The Darling Dahlias and the Naked Ladies

After a few months, the Beauty Bower was such a runaway success that Beulah advertised for a helper, which resulted in Bettina Higgens. Bettina was not what you might call pretty (her brown hair was stringy and thin and she was as skinny as a bean pole) and she had never been to beauty school. But Beulah saw an innate talent in Bettina’s nimble fingers and knew that she had what it took to make women beautiful. Within a couple of weeks, the two were wearing twin pink ruffled aprons embroidered with Beulah’s Beauty Bower and working elbow-to-elbow at the shampoo sinks.

One of the things that Beulah and Bettina liked best about their workplace was its conviviality, for each day of the week brought its regulars who looked forward to seeing their friends, saved up their tidbits of gossip to share, and even brought cookies and cupcakes to go with the hot coffee and iced tea that Beulah always kept ready, depending on the season. Beulah was careful not to schedule the day’s appointments so tightly that they couldn’t accommodate somebody with a hair emergency, though. She hated to turn away a potential customer. Why, the person might get in over at Conrad’s Curling Corner and be lost to the Bower forever!

Fridays and Saturdays were always the Bower’s busiest days, with people getting prettied up for Saturday night parties and Sunday morning church. Monday mornings were usually fairly quiet, with Myra May Mosswell and Miss Dorothy Rogers coming in at nine and Bessie Bloodworth and Leona Ruth Adcock at nine thirty.

But on this particular Monday morning, both nine o’clocks had already canceled, Myra May because she was shorthanded at the diner and the telephone exchange (Violet Sims was still out of town), Miss Rogers ostensibly because she was coming down with a head cold and didn’t want to sit around with wet hair. Beulah suspected that it was because Miss Rogers was short of funds again, and the thirty-five cents she spent on a shampoo and set had a better use elsewhere. But of course Miss Rogers couldn’t be blamed for she, like so many others, was in a very difficult predicament. Beulah was just grateful for every customer who could still afford the luxury of becoming beautiful.

So this morning, when the clock said nine and there was still a half-hour before the regular nine-thirties arrived, Bettina sat down with a tray of metal Kurley Kew curlers in her lap and began to sort them by size, while Beulah went out to her backyard garden to pick an armload of chrysanthemums, gerbera daisies, and zinnias, along with some ferns for greenery. Flowers, she always thought, gave the Bower the “salon look.” She had brought them in and was arranging them in a big glass bowl when the door opened and a stranger walked in.

Beulah knew right away, however, that this woman was no stranger. She was a kindred soul who obviously cared deeply about beauty. Her platinum blond hair (Beulah always saw hair first, before she saw anything else) was styled in loose, soft curls like Jean Harlow’s, although the roots were in definite need of some attention and the curls were a trifle untidy. She was stylishly dressed in a bright blue dress with a bolero jacket trimmed in blue velvet (which did nothing to hide her generous bosom), a blue pillbox hat with a veil, blue gloves, and shiny patent shoes with tasteful rhinestone-trimmed buckles on the straps, just as if she had stepped off the streets of New York or out of the pages of Vogue. She had a pretty face, with pencil-thin plucked eyebrows, a delicate nose, a rosebud mouth, and a dark beauty mark just above her lip. Beulah, whose experienced eye could catch the flaws and imperfections in even the most expert makeup job, noticed that there were a few crow’s-feet wrinkles around the woman’s eyes, and if you looked close, you might see a sprinkling of largish pores on either side of her nose. But as Beulah often put it to her customers, what did a few wrinkles and pores really matter? A beautiful woman was beautiful at any age. And in Beulah’s expert opinion, this stranger was a beautiful woman who was simply in need of a few touch-ups here and there.

Beulah’s feeling of kinship was reinforced when the stranger lifted her hands, gasped at the flowers, and cried, “Oh, how stunning! What a lovely thing to see on a Monday morning. Flowers do get the week started out just right, don’t they?” She sounded like a Yankee, but as far as Beulah was concerned, anybody who loved flowers was a true sister.

“They purely do,” Beulah said happily. She turned to Bettina, who was staring, openmouthed, at this platinum-haired vision of feminine loveliness. “Bettina, honey, would you fill this bowl with water, please?”

“Oh, yes, ma’am,” Bettina said, and jumped up, scattering Kurley Kews all over the floor.

Beulah left Bettina scrambling to pick up the curlers and turned back to her customer. “Now, dear, how can we help you on this beautiful mornin’?”

The woman’s face became serious, and she looked around, as if she were making sure she had come to the right place. “I hope you do coloring,” she said hesitantly. “Not just shampoos and sets.”