Diane’s Doughnut Moon

Blinkie’s Donut Emporium in Woodland Hills was my frequent stop. Run by the Lees, who escaped the Khmer Rouge carnage with their children, Blinkie’s offered a sumptuous, carb-disdaining apple fritter that was the irresistible gold standard. But that day, I was urgently seeking father Steve Lee’s advice on my wife’s budding and misguided enterprise. He dispensed it with staccato censure and disbelief.

“Crazy! White people don’t run doughnut shops. Cambodians, Thais, Koreans! You too old! Your kids grown so you have to pay for help, no-good ones who don’t show up or steal. You tell her hard work, flour bags weigh 50 pounds, 16, 18 hours a day, seven days a week! I never sit down.”

I nodded assent on every point. So he posed the unfathomable: “Why your wife want to run a doughnut shop, anyway?”

Months earlier, Diane had trailered our beloved 18-year-old Arabian stallion, Ard Dochas, to the Santa Ynez Valley for major surgery at Alamo Pintado, an equine Mayo Clinic. For days afterward as he rehabbed, she would alternately sleep in his stall or curl up in the back of our Isuzu Rodeo shivering under the one blanket she’d taken. She opted for crisp, still nights and a sky crammed with stars over the amenities of local hotels, saying, “I am falling in love with the beauty and peace up here. I’d love to find five acres.”

Diane had raised six children and enjoyed a career in the health-care field. Now, in some way, her own cherished childhood at her parents’ plant nursery in Northridge was exerting itself. One bracing morning, she shook off the barn hay and made her way a few miles to Buellton (home of Andersen’s Pea Soup) on Highway 101. She stumbled upon a foundering doughnut shop obscured by a Burger King. The managers of Donut Time had skipped, and the beleaguered owners could keep it going only sporadically. I inferred that the shop was no thriving Blinkie’s. But her visit to Donut Time became a daily ritual, and each morning she briefed me on her growing bucolic enchantment. Diane’s childlike wonder has always held me in thrall. That is, up until the morning that she uttered three portentous words:

“It’s for sale.”

“You found five acres?”

“The doughnut shop!”

“The one with no customers where the former managers had the good sense to leave?”

“We could build it back up,” she said. “This area and the people are wonderful. You’d love it! You could write here.”

I was born in New York City and work happily in downtown Los Angeles. If I don’t see a freeway or skyline for 15 minutes I call OnStar.

“Just talk to the owners,” she said. “They’re lovely people.”

I met them, and they were lovely people. But as I sat in the shop over several hours, I counted three customers. Diane was unfazed.

“Could we just watch the baker tonight?”

my body’s circadian understanding of night is that following the 10 o’clock news, you sleep. Doughnut time is different. The baker didn’t even arrive until 1 a.m., and he seemed disconcerted that it was Diane, not me, who would be doing the work. “Flour bags weigh 50 pounds, and that’s a 60-quart Hobart mixer,” he said, gesturing to a redoubtable steel machine. “Needs cleaning after every batch.”

Realizing that he might be killing the sale, he flicked a switch and the gas fryer fired with a sputtering, protesting roar. Diane watched with the acuity of the accomplished baker she is. After blending a batch of buttermilk mix, she hefted the mixer to the sink for cleaning. The baker threw me a look.

“His back,” my wife explained. “He’ll take notes.”

Cued, I wrote copiously. To further impress him, I repeated his instructions aloud. This helped me stay conscious. But by 3 a.m., as my wife was absorbed in the alchemy of glazing, I faded away on a couch in the supply room despite the din of dough being pummeled by the Hobart. At 6:30, I awoke to Diane’s sober recap.

“It’s incredibly hard work. I don’t have the leverage that he has to roll the dough. It just splayed on me. None of this is remotely similar to baking. Did you know that the perfect cake doughnut has to have five points so it forms a star in the center?”

I knew an opening and seized it. “For what it’s worth, I’m proud of you for giving it a shot. Let’s go home now.”

“I know you think this is a nutty idea, but it’s not really mine,” she said, pregnantly.

Diane had played our marital trump card: the Voice. During our years together as a close team, in any major considerations or plans, that universal whisper--gut-feel, hunch, intuition, that inner guide, whatever you choose to call it--had too many times rung true in our lives. It continuously plays for all of us in a minor or major key. Whether we listen to or overrule it is our choice. We’d done both, but we knew better than to ignore it.

I sighed. “What do you want me to do?”

“Please make an offer. You know I hate business stuff.”

“Offer? People watching Krispy Kremes being made know more than I do.”

“Just ask Mr. Lee,” she said. “I’ll accept whatever he says it’s worth.”

as i recounted this improbable background to lee, he cut to the essential: “How much they want?”

I showed him the asking price.

“Crazy! You want to buy doughnut shop, I sell you one right down on Ventura Boulevard, much cheaper, very close to your house.”

“But Diane doesn’t want Ventura Boulevard. She loves that area, the people are so--”

“Sounds like you doing this because of that horse.” He swung into one of his bright vinyl booths. “First time I’ve been off my feet for 14 hours. You tell your wife that!”

He scrutinized the equipment list critically. “Fryer, too old.”

“The owners assure us it’s reliable.”

“You need new one! Four, five-thousand. How much business doing?”

“A little slow. They’ve been closed off and on. But Diane believes there’s terrific potential.”

Lee pierced the blue-sky riff. “No business! You on main street, like me?”

“Technically it’s on the highway, but kind of wedged behind the Burger King.”

“Better you buy the Burger King! No wonder they want to sell to white people. No Cambodian buy it. New fryer, bad location, no business! Not worth more than this!” He scribbled a number. “Got to get my fritters.”

Lee’s figure was markedly under the asking price, low enough to quash Diane’s vision of our horse gamboling in Santa Ynez greenery and doughnuts flying out of the kitchen. She agreed to go with Lee’s appraisal, though, and the owners’ e-mail reply was peremptorily swift: “Unacceptable! Very disappointed. Believed you both were perfect for it.”

Relief coursed through my body. Diane, however, emitted an impelling silence. To be at peace with her, myself--and I freely admit, the Voice--I drafted a win-win counter, inherently fair to all parties, expecting it to meet a similar rejection. It elicited an equally immediate response. Diane heard me yelp: “My God! They accepted!”

She fell asleep beatifically. My night was epic as I wrestled with the idea of signing a three-year lease on a commercial property in Buellton. What’s a Buellton?

for the next two weeks, diane left our home in calabasas at 11 p.m. for the two-hour drive up the 101 to apprentice with the baker. Locals were wary of any interloper from Los Angeles and were confused by the shop’s desultory hours. She earnestly assured each customer and potential customer of her love of the area and an unwavering commitment to make deliciously fresh doughnuts daily.

“People are so genuinely nice and encouraging,” she reported.

“How many genuinely nice and encouraging people came in today?”

She deflected my transparent probe. “We’ll do better. They just have to know we’ll be open consistently.”

She hurtled through two weeks of training, and nighttime and daytime blurred. It was an abrupt jolt when the baker reminded her: “This is my last night, you know.”

“Already!”

And so Diane took over. The first night, she arrived at the shop by 10 p.m., realizing that as a novice she needed the three-hour jump. She was completely alone. But while I wasn’t physically there that night, I fielded her steady stream of calls.

“I can’t do this. Doughnuts have a mind of their own. Cakes are coming out wrong. They don’t have the five-point star!”

“Trust me, no one will count. How do they taste?”

“Fine. But I’m not putting out ugly doughnuts my first day.”

Don’t sweat it for three customers, I thought.

“What was I thinking? The thermostat is gyrating all over the place . . . the yeast dough is fighting me!”

Somehow, she did it. “It’s a miracle,” she said, exultant. But I was depleted. At noon, I got her first day’s sales report. “We did $85 today.”

At that take we’d make the rent. Only later did she realize that the first day’s tally included the $65 that she had put in the till at the outset. But emboldened by how nice the doughnuts were turning out, she approached and persuaded several upscale markets in Los Olivos and Santa Ynez to carry her wares.

“Great, honey! But how can you bake all night, do the front end and run deliveries?”

“I met this lady who doesn’t open her consignment shop until 10. She can deliver for me. It’s a miracle.”

I pried yet another “miracle” out of her when I noticed a fresh red welt on her cheek. The fractious fryer’s handle had pitched into the oil, spewing a 375-degree geyser over her. Moving fast, she’d escaped serious burns.

My weekends, when not on call in Los Angeles for my job, found me in an apron, greeting Diane’s Greek chorus of laudatory regulars: Mary Mom, from an agricultural commune; Brad, Teresa and their six kids (contemporary Waltons); Bill and Jackie (he was then mayor); and Pat and Jane from Lompoc, who proclaimed Diane’s doughnuts the best on the Central Coast. One Saturday, the shop netted $135.

Things were stabilizing nicely except for the challenge that loomed each day. The brutal four-hour round-trip commute left Diane barely five hours’ sleep. It had become unworkably risky. She’d nearly been rammed over the Gaviota cliffs by a driver who had fallen asleep. Distasteful reality was at hand.

Diane had moved Ard Dochas onto a beautiful ranch. With a nice stall, turnout and new companions, he’d come out a winner. A comfortable house trailer adjacent to his pasture was available. We moved Diane in. “Beats an overnight in his stall,” I said, maintaining a surface lightheartedness. Thus, two people that had been inseparable accepted the necessity of living apart. The upside was a salvational 15-minute drive to the shop, but that was scant comfort for each week’s separation.

lee inquired routinely, “how your wife doing?”

“Well, the fryer handle broke . . . . “

“I told you! Crazy!”

A new fryer’s cost notwithstanding, what really threatened to scuttle it all was the harshest of “Lee’s Laws.” Help, Diane learned, was a four-letter word. An endless cavalcade of people applied. Most could not keep up or stay up and, inevitably, did not show up. Diane’s intensity contributed to the churn as she barked throughout the unforgiving nightly deadline. Eventually, customers got a help-wanted flier with their doughnut and coffee; some were even conscripted to make deliveries. Recruitment continued for nearly three months until the night I got her call.

“There’s a really strange guy at the door. Long pigtail . . . keeps standing there, peering in.”

I heard him talking to her through the glass door: “You told me to come.”

An applicant. “Oh, that’s right, I did,” she answered him. “But I meant for you to come in yesterday, but it’s actually today because my nights and days get turned around.”

“Right,” he said.

I heard the shop bell ring and knew she had let him in.

“Let me talk with him!”

“No Fortune 500 interview, OK? He qualifies by showing up at midnight. Anyway, I have a good feeling about him.”

She was right. He was a Yaqui, from southern Arizona, and would prove to be her “five-point” factotum whose skill, artistry and temperament balanced hers beautifully. During the late-night madness, he rendered a line of entertaining chatter on minutiae gleaned from Snapple caps and watching the Discovery Channel. Sometimes, assaying the night sky, he would forecast: “Doughnut Moon! It will pull the yeast dough right out of the mixer.”

Lunar gravitation or not, the yeast batches on those occasions rose beautifully. An artist whose work was shown in a Tucson gallery, he decorated the cake doughnuts as though each were to be exhibited there also. One night he sat down and drew ethereal fairies on a model’s photo in a women’s magazine. Diane was stunned by the beauty of his enhancement and asked to keep it.

They collaborated on novel creations. There was the “Buellton Cream.” It sold out. Next evolved the “Buttercrumb,” and that moved nicely too.

Still, there was an inherent contradiction. During their time together, he allowed that he’d been an enforcer for a motorcycle gang. His lightning-quick martial arts moves had earned him the nickname “Snake.” Yet that disclosure--which Diane found credible--never gave her pause. For the five months that he was there, he had lifted a great onus. She no longer faced the enervating uncertainty of going it alone. He had stood with her in the nightly crucible.

My reports over the months to Lee became more sanguine.

“She do fritter yet?”

“Not yet. She wants them perfect.” I surmised that in her mastery of it, some higher rung on the doughnut ladder would be conquered. Then came her panicked call at 2:30 one morning.

“I’m alone!”

As apparitionally as he had come, her spirit guide was gone. He was to return after a holiday break, but had never showed. The till had been short on the days that he had manned the front end. She had not accused him because the money was inconsequential.

“What really matters,” she said, “was that he was one of my biggest miracles.”

I got underway fast, driving the route that she’d traversed so many nights. Just above Ventura, I noticed a full moon hanging imperially over Rincon Point. The muse visited me. I composed a little verse to pass the time, and managed the two-hour drive in less than 90 minutes.

I jumped out and tapped on the glass door, peering in. The shop was dark except for the display cases that theatrically lit glistening buttermilk, plain, glazed, cinnamon and chocolate-filled doughnuts and Frisbee-sized cinnamon rolls. I was spellbound and deeply moved. I too am acquainted with the night, getting the paper on the streets in the wee hours, but always with a capable team as backup. Hers was a solitary ascent. My reverie was broken when she spotted me, opened the door and proffered an apron. I was eager to express my awe:

“I wrote this little poem for you . . . .”

“We’re way behind. Sorry. Start on the market orders! Oh, and try the fritter.”

I sampled it in astonished silence.

“What’s the matter, no good?” she yelled from the kitchen.

“No, it’s fabulous. As good as . . . maybe better than . . . . “

I never finished. I didn’t have to. She knew.

Christmas Eve was straight out of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town.” Mary Mom bought coffee and doughnuts for strangers; regulars chatted; a woman traveling up the Central Coast stayed past two refills, sobbing to reveal the premature death of her husband and seeking an answer. All listened. No one was uneasy. Diane’s knowing look to me said, “See, this could only happen up here.”

Each night at the ranch, Diane tucks Ard Dochas lovingly in his stall with his senior feed treat before driving to the shop. We talk on the cell as she drives. We are two passing ships: I prepare to sleep. She’s going to work. I am particularly conflicted when I know she’s alone. At those times I question it all. She reminds that we undertook a path, albeit not fully mapped, and agreed to follow it. Somehow, in each of these exchanges, we renew our love with a trust in what the sojourn ultimately will bring.

When she finally arrives at the shop each night, I hear the tinkling bell herald her entry. Help may show or not. The fickle yeast may rebel. Nonetheless, she will prevail and, by some miracle--yes, miracle--at dawn the cases will brim with the handiwork of the woman I hereby deem, with Lee’s full approbation, “my honorary Cambodian.” And, finally, I offer her my poem.

Ode to Diane’s Doughnut Moon

Doughnut, go gently into that good night

In that amber molten pool, transform to delight

the morning guests your aroma will invite.

Raised, round moon, unleash your companion stars

to festoon her cakes that no untoward rumple mars.

Diaphanous clouds, disperse as glazing for her bars.

Intransigent yeast, arise and be pliable as one

under her kneading hands before daylight’s begun.

Tonight, alone. . . she dares to race the sun.