Charlotte Au Chocolat by Charlotte Silver

Author:Charlotte Silver [Silver, Charlotte]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Literary, Women, Personal Memoirs
ISBN: 9781101560242
Google: FeNs7itOUnwC
Amazon: B005GSYZBG
Publisher: Riverhead Books
Published: 2012-02-15T16:00:00+00:00

Sometimes 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.

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