Free Charlotte au Chocolat by Charlotte Silver

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.
    â€œOh, 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.
    â€œWear this, Mummy,” I said, sifting through the finery to extract a jacket or shell for her to wear on top.
    â€œCharlotte, 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.
    â€œRemember 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