Chronicles of a Radical Hag (with Recipes) Read online

  “The world’s going to fix their opinions about older women after the election,” said Susan, a tease in her voice. “With our first female president!”

  “That’s right,” said Haze, brightening. “When the Nation of Pantsuits rises up and demands to be counted!”

  “I ALWAYS LIKED READING HAZE’S COLUMNS,” says Caroline after hearing about the Happy Tea. “But now I want to go back and read a bunch more of them.”

  “I know,” says Susan. “I’ve read every one since I started working here, but I’ve still missed years’ and years’ worth.”

  Their eyes widen as the lightbulb of an idea switches on for both of them.

  “Let’s go in the archives and read them,” says Caroline, fingers moving on her keypad.

  “No, not online,” says Susan, as she stands. “Let’s go into the real archives—Haze’s office. She’s saved everything.”

  OPENING THE BOTTOM DRAWER of one of several wooden file cabinets that crowd Haze’s small office, Caroline says, “1964 to 1966. I guess it all starts here.”

  They unload the drawer and carry its contents into the conference room.

  Seated at the long table, Susan takes out the manila folders that fill a speckled brown accordion file, and as she opens one, her eyes fill with tears.

  “It’s Haze’s first column.” She unclips an inch of papers attached to it. “And all the reader responses it got.”

  She passes half of the letters to Caroline, who peers at them like an archaeologist examining ancient papyrus.

  “They actually mailed these?”

  “That’s what people did,” says Susan. “They sat at their desk or kitchen table with pen and paper and wrote.” She thumbs through the pages of onion skin, of flowery note cards, of monogrammed personal stationery. “And then they addressed an envelope, put a stamp on it, walked to the corner mail box, and dropped it in.”

  “So much effort,” says Caroline.

  “Oh my gosh,” says Susan. “Here’s a letter from the mayor at the time. Waldo Albeck. He wishes Haze good luck and hopes that she’ll focus on ‘the column-worthy business opportunities here in Granite Creek.’”

  The conference room clock ticks away as they read letters written fifty years ago, grumbling about or praising the new columnist.

  “I love all the different handwriting,” says Caroline, when she gets to the last of her pile. “It sort of makes you know the letter writer a little better.” She brushes her fingers along the engraved name on a piece of thick vellum stationery. “Like this, from Mrs. Paulette VanderVerk. I’ve never seen such beautiful handwriting.”

  Susan’s shoulder presses against Caroline’s as she leans in to look.

  “It is pretty. And so was she. I remember her and her husband—he was a judge—visiting my grandparents. She had white-blonde hair that she wore in a French roll, and the pointiest-toed high heels I’d ever seen.” She looks at the letter. “What’s she say? Was she on the ‘Yay, Haze!’ or the ‘Boo, Haze’ side?”

  “Yay,” says Caroline.

  “Most of the women were. Which makes sense, I guess.”

  It is past noon by the time they finish reading the contents of the first file, and the growl in Susan’s stomach reminds her that eating hasn’t been a priority in the hurly-burly of the past few days.

  It reminds her assistant too, who asks, “Should I run to Rudolph’s for some sandwiches?”

  “That sounds great.” She threads her fingers together and with her palms facing the ceiling, lifts her arms, her stretch long and luxurious.

  As Caroline gets out her phone to call in their order, she asks, “So, turkey, tuna salad—”

  “Oh my God,” Susan says, dropping her hands to cap her head. “I just had the greatest idea.”

  2

  July 16, 2016

  Editor’s Note:

  In her career, Haze Evans has won a fair number of prizes and accolades, but they were all “piffle” to her. Two years ago, I told her I was planning a big to-do to celebrate her fifty years’ writing for the Gazette. It was a to-do on which she put an immediate kibosh.

  “All I need,” she said, “is for you to keep running my columns.”

  That’s what we’re going to do.

  After five decades, Haze’s columns still generate considerable reader feedback, but we were unaware of the volume of reader responses her long-ago columns inspired. Haze has kept meticulous files on every column, from readers’ letters (noting which ones the paper printed), to interoffice memos. Until Haze can write for us again, we will be printing her old columns on a daily basis. Occasionally, we will include some of the letters readers wrote her in reaction to a particular column. Following is the very first column she wrote for the Granite Creek Gazette.

  April 27, 1964

  Cheerful Greetings, Readers!

  I was thrilled when the peach organza prom dress I sewed won a blue ribbon at the statewide 4-H Career Day competition, thrilled when I graduated UND with a degree in journalism, and thrilled when the Gazette hired me away from the Fargo Forum. To be thrilled is a lovely state of being, one that I again find myself in now that I’ll be writing a biweekly column!

  Every year my bachelor uncle Ralph brought a different date to our family’s holiday table, and one memorable Thanksgiving he was accompanied by Carol Bergeson. Carol Bergeson!

  Thirteen years old and a recent graduate to the grown-ups’ table, I was not only beside Miss Bergeson but beside myself. She may not be as well known here in Minnesota, but in the Dakotas and states west, she was the reigning Queen of the Rodeo, and throughout the passing of mashed potatoes, turkey, and candied yams, I deliberated over what sophisticated and witty words I might say to impress her.

  “I saw you at the Dunn County Fair,” I finally offered, watching her drizzle gravy over her generously filled plate. “You were wearing lots of fringe.”

  “I always wear fringe, darlin’,” she said, “except at the dinner table, where it can get a little sloppy.”

  She was the nicest woman, with a big laugh and a headful of wild red hair, and she regaled us with tales of bucking broncos and rodeo clowns with drinking problems. Moreover, she had all the time in the world for a strangely pale teenager who thought she’d hidden a pimply chin and forehead with liberal pats of her mother’s powder puff.

  Uncle Ralph always whisked his dates away directly after dessert, not wanting, I suppose, to be part of the familial loosening of belt buckles, burps, and other noises repressed (and unrepressed), and when they were leaving, Miss Bergeson shrugged into her luxurious dark fur coat and pulled me toward her.

  “Now remember, Haze,” she whispered. “Everybody told me little girls didn’t grow up to be rodeo stars. But I didn’t listen to ‘everybody’—I listened to myself. If you want something, chase after it, rope it, and pull it in!”

  It is advice that has served me well, and after Walter Peterson announced his retirement, I thought, “That’s something I want—his job! And so after it I went.”

  “Why should I give a features writer her own column?” asked Mr. McGrath, this paper’s publisher. “A features writer who’s only been with the Gazette for a year?”

  “Because I love a good story,” I said, practically ejecting from my chair. “I love hearing them and love telling them. And besides, I did a little research, and the Gazette hasn’t had a female columnist since Ethyl’s Kitchen Nook—and that was ages ago!”

  “I believe it’s been four years since Ethyl took her retirement,” said Mr. McGrath, who went on to tell me how Ethyl had a point of view and how people who read her columns knew they were going to get tips for making moist pot roast and cute stories about who first dared to add grated carrots to their Jell-O salad.

  “Just like with Ramblin’s by Walt, they knew they were going to get a sportsman’s slightly curmudgeonly view of the world as well as how the fish were biting on Flame Lake. What will they know they’re going to get with you?”

  “
Who knows? We’ll discover it together! I’ll write what moves me, what riles me up or makes me sad, and just look at it from a business perspective—a column by a woman who could be the granddaughter of the columnist she’s replacing—well, it could bring in not just younger subscribers but more women subscribers!”

  The silence that followed was Grand Canyon–size deep, finally broken by the muffled rat-a-tat-tat of the pencil Mr. McGrath tapped eraser-side down on his desk blotter, and just as I thought he was going to tell me to get out of his office and pack up my desk, he sighed.

  “All right. Have your first column on my desk Monday morning. I’ll give you a six-week trial run to show me what you’ve got.”

  So that’s why I’ve written about Thanksgiving at the end of April. Because I’m really grateful.

  Here we go. Wish me luck!

  4/28/64

  Interoffice Memo

  From: Joan Dwyer

  To: Haze Evans

  Haze—Thought you might be interested in your predecessor’s reply to your column. Don’t tell my boss I let you see this!

  Bill—

  What the hell was that? Maybe it should have been you who retired, because no offense, it looks like you’ve lost the discernment and taste that used to hold you in good stead as a newspaper man. What’s with all those direct quotes—did you really say that stuff? And where was the blue pencil that should have cut this piece in half? The readership that I spent nineteen years building is not going to be happy with this shit! Send this twerp back to writing features on bridge parties and weddings!

  Walt

  P.S. And “Cheerful Greetings”? Here’s my idea for her column name—“Puking on Paper.”

  P.P.S. Did you really call me curmudgeonly?

  Susan had chuckled, imagining the office subterfuge of her grandfather’s secretary passing on Walt’s snide note about his successor, but out of all the correspondence Haze had paper-clipped to her column, she chose to publish only one response.

  4/28/64

  To the Editor:

  My aunt gave my husband and me an “introductory” subscription to the Granite Creek Gazette when we first married. I always thought it was sort of cheap of her, because the “introduction” only lasted a month. What did that cost her—three dollars? But it was enough that we’ve kept up the subscription and the marriage (ha ha). My husband huffed and puffed while reading the new columnist (he loved Ramblin’s by Walt), calling it a bunch of claptrap, but from what I’ve read, I hope she passes her trial run!

  Sincerely,

  Can’t Use My Name Because My Husband Would Be Mad

  “Then ditch the rat bastard,” mutters Shelly. One of the many names Susan and Mitch call her is the Master Mutterer, although never to her face. Shelly does not go in for teasing, jokes at her expense, or heaven forbid, the tiniest inkling of what might be considered criticism. The area around her desk is carpeted in eggshells, or it seems that way, judging from the way everyone tiptoes through the reception area.

  “She scared me half to death when I came in for my interview,” Caroline once told Susan.

  “She scares everybody,” Susan had said, and even though she looked forward to the day when Shelly finally decided to retire, she was fond of the crotchety woman, who was one of the few holdouts from when her grandfather was still at the paper.

  Now on her third Tums of the morning, trying to soothe a stomach agitated by a constantly refilled coffee cup and her own foul mood, the receptionist turns to the comics on page 12B. She supposes she feels bad for Haze, but not as bad as those who’d been fooled—unlike herself—by Haze’s friendliness and bonhomie. It was her bitter joke that amid an office full of reporters, she was the only one who knew Haze’s real story.

  Shelly was hired in 1971, two days after her twenty-first birthday and exactly one month after she’d found scrawled on the magnetized refrigerator pad a note from her husband that read, “Bye Bye! I’m out of here—for good!” Shelly let herself believe for a few moments that maybe it was an April Fools’ joke, even though it was already the fourth of the month, but the fantasy was short-lived when Ray called her that evening and offered an elaboration.

  “I just got tired of you holding me back, Shel,” he said from a pay phone in Des Moines. “Everything I wanted—from getting a little lake cabin to buying stock in General Mills to partnering up with Vern Anderson in his custom motorcycle business—you called a pipe dream. Your big problem, Shel—but it’s no longer mine—is that you’ve got no imagination!”

  Curling up like a salted slug, Shelly felt as if she were going to die and was surprised to find, by the sheer act of waking up the next morning, that she hadn’t. Her first order of business as a jilted wife was to cut out pictures from the newspaper and Life magazine and use them to deface every photograph of herself and the rat bastard, starting with their Vegas wedding picture, in which they posed underneath a trellis threaded with plastic morning glories, he in a rented tux with a pink ruffled shirt, and she in the prom dress she had worn just months earlier.

  “Is this imaginative enough for you?” she muttered, after gluing Steve McQueen’s face over Ray’s.

  She smudged beads of Elmer’s Glue on the back of a cutout cow’s head and carefully pasted it over her own in a picture of her and Ray at a picnic table.

  “So now you’ve got a thing for heifers, huh Ray?”

  She found pictures of a heavily bearded gentleman, a basset hound, and an old woman with no teeth; these were all carefully pasted over her own countenance so that it appeared her rat-bastard husband had extremely bad and sundry tastes in partners. In other photos, the faces of movie stars were pasted over his, so that she appeared to have excellent taste.

  She made a little album out of these reconstituted photographs, tying curly ribbon through the three holes she had jabbed into the construction paper with a paring knife, and kept it on her bedside table for years, until it was destroyed by a spilled rum and Tab, one of the three or four with which she tucked herself into the night.

  SHELLY PICKS UP THE RINGING PHONE and in a voice pickled in vinegary sweetness agrees with the caller that yes, running Haze Evan’s columns was simply a wonderful idea.

  May 4, 1964

  Hello from Haze!

  Note to readers: I was up in Fargo Saturday for the funeral of a woman who was one of my first interviews when I wrote for the Forum. After our meeting, she revealed she had sudden concerns about her privacy and asked me not to write the story. I agreed, but now, after having learned of her recent death, I dug out my notes on our interview and decided to write what I hope is a tribute.

  “My real name’s Susan Elias,” the costume designer told me in the slightly British accent the movie stars she worked with used back in the 1930s. “A perfectly fine moniker, but two weeks in Hollywood and I became SuZell.”

  Dyed an unnatural black, her hair was worn in a low chignon, like a ballet dancer’s. Her face was pale, except for two feverish-looking spots of rouge. She held a cigarette in a foot-long ebony holder, given her, she informed me, by the Earl of Sussex.

  “I was once given a ham on rye by the Earl of Sandwich,” I said.

  SuZell was not amused, her look implying that I had given her a sudden migraine. Stubbing out her cigarette in an onyx ashtray, she said, “Let’s move on to my studio, shall we?”

  The large room was filled with mannequins dressed in her designs.

  “That was Roz’s—Rosalind Russell’s—favorite hostess gown. She told me she loved it so much she wore it to rags.”

  I replied that it looked brand-new.

  Again the sudden, stabbing migraine look.

  “She didn’t wear that one. These are my original designs, dear, prototypes, as it were, from which I was commissioned others.”

  The clothing was beautiful; there was a business suit with linebacker shoulder pads she’d designed for Joan Crawford, a hoop-skirted ball gown for a Civil War movie, a pink blush of a dress whose silk seemed li
quid. I could have spent hours examining the craftsmanship of the sewing, studying the way she set in a sleeve or draped a skirt on the bias, but touching anything was verboten and listening to SuZell rattle off the many testimonials she received to her genius . . . well, it got a little tiring.

  “It’s obvious you loved your work in Hollywood,” I said, when we were back in her parlor. “What made you move back to Fargo?”

  The migraine expression flashed on her face, and instead of answering my question, she said, “You sewed that blouse you’re wearing, didn’t you?”

  Nodding, I flushed, wondering what misplaced dart or crooked seam had tattled on me.

  “It’s very well-constructed,” she said, screwing a new cigarette into the end of her holder. “We designers are like architects, don’t you think? Concerned with form and space and how it bests suits a person.”

  “I didn’t design this,” I said, tugging at my collar. “I used a pattern.”

  After lighting up, SuZell drew in what might be the longest inhale in the history of smokers, and her exhale put me in the middle of a fog bank.

  “It might behoove you to learn how to accept a compliment,” she said. “Especially from someone your superior.”

  It was then I thought my afternoon with the famous designer should end, and after I put my pen and notebook in my purse, the woman’s rouged and powdered face did what it hadn’t done before: became animated by laughter.

  For a moment I wondered if I were dealing with someone who’d dropped a few marbles in the game of old age, and seeing my confusion, she laughed even harder.

  “Have you had lunch?” she said finally, and when I shook my head, she added, “Fabulous. You can experience some more of my talents.”