Free Charlotte au Chocolat by Charlotte Silver Page B

circumstances, to be broken.
    â€œNo crying at the restaurant, Charlotte. Remember, it’s a public place.”

Six
    NOT IN FRONT OF THE CUSTOMERS

O ne night when I crawled underneath the bar to take a nap, I noticed that it seemed smaller. When I stretched my legs out, my Mary Janes dangled out from the flap of the tablecloth, and I imagined that if one of the customers saw them, they would think they belonged to a corpse. I rather liked that thought. It was so
dramatic
. Trying to make myself comfortable, I drew my knees together; I leaned onto my side; I tried to rearrange the bundles of linen. Nothing helped. The air smelled starchy, as it always did underneath the bar, but the scent bothered me now, and I coughed from all the dust.
    Thud.
I had slammed my head against the oak tabletop. I worried that the glasses above would rattle and shake, but I heard nothing, only a dull drumming in my ears. The pink bow on top of my headband was crushed. And for the rest of the night, even after I had wiggled out from underneath the bar, I felt dizzy; the gold threads in the carpet looked fuzzier, the lights in the chandeliers dimmer.
    That was the first of the kingdoms from which I would be exiled—the kingdom underneath the bar.
    Forever after that, I had no relief from the dining room. There was no place to hide. I had to adapt to it, however I could.
    Weekends were hard. Weekends my mother had no time for me. So on Saturday afternoons, I used to pace around Harvard Square, looking for something to do. I went to the Coop, where wind blew into the main room with the marble floors and it seemed to me they sold only black kneesocks, fountain pens that leaked or had run out of ink, postcards that had peeled at the sides, and chocolate Easter eggs left on the shelves in all seasons in battered pink or red boxes. I went to Café Pamplona, the underground coffee shop on Bow Street, where the waiters were looming and grumpy, the parfait spoons rusty, and the menu—gazpacho, swampy green and slithering with onions, and a pork and pickle sandwich on a fried bun—never changed. There was also Colonial Drug, the old-fashioned perfume store with the leopard hatboxes and a velvet carpet the color of a crushed blackberry, and Cardullo’s, the specialty food shop, also with a velvet rug, which sold hand-painted tins of caviar and beribboned bags of chocolate almonds that looked like they had been there since the 1950s. And the Brattle Theatre: it showed
Casablanca
every Valentine’s Day and film noir on Monday nights, yellowed fluff peeked through the Prussian-blue leather seats, and the clock on the wall had been broken for as long as I could remember.
    Then came Saturday night. When I was growing up, Saturday night was the big event of the week. It was the grand crescendo toward which all the week’s activities had built.
Saturday night
—the words alone had a glamour and a menace about them.
Saturday night!
One hundred and fifty customers, two hundred, three hundred, four hundred.
Saturday night!
“No main course for you tonight,” my mother would tell me. “Maybe an appetizer if you order early.”
Saturday night!
“Here, help out, why don’t you? Polish some silver; light the candles; fold a napkin into a tiny pink swan. But, don’t forget the customers. Customers are coming!”
    My main job on Saturday nights was to stay out of the way of the customers. And then sometimes I did little errands or chores. Like sometimes on summer nights when the chefs were wilting behind the line in that smoldering Victorian kitchen, where the heat was not even relieved by ceiling fans, they would send me to go get beers from behind the bar. I loved doing that. I would plunge my hands into the ice bucket, basking in the cold, until one of the bartenders pushed me out of the way. Then I would stumble back into the kitchen.
    â€œThanks, kiddo,” said Carla, standing at the head of the