The Darling Dahlias and the Texas Star

When Tuesday morning came and Myra May and Violet went downstairs to start the biscuits for the breakfast crowd, there was no Euphoria. She failed to show up to cook the noon dinner, too, so Myra May wound up repeating the Monday special, which was meat loaf. Sticking several pans of meat loaf into the oven was easier than standing over three or four skillets of frying chicken and turning the pieces every few minutes. Violet fried catfish and made coleslaw. Sissy Dunlap (the daughter of Mr. Dunlap, who owned the Five and Dime) came in to help with the serving and the cleanup, and Bennie Biddle helped, too. But between cooking and managing the counter, Myra May and Violet were as “busy as a stump-tailed cow in fly season,” as Mr. Greer (from the Palace Theater) put it. And all the while, Myra May was worrying about the coming weekend and the Kilgores’ party. How were they going to manage?

As soon after lunch as she could get away, Myra May went next door to the office of the Darling Dispatch, where she stood at the counter and filled out an advertising form for auditions for the Darling Diner cook’s position. Every applicant would be required to fry chicken, catfish, and liver and onions, as well as make a meat loaf, cook beans and greens, and bake biscuits and pies. The “audition” would be an on-the-job test that would also show how well the person worked under pressure. She didn’t put all of this in the ad, though, since she was being charged by the word.

Charlie Dickens, the Dispatch editor, was sitting at his desk, frowning about something. He had just picked up the candlestick telephone when he looked up and saw Myra May. He put the phone down, pushed back his chair, and came to the counter. He wore a rumpled white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, red suspenders, and a green celluloid eyeshade.

Charlie had grown up in Darling, but he had left when he was young, soldiered in France in the Great War, hoofed it through Europe and the Balkans, then became a reporter for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Baltimore Sun, and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. His nomadic experiences had given him a slantwise, skeptical view of settled, small-town life. In fact, it was such an un-Darlingian view that most folks figured he stayed only because—given the depressing economic effects of the Depression—he couldn’t afford to leave. This was just about right, as Charlie might tell you if you happened to ask him when he’d been helping himself from the bottle of Mickey LeDoux’s bootleg corn whiskey he kept in the bottom drawer of his desk. When he was sober, he’d just say it was none of your damn business.

“So what’s this?” Charlie asked in an ironic tone, looking down at the ad copy Myra May handed him. “Auditions at the diner? You and Violet planning to add some supper-time entertainment?” He tipped his eyeshade back with his thumb. “Some hootchy-kootchy? A sword-swallowing act?” He seemed to find this amusing.

Myra May explained the predicament they were in and what they wanted to do, and Charlie pursed his lips. “Maybe you better put ‘cooking’ in front of ‘auditions,’” he said. “To get your meaning across.” When Myra May nodded, he penciled the word in, then turned and shouted, “Ophelia! Hey, Ophelia. I got an ad for you. And a story.”

While Myra May was writing out her ad, the Linotype machine had been clunking slowly away at the back of the big room. It stopped, and the woman who had been operating it slid out of her seat and made her way through the maze of type cases and makeup tables to the front counter. People (mostly men) sometimes said that a woman didn’t have the kind of muscle a Linotype operator needed to pull the casting lever, but that was a lot of hooey, according to Ophelia Snow, who had been pulling that lever for over a year.