Lulu's Recipe for Cajun Sass - Sandra Hill Page 0,70

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