Free Charlotte au Chocolat by Charlotte Silver Page A

restaurant—spiked heels stuck out of cubbyholes in the office, and shoe boxes piled up on top of the walk-in refrigerator in the kitchen. “The right shoes,” she told me. “That’s all I’ll ever need: the right shoes and a trusty exterminator.” She could wear her apron in the dining room, she said, but nobody would care, as long as her high heels caught the sparkle from the chandeliers.
And
they lengthened her legs.
    â€œLeopard,” my mother used to say, “is my favorite neutral.”
    She liked the way it went with other things: emerald, camel, salmon, dusty gold. The off-kilter exuberance of leopard and plaid colliding was a favorite visual motif of hers both in interior design and dress. She would place a leopard cushion against a plaid silk armchair, or wear round-toed leopard pumps with little plaid socks and black palazzo—or what I always thought of as “hostess”—pants.
    Her signature piece of clothing was a leopard-print swing coat, Italian, with wide bell-shaped sleeves and a lining of mocha velveteen. This she wore for years and years. Animal-like, it marked her territory. If you walked into the restaurant and saw it slung over one of the backs of the red velvet chairs, you knew my mother was there.
    O ne afternoon not long after we had moved to Cambridge, I ran into one of the restaurant’s deliverymen on Mass Ave. He smiled at me, but I didn’t smile back. I thought that if I smiled at him he might talk to me, and I didn’t remember his name. My mother said it was rude to say hello without adding the person’s name at the end, and so I kept on walking.
    â€œI am so disappointed in you,” my mother told me later that week. “Jim, our fruit supply man, stopped by today and he said you didn’t smile at him when you saw him on the street. What is this? Anybody would think you were shy.”
    It was bad manners to forget his name and bad manners not to smile, bad manners to speak to him and bad manners to ignore him. Bad manners, everywhere.
    If I forgot a name in the dining room, I thought all conversation would halt, as when a busboy dropped a tray of martini glasses and they shattered against the linoleum floor of the kitchen. Or as when the waiters brushed against the light switch and for a few moments the customers could see the dust bunnies in the rafters and the runs in the curtains. All would be revealed, and I would disgrace us both.
    â€œYou’re either on or you’re off,” my mother liked to say. “You either stay home or you go out and you pull yourself together.” I could tell when she was off and when she was on from the tone of her voice. It changed all the time. In the front room, it sounded as thickly sweet as the Joy perfume she rubbed on her wrists, and it oozed over the tables.
“Hello,”
she said, greeting people. She rolled the word off her tongue and dabbed traces of lipstick on strangers’ cheeks.
    When she went into the kitchen, her voice dropped several octaves. It was bold, like the sound of her stilettos striking the linoleum. “That trout looks as soft as rice pudding,” she said. “This is
not
an old person’s home.” Then she swept into the dining room, and her heels went soft against the velvet carpet, and her voice went soft again.
“Hello. Hello. Hello.”
    So when the waiters came up to my table, pen and paper in hand, I knew what to do. I raised my voice, not loud but high. The voice wound up inside me, somewhere underneath my party dresses, and surged to the top, as when I twisted off the cap to a bottle of grenadine and it produced a squeak and then sweetness. Every thank-you was like another shot of the syrup, straight, but the waiters didn’t mind. They told my mother I was a lovely child. I had lovely manners.
    There was another rule about manners; my mother said it was the most important one of all, never, never, under any