Charlotte au Chocolat (9 page)

Charlie, the line cook with the three-piece violet suit that my mother had recruited from the homeless shelter, also left. After three years at the Pudding, he placed a personal ad, went on one date with a self-professed “songstress” named Rochelle (whose own ad, my mother later told me, was headed “Church-going woman loves oral sex”), and married her a month later in a gospel ceremony to which my mother was not invited; Rochelle had named her “the blond bitch.” Charlie now dabbled in the real-estate business. Or he said he did; when he called my mother, drooling about some “sweet, sweet deal” he'd found for her, she could hear the murmur of the daytime soaps in the background.

“It's too bad,” said my mother. “He had the real hospitality touch, Charlie did.”

“Hospitality? But he worked
in the kitchen
,” I said. Kitchen people were not noted for their customer-friendly touch, and it was a blessing, in most cases, that they seldom interacted with the public.

“Oh, but I used to have him answer the phone in the mornings,” my mother said. “You know, when the phone rang before anyone from the front room got in. Oh, he had the most wonderful phone manner of anybody; I wish I'd had him answering the phone all the time. Well, anyway, one morning I happened to overhear him. The person must have been asking him what kind of food did we serve because Charlie, without missing a beat, said”—and here my mother imitated his Southern accent—“‘Well, ma'am, I do believe it's Polynesian.'
Polynesian? Polynesian?
But he sounded so lovely when he said it, I hardly had the heart to correct him.”

Eight

FOOD OPPORTUNITIES

M
y mother liked to warn me about the food outside high-end restaurants. A machine tenderized the meat; the greens drooped; no one hand-rolled the pasta. They baked cakes from mixes and made mashed potatoes out of powder. “Never order chicken just anywhere,” my mother told me. “They're filthy animals.” The chickens we served at the Pudding, baked in their crackling golden skins and rubbed in fried sage, came from private farms. We knew all our suppliers by name, fed them biscotti while they waited for the check, and gave them gift certificates at Christmas. My mother air-kissed the woman who dug our Wellfleet clams out of the sea with her own hands and the man who foraged for our wild mushrooms in the woods. I could stare down at my plate and trace every ingredient—how could I go to another restaurant?

But food, what my mother called “beautiful, beautiful food,” took time. It also took money. While we splurged on ingredients at the restaurant, we saved at home; our refrigerator was empty, except for blue cans of seltzer water. My mother left her lipstick around the edges of the turquoise cans and littered them around our apartment, on top of stacks of old newspapers or cookbooks or mixed in with the plastic Chanel bangles on her vanity table. If we had a half box of stale Cheerios, then we had no milk, or the milk would be sour, or if the milk was fine then we had no Cheerios. Sometimes my mother brought home dishes from the restaurant, but sometimes they did not travel well and I had to pry Moulard duck breasts off of plastic containers gelled over with burgundy-cherry sauce. Most nights that I stayed home I depended on baked potatoes, salt, no butter. I ate them alone on winter nights in my flannel nightgowns, reading nineteenth-century Russian novels. My mother ate baked potatoes, too, without the salt.

Because she made no apologies for the absence of food in our home, my mother coined the phrase
food opportunities
. Food opportunities did not need to be beautiful; I simply had to seize them when they presented themselves. So I ate, aside from my meals at the Pudding, a variety of food: Chinese takeout and cheeseburgers with the staff, deviled eggs and margaritas at people's summerhouses, drippy flans and lukewarm cocoas from coffee shops in the Square. I also ate the food at my classmates' houses. It tended, in Cambridge, to be drab and healthy: great tubs of ginger couscous, tabouli with slivers of purple onions and sun-dried tomatoes, bottles of Orangina and Perrier.

My mother didn't do school lunches. Instead, every Sunday she brought home a dozen bagels and wrapped them in tinfoil so they would keep for the rest of the week. In the mornings she called me from the restaurant at seven thirty—she went into the Square hours before—to wake me up for school, and I stumbled into the kitchenette and plopped one of the bagels into a brown paper bag. The bagel was usually cinnamon-raisin, and stale. I didn't have any chips or celery sticks to go with it, and at school I ate my lunch fast, with an air of duty, as if I were popping a pill. I only minded the lack of beverage. My mouth felt dry from the whole wheat and sugary from the raisins, and I would as soon use the water fountain, with hairs stuck to the metal and pieces of bubble gum floating in the drain, as I would eat a school lunch—the ones you bought, with the square-shaped pizzas and spongy peas in the aluminum trays.

When I was in the fifth grade, I decided to ask my mother if she could buy me some juice boxes, a package of juice boxes that would last the whole week. The other girls had juice boxes, and they got to prick straws through the holes of the multicolored boxes and sip and sip. If I had a juice box, I could alternate my sips with bites from the bagel, and lunch would last much longer.

The day I finally asked her about the juice boxes, my mother had just come home from work. She had a cocktail party to go to in forty minutes, and she was moisturizing her legs. A pair of fishnets dangled off the arm of her stair-climber.

“Mummy,” I said, standing at the foot of her bed, “if you go to the supermarket sometime, would you ever please buy me some juice boxes?”

Her expression looked the same as it had when I'd given her, at age six, the lopsided paper angel with a pipe-cleaner halo I'd made at the holiday arts and crafts fair. She was never much of a fan of childhood arts and crafts, my mother.
“Juice boxes”
was all she said, shaking her head.
“Juice boxes.”

The next day at school, I drank from the water fountain.

S
ometimes on Sunday nights, my mother stayed home. That was the only time of the week she ever did. Then we both took hot baths and put on our flannel nightgowns, and she would make Benjamin and me a simple dish she used to make us at the farmhouse: poached eggs on English muffins. We ate them together at a wobbly-topped glass table, and those nights “keeping up with the conversation” didn't matter; there were no air kisses and no laughs. I read
Vogue
; she read the real-estate section of
The Boston Globe
. When she read, my mother took off her sunglasses, and I could see her eyes. They looked misty as she flicked the pages, and I knew she was thinking that all the prices were too high. She still couldn't afford to buy a house.

After she had prepped for brunch some Sundays, my mother would go to open houses. She looked at all sorts of houses, ones she could afford and ones she could not: brownstones in downtown Boston and two-families in Somerville and farmhouses like the one we had left years ago. She said she wanted her own garden and her own kitchen where, during snowstorms, she could bake brioche doughnuts as she had when I was a little girl. She said she wanted her own Christmas tree—a place to hang the hundreds of ornaments we kept in storage.

On some summertime Sunday afternoons, we would drive out to Bedford, where our farmhouse had been, so my mother could go to the farm stands there and in Concord. “I'm looking for potatoes,” she said. “Beautiful Red Bliss potatoes I'll dip in some salt for dinner.”

And then, from the bottom of her being, my mother would sigh, revealing a softness, a quality of yearning dissatisfaction, that she seldom exposed at the restaurant.

But what about money? Why did the restaurant never make any money? But it didn't. No matter how much business they did, there were too many expenses. The Pudding was simply on too lavish a scale. If you wanted to make money in the restaurant business, my mother said, the thing to do was open a pizza joint or maybe a Chinese take-out place. “Why didn't you?” I once asked her.

“Because I'm interested in the product,” she said. “I'm interested in things being
beautiful
.”

So our lives, while unstable, were always also beautiful; the veneer of things, the shimmer of them, mattered. And so our lifestyle was always on a scale that our finances, strictly speaking, couldn't support.

One of the things that helped us to live this way was trade.

We had trade at stores in Harvard Square; that meant we gave people charge accounts at the Pudding in exchange for their services. We had trade at Harvard Book Store and Colonial Drug and Casablanca, the bar next to the Brattle Theatre. We had trade with Serge the florist and trade at Gino, the hair salon down the street where the bill for my mother's highlights, which she brightened every three months, cost hundreds of dollars. Our tailor dined at the Pudding on trade. So did my mother's lawyers, her exterminator, manicurist, and house inspector. I later on had a therapist who dined on trade.

Meanwhile, at the Pudding, we simply replaced instead of washed the linens, we tossed the leftover veal chops in the garbage at the end of the night, and my mother dished out thousands of dollars during the holidays on all the employee bonuses alone. “Oh, well,” she said, shrugging. “Fine dining should be like a great dinner party at someone's house and, if you want
my
opinion, nobody has fun if the hostess worries about spilling red wine on the carpet.” To dine at the Pudding
was
like going to a dinner party: people often ate for free. Indeed, freebies swirled in the dining room like confetti.

“Trade,” my mother said. “It makes the world go round.”

And so, for us, for many years, it did.

O
n Friday nights I used to go visit my father's studio. I remember one evening during the height of summertime when he pulled up on the curb in his latest crummy, wheezing old car and got out to greet me. He wore a pair of denim shorts coarsely cut off below the knee. I thought to myself,
Oh, no. Not the denim shorts.
The paint-splattered black pants were bad enough.

But then, I was dressed pretty shabbily myself. I always made a point of wearing my oldest clothes whenever I saw my father, because that way I didn't mind if they ended up smelling like cigarettes.

My father and I decided to go to dinner at a vegetarian restaurant in Harvard Square, a restaurant that isn't there anymore. We waited in line to be seated. The hostess did a double take when she saw us. Then, in a tone of exaggerated friendliness, she said, “Oh, come right this way with me. You must be so hungry,” she added gently to me. And all at once it clicked: She had seen my father. She had seen the denim shorts. The cigarettes, the seedy air of poverty. She thought that we were homeless people.

My mother, meanwhile, had quite a tolerant attitude toward the homeless people in Harvard Square. Indeed, she felt something of an affinity with them. “No one's even up in Harvard Square when I get to the restaurant. It's just me and the homeless people.”

It showed a certain entrepreneurial spirit to have claimed territory in the Square as your own without even paying for it, my mother always said, and she respected the homeless. She thought the man who sold
Spare Change
in front of Au Bon Pain, waving the newspapers in pedestrians' faces and calling, in a resounding Southern accent,
“Young lady, young lady,”
was a wonderful salesman. Every time she walked past him she nodded, as if to congratulate him. “He's got hustle,” she told me. “That's what I look for.” Another homeless person stole my mother's
New York Times
off the front steps every morning, and when she found out his identity, instead of scolding him, she asked him why, with such a consistent record of early rising, he couldn't get a job. “He must be a kitchen person,” she said. “Most waiters can barely drag themselves to a ten o'clock brunch shift.”

The Pudding bathroom, located on the second floor of an open building, was one of the only accessible bathrooms in the Square, and homeless people used it all the time. Sometimes they flooded the bathroom with water, trying to clean themselves, and when a member of the staff alerted my mother to the gushing faucets, she turned them off and gave the person a cup of coffee and whatever cookies we had available in the kitchen. If they vomited on the floor, as they often did, my mother mopped up the puddles. “I don't mind,” she said, “as long as it's
their
vomit and not the vomit of the Hasty Pudding kids.”

One morning, when she was alone in the kitchen, a man in a ski mask crept up the back stairs. Afterward, she calmly reported the incident to the staff. “I told him,” she later said, “never to mess with women in kitchens again.”

In the end, it was not the man in the ski mask but an obese woman known among the staff as Fatty-Pie who gave my mother the most trouble out of all the homeless people. Fatty-Pie sat on a milk crate outside of Yenching Restaurant on the corner of Holyoke Street and Mass Ave; her sign read
PLEASE HELP—SOBER—CHRISTIAN—HUNGRY
. My mother considered herself an authority on Fatty-Pie, who had stolen her milk crate from behind the Pudding Dumpster, and early one morning, when she was walking down Holyoke Street, she discovered that there were
two
Fatty-Pies: one got into a car and the other stepped out. They also used the Pudding bathroom, and once my mother found one of the twins eating Twinkies in the handicapped stall. “Heavens,” she said later that night, pressing her hand over her heart. “I'll let you imagine the rest of the details for yourself.”

Then one Saturday night during the eight o'clock rush, Fatty-Pie, in a pair of jade green sweatpants and a baseball cap, barged into the dining room, waving a piece of paper in the air. It turned out to be an eight-hundred-dollar gift certificate to the Pudding, issued in the name of a waiter whom my mother had recently fired for missing his shifts. The waiter, in a dazzling act of revenge, had presented the gift certificate to Fatty-Pie, knowing that my mother had tried to ban her from the building and that she would try to use it. But even he couldn't have predicted her persistence; when the hostess refused to seat her, she asked if she could redeem the gift certificate in cash.

“I wonder,” my mother exclaimed after the woman had left the building, “
which
Fatty-Pie that was!”

E
ven though our financial situation was often uncertain, my mother continued to buy me, sparing no expense, the most beautiful party dresses. The turning of the seasons was signified by going to the children's department at Neiman Marcus, where all of the salesladies knew my name.

Holidays were signified by different dresses: rust-colored taffeta for Thanksgiving, black velvet for Christmas. One Easter dress in particular I remember: navy grosgrain with white polka dots and a chiffon sailor collar, one of the prettiest dresses I ever had.

“Oh, Mummy,” I said, doing a little twirl in front of the mirror, “can I wear it to Easter brunch?”

“It's
perfect
for Easter. With your navy Mary Janes.”

But though my mother and I made much of what I was going to wear on any given holiday, when the holiday actually came, it was another story. My mother would be so busy at the restaurant, she would be much too preoccupied to pay attention to what I was wearing or what I was going to do that day.

That Easter, it rained. But I wanted to wear my new party dress anyway. I fluffed the chiffon collar over my shoulders, buckled my Mary Janes, and snapped up the buttons of my pink rain slicker. Then I walked into Harvard Square by myself. The rain slicker didn't have a hood, and rain pattered down on my braids and soaked through the white ribbons at the tips. By the time I got out of Harvard Yard, all I wanted was fresh orange juice squeezed the way I liked, in a martini glass, and a plate of smoked salmon on buttered toast. Everything would be fine, once I sat down at the table with my mother.