Tender at the Bone

by Ruth Reichl

“No thanks,” I said.

  “You better treat me right anyway,” he said sidling over and looking hungrily at the place where my breasts spilled out of my blouse.

  “What can I do?” I wailed to Henry.

  “How much you taking home?” he asked sternly.

  “Thirty-five dollars on a good night.”

  “You want to go work in a cocktail lounge where you earn half that and the men put their hands up your skirt?”

  I didn’t.

  “Rolf won’t do anything,” said Henry contemptuously, “he’s all talk and no walk. Besides, it won’t be long now before Maurice goes broke.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Maurice has done it all wrong,” he said with conviction. “Nobody puts Limoges and crystal into a restaurant. You know why?” He paused. “Because it breaks in the dishwasher. A few more months, there will be none left. He’s already losing half the meat; that fat useless Frenchman is stealing him blind.”

  “It’s Rolf who’s stealing!” I said. “He’s the one who offered me the meat.”

  “He was just appropriating the Frenchman’s stolen goods. Rolf doesn’t steal himself.”

  “You mean everybody knows that the chef is stealing?” I asked.

  “Of course,” said Henry philosophically. “And if Maurice had any sense at all he’d be out there checking those garbage cans every night.”

  “Don’t you think you should tell him?”

  “Not my business,” he said with dignity, getting back to the main subject. “But next time Rolf comes at you remember that a year from now he’ll be back in New York working in some other restaurant, and you’ll be carrying cocktails.”

  Meanwhile, there was Marielle. She glowered at me during staff dinner and avoided me in the dining room. But she respected Henry and as long as he was there she kept her distance.

  But on his first night off she watched, eyebrows raised, as I mixed a Caesar for a fourtop. The men were solid, with striped ties and diamond pinkie rings, and their wives were large and sympathetic. I milked my story for all it was worth, lamenting the beauty of my lost island, the family sheep, my mother’s homemade jam. I told them how cold it was in America, how miserable I was. The bleached blonde was on the verge of tears.

  Any minute, though, she might be crying in earnest. She had ordered Dover sole, the one dish I had not perfected. I was terrified that I would miss a bone and kill a customer. Henry always filleted them for me.

  But now I was on my own. As I hesitated over the fish Marielle swooped in for the kill.

  “Alors, ma petite,” she said, “on a terminé le drame?” And in her precise Parisian French she began giving instructions. Her thought, she told me later, was that I would not understand a word and be so embarrassed that I would flee in tears, never to return. Or, at the very least, never to return as a Frenchwoman.

  But instead, there I was following her instructions to the letter. “You begin with the bones at the top,” she said. “Take the fork and flick them out. They’re small. Oui, c’est ça. Now the bottom. Now run your knife right down the middle of the fish, doucement, doucement, you can feel the bone.”

  Step by step she took me through the ritual. Finally she concluded by telling me to serve the first portion to the old bag on the right wearing the terrible dress with the flowers. When I looked up, startled, she said, always in French, “Oh, the Americans! They never understand a word!” And she retired to her station.

  When I went later to thank her she just shook her head and said “J’étais loin de croire que tu me comprendrais.” The significance of my having jumped, in the boning of a fish, from vous to tu was not lost on me; in Marielle’s eyes I had become French. And she took over my education.

  “Give her to me, Henri,” she said the next night. “You have taught her the American way. Now I will teach her the French. When we are done she will, perhaps, help us with our little project.”

  “What project?” I asked, but neither of them would say.

  Slowly, proudly, Marielle began teaching me everything she had learned in hotel school. She taught me to bone fish, make omelets, and serve with a spoon and fork and one hand behind my back. She made me taste salad dressings over and over until I could pour out the precise ratio of olive oil to vinegar without looking at what I was doing. “It’s like typing,” she said, “you have to know it in the fingers so that you do not think about it with the head. You will need this later.”

  At night, after the final customers had left the dining room and we had reset all the tables, after Rolf had placed the pot of cream over the pilot light to cook down during the night, after William the cashier had balanced out, we went off together for a drink. They all told stories about the restaurants they had worked in, trying to top each other’s horror stories. I wasn’t old enough to drink legally, but I got lost in the crowd and no bartender ever challenged my right to be there.

  One Sunday Lincoln invited us all out to his cabin at Whitmore Lake. The best grill man in the Midwest had dug a barbecue pit and spent all day cooking ribs laid across old bedsprings. The smell spiraled up into the crisp air and we drank beer and told jokes. Rolf, sober for a change, went off for a walk alone and came back clutching something.

  “Look,” he said, opening his hands as if he had found a great treasure. “Morels.”

  “Oh yeah,” said Lincoln, “they’re all over the place. Help yourself.”

  Rolf looked suddenly younger in his enthusiasm. ‘We must gather as many as we can,” he said. “If we can find enough I will put them on the menu tomorrow night.” He organized us into teams to hunt mushrooms.

  “What if we pick the wrong ones?” asked Marielle, ever practical. “We will poison the customers.”

  “Impossible,” said Rolf, holding up something that looked like a fairy’s umbrella from a child’s storybook. “No other mushroom looks like a morel. Even Alan Jones could not confuse a morel with a poison mushroom.”

  We came back with armfuls of morels; they were everywhere. As Rolf sliced onions and started to sauté them in Lincoln’s rustic cabin he seemed almost attractive in his happiness.

  “Rolf and Lincoln’s Mushroom and Ribs,” he said. “What do you think, Lincoln? You want to go into business with me after Maurice goes broke?”

  “Could be,” said Lincoln. “But I think that would be Lincoln and Rolf’s Ribs and Mushrooms.”

  “How long do you think he’s going to last?” asked Alan Jones.

  “Well,” said Henry slowly, “the way I see it, he’s probably got another six months. If that fat Frenchman doesn’t get too greedy.”

  “I told him to stop stealing,” said Rolf, “or I would tell Maurice. This is the best job I ever had and I wish there were some way to make it last.”

  “Why can’t it?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” said Alan Jones, “can’t Maurice just replace the china and crystal with cheaper stuff?”

  The others looked at us as if we were sweet, dense children. “It’s the customers,” they chorused.

  “What about them?” I asked.

  Rolf came up and put a morel into my mouth. It had an earthy flavor, like the entire countryside concentrated into a single bite. “A little more salt?” he asked. He scattered salt from his fingers into the pan and put another morel into my mouth. The salt had intensified the flavors, made them deeper.

  “I didn’t know that there was anything that tasted like this,” I said reverently.

  “Exactement!” said Marielle, looking at Rolf with new respect. “Americans don’t know what they have. A restaurant like L’Escargot is wasted on them.”

  “Have you noticed,” said Henry gently, “how many repeat customers we have?”

  One: the art history professor who came, alone, every night and asked the chef to make something special. Nobody else ever returned. “After every curious person has tried the restaurant,” he went on, “Maurice will run out of customers. He is ahead of his time.”

 
“How would you do it differently?” I asked. Henry looked at Marielle, and I could see that he was asking her a question. She nodded, almost imperceptibly.

  “We have it all figured out,” he said. “Maurice’s problem is that the food is too fancy. It frightens people. I have been waiting table all my life and I know exactly what people want. We will give them the food that they know, only better. When people leave our restaurant they will say, ‘I never knew macaroni and cheese could taste so delicious.’ It’s very simple, really.”

  “We will take off the tuxedos,” said Marielle, “we will be more friendly. People will love to come to our restaurant. You will see.”

  Meanwhile the weeks passed and Maurice slowly grew grayer and more wrinkled. He stopped wearing makeup, his impeccable clothes were sometimes spotted, and he lost the bounce in his step. One day I came in earlier than usual and found him in the dining room running frantically from table to table. “Look at this plate!” he shouted at me, holding it up so that his finger was across the long, jagged crack through the middle. He hurled it at the wall and watched it shatter, the shards skittering onto the carpet in tiny pieces. He went to another table, examined the plates, and hurled another one against the wall. And then another.

  When he was done he put his hands over his eyes and then looked at me, his face ashen. “I’m sorry,” he whispered and went to get the broom.

  That night Rolf went upstairs, to Maurice’s “office,” the dusty room where the extra chairs and tables were stored. When I went up to change out of my uniform I saw them scribbling figures on a piece of paper as they took alternate swigs out of a bottle of red wine. When they came down, Maurice went into the kitchen and said something to the chef, who shrugged his shoulders and began packing his knives.

  “We don’t need him and his fat salary,” said Rolf, startling me by coming up behind me. “He is a useless expense.” The chef didn’t even say good-bye.

  We didn’t need all the waiters either, and as the customers became sparser the tips did too. Pretty soon the restaurant was running with a skeleton crew. When Alan Jones left to do his alternative service for the draft he was not replaced. Then Maurice cut my hours to weekends only. I got a supplementary job down the street as a cocktail waitress.

  I stopped in every night on my way home, but the mood in the restaurant had gotten grimmer. “Notice anything different?” asked Henry one night. I looked around. I didn’t.

  I walked over to the stove and dished up some leftover coq au vin. “It’s incredible to me,” I said, “that the idiots I serve would rather eat the slop down the street than Rolf’s cooking. This is great!”

  “Ah, Americans!” said Marielle coming in. “What do they know?”

  “But do you notice anything different?” Henry persisted. He pointed to a can of tomato paste. It looked just like the one collecting mold on my own refrigerator shelf. “This comes from the supermarket. And that means that Maurice can’t pay his bills. It won’t be long now. Maurice owes everyone and he’s got no credit left. It’s a damn shame.”

  That night Maurice came out drinking with us for the first time. He ordered a Rémy Martin and held up the snifter. “Here’s to me,” he said bitterly, “the last of the dreamers.”

  “What are you going to do?” asked Henry.

  “Auction it all off, lock the door, and get the hell out of this state,” said Maurice.

  “If you come back, you got a job waiting,” said Henry. He looked at Marielle, who nodded her head. “The French lady and I are going to open our own place. Rolf’s going to cook for us. We could use a maître d’.”

  Maurice looked at him a long time. Then he shook his head. “I don’t think so,” he said. “But I wish you the best. And Henry?”

  “Yes?”

  “Keep it simple.”

  “You got that right,” said Henry.

  TUNIS

  I spent my final year in college worrying about the future. I would have a BA, with honors in sociology, prepared for absolutely nothing. I wished school would never end.

  Serafina was equally loath to move on. She was deeply involved in politics and completely unsure of what she wanted to do with her life.

  We both spent the summer of ’68 in Ann Arbor, but not together. Serafina had made it clear that she had no interest in white friends. Understanding did not make me less lonely. She always spoke to me when I called, but she never called me back.

  It was a pretty depressing time. L’Escargot had closed, Henry’s restaurant was not yet open, and my job as a cocktail waitress was every bit as bad as Henry had said it would be, down to the short skirt and the men’s hands.

  I missed Serafina. I missed Mac too. He had delicately indicated that he would be happy to expand our relationship; my mother had been right after all. When I didn’t respond he went off and fell in love with someone else. I was miserable; it was clearly time to make new friends.

  When a girl from my art history class asked if I wanted to move into her apartment I jumped at the chance. Pat was six feet tall, an artist, and the most flamboyant creature I had ever encountered. She attended classes barefoot, wrapped in bolts of cloth and clouds of patchouli. Bells and bracelets jangled each time she took a step. She was famous all over campus and I was flattered and terrified by the idea of becoming her roommate; she made me feel like such a bore.

  Pat scoured her apartment from top to bottom before I moved in. She even emptied out a couple of closets. I was touched and surprised: I had expected her to be interesting but I hadn’t expected her to be nice. Aside from a reprehensible tendency to exercise—she went out at 6:00 A.M. every morning to run barefoot around a cinder track—Pat turned out to be remarkably unscary.

  Much later Pat told me that I was the most depressing person she had ever met. I certainly felt that way. Out in the real world there were riots at the Chicago convention and a love-in at Woodstock, but I was locked into my own misery. I felt numb. When Serafina called to ask if I wanted to take a trip with her I felt as if she were throwing me a lifeline. “I’ll go anywhere,” I said, “as long as it’s cheap.”

  “How about North Africa?” she said. “We can get a cheap flight to Rome and take the ferry from Naples to Tunis. From there we can go to Algiers and then Morocco. Mohammed said we could stay with his family in Meknes. He said his mother will teach us to make her famous bisteeya.”

  “Fine,” I said.

  “Why would you want to go there?” my mother asked when I told her of my plans.

  “Because it’s exotic,” I said. “Because no one else goes there. And because it’s cheap.”

  I might have added that I was trying desperately not to lose Serafina. But I didn’t know it.

  MOHAMMAD’S BISTEEYA

  3 cups chicken broth

  2 small chickens, rinsed

  4 cloves garlic, peeled

  1 teaspoon salt

  1 stick cinnamon

  1 bunch parsley

  1 large onion, peeled and chopped

  Quarter-sized chunk fresh ginger, peeled

  1 teaspoon pepper

  ¼ pound butter

  ¼ cup lemon juice

  8 large eggs, beaten

  2 tablespoons butter

  ¾ pound almonds

  ¼ cup confectioners’ sugar

  2 teaspoons ground cinnamon

  1 package phyllo dough, defrosted if frozen

  ½ pound butter, melted

  Put first 10 ingredients in a large pot. Bring to a boil, cover, lower heat, and simmer for 1½ hours.

  Remove the chicken from the cooking liquid and shred meat into bite-sized pieces. Set aside.

  Strain liquid and cook down until it has reduced to 2 cups. Add lemon juice and simmer about 5 minutes. Slowly add beaten eggs and stir constantly with a wooden spoon until the eggs have congealed into a thick curd and most of the liquid has evaporated. This takes about 10 minutes. Cool.

  Heat the 2 tablespoons of butter in a skillet and sauté almonds. When you
can smell them and they are lightly browned, drain on paper towels, chop, and combine with confectioners’ sugar and cinnamon.

  One hour before eating, preheat oven to 400°.

  Unroll the phyllo and put the leaves under a damp towel to keep them moist while you are working. Brush the bottom of a pizza pan, paella pan, or very large cake pan with the melted butter. Layer the bottom of the pan with leaves of phyllo until the entire surface is covered and the phyllo extends about 2 inches outside the pan in all directions. Brush the top of the phyllo with butter.

  Top with half of the nut mixture, cover lightly with more phyllo, and brush with butter. Add half the chicken, covering with more phyllo and brushing with butter. Cover with half of the egg mixture, add another layer of phyllo, and brush with butter. Add remaining chicken and a couple more leaves of phyllo brushed with butter. Add remaining egg mixture, two more layers of phyllo, each brushed with butter, and sprinkle the remaining almond mixture over the top. Cover with all but 3 of the remaining leaves of phyllo, again brushing with butter.

  Fold the edges of the bisteeya in over the top to make a neat package. Put the remaining leaves of phyllo on top and pour most of the remaining butter over them.

  Bake for 20 or 25 minutes until top leaves are golden. Remove pan from oven, carefully invert onto a large buttered baking sheet, brush with the remaining butter, and bake 10 more minuters.

  Dust with confectioners’ sugar and cinnamon and serve immediately. Bisteeya should be eaten with the fingers. It should hurt, a little.

  Serves 10.

  Neither of us wanted to admit it, but we were scared. Tunis seemed so foreign even after Naples. The boat ride over—$12 to sleep on the deck—had been more grubby than romantic and now here we were, trudging down a dusty road looking for a place to stay. The landscape was parched and colorless and little puffs of sand whirled up with each step. Our bags were getting heavy. “I’m thinking of Gary Cooper in Beau Geste,” said Serafina, swallowing hard. “Don’t look now, but we’re being followed.”

  “I know,” I said grimly. The black car had been snuffling along behind us for several blocks, keeping a discreet distance. I didn’t want to look, but I thought there were two boys in the car. Or maybe they were men. Serafina started to turn. “Don’t look,” I hissed. We walked on, hot and silent, for another block. I was glad there were two of us, glad that we were together.