Just Desserts

The Stiletto Stories

B.K. Smith

Lipstick Mountains Press

Madison Avenue Publishers, LLC

2015

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Acknowledgments

Epigraph

JUST DESSERTS

About The Lipstick Mountains Memoirs by B.K.Smith

LIPSTICK MOUNTAINS MEMOIRS #1—Chelsea Matinee, Memoirs of an Easy Woman

LIPSTICK MOUNTAINS MEMOIRS #2—Sands Point – Memoirs of a Money Trader

LIPSTICK MOUNTAINS MEMOIRS #3—RattleSnake Lodge – Memoirs of a Seeing Woman

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, includes electronic information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publishers except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

JUST DESSERTS

B.K. Smith

Copyright © 2007, 2015 B.K.Smith

Ebook ISBN-10:0979872642

ISBN-13:978-0-9798726-4-8

Also by Lipstick Mountains Press

The Stiletto Stories - The Novellas

LAINA and the VAMP

Picture Books:

The Ecology of Photography

The Lipstick Mountains Memoirs Series

#1 CHELSEA MATINEE –

Memoirs of an Easy Woman

#2 SANDS POINT –

Memoirs of a Money Trader

#3 RATTLE SNAKE LODGE –

Memoirs of a Seeing Woman

#4 MANIFEST DESTINY –

Memoirs of a Dreaming Woman

#5 THREADS -

Memoirs of a Weaving Woman

‘Just Desserts’ was originally published in 2007 in a collection of unusual love prose titled The Holding Pen. The story was selected for publication in the Jewish Literary Magazine, Poetica, in 2015.

Info@MadAvePub.com

Everything I know I learned from someone.

I especially wish to thank the late Rose VanSand for mentoring me at Lerner Shops Corporate Office in the seventies and the 21 Club; the late Peter A. Duffy for hiring me on Wall Street where we traded various vehicles of yield in the WTC in the eighties; and the late Paul Smith for supporting me through my various graduate programs in the nineties. To my teachers who brought literature and poetry, the exercise and the beauty that is in writing, into my life at CUNY and Lehman College in the Bronx, where I did my required reading as a literature major, and the New School for Social Research in Manhattan, where I began this very story in a writing class. Many years later I developed in prose a flawless depiction of the etiology of mental illness in young women of untreated trauma and isolation.

Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled,

whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence.

--Edgar Allan Poe, Eleonora

JUST DESSERTS

The shop at the end of the street was more than a candy store. It was a sweet place where many of the more social people in the neighborhood gathered. And Bob Cohen, the proprietor, was the biggest yenta of them all. He had a wonderful sense of humor, they said, and a great big laugh, and on most days the shop was busy from open to close and rich with community flavor and gossip—as well as homemade desserts. If anyone wanted to know anything about anything or anyone or wanted everyone in the neighborhood to know something about someone or something, anything, the place to inquire was The Sweet Shop and the person to tell was Mr. Sweets himself, Bob Cohen.

Oddly, no one seemed to know much about him, like where he came from, or who his people were. Some said he was an orphan. Some said he came over on the boat alone. I don’t know. He drifted into town a few years back. He bought the building, started the business, and lived in an apartment over the store. He never married and he rarely went out. And why would he? He held court in his own social parlor and charged two cents for the refreshments he served his guests. There’s no free lunch. He seemed to have it all figured out.

One afternoon Sylvia Stanger entered The Sweet Shop with her daughters, Nechama and Deborah, to buy each a candied apple. Sylvia was a voluptuous woman around thirty, pleasant enough, married to Martin Stanger. She was a homemaker and a mother. She had been raised in a traditional Jewish family; she could read and write and she could have finished high school if she had wanted. She was also obedient and she was terribly vain. She always had a little extra money in her purse to spend on sweets.

Until today Sylvia, never thought much about going to work, or worried much about what she would do if her husband did not or could not provide for her and the children. She assumed that she had a good marriage, a reasonable enough one, even though she did not enjoy sex especially, and she did not care for loud parties, music, or popular dancing. The most outrageous thing she had ever done was not keeping a traditional Kosher home, which wasn’t hard for her because Martin’s people were reformed, and it was a lot less work.

The sight of Miss Lisa Olson sitting at the counter on a stool when Sylvia entered the shop gave her a bit of a start and, as usual, set her teeth on edge. Lisa was sipping a carbonated sarsaparilla through a long straw, teasing Bob Cohen with it while he talked to her about something quietly, and she wrote in a notebook. No one seemed to know very much about Lisa Olson either, except that she had enough money, style, and beauty to solicit appreciative nods from men on the street and a few unappreciative glares from some of the women. An unmarried woman at her age—and with her ideas—they gossiped, was scandalous even in the modern world of the 1950s.

Shopkeeper Bob Cohen was so enthralled or infatuated, and engrossed in his conversation with Lisa Olson, what with her bright green eyes and flashy red hair, that he didn’t seem to notice Sylvia standing there waiting for his attention,