Charlotte au Chocolat (7 page)

Six

NOT IN FRONT OF THE CUSTOMERS

O
ne night when I crawled underneath the bar to take a nap, I noticed that it seemed smaller. When I stretched my legs out, my Mary Janes dangled out from the flap of the tablecloth, and I imagined that if one of the customers saw them, they would think they belonged to a corpse. I rather liked that thought. It was so
dramatic
. Trying to make myself comfortable, I drew my knees together; I leaned onto my side; I tried to rearrange the bundles of linen. Nothing helped. The air smelled starchy, as it always did underneath the bar, but the scent bothered me now, and I coughed from all the dust.

Thud.
I had slammed my head against the oak tabletop. I worried that the glasses above would rattle and shake, but I heard nothing, only a dull drumming in my ears. The pink bow on top of my headband was crushed. And for the rest of the night, even after I had wiggled out from underneath the bar, I felt dizzy; the gold threads in the carpet looked fuzzier, the lights in the chandeliers dimmer.

That was the first of the kingdoms from which I would be exiled—the kingdom underneath the bar.

Forever after that, I had no relief from the dining room. There was no place to hide. I had to adapt to it, however I could.

Weekends were hard. Weekends my mother had no time for me. So on Saturday afternoons, I used to pace around Harvard Square, looking for something to do. I went to the Coop, where wind blew into the main room with the marble floors and it seemed to me they sold only black kneesocks, fountain pens that leaked or had run out of ink, postcards that had peeled at the sides, and chocolate Easter eggs left on the shelves in all seasons in battered pink or red boxes. I went to Café Pamplona, the underground coffee shop on Bow Street, where the waiters were looming and grumpy, the parfait spoons rusty, and the menu—gazpacho, swampy green and slithering with onions, and a pork and pickle sandwich on a fried bun—never changed. There was also Colonial Drug, the old-fashioned perfume store with the leopard hatboxes and a velvet carpet the color of a crushed blackberry, and Cardullo's, the specialty food shop, also with a velvet rug, which sold hand-painted tins of caviar and beribboned bags of chocolate almonds that looked like they had been there since the 1950s. And the Brattle Theatre: it showed
Casablanca
every Valentine's Day and film noir on Monday nights, yellowed fluff peeked through the Prussian-blue leather seats, and the clock on the wall had been broken for as long as I could remember.

Then came Saturday night. When I was growing up, Saturday night was the big event of the week. It was the grand crescendo toward which all the week's activities had built.
Saturday night
—the words alone had a glamour and a menace about them.
Saturday night!
One hundred and fifty customers, two hundred, three hundred, four hundred.
Saturday night!
“No main course for you tonight,” my mother would tell me. “Maybe an appetizer if you order early.”
Saturday night!
“Here, help out, why don't you? Polish some silver; light the candles; fold a napkin into a tiny pink swan. But, don't forget the customers. Customers are coming!”

My main job on Saturday nights was to stay out of the way of the customers. And then sometimes I did little errands or chores. Like sometimes on summer nights when the chefs were wilting behind the line in that smoldering Victorian kitchen, where the heat was not even relieved by ceiling fans, they would send me to go get beers from behind the bar. I loved doing that. I would plunge my hands into the ice bucket, basking in the cold, until one of the bartenders pushed me out of the way. Then I would stumble back into the kitchen.

“Thanks, kiddo,” said Carla, standing at the head of the line. When she banged a butcher knife against the bottle top, the top flew up in the air; I hoped it hadn't landed in the tins of prep garnishes. But Carla didn't bother to look; she just lit another cigarette.

“Don't make yourself too comfortable, kiddo,” she said. “I'll need another beer soon.”

What was she talking about?
Nobody
could be too comfortable in a kitchen. There was no place to sit. Oh, for the days when I could crawl underneath the bar and get away from it all! Now there was no place for me, and especially on Saturday nights. Saturday nights were
the worst
.

“Here, kiddo.”

Carla always called me
kiddo
, not
sweetie
or
honey
like the waiters did. She scraped a piece of tenderloin off the pan and flicked it onto a brown paper towel. The meat reddened the paper.

“That's for you.”

On Saturday nights, I didn't order dinner. Instead, I ate whatever snippets the chefs doled out to me: lopsided zucchini blossoms or clams casino swiped off private-party platters. There were always plenty of samples of food to eat in the kitchen, and chefs love feeding people. Carla used to save the most rare meat for me. She knew I liked it—one of my favorite foods was steak tartare on buttered toast points—and the customers would have sent back meat as rare as this tenderloin.

“Thank you, Carla,” I said.

“You and your
thank-you
s—would you give it up? I'm not one of those pansies in the front room who's just dying to freshen your . . . your . . . What are those things called?”

“Shirley Temples?”

“Yeah, yeah, those.”

I picked the piece of tenderloin off the paper towel. In the front room, I had good table manners, but you couldn't feel graceful if you had no knife or fork. I hoped the juice wouldn't splatter my new party dress, a garden-party dress: white muslin printed with cabbage roses and a white petticoat underneath that puffed out like one of the meringues on the trays in the cold station. It also had a trailing rose-chiffon sash that reminded me of my mother's cocktail dresses with the small waists; I loved that sash the most.

“Here.” She handed me another napkin; the tenderloin had stained my fingertips red. “I know how you hate to be messy.”

I wondered when we would go home. It must have been eight o'clock now, rush time. Customers' conversation roared through the doors, and I heard my mother's voice, her kitchen voice. “Buck up!” she told the waiters. “Can't you see the kitchen's in the weeds?” I supposed she was out on the floor now, fluttering from table to table, planting Coco Pink kisses on cheek after cheek, and swerving away on the tips of the stilettos.

“Watch out!” said Carla. I looked and saw flames spouting off the stove. “Go . . . go somewhere.”

I pranced off the rubber mat onto the bare floor between the rows of the stoves and the pastry station. My patent leather Mary Janes slid on a sprig of buttered parsley. Meanwhile, the waiters charged down the aisle and grabbed the desserts waiting on the top of the shelf.

“Where's the lemon budino for C-3?” one of them asked. “Hurry it up, they're the table from hell . . .”

I hid in the cold room. I yanked open the steel door and stepped up to the sawdust floor. The gust of air from the freezer prickled my bare legs underneath the petticoat. I stood very still in the center of the cold room. If I moved, I thought one of the Cornish game hens swinging from the ceiling might fall off its string.

“Coming through,” said Charlie, opening the door. He was lugging a crate full of lobsters for the lobster salad entree my mother put on the menu every summer. “Well, hello, Miss Charlotte.”

Charlie was one of the black guys my mother had hired from the homeless shelter in downtown Boston. He was from Tennessee, and my mother chose him because of what she called “his Southern charm” and because the day she went to the homeless shelter he was wearing a three-piece violet polyester suit and saddle shoes he still bothered to polish.

“That's one sweet dress you've got on, Miss Charlotte,” he said. “Now do you mind if I get through here?”

“Sorry, Charlie.”

I dashed out of the cold room. I found myself in front of the line: flames leapt, chefs huffed, waiters whizzed. Their voices all blended together.

“Two ducks. Three Caesars. One beef Wellington, hold the foie gras.”

“We can't hold the foie gras,” Carla said. “Do these people even know what beef Wellington is? It's
inside
the puff pastry.”

“I told them, I told them, but—”

More orders, more voices: “Three arugulas,” they said. “Two crab vicars, one gnocchi, one truffle tagliatelle—no, one truffle risotto, sorry.”

They clipped the orders on the metal shelf in front of the stoves. When the orders fell from the grip of the shelf, I dipped down to pick them up from the floor. Nobody remembered to say thank you. Nobody called me
honey
or
sweetheart
, either, as they did in the front room, because nobody had the time.

The double doors swung back and forth, the chain jangling between them. Champagne buckets skidded across the floor. Wine corks stuck straight ahead in the air like daggers. Red-pepper soup dribbled off the edges of the bowls and onto the floor. The flames of the chefs' cigarettes danced above the flames of the stoves.

“Coming through!” the waiters announced. “Coming through!”

I ducked underneath the white linen sleeves and porcelain plates above me and scurried past the cold room and the stoves until I reached the pastry station. It must have been somebody's birthday, because Sarah, the pastry chef, was standing next to the Cuisinart on the floor and lighting candles on a slice of coconut layer cake. We had always been friends, Sarah and I, but tonight she didn't even bother to say hello to me.

Whoosh!
What was happening? I spun around and around as puffs of whipped cream tickled my face and splattered my curls like snowflakes in a blizzard. This was it: I was becoming a charlotte au chocolat, just like people used to tease me.
One of these nights when we run out of charlottes, we're going to plop you on a plate and top you in whipped cream . . .
Maybe everyone on the staff was in on the plan. First they were smothering me in whipped cream, and then—

A blade. I must have been standing too close and my dress got caught on the machine. A blade, whirling toward my waist. It was the blade of the Cuisinart: something had caught on the Cuisinart.

Then I heard the sound of shredding fabric. The Cuisinart stopped and I toppled backward onto the floor.

“Damn it,” Sarah said. She blew out the candles and slapped the matches down on the table. “Why doesn't this thing ever just work?” She peered into the bowl of the Cuisinart and reached in with her fingers. “
This
is a new one.”

She held what looked like two stubby, frayed pink ribbons in her hands. My sash! The blade had severed my sash in half. I stood up from the ground. My dress hung limp around my waist.

“My sash,” I said, spreading my fingertips toward Sarah. But it was too late. She had flicked it in the garbage. “My sash . . .”

“Oh, that was yours!” she said. “God, Char, I'm sorry. I didn't even think about it. Do you know, last week your mother said she would give a raise to the person who found—” She turned the Cuisinart on again. “To the person who found her ring. That really big pink plastic Chanel one. We think it got into the bouillabaisse . . .”

One of the waiters stormed into the pastry station. “Sarah, what the hell happened to that budino?”

“Sorry, sorry . . .”

“Spare me the apology till you see my tip.”

He walked away. Sarah reached for the container marked
LEMON BUDINO
in Magic Marker, took one of the long wooden spoons, and scooped the pale yellow cream onto a plate. “Could you pass me the raspberries?” she asked me. “They're under the table. God, does this feel like the longest night or what?”

I handed her the box of raspberries. “Do you know what time it is?”

“Around nine, I think.”

Nine! We didn't leave on Saturdays until midnight at the earliest. I sighed.

“Thanks, Sarah.”

But Sarah wasn't there; she had already sped off somewhere. I peeked into the garbage and saw, mixed in with pulpy strawberries and paper towels streaked with olive oil, just a sliver of rose chiffon.

M
y mother was tough about most things but had one great phobia, which she passed down to me: rodents. In those days, Harvard Square was dirtier than it is today, and the T station had recently undergone a major construction job. For a number of years, there was a big hole in the middle of the Square, increasing the sheer number of rodents as well as the insouciance with which they roamed the streets. You often saw them lurking on the edges of Dumpsters or slithering down alleys.

The Pudding, being located in a ramshackle Victorian building, had rodents in the basement. Almost no one ever went there, but people who had came back, as if from beyond the grave, with warnings:
Charlotte, whatever you do, don't ever go down to the basement!

But one night I happened to spot a mouse
upstairs
, behind the bar. Instinctively, I screamed. “A mouse!” I wailed. “A mouse! Mummy, there's a—”

My mother swooped down and cupped my mouth with her hand. When she spoke, it was in a whisper. “Don't say that. Don't ever say that again.
Not in front of the customers!
”

She gripped my hand and we walked across the dining room toward the office. There were no mice in the office. They only existed in the kitchen, or behind the bar, or in the bathroom, and especially in the alley, skirting around the edges of the Dumpster. At least the one I had just seen was dead, caught in the crack of the ice-cream chest.

“It wasn't big enough to be the
other
thing,” I said as soon as my mother closed the door to the office. “But it was dirty, and I saw the little pink . . .”

She was shaking, as she always did whenever anyone mentioned rodents.