Charlotte au Chocolat (6 page)

My mother was already pregnant with Benjamin when my parents were married in a simple ceremony befitting that less materialistic time. They spent their honeymoon in Vermont, a conventional enough choice, I suppose, except that for some reason Mary-Catherine went along with them. In fact, Mary-Catherine met my father before my mother did, and, compelled by his moody, cerebral magnetism, had even had a crush on him. No matter. It was my understanding, even as a child, that Peasant Stock had abounded in many love triangles far less innocent than this one, which went on to fuse friendship and business. And many years later, when I was all grown up and my father was dead, too young, of his third and final heart attack, my mother and I sat down to a breakfast of English muffins and blueberry preserves at a fancy resort in Woodstock, Vermont, on a radiant midsummer morning. My mother sighed and mentioned coming to Vermont for her honeymoon; an unusual nostalgic detour for her, for she still doesn't talk that much of the past. Then she said, “Mary-Catherine Deibel came with us on our honeymoon, did I ever tell you that?” My mother laughed. Then, surveying the wreckage—but also the delicious richness—of her life: “Oh, well. I guess I always figured I'd end up with one or the other of them. And so I did.”

As for Peasant Stock, it served its last glass of grappa in 1987, when I was six years old and, incidentally, just around the time my parents' marriage was cracking up on Dudley Road.

There were certain foods that my mother claimed she could no longer bear to eat, years and then even decades after she had worked at Peasant Stock, because, she would explain, she had eaten too much of them back in the day.

These forbidden foods included Mary-Catherine's famous chicken liver pâté, which had been served flecked with chives in a deep, cut-glass bowl along with buttered toast points at untold numbers of parties in Cambridge, and which, potent with criminal quantities of butter, sherry, and heavy cream, was to me one of the most decadent foods in the entire world. But my mother could no longer eat that pâté, or anything at all with the herb tarragon. Nor could she eat certain game meats, for Peasant Stock used to sometimes host spectacular eight-course game-meat dinners over which my father, who loved such meats, presided. I still have a yellowed menu from one of these dinners; the year was 1976, and my father was serving Wild European Boar with Apples and Sage and Hare Flamed in Chartreuse.

And something about my mother's expressions when she reacted to these foods (the tone of voice she used when saying the word
tarragon,
for instance, unlike the word
grappa
), the way she flinched away from even the possibility of tasting them again, told me something, even when I was just a child, about the vague, bitter under-taste of the Peasant Stock romance, of the hippie era itself. Maybe, even, of love, from the point of view of a woman; that it contained a multitude of flavors and that some of these you might, years later, seek to reclaim.
Grappa.
Some you wished you might erase from your memory forever.
Tarragon.
These were the overlapping tastes—the adult consequences—of love.

Five

THE LAVENDER BLONDE

W
henever people found out that my mother owned the Pudding, the first question inevitably would be “Which one is your mother? The one with the sunglasses?” For sunglasses were my mother's trademark; never did she appear in public, day or night, without them. Men were forever going up to her on the street and gushing, “Honey, I
love
the glasses.” Enormous Chanel frames swept movie star–style across her face, their lenses tinted a custom-made shade of purple-blue and casting soft lavender shadows across her face. When she was younger, my mother was told she looked like the actress Kim Novak, the Lavender Blonde. On the rare occasions when she took off her sunglasses, you could see that my mother's face was delicate and kittenish; her eyes were silvery green. But you almost never saw them.

“I've got to get my waist back,” my mother had said not long after my father left, and to her credit, that's exactly what she did. She achieved this by exercising extraordinary discipline in the face of constant exposure to fattening food. At the restaurant, she stirred vats of roasted-sweet-red-pepper soup and frosted triple-layer coconut cakes, working in the kitchen for up to twelve hours a day. Sometimes she swiped a sliver of prosciutto off the butcher block or ordered a Caesar salad for lunch, but she hardly ever snacked in the kitchen. Her logic was simple: “Either you love wonderful food or wonderful clothes,” she told me. “I happen to love wonderful clothes more.”

Her waist, she told me, was now twenty-six inches. Over time, it got to be twenty-five and twenty-four. I did not know how many inches women's waists were supposed to be, but my mother's waist
did
look small, especially when she suctioned it into cinch belts. The belts were black patent leather or crocodile; they had gold and rhinestone buckles and interlocking Chanel
C
s and sometimes fringe. “The thicker the belt, the tinier the waist,” she said.

Every night, my mother came home to dress up before going back into the restaurant again. She looked a wreck from the long hours in the kitchen: hair sliding out of tortoiseshell combs, pink lipstick smeared from taste-testing, apron splattered with bacon grease and chocolate ganache.

“Oh, God, what time is it?” she would say. “Charlotte, run the bathtub. They're expecting me in forty minutes.”

I ran the tub and filled it with the waxy lavender petals we kept in a glass jar on the sink. And when she stepped back out of the bathroom, it was as if all the sweat of the kitchen had oozed down the drain. My mother's skin always smelled delicious; her arms felt as smooth as mine. She slid her legs into Velvet De Luxe Wolford panty hose and fastened the clasp of one of her black lace bras with the shirring around the cups. I had heard her say that wearing nice underwear was the only way a woman in a kitchen could still feel like a woman.

My mother always wore Joy perfume, which at one time had been the most expensive perfume in the world. Its exuberant femininity, no expense spared, suited my mother's brand of excess, containing thousands of jasmine petals and twenty-eight May roses per ounce. I watched her as she untwisted the gold-capped square bottle and dabbed the scent behind her temples. Instantly it perfumed the apartment, blotting out the lavender fragrance from her bath.

“Wear this, Mummy,” I said, sifting through the finery to extract a jacket or shell for her to wear on top.

“Charlotte, you don't understand,” she said. “It needs to
nip
in.” She gestured to her waist strapped underneath the ribbon piping of her bouffant skirt. “What I look good in is a top—well, a beautiful fitted cashmere sweater—that stops at the waist, and then a full skirt. But midcalf—never too long and
never, never short
.”

It was true. My mother did not show her legs, only her waist, only her breasts in sweetheart necklines of cocktail dresses or off-the-shoulder cashmere sweaters. Her legs were short, and despite all the weight she'd lost, they looked pretty much the same as before; they would never be slender. But the flash of silk stockings under rustling skirts looked like a naughty promise, as though she had hidden the rest of her legs to provoke the viewers' fantasies—really they stretched on forever.

“Remember the waist,” she told me, spraying gusts of Joy perfume in the air. “Remember the waist and the legs don't matter.”

Then, after she had wrapped herself in an evening cape and found her keys, she swept out the door, leaving a trail of debris, like the scene of a movie queen's murder: an overturned gilded mirror, lurid smudges of pink lipstick, the inky spill of an open mascara tube. (Sometimes I picked up the belts she had littered the floor with and tried to fasten them around my midriff. As I got older, and rather chubby for a time, my baby fat would dribble over the buckle. Of course, I thought to myself, my mother's belts didn't fit me—they only fit
her
.)

At the same time my mother got thin, she threw out all her shoes and replaced them with high heels, which she now wore every day. The other grown-up women I knew owned black stilettos or navy or camel-colored pumps. But my mother bought zebra-print T-straps and jeweled black satin evening boots, watermelon-pink mules with matching polish peeking out of the open toes and stacked Lucite slippers, heels with feathers, heels with ribbons lacing ballerina-style up the ankles.

My mother did everything in these shoes; she even cooked in them sometimes. Her heels dug into the cut-out holes of the rubber mats behind the stoves as she swept through the grease and flames and grunting men, and I never saw her slip. She kept extra pairs around the restaurant—spiked heels stuck out of cubbyholes in the office, and shoe boxes piled up on top of the walk-in refrigerator in the kitchen. “The right shoes,” she told me. “That's all I'll ever need: the right shoes and a trusty exterminator.” She could wear her apron in the dining room, she said, but nobody would care, as long as her high heels caught the sparkle from the chandeliers.
And
they lengthened her legs.

“Leopard,” my mother used to say, “is my favorite neutral.”

She liked the way it went with other things: emerald, camel, salmon, dusty gold. The off-kilter exuberance of leopard and plaid colliding was a favorite visual motif of hers both in interior design and dress. She would place a leopard cushion against a plaid silk armchair, or wear round-toed leopard pumps with little plaid socks and black palazzo—or what I always thought of as “hostess”—pants.

Her signature piece of clothing was a leopard-print swing coat, Italian, with wide bell-shaped sleeves and a lining of mocha velveteen. This she wore for years and years. Animal-like, it marked her territory. If you walked into the restaurant and saw it slung over one of the backs of the red velvet chairs, you knew my mother was there.

O
ne afternoon not long after we had moved to Cambridge, I ran into one of the restaurant's deliverymen on Mass Ave. He smiled at me, but I didn't smile back. I thought that if I smiled at him he might talk to me, and I didn't remember his name. My mother said it was rude to say hello without adding the person's name at the end, and so I kept on walking.

“I am so disappointed in you,” my mother told me later that week. “Jim, our fruit supply man, stopped by today and he said you didn't smile at him when you saw him on the street. What is this? Anybody would think you were shy.”

It was bad manners to forget his name and bad manners not to smile, bad manners to speak to him and bad manners to ignore him. Bad manners, everywhere.

If I forgot a name in the dining room, I thought all conversation would halt, as when a busboy dropped a tray of martini glasses and they shattered against the linoleum floor of the kitchen. Or as when the waiters brushed against the light switch and for a few moments the customers could see the dust bunnies in the rafters and the runs in the curtains. All would be revealed, and I would disgrace us both.

“You're either on or you're off,” my mother liked to say. “You either stay home or you go out and you pull yourself together.” I could tell when she was off and when she was on from the tone of her voice. It changed all the time. In the front room, it sounded as thickly sweet as the Joy perfume she rubbed on her wrists, and it oozed over the tables.
“Hello,”
she said, greeting people. She rolled the word off her tongue and dabbed traces of lipstick on strangers' cheeks.

When she went into the kitchen, her voice dropped several octaves. It was bold, like the sound of her stilettos striking the linoleum. “That trout looks as soft as rice pudding,” she said. “This is
not
an old person's home.” Then she swept into the dining room, and her heels went soft against the velvet carpet, and her voice went soft again.
“Hello. Hello. Hello.”

So when the waiters came up to my table, pen and paper in hand, I knew what to do. I raised my voice, not loud but high. The voice wound up inside me, somewhere underneath my party dresses, and surged to the top, as when I twisted off the cap to a bottle of grenadine and it produced a squeak and then sweetness. Every thank-you was like another shot of the syrup, straight, but the waiters didn't mind. They told my mother I was a lovely child. I had lovely manners.

There was another rule about manners; my mother said it was the most important one of all, never, never, under any circumstances, to be broken.

“No crying at the restaurant, Charlotte. Remember, it's a public place.”