by Ruth Reichl
“Pearls like to be worn,” Mom said every time she fastened them around her neck. “I hope you’ll remember that when these are yours. Every time you wear them, they grow more beautiful.” The pearls gave off a warm glow against the silky blueness of the dress, an effect that was far too quiet for my mother, who always completed the ensemble by splashing bright green eye shadow across her eyelids and pressing a tiny silver star onto each one.
“Like this?” asked Denise as she put the stars on my eyes. She had painted my short nails with the deep blue-red polish my mother always used; when I slipped on Mom’s large moonstone ring, even my hands were playing the part. “Now look,” she commanded, whirling the chair to face the mirror.
“My God” was all I could muster. And then we all went silent, staring at the reflection.
Claudia had been right: I had never noticed the resemblance, but if you dressed me up in my mother’s clothes, hid my hair beneath a silver wig, and covered my face with wrinkles, I turned into a virtual replica of Miriam Brudno. “Are you aware,” asked Claudia at last, “that when you said gawd it was in that Cleveland accent of your mother’s? You even sound like her.”
Molly had been a costume; putting it on made me realize that we all become actors, to some extent, when we go out to eat. Every restaurant is a theater, and the truly great ones allow us to indulge in the fantasy that we are rich and powerful. When restaurants hold up their end of the bargain, they give us the illusion of being surrounded by servants intent on ensuring our happiness and offering extraordinary food.
But even modest restaurants offer the opportunity to become someone else, at least for a little while. Restaurants free us from mundane reality; that is part of their charm. When you walk through the door, you are entering neutral territory where you are free to be whoever you choose for the duration of the meal.
When I became Molly, I merely took the theater of restaurants to the next logical step. Becoming my mother, on the other hand, was taking a giant leap beyond. The only thing I can compare it to is being so absorbed in a novel that you disappear into the fiction and feel emotions that are not your own. The moment the silver wig went on my head, I turned into someone else. It was stunningly unnerving.
I am nothing like my mother. No one is. She was a commanding figure who did not have a timid bone in her body. Frank, fearless, and totally tactless, she was a woman who said what she felt, did what she pleased, and let the chips fall where they might. Having spent most of my life being embarrassed by Mom, I was shocked to discover how easily I slipped into her shoes.
Finding out that it was fun was even more frightening. Becoming my mother was like getting cosmic permission to abandon my superego, act without considering the consequences, behave badly. It wasn’t me, after all, doing these bold things, but it gave me an extraordinary sense of exhilaration.
“What are you doing?” asked Claudia, her voice rising when I went to the phone. She was still chalk white, and talking fast as if attempting to keep herself from fainting.
“Making a reservation,” I said. My mother never walked; she advanced upon the world as if she were an invading army intent upon conquest. My rhythm, I found, had changed too. When Mom made calls she punched the numbers into the phone, as if the very pressure would speed the connection. And I was punching now.
“But this was just a dress rehearsal,” wailed Claudia. “We’re not going out tonight.”
“Oh yes we are,” I heard my voice saying. “I’m all dressed up and I want to go out.” I punctuated this by thumping my foot firmly onto the floor. “Right now! I’ve always longed to go to 21, but Ernst felt we couldn’t afford it. I’ve dreamed of this for years. Tonight’s the night.”
“I am not dressed for 21,” mumbled Claudia, who was still the color of an egg. “Why don’t you take Michael?”
“I would gladly take him if he were here,” I replied, “but he’s not. He’s in Arkansas, working on another Whitewater piece.”
“I am certain you must have some other friend who would like to go to dinner with you,” Claudia said.
“I’m sure I do,” I said, “but I don’t want to wait. I want to do it right this minute. We’re going to go to 21 and we’re going to spend a great deal of money. We’ll have cocktails. We’ll have caviar. I’ve already made the reservation. Put on your coat, dear, we’re going out.”
My mother had been an irresistible force. Feeling her inside me, I swept Claudia up and propelled her out the door, paying no heed to signs of resistance.
Claudia shakily navigated the narrow steps that lead to 21, and she walked through the door with uncharacteristic diffidence. She was still lagging behind as we traversed the staid little lobby, tugging on my arm as if to hold me back.
But inside the dining room she emitted a little cry of protest. “This is 21?” she asked. It was a moan of disappointment. She looked at the red-and-white-checked napkins on the table, the long bar, and the low ceiling hung with thousands of toy trucks, airplanes, and football helmets. Her mouth formed a large circle of discontent. “It looks like a parody of an inexpensive Italian restaurant,” she wailed. “It looks like a suburban recreation room. It looks as if it has not changed since it was a speakeasy.”
“I don’t think it has changed,” I said as a maître d’ led us inexorably toward the dim reaches of the rear. “I think that’s supposed to be part of its charm.”
Claudia snuffled unhappily. “This must be the worst table in the entire room,” she noted when the maître d’ finally came to a halt. “I am certain that all the important people are seated in the front.”
She was right. What would Mom do? I surveyed the situation. “We need a martini,” I decided, and let my mother take charge, waving my hand imperiously about to summon a waiter. When he finally materialized I firmly delineated our requirements. “Gin,” I said. “Dry. With olives. Shaken, if you please, not stirred. I like them very, very cold.”
Eating out with my mother was a terrible trial. Soup was never hot enough, meat was always too well done, salads were overdressed or underdressed or served at the wrong temperature. She sent everything back. Each time Mom went into her routine, I wanted to crawl under the table, but here I was, in a restaurant with her once again, and this time I was enjoying it. I watched the waiter approach with the martini and noted, with a kind of glee, that it was not in the distinctive triangular glass.
Suddenly I heard my mother’s voice issuing from my mouth. “Martinis,” it said, “never taste as good when they are served in wineglasses. But that can’t be helped. But this one isn’t cold, and that can. Take it back, please, and fetch me a cold one.”
The waiter started to give me a who-do-you-think-you-are look, but I swept him with one of my mother’s queenly glares and he changed his mind. “Yes, madam,” he said.
Claudia watched this with bewildered fascination. But Miriam hadn’t finished. “This menu,” I allowed her to note, “is shocking. An appetizer of cold asparagus for sixteen dollars! Who spends this kind of money anymore?”
“My darling,” Claudia pointed out, rousing herself, “it is not your money. Would you mind very much if I had oysters instead of caviar?”
“If you must,” I said. “What will you have as an entrée?”
“Steak?” she asked. “Would that be acceptable?”
“Ask the waiter for his recommendation,” I said. “Make him work for his tip. I think I’ll have Caesar salad and steak tartare; they’ll both have to be made at the table. That should be entertaining.”
The waiter did his best to make us understand his limited interest in two old ladies. “You don’t want that,” he said curtly when I ordered the steak tartare. “It’s raw.”
This was extremely unwise. “I do, indeed,” I told him, “but only if the meat is hand-chopped. Please inform the chef that if he tries to send me tartare that has been turned to mush in a food processor I will send it straight back.”
“Yes, madam,” he said for the second
time.
Next we had to endure the sommelier’s condescension. “Ponzi Reserve Pinot Noir?” he intoned in a slow, lugubrious voice. I had deliberately ordered one of the least expensive wines on the list. He sighed loudly. “Very well, madame.” His manner was meant to convey the information that persons spending a mere fifty dollars were unworthy of his attention. Mournfully, he shuffled off. I watched him go with a look my mother had perfected, one that did not bode well for the next person approaching the table.
That turned out to be the waiter, with a tray of oysters. “Oh,” I said as he set them on the table, “Malpeques.” I sniffed. “Served with catsup and horseradish—what were they thinking?” I picked up my fork and poked one of the unhappy mollusks. “You can’t eat these,” I announced to Claudia as I summoned the waiter. “They’ve been out of the water too long.”
“How can you tell?” asked Claudia.
I prodded the soft gray lips of the oyster. I thrust a tine straight into its rounded belly and watched it quiver. “See how dry it is?” I noted. “An oyster should have abundant liquid in the shell. This dryness could be the result of chipping, or the oyster might have been ineptly opened, but it’s not a good sign. The real giveaway is the color. See how dull it is? When an oyster first comes out of the water, it is shiny, luminescent. It looks like”—I searched for something to compare it to—“this moonstone,” I said, waving my mother’s ring at her. “But the longer an oyster is out of the water, the duller it becomes. This, as you can see, has no shine at all.” I sent the oysters back. Claudia bleakly watched them depart.
Then I dipped an exploratory spoon into my lobster-butternut squash bisque, noted that it was thin and sweet, and took another bite. No soup was ever hot enough for my mother, and this was no exception. Once again I summoned the waiter. “Tepid soup is not worth eating,” I told him. “Please take it back and do not return until it is steaming.” He started to pick up the bowl when I was struck by another thought. “And see that they take those chunks of lobster out beforehand. It would be a shame if they were to become tough.”
He nodded and removed the offending soup.
Mom would have rejoiced in rejecting the asparagus as well. Unfortunately, other than the fact that the spears cost three dollars apiece, I could find no fault with them. But when the waiter made a Caesar salad, the Mom in me decided that he had overdone the anchovies. “I’m so sorry,” I said sweetly, “but it’s a bit fishy. Would you mind making me another?”
He glared at me. Then he cleared the plate and recommenced the operation. “Stop!” I cried. The waiter came to attention, salad fork in the air. “Are you sure that egg is coddled?” I asked.
“Yes, madam,” he said. His voice now betrayed exasperation tinged with grudging respect. “It has been cooked exactly one minute.”
“Very well,” I said, keeping him under surveillance as he warily mixed the dressing. “Be careful with that cheese,” I cautioned when he was nearing the end. “Too much will ruin your creation.” Lifting his eyes to mine, he cautiously dusted the lettuce with grated Parmesan until I indicated that he was welcome to stop.
“Is it to your liking?” he asked anxiously as I took the first bite.
I felt one of my mother’s triumphant little smiles cross my lips. I inclined my head, as she would have done. “Perfectly,” I said. “You have outdone yourself.” I waved him off and took another bite. As he rolled the cart from the table, relief was etched in every muscle of his back.
“Being an old lady can be extremely useful,” my mother used to say. “I can get tickets to any Broadway show, even if it’s sold out. When they tell me there are none, I simply stand there. The box office always has a couple of tickets, and in the end they let me have them, just so I’ll go away. What else are they going to do?” I had known that Mom was proud of this talent, just as she was proud of her ability to put a waiter in his place. What I had not known was that, unbeknownst to me, I had absorbed every one of her tricks.
The onion rings were cold; I sent them back. There was too much Worcestershire sauce in the steak tartare, and I considered rejecting it. “Don’t, I implore you,” Claudia pleaded. “This is starting to feel like the second act of Taming of the Shrew, and it has always made me uncomfortable.”
“But you can’t let them get away with treating you shabbily,” I said. “If you don’t insist on good service in restaurants, you have only yourself to blame.”
Claudia said nothing. But when I decided that the fudge on my sundae was not sufficiently hot, I understood the look that crossed her face. She wanted to put the poor waiter out of his misery, if only to end her own.
The moment we were out the door, I pulled the wig from my head and released my hair from the nylon net. I ran my fingers through my curls, over and over, shaking myself out. “Free at last,” I said.
Claudia looked at me. “Tell me,” she asked, “did you actually believe any of those things you said in there?”
“No,” I said, happy to hear that my own voice was back. “That was all Mom. She made a scene at every restaurant we ever ate in, and it always made me miserable. I’ll eat almost anything rather than endure the trauma of sending it back.”
“Your father felt the same way,” said Claudia. “He once told me how uncomfortable he became when she started in.”
“Lots of people feel that way,” I said. “Last week I had lunch with the paper’s wine critic, Frank Prial. When he tasted the wine he hesitated, and then rejected it with obvious reluctance. It was clearly corked, but when the sommelier went off for a replacement, Frank told me that even if the next bottle was off he planned to accept it. And then he said something that made great sense: ‘What’s the point in taking people out only to make them wish they weren’t there?’ ”
“If only you had kept that in mind during dinner,” lamented Claudia. “I would have preferred to be almost anywhere else on this earth.” She closed her mouth and looked at me, and then her shoulders began to shake. I watched the laughter move into her face and then slowly begin to escape. Soon great peals of mirth were rolling down the dark street and I was laughing with her, although I wasn’t quite sure why.
“It was rich,” gasped Claudia when she had finally stopped long enough to breathe. She held her stomach and said, “Tonight we scored one for every old lady in New York.” Then she gave in, once again, to the laughter. When it was over she grabbed my arms and looked squarely into my face. “If I were being entirely truthful, I would have to admit that I would not have missed that for the world.”
“I’m glad you feel that way,” I replied, “because tomorrow we’re going to tackle a more difficult target.”
“We are?”
“Oh yes,” I said. “Tomorrow we lunch at the Four Seasons!”
I woke up the next morning with a sense of anticipation. Groping through the sleepiness, I tried to remember my plans for the day. And then it hit me: I was going to dress up like my mother. The notion pleased me just a little too much, and I realized that sometime in the near future I was going to have to think about why this disguise was such fun. But first I had to practice putting on Mom’s makeup. I didn’t want Nicky to wake up and discover that his mother had been replaced by a stranger—it would probably terrify him. But if I worked fast I could get the makeup on, and off, before he was out of bed. I went into the bathroom, taped the diagram Denise had given me to the mirror, spread the pots and brushes across the sink, and started in.
It was awkward work. Covering my face and eyebrows with the foundation was more difficult than I’d expected, and the more I began to look like my mother, the clumsier I became. I had been working for almost an hour when I realized that it was time to wake Nicky up. I reached for the tissues and the cold cream and then my heart stopped: the bathroom door had swung open and my son was standing there, watching me.
I caught his eye and he came padding into the bathroom in his electric blue Superman pajamas, red cape flying out behind him. He stared for a
moment at the person I had become. And then he said simply, “Mommy, you look very silly,” and left the room.
So much for terror. I turned back to the mirror and went on with the makeup. My colleagues had been begging me to show them one of my costumes, and today might be a good time to do it. I put on the blue dress, squirmed into the wig, and went to make breakfast. Nicky wrinkled up his nose at the strong smell of Joy. “What’s your name?” he asked, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to see your mother dressed up in someone else’s clothes.
“Miriam, Miriam, Miriam,” he chanted when I told him. He was still chanting when we left the apartment. As the elevator door opened he turned to Gene, our large Irish elevator man, and said, “This is my friend Miriam.”
Gene tipped his hat. He looked at me. “Morning ma’am,” he said. “You must have arrived very early, before I started my shift.”
“Yes,” I said, “very early indeed.”
Nicky stifled a giggle.
There is no place colder than a Number 5 bus stop in the middle of winter. The wind howls off the Hudson, sneaking down your collar and whistling up your sleeves. We jumped up and down; we rubbed our hands; we prayed the bus would show up. And here it came, slowly and majestically sailing down Riverside Drive, taking its time to kneel for the old people who lived in the neighborhood.
“Mommy, there are icicles in my hair!” Nicky cried, tears in his eyes from the stinging wind. “I’m so cold. Can’t we go back to L.A.?”
“Look,” I said, pointing down the street. I wrapped myself around him to provide a little warmth. “The bus is only two blocks away. It will be here soon. And there aren’t really icicles in your hair.”
“It feels like there are,” he said reproachfully. “And if we were in Los Angeles, it wouldn’t.”
“If we were in L.A. I wouldn’t be wearing this wig,” I muttered as the door opened and an enormous woman lumbered slowly down the steps while we stood, shivering and helpless, watching her progress. She took her time. When she finally reached the ground and cleared the doorway, we rushed toward the bus, Nicky dancing up the steps, happy to reach the steamy warmth of the interior.