by Ruth Reichl
“It sounds like it’s all seafood,” she said.
“It is, pretty much. They’re always the most expensive ingredients. But I have to hand it to Joe; we’re going all out. The pièce de résistance is going to be dancing shrimp.”
“What?”
“It’s a dish I’ve always wanted to try. They put live shrimp into rice wine and slowly heat it up. The shrimp die drunk and happy and according to everything I’ve read, the flavor is amazing.”
“Too bad you won’t get to taste it.”
“Oh, I get to taste it all right. Joe expects me, and Michael, to be there.”
“Really? Who else is going?”
“Oh, nobody who counts. Just the chairman, the publisher, the managing editor, and Arthur Gelb. Remind me who he is.”
“That would be the great Arthur Gelb to you. He used to be the managing editor. Not to mention holding just about every other powerful job at this paper.”
“Yeah, I thought he had to be somebody big. Plus assorted wives. And us.”
“When will this feast take place?” she asked.
“Next Tuesday,” I replied, “September eighteenth.”
“Pray for a major news event,” she said. “It’s the one thing that will save you. If something big happens, they’ll have to call it off.”
On Wednesday, September 19, 1995, the New York Times published the Unabomber Manifesto. “You must have a direct line to Heaven,” said Carol when I showed up that morning. “You got your major news event. What a relief!”
I shook my head, and Carol crossed her arms and looked at me incredulously. “Don’t tell me they all went anyway?” she said. “I don’t believe it!”
“At six o’clock on the button,” I replied, “a small squadron of limousines pulled up on West Forty-third Street to take us to the great Flushing feast. I knew from the get-go that it was going to be bad: in the scramble for seats Michael and I got separated.”
“Oh no,” she said, “Donald would kill me. Who did he go with?”
When I said “Gene Roberts,” Carol winced.
The managing editor was a severe and awkward person, but when I saw Michael climbing into his car, I thought he and Michael might actually get along. Gene had a national reputation as a journalist’s journalist. But I caught an occasional glimpse of their car as we inched our way forward in the agonizingly dense rush-hour traffic, and I could see that Gene was in back, Michael in front. Every time I saw them, Michael looked more miserable.
“He said Gene treated him like an imbecile,” I went on. “He apparently asked Michael what he thought of the paper’s Whitewater coverage and then got mad at the answer. Gene’s supposed to be such a straight shooter, and Michael never minces words. I’d have thought it would be okay.”
“Why would you think that?” asked Carol. “Nobody ever talks straight to those guys, and they don’t like it when someone says they’ve made a mistake.”
“Apparently.”
“Great way to start the evening.”
“Oh wait,” I said. “It gets better. In my car everyone was second-guessing the printing of the Manifesto. The conversation went on forever; the traffic was terrible.”
“So did Punch get his tour of Flushing?”
“By the time we got there, we were so late that we just got off the highway and went right to the restaurant. I thought we might take the tour as an intermission during dinner, but by then things were pretty tense. Besides, there were no cars to take us.”
“The cars didn’t wait?” she said. “How’d you get back?”
“We had to call more cars when we were done. I guess it’s cheaper if they don’t wait.”
“Seems like a weird time to pinch pennies,” said Carol.
“I guess. I was just so glad to finally be there. I think the manager was afraid we were going to stand him up. He bowed and smiled and showed us right into the private room.”
“Was it okay?” she asked.
“It was nice,” I said. “They’d closed off the back of the restaurant and the room looked pretty. Very private. The suits seemed happy for at least a minute. Then the waiter pointed to the big golden pot sitting in the center of the table and said proudly, ‘That’s for the dancing shrimp.’ That was when the trouble started. The chairman went pale, and young Arthur looked uncomfortable, and I thought uh-oh, we’ve got a p.c. problem with the shrimp.”
“Ooh,” she said, her voice pained, “I never thought of that.”
“That wasn’t the problem. You’re not going to believe this: the chairman doesn’t eat shellfish! He’s allergic, I think.”
“No!” said Carol.
“Yes,” I said. “We might just as well have gone home. That pretty much put a pall over the whole event. He was very nice about it, but even the phoenix platter was mostly seafood.”
“All that work!” moaned Carol. “All those meals. All those trips on the Number Seven train!”
“Yeah,” I said glumly. “It was pretty much downhill from there. Everybody tried. Young Arthur gave a toast, but it was like listening to some guy from the Moose Lodge being insincere. He thanked Joe for arranging this, nodded in my direction, and said something so formal to the chairman that you’d never know he was his father.”
“The truth is,” said Carol, “that even though they’re father and son, they barely know each other. But cut to the chase: how was the food?”
“The dancing shrimp were amazing! The waiter filled the pot with fragrant herbs so that when he lit the fire beneath it, the whole room filled up with this great piney perfume. Then he brought in the shrimp—they were wriggling around—and as the wine was poured over them they began to dance. A couple of them danced right out of the dish! The waiter added them to the broth one by one, and then snatched them out. They were incredibly good—sweet and silky soft.”
“Mmm.”
“Then we had little stuffed blue crabs, and baked lobster with pea shoots and salt-baked crabs.”
“All seafood,” she said.
“All delicious,” I said. “And thank God it was Joe who made the menu.”
“What did the chairman eat?”
“Chicken. And more chicken, and more chicken. He couldn’t even eat the winter melon soup, which was amazing, because it had seafood in it. And then, ta da! We got a dish he could eat. It was soy sauce chicken. I’ve never had a better chicken; it was moist and fragrant with crisp skin and almost as much fat as a duck. But I guess by then the chairman was pretty sick of the stuff.”
“What’d you talk about?” she wanted to know.
“Oh God,” I said, remembering, “don’t ask. It was so embarrassing. They kept making these horrible white guy jokes, as if the waiters couldn’t understand what we were saying. Maybe they couldn’t, but I was so embarrassed. Everyone liked the steamed grouper with ham and shii- take mushrooms, and they loved that fried rice served in a pineapple. It was familiar food. But then it was time for dessert.”
“Let me guess,” she said. “They weren’t into hot papaya soup with white fungus?”
“You should have seen the faces.”
“But they must have liked the little pastries?”
“Yeah, except that by that time everyone was remembering that the cars had been sent back and worrying about how we were going to get home.”
“You had to wait?”
“It took a while. When we finally climbed into ours, Michael said, ‘I bet that was the last time the chairman comes to Queens.’ And then he looked at me and said, ‘I would have given anything to be at home tonight, eating your Thai noodles. I sure hope that Joe has more luck with the Manifesto than he did with that dinner with Chairman Punch.’”
Betty
The woman climbed onto the M104 bus so wearily you knew that her knees ached and her ankles hurt and her swollen fingers chafed against the string handles of the shopping bag they held. She tackled each step as if it were a hurdle, slowly hauling herself up one, then another, and the next. W
hen she had mastered the final hurdle she paused, winded by the effort. With slow deliberation she set the bag down and clicked open the worn pocketbook dangling from her arm. Some searching produced a puffy change purse, and she carefully counted out the quarters and dropped them into the fare box. As the final ping rang out, she bent for the shopping bag, hefted it, and headed timidly up the aisle, breathing soft “Excuse me’s” as she went.
Her hair was short, gray, and chopped off at the bottom, as if she had scissored it herself. Her skin was powdery white. She wore no-color glasses. The ragged hem of the dress that strayed beneath the formless coat was a nondescript print—white squiggles on a dark blue background. The handbag was large and square. And her feet were laced into sensible shoes: high-heeled oxfords, the black leather perforated with little holes. Timeless, ageless, sexless, her anxious eyes surveyed the nonexistent seating possibilities, and by the time she reached me they were registering dismay. She set the shopping bag down. It sighed, folding wearily in upon itself. Just as it ceased moving, the driver gunned the engine and both the bag and the woman lurched forward. As she reached for my seat to keep from falling, another soft “Excuse me” escaped into the overheated air.
She smelled sweetly old-fashioned—a powdery mixture of talc and that perfume they used to sell at Woolworth’s in little blue bottles—but beneath the flowers was something else. It was the musty scent of old apartments. It was the smell of peeling paint, boiled vegetables, and dirty laundry. It was the aroma of loneliness.
When I stood up, she looked utterly surprised. “For me?” she whispered, pointing to the seat.
I nodded and we switched places. As she sank down she said, “Thank you, dearie. No one ever stands up for me” in a voice so soft I had to lean down to catch it. “Sometimes,” the whispery voice continued, “I feel invisible.”
Invisible. The tide of people moving inexorably toward the back of the bus pulled me along, but as I traveled up the aisle, the word kept echoing in my head. Invisible. I watched her from a distance and saw that she was right. I waited for an eye to catch hers, or a smile to move in her direction, but the people on the bus moved past as if her seat were empty. I was so absorbed in this surveillance that I did not notice when the bus went sailing past my stop.
We headed up Broadway and the Gaps, the Benettons, the Circuit Cities, gave way to little bodegas and 99 Cents or Less stores. In that fall of 1995 the gentrification of the Upper West Side did not extend past Eighty-sixth Street, and as we traveled north the neighborhood grew increasingly tattered and the crowd increasingly thin. All the fur coats got off.
At Ninety-eighth Street the woman pressed the buzzer and began the difficult process of extricating herself from the seat. As she staggered down the aisle, no arm reached out to help. No one paid her the slightest attention until she was laboring slowly down the stairs, and then it was just the man behind her, frowning at the pace of her progress. When she finally reached the bottom step he pushed past in exasperation, nearly knocking her over.
I got off and followed as she navigated the streets. In the grocery store the brusque Korean woman behind the counter silently watched her slowly count out coins for a quart of skim milk, a box of Raisin Bran, and a can of dog food. Next door in the drugstore, the bored cashier filed her nails, never even lifting her head as the woman paid her for Correctol. On the sidewalk nobody stopped to nod or smile as she shuffled past. And when she reached her building, the young man walking out brushed impatiently by, letting the heavy door swing shut behind him. She caught it just before it closed, grimaced, squeezed through.
I scanned the names listed next to the buzzers on the door, wishing I knew which one was hers. She was not Clementina Suarez, I was certain of that, nor was she likely to be James Poldor. I wondered if she could be Katherine Reynolds? Probably not. Howardina Saunders? Not likely. Definitely not Samaritana Ratazzi or Bobby Lynn Nelson. June Jarvis Farley? Possible, but I thought not. And then a modest name leapt out at me, a gray cloth coat of a name: Betty Jones. My invisible woman was Betty Jones.
Becoming Betty Jones was easy; her clothes can be found in any thrift store. The dress, the coat, the square handbag, and the glasses were all waiting for me in the first Salvation Army store I tried. I even found the shoes, a pristine pair of Enna Jetticks that fit me perfectly.
“Oh my God,” said Carol when I appeared at the office dressed in my latest purchases. “What did Michael say?”
“That he wouldn’t be seen with me looking like this,” I replied.
“Who can blame him?” She laughed. “Where’d you find her?”
“On the bus,” I said. “When I got up to give her my seat, she said she felt invisible. And I realized that she was just what I’ve been looking for. I followed her home; her name is Betty Jones. What do you think?”
Carol examined me, her eyes running over the cheap gray wig I had bought at the crowded Chinese wig store on Fourteenth Street, and the shapeless dress. She nodded. “If you keep your mouth shut and have everyone call you Aunt Betty, nobody will know you’re there. Who’s your first victim?”
“Tavern on the Green.”
“Please watch for Ruth!” said Carol.
“Exactly,” I replied. A few months earlier, to the enormous amusement of the entire staff, an anonymous reader had sent me a memo written by the restaurant’s manager, Thomas W. Monetti, asking the staff to “watch out for Ruth.” He’d attached a photo, along with a list of the aliases I had been using. He told them I had very curly long hair, mentioned that it was unruly, and in what I considered a rather low blow said that I pushed my hair in front of my face so that people wouldn’t recognize me. (Surely he gave me more credit than that!) For some reason he seemed to think that I liked small groups (“she only travels in parties of two or three”). He also had the idea that I had an “advance person,” described as a “gentleman about thirty-eight years old, who usually comes in and checks the front desk and lobby area first and then waits for Ruth, either in the cocktail lounge or at the table.”
“I’m sure Michael was thrilled by that,” said Carol. “And didn’t the man say that you went into the ladies’ room to speak into your secret tape recorder? You don’t do that, do you?”
“I haven’t used a tape recorder in at least ten years,” I said. “He got a lot of stuff wrong. In the next memo, which I didn’t show you, the guy said I was short and always wore black.”
“You do wear a lot of black,” she said.
“You mean, unlike every other woman in New York?”
“Point taken.”
“That’s not my favorite bit,” I said, scanning the memo, looking for the passage. “Here it is: ‘Another thing that may help you recognize her: I have been told that she’s always smiling. She smiles a lot.’”
“Well, you do,” said Carol reasonably.
“What a great clue: they stop all smiling women at the door,” I said. “But it doesn’t matter because their system sucks. I was there in June, which is when that second memo was posted. I wasn’t even in disguise, and they never made me. They were so busy looking for some short smiling woman in black with a thirty-eight-year-old advance man that they completely overlooked two grumpy couples with an excited little boy.”
From a distance Tavern on the Green looks like an enchanted fairyland surrounded by a golden haze. For three years Nicky and I had passed the restaurant every day as we walked home from school, and every day he looked longingly up at the thousands of little lights they had strung through the trees. Some days he ran up and pressed his nose forlornly against the window, reminding me of the Little Princess dreaming about a better life.
For three years my desire to make my son happy did battle with my good sense. I had been at the restaurant many times over many years and the food had never been anything but dreadful. There were no credible reports of improvement until a few months ago, when the owner had, with a great deal of fanfare, finally hired a good chef. Patrick Clark was a big cheerful guy
who had been in Los Angeles when I was. I had always admired his food, and I thought that if there was anyone who could save a restaurant serving 1,500 meals a day, he was it.
“Bad?” asked Carol.
“Worse than I thought it could possibly be. We got there at seven-thirty and by a quarter of nine we had eaten our way through the bread basket and were begging for food. I kept getting up to take Nicky on walks, trying to entertain him. We went to the gift shop; we examined all the different dining rooms; we even went outside to look at the topiary gorilla. But when we came back, still nothing.”
“Did you ever eat?”
“Yeah, and when the food finally came I have to admit it was okay. But by then Nicky was asleep on my lap. Now when we pass the place he doesn’t even glance at the lights.”
“So I guess you’re not taking him,” said Carol. “Who are you taking?”
“You remember my mother’s friend Claudia? The acting coach? She’s bringing some friend of hers. She won’t tell me a thing about her, but she says that as soon as I meet Helen I’ll understand why we need to have her with us.”
“So you’ll be three old ladies?” said Carol. Her eyes crinkled with laughter. “I can’t wait to hear about it!”
Michael and Nicky watched me dress.
“I think she looks like a very nice person,” said Nicky loyally. “She looks like Matt’s grandma.”
“See,” I said, turning to Michael, “you could come along and call me Mom.”
“Thanks anyway,” he said.
“What’s your name?” asked Nicky.
“Betty,” I said. “Betty Jones.”
“How old are you?” he asked.
“Sixty-eight.”
“You look older,” he replied.
“I’ve had a hard life,” I said.
“Don’t you have any children?” he asked. Like all beloved children, he felt very sorry for childless grown-ups.