“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.
My 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.
“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 stati
ons.”
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
For 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 the
m 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.
After 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.
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