Charlotte au Chocolat (8 page)

“And it was
dead
. It—”

We heard a knock on the door. It was Sarah.

“Deborah, I wanted to know if you had ordered any more strawberries for— Hey, Char, what's the matter?”

I paused.

“A mouse,” my mother said. “And once I saw one in the cold station.”

“Oh, the
cold station
,” Sarah said, eyeing my mother. “Well, you know what I bet that was? That wasn't any mouse. That was just a piece of my new fur coat; it must have fallen off.”

“It shed,” my mother said after a pause. “That happens with furs.”

I pictured the object I had seen in the crack of the ice-cream chest. It was gray and fuzzy. I pictured fur coats. They were gray and fuzzy, too. It couldn't have been a mouse I saw in the ice-cream chest, after all.

But I still saw mice around the restaurant, dead and alive. A fat one bobbed in a ring of filthy soapsuds in a yellow bucket on the floor of the kitchen bathroom. Pink tails waggled and spun behind the stoves. Everywhere, even in the dining room, I looked for clumps of gray and flashes of moist pink. The rodents were winning: the exterminator told my mother that there was no hope for a nineteenth-century building two blocks away from the subway station. “Please give me a nice, romantic table for two,” he told her when he and his wife came in to dinner for their anniversary. “Not too close to the bait stations.”

And the rats; rats invaded the kitchen stairs. I knew it. They gorged on bacon scraps and buttered endive leaves, wriggled in and out of holes shielded with spiderwebs, and then waddled back to the parking lot. Sometimes, at the end of the night, my mother and I saw them slinking down the alley as we approached the car. Their thick tails twitched and their eyes glinted. They surveyed my mother and me, wrapped in our finery, coolly.

“Mummy! A rat! A rat!”

“Charlotte! A rat! A—”

Then we shrieked. We, who never cried in the dining room, shrieked all the way down Holyoke Street. We ran all the way to the cabstand outside of Out of Town News, and my mother did not go anywhere near the alley and our car until the next morning, when the rats were curled up underneath the Dumpsters, coiled in the gathering shadows, asleep.

There was a night when I must have been no more than seven or eight years old when my mother and I were driving through Harvard Square. This was at the end of the kind of deathless summer evening where the chefs, slaving behind the line in that ramshackle Victorian kitchen, rich with prosciutto, fried sage, ricotta, and sweating, salted half-moons of cantaloupe, used to beg me to go get them bottles of beer from the bar. After locking up the restaurant, my mother and I made it safely through the alley, dodging the rats as usual. We got in the car; we started to drive through the Square. Street musicians were still playing, even if, by now, only the homeless people were listening. And then my eyes landed on a couple making love, standing up, right in the middle of Mass Ave, in front of one of the gates of Harvard Yard, with most of their clothes still on. The man, with great, nearly angelic tenderness, was undoing the buttons of the woman's white linen blouse. I looked and looked; my mother didn't say a word. Then we drove on until the couple, and Harvard Square itself, receded from view.

Although, in my life as a woman, I was to go on and find at least a couple of men who touched me that same way—with that same angelic gaze in the eyes—and although I did have moments of pleasure that made me recapture, almost, the divine ache of letting beads of clementine ice dissolve on my child's tongue at the Pudding, there was never anything to compare to the feeling of pure, buoyant sensation, of the limitless abundance of the physical world, I experienced that night. No, there was never again to be a moment approaching the splendor and mystery of that one, of the sight of those two strangers making love, as naturally and as full of innocent sensual life as those cantaloupes or those gentle, scalloped slopes of ricotta in wax paper.

And what of the rats? What has become of them? I suppose that if their offspring are no longer in that parking lot, by now they have gone on to other Dumpsters, other neighborhoods, being resourceful rats, and from one generation to another, long for this world.

Seven

CERISE DELIGHT

F
or a long time, I used to go behind the bar and hoard the small glass jars of maraschino cherries. I'd twist off the red tops and flick the stems in a pile, like the red ribbons of opened Christmas presents. Afterward, I licked the perfumed liquid off my fingertips and reached for another jar. Adults didn't like maraschino cherries; nobody ate them but me. “Never give Charlotte just one cherry in her Shirley Temple,” everybody said. “Make it at least five or six.” But I tired of cherries, just cherries.

So after a time, lemon, lime, and orange twists snaked around the brims. Dollops of Chantilly cream floated like water lilies on top of mint leaves in the fizzy pink water. The bartenders dipped sugar swizzles in grenadine overnight so they would look like pink rhinestones, capped cocktail straws with berries they had rolled in honey, and looped lemon peels around the stems of martini glasses. Everyone on the staff called those ones “Bondage Shirley Temples,” and then they would wink at one another.

The customers stared at my drinks as they passed through the dining room perched on the waiters' trays like brightly plumed birds. Sometimes they pulled members of the staff aside and asked, “
What
is that child drinking?” Other times they pointed to my table and told the waiters they would have the same drink as I was having, whatever it was. But they did not get Chantilly cream and lemon peels, and only got the proper amount of maraschino cherries. After all, they were grown-ups.

Everybody used to drink out in the open in the dining room; it was no big deal. My friends the waiters Henry and Alex used to drink something called Brandy Alexanders, which were pale, creamy brown, like the brown of some beautiful mushroom, and went down like milk shakes. I knew this because sometimes they let me have a sip of them, and they tasted divine.

“Like chocolate milk,” said Henry, jangling his brandy snifter with a slim, expressive wrist. “Right, sweetheart?”

Henry and Alex hardly ever called me Charlotte. They called me
sweetheart
or
honey
or
movie star
, or simply,
love
.

Sometimes they called me Cordelia, after Sebastian's youngest sister in
Brideshead Revisited
. This was the eighties; the miniseries had recently been on television and all things
Brideshead
were the rage. Henry and Alex were around the year I went trick-or-treating as Cordelia in stiff, rust-colored taffeta. Sometimes during setup in the dining room—polishing glasses, folding napkins into tiny pink swans—we acted out Cordelia's grand monologue, the one beginning “Sebastian's drunk!” We practiced our best British accents, and the fact that
Brideshead Revisited
was a book about alcoholism quite escaped me.

Henry and Alex said they would take me for the whole afternoon some Saturday; I loved it when people on the staff did things with me outside of the restaurant. They wanted to take me back-to-school shopping at the Neiman Marcus children's department, and afterward we could have a sleepover at their apartment, which had, they said, a lavender bedroom. Lavender was my favorite color, second only to pink.

I couldn't wait for my day with Henry and Alex. They said we could rent old movies and eat cucumber tea sandwiches off heart-shaped plates. I could even use Henry's Chanel face cream. Henry had such smooth skin that my mother had begged him to tell her what product he used. “Why do you think I wait tables?” he said. “So I can afford Chanel.” After that, my mother used Chanel face cream, too, then the tanning lotion. “Where did you get that tan?” people asked her. “The Chanel counter,” she said.

One time Henry and Alex picked me up after school. We were going to bake a fruitcake for the staff Christmas party that was coming up, and so they took me to their apartment with the lavender walls and the fluffy white rug on the living-room floor. Henry made me a cream cheese and olive sandwich, and Alex took a glass bottle of chocolate milk out of the refrigerator. “Just for you,” he said. I checked to see if they wanted any of the chocolate milk before I poured myself another glass, but Alex was already mixing gin and tonic water and Henry was squeezing the limes, so I finished off the bottle.

“What do we need for the fruitcake?” I asked. I feared they took a long time to make. My mother had baked them at the farmhouse; she used to let me lick the brown sugar and bourbon off the sheets of wax paper she had spread on top to help them cool.

“God,” said Alex. “I don't know. Flour?”

“No flour,” Henry said, opening the cupboard. It was empty.

“Eggs,” I said. “You always need eggs. And then fruit. Currants and—”

Henry jerked open the door to the refrigerator. I saw only the carton of cream cheese, and bottles, and bottles.

“How about sherry?” I said, wondering where they kept their cookbooks. “Sherry, or bourbon?”

“Oh,” they said together, “we have
those
.”

I was about to ask for a pen to make a shopping list when Henry said, “
Flour.
Who wants to bring a lumpy old bag of that stuff into the home, anyway? I'll tell you what: let's just open the sherry. Want another sandwich, sweetie?”

That Christmas party there was no fruitcake, as it happened, and Henry and Alex didn't come to the party at all. I waited for them by the banister, scraping the gold-leaf garnish off a pinecone with my fingertips. After an hour I began to climb the stairs to the dining room. The pinecone lay split open on the foot of the stairs and slits of gold leaf gleamed against the dark carpet.

I never did see Henry and Alex again, though I heard tell that they'd moved to San Francisco.

A
fter Henry and Alex left, I became friends with a new waitress named McKenzie. McKenzie was even blonder than my mother, and almost as glamorous. Her hair was bobbed and her lipstick was called Cherries in the Snow, and underneath her white shirt she wore a black-lace bustier, which she claimed increased her tips. At the staff Christmas party she swished into the dining room in one of her mother's coming-out dresses from the fifties, cream tulle piped in black velvet, and I stared as the hem unraveled around her ankles.

McKenzie said I was precocious. She said I was an “old-fashioned dear.” When it turned out we had the same birthday, February 26, she said we
had
to be friends. Sometimes she took me to her apartment. She had an old-fashioned white phone that never worked but looked cool, a red-velvet boudoir pillow, and a jewelry box. Inside the jewelry box she kept gilt-tipped powder puffs, stray feathers from an angel-white boa, black-lace garters, and blood-dark roses drooping off of split blue ribbons with ink-splotched messages from admirers. They must have been admirers, because McKenzie, I knew, went out on dates.

Once she asked me if I had ever had a boyfriend. “I'm only ten,” I said.

“I had boyfriends,” she told me, “long before that.”

McKenzie made only one food: tomato and Boursin sandwiches on pumpernickel bread. Her mother never cooked anything else, either, she told me. McKenzie came from the South, from one of the Carolinas (I couldn't remember which one); her voice mingled gardenias and cigarettes. At the age of seventeen she'd run away and worked at a hot-dog stand behind the beach. I pictured her in a yellow gingham bikini, legs sprawled over the arm of a plastic fold-out chair, idly squeezing mustard onto the hot dogs. “I've been in the hospitality industry ever since,” she said. “Or is it the
hostility
industry, darling?” She wanted to be an actress; it seemed like a lot of people in the front room did.

Setup began at three thirty. An hour before, McKenzie started to prepare for work. She had to put on the bustier at home, she explained, to get in the mood; I wondered what
the mood
meant. Whatever it was, it involved powder and mascara, and several coats of Cherries in the Snow. “Take note, my dear: it's the only red for blondes.”

But I wasn't blond anymore, or not as blond as I had been. Strangers no longer cooed over my downy golden curls, because now they were only light brown, only ash. I couldn't wait till I was old enough to get highlights—like McKenzie's, like my mother's.

Meanwhile, McKenzie rubbed the powder onto her face while I sat on one of the red-velvet pillows on the floor. Then I remembered that my mother was going to a party tonight. I pictured the too-small bathroom of our latest apartment steaming from my mother's perfumed bubble bath. It was Saturday. We had two hundred and fifty reservations on the books. If I went to the restaurant, I would only be able to order an appetizer, and then I'd have to eat it in the office, making sure not to spill my food on the piles of bills.

I heard the yank of a zipper and the teeth scraping against the silk lining of McKenzie's bustier. “Come on,” she said, buttoning up her cardigan. “I don't want to be late.” So I dropped the garter in my hand and I followed her, back to the restaurant.

Several months later, my mother came home from work and said, “Charlotte, come out in the hall for a second. I have a present for you.”

She had a knack for sudden gifts, my mother. Often she brought me home lilac sachets or Tiffany key chains, but I wondered what could be out in the hallway.

“It's big,” she said. “I had to hire one of the guys in the kitchen to get it up the stairs.”

We stepped out into the hallway. She told me to close my eyes, and when I opened them, I saw a vanity table. Pink-and-green silk ribbons dangled in front of the mirror. I had always longed for a vanity table.

“Thank you, Mummy, it's . . .”

“Isn't it a beauty? McKenzie thought you would like it.” I tugged one of the ribbons. “It used to be McKenzie's,” she said. “She wanted to get rid of it before the move.”

I paused. Then I asked, “Where is she moving to this time?”

“Oh, LA. You know, for acting.”

The ribbon slid to the floor. It didn't matter; there were other ribbons.

I
t was a Saturday morning, one of those long Saturday mornings when the dining room was empty and I had nothing to do. I stood on top of the chair outside the waiters' station, staring at the poster of the man with the top hat and fangs, and when I touched the case, dust caked my fingertips. Had Richard told the truth? Did the Pudding ghost live inside the frame? I couldn't find out yet, because ghosts didn't come out in the sunshine. We hadn't set the table for staff lunch yet and I hadn't seen anybody pop open a bottle of red wine. That's how early it was.

Moments passed, more dust blew off the poster case, and then I heard a scream from the kitchen, a scream that could have punctured the vaulted ceiling. Then I heard another one.

“A mouse!” my mother cried. “A mouse!”

“No, it's—” I heard Carla's voice.

“Oh, no, don't tell me it's a rat!”

“Fire!”

Mixing spoons and copper pots clattered against the floor. The dishwasher turned off his faucet. I was still standing on top of the chair and my knees wobbled.

“Charlotte,”
said Carla, thrusting open the double doors, “get out of here. Get out of here
now
.”

“But my mother—”

“Your mother's
fine
. Now go!”

I jumped down from the chair. As I dashed through the dining room, I smelled smoke curling in the air. The black-painted doors had never felt so heavy to me as they did at that moment. I was alone as I fled down the staircase, and I could not hear anything, not even curses or screams, from upstairs. My mother—my mother might
die
. They all might die in the flames.

Outside, I crossed the street and stared at the building. I didn't see any flames, only smoke, plumes and plumes of smoke spiraling around the building. My mother was fine, Carla had said. She was fine. Holyoke Street was empty except for me, and I cried, I cried in great, racking sobs. Even later, when the fire trucks roared down the street and spectators had started to gather on the sidewalk, I was still crying.

The building had not burned down after all. The clouds of smoke thinned, and then the chefs slunk out from the alley. They leaned against the redbrick wall of 8 Holyoke Street in their bandannas and black-and-white-check pants, smoking while the firefighters sprayed their hoses. I crossed the street.

“You know,” said Carla, pointing at the crowd, “leave it to those half-wits to blame it on the cigarettes. The firefighters
told us something caught on fire in the pipes. Why not, kiddo? This building's fucking old.”

Only the kitchen had been damaged; the dining room was safe. We reopened for business in a couple of weeks. But I have always remembered that fire, because it seemed to me the end of one era in the kitchen and the beginning of another when, not long afterward, Carla gave her resignation to my mother. She was the last person there who remained from my father's days, and the two of them had always been great friends. When she left, it felt like the last link to him had gone.

She gave her resignation right after Benny, her brown Doberman with the bullet in his leg, had to be put to sleep. After he died, my mother and I took Carla, who was already trashed on red wine, out to a twenty-four-hour pizza joint on Mass Ave once we had locked up the Pudding. She downed several beers and passed out over her bowl of spaghetti, and she did not show up for work ever again. My father, who occasionally picked up catering shifts, sometimes ran into her behind the scenes at these events, where she muttered to him in passing, “What is it about weddings and wild rice? Wild rice, wild rice—it's enough to make you never want to get married.” Last we had heard, she was living with three lame dogs and her parents in Erie, Pennsylvania.

But in the restaurant business, nothing was forever. People on the staff were forever going away. They just up and left, sometimes with explanations but more often without. Sometimes we heard from them afterward and sometimes we did not. We learned that Patrick, the bartender who used to style my hair, didn't even have the same name anymore. He worked as the limousine driver at a monastery in Vermont, and now he called himself Tino Barbarossa. His parents had held a name-changing ceremony at their house, where his mother had spelled out the new name in deviled eggs on a platter. “What a lot of deviled eggs to make,” my mother said. “Maybe I should hire
her
to be a line cook.”