The Romance Reader's Guide to Life

Lilly was twenty and I was nineteen when the returning servicemen got us fired by needing our jobs. Since she’d started at Mr. Case’s spa she’d tripled his cosmetics sales. Women drove thirty miles for Lilly Terhune’s advice on how to handle problematically thin brows. I was baking at the Bigelow Diner and successfully tripling the number of customers on Tuesdays and Thursdays, which were pie days at the Bigelow. But in 1945 we were supposed to marry a returning hero and have kids and dinner parties that ended with Cherry Surprise Jell-O cups, recipe available on page 52 or on the side of your Jell-O box! Lilly must have turned down five proposals that summer and fall. She was looking for romance, which she saw as something related to but not necessarily the same as marriage. I was looking for romance too, but in my mind, in a corner too secretive and dimly lit to actually admit existed, romance involved pursuits and captures, heart-stopping dangers and erotic escapes, the abandonment of the self to the other. In other words, I had a very limited social life.

She dragged me along with her on an odyssey to the best furrier on Newbury Street and talked the both of us into four-year credit plans for two raccoon coats. “A girl’s got to bait her hook,” she said, spreading them out on our bed for us to admire when we got home to Lynn. Lilly Terhune was surely a baited hook if ever there was one. She was double-booked every weekend. I wasn’t, but that wasn’t the fur coat’s fault.

We lost our jobs just after we bought those coats. Lilly turned to me with perfect faith, convinced that I could come up with something wonderful for us to do that also generated cash. We lay side by side in bed at night and talked about desire. Not Jell-O. We wanted adventure, risk, diamonds, travel, love. Not Jell-O. Lilly slept like a log all night and spent all day certain I would figure out a life full of diamonds and big cars. She didn’t bother to strategize beyond that herself—she was sure I’d manage to make it happen, whatever it turned out to be.

I made an inventory of our talents and found more of them, of a more interesting kind, in my sister’s possession than in mine. How many women had come to her in that corner store and learned how to turn every head in a room with a dab of red glycerin, a line of kohl, some turmeric powder, and a snug skirt? I’d watched, transfixed, while every single one of them had left with a package in her hand whether she could afford it or not. Lilly could turn a dumpy jam-smeared housewife into a pagan goddess of love, and if you don’t think that draws women like ants to sugar on the sidewalk, you don’t know anything.

Mr. Case hadn’t even apologized to Lilly when he told her to turn in her apron so he could give it to a guy who’d spent the war in San Francisco, putting Coca-Cola and cigarettes onto cargo ships.

“He’s useless,” she’d fumed. “Mary Lou Evans came here last week and there he was, ringing up a high-beam gloss for her when she very specifically needed a matte. He didn’t ask her about her evening plans, or her outfit. You know high beams smear like crazy. It was a dinner date with a new prospect beau! Smearing, messy … and that high gloss doesn’t do anything for her skin. Totally wrong.”

No matter. Lilly was fired.

I followed her into unemployment soon after. I’d started at the Bigelow right after high school graduation, waiting tables. Waitressing is not like baking. There’s no satisfaction in waitressing, and you have to interact with sticky children and the occasionally hostile or stupid customer.

When I’d alienated one customer too many, Mr. Bigelow told me to help the baker, a seventy-year-old heavy smoker with bad eyes who dropped ashes in the bowls as he mixed. During the war years the Bigelow family had an intimate and vaguely illegal relationship with the local members of the rationing board. They’d cultivated friends who sold things that fell off trucks so the Bigelow kitchen had always been awash in lard and sugar, giving it a steady customer base through the rationing years. Late in 1943 the baker came down with a bad case of serial hangovers and I found myself basically in charge of all the Bigelow’s baking. My first week I turned out a raft of blueberry and peach pies. They were gone in an hour. Word spread that something had happened to the pies at the Bigelow, and customers lined up for them. Mr. Bigelow fired his baker and gave me a raise.

My first week as the Queen of Pies at the Bigelow Diner I was in the kitchen by five a.m., fanning whole bananas sliced lengthwise into crescents over butter-yellow pools of custard. I laid them out like pinwheels, and over that I slathered a sheet of chocolate custard. Big hit. I would sit happily in that diner kitchen on Friday nights, looking at what there was to work with and doing some prep work for Pie Day. The smell of baking pies called up afternoons in Mrs. Daniels’s living room and Saturday mornings in Violette’s kitchen. I’d sit in my little calm, orderly paradise, going about the business of snickerdoodles and hermits.

Lilly mocked me. “Another dateless Friday night,” she’d say, shaking her head at me. “If you’re putting the guys off on purpose, go ahead, but if you want to learn how to change your social life, I’m around for consultation.” I ignored her.

The first pie that I considered truly my own was a banana butterscotch. Next came a plain butterscotch with sweet-cream ganache. I had learned about ganache from Violette and I loved the sound of the word. I’d hum it under my breath as I melted semi-sweet chocolate into heavy cream: ganacheganacheganache. Jane and Snyder polished off the test-drive first pie in an hour. Jane got almost hysterical about it. We had to cut her off at piece number three before she made herself sick. Jane ended up helping me brainstorm pies, which led to what I came to think of as the Jane pies: M&M’s pie with little rivers of M&M’s running through them; banana pinwheel and peanut butter cream pie (with nuts and without); s’mores pie with crushed graham-cracker shells and thin sheets of melted chocolate under broiler-toasted pillows of marshmallow. People stood in line for Jane pies. No matter: I was replaced by a guy who’d spent his war playing poker in Newport News. He knew as much about pies as he knew about lipstick. Mr. Bigelow said he’d love to keep both me and potato-peeler boy, but there wasn’t enough cash in the cash flow. At Mr. Case’s spa, where Lilly had once ruled the cosmetics department, the lipsticks disappeared and an underwear display popped up. At the Bigelow, standard berry and pumpkin things got baked, but the long lines for Pie Day dwindled, dwindled, vanished.

So we found ourselves unemployed, in a world that seemed designed to keep us that way. I lay in bed at night and tried to plot a way out, but I only looped back to the reasons that Lilly and I were trapped and would never lead the lives we were born to lead. This kind of thinking gets you nothing but deeper into the weeds, and besides that, it isn’t restful. Finally I slept.

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