The Darling Dahlias and the Silver Dollar Bush

“And lovin’ it, just plain lovin’ it,” as Bettina said with a giggle.

Beulah had operated her shop on Dauphin Street for almost six years now. Petite, blond, and abundantly endowed where bosoms were concerned, she was a Darling girl from the wrong side of the L&N tracks. But Beulah had brains and ambition as well as beauty, and was determined to better herself. After high school, she took the Greyhound bus to Montgomery and enrolled in the College of Cosmetology, where she learned how to do a shampoo and scalp massage, cut a smooth Gloria Swanson bob, manage a marcel and a permanent wave, and color hair. She also studied facials, manicures, pedicures, and makeup—everything a beauty specialist needed to know “in order to make the ordinary woman pretty and the pretty woman beautiful,” as the College of Cosmetology advertised in its four-color brochure. Beulah studied hard and graduated with high marks in every aspect of beauty.

Back home in Darling, she had gotten right down to business and married Hank Trivette, the son of the pastor of the Four Corners Methodist Church. Hank was not the most exciting man she had ever met, but he was definitely from the right side of the tracks and Beulah, who was truly a practical person, thought that when all was said and done, love lasted longer when there was a little extra money in the cookie jar. They bought a nice frame house at the best end of Dauphin Street, and Beulah set up her Beauty Bower on the screened porch at the back of the house. She wallpapered the walls with her favorite fat pink roses, painted the wainscoting pink, and hung her College of Cosmetology Certificate of Achievement where everybody could see it. Then she painted the words BEULAH’S BEAUTY BOWER on a white wooden sign, decorated it with painted flowers, and planted it right in the middle of a flower bed installed by her fellow flower-lovers, the Darling Dahlias, in front of her house. Anybody walking or driving down Dauphin Street would have to be blind not to see it.

A few months after the Bower opened, business was so good that Beulah hired Bettina Higgens. She wasn’t the prettiest flower in the garden (as Bettina herself put it) but she did know hair. Beulah and Bettina got on like a house afire, sharing a commitment to make all of Darling beautiful, one lovely lady at a time.

Since the beginning of the year, however, business had been falling off at an alarming rate. Usually, the chairs in the Bower would be filled with clients (Beulah refused to use the word “customers”) waiting their turn for a shampoo, a cut, or a perm. Beulah had a sunny disposition and always tried to look on the bright side of things, where the flowers bloomed. But it was hard to do that when many of her former clients were saving their rainwater to wash their hair at home and asking their sisters and their neighbors to cut and pin-curl it.

The Dahlias were still very loyal, of course, although several of them (Bessie Bloodworth, for one, and Mildred Kilgore and Myra May Mosswell) had cut back on their visits, coming only twice a month instead of once a week. Beulah had reduced her price for a shampoo and set from thirty-five cents to twenty-five, which was the price of a movie ticket. But if it came down to choosing between Clark Gable (Red Dust had played at the Palace the week before) and a shampoo and set, most Darling women would rather have Clark Gable—although with the bank closing, they might not even have him. How long would the Palace be able to stay open? Worse yet, how long would there be enough beauty work at the Bower for both Beulah and Bettina? Would she have to let Bettina go?

But Beulah never liked to meet trouble halfway. She turned off the rinse water, turbaned Twyla Sue, and helped her sit upright.