Charlotte au Chocolat (13 page)

By this time, when I was in the seventh grade, I should have been wearing a bra. But somehow, I wasn't. My mother, whose succulent Joy-perfumed cleavage was a great part of her feminine identity in the world, never mentioned the subject to me. Certainly we never had, were never going to have,
the talk
.

That spring I had a favorite dress, bought from a store on Mass Ave that sold children's fashions imported from Paris. It was black poplin scattered with a pattern of tight little cherries, barely ripe, and had a Peter Pan collar, dirndl skirt, and a row of plastic buttons in the shape of cherries down the front. Painted cherries and plastic cherries, cherries and more cherries—my beloved cherry dress. But then month by month, week by week, bit by bit, the buttons stretched across my budding chest: it looked as if I was going to inherit my mother's extravagant figure after all.

Then one day at recess, a luminous spring afternoon, I raised my arms, and
rip!
Two of the buttons burst, the ones right across my chest. My breasts emerged out of shaken cherries and hung unsheathed, two lonesome white bells in April air.

That was the last of the cherry dress. And I did, after that, get a bra. (And soon after that, highlights, restoring my ashy hair to its childhood gold.) But in the dressing room, being fitted for one by some strange woman snapping open a tape measure at my untouched skin, I cried. I cried with my whole body, and in a way I would go on to cry on several other occasions in my life, when you know that you are leaving someone, or something, forever.

That was in the spring. And by the time it was winter and Veronica was back in Cambridge doing the coatroom on Sunday nights again, all of my dresses, not just that black velvet one, came from the grown-ups' department.

Eleven

DOVER SOLE

W
hen I was fourteen, my father lost his longtime studio above the train tracks in Waltham. Over the years, I had noticed that the building itself was changing. The landlord had raised the rent, forcing many of the artists to move out. Now it was only subsidized housewives who could afford the rent, painting fruit still lifes in the afternoon before they picked up their children from school. They turned the drafty building where mice had scurried in the hallways and dust had hung thick from the rafters into a civilized place. They kept bottles of peppermint soap and rolls of paper towels in the bathroom, swept the floor, and called the exterminator to report mouse sightings. Sometimes they knocked on my father's door, asking if he wanted to try some pâté they had picked up at the grocery store. My father would taste the pâté, but he disliked what they had done to the building; and soon he, too, could no longer afford the rent and had to find someplace else to go.

For a time, after getting kicked out of a girlfriend's house, he lived in a studio in downtown Boston, not far from Chinatown. He shared it with a number of other artists, but he was the only one who slept there, on a rust-colored sleeping bag with a busted zipper flung on the dusty floor. When I visited him there, I could see holes in the wall, and I wondered if rats lurked behind the cobwebs.

“What do you think of that sofa?” my father asked me, pointing. “Isn't it great? It's called a fainting couch.”

I did like the sofa: moss green velvet, curved low to the ground. I liked the name, too:
a fainting couch
. It was the only piece of furniture in the room, and made a very dramatic statement.

“Hey, Luu-Luu, cut it out.”

A Persian cat was scratching the fainting couch. Rips already ran up and down the sides.

“If you see another cat around here, that's Nixon,” he said. “At least he catches the mice sometimes.
She's
just useless.”

Luu-Luu clawed the couch as my father lit another cigarette.

“I like it here,” he said. Then, his face brightening up as if he had a secret, “Hey, Char, you know what you can see from the window?”

“What?”

My father pointed out the long window. This was during the years of the Big Dig construction project, and much of the city of Boston was torn up and in chaos. But in the distance, my father had something he wanted to show me.

“Elmo!” he announced.

“Elmo?”

“Oh, I forgot, we never made you watch
Sesame Street
or any of that crap. Look, Char, see that big red monster on top of the Children's Museum? Parents think that thing is wholesome? Christ. I think it's demonic. When it's windy out, it moves, and I always say, ‘Look! Elmo's drunk again!'”

I looked, and there, as promised, was the enormous Elmo mounted on top of the Children's Museum, his shaggy red fur waving just slightly in the breeze, black button eyes dilated. My father got it absolutely right: demonic.

My father laughed, his deep belly laugh.

“You know what Veronica says about the Children's Museum?”

“What, Char?”

“She says, ‘If I were a child today, I feel confident that I would hate being taken to the Children's Museum.'”

My father and I howled, for it went without saying that I hated things like going to the Children's Museum, too. I had only ever gone there on field trips, which were lonesome for me; I always sat next to the teacher on the bus. Actually, it was on one of these field trips—the day my sixth grade class went to an ice-skating rink—that I, sitting by myself on the bench and watching my peers glide by on the ice, had one of those melancholy forebodings people have sometimes that ring of absolute truth:
all of the grown-ups are going to die.
And for a split second, I had a vague, shivery premonition of just how lonely my twenties would be.

We left the studio and went out to eat in Chinatown with a friend of my father's. I could always count on him to produce new people, new characters. This time it was a beautiful, coltish young woman with long, dark, Victorian hair and something tragic in her eyes, and I figured my father must have been photographing her. We ordered plenty of food, my father trying to convince the waiter to get us some of the more alluring dishes he saw the Chinese families eating. His last girlfriend was Chinese and a real asset whenever we ordered food in Chinatown. My father, without her, was desperate not to miss out on some nameless treasure. Somehow, without a word of Chinese, he always succeeded in winning over the waiter—not by being pushy, for he was not a pushy man, but just by being respectful and curious, by conveying a warm and casual appreciation of the cuisine and the culture.

The food arrived, sizzling full-flavored dish after sizzling full-flavored dish. We all dug in, without the slightest self-consciousness. The conversation flitted over a number of subjects, only to land on the avant-garde filmmaker Stan Brakhage. One time, in New York City, my father took me to see a film of his about what happened to dead people's body parts.

“Oh, God,” I said, remembering; images from the film, buried for years, had come back to me. “That movie was gross.”

“There was nothing gross about it, Char,” said my father, “but have it your way; I can't stop you. I thought it was so interesting getting to see all the things that might happen to your body after you're gone. You should become an organ donor, Char, when you get your license. I am; that's just about the one thing I believe in.” My father took another helping of bird's nest soup, a big smile on his face. “I'm telling you, Char. I can't wait until I'm dead.”

Around this time I found, while rooting through milk crates during our latest move, a stack of reviews and articles about the Pudding from back when my father was still the head chef. I was careful not to rip the crackly paper, and I read the words in faded ink. In one of the articles, the reporter mentioned my father bringing Dover sole home for me at the end of the night. “My daughter is going to love this.” I tried to picture my father standing over my high chair, scooping pieces of Dover sole onto my pink tin tray, but the image felt remote to me by now. It was all so long ago.

S
ince leaving Dudley Road, we had lived in a number of different apartments, almost always near the Cambridge-Somerville line, for years. We always rented, and would move when leases ran out, or when, as was so often the case, the rent was raised. But then one afternoon my mother came home from the restaurant and told me as she was pulling off her apron, “We're moving. Next month.”

“Oh.”

“But it's different now: we're
buying
.”

“Where? Did you find a house?”

“Oh, no,” she said. “Just upstairs.”

My mother, it turned out, had toured a condo on the third floor of the building where we were living at the time, decided that the sunshine would be marvelous for her pink geraniums, and agreed to buy it. We moved on schedule a month later, just the two of us. Benjamin was at this point living in Northern California. “Why bother with movers,” she said, “when it's only upstairs?” The building was a redbrick Victorian schoolhouse that had been converted into condominiums, and the ceilings were high and the oak staircase broad and seemingly endless. For two days, we lugged everything we owned up the stairs to our new home. At night, I fell asleep to the sound of my mother hammering hooks to hang the plates on the wall.

She devoted herself to the decoration of the condo. Every morning, she clawed the carpet out with her bare hands, bit by bit, before she went into the restaurant. Then she hired a painter to dapple pink peonies and silver-leaf polka dots on the floor and ribbons on the walls. She put lavender porcelain doorknobs on my armoire, even though I said the old knobs suited me just fine, and painted the armoire itself a gray called Kid Glove and the walls of my bedroom a pink called Degas. There was not a splotch of white paint anywhere in the condo. Some mornings I awoke to the sounds of hammers pounding and ladders scraping. Once I drifted into the living room in my flannel nightgown only to see a bare-chested stranger standing on a ladder, paintbrush in hand.

“Charlotte,” my mother said, click-clacking out of the kitchen on her stilettos, “meet my friend Danny.”

“Hello, Danny,” I said in my little-girl voice, stifling a yawn.

“Danny is my friend. And he's going to paint the walls Maiden Sunrise. What do you think?”

“Wonderful,” I said, rubbing my eyes.

Then she rooted through the boxes tumbled on the floor till she found the one she was looking for. “Aren't these cunning?” she said, taking mother-of-pearl forks out of sheets of tissue paper. “Won't they be perfect for shrimp cocktail?”

“That would make a good appetizer,” I told her. “I think people would order it.”

“At home!” she said. “I'm going to make shrimp cocktail at home, just you wait.”

A couple of years after we had moved into the condo, when the living-room walls had become Maiden Sunrise and Confetti and Amethyst Phlox and Macaroon, an editor from
Boston Magazine
asked my mother if they could photograph the condo for their upcoming style-at-home issue. “I'm sorry, Charlotte,” she told me, weaving between the empty paint cans in the hallway. “It's going to be a little bit chaotic here until we finish with this photo shoot.”

It was then before Christmas. On Christmas morning, when I opened my presents underneath the topiary tree my mother had decked with her costume jewelry, she told me, “Now, about the bathrobe. Oh, it's
beautiful
cotton, isn't it? But I really only bought it for the photo shoot.” It was white terry cloth embroidered with pink satin hearts around the collar. I loved it, but my mother took it away in case the photographer wanted to feature it in the photo shoot.

She wanted to hang the bathrobe off the porcelain hooks she planned to drill into my wall, if only she had the time: “You can't imagine the pressure I'm under.”

One day after school, I stepped into the condo and heard tinkling female voices in the living room. My mother had gotten all the ladders out of the hallway and flicked on the rose-shaded lamps. I smelled something in the kitchen—something rich and lingering. It must have been food.

“Charlotte,” my mother called from the living room, “help yourself to some of the chicken soup I made. It's delicious.”

“Absolutely delicious,” the other woman said.

“Charlotte, come meet my friend Emily.”

Emily, the Features editor for
Boston Magazine
, had come to the condo to interview my mother. “Wonderful,” she said, shaking my hand. “Now I can ask you questions, too.”

I sat down on one of the white wrought-iron chairs. My mother had brought out one of our cake stands, the pink-check porcelain one, and piled the tiers with chocolate-dipped strawberries and pistachio biscotti.

“So,” Emily said, “I take it you like pink, too.”

“Pink lightbulbs are terrible for your eyes,” I said, reaching for a biscotto, “but they're wonderful for the complexion.”

Emily laughed. Then she said, “So tell me. Which table do you guys eat dinner at? I was wondering about that.”

A-1, I wanted to say, thinking of the table at the Pudding where we ate so many of our meals.

“Oh,” I said after a pause. “The truth is, Emily, we're very fond of all the tables.”

The magazine came out that April. Our condo looked magnificent: the black-and-white floors sparkled, the vases of peonies delivered by Serge the florist lined the windows, and the pink lightbulbs made the living room glow like the inside of a bottle of grenadine. “In Cambridge, Hughes became a serial renter,” Emily wrote, “moving a dozen times in eight years.” It was then that I realized I had never kept track of the number myself.

Years later, when I went away to college, my mother ended up selling that condo. We moved again, this time to the house my mother lives in now. For months and months, the condo languished on the market, its candy-slicked painted surfaces and gold-leaf embellishments too extreme a statement for most people's tastes. Then, one day just as she was beginning to despair that she'd have to whitewash the condo in order to sell it, my mother at long last found a buyer. The catch? The buyer was color-blind. All colors read to him, he assured the Realtor, as one color only: “a soft,” he said, “gentle gray.”

But my mother's dream house would not have been that condo, or even the house she went on to buy later on; it would have been, always and forever, the farmhouse she'd left behind on Dudley Road. Sometimes, never in the dead of the winter, but in the spring and the summer when green things were growing and memories stirring, my mother and I would drive out to Bedford, to the site where the farmhouse had been before the developer bought up the land. The first time we finally saw it after all of those years, I remember thinking that the cluster of condominiums looked like a housing complex named “Fern Court” or “Ivy Circle.” It might have been anywhere in the entire country, not necessarily New England. Bulldozers had long since smashed several of our neighbors' homes to the ground, and in their place we saw one-sized houses with fresh coats of tan paint and fuzzy welcoming mats on the stone stoops underneath the doors.

We went and toured our old house, the only one still standing. Since it was now the information center for prospective buyers, a row of shelves in my former bedroom displayed swatches of carpeting and wallpaper for people to choose from. Someone had whitewashed the raspberry walls and replaced the mint green floors with wall-to-wall carpeting.

“I hate wallpaper,” my mother whispered to me. “
And
carpeting. What is that color, anyway,
taupe
?
Natural?
”

In the bathroom, she sniffed the cluster of poppies in a white plastic vase on the sink.