are opening on Saturday. We’ve advertised our bread in the Dispatch, and it’s in our flyer, for eleven cents a loaf. What are we going to do?”
Earlynne gave her a long, searching look. Then she said, “Have you ever tried baking bread?”
CHAPTER NINE
“NOTHING SAYS CHRISTMAS LIKE A POINSETTIA”
It was not quite one o’clock that afternoon when Liz left Verna’s office in the courthouse. She had a couple of hours to kill before she and Verna planned to meet at the Diner, to let Violet and Myra May know about Mr. Price’s telephone call. She was headed home, but she needed a couple of things at Dunlap’s Five and Dime, so she went there first.
Darling was too small for a Woolworth’s, but nobody cared because their Five and Dime was just as good. Like other dime stores across the country, Dunlap’s sold just about anything your heart desired, as long as it was under a dollar. Because Darling shoppers could get five or six or even more items for every dollar (some of which they might have needed), the bargainbasement prices made them feel rich. So even though the shadow of the Depression continued to darken the prospects of many businesses, Darling’s Five and Dime was holding its own.
Nowadays, Lizzy had a personal reason to care about the Five and Dime, for her mother—long a widow—had recently married its owner, Reginald Dunlap. The marriage had been as much of a surprise as Grady’s marriage to Sandra Mann, but a pleasant surprise, even a delightful one, and for good reason. Lizzy’s mother had always believed that she wasn’t doing her maternal duty if she wasn’t instructing her only daughter in the management of her life: not only what to wear and how to fix her hair, but what goals to set and how to reach them.
As a girl, Lizzy had found it hard enough to handle this matriarchal tyranny. But as she grew older, Mrs. Lacy’s meddling became almost intolerable—especially when she began pushing Liz to marry Grady Alexander.
“It’s time, Elizabeth,” she would say, in a doomsday voice. “You’re not getting any younger. I’m telling you this for your own good, you know. You should say yes to that fine young man now.”
And when Grady got Sandra pregnant, Mrs. Lacy actually told Liz it was all her fault—which Lizzy took to mean that if she’d given Grady what he wanted when he wanted it, he wouldn’t have gone to Sandra. (Unfortunately, this was near enough to the truth to make Lizzy feel uncomfortable, although she refused to go so far as to blame herself for what Grady did.) When she heard the astonishing news that her mother was getting married, Lizzy was jubilant. From here on out, the new Mrs. Dunlap would be Mr. Dunlap’s problem.
But Mr. Dunlap probably thought he had gotten a gem, for his wife (who had been dying for something significant in her life) rolled up her sleeves and took command of the Five and Dime. She cleaned the place top to bottom, reorganized the inventory, and rebuilt all the displays. This afternoon, when Lizzy got to the store, she saw that her mother had also redone the big front window. She had created a clever snow scene, with a miniature Christmas tree, Santa’s sleigh, a toy train, and elves, surrounded by pine boughs twisted with colored lights and dusted with glittery fake snow. It was really quite charming.
Her mother opened the shop door. “Well, how do you like it, Elizabeth?”
The former Mrs. Lacy was a large, heavy-bosomed woman with a shrill voice—so large and formidable, in fact, that Lizzy had never quite figured out how Mr. Dunlap (a small, mild-mannered man with gray hair and thick spectacles) had summoned the courage to propose. But appearances had to be deceiving. Her mother had confided to her that, when they were alone together, Mr. Dunlap was a “tiger.”
“I think it’s lovely, Mama,” Lizzy said, quite honestly.
“It’s for the Merchants’ Association window-decorating contest,” her mother said. “Just between the two of us, I’m sure it will win. I stopped at Mann’s Mercantile this morning and looked at Twyla Sue’s window. It’s not at all creative, just a few boots and shoes stuffed with pine branches and lots of fancy ribbon. And the window at Hancock’s Grocery—well! A pyramid of canned Heinz soups, decorated with a string of popcorn and dried cranberries? Mine looks so much better, if I do say so myself.” She paused, giving Liz a critical look. “Speaking of looking better, isn’t it time you got your hair cut, Elizabeth? You’re looking awf ’lly shaggy.”
“I have an appointment at the Beauty Bower next week, Mama,” Lizzy said, although she was letting it grow out and only intended to get it washed and set.
Her mother seemed satisfied. “Good. Now, let me show you this eggbeater we just got in. I know you’ll want it.”
Fifteen minutes later, Lizzy was on her way home through the chilly afternoon, bending into the blowing wind and wishing she’d thought to wear her mittens and a muffler. Her paper sack contained the fingernail polish (ten cents), bobby pins (seven cents), and elastic garter belt (fifty-thr
ee cents) that had been on her list, plus the “new, improved” rotary eggbeater (thirty cents) her mother had insisted she buy. Lizzy had learned long ago that it was easier to get along with her mother if she gave in on the small things (like the eggbeater) and saved her energy for significant battles. Her house had been one of those battles.
Lizzy and her cat, Daffodil, lived in a beautiful yellow house about the size of a dollhouse, across the street from her mother’s house, where Lizzy had grown up. She had secretly purchased the rundown old place and had it remodeled without telling her mother. When it was done, she announced that she was moving and moved—the very next day. This had provoked a series of hysterical eruptions that continued for weeks. But Lizzy was doing what she knew she had to do: move out of her mother’s house, even if it was only just across the street.*
And as far as Lizzy was concerned, her tiny house was perfect. There was a postage-stamp parlor, a miniature kitchen, and two small upstairs rooms with slanted ceilings, one for her bedroom, the other for her writing studio. Upstairs and down, her house was only about six hundred square feet. But it felt bigger, because there was a front porch just wide enough to accommodate a white-painted porch swing, and a screened-in back porch where she often ate.
And the back yard—oh, my! It was many times bigger than the house, and incredibly lovely. In the summer, the grass was lush and green and there were sunflowers and pink roses and a graceful weeping willow. Even now, there were sweet peas, honeysuckle, and sweet-scented winter jasmine. And summer and winter, there were fresh vegetables in the kitchen garden.
To Lizzy, her dollhouse seemed simply perfect. It was even more perfect because it was hers, and she could (and did!) lock the door against her mother—politely, of course. And because it was hers alone, a truth she found difficult to explain, even to her friends.
The Darling Dahlias and the Poinsettia Puzzle Page 8