Charlotte Au Chocolat

by Charlotte Silver

  There were certain foods that my mother claimed she could no longer bear to eat, years and then even decades after she had worked at Peasant Stock, because, she would explain, she had eaten too much of them back in the day.

  These forbidden foods included Mary-Catherine’s famous chicken liver pâté, which had been served flecked with chives in a deep, cut-glass bowl along with buttered toast points at untold numbers of parties in Cambridge, and which, potent with criminal quantities of butter, sherry, and heavy cream, was to me one of the most decadent foods in the entire world. But my mother could no longer eat that pâté, or anything at all with the herb tarragon. Nor could she eat certain game meats, for Peasant Stock used to sometimes host spectacular eight-course game-meat dinners over which my father, who loved such meats, presided. I still have a yellowed menu from one of these dinners; the year was 1976, and my father was serving Wild European Boar with Apples and Sage and Hare Flamed in Chartreuse.

  And something about my mother’s expressions when she reacted to these foods (the tone of voice she used when saying the word tarragon, for instance, unlike the word grappa), the way she flinched away from even the possibility of tasting them again, told me something, even when I was just a child, about the vague, bitter under-taste of the Peasant Stock romance, of the hippie era itself. Maybe, even, of love, from the point of view of a woman; that it contained a multitude of flavors and that some of these you might, years later, seek to reclaim. Grappa. Some you wished you might erase from your memory forever. Tarragon. These were the overlapping tastes—the adult consequences—of love.

  Five

  THE LAVENDER BLONDE

  Whenever people found out that my mother owned the Pudding, the first question inevitably would be “Which one is your mother? The one with the sunglasses?” For sunglasses were my mother’s trademark; never did she appear in public, day or night, without them. Men were forever going up to her on the street and gushing, “Honey, I love the glasses.” Enormous Chanel frames swept movie star–style across her face, their lenses tinted a custom-made shade of purple-blue and casting soft lavender shadows across her face. When she was younger, my mother was told she looked like the actress Kim Novak, the Lavender Blonde. On the rare occasions when she took off her sunglasses, you could see that my mother’s face was delicate and kittenish; her eyes were silvery green. But you almost never saw them.

  “I’ve got to get my waist back,” my mother had said not long after my father left, and to her credit, that’s exactly what she did. She achieved this by exercising extraordinary discipline in the face of constant exposure to fattening food. At the restaurant, she stirred vats of roasted-sweet-red-pepper soup and frosted triple-layer coconut cakes, working in the kitchen for up to twelve hours a day. Sometimes she swiped a sliver of prosciutto off the butcher block or ordered a Caesar salad for lunch, but she hardly ever snacked in the kitchen. Her logic was simple: “Either you love wonderful food or wonderful clothes,” she told me. “I happen to love wonderful clothes more.”

  Her waist, she told me, was now twenty-six inches. Over time, it got to be twenty-five and twenty-four. I did not know how many inches women’s waists were supposed to be, but my mother’s waist did look small, especially when she suctioned it into cinch belts. The belts were black patent leather or crocodile; they had gold and rhinestone buckles and interlocking Chanel Cs and sometimes fringe. “The thicker the belt, the tinier the waist,” she said.

  Every night, my mother came home to dress up before going back into the restaurant again. She looked a wreck from the long hours in the kitchen: hair sliding out of tortoiseshell combs, pink lipstick smeared from taste-testing, apron splattered with bacon grease and chocolate ganache.

  “Oh, God, what time is it?” she would say. “Charlotte, run the bathtub. They’re expecting me in forty minutes.”

  I ran the tub and filled it with the waxy lavender petals we kept in a glass jar on the sink. And when she stepped back out of the bathroom, it was as if all the sweat of the kitchen had oozed down the drain. My mother’s skin always smelled delicious; her arms felt as smooth as mine. She slid her legs into Velvet De Luxe Wolford panty hose and fastened the clasp of one of her black lace bras with the shirring around the cups. I had heard her say that wearing nice underwear was the only way a woman in a kitchen could still feel like a woman.

  My mother always wore Joy perfume, which at one time had been the most expensive perfume in the world. Its exuberant femininity, no expense spared, suited my mother’s brand of excess, containing thousands of jasmine petals and twenty-eight May roses per ounce. I watched her as she untwisted the gold-capped square bottle and dabbed the scent behind her temples. Instantly it perfumed the apartment, blotting out the lavender fragrance from her bath.

  “Wear this, Mummy,” I said, sifting through the finery to extract a jacket or shell for her to wear on top.

  “Charlotte, you don’t understand,” she said. “It needs to nip in.” She gestured to her waist strapped underneath the ribbon piping of her bouffant skirt. “What I look good in is a top—well, a beautiful fitted cashmere sweater—that stops at the waist, and then a full skirt. But midcalf—never too long and never, never short.”

  It was true. My mother did not show her legs, only her waist, only her breasts in sweetheart necklines of cocktail dresses or off-the-shoulder cashmere sweaters. Her legs were short, and despite all the weight she’d lost, they looked pretty much the same as before; they would never be slender. But the flash of silk stockings under rustling skirts looked like a naughty promise, as though she had hidden the rest of her legs to provoke the viewers’ fantasies—really they stretched on forever.

  “Remember the waist,” she told me, spraying gusts of Joy perfume in the air. “Remember the waist and the legs don’t matter.”

  Then, after she had wrapped herself in an evening cape and found her keys, she swept out the door, leaving a trail of debris, like the scene of a movie queen’s murder: an overturned gilded mirror, lurid smudges of pink lipstick, the inky spill of an open mascara tube. (Sometimes I picked up the belts she had littered the floor with and tried to fasten them around my midriff. As I got older, and rather chubby for a time, my baby fat would dribble over the buckle. Of course, I thought to myself, my mother’s belts didn’t fit me—they only fit her.)

  At the same time my mother got thin, she threw out all her shoes and replaced them with high heels, which she now wore every day. The other grown-up women I knew owned black stilettos or navy or camel-colored pumps. But my mother bought zebra-print T-straps and jeweled black satin evening boots, watermelon-pink mules with matching polish peeking out of the open toes and stacked Lucite slippers, heels with feathers, heels with ribbons lacing ballerina-style up the ankles.

  My mother did everything in these shoes; she even cooked in them sometimes. Her heels dug into the cut-out holes of the rubber mats behind the stoves as she swept through the grease and flames and grunting men, and I never saw her slip. She kept extra pairs around the restaurant—spiked heels stuck out of cubbyholes in the office, and shoe boxes piled up on top of the walk-in refrigerator in the kitchen. “The right shoes,” she told me. “That’s all I’ll ever need: the right shoes and a trusty exterminator.” She could wear her apron in the dining room, she said, but nobody would care, as long as her high heels caught the sparkle from the chandeliers. And they lengthened her legs.

  “Leopard,” my mother used to say, “is my favorite neutral.”

  She liked the way it went with other things: emerald, camel, salmon, dusty gold. The off-kilter exuberance of leopard and plaid colliding was a favorite visual motif of hers both in interior design and dress. She would place a leopard cushion against a plaid silk armchair, or wear round-toed leopard pumps with little plaid socks and black palazzo—or what I always thought of as “hostess”—pants.

  Her signature piece of clothing was a leopard-print swing coat, I
talian, with wide bell-shaped sleeves and a lining of mocha velveteen. This she wore for years and years. Animal-like, it marked her territory. If you walked into the restaurant and saw it slung over one of the backs of the red velvet chairs, you knew my mother was there.

  One afternoon not long after we had moved to Cambridge, I ran into one of the restaurant’s deliverymen on Mass Ave. He smiled at me, but I didn’t smile back. I thought that if I smiled at him he might talk to me, and I didn’t remember his name. My mother said it was rude to say hello without adding the person’s name at the end, and so I kept on walking.

  “I am so disappointed in you,” my mother told me later that week. “Jim, our fruit supply man, stopped by today and he said you didn’t smile at him when you saw him on the street. What is this? Anybody would think you were shy.”

  It was bad manners to forget his name and bad manners not to smile, bad manners to speak to him and bad manners to ignore him. Bad manners, everywhere.

  If I forgot a name in the dining room, I thought all conversation would halt, as when a busboy dropped a tray of martini glasses and they shattered against the linoleum floor of the kitchen. Or as when the waiters brushed against the light switch and for a few moments the customers could see the dust bunnies in the rafters and the runs in the curtains. All would be revealed, and I would disgrace us both.

  “You’re either on or you’re off,” my mother liked to say. “You either stay home or you go out and you pull yourself together.” I could tell when she was off and when she was on from the tone of her voice. It changed all the time. In the front room, it sounded as thickly sweet as the Joy perfume she rubbed on her wrists, and it oozed over the tables. “Hello,” she said, greeting people. She rolled the word off her tongue and dabbed traces of lipstick on strangers’ cheeks.

  When she went into the kitchen, her voice dropped several octaves. It was bold, like the sound of her stilettos striking the linoleum. “That trout looks as soft as rice pudding,” she said. “This is not an old person’s home.” Then she swept into the dining room, and her heels went soft against the velvet carpet, and her voice went soft again. “Hello. Hello. Hello.”

  So when the waiters came up to my table, pen and paper in hand, I knew what to do. I raised my voice, not loud but high. The voice wound up inside me, somewhere underneath my party dresses, and surged to the top, as when I twisted off the cap to a bottle of grenadine and it produced a squeak and then sweetness. Every thank-you was like another shot of the syrup, straight, but the waiters didn’t mind. They told my mother I was a lovely child. I had lovely manners.

  There was another rule about manners; my mother said it was the most important one of all, never, never, under any circumstances, to be broken.

  “No crying at the restaurant, Charlotte. Remember, it’s a public place.”

  Six

  NOT IN FRONT OF THE CUSTOMERS

  One night when I crawled underneath the bar to take a nap, I noticed that it seemed smaller. When I stretched my legs out, my Mary Janes dangled out from the flap of the tablecloth, and I imagined that if one of the customers saw them, they would think they belonged to a corpse. I rather liked that thought. It was so dramatic. Trying to make myself comfortable, I drew my knees together; I leaned onto my side; I tried to rearrange the bundles of linen. Nothing helped. The air smelled starchy, as it always did underneath the bar, but the scent bothered me now, and I coughed from all the dust.

  Thud. I had slammed my head against the oak tabletop. I worried that the glasses above would rattle and shake, but I heard nothing, only a dull drumming in my ears. The pink bow on top of my headband was crushed. And for the rest of the night, even after I had wiggled out from underneath the bar, I felt dizzy; the gold threads in the carpet looked fuzzier, the lights in the chandeliers dimmer.

  That was the first of the kingdoms from which I would be exiled—the kingdom underneath the bar.

  Forever after that, I had no relief from the dining room. There was no place to hide. I had to adapt to it, however I could.

  Weekends were hard. Weekends my mother had no time for me. So on Saturday afternoons, I used to pace around Harvard Square, looking for something to do. I went to the Coop, where wind blew into the main room with the marble floors and it seemed to me they sold only black kneesocks, fountain pens that leaked or had run out of ink, postcards that had peeled at the sides, and chocolate Easter eggs left on the shelves in all seasons in battered pink or red boxes. I went to Café Pamplona, the underground coffee shop on Bow Street, where the waiters were looming and grumpy, the parfait spoons rusty, and the menu—gazpacho, swampy green and slithering with onions, and a pork and pickle sandwich on a fried bun—never changed. There was also Colonial Drug, the old-fashioned perfume store with the leopard hatboxes and a velvet carpet the color of a crushed blackberry, and Cardullo’s, the specialty food shop, also with a velvet rug, which sold hand-painted tins of caviar and beribboned bags of chocolate almonds that looked like they had been there since the 1950s. And the Brattle Theatre: it showed Casablanca every Valentine’s Day and film noir on Monday nights, yellowed fluff peeked through the Prussian-blue leather seats, and the clock on the wall had been broken for as long as I could remember.

  Then came Saturday night. When I was growing up, Saturday night was the big event of the week. It was the grand crescendo toward which all the week’s activities had built. Saturday night—the words alone had a glamour and a menace about them. Saturday night! One hundred and fifty customers, two hundred, three hundred, four hundred. Saturday night! “No main course for you tonight,” my mother would tell me. “Maybe an appetizer if you order early.” Saturday night! “Here, help out, why don’t you? Polish some silver; light the candles; fold a napkin into a tiny pink swan. But, don’t forget the customers. Customers are coming!”

  My main job on Saturday nights was to stay out of the way of the customers. And then sometimes I did little errands or chores. Like sometimes on summer nights when the chefs were wilting behind the line in that smoldering Victorian kitchen, where the heat was not even relieved by ceiling fans, they would send me to go get beers from behind the bar. I loved doing that. I would plunge my hands into the ice bucket, basking in the cold, until one of the bartenders pushed me out of the way. Then I would stumble back into the kitchen.

  “Thanks, kiddo,” said Carla, standing at the head of the line. When she banged a butcher knife against the bottle top, the top flew up in the air; I hoped it hadn’t landed in the tins of prep garnishes. But Carla didn’t bother to look; she just lit another cigarette.

  “Don’t make yourself too comfortable, kiddo,” she said. “I’ll need another beer soon.”

  What was she talking about? Nobody could be too comfortable in a kitchen. There was no place to sit. Oh, for the days when I could crawl underneath the bar and get away from it all! Now there was no place for me, and especially on Saturday nights. Saturday nights were the worst.

  “Here, kiddo.”

  Carla always called me kiddo, not sweetie or honey like the waiters did. She scraped a piece of tenderloin off the pan and flicked it onto a brown paper towel. The meat reddened the paper.

  “That’s for you.”

  On Saturday nights, I didn’t order dinner. Instead, I ate whatever snippets the chefs doled out to me: lopsided zucchini blossoms or clams casino swiped off private-party platters. There were always plenty of samples of food to eat in the kitchen, and chefs love feeding people. Carla used to save the most rare meat for me. She knew I liked it—one of my favorite foods was steak tartare on buttered toast points—and the customers would have sent back meat as rare as this tenderloin.

  “Thank you, Carla,” I said.

  “You and your thank-yous—would you give it up? I’m not one of those pansies in the front room who’s just dying to freshen your . . . your . . . What are those things called?”

  “Shirley Templ
es?”

  “Yeah, yeah, those.”

  I picked the piece of tenderloin off the paper towel. In the front room, I had good table manners, but you couldn’t feel graceful if you had no knife or fork. I hoped the juice wouldn’t splatter my new party dress, a garden-party dress: white muslin printed with cabbage roses and a white petticoat underneath that puffed out like one of the meringues on the trays in the cold station. It also had a trailing rose-chiffon sash that reminded me of my mother’s cocktail dresses with the small waists; I loved that sash the most.

  “Here.” She handed me another napkin; the tenderloin had stained my fingertips red. “I know how you hate to be messy.”

  I wondered when we would go home. It must have been eight o’clock now, rush time. Customers’ conversation roared through the doors, and I heard my mother’s voice, her kitchen voice. “Buck up!” she told the waiters. “Can’t you see the kitchen’s in the weeds?” I supposed she was out on the floor now, fluttering from table to table, planting Coco Pink kisses on cheek after cheek, and swerving away on the tips of the stilettos.

  “Watch out!” said Carla. I looked and saw flames spouting off the stove. “Go . . . go somewhere.”

  I pranced off the rubber mat onto the bare floor between the rows of the stoves and the pastry station. My patent leather Mary Janes slid on a sprig of buttered parsley. Meanwhile, the waiters charged down the aisle and grabbed the desserts waiting on the top of the shelf.

  “Where’s the lemon budino for C-3?” one of them asked. “Hurry it up, they’re the table from hell . . .”

  I hid in the cold room. I yanked open the steel door and stepped up to the sawdust floor. The gust of air from the freezer prickled my bare legs underneath the petticoat. I stood very still in the center of the cold room. If I moved, I thought one of the Cornish game hens swinging from the ceiling might fall off its string.