My Mother the Cheerleader

by Robert Sharenow

  Charlotte carefully selected eight crabs, making sure they were still alive by poking them with her index finger. “You never want to buy a dead crab,” she said. “Dead meat’s not sweet.” The crabs responded by flexing their claws over their heads. It always looked to me like they were stretching after waking up in the morning. Jermaine waited while she conducted her inspection. One of his feet tapped impatiently. I shot him a knowing smile, attempting to forge an alliance. I think he knew I was trying to catch his eye, but he quickly turned his glance to his tapping feet and kept them there until Charlotte was finished.

  After we arrived back home, we set to work preparing the meal. First she boiled the crabs and cleaned all the meat out of the shells, chopping it into a pile for crab salad. To this she added just a pinch of salt and the juice from a whole lemon. While she did this, I mixed together her rémoulade sauce to use for dipping—mayonnaise, sour cream, cayenne pepper, salt, and crushed mustard seeds.

  Next, Charlotte plucked the chicken and carefully separated the meat from the bones with a sharp little knife. She expertly cut away the flesh so as not to leave even the smallest piece of meat behind. She reserved the bones for soup and gave the meat to me for pounding under long sheets of waxed paper.

  “So who are we cooking for this time?” she asked. “Another trucker?”

  “He’s not a trucker,” I replied a little too sharply. Charlotte raised an eyebrow.

  “Oh? Then what is he?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But he’s not a trucker.”

  For emphasis I started pounding the chicken with the large wooden mallet. Thump, thump, thump.

  “You don’t have to beat the life out of it,” she warned.

  Charlotte’s paneed chicken recipe was a closely guarded secret. She coated the chicken with bread crumbs and a mix of spices and green herbs: thyme, basil, and oregano. She also added a healthy dose of grated dry cheese and an egg “to make it all mingle and stick to the skin.”

  But her most unusual technique involved wrapping the chicken in raw bacon strips. She let them sit for about an hour. “Two meats that don’t know each other need a chance to get acquainted,” she explained, “before they’re thrown in the pan together.” Then she’d cook the bacon strips until they were nice and crispy. Using the edge of a cleaver, she’d pulverize the bacon and mix it into the butter in the pan before adding the chicken. “That way, the butter and the bacon stick together and gang up on the chicken,” she said. One of my favorite smells in the world was Charlotte’s chicken sizzling in bacon butter. I’d inhale deeply until the smell got dull in my nose. Then I’d step outside and breathe some of the outside air just so I could step back inside and let the smell hit my nose again.

  Charlotte had been working for my mother since before I was born. I never knew her exact age, and she refused to divulge it. She did once reveal that she remembered the turn of the twentieth century. “I was just a little thing,” she explained. “And my mother woke me up at midnight and took me down by the water in my nightgown to see the fireworks. I had never been allowed out of the house in my nightgown before.” So she had to be north of sixty. Her hair was grayed around the temples and crown, but her skin was remarkably unlined and had an unusually reddish tint. She had huge cat-shaped eyes that were the deepest black and shone like glass marbles. She always dressed in neat blue, green, or gray dresses, alternating among the three.

  Charlotte described herself as “a churchgoing, no-nonsense woman.” She quipped, “I have to be, around here, because your mother is an all-nonsense woman.” It was true that my mother and Charlotte had vastly different temperaments. My mother was loud. Charlotte was quiet. My mother dressed flashily. Charlotte dressed demurely. My mother rarely attended church. Charlotte practically lived at hers and even taught Sunday school there.

  Unlike my mother, Charlotte was a reader. She kept two books on hand at all times, the King James Bible and a Webster’s unabridged dictionary. “Between these two books,” she said, “you could explain just about everything in this wide world.” It was Charlotte who really taught me how to read and encouraged me to keep expanding my vocabulary. “The more words you know,” she explained, “the less someone will be able to trick you into something.” She conditioned me to stop reading when I came across a word I didn’t know and look up the definition. “You keep on doing that, by the time you get to be grown up there won’t be any words that take you by surprise and you’ll be nobody’s fool.”

  One of the only traits my mother and Charlotte shared was an aversion to any kind of New Orleans slang. Neither of them replaced the words the, them, and there with da, dem, and dere. And they both avoided using the standard Ninth Ward greeting: “Where y’at?”

  My mother tried her best to sound like a refined Southern lady from a Hollywood movie set on a plantation. While my mother spoke “Hollywood English,” Charlotte claimed to speak “Bible English.” I once heard her admonish her friend Julie, who sometimes came over in the afternoons to discuss Scripture. “Jesus gave a Sermon on the Mount,” she said, “not a Sermon on da Mount.” Julie replied, “I don’t know why y’all are making such a fuss, Charlotte. Jesus and dem didn’t speak English back den anyway.”

  Charlotte and my mother did have another thing in common: They both closely guarded the details of their pasts. Most of the information I had gathered about each of them over the years had come from the other. My mother said that Charlotte’s daddy had been a preacher at a Negro church and that Charlotte had been a rebellious child. She got into all sorts of trouble with men when she was still a teenager and had run away from home. A few years later she came back. The world outside her neighborhood had taught her some hard lessons, so she moved back into her daddy’s house. She still lives there to this day. Her daddy passed on, but her mother is still up and around and is said to be nearing one hundred years old.

  “Do you think I’m pretty?” I blurted out, after silently pounding the chicken for a couple of minutes.

  Charlotte paused in chopping the greens and looked me up and down and nodded.

  “You’ve got all the right parts,” she said. “You’ll be a pretty woman.”

  “You say it like it’s something that’s gonna happen in the future,” I pleaded. “I’m asking if I’m pretty now.”

  “Why are you so hot and bothered to know?”

  “I just am.”

  “You want the truth?” she asked, putting down the cleaver.

  Suddenly afraid, I paused a second before responding, “Yes.”

  “You’re cute,” she said, and resumed chopping.

  “Cute?” I whined. That was the wrong answer.

  “You’re still a little girl,” she said. “You should be happy with cute. Pretty will come later. And don’t be in a rush for it, either. The more you try to rush something like that, the more you risk turning into something that doesn’t know what it is. Nothing looks worse than that.”

  “Thanks a lot.” I pouted.

  “If you don’t want honest answers, don’t ask me.”

  “I won’t.”

  We prepared the rest of the meal in silence.

  CHAPTER 8

  My mother spent the afternoon at the Paris Beauty Shoppe on St. Claude, having her hair done and her nails painted fiery red. After setting the dining room table for three, I brought Mr. Landroux his dinner tray and then retreated to my room to get dressed. I wore my best Sunday clothes, a light-green cotton dress with a white sash and a matching white ribbon in my hair. Using a dime-store hand mirror, I applied the slightest layer of lipstick. My mother didn’t want me wearing any makeup, but I had swiped a lipstick from her a year ago that I occasionally used as a one-stop makeup kit. I lightly layered my lips, just enough to give me a splash of color but not enough to look like I was actually wearing lipstick. Next, I rubbed a small amount into my cheeks as substitute rouge.

  My mother returned around five o’clock and spent the rest of the afternoon picking out her war
drobe for the night. She settled on a tight red cocktail dress, aware that she could wear a red potato sack and make it look sexy. But this dress was no potato sack.

  Morgan came down to the dining room at exactly the appointed time.

  “You look lovely tonight,” he said to my mother as he came to the table, his eyes taking in all the hot spots.

  “Why, thank you.” My mother blushed.

  “You too, Miss Louise,” he said. “I should’ve brought fancier duds.”

  “You’re perfect, Mr. Miller,” my mother said. “Just perfect.”

  He wore exactly the same clothes he had worn during the day, with the addition of a blue linen blazer. He had shaved and smelled faintly of an aftershave or cologne that was sweet yet masculine.

  Charlotte’s dinner of crab salad with rémoulade sauce and paneed chicken and creamy garlic greens was a smashing success. Morgan ate seconds and lavished compliments on my mother for culinary skills she did not possess. As Charlotte passed through the dining room clearing plates, she subtly rolled her eyes at me when she overheard Morgan praise the smoky flavor of the sauce. I stifled a giggle.

  We finished the meal with a plate of Charlotte’s homemade pralines. Before mixing in the pecans, she would sauté them with butter, just a dash of cinnamon, and crushed nutmeg, “to give them a bit of mystery.” I usually ate at least six pralines in one sitting, but held myself to two that night, not wanting Morgan to think I was a glutton.

  Most evenings I took my dinner in the kitchen. Sometimes I ate with Charlotte. More often than not I ate alone, because Charlotte liked to be home to feed her mother. My mother never really ate any proper meals. She’d pick at things throughout the day without ever sitting down to a whole plateful of anything. She never ate dinner with me unless a guest had requested dinner. Then she would put on a show and have us all eat in the dining room, and act as if we did so every night. Most of those meals were dull affairs, where I’d sit quietly and listen to the guests and my mother talk. If she was entertaining one of her truckers, he would typically do most of the talking, droning on about the road, just thankful to have a set of human ears listening. But Morgan was different. He seemed to listen just as much as he talked. And it wasn’t the kind of listening where he would just be waiting for my mother to finish so he could start talking. He actually seemed to be interested in what my mother was saying; and she and I were certainly interested in him.

  “What business are you in, Mr. Miller?” my mother inquired as Charlotte cleared the dessert plates.

  “Publishing. I’m an editor.”

  “How fascinating. Do you do romances? Westerns? Mysteries? Do you work with anyone I might’ve read?” she asked.

  I snickered to myself at the thought of my mother actually reading something other than her horoscope.

  “Probably not. I edit mostly textbooks and technical journals. Pretty dry stuff.”

  “Surely you must have gotten to meet some famous writers.”

  “Well, I guess a few.”

  “Oh, I knew it. Who? Please tell! Things are so dull down here. We never get to meet anybody famous.”

  “Well, my work really isn’t that glamorous. But I am friendly with John Steinbeck and his wife.”

  My head nearly exploded. Did he really mean the John Steinbeck?

  “Steinbeck! I love Steinbeck,” my mother squealed with delight. “He’s my very favorite author.”

  “Really?”

  “Why, yes! His books make the most wonderful movies. I must’ve seen East of Eden ten times. Please tell me you’ve met James Dean.”

  “I’m afraid not,” Morgan replied with a light chuckle.

  “What a gorgeous man he was. He was just made for the role of Cal Trask. I cried when I heard about the car crash that took him, I really did. What about Henry Fonda?”

  “Henry Fonda?”

  “Did you ever meet him? He was in The Grapes of Wrath. That was Steinbeck too, right?”

  “No, I never met him, but I did see the picture. It was quite good.”

  “What a wonderful actor. Those eyes of his just melt me….”

  “I’ve read Of Mice and Men, The Red Pony, The Pearl, and Cannery Row,” I interrupted.

  My mother’s eyes bulged in surprise.

  “Pretty advanced stuff,” he said.

  “She’s quite a bookworm,” my mother commented, making sure to place just the right emphasis on the word worm to telegraph to me just how mad she was at being upstaged and interrupted.

  “What’d you think?” he asked.

  “What did I think?”

  “Yes. About the books?”

  “I love his books,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “Why?” I paused. “It’s the characters. They’re like real people. A lot of books you read have all these characters that you’d never really come across, like they’re too smart or too funny or too brave. But John Steinbeck’s stories are about real people, people you think you might’ve seen in your own life. They talk like real people talk, not like in lots of books, where they talk like some writer’s idea of how people oughta talk, and…”

  I trailed off, suddenly embarrassed. I’d never talked so much at the dinner table before. “Sorry,” I mumbled.

  “No. Go on,” Morgan prompted me.

  My mother glared at me with heat-lamp eyes.

  “Well, it’s as if his characters really exist somewhere,” I said. “Like the bums on Cannery Row, or the farmhand Lennie from Of Mice and Men. I feel like I know people just like that right here in New Orleans. And I guess reading those books made me think I understand those people a little better. At least I think I do.”

  “I think John would be very impressed by your analysis, Miss Louise.” He turned to my mother. “She really is very advanced for her age.”

  “Yes, she’s something all right,” my mother replied. “She took to books like a fish to water. Ever since she was the littlest girl, book learning was just like breathing with this one. She’d read through all the kiddie books at the library by the time she was nine and then started in on the adult section. It’s really quite amazing considering how long it took me to potty train her. Do you realize she was still wetting the bed at age five?”

  My throat constricted so fast I nearly choked, like I’d been bit by a water moccasin. My eyes filled with tears. It took all my powers of self-control to stop myself from bursting into sobs. Even if I could have found my voice, I couldn’t have rebutted what she said, because it was true. I’d never been to a sleepover for fear I’d have a relapse.

  “Five!” Morgan gasped. “That’s nothing. I wet the bed until I was nearly eight.” He winked at me. “It’s always a pleasure to dine with another former member of the rubber sheet club.”

  At that moment I was absolutely convinced he was an angel. My throat instantly relaxed and I felt my spirit lift toward heaven. Two fantasy scenarios formed in my mind. Either I would marry this man or he would adopt me as his own child. Either way, he would take me back to New York City with him so we could discuss books all day long.

  “Morgan, would you care to join me for a sherry in the Music Hall?” my mother asked.

  “That sounds nice,” he said.

  “Louise, I think it’s time for you to help Charlotte in the kitchen, and then it’s time for bed.”

  Banished. I knew it was coming. She had me. I couldn’t disobey her without seeming like a brat. Reluctantly, I rose.

  “Will you be joining us for breakfast, Mr. Miller?” I asked.

  “Not tomorrow,” he replied. “I’m meeting a friend early in the morning. Maybe Tuesday.”

  “Say good night, Louise,” my mother instructed.

  “Good night, Mother. Good night, Mr. Miller.”

  “Good night, Miss Louise,” he said.

  He gallantly rose and dramatically kissed my hand. My face flushed so fast, I had to turn away and quickly retreat before he saw me transform into a beet before his eyes.


  I found Charlotte drying the dinner plates as I entered the kitchen. I tried to busy myself putting away the pots and pans that Charlotte had already washed and dried, so she wouldn’t notice my agitated condition. I worked fast, because I wanted to retreat upstairs so I could eavesdrop from my secret spot in the second-floor bathroom. In my haste I dropped a glass, which shattered across the floor.

  “What’s wrong with you?” she said.

  “Nothing.”

  “You sure you don’t have a fever or something?”

  “No,” I said. But I was lying.

  I fetched the broom, and Charlotte swept up the broken shards while I held the dustpan. Thoughts of Morgan had somehow gotten under my skin and inside my veins, throbbing in my chest and in my head. My entire body felt hot.

  “You’re so red it looks like you got sunburned.”

  “It’s nothing.”

  Charlotte put her hands on my shoulders.

  “Then let’s talk about nothing,” she said.

  She tried to stroke my cheek, but I abruptly turned away and dumped the broken glass into the trash can.

  Charlotte put away the broom and washed and dried her hands. She kissed me on the head, put on her coat, and tied on a kerchief over her hair. I placed the last plates back on the pantry shelf.

  “Louise?” she called to me.

  Slowly I turned to face her.

  “You look pretty tonight,” she said, and then she walked out, closing the back door behind her.