Charlotte au Chocolat (15 page)

The palette, the palette was the thing; the palette was the difference. The reason I flinched, at once, from the colors of the items in the Pacific Sunwear window was the same reason my mother flinched from red roses: they were too one-note, too bold. Cambridge, being the ultimate preppy town, had always been a place of dim colors and deep textures. Had Cambridge been a fabric, it would have been Shetland wool. Had it been a smell, it would have been one of those old-time pipe tobaccos, as offered at Leavitt & Peirce: Black Coffee or Cherry Cavendish, Dark Honey or Amaretto.

After The Tasty closed, it wasn't long before the Coop changed hands, too. Harvard agreed to sell the Coop's bookstore to Barnes & Noble, provided they didn't change the name on the sign, and indeed, people still spoke of it as “the Coop.” From the outside it looked the same, but inside I felt the difference, as I could taste the difference between the roasted capons we served at the Pudding and fast-food chicken tenders. The white walls twinkled and the railings of the staircase looked like they were made out of plastic. Tourists did not know that the Coop had been, above all, shabby, that one afternoon in its final days, a high school friend of mine had tried to take a picture of the Square through one of the windows and couldn't, because of all the dust. “That is one filthy window,” he had said; it had been, once.

Thirteen

CABANA BOYS

M
eanwhile, cloistered in the gilded Victorian rooms of 10 Holyoke Street, we went on as though nothing had changed. The same year The Tasty closed, my mother threw me a lavish Sweet Sixteen birthday party downstairs in the Club Bar. The party took place in the middle of a snowstorm, making the gracious red-walled room as cozy as the hot center of a jam tart. There were three cakes (chocolate dacquoise, coconut-lemon cream, and strawberry-mascarpone) all with shapely, fluted, pale green letters pressed into them reading
Happy Sweet Sixteen, Charlotte
. I myself must have brought to mind a pastry that night, wearing a confection of fluffy almond-colored tulle.

The dress, whose strapless sweetheart neckline and sweeping skirt recalled, I hoped, the famous white lilac dress Elizabeth Taylor wore in the ballroom of
A Place in the Sun
, also made me think of something my mother would have worn. Recently, I had found some pictures of my mother wearing a fluffy white dress and lavender-dyed dancing pumps to a ball she and Mary-Catherine had gone to at Harvard, and it surprised me to notice that her taste was rather less flashy now. Her color palette, for one thing, had mellowed. Gone were those rich, saturated parma violets and crocodile greens; now my mother wore subtle sea-foams and terra-cottas, champagnes and silvers. The hourglass silhouette, however, remained intact.

It was right around the time of my Sweet Sixteen party that I began shopping vintage. When I was in high school, dresses from the romantic era of “the New Look” were still easily available and not nearly as expensive as they are today. In no time, I collected a marvelous assortment of them.

The first piece of vintage clothing I ever bought was a pink satin cocktail dress starred all over with little gold dots, which, as people often remarked whenever I wore it in the dining room, matched the decor of the restaurant. I think it was only when I first stood in front of the dressing-room mirror in that dress that I realized I had inherited my mother's figure after all and that it might be fun to show it off. And I did. I
loved
my waist. I
loved
my stomach. I loved the dip and curve of it beneath those vintage dresses, and how, although it was probably the most toned part of my body, it was not altogether flat; it had a gentle layer of baby fat as some yogurts have a silken layer of cream on top.

For me, the experience of wearing vintage dresses was a sexual education of sorts—a heightening of my awareness of my own flesh, long before any man ever actually touched me, beyond the lightest and most courtly of good-night kisses. Putting on that first pink cocktail dress felt sexual as no other article of clothing ever had to me. So did all the other dresses I bought after it: the summertime picnic ones and tennis ones and prim-wool winter-office ones, and the Lolita playsuits and painterly patterned circle skirts and bullet-breasted halter tops. It turned out that for this type of clothing I had the perfect figure—the petite hourglass. Never once in the whole time I wore vintage did I have to take anything to the tailor for alterations, only repairs. I was much fussed over by the owners of certain vintage stores because I could fit into the most outlandishly curved of the 1950s dresses, the ones that were too small in the waist and too full in the bust for most customers to fit into. Fitting into these dresses, that was the ceremony, that was the grand event: the zipping-in often felt more sexual than actually wearing them out in public. I loved the sucking in, the sweet wishy breathlessness; how rusty side-zippers snaked along creamy skin—one wrong swerve and their teeth might nibble my flesh!—and how then in one swift motion they fastened into place.

Sometimes it seemed to me that these dresses—these same cotton dresses that could look so heartbreakingly innocent crossing the lawn on a summer's evening, that harkened back to the era of sock hops and glass-bottled Coca-Colas and sherbet-colored Cadillacs—had been designed with a naughty streak in mind. A pair of robin's-egg blue bloomers peeked out from beneath the gingham kick pleats of one of my tennis dresses (
not
that I ever played tennis). Turn over a rickrack hem and find a threaded ribbon of red lace below. One of the sundresses, also gingham, had little silver snaps located on the insides of the shoulder straps; pull the snaps apart and the dress fell open to the breasts. Sometimes beneath the skirt of a dark tweed dress there would be gnashes in the slippery silk of the lining: a suggestion of ravishment.

“Can you fit a meal inside of that?” the waiters said, scanning my figure when I entered the dining room, adding, “
That
is some waist.”

During these years, I went to an artsy, progressive private school in the suburbs, where my whimsical style was probably an asset and I did, for the first time in my life, have a number of friends my own age. But I was still “the girl whose mother owns the Pudding,” and the restaurant continued to be the main setting of my social life; it was my clubhouse, as it were, my private world to which I allowed other people tantalizing glimpses.

On school nights, to break up the tedium of homework and commuting and New England winters, my friends and I used to do “dress-up” dinners. Our favorite things to order were red meat and chocolate, although these days, when I meet old friends for lunch in some East Coast city or other, we all seem to order the same beet salads with prickly greens and thin dressings, and it isn't the same; nothing is the same. But then we all wore vintage dresses, we piled our wrists with bangles and our necks with pop-bead pearls, and drank “Bondage Shirley Temples” trailing lime and lemon peels. We flirted with waiters, gay and straight, though it seems to me now that the gay ones always excited our imaginations more than the straight ones. I don't think it was just because they were more handsome—although I suppose that some of them must have been—but because we understood from all the old movies we had ever seen and all the novels we had ever read that unrequited love was sexiest.

There was one colorful young man I had something of a crush on in those years. His name was Drew.

He was such a dandy that he once told my mother, “I'll quit if you don't write bow tie privileges into my contract.”

The Pudding, alas, had a dress code for the staff now. It wasn't like the old days, when the waitresses wore different white blouses and the waiters wore jewel-toned cummerbunds. Now both waiters and waitresses wore black pants and starched white shirts issued from our linen supplier, with black shoes that the managers were supposed to check for scuffs and holes. But Drew—and I admired him for this—would have none of it. He told me that he suspected that our latest general manager, himself a flamboyant dresser, had made up the dress code because he feared competition from the staff. When Drew told my mother that he suffered from a shortage of closet space and had had to put portable clothing racks in his bedroom, as she herself had, she made an exception in his case. Anyone who loved clothes as much as she did didn't need to follow the dress code.

Drew had a shaved head. “Imagine,” my mother said, “how high maintenance it would be to keep up that shaved head.
I
can barely keep up my highlights.”

Some of the line cooks had shaved heads, too, but Drew's was different. No one had ever seen a speck of hair on it, and the skin looked as pristine as the shell of a peppermint candy. Drew drank three brandy snifters full of whole milk a day. He carried an old-fashioned doctor's bag full of packages of vanilla wafers with him at all times. His collection of bow ties rivaled my mother's collection of high heels in quantity, and they were very beautiful: I remember in particular a rich blue velvet one. He also wore top hats, which he propped on the oversized bottles of champagne behind the bar. Sometimes I didn't notice the top hats, because they fit in with the rest of the antiquated clutter in the dining room. As Drew himself said, “I
go
with this restaurant.”

Drew's appearance won him presents as well as attention. At the Bastille Day festival on Holyoke Street—a sweaty affair in which the Pudding, along with other restaurants in the Square, was forced to set up a booth and sell beignets and sausages to tourists—he got free sticks of cotton candy because they went so well with his straw hat and seersucker suit. One of the waitresses, who also worked as a first grade teacher, had her students scamper around the classroom, collecting feathers and rhinestones so they could make Drew an Easter bonnet to wear at brunch.

But it was Mariness Dewitt III, one of our regular customers, who gave the most extravagant gift. Every year, Mariness celebrated his birthday alone on the terrace with a glass of sherry and a slice of coconut cake, and every year he would stand up to blow out the candles while the other customers applauded. One afternoon he dropped off a beribboned package for “that delightful bartender.” It was an antique top hat, heavy with smoke blue plumes and reeking of moths. “I do want to wear it,” Drew said, “but I couldn't feel . . . clean.”

Whenever Drew worked, I ate dinner at the bar and felt like a little girl again, even though by now I was a teenager. He gave me some of his vanilla wafers—a treat, because I ate at the Pudding so much, I sometimes got bored of all the desserts on the menu—and milk mixed with ice cubes in a sterling-silver cocktail shaker so that it tasted like the frostiest, purest milk in the world.

I
t was hot the summer I was seventeen. On the terrace, little old ladies broiled in the sun, clutching Bloody Marys in their wrinkled hands. Whenever I ate outside, I heard the chefs cursing and grunting through the screen of the kitchen. I heard the hiss of the dishwasher and smelled, along with the roses and honeysuckle, bacon frying and blueberries bubbling on the stove in a pot of sugar. Inside, I shed golden hairs on the backs of the red velvet chairs. One afternoon, during lunch, we went through every martini glass in the restaurant—the dishwasher could not scrub them fast enough to keep up with the demand—and for several nights in a row the expediter peeled down to only his boxers in the middle of the line, because he could no longer bear the heat.

Now that I was a teenager, summertime meant boys, the college boys who waited tables in the summer. They came to work in pale Oxford shirts and flip-flops, and stood bare-chested in the beating sun as they arranged umbrellas and lifted crates of San Pellegrino on the terrace. I could see their muscles, the waistbands of their blue gingham boxers below their tanned midriffs. They smoothed napkins on my lap, brought me thick wedges of coconut cake and slices of grapefruit on ice, and hugged me, at the end of the night, too long and too hard. “The cabana boys,” I called them. “My cabana boys.”

That summer, I kissed one of the cabana boys. I kissed him nearly every afternoon on the fire escape off the terrace all summer long. He had broad shoulders and put lemon-scented gel in his blond hair, but I liked the back of his neck the best: the line of clean-clipped blond against the tanned flesh. I traced it, softly, with my fingertips.

Some afternoons it was too hot to eat. Then the ice cubes in the mint juleps the cabana boy made me melted before I could take my first sip and the strawberry ices dissolved to pink puddles. Those days, he brought me finger bowls: violets and nasturtiums bobbing in soapy water. He rubbed lily of the valley talcum powder onto my shoulders, and the flecks fell through the cracks in the fire escape and landed like snowflakes on the sizzling red bricks of the sidewalks below. Afterward, he pressed his lips to my shoulder and smeared the powder, like powdered sugar on a petit four after you take your first bite.

When he went to check on his tables, I lay back on the fire escape, the rails digging through my cotton dresses, my head throbbing from booze. I gazed at the slate roofs against the blue sky and waited for him to return.

He vanished, of course, at the end of the summer; all the cabana boys did. Out of everyone in the restaurant business, only they kept a reliable schedule.

But I dreamed about those boys, the cabana boys, and wondered if they ever dreamed about me after they had gone. Once, late at night in an ice-cream parlor, I ran into the blond one; he had a girl on his arm. As I stood there under the fluorescent lights, I realized just what an enchanted environment the Pudding could be. In the real world, it was unlikely that many of these cabana boys ever would have given me a second look. But at the Pudding, what had worked in my favor? Did they want to break the rules and flirt with the boss's daughter? Or was it something else—something drowsy and sensual in the air on those empty summer afternoons, the red velvet chairs baking in the thick golden light? In any case, I attributed their attraction to me to the romance of the atmosphere, and not to any budding sexuality of my own.

J
ust before I left for college my mother had an unfortunate incident with a representative from Harvard Real Estate.

Now that the restaurant was getting so busy, there was too much garbage to fit into the Dumpsters in the alley at the end of the night. This looked untidy, and it attracted rats as well, which already menaced that parking lot. Harvard Real Estate complained to my mother, insisting that she find a way to reduce the amount of garbage.

In the old days, the dishwashers used to hurl the bags of garbage off of the fire escape, aiming for the Dumpster. In most cases, they landed there. But one night, a bag fell on the roof of the car of a representative from Harvard Real Estate just as he was stepping into the parking lot. Some people might have had a sense of humor about this (
we
did), but not this man. He was livid, and stormed back into the building, where after much commotion he found my mother and demanded that she pick up the spilled garbage herself. It was raining that day and there were scraps of wilted produce in the mud at the foot of the Dumpster. I saw my mother kneeling on the ground and holding a radish peel in her hands. The man from Harvard Real Estate, in a sleekly tailored navy suit, was standing over her and watching.