Charlotte Au Chocolat

by Charlotte Silver

  Setup began at three thirty. An hour before, McKenzie started to prepare for work. She had to put on the bustier at home, she explained, to get in the mood; I wondered what the mood meant. Whatever it was, it involved powder and mascara, and several coats of Cherries in the Snow. “Take note, my dear: it’s the only red for blondes.”

  But I wasn’t blond anymore, or not as blond as I had been. Strangers no longer cooed over my downy golden curls, because now they were only light brown, only ash. I couldn’t wait till I was old enough to get highlights—like McKenzie’s, like my mother’s.

  Meanwhile, McKenzie rubbed the powder onto her face while I sat on one of the red-velvet pillows on the floor. Then I remembered that my mother was going to a party tonight. I pictured the too-small bathroom of our latest apartment steaming from my mother’s perfumed bubble bath. It was Saturday. We had two hundred and fifty reservations on the books. If I went to the restaurant, I would only be able to order an appetizer, and then I’d have to eat it in the office, making sure not to spill my food on the piles of bills.

  I heard the yank of a zipper and the teeth scraping against the silk lining of McKenzie’s bustier. “Come on,” she said, buttoning up her cardigan. “I don’t want to be late.” So I dropped the garter in my hand and I followed her, back to the restaurant.

  Several months later, my mother came home from work and said, “Charlotte, come out in the hall for a second. I have a present for you.”

  She had a knack for sudden gifts, my mother. Often she brought me home lilac sachets or Tiffany key chains, but I wondered what could be out in the hallway.

  “It’s big,” she said. “I had to hire one of the guys in the kitchen to get it up the stairs.”

  We stepped out into the hallway. She told me to close my eyes, and when I opened them, I saw a vanity table. Pink-and-green silk ribbons dangled in front of the mirror. I had always longed for a vanity table.

  “Thank you, Mummy, it’s . . .”

  “Isn’t it a beauty? McKenzie thought you would like it.” I tugged one of the ribbons. “It used to be McKenzie’s,” she said. “She wanted to get rid of it before the move.”

  I paused. Then I asked, “Where is she moving to this time?”

  “Oh, LA. You know, for acting.”

  The ribbon slid to the floor. It didn’t matter; there were other ribbons.

  It was a Saturday morning, one of those long Saturday mornings when the dining room was empty and I had nothing to do. I stood on top of the chair outside the waiters’ station, staring at the poster of the man with the top hat and fangs, and when I touched the case, dust caked my fingertips. Had Richard told the truth? Did the Pudding ghost live inside the frame? I couldn’t find out yet, because ghosts didn’t come out in the sunshine. We hadn’t set the table for staff lunch yet and I hadn’t seen anybody pop open a bottle of red wine. That’s how early it was.

  Moments passed, more dust blew off the poster case, and then I heard a scream from the kitchen, a scream that could have punctured the vaulted ceiling. Then I heard another one.

  “A mouse!” my mother cried. “A mouse!”

  “No, it’s—” I heard Carla’s voice.

  “Oh, no, don’t tell me it’s a rat!”

  “Fire!”

  Mixing spoons and copper pots clattered against the floor. The dishwasher turned off his faucet. I was still standing on top of the chair and my knees wobbled.

  “Charlotte,” said Carla, thrusting open the double doors, “get out of here. Get out of here now.”

  “But my mother—”

  “Your mother’s fine. Now go!”

  I jumped down from the chair. As I dashed through the dining room, I smelled smoke curling in the air. The black-painted doors had never felt so heavy to me as they did at that moment. I was alone as I fled down the staircase, and I could not hear anything, not even curses or screams, from upstairs. My mother—my mother might die. They all might die in the flames.

  Outside, I crossed the street and stared at the building. I didn’t see any flames, only smoke, plumes and plumes of smoke spiraling around the building. My mother was fine, Carla had said. She was fine. Holyoke Street was empty except for me, and I cried, I cried in great, racking sobs. Even later, when the fire trucks roared down the street and spectators had started to gather on the sidewalk, I was still crying.

  The building had not burned down after all. The clouds of smoke thinned, and then the chefs slunk out from the alley. They leaned against the redbrick wall of 8 Holyoke Street in their bandannas and black-and-white-check pants, smoking while the firefighters sprayed their hoses. I crossed the street.

  “You know,” said Carla, pointing at the crowd, “leave it to those half-wits to blame it on the cigarettes. The firefighters told us something caught on fire in the pipes. Why not, kiddo? This building’s fucking old.”

  Only the kitchen had been damaged; the dining room was safe. We reopened for business in a couple of weeks. But I have always remembered that fire, because it seemed to me the end of one era in the kitchen and the beginning of another when, not long afterward, Carla gave her resignation to my mother. She was the last person there who remained from my father’s days, and the two of them had always been great friends. When she left, it felt like the last link to him had gone.

  She gave her resignation right after Benny, her brown Doberman with the bullet in his leg, had to be put to sleep. After he died, my mother and I took Carla, who was already trashed on red wine, out to a twenty-four-hour pizza joint on Mass Ave once we had locked up the Pudding. She downed several beers and passed out over her bowl of spaghetti, and she did not show up for work ever again. My father, who occasionally picked up catering shifts, sometimes ran into her behind the scenes at these events, where she muttered to him in passing, “What is it about weddings and wild rice? Wild rice, wild rice—it’s enough to make you never want to get married.” Last we had heard, she was living with three lame dogs and her parents in Erie, Pennsylvania.

  But in the restaurant business, nothing was forever. People on the staff were forever going away. They just up and left, sometimes with explanations but more often without. Sometimes we heard from them afterward and sometimes we did not. We learned that Patrick, the bartender who used to style my hair, didn’t even have the same name anymore. He worked as the limousine driver at a monastery in Vermont, and now he called himself Tino Barbarossa. His parents had held a name-changing ceremony at their house, where his mother had spelled out the new name in deviled eggs on a platter. “What a lot of deviled eggs to make,” my mother said. “Maybe I should hire her to be a line cook.”

  Charlie, the line cook with the three-piece violet suit that my mother had recruited from the homeless shelter, also left. After three years at the Pudding, he placed a personal ad, went on one date with a self-professed “songstress” named Rochelle (whose own ad, my mother later told me, was headed “Church-going woman loves oral sex”), and married her a month later in a gospel ceremony to which my mother was not invited; Rochelle had named her “the blond bitch.” Charlie now dabbled in the real-estate business. Or he said he did; when he called my mother, drooling about some “sweet, sweet deal” he’d found for her, she could hear the murmur of the daytime soaps in the background.

  “It’s too bad,” said my mother. “He had the real hospitality touch, Charlie did.”

  “Hospitality? But he worked in the kitchen,” I said. Kitchen people were not noted for their customer-friendly touch, and it was a blessing, in most cases, that they seldom interacted with the public.

  “Oh, but I used to have him answer the phone in the mornings,” my mother said. “You know, when the phone rang before anyone from the front room got in. Oh, he had the most wonderful phone manner of anybody; I wish I’d had him answering the phone all the time. Well, anyway, one morning I happened to overhear him. The pers
on must have been asking him what kind of food did we serve because Charlie, without missing a beat, said”—and here my mother imitated his Southern accent—“‘Well, ma’am, I do believe it’s Polynesian.’ Polynesian? Polynesian? But he sounded so lovely when he said it, I hardly had the heart to correct him.”

  Eight

  FOOD OPPORTUNITIES

  My mother liked to warn me about the food outside high-end restaurants. A machine tenderized the meat; the greens drooped; no one hand-rolled the pasta. They baked cakes from mixes and made mashed potatoes out of powder. “Never order chicken just anywhere,” my mother told me. “They’re filthy animals.” The chickens we served at the Pudding, baked in their crackling golden skins and rubbed in fried sage, came from private farms. We knew all our suppliers by name, fed them biscotti while they waited for the check, and gave them gift certificates at Christmas. My mother air-kissed the woman who dug our Wellfleet clams out of the sea with her own hands and the man who foraged for our wild mushrooms in the woods. I could stare down at my plate and trace every ingredient—how could I go to another restaurant?

  But food, what my mother called “beautiful, beautiful food,” took time. It also took money. While we splurged on ingredients at the restaurant, we saved at home; our refrigerator was empty, except for blue cans of seltzer water. My mother left her lipstick around the edges of the turquoise cans and littered them around our apartment, on top of stacks of old newspapers or cookbooks or mixed in with the plastic Chanel bangles on her vanity table. If we had a half box of stale Cheerios, then we had no milk, or the milk would be sour, or if the milk was fine then we had no Cheerios. Sometimes my mother brought home dishes from the restaurant, but sometimes they did not travel well and I had to pry Moulard duck breasts off of plastic containers gelled over with burgundy-cherry sauce. Most nights that I stayed home I depended on baked potatoes, salt, no butter. I ate them alone on winter nights in my flannel nightgowns, reading nineteenth-century Russian novels. My mother ate baked potatoes, too, without the salt.

  Because she made no apologies for the absence of food in our home, my mother coined the phrase food opportunities. Food opportunities did not need to be beautiful; I simply had to seize them when they presented themselves. So I ate, aside from my meals at the Pudding, a variety of food: Chinese takeout and cheeseburgers with the staff, deviled eggs and margaritas at people’s summerhouses, drippy flans and lukewarm cocoas from coffee shops in the Square. I also ate the food at my classmates’ houses. It tended, in Cambridge, to be drab and healthy: great tubs of ginger couscous, tabouli with slivers of purple onions and sun-dried tomatoes, bottles of Orangina and Perrier.

  My mother didn’t do school lunches. Instead, every Sunday she brought home a dozen bagels and wrapped them in tinfoil so they would keep for the rest of the week. In the mornings she called me from the restaurant at seven thirty—she went into the Square hours before—to wake me up for school, and I stumbled into the kitchenette and plopped one of the bagels into a brown paper bag. The bagel was usually cinnamon-raisin, and stale. I didn’t have any chips or celery sticks to go with it, and at school I ate my lunch fast, with an air of duty, as if I were popping a pill. I only minded the lack of beverage. My mouth felt dry from the whole wheat and sugary from the raisins, and I would as soon use the water fountain, with hairs stuck to the metal and pieces of bubble gum floating in the drain, as I would eat a school lunch—the ones you bought, with the square-shaped pizzas and spongy peas in the aluminum trays.

  When I was in the fifth grade, I decided to ask my mother if she could buy me some juice boxes, a package of juice boxes that would last the whole week. The other girls had juice boxes, and they got to prick straws through the holes of the multicolored boxes and sip and sip. If I had a juice box, I could alternate my sips with bites from the bagel, and lunch would last much longer.

  The day I finally asked her about the juice boxes, my mother had just come home from work. She had a cocktail party to go to in forty minutes, and she was moisturizing her legs. A pair of fishnets dangled off the arm of her stair-climber.

  “Mummy,” I said, standing at the foot of her bed, “if you go to the supermarket sometime, would you ever please buy me some juice boxes?”

  Her expression looked the same as it had when I’d given her, at age six, the lopsided paper angel with a pipe-cleaner halo I’d made at the holiday arts and crafts fair. She was never much of a fan of childhood arts and crafts, my mother. “Juice boxes” was all she said, shaking her head. “Juice boxes.”

  The next day at school, I drank from the water fountain.

  Sometimes on Sunday nights, my mother stayed home. That was the only time of the week she ever did. Then we both took hot baths and put on our flannel nightgowns, and she would make Benjamin and me a simple dish she used to make us at the farmhouse: poached eggs on English muffins. We ate them together at a wobbly-topped glass table, and those nights “keeping up with the conversation” didn’t matter; there were no air kisses and no laughs. I read Vogue; she read the real-estate section of The Boston Globe. When she read, my mother took off her sunglasses, and I could see her eyes. They looked misty as she flicked the pages, and I knew she was thinking that all the prices were too high. She still couldn’t afford to buy a house.

  After she had prepped for brunch some Sundays, my mother would go to open houses. She looked at all sorts of houses, ones she could afford and ones she could not: brownstones in downtown Boston and two-families in Somerville and farmhouses like the one we had left years ago. She said she wanted her own garden and her own kitchen where, during snowstorms, she could bake brioche doughnuts as she had when I was a little girl. She said she wanted her own Christmas tree—a place to hang the hundreds of ornaments we kept in storage.

  On some summertime Sunday afternoons, we would drive out to Bedford, where our farmhouse had been, so my mother could go to the farm stands there and in Concord. “I’m looking for potatoes,” she said. “Beautiful Red Bliss potatoes I’ll dip in some salt for dinner.”

  And then, from the bottom of her being, my mother would sigh, revealing a softness, a quality of yearning dissatisfaction, that she seldom exposed at the restaurant.

  But what about money? Why did the restaurant never make any money? But it didn’t. No matter how much business they did, there were too many expenses. The Pudding was simply on too lavish a scale. If you wanted to make money in the restaurant business, my mother said, the thing to do was open a pizza joint or maybe a Chinese take-out place. “Why didn’t you?” I once asked her.

  “Because I’m interested in the product,” she said. “I’m interested in things being beautiful.”

  So our lives, while unstable, were always also beautiful; the veneer of things, the shimmer of them, mattered. And so our lifestyle was always on a scale that our finances, strictly speaking, couldn’t support.

  One of the things that helped us to live this way was trade.

  We had trade at stores in Harvard Square; that meant we gave people charge accounts at the Pudding in exchange for their services. We had trade at Harvard Book Store and Colonial Drug and Casablanca, the bar next to the Brattle Theatre. We had trade with Serge the florist and trade at Gino, the hair salon down the street where the bill for my mother’s highlights, which she brightened every three months, cost hundreds of dollars. Our tailor dined at the Pudding on trade. So did my mother’s lawyers, her exterminator, manicurist, and house inspector. I later on had a therapist who dined on trade.

  Meanwhile, at the Pudding, we simply replaced instead of washed the linens, we tossed the leftover veal chops in the garbage at the end of the night, and my mother dished out thousands of dollars during the holidays on all the employee bonuses alone. “Oh, well,” she said, shrugging. “Fine dining should be like a great dinner party at someone’s house and, if you want my opinion, nobody has fun if the hostess worries about spilling red wine on the carpet.” To din
e at the Pudding was like going to a dinner party: people often ate for free. Indeed, freebies swirled in the dining room like confetti.

  “Trade,” my mother said. “It makes the world go round.”

  And so, for us, for many years, it did.

  On Friday nights I used to go visit my father’s studio. I remember one evening during the height of summertime when he pulled up on the curb in his latest crummy, wheezing old car and got out to greet me. He wore a pair of denim shorts coarsely cut off below the knee. I thought to myself, Oh, no. Not the denim shorts. The paint-splattered black pants were bad enough.

  But then, I was dressed pretty shabbily myself. I always made a point of wearing my oldest clothes whenever I saw my father, because that way I didn’t mind if they ended up smelling like cigarettes.

  My father and I decided to go to dinner at a vegetarian restaurant in Harvard Square, a restaurant that isn’t there anymore. We waited in line to be seated. The hostess did a double take when she saw us. Then, in a tone of exaggerated friendliness, she said, “Oh, come right this way with me. You must be so hungry,” she added gently to me. And all at once it clicked: She had seen my father. She had seen the denim shorts. The cigarettes, the seedy air of poverty. She thought that we were homeless people.

  My mother, meanwhile, had quite a tolerant attitude toward the homeless people in Harvard Square. Indeed, she felt something of an affinity with them. “No one’s even up in Harvard Square when I get to the restaurant. It’s just me and the homeless people.”

  It showed a certain entrepreneurial spirit to have claimed territory in the Square as your own without even paying for it, my mother always said, and she respected the homeless. She thought the man who sold Spare Change in front of Au Bon Pain, waving the newspapers in pedestrians’ faces and calling, in a resounding Southern accent, “Young lady, young lady,” was a wonderful salesman. Every time she walked past him she nodded, as if to congratulate him. “He’s got hustle,” she told me. “That’s what I look for.” Another homeless person stole my mother’s New York Times off the front steps every morning, and when she found out his identity, instead of scolding him, she asked him why, with such a consistent record of early rising, he couldn’t get a job. “He must be a kitchen person,” she said. “Most waiters can barely drag themselves to a ten o’clock brunch shift.”