Folly Beach - Dorothea Benton Frank [26]
“No. Maybe. How the heck should I know? But I know this—the longer we let this drag out the worse it’s gonna be on you. Emotionally, I mean. FYI, I took your saffron. That stuff is way too expensive to leave.”
“Definitely. Gotta love your practical side. And you know what?”
“What?”
“I’m gonna call Aunt Daisy tonight. I think I’m going back to Folly.”
Chapter Seven
Setting: The Porgy House kitchen, condensed-milk cans, a large sack of potatoes and onions, loaf of bread, carton of eggs, bananas.
Director’s Note: Photos of the Porgy House kitchen on the back scrim. A photo of Jenifer as an infant and show Dawn Hill, their North Carolina home. Switch to the dancing.
Act I
Scene 4
Dorothy: It was always a struggle to figure out what to cook for supper, when we lived on Folly. Some days the kitchen seemed like another planet to me where I wandered around like an alien, unable to tell a good onion from a bad turnip. That’s when I made soup. Onion, water, done! On other days, when the pantry was just about bare, I felt like Harry Houdini, producing a meal from thin air. Thank heavens for condensed milk and potatoes. Anyway, surprises and miracles happened in my kitchen on Folly Beach. And no one ever died from my catch-as-catch-can cooking skills, well, no one I knew of anyway. As a rule, small portions of blandness did not kill.
Oh, sure, breakfast was easy enough to put together—a few fresh eggs from Romeo, the island egg man, a slice of toast, a glass of juice. Or cereal! What an absolutely brilliant invention were cornflakes? With sliced banana? Even I could handle that. And our midday dinner wasn’t completely beyond my capabilities either. I just always kept it simple because of our budget. Besides, DuBose and I kept a strict regime, being ever-vigilant of our health. On Sunday, if we weren’t invited to dinner with friends or his mother, I might bake some chicken or pork chops with steamed rice and maybe I’d boil up a head of broccoli. No cream or sauces. Nothing spicy. Our digestive systems would have rebelled. We were not accustomed to much more than a little butter or the smallest sprinkle of salt.
When the day was at an end and I had to produce yet another meal I always wished we could just forget it. And sometimes I was just so tired. Another meal? Didn’t I have a full-time job, a young daughter whose care was almost solely mine, and a house to run as well? Sometimes, when I was on the verge of exhaustion, I wondered why women found managing a household so attractive and that’s when I would think about Jo Pinckney and just how smart she really was to never marry. Honestly, some days it was all just too much, especially when my head was deep in the process of creating a new story.
But on most days I took my domestic duties in stride. DuBose wasn’t fussy about the state of the house or his meals. Often, I made sandwiches or plates of sliced leftovers from the previous day. If there were any to be had, that is. If I did not plan for leftovers, which I never seemed to calculate quite right, there would have just been more cornflakes! It seemed to me that I should’ve been able to come up with a more satisfying plan, so sometimes I served a dinner meal for supper and just quick sandwiches for our midday meal, especially if my writing was going well. To stop writing around noon to cook a hot meal usually meant my workday would come to an end, because it was hard to change gears and cook and then change them again to return to my writing table. This is sounding confusing, even to me, but the point is that I felt that the more time I spent out of the kitchen the better it was for our health, our finances, and our careers.
Oh, those were the days! Such sweet days! DuBose and I were married