Lulu’s Recipe for Cajun Sass

by Hill Sandra

  She and Tante Lulu placed their orders for sweet tea, crawfish étouffée, Creole sunburst salads, and a salty caramel bread pudding which they would share. The waitress paused before leaving and asked, “Are you Tante Lulu?”

  “I am, dear. Why do you ask?”

  “My mama, Eveline Foucet, swears by your diaper rash ointment. Says it’s better than anything you can buy in the store. My baby has a bad rash that just won’t go away. The poor thing cries all night.”

  Tante Lulu nodded and said, “You come to my cottage later today, and I’ll have the salve ready fer you. I live about a mile past Boudreaux’s General Store out on Black Bayou Road. Do you know where that is?”

  “I do. Thank you so much!”

  “And tell yer mama to stop by anytime. My fig tree is about to burst with fruit, and I recall how Evie allus had a hankerin’ fer fig jam.”

  When the waitress was gone, Mary Lou looked at her aunt. “What’s in your salve that makes it so special?”

  “Gator spit.”

  Mary Lou wasn’t sure if she was serious or not. But then, it didn’t matter. Tante Lulu was Tante Lulu. Mary Lou wouldn’t put anything past her.

  While they dined, they chatted about family, Tante Lulu’s continuing herbal healing business, Mary Lou’s studies, and Uncle René’s band, The Swamp Rats, which was planning a concert next month for Save the Bayou, an environmental group that was battling the oil industry on the gulf. Her aunt was as alert and funny, as ever, thank God!

  “I hear that louse, Valcour LeDeux, has got another girl pregnant. At his age! They oughta chop off his pecker and pickle it in a Mason jar and send it to Ripley’s Believe It or Not. I’d do it myself, except I wouldn’t want to touch the slimy thing. Eew!”

  “Auntie!”

  “Sorry. I forgot, he’s yer granddaddy.”

  “It’s not that,” Mary Lou said, laughing. “I hardly ever see him. It’s what you said…that word.”

  “What? Pecker? I coulda said somethin’ worse.”

  “I know, I know. Please don’t.”

  Mary Lou knew that Tante Lulu had hated Valcour LeDeux for a long, long time. Everyone knew that. In fact, when Mary Lou’s uncles Luc, Remy, and René were boys, they often fled the drunken rages of their father, running to the bayou cottage of Tante Lulu, who was in some convoluted way their aunt, or great-aunt, or something. Tante Lulu claimed he was an egg-suckin’ dawg from the first she met him. And the shelf life on Tante Lulu’s grievances against Valcour was like forever, but then he kept adding more chits onto his bad boy/man tab. Mary Lou was aware of four legitimate children born to two wives, one deceased and one hanging on by her expensive sculptured nails, but more and more illegitimate ones kept coming to light over the years. Mary Lou’s own mother, Charmaine, was one of the illegitimate ones.

  It didn’t help Tante Lulu’s opinion that Valcour was also in bed with the oil companies.

  By the time they finished their meal and were sipping at cups of café au lait, Tante Lulu, wise old owl that she was, decided that enough was enough. “No more beatin’ around the bush,” she said, “Obviously, you have a problem that only I can solve; otherwise, you would’ve saved the small talk fer tomorrow at the birthday bash.”

  To tell the truth, Mary Lou was having second thoughts about unloading her issues on the old lady. “Well, actually, it’s nothing to bother—”

  “Pff! Thass why God put me here. To be bothered. Thass why he assigned St. Jude to be my partner.” Tante Lulu beamed with encouragement. “Doan matter whether it’s big or small. There’s somethin’ troubling you, girl, and I’m here to help.”

  Immediately, tears welled in Mary Lou’s eyes. She’s pulling out the St. Jude card. Must be she thinks I’m hopeless. I am! Mary Lou wailed inwardly.

  Tante Lulu reached two hands across the table, squeezed one of Mary Lou’s, and continued to hold on. “Tell me, honey.”

  “Derek dumped me,” she confessed on a sob, then immediately lowered her voice when she noticed a couple at a nearby table look their way.

  Tante Lulu nodded. “I wondered why you didn’t mention him. And you’re not wearing that friendship ring.”

  “Promise ring,” Mary Lou corrected, then realized that it didn’t matter. The ring and the promise were gone.

  “You were keepin’ company with that boy fer a long time,” her aunt pointed out.

  “Yep. Two years. Ever since we were seniors in high school.”

  The old lady narrowed her eyes suddenly, which caused the mascara clumps to stick together. “Did he cheat on you?”

  “No, no,” Mary Lou said. “Not that I’m aware of. No, he said I’ve become…boring.”

  Tante Lulu stared at her for a moment, then burst out laughing. “Girl, I thought it was something serious, like bein’ preggers. You aren’t, are you?”

  “No!” Mary Lou exclaimed.

  “Aw, shucks! I was kinda plannin’ on convertin’ my spare bedroom into a nursery fer you and the baby.”

  “I am not pregnant,” Mary Lou declared emphatically. That’s all she would need, for her mother to get wind of a rumor about her only daughter about to make her a grandmother. And, frankly, Mary Lou was rather offended that Tante Lulu would think she was that dumb. “I’m on the pill, auntie.”

  Tante Lulu put her hands on her ears. “Doan be tellin’ me stuff like that.”

  Mary Lou was surprised, continually, by the old lady’s conflicting ideas. She could be as outrageous as any hell-raising senior citizen, a feminist from way back, but then adhere to her strict Catholic opinions on other things, like birth control.

  “Anyhow, being boring is serious,” Mary Lou said, bringing the subject back around. “The ultimate insult, I think.”

  “Boring, huh? Thass one thing no one has ever said about the women in this family.”

  Mary Lou shrugged. “Guess I’m the exception.”

  Tante Lulu studied her appearance, tapping a fingertip against her lips which were now minus color except for a red line around the edges. Mary Lou resisted the temptation to lean forward and use a napkin to wipe off the excess.

  “Well, that just dills my pickle! You’re a beautiful girl, Mary Lou, and if brains were leather, that Derek wouldn’t have enough to saddle a pissant,” Tante Lulu concluded, getting a bit red in the face. “Mebbe yer hair could be fluffed up a bit, and it wouldn’t hurt to add a bit of rouge to yer cheeks, and, holy moley, tart up yer clothes once in a while, but other than that, that boy had no bizness callin’ you boring.”

  “Is that all?” Mary Lou should have been offended, but it was hard to take Tante Lulu’s jibes to heart when she meant well. “Actually, I don’t think it’s my physical appearance that he means as boring. More my personality.” She turned on her male voice and imitated Derek by husking out, “All you talk about, Mary Lou, is horses, horses, horses. I swear, honey, you’d live in a stable if you could. And all you ever want to do is ride, ride, ride. Not that I don’t like a certain kind of riding. Ha, ha, ha! Think about it, sweetheart, you look down on my frat parties, but you’re the first one at a barbecue at some shit-stinky ranch or out roping or branding the animals. Be careful, sweetheart, or you’re gonna start lookin’ like a horse.”

  Tante Lulu’s jaw dropped and she just stared at her for a moment. Then, she said, “What a schmuck! Did it ever occur to him that all he talks about is football? To some of us, tossing a ball around and men tacklin’ men to break their bones fer fun is bor-ing. And all those bulgy steroid muscles! Do they wanna look like Popeye? Eew!”

  Tante Lulu had a point there. Derek played football for Tulane, and he spent all his spare time watching NFL games on TV or working out with weights, sometimes both at the same time.

  “You never did like Derek, did you? I always figured it was because he wasn’t Cajun.”

  “Nope. There are plenty of good non-Cajun men out there. But I suspicioned early on that he was using you to get close to yer cousin Andy. Mebbe get an in with the Sain
ts’ big brass.”

  Mary Lou felt her face flush. That thought had occurred to her, too.

  “Not that he wasn’t attracted to you and all,” her aunt added quickly. “More like he was lookin’ fer a little lagniappe, along with the sex.” In Cajun land, lagniappe was the little something extra a merchant threw in with a customer’s purchase. “Ain’t nothin’ wrong with a little hanky panky. I never did go for that, ‘Why buy the cow when you kin get the milk fer free?’ To me, it’s jist as easy to say, ‘Why buy sausage when steak is on the menu?’ What’s good fer the goose and all that!”

  “Tante Lulu!” Mary Lou exclaimed again. You couldn’t say the old lady wasn’t blunt…and possibly right. And wasn’t it odd how her language fluctuated from almost illiterate to highly intelligent, practically from sentence to sentence? Did she do it on purpose, to give the wrong impression, so she could then zap a person with some wisdom? Probably.

  “I’m too old to waste time on pretendin’ I doan know what you young folks do. Old folks, too, fer that matter. But thass beside the point. Did you tell yer mother about Derek bustin’ up with you? Betcha she’d have some good advice, specially since she was a Miss Louisiana at one time and broke more hearts than the shredding machine at Whitman’s Sampler the day after Valentine’s.”

  Mary Lou just blinked at that long spiel, but then she said, “I’m not that crazy…or desperate. If I told Mom, she’d blab to Dad, and you know what he’d do? He’d go after Derek with a cattle prod. I overheard him telling Uncle Luc one time that if any guy hurt his little girl, meaning me, he’d shoot his balls off.” Uncle Luc had three daughters, and was always complaining about how they were giving him premature gray hairs, but he’d agreed with her father.

  “Yep. You are yer daddy’s girl. Allus have been, from the moment he first saw you in the hospital. He cried when he held you fer the first time. Did you know that?”

  Mary Lou did know that. Tante Lulu had told her about it at least a hundred times. “I never get tired of hearing about Daddy’s love for me, and Mom, and the brat,” which was the affectionate name she’d given the new baby, Timmy. It was embarrassing to see how her father looked at her mother sometimes, his heart in his eyes, as old as they both were…almost fifty, for heaven’s sake!. But that’s the kind of love she’d been looking for, hoping for, with Derek. And that wasn’t so unreasonable, dammit! She and Derek had been a couple for years now, and he said he loved her. They’d even talked about marriage sometime in the future…the far future, after graduation, but still…

  “So, what do you want now? To get Derek back, or to move on? I got advice that could go both ways.”

  “I’m not sure. I do love him. On the other hand, I’d like to show him that I can do better.”

  Tante Lulu nodded.

  “You really could help me?”

  “For sure, darlin’.”

  “How?”

  “Well, it’s obvious,” Tante Lulu shook her head sadly, causing the Farrah Fawcett wig to go a bit lopsided, “you’ve lost something important, and I don’t mean the schmuck.”

  Mary Lou tried to laugh, but it came out as a choke. “What?”

  “The thing all bayou gals are born with.”

  “What?” she repeated dumbly.

  “Cajun sass.”

  * * *

  In Tante Lulu’s world, there’s a recipe for everything…

  Some folks would discount Mary Lou’s heartache as young love that would soon pass, like wind in the bowels, or a bad hair day. They would pat her on the back in a patronizing way and say, “It’s not like you have cancer or polio or a bad case of the swamp runs, honey chile.” Then there were those dimwits that would say, “Time, the great healer, is your friend; you’ll forget that loser quick as spit.” Or Louise’s favorite: “Men are like buses. You miss one, and another will be along in five minutes, sure as Bourbon Street sin.”

  Louise didn’t say any of those things. After all, she’d been the same age as Mary Lou when she’d fallen in love with Phillipe Prudhomme, then lost him the next year in the big war. More than fifty years later, and her heart still ached for him every single day.

  “Oh, auntie!” Mary Lou said with a laugh and reached across the table to squeeze her hand. “You are such a treasure!”

  “’Course I am.” She preened.

  “Where do you come up with this stuff?”

  She stopped preening. “Stuff? This ain’t stuff. It’s pure, guar-an-teed bayou wisdom.”

  “There’s no such thing as Cajun baby girls having a gene for sass,” Mary Lou said in a gentle tone, so as not to offend.

  Hah! It would take a lot more than that to offend her.

  “Genes, smenes! Thass all you know, girl. They’re there, all right. The lucky females let it shine right outta their skin, practically from the time they leave the crib. Those are the ones that bat their flirty little eyelashes and turn their daddies into butter. But some gals hold it in. Like constipation. Others jist need a jolt to trigger it loose, like you and me.”

  “You?”

  “Yep. For a long time, years after my Phillipe was gone, I jist wallowed in my miseries. Dint care ’bout my appearance. Heck, I never went out anywhere to be seen.”

  “Didn’t you have to work?”

  She shook her head. “No jobs were available, lessen I went into Nawleans to my old job as a typist. But I dint have the energy to make the effort. Plus, I would have had to do my hair and press my clothes. In the end, it was easier to jist sleep way too much, ’cept when Mama dragged me out into the swamps in her pirogue to gather herbs fer her healin’ business.”

  “At least you had that saving grace. Learning to be a folk healer, even if it was against your wishes in the beginning.”

  Louise was pleased that Mary Lou was following her story so closely, and seemed to understand. She was a smart girl, way too smart for that Derek dope. “Then my Mama died of the cancer and left me with little Adèle, my brother Frank’s daughter, to care for.”

  “Adèle? That was Uncle Luc, René, and Remy’s mama, right?”

  “Right. Adèle was only five at that time, though, and a handful. Believe me, a toddler runnin’ wild with snakes and gators nearby dint allow fer no wallowing. I had no choice but to straighten up and take responsibility.”

  “So that was your trigger?”

  Louise shrugged. “The first of many.”

  “I know you’re trying to be helpful, auntie, but our situations are entirely different. My being boring and unable to hold onto my boyfriend is nothing compared to your grief.”

  “Grief is grief. The cure is the same.”

  Mary Lou arched her brows in question. “To pull up my big-girl panties?”

  “So to speak. You gotta remember that a dash of Cajun sass kin go a long way to cure jist about anything.”

  Mary Lou groaned. “That again!”

  “Always that, sweetie. But not to worry. I have the recipe.”

  “You have a recipe for Cajun sass?” Mary Lou laughed.

  Did she think this was a joke? Not to Louise. “Of course. Ain’t that what I been tryin’ to tell you?”

  “You have?” Mary Lou hit the side of her head with the heel of one hand and smiled. “And the ingredients are…?”

  Louise could tell that the girl was still an unbeliever.

  “SASS. Style, Attitude, Smarts, Stubbornness. Fer a start. ’Course, there are lots of other things…the spices. Like bravery, focus, and optimism.”

  Mary Lou laughed out loud. “You’re serious!”

  “Aren’t you glad you came to me fer help?”

  Just then, Tee-John walked up. “What’s taking you so long, old lady? I’ve been sitting in the parking lot, baking my ass off, waiting for you.”

  “I thought you were going to Luc’s office.”

  “I did, but he’s in court today. You about talked out?”

  “Doan be such a grump.”

  “Hi, Uncle John.”

  H
e sat down and began to eat the remainder of the bread pudding. “Yum!” he said, then, “You two were laughing like hyenas when I came in. What was so funny?”

  Mary Lou used a napkin to wipe at the tears of mirth that still rimmed her eyes. “We were just talking about recipes,” she told him.

  “Recipes? I like the sound of that.” He turned his attention to Louise. “Hope it’s the recipe for Hot Pepper Jam. I ran out of that batch you gave me for Christmas.”

  Tee-John had a fondness for the preserves that she made with habaneras and rhubarb served over cream cheese-slathered crackers.

  “No, Tee-John, this is an entirely different recipe. It’s one of those change-your-life formulas.”

  “Well, hell’s bells! Count me in. I’m always up for a new experience.”

  “Celine would have something to say about that,” Louise said.

  “Only good things,” Tee-John protested. “My wife loves all the new experiences I bring her way.” He waggled his eyebrows for emphasis.

  “Like the time you were a stripper? Or the time you went to the underwear-optional party? Or when you drove my convertible into Lake Pontchartrain?”

  “Those were all before Celine and I got together. So, they don’t count.” He sat back and grinned with satisfaction, as if he’d won the argument.

  The fool!

  Mary Lou’s head was swiveling back and forth as she witnessed this exchange, probably learning a few things she didn’t need to know about her uncle.

  “Anyways, the recipe Mary Lou and I were discussing is fer women only.”

  “Aw, shucks!” he said. But then, as he thought for a moment, he added, “I can’t imagine any time when you needed a change-of-life experience, auntie. Seems to me, you’ve always been a bayou gal, born, bred, and stay the same till you’re pushin’ up daisies…or okra.”

  “You have no idea,” she said. “Now, skedaddle. Mary Lou will drive me home so we kin continue our discussion. I gotta give her the exact recipe.”

  She noticed Tee-John and Mary Lou exchanging a look, probably wondering if she was losing it. People had been giving her that look for decades now. That didn’t matter to Louise. She needed a little time to recollect that period in her past when she’d been at her lowest and felt the need to call on her bayou background…to garner her…yes, her Cajun sass.