Once when I was sitting there eating, a woman at the next table began to complain. She spoke in the general direction of the kitchen, and what she said, in a tone just louder than conversational, was that her friend Edna had recommended this restaurant but the food was a disappointment.
Humphrey emerged, spatula in hand and apron filthy, and asked her what the matter was. The woman pointed to her plate. I craned my neck over: it looked like the fish stew. “What’s this?” she demanded, flicking her finger at a little bit of something. Humphrey leaned to look. “And this? This here? She says to me, try one of their stews, she says. What kind of stew? I asked her. I’m not sure I like stew. She says, anything—just try it, you’ll like it. But I can’t eat this!” She pushed the plate away, almost in tears. “I don’t know what these are! I saved up all month—I’m on a fixed income, you know—my husband passed away two years ago—I save all month so I can go out for a nice meal at the end of it—but I can’t eat this!” Her voice rose, and Humph sat down and patted her arm. “And this place is not cheap, if you’d like to know!” she finished shrilly.
Humphrey picked up a spare fork and speared a little brown bit. “Is this what’s troubling you?” he asked gently. “I’m the chef,” he said. “I made this stew myself. This is a lardon—a little piece of pork.” He spoke very gently and slowly. “I’ll tell you what I do. I fry up a lot of these little guys in the big pan I’m going to make the stew in—along with the onions? You know? And I find—now this is not just my own idea, this is a classic technique of French cooking—I find that they add just that extra touch of—” He rolled his eyes to the ceiling and waggled his head, to indicate ecstasy.
“Even in a fish stew?” said the woman—meaning, I could tell, to disguise sheer ignorance as mild doubt.
“Well—yes,” Humph said judiciously. “Now. What I want to say is that if you really don’t like my little meurette, I’ll be glad to bring you something else. I know better than anybody, believe me, what an expense it is to eat in a restaurant …”
He went on, and when he was done she was practically eating her stew out of his hand. She became, needless to say, a regular.
I was a regular myself. Eating at Grand’mère was always an adventure. But I also ate there because I wanted to put off going home to Juliet and Alan. They had become rather social as Juliet got to know her fellow students at Yale, and there tended to be groups of them sitting around the living room at night, eating nuts and drinking apple cider and being, I suppose, clever and profound. Even the potheads and pushers Alan towed home from his clinic were well-read. Sometimes they all played those infernal word games my siblings had so loved in their youth. They invited me to play, of course, but I never did, though sometimes I sat with them, nibbling nuts. I liked Juliet’s professor, Mr. Oliver, a small man with a goatee who used to affect a Pakistani accent. He was a coin collector, and we sometimes talked about the price of gold, or about some fabulous auction. He also drew cartoons and sent them in to The New Yorker. They were never printed, and I never got the jokes, but I laughed dutifully and admired the drawings, which were done in a series of minute black dots.
But mostly, I avoided Juliet and Alan and their friends. I sat alone in my room listening to the radio in the evenings, comfortably full of Humphrey’s cooking. I cursed my wasted life, all the years of Twinkies and hot dogs (though I missed them, too). It wasn’t soybean curd I needed, it was crêpes d’épinards, it was aubergine en pistouille, it was salmon mousse with a ribbon of my own mayonnaise across it.
“U-R-KA-RA-ZEE!” Crystal, the fat tanned waitress, scrawled across my bill once. I suppose I must have looked it, eating with my eyes closed and curling my tongue around each little flavor. I was as happy eating Humph’s quenelles at Grand’mère as I had been years before eating the Frontenacs’ Oreos in the kitchen above Hector’s.
Another reason I liked to eat there was to give my feet a rest before I started home. I cut my fingers up a bit during my first couple of weeks (before I learned to keep my weak right hand away from the knife), but the greatest casualties were my feet. After being stood upon for eight hours straight, they were swollen and painful. I had a stool to sit on, but it wasn’t really tall enough for me. I did a better job standing up, and if I stood I didn’t have to keep jumping off the stool to go to the refrigerator. The first week, I barely made it to the bus stop, and when I got home I had to soak my feet in Epsom salts. Juliet and Alan were no help. Predictably, they thought my job was vile; my swollen feet weren’t the worst of it.
“When are you going to take your life seriously, Cordelia?” Juliet asked me, while Alan’s disappointed face hovered over her gaunt shoulder. “A salad girl!”
“Salad person,’” I corrected.
“And then the food! The junk you deal with!”
“But they use all fresh vegetables!” I told them. I described vegetables done à la grecque, figuring that would soften my Grecophile sister.
“Why do they have to junk everything up?” she demanded petulantly.
“They use eggs fresh from the chicken, fish right off the boat, pure butter.” By that time I knew I was talking poison—cholesterol, hormones, mercury, insecticides. I wasn’t really trying to convince them, I just wanted to see their faces. Revolted tremors passed from Juliet to Alan and back, but neither said anything. I think it was then that they officially gave up on me. I was lost, a hopeless heathen.
And it was then that I began to worry a little about Juliet. I feared she was going beyond the bounds of harmless eccentricity. She had always been judgmental, but now she was rigid, and a sense of humor no longer softened her. She even stood stiffly, perhaps because of her bowel troubles, and her lips seemed thinned out. She was as skinny, as pale and languid, as a bean sprout. She seemed to have no breasts, no superfluous flesh at all, and bones showed sharply in the oddest places: above her eyes, behind her ears, along her shoulders. She ate almost nothing, as far as I could see. It was she Alan always looked approvingly at when he said to me, “Eat as little as possible, eat just enough to keep your body functioning.” Sometimes he would stroke Juliet’s smooth, bony arm or her knobby knee appraisingly, as if she were a statue he was working on. I thought of that old movie about Svengali and poor Trilby.
But my concern couldn’t reach her. I see now that I should have tried harder. I should have taken my intuitions more seriously. But she held me off. Most of the time we avoided each other, mutually willing. And though I felt guilt and inadequacy cling to me like the odor of beef and wine and butter, I kept thinking, I need to be with my own kind.
Grand’mère was my only refuge. I would gladly have moved into the hot, friendly kitchen with its good smells and its constant activity. And people I could talk to. I talked all the time, so much that Humph had to remind me once in a while, “Food before conversation, Delia.” I talked to Crystal and Anne, the waitresses. I talked to Cynthia, the elegant bartender, who was sleeping with Humph. I talked to Archie, whose function in the kitchen I never did find out—he did a little of everything, but mostly he sat somewhere with the unlit weed between his lips, silent and smiling, and his fingers would tap out convulsive rhythms along the sides of his pantlegs. When I talked to him, he would nod and his smile would widen. I used to wonder if he was perhaps retarded until I later discovered he was a gifted classical pianist. I found this, literally, unbelievable, I was so used to thinking of Archie as practically an inanimate object, like the refrigerator, only not so useful. But eventually I heard him play, and became convinced.
That was after I met Nina. I went to work one day, and there was this beautiful, overweight, auburn-haired person out in the kitchen in a Grand’mère waitress uniform. She was listening closely to Humphrey, frowning as he talked. A new waitress, I thought, and then I noticed she was writing in a notebook spread out on the counter. An overconscientious new waitress, I was amending, with disgust (that’s how Juliet would approach it, taking notes), when Humphrey called me over.
“Delia Miller,” he said. “Nina Treat. Nina’s a reporter for the Nickel Bag. She’s going to fill in for Crystal this week.”
The Nickel Bag was a local weekly, it only cost a nickel, and it prided itself on being a muckraking alternative to the regular newspaper. Juliet and Alan sometimes had it around, so I knew what it was, though I’d never read it. I couldn’t imagine why one of its reporters should be waitressing at Grand’mère.
“I’m doing a piece,” Nina said. She had the most beautiful dark blue eyes and long black lashes I’d ever seen. She looked like Brenda Starr, plus about thirty-five pounds. “On waitressing,” she added when I just looked at her. “I’m being a waitress for a week so I can write about it.”
“Wouldn’t it be easier just to ask the waitresses what it’s like?” I asked. “I mean, you’re probably not going to enjoy it much. It’s even harder on the feet than salad making.”
She turned to her notebook and wrote this down—or I assumed she did. At any rate, she scrawled.
“Wouldn’t it be easier?” I persisted.
“The Nickel likes first-person, true-life tales,” said Nina.
“Nina’s trip is investigative reporting,” Humphrey added. “Like Woodstein and Berwitz.”
“She’ll still hate it,” I said, slipping my shoes off. I put on the soft slippers I kept there to wear while I stood. Nina looked at them.
“Feet,” she said, and bent over her notebook again. “I see my angle.”
I found out shortly after, when Archie came in and she grabbed him and gave him a passionate kiss, that Nina was Archie’s girlfriend, and it was because Archie was Humph’s best friend and right-hand man that Crystal had a week off with pay so Nina could step in and take notes on us all.
Nina worked harder than I did. She stayed there all day, watching everything and writing and helping out in the kitchen, and at five o’clock she started waiting tables as if she’d been born with a tray in her hand. I watched her admiringly; I like competent, practical people. Humphrey told me she was the Nickel’s star reporter.
“That girl is worth her weight in gold to that crummy little paper,” he said, licking a saucepan with a spoon. “She ought to go on to better things, she ought to shoot right to the top, she ought to be in New York or California standing them on their ear, but she stays here because of Archie.” He crooked his neck fondly in Archie’s direction. Archie was standing at the stove, stirring something in his out-of-it way, the cigarette between his lips.
“Archie,” I said.
“He’s a dear boy,” Humphrey said with a sigh. “He’s my best friend. I love that little guy like a brother, and you know I mean that, Delia. But Nina—” He shook his head, his California rhapsodies unable to do justice to the superlative Nina.
Though I admired her, I didn’t like her at first—her crazy devotion to Archie, her note taking, her questions, the silliness of her project got to me. But we became friends. She used to wait on me when I ate dinner at my corner table, and when things were slow she’d come and talk to me. At first I thought she just wanted information, the inside dope on salad making (her article had expanded from waitressing to the whole operation), but instead she got me talking about Juliet and Alan and my life in general, and she talked about Archie.
“I’m a slave to that man,” she told me, tossing back her flaming hair and looking dreamily off into the distance. “I’m a slave to his talent. I feel it’s my duty to mankind to bring him out. Do you know, he won’t play for anyone but a few friends? I’m trying to help him.”
I still hadn’t heard Archie play, still thought of him as a defective kitchen appliance. “Then you’re in love with his piano playing?” I asked Nina, trying to understand.
Nina blushed. “It’s not only that. I’m a prisoner of sex. Archie is so …” She rolled her eyes, and then closed them briefly, and then got up to go take an order.
It was harder to think of Archie as a sex object than as a musical genius, but if someone like Nina was enslaved and imprisoned by him, there must, I supposed, be something in it.
Becoming friends with Nina was like a passport to the social life of the Grand’mère crowd. Once in a while on Mondays, when the restaurant was closed, Humph would invite Archie and Nina and some of the rest of us to his place. The invitation, it was understood, was an honor. Humph would cook up something good, there would be wine, and the happy atmosphere of the restaurant kitchen would be there in Humph’s cluttered rooms as if he concocted it on his stove. And once or twice, when I was there, Archie was persuaded to play Humph’s battered old upright piano. I expected him to become a different person at the keyboard, but he looked exactly the same: half asleep, the cigarette behind his ear, and his fingers flashing over the beige and broken keys the way they moved up and down his pantlegs. But the music was gorgeous, lush and brightly colored, more like Nina than Archie. It awed me, the way it suggested the bottomlessness of people, their secret depths and delights, and it made me believe in Archie’s sexual prowess. I envied Nina her passion—her enslavement and imprisonment.
I must admit I was desperately frustrated by the absence of any sex life at all. I was surrounded by couples. I’d never noticed how paired-off the world was—Nina and Archie, Juliet and Alan, Humph and Cynthia, Crystal and Anne with nice (I had no doubt they were nice) husbands at home, and all the happy couples surrounding me while I ate my Grand’mère dinners—a regular Noah’s ark, and I was left behind, alone, drowning.
But I was happier than I’d been since Danny left. I liked having Nina to pal around with. Archie spent long hours practicing, and Nina worked erratically, sometimes swamped with assignments, sometimes idle for days. “I’m on retainer for the Nickel,” she explained with pride. This meant they paid her regularly whether they had a job for her that week or not, and it was, for a journalist, a sign of success.
Nina and I used to sit around her maniacally messy apartment talking and drinking coffee in the evenings. Living with Juliet and Alan, where after my first torrential outpourings I had become mostly silent, I needed talk the way I needed meat, and Nina was an ideal listener. She was sympathetic and, better yet, truly interested, and not because she wanted to reform me. She just wanted to hear it.
“Why?” I asked her.
“Because you’re my friend, Delia!” she replied, and I almost wept.
In between my confessions, she told me her own life story. She was older than I, and had been a radical in the late sixties. She was thinner then, she told me, in better shape for dodging billy clubs. “I was at Columbia,” she said. “I was in Chicago. I stuck daffodils into police rifles. I marched in New York and Washington. I lit matches for draft-card burners in Boston. I threw a rotten tomato at Nixon in Hartford.”
Danny and I had probably seen her on television, those long, lovely evenings in the living room above Hector’s.
“I was looking for a cause,” Nina said. I remember exactly how she sat, barefoot, on her old corduroy sofa as she said this, because it impressed me so much. She held a coffee cup in one hand, and with the other she dug the dirt from between her fat toes. “And now I’ve found it. Archie.”
The envy poured out of me in waves. I could almost see it, a dull, leaden green. It wasn’t Archie I envied her, it was the simplicity of a life that had a purpose controlling it.
“What about your work?” I asked her.
“Oh—my work,” she said absently, dismissing it, thinking of Archie. But I was impressed by her articles. After her piece on the restaurant business and Grand’mère (“FEET: Soft Shoes for a Hard Job,” and a photograph of my very own feet in my slippers), Humph personally sawed down the legs on my wooden stool so I could sit and chop instead of standing, and he was considering some sort of wheeled contraption so I could scoot back and forth to the refrigerator without getting up.
It was wonderful to have a friend. Until I met Nina, I had had to consider Juliet my confidante, and it made me uneasy to be forced into cahoots with a membe
r of my family. And then, Juliet had gone from welcoming sisterliness, to her old criticisms, to lethargy and withdrawal, as if she were in pursuit of some goal invisible to the naked eye and unintelligible to anyone except, possibly, Alan.
Sometimes, if only to escape Juliet and Alan’s place, I went with Nina on her assignments for the Nickel Bag, which is how I happened to go to the street fair where my life took another turn.
Nina was covering the fair for the Nickel, which meant, I discovered, that she wandered around looking dazed, an experience from which she later would write a lively, funny, and precisely accurate reconstruction of the event, complete with quotes from participants—though she often made those up. “People aren’t authentic enough,” she said. “And they hardly ever talk in sentences.”
We drove there in her aged blue MGB convertible with its IM NINA license plate and GOD IS MY CO-PILOT bumper sticker (Nina’s talisman against accidents, of which she had a morbid fear). She explained her journalistic methods to me on the way, and asked me if I’d mind if we separated for a while when we got there; otherwise she’d get talking and be distracted.
“I’ll meet you at ten by the chili-dog booth,” she said as we parted. “And if you overhear anything good, try to remember it, even if you have to make it up.” I pondered this as I watched her go toward the Ferris wheel, head high and nose up, the better to sniff it in.
I wandered, not much pleased—though I didn’t tell Nina—to be by myself. I was sick of being alone, and I had little heart for the ring toss or the candy apples. I half thought I might meet some nice man who would win me a turquoise-blue stuffed bear, and in fact, twice men approached me, one of them quite nice-looking, but—as always in these encounters—it was like my old shoplifting compulsion: I was waiting for someone to touch me at some secret level deep in my bones—like the collie dog on the trivet. I wanted someone I couldn’t possibly live without. So I always smiled and turned away, waiting for just the right face.
Chez Cordelia Page 15