Madame Mirabou's School of Love

by Barbara Samuel

  My beautiful, brilliant daughter. The best thing I’d ever do in my life, no matter what else happened. Think of her, not myself. Today, Giselle was in London, breathing in the air of that lovely city, gaining experience and culture. Hooray for her.

  Below me, in the parking lot, a young mother carried a baby on her hip and held the hand of a toddler, and shepherded another with her voice. She had the look of an army wife, of which there were a number in the buildings, many whose husbands were in Iraq.

  Which made my situation look pretty whiney in comparison.

  Get over yourself, Nikki.

  I turned on the radio to the local classical station and was about to fill up my watering can when the doorbell rang. Surprised, I carried the can with me, fully expecting it to be a flyer delivery or other such excitement.

  Instead, it was my neighbor, Roxanne. She wore simple jeans and a paisley turquoise peasant blouse that showed a slice of elegantly slim collarbone. “Hi,” she said, holding up a grocery bag. “I’m returning your flour, and”—she held up the other hand, which obviously held a bottle of something—“I’ve brought a welcome gift.” She spied my watering can. “Unless you’re busy?”

  “God, no. Come in!” I swung the door open, gestured her in. “There’s still no furniture, but we can sit on the stools at the breakfast bar. Do you want some coffee or something?”

  “I could drink some coffee,” she said. Again the luscious, Lauren Bacall smokiness of her voice snared me. “Or—” she raised the bottle, “I have wine.”

  I grinned. “Oh, Chardonnay wins every time.”

  “I thought you looked like a Chardonnay kind of girl.” She settled at the counter. Her smile was warm and somehow mischievous. “My ex is going to pick up my children for the weekend and I thought it would be a nice chance for us to get to know each other a little.”

  From the drawer, I took out a heavy-duty corkscrew, passed it over, and took down some glasses. “This is a treat. I was just feeling sorry for myself.”

  “It gets easier,” she said, taking cheese and crackers out of the bag, too.

  “Oh, I’m pretty good at it already,” I said.

  Roxanne grinned. “If you can make jokes, you’re doing pretty well.”

  I settled on the stool beside her. “I’m so glad to meet someone else who is divorced.”

  “This is a very married place, isn’t it?”

  “It is.”

  She poured wine into each of our glasses, and we raised them. “Welcome to the neighborhood, Nikki.”

  I clinked my glass with hers, feeling almost absurdly grateful for the possibility of a friend. “And to you, for being the welcoming committee.”

  “You’re welcome.” She put her glass down. “It was really hard for me at first, too. It’s like that little stretch of time after you’ve had a baby, and you want to tell everybody about the delivery?”

  I laughed in recognition. “Yeah.”

  “Women,” she said, “need to tell stories about what happens to them. That’s how we get it to make sense.”

  “Interesting. What do men do?”

  “Have heart attacks, and sex with strange women.”

  I snorted.

  “So, tell me about yourself, Nicole. Does anyone call you Nikki?”

  “Yes. Please. I like it better.”

  “So, you’re divorced. No children?”

  “No, I have a daughter. She’s fifteen.”

  “She lives with her dad?” My face must have given some sour signal because she waved a hand. “Sorry. Tell me to back off if I get too personal.”

  “No, it’s fine. Giselle lives with her dad.”

  “And you don’t mind?”

  I closed my eyes. “I mind a lot, but he has a lot more money. They live in Malibu, and she’s having a great time.”

  She nodded. “Do you mind if I ask what the explosion was that your friend talked about?”

  “Oh, that.” I turned my wineglass in a circle. “I had a house over on Wood Avenue—”

  “Nice!”

  “—and the furnace exploded. Which is why I’m here.”

  “No insurance?”

  “Oh, yeah, there was, but—” I cleared my throat. Took a sip of wine. “Uh . . . an inspector had told me to have the furnace replaced, and I just didn’t get to it, and now the insurance company is trying to avoid paying.”

  “Ah.” Roxanne’s dark eyes glittered. She looked at the empty living room, then back at me. “It will be great fun to buy new furniture. You’ll get to make all the choices yourself.”

  The words blew a sense of possibility through my chest. “I never thought about it that way.”

  “Well, now you can. What kind of furniture do you like?”

  I thought of the living room in the old house. “I had a lot of overstuffed, chintzy things, but the rooms sort of required it. Daniel liked all that heavy wood and sturdy stuff that weighs a million tons.”

  Roxanne nodded, her delicate features patient. “And what did you pick?”

  I thought of the niche in the kitchen. “I had a blue glass vase I liked to fill with sunflowers, and this tiny Art Deco table.”

  She smiled and spread her hand. “That sounds like an easy place to start.”

  “It does,” I said in some wonder. “Thank you.”

  “No problem.”

  “What did you buy, the first thing?”

  She took a teeny, tiny sip of wine. “A garlic press. I love garlic, and my ex hates the smell of it. Now whenever I’m pissed at him, and I know he’s going to come get the kids or something, I eat like a whole head of roasted garlic.”

  I laughed. “So, the divorce isn’t that friendly?”

  She widened those blue eyes, which were, I suddenly noticed, almost exactly the same color as that blue glass vase I’d loved. “You mean I’m actually sort of hiding my bitterness a little now?” Her mouth was rueful, that pained mix of ashamed and furious that seemed so much a part of the game. “No, it’s a very unfriendly, unhappy divorce.”

  “It’s been two years?”

  “Yep. That’s actual final divorce, now. We were separated and going back and forth, trying to make it work for a couple of years before that.”

  I wondered how that would feel, a year from now. Three years from now. “Tell me it gets easier.”

  “It does.” She took a delicate sip from her glass. “Takes awhile, though, so don’t beat yourself up if you’re not over it in five minutes. People kept telling me to get over myself, and it pissed me off. It was hard.” She lowered her eyes. “It’s still hard.”

  “Thank you for saying that.”

  “People just don’t understand. They mean well.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “To good times,” she said.

  “To understanding,” I replied.

  We touched rims and drank.

  Not even the slight leakage of dawn had begun when I set out for Annie’s the next morning. It felt like having a secret to start my day when the streets were still empty. I loved the glimpses of other lives I saw through windows lit with lamps. At a traffic light, I sat for a long time, and no other cars ever showed up.

  The front door was locked at Annie’s. I knocked on the glass, and the young man—Jason—from yesterday opened it, smiling cheerfully. “Hi, Nicole. I’ve been watching for you—forgot to tell you to go around to the back in the mornings.”

  “Thanks.”

  “We’ll go to the kitchen first,” he said.

  “Okay.”

  He led the way through the restaurant. I heard laughter and women’s voices coming from the kitchen, along with the sound of dishes clattering, water being run, a radio playing quietly over the sound system, something baroque, though I couldn’t quite pin down the composer. Each dining room was lit up, and a girl about twenty-one or twenty-two had a fistful of pink carnations in her hands, which she was putting in tiny vases on the tables.

  Passing into Kitchen World, we were met
with a blast of sound and light and scent—the overhead lights were bright and strong, the radio was louder, the dishwasher was running. Annie and another woman stood at the butcher-block cutting area, and a skinny girl with multiple facial piercings and tattoo sleeves on both arms washed a giant steel bowl.

  “Hey, everybody,” Jason said. “Here’s Nicole.”

  “Nikki,” I said, lifting a hand in a wave.

  “Hi,” the dishwasher said. “Cool earrings.”

  I touched them. A Spanish-style silver and amber pair, not expensive, but pretty. “Thanks.”

  Annie smiled. “Good morning, Nicole.” Her German tongue lingered slightly on the “l.” “We’re glad to see you. This is Mary.” She waved to the other woman, an African American somewhere between forty and mid-fifties—who could tell?—with perfectly unlined skin and an Alfre Woodard mouth. She didn’t smile. I felt my measure being taken.

  Mary dried her hands on a bar towel. She was preparing something from a cookbook I vaguely recognized, and I paused. “Do you mind?” I asked, pointing to the cookbook.

  She waved a hand. “Go ahead.”

  “Thought so,” I said, looking at the cover, which showed two attractive, middle-aged black women. “Spoonbread & Strawberry Wine! I have such a battered copy of this cookbook. I absolutely love it.”

  “What’s a white girl like you doing with this book?”

  I raised one eyebrow. “Sorry, I didn’t bring my credentials with me.” When she had the grace to look at least slightly abashed, I said, “Somebody gave it to me.”

  “Somebody black, I reckon.”

  “Yeah, it was.”

  Mary grinned. The expression gave her face an entirely different aspect, made her look a lot younger. “You have favorite recipes?”

  “The sweet potato salad with pineapple, by far. But I also love, love, love the triple-decker butterscotch pie.”

  “Damn. Me, too. Love it. Won’t be eating that around here, but I’m making the potato salad this afternoon. This crowd likes it a lot.”

  “Cool.” I thought it funny that a Southern-style cookbook could be adapted to the Colorado healthy-lifestyle organic cooking that Annie’s offered, but why not?

  “We’ll have to talk some more about food, but this mornin’, let’s get you started.”

  She took me around the kitchen, illuminating various stations. There was a giant blackboard on the wall with the day’s specials, with ingredient lists—which I presumed was for the allergy prone— and the choices available. The morning’s breakfast special was an egg casserole with scallions, Swiss and gouda cheeses, and layers of spinach, served with whole grain walnut muffins, or oatmeal made with fresh berries and served with raisin toast. My stomach growled.

  “It’s a small operation back here, just me and Annie in the morning, with another girl who comes in at lunch,” Mary said. “So you do your own garnishes. You’ll pick up your plates here,” she said, and showed me the pass-out bar, traditional and old, with lights and a metal shelf. “This’ll get very hot after a couple hours, so don’t burn yourself.” She turned around to a long counter against the wall. “Breakfast has a garnish of fruit—usually grapes, one strawberry, and an orange or grapefruit slice, and you’ll get your own breads. Penny will show you all of that.”

  “I should have brought a little notebook.”

  She nodded. “Tomorrow. For now, just remember two things: you do your garnishes, and keep your eye on that board. If I erase something, we’re out of it. I can’t be bothered trying to remember which girl I told. We’re out, I just walk over there and erase it.”

  “All right. Seems simple enough.”

  Her rich-looking mouth quirked. “Yeah, well, you’d think so.”

  Mary continued the kitchen tour—dish and trash, walk-in fridge, which I wouldn’t have much call to enter, and the little door beside the big one that opened to a series of shelves with little silver pitchers on trays, and a box of whole oranges, grapefruits, clusters of red grapes.

  The waitress who had been in the other room came up. “I’m stealing her now. We have a lot to cover.” She smiled at me. Her face was pricelessly fresh, her skin dewy, no makeup and none needed. Freckles were scattered across her nose, and her hair was braided tightly into plaits that fell down her back. “Ready?”

  “Sure.”

  “I’m Penny,” she said. “You’re Nicole?”

  “Nikki.”

  “Let’s go out front. We open at seven, and I want to get you oriented as much as possible before then.”

  “There’s more than just us, isn’t there?”

  “Barely,” she said, and gave me an apologetic lift of the eyebrows. “There will be three servers—you, me, and Janny—but I’m not going to lie, there should be four. Zara—the blond barista, you met her?”

  I nodded.

  “She can take a few tables, but usually she’s pretty busy at the bar, so we try not to overload her too much.”

  Panic sucked the air from my lungs. “You know I haven’t done this in years. I’m going to be terrible.”

  She smiled. “No you won’t.”

  “You don’t know! I feel way over my head. Maybe this was—”

  Penny laughed, and put her hand on my arm. “Breathe. Trust me, you’re going to be fine. I’m not going to throw twenty tables at you—only a couple to get started, and you can do it. I’ll let you have the easy customers to start with, all right?”

  I sucked in a deep breath, let it go. “Okay. Right. Breathe.”

  “The truth is, we are desperately shorthanded, and just having you take two or three tables is going to help tremendously. We’ve closed one dining room for a few days, and we’ve got a fourth waitress coming in at lunch, so we’ll be all right, okay?”

  I nodded.

  “Let me show you where everything is.” We went to the service area, and she showed me the coffee machine, the pots of milk and empty tin pots for milk, and the butter, condiments, baskets for bread. There were rows of industrial gray plastic bins for forks, spoons, knives, and above them, shelves for tiny bowls.

  I barely heard her over the roaring panic in my ears.

  What could I possibly have been thinking, coming to work in a restaurant? I was going to be a terrible, flaming disaster, and I’d never be able to come into Annie’s again.

  But I was stuck just now. I had to stay for today anyway.

  By the time the first customers arrived, I felt better. Penny had walked me through everything. I would only have a few tables.

  I could do this.

  It was quiet to start with—the table of regulars Penny had described, a genial pair who read their newspapers and sipped coffee in the sunshine coming through the windows.

  After an hour, close to three-quarters of the tables in the restaurant were full, and I had just had my third turnover on two tables. There were tips in my pocket. I had worked up a light sweat, and had been a little flustered trying to remember things a couple of times, but mostly felt okay.

  After two hours, I felt like the queen of the world, fully in control of my little three-table section, and it was nearly nine-thirty. The rush—such as it had been—would no doubt be done very soon, and then I’d have a chance to regroup and train for lunch.

  I could do this. With a sense of optimism, I went to the coffee area and started to make a new pot and then deliver the two tickets in my pocket. Penny bustled into the alcove, and I remembered to tell her, “We’re out of oatmeal.”

  “Thank you,” she said, and slammed metal teapots on a tray. “No more muffins, either. Just give them another biscuit.”

  The bell on the door rang, and we both looked over our shoulders. “Uh-oh,” she said.

  There was a little knot of women at the door, from their thirties to their sixties, outfitted in Gore-Tex fleeces and Land’s End cotton turtlenecks and sturdy walking shoes. “What?”

  “Annie’s Amblers,” she said. “They have a longer name, but I can’t think of it no
w. They’re one of the walking clubs.”

  “One of the walking clubs?”

  “There’s a bunch of ’em around here.” She sighed. “This is one of the larger groups. We’re about to get slammed, I think.”

  As we stood there, two more came in. They were the kind of women who lived in my old neighborhood: well-to-do, healthy, clear-sighted. I wondered suddenly what it would feel like to wait on someone I knew from, say, the PTA or soccer club or violin recitals. “Is there something I should be doing to get ready?”

  She nodded. “Here’s the plan,” she said, and laid out my instructions.

  It went well enough. I made some small mistakes—forgetting to bring juice to one man, and nearly mixing up the orders of two tables another time, realizing I’d left the coffeepot empty another.

  But for the most part, I handled the small number of other tables that came into the restaurant, as well as running backup for Penny, garnishing plates, pouring refills on coffee, refilling the little bowls of butter.

  It was weirdly empowering, to master something. Do something new. Take a step forward and do okay with it.

  Zara showed me the ropes for lunch. The specials were corn chowder and a layered filo-and-spinach casserole. Sandwich was goat cheese and tomato on olive bread. The baskets switched over, too, to warm servings of small, hefty brown rolls.

  By noon, there was a waiting list, and Zara started taking tables here and there, and Jason did a lot of backup, and I was feeling the strain of serving five tables. Penny was handling twice as many tables as she ordinarily would have, including the lingering walking group.

  I was starting to feel it. The heavy trays, the constant movement, the mental stress of trying to remember everything. I was getting tired.

  About midway through the lunch rush, I forgot we were out of the spinach casserole, and put in an order for it. Mary spied it and said, “Nicole! Look at the board.” She slid the ticket back toward me. “Go find out what else they want.”

  “Right, right,” I said, glancing at the board. The casserole had been erased, but everything else was the same. “Sorry.” I hustled back out. To the man at the table by the window, I said, “Sir, I’m sorry, we’re out of the spinach casserole. Would you like to look at the menu again?”