An Enlarged Heart by Cynthia Zarin

Author:Cynthia Zarin [Zarin, Cynthia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Literary, Personal Memoirs, Women, (¯`'•.¸//(*_*)\\¸.•'´¯)
ISBN: 9780307962195
Publisher: Knopf
Published: 2013-01-22T00:00:00+00:00

Restaurants

Some restaurant stories are tales of the lost world. On the corner of ll6th Street and Broadway, now, is a Chinese restaurant called Ollie’s to which one of my daughters, since she was very small, has gone to so often with her father that the proprietor, a blade-thin man whose high cheekbones are two half moons in his worried face, brings her scallion pancakes as soon as she sits down. She is seventeen now; she has eaten there, conservatively, thirty times a year since she was two. For a very long time it was the only place she went out to eat: it’s her protorestaurant. But to me Ollie’s is on the corner where an old Chock full o’Nuts used to be. The other day I was headed down into the subway on that corner when my phone rang—it was an old friend who was born in Manhattan, twenty blocks away, but who has lived in the country for years (in New York, anything beyond a commuter rail is the country, but he lives in real country, roads with nothing on them but fir trees) and when he calls he always asks where I am: the city is still, for him, the grid of his heart, and I said I was by the old Chock full o’Nuts. Or I could have said, where T— used to live. Ollie’s means nothing to him.

Like most New York restaurants, Ollie’s is on the ground floor of an apartment house—twenty-five years ago, he lived for a time in that building on the fifth floor. It was a borrowed apartment (borrowed from T—); in those days, apartments were sublet and borrowed more casually: they were mainly rented, not owned, and at least in that neighborhood, near Columbia, they passed from hand to hand. All I can remember of the interior is a black leather sofa and a red dressing gown hanging on the hook in the bathroom. T—— ended up marrying the girl I once found, unexpectedly, on that sofa. Once in a while we bought coffee at the Chock full o’Nuts, and whenever I see Edward Hopper’s picture Nighthawks, I think of that coffee shop. Even during the day, it had that brooding, hopeless quality, of conversations not started because, even if she said something, there was nothing to say. Very early in the morning, the harsh smell of the coffee coiled itself into that apartment and slowly browned the old copies of Newsweek and the Asia Times.

In those days I never ate at home. We certainly never cooked at T——’s. We went to the Knickerbocker, down on University Place, or a restaurant whose name I’ve forgotten at One Fifth Avenue, or to the Blue Bar at the Algonquin, where we pretended it was nineteen forty-five. There was a restaurant we liked on Seventy-second Street above a flower stall where we always ordered the butterflied pan-roasted chicken breast, something I’ve never eaten or made since, and a French restaurant on Broadway which has had

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