22
OF LAMB AND SANITARY NAPKINS
I didn’t have a spare moment to share my relief and excitement with Joe. We pedaled like mad along University Avenue, and I arrived at the bookshop at 11:59, out of breath and with my hair very untidy.
I was shelving books with Frances, another of the clerks, after some hasty smoothing of my hair, when Mr. Uxbridge approached and said, “I can only use you until three today, Mrs. Stark. And don’t bother coming in on Friday, either, unless you want to pick up your check.”
“Oh?” I was startled. He’d told me not to come in on Tuesday as well. “Is this something I’ve done? A problem with my work?” And here I’d thought my anxieties were laid to rest for the day! And “unless you want to pick up your check”? Did he think I worked here merely for fun?
“Do you see a crowd in here?” he asked.
“Well, no,” I said. “As many of the students are away.”
“And why would I need a full staff for that?”
“Keep your hair on, Mr. U,” Frances said. She was one of those small, dark, pert girls. “You know Marguerite doesn’t know the ropes.”
“Common sense,” Mr. Uxbridge said.
“Yes,” I said. “I understand.” My heart sank a little as I continued my shelving, alphabetizing mechanically. I would need to buy books for those classes.Twoclasses. And textbooks were very costly; the ones Joe had just bought for his five classes—he was burning the candle at both ends; no wonder he had nightmares!—had cost nearly twenty dollars, and they’d all been used! I needed to check our shelves today for the used versions of my own books, for they went the fastest; Joe and I weren’t the only ones with limited funds. Unfortunately, I also needed to buy a lamb roast for Easter dinner. If I bought the textbooks today, though, I’d still have enough to do the rest of our shopping once I collected my pay tomorrow. Probably.
I’d have to see, that was all. I’d begun a system of envelopes, and the money went into these as soon as we received it. An envelope for rent—twenty-five dollars each month—and another for a month’s worth of tuition and books, to which I must add if I were going to need books as well. The telephone, gas, and electricity, and, of course, the envelope for groceries, which also included terribly expensive items like sanitary napkins. I would pay that fifty-nine cents each month; anybody who’d had to use rags as a refugee would have done the same, even if it meant eating potatoes, but I didn’t have to like it. It was fortunate that Joe didn’t smoke. Many of his friends smoked a pack or more of cigarettes each day—at almost twenty cents apiece!
I’d planned to buy many other things along with the lamb tomorrow, though, for we’d invited Susie and Fred to join us, and also Myrna, although she was Jewish. “But Joe is Jewish as well,” I’d told her, “and we needn’t speak of Jesus and Mary and the saints, you know, for Susie and I will have been to Mass already, so you mustn’t think it’s sacrilege. There will be nothing forbidden to eat; no ham at all, although Easter hamis truly very lovely. We’ll think of it instead as a celebration of Spring, which is a most beautiful season.”
I’d conceived the plan after hearing of Susie’s disappointment at having to return to college before her mother’s Easter dinner, but it was probably merely an excuse, for I was discovering that I loved to entertain. The conversation was always so lively, the laughter so ready, and I hadn’t had enough of such things these past years. Sunday’s would be my most sophisticated menu yet, but Susie and Joe had both promised to help, and if the meal were less than perfect—well, Joe and Fred were both returned GIs, who wished only for full stomachs and a meal eaten at a table. Also, my dry chicken had been made tolerable at Christmas by plentiful amounts of gravy. Most fortunate that one could make gravy for lamb, too!
So there was the lamb to buy, and the carrots, onions, parsnips, and sweet potatoes to roast along with it, although these were fortunately inexpensive. Also asparagus, which I hadn’t had for—goodness, four years now! It would truly feel like Spring if one had asparagus. A separate dish of potatoes, too, which I would prepare in the scalloped style so they didn’t taste quite so much of potato. Men, Joe had told me firmly, needed potatoes. Crescent rolls, which were simplicity itself and required little more than flour and yeast and shortening, and butter to spread on them, and finally, a great many eggs.
Joe had a passion for chiffon cake, I’d learned, and I knew fromThe Ladies’ Home Journalthat such cakes were all the rage. There was a recipe in the wonderful cookbook for a Lemon Chiffon Cake that seemed manageable, although it used seven eggs—seven!—and what could say “Spring” better than lemon? Susie would lend me the pan, which was called a “tube pan,” and, she’d promised, help me get the cake out of it. And that would be another thing I knew how to do.
Also, there were cheeses—realcheeses, not just the “Cheddar” and “American” varieties found in the supermarket—to be purchased at the deli for Easter breakfast, together with soft-boiled eggs and the bread I would bake tomorrow, and grapefruit, too, for we were in California now. And, of course, coffee. Coffee, we must certainly have, at breakfast and at dinner, too, and not with milk—with cream, for we would have guests.
I could forego the cheese for breakfast, perhaps, and the eggs, too, and prepare oatmeal instead. Cooked with cinnamon, chopped apple, and raisins, and sprinkled with brown sugar, it was almost delicious, and would have been a feast beyond measure only two years earlier. I’d bake a pineapple upside-down cake, too, instead of the chiffon cake. Susie had told me that this was easily made, and it couldn’t possibly require more than twoeggs. Margarine for the rolls instead of butter; this would be acceptable.
The cost of food had only gone up since December, and now, the newspaper told us, was at an “all-time high.” The Easter dinner idea was what Joe called a “splurge,” but with my salary from the bookstore, we’d decided after totting up the figures in my notebook and consulting the passbook, we could afford it. Such small pleasures lifted one greatly, and it would be a cheerful way to begin the new quarter.
But why, oh,whyhad Joe bought me those pearls? The money had come from his savings, as my wardrobe had come from mine, but our impulsive actions seemed foolish now that our savings would have to stretch further than ever. The Sears, Roebuck catalog would have been a muchbetter idea than Saks Fifth Avenue, and as for my beautiful black coat with the red satin lining … that had been pure madness.
I was pondering my menu revisions when Frances said, “I hope you weren’t planning to work this summer.”
“Pardon?” I asked, startled.
“He lays off everybody except the permanent staff then. From mid-June until mid-September, you should plan on finding something else. Or will you be with your husband’s parents over the summer?”
“With his parents?” I was confused.
“Most kids go home to their parents then,” she said. “You live for free, and you can get a job if you need to and save. We’ll all be busily beavering away, stashing away those nuts for the winter like squirrels.Includingme.” She sighed. “My father believes in ‘learning the value of a dollar.’ Iknowthe value of a dollar. The value is: never enough.”
I laughed. “But beavers and squirrels are two different animals.”
She waved a hand. “You know what I mean. It’s dead here during the summer. Stands to reason—hardly any students, and the profs off on their own holidays. Nope, employment in this burg is strictly during the school year.”
We were interrupted by a middle-aged customer, as well-groomed as most in Palo Alto—women here seemed positively glossy, so shiny were their hair and nails and so red their lipstick—who wanted to know whether she should purchaseThe Naked and the Deadfor her husband. “I’m afraid it may not be a verynicebook,” she said, “but the girls have been talking about it at mahjong, saying that it’s so veryreal.George usually says that books aren’t real enough—he despises what he calls ‘pretty stories’—so I thought that this one …”
“Is your husband a war veteran?” I asked
“Oh, yes. Of the first war. He was in France.”
