Lulu’s Recipe for Cajun Sass

by Hill Sandra

  Etienne…rather, Steve…went off with his Daddy to look at all the military stuff, including, yes, a few tanks. Tee-John probably accompanied him so he wouldn’t really climb into one of the things.

  Next up was a booth about Victory Gardens and home canning. Hah! Cajuns, ever frugal, knew all about the benefits of raising their own food. There was even a booth about bayou animals, how to catch and cook them, including squirrels, raccoons, snakes…and gators, of course.

  “There’s a trend toward austerity t’day,” Charmaine told her, using the same word Tee-John had, back in the car. “People wanna go back ta simpler lifestyles. Avoid processed foods and red meat. Live off the land, completely.”

  “Whass wrong with a supermarket once in awhile?” Louise asked. “And ain’t nothin’ like a rare roast beef with sides of okra and dirty rice.”

  “I cain’t argue with that, livin’ on a ranch and all. Right, Rusty?” Charmaine asked.

  But Rusty and Mary Lou had already moved on to the next booth where an old-fashioned wringer-type washing machine was being demonstrated.

  “I remember those. What a pain in the hiney they were! Took half a day jist ta do a little laundry. ’Course, Monday was allus wash day. And we allus had red beans an’ rice simmerin’ on the stove on Mondays ’cause it took no trouble.”

  Rob and Annie were fascinated by a Pez booth with samples of hundreds of the candy dispensers. An old Woolworth sign advertised them for ten cents each. She could only imagine what those early ones were worth today.

  Cigarette girls walked around the grounds with trays held by a neck strap. Camels, Lucky Strikes, Pall Malls, Raleighs. They were probably empty packs, considering their reputation as “coffin nails,” but there was no question they had been popular back in the day. She’d smoked a few herself, when she’d thought they made her look older and more sophisticated.

  Separate booths dealt with ration books, Spam, Griswold cast-iron pans, and kitchen gadgets. Louise had to explain to Mary Lou the purpose of ice picks, hand-cranked meat grinders, and treadle sewing machines.

  All the women and girls were fascinated by the vintage clothing on display. Both Sylvie and Rachel sat down to have their hair styled in “Victory Rolls” that ran from one ear, along the nape, to the other ear, with center parts, or cute bangs across their foreheads. Still others had their hair done into an “up-do.”

  Meanwhile, among the crowds, Celine pointed out that there were educators here who wanted to impart information about the era (the event organizers, historical societies, professors, and authors), men who liked boy toys (the military paraphernalia, in particular), and the promenaders (military re-enactors and people who just loved the attire of that time period, like Charmaine). Occasional World War II vets also hobbled about. Actually, veterans of other wars, as well.

  Louise was particularly touched when she noticed some fellows in the old white “crackerjack” uniforms of the sailors, complete with the “Dixie Cup” or “gob” hats that could be molded to a rakish angle. The memories they triggered caused her heart to constrict so tight she could barely breathe.

  “Are you all right?” Tee-John asked, coming to stand beside her. Apparently he and Etienne were done ogling the war planes and tanks.

  “I’m fine,” she replied, but looped her arm in his as they moved along.

  “Holy shit!” Etienne said suddenly.

  “Watch yer language.” His father smacked him on his shoulder.

  “Sorry,” Etienne apologized, though he didn’t look sorry at all. Instead, he pointed to a tent that had a display of 40s pin-up posters and magazine covers, including some by the famous painter Alberto Vargas.

  “Lookee there, Tante Lulu was a centerfold.”

  “She was not!” Tee-John declared, giving his son another smack.

  “Yes, I was,” Tante Lulu said.

  “Told ya!” Etienne hooted. “That chick up there looks jist lak Tante Lulu in that graduation picture on her dresser…the one in a silver frame. Y’know the one I mean, Daddy. She’s wearin’ a red dress and high heels and holdin’ a diploma.”

  “I’ll be damned!” Tee-John muttered.

  Everyone in her family who’d gathered to see what the problem was turned as one to stare at her, up at the posters, then back at her.

  “I was a pin-up, not a centerfold,” Louise amended.

  Luc groaned.

  Tee-John laughed.

  “Lemme see,” Charmaine said, pushing her way forward. Then, examining the two posters in questions, she remarked, “Wow! You were a real beauty, auntie. Bet I could do one of these pin-up pictures. What do you think, Rusty?”

  Rusty just made a gurgling sound.

  “All of those pin-up artists made the women look like they had perfect figures, almost too perfect. There probably isn’t a female alive with breasts so perky and waists so small. It was almost misogynistic and sexist, really. Worse than Barbie dolls,” Celine informed them all.

  Did I mention Celine is a know-it-all, bless her heart? “Bull-pucky!” Louise countered.

  “Get out of there,” Celine hissed as Etienne moved farther inside the tent, getting an eyeful of what would certainly appeal to an adolescent boy. To men, too, truth to tell. “Women don’t really look like that,” she continued to instruct her son. “It’s just a male fantasy.”

  “God bless fantasies,” Tee-John murmured as his eyes swept the array of posters.

  Celine glared at him.

  He waggled his eyebrows at her. “Hey, darlin’, if I buy you one of those garter belts being sold back there with a pair of seamed stockings, I could take your picture with my cell phone, and—”

  “Grow up!” Celine said.

  “Never!” Tee-John and Louise hooted at the same time.

  Celine had to smile then, shaking her head at the two of them.

  Then Tee-John put his arm around his wife’s shoulders and tugged her closer to his side, kissing the top of her head. She could hear him whisper, “You look better than any of these models, babe.”

  What a charmer!“

  What’s the difference,” Etienne asked Louise, “between a centerfold and a pin-up?”

  “The difference is clothes,” Tante Lulu explained, following after Etienne. There was nothing but LeDeuxs in the big tent now. “Pin-ups wore clothes, centerfolds were buck nekkid. Mostly.” She was peering closely at the two posters in question. She remembered when she’d had them done. Originally, she’d just wanted a racy picture to give to her fiancé, Phillipe Prudhomme, before he went away, but the painter, an associate of Vargas, Emmanuel Delgado, had convinced her to do several others, which had been used in a series of pin-up calendars sold in military canteens around the world.

  One of the posters showed Louise wearing a red silk robe that exposed one leg up to the thigh and a cleavage no real woman ever had; in it, she posed on a pink chaise lounge, with her back arched so that her long, dark hair, like Charmaine’s Veronica Lake ’do, hung back almost to the floor. Her hair hadn’t been that long, either. Another bit of artistic license. On the other poster, she wore a strapless white bathing suit and white high-heeled pumps, posed against a boat. Perched on her up-do hairstyle, ala Judy Garland or Joan Crawford, was a white sailor cap.

  “I looked good, dint I?” she said to Tee-John.

  “Damn good! You actually appear tall in that one. At least five-seven, or –eight.”

  “Oh, that was a trick all the pin-up painters did at that time. They wanted tall women, of course, but they had ways ta make us shorter ladies have longer legs. Like that picture shopping they do t’day.”

  “She means photoshopping,” Celine told Tee-John.

  “I know what it means,” Louise snapped.

  The owner of the tent, overhearing their conversation, came up to them and asked Louise, “Would you mind autographing a few of your posters?”

  “Sure,” she said.

  Actually, her family members bought most of them, wanting evidence, no doubt
, that their outrageous Tante Lulu had been outrageous, even back then.

  “What do you say to a little lunch?” Luc suggested. “There’s a food tent over there. Aunt Hattie’s Tea Room. Looks like fun. Scones with clotted cream and lemon curd. Crustless finger sandwiches. Yum.”

  She didn’t know if Luc was serious or poking fun. Whatever. Louise wasn’t really hungry, but she’d been on her feet all morning, and she’d welcome a little break. They had to pass the USO tent before they got to the tea room.

  Sylvie linked arms with her on one side and Luc on the other. “Did you ever go to one of these?” Sylvie asked her.

  “Are ya kiddin’? I lived in those canteens durin’ the war. It’s where I first met Phillipe. Well, not really ‘met’ fer the first time. We knew each other from down the bayou when we were both young’uns, but Phillipe was six years older than me. It was in the Nawleans USO where we got t’gether—really got t’gether, if ya get my meanin’.”

  “We got your meanin’, auntie. No explanation needed,” Luc said.

  “Are ya funnin’ me again?”

  “Me?” He looked at her with mock innocence.

  “Fool!” she said and glanced toward the USO tent as they passed.

  Then stopped dead in her tracks and did a double take.

  Disengaging herself from Luc and Sylvie, she moved hesitantly into the tent where many pictures of USOs from Louisiana were displayed. It was the black-and-white photo, enlarged to poster size, which showed her and Phillipe slow-dancing at the Fort Polk USO New Year’s Eve dance in 1943.

  Phillipe hadn’t been overly tall. Only about five foot ten, but with her high-heeled pumps and dancing on her tippy toes, there had only been a few inches difference in their height. She, wearing her then-favorite tea-length gown of red chiffon, was gazing up at him with adoration. He, in his Navy dress uniform, Cajun to the core, was smiling down at her. A couple in love, no doubt about it.

  Louise remembered that night as if it were yesterday. The band had been playing “Star Dust.” She could still smell his Aqua Velva, and her own musky Tabu. Still feel his nighttime stubble against her cheek. The press of his one hand against her lower back, the other hand holding her palm against his heart, thus displaying her new engagement ring, which had been a Christmas present. The whisper of his “I love you, chère” against her ear.

  That’s when all the events of the day, the nostalgia, the jarred memories, good and so painful they still made her heart hurt in her chest, took their toll. There was only so much a lady could take.

  Louise, for only the second time in her life, fell into a dead faint.

  Get your copy of When Lulu was Hot today!

  Excerpt from Bayou Angel

  The angel was wild tonight...

  Angel Sabato stood at the edge of the dance floor like a dunce, shaking in his thousand-dollar Tres Outlaws boots as he watched the redhead shake her booty to the beat of “Wild Thing.” For an ex-nun, she sure had moves.

  Ironically, he was the one feeling wild. His hands were clammy, his heart was thumping—da dump, da dump, da dump—and, truth to tell, he was scared spitless. Tonight was going to be the night. Do-or-die time.

  It was ridiculous, really. He was thirty-four years old. He’d been around the block so many times there were probably street signs named after him. At the least, his “tread marks” were notorious. Shyness wasn’t even in his vocabulary. After all, he was the dick-for-brains who’d once bared it all for Playgirl magazine.

  Just then the redhead in question, Grace O’Brien, noticed him and smiled widely, crooking a forefinger for him to come out and join her.

  Not a chance.

  It wasn’t dancing he had on his mind.

  She said something to her partner, one of the young LeDeuxs...a freshman at LSU. Then she left the kid behind and snaked a slow, sensuous boogie toward him, her twinkling green eyes holding his the entire time, her arms held out in front of her, fingers beckoning. She must be half plastered or, more likely, in a teasing mood.

  He was not in the mood for teasing.

  “Yo, matey,” she drawled at him.

  This was the tail end of the Pirate Ball. It was being held here in Houma, Louisiana, to celebrate the successful search by Jinx, Inc., a treasure-hunting company, for Jean Lafitte’s hidden gold. Thus the silly pirate talk. Not to mention silly pirate costumes.

  He and Grace had worked on the Jinx team’s Pirate Project these past weeks. Before that they’d been professional poker players. And before that, Grace had been a nun, and he had been in the navy, then construction, and...well, a lot of things.

  She was dancing around him now, dressed in a saucy tavern-wench costume with a jagged knee-length hem, while he was in a puffy shirt tied with a red sash. Jerry Seinfeld would be so proud of me.

  When he pretended to ignore her sexy dancing, she grabbed his upper arm and attempted to tug him forward. Being about seventy-five pounds heavier at six-foot-one to her measly five-foot-five, he was pretty much immovable.

  She put her hands on her hips and glared at him. “Come out here and shake a peg leg, you randy buccaneer.”

  He had to grin at that. “Who says I’m randy?”

  “You’re always randy.”

  “And you know this...how?”

  “All the satisfied smiles I’ve seen on women exiting your revolving bedroom door the past ten years.”

  “You noticed?”

  “Stop changing the subject. I wanna dance.”

  “Are you blitzed?” he asked with a laugh.

  “Just a little,” she slurred.

  Luckily, the DJ changed the music to a different pace. Now Mariah Carey was urging “Touch My Body.”

  He opened his arms to Grace and adjusted her so that her arms were around his neck and his hands were linked behind her waist, just above her butt. And yes, Mariah, he had touching in mind. Touching Grace.

  “I’m flying back to Jersey early tomorrow morning. I need to talk to you,” he said into her hair, which smelled like apples, or was it peaches? Some kind of frickin’ fruit, anyway.

  “Uh-huh. I’m listening,” she replied, definitely not listening as she nuzzled her face into the crook of his neck, inadvertently pressing her belly against the crotch of his tights.

  Yeah, he was wearing XXX-sized tights. With testosterone-induced hysterical irrelevance, he mused that the guys back in his old gang in Newark would get a kick out of him in latex, unless it were of the prophylactic kind. Or was that spandex? Spandex, latex, whatever! That was beside the point. Call me crazy, but did she just lick my ear?

  Blood drained from his head and slam-dunked into sex central. For a second, he thought his knees might give out.

  “Not here,” he gurgled. “Let’s go outside for a walk, down by the bayou. Better yet, I’ll take you back to your hotel room.”

  “I already checked out. I’ll be staying with Tante Lulu from now on.” She leaned her head back to look at him. “You sound serious.”

  “I am serious, babe.” He wondered if she was aware that when she arched back like that it caused his erection to rub against her belly button, which was exposed by her low-riding wench skirt. And that was damn serious.

  “You can drive me to the cottage. Let’s go tell Tante Lulu that I’m leaving.”

  “So, you’re staying with that Cajun dingbat, huh?” he asked, arm looped over her shoulder as they walked to the other side of the hall, where Tante Lulu was chattering away to some guy in a frock coat and tricorne hat. At least he wasn’t wearing tights.

  Louise Rivard, better known as Tante Lulu, was the craziest old woman he’d ever met. But she was a noted traiteur, or folk healer, and Grace had decided to apprentice herself to the fruitcake in hopes of learning more about the healing arts. Really, Grace’s life was like a pendulum swinging from one extreme to the other. Nun to poker player to treasure hunter to healer. He couldn’t wait to see where she landed next, as long as she took him along for the ride.

  “
Don’t call her a dingbat.” Grace turned slightly and swatted him on the chest, then grinned. “Even if she is a dingbat.”

  “Grace...Angel...hope y’all had a good time t’night.” Tante Lulu was dressed as a senior citizen pirate gal. A scary sight, to be sure—she was ninety years old, give or take. No one knew for sure. She eyed them suspiciously when Grace told her she would be leaving with him. Grace was oblivious to that pointed look, which took in his arm on Grace’s shoulder, but he could practically see the matchmaking wheels churning in Tante Lulu’s little brain. “That full moon t’night, she is purty enough to make a cat smooch a hound dog.”

  “Huh?” Grace said.

  “Welcome to TanteLuluville,” he muttered under his breath, then smiled.

  “Ya got a hope chest?” Tante Lulu asked Angel just before they walked away. Tante Lulu had a tradition of making hope chests for the men in her family, or male friends of the family, just before the “thunderbolt of love” hit them.

  Hah! He had news for the Louisiana love bug. That thunderbolt had done its business with him a long time ago.

  “So, what did you want to talk to me about?” Grace asked, once they were sitting in his rental car back in Tante Lulu’s cottage driveway. She didn’t seem so tipsy anymore.

  A full moon allowed him to see Grace’s face. She was concerned. For him.

  “I want you to come back with me, sweetheart.” Well, that was laying his cards on the table from the get-go.

  She frowned. “Back to your motel room?”

  “No. I mean, yeah, that would be great, but I meant, fly back to the East Coast with me in the morning. Come with me and the Jinx team to Germany for our next project.” He gulped. “Just come with me, that’s all.”

  “I don’t understand. You know I quit treasure hunting. It was never intended to be more than a one-shot deal for me. I’ve already explained why I’m staying here.” She moved closer and accidentally put a hand on his thigh.