Chez Cordelia (19 page)

“Crap,” I said from embarrassment.

“Do
not
say
crap
in my kitchen, Delia,” Humphrey ordered from the stove. “And do
not
deprecate flights of fancy. I have known good food to inspire poetical thoughts on many an occasion—many.” Dreamily, he stirred his sauce. “Let it go, let it flow, we're all one big happy family here.”

Humphrey was given to such vague, benign utterances: he was from California. He had gone to chef school there, and had come East after having a dream that the Atlantic Seaboard was sunk in depravity and needed good people to migrate there and save it. Humph considered himself a good person and a great chef (he was right on both counts), so off he went, by bus, eating his way across the country. He was disappointed at first to find the East wasn't all that depraved, but the restaurants consoled him. He went to New York and ate for three months straight. (That's when he became, as he put it, “stout.”) Since then, he had cooked all over the East, and he was utterly contented. Cooking was his life. I never saw him—truly, in all the time I knew him—when he wasn't either cooking or eating. “I got a job to do, and I do it the best I can,” he used to say rhythmically, playing his big black stove like a musical instrument. “I got good food here, and I got good helpers. I got good friends, and we all get along fine.”

He had begun shaving his head when a customer found a hair in the soup, and his head was fat and shiny under the white chef's hat. His eyes were sunk back deep under thick, golden eyebrows. “You must have had nice hair, Humph,” I said to him once, and he glared at me.

“Food before looks,” he said.

I worked from eight to five, when a chubby Puerto Rican woman named Maria came to relieve me. As soon as she took over, I was free to have dinner. Lunch was part of my wages, which were minimum, but I bought myself dinner there three or four nights a week. The kitchen staff thought I was crazy. “So expensive!” cried Maria, grasping her head in her hands and rolling it around. I explained about the meals at home. “Go to the deli,” I was counseled. “Get takeout Chinese. Get a pizza.” I did, sometimes, but I got an enormous kick out of removing my apron, washing up, changing my shoes, and sitting out front in the near-empty restaurant, at my special table in the corner. “She wants to meet men,” Maria stage-whispered, raising her eyebrows and waggling her hips.

Maybe I did, though the only bachelor who ever seemed to penetrate the ranks of couples who ate there was old Mr. Sawyer, who wore a beret, a long handlebar moustache, and a maroon velvet jacket. But it was mostly that I liked the atmosphere of the dining room, with its brown and white checks and its warm, dim light. It was clean and quiet and orderly there. Coming out of the kitchen, it was like entering the room reserved for company, like the white-and-gold parlor at my old pal Sandy Schutz's house. And the service was sublime.

Once when I was sitting there eating, a woman at the next table began to complain. She spoke in the general direction of the kitchen, and what she said, in a tone just louder than conversational, was that her friend Edna had recommended this restaurant but the food was a disappointment.

Humphrey emerged, spatula in hand and apron filthy, and asked her what the matter was. The woman pointed to her plate. I craned my neck over: it looked like the fish stew. “What's this?” she demanded, flicking her finger at a little bit of something. Humphrey leaned to look. “And this? This here? She says to me, try one of their stews, she says. What kind of stew? I asked her. I'm not sure I like stew. She says, anything—just try it, you'll like it. But I can't eat this!” She pushed the plate away, almost in tears. “I don't know what these are! I saved up all month—I'm on a fixed income, you know—my husband passed away two years ago—I save all month so I can go out for a nice meal at the end of it—but I can't eat this!” Her voice rose, and Humph sat down and patted her arm. “And this place is not cheap, if you'd like to know!” she finished shrilly.

Humphrey picked up a spare fork and speared a little brown bit. “Is this what's troubling you?” he asked gently. “I'm the chef,” he said. “I made this stew myself. This is a lardon—a little piece of pork.” He spoke very gently and slowly. “I'll tell you what I do. I fry up a lot of these little guys in the big pan I'm going to make the stew in—along with the onions? You know? And I find—now this is not just my own idea, this is a classic technique of French cooking—I find that they add just that extra touch of—” He rolled his eyes to the ceiling and waggled his head, to indicate ecstasy.

“Even in a fish stew?” said the woman—meaning, I could tell, to disguise sheer ignorance as mild doubt.

“Well—yes,” Humph said judiciously. “Now. What I want to say is that if you really don't like my little meurette, I'll be glad to bring you something else. I know better than anybody, believe me, what an expense it is to eat in a restaurant …”

He went on, and when he was done she was practically eating her stew out of his hand. She became, needless to say, a regular.

I was a regular myself. Eating at Grand'mère was always an adventure. But I also ate there because I wanted to put off going home to Juliet and Alan. They had become rather social as Juliet got to know her fellow students at Yale, and there tended to be groups of them sitting around the living room at night, eating nuts and drinking apple cider and being, I suppose, clever and profound. Even the potheads and pushers Alan towed home from his clinic were well-read. Sometimes they all played those infernal word games my siblings had so loved in their youth. They invited me to play, of course, but I never did, though sometimes I sat with them, nibbling nuts. I liked Juliet's professor, Mr. Oliver, a small man with a goatee who used to affect a Pakistani accent. He was a coin collector, and we sometimes talked about the price of gold, or about some fabulous auction. He also drew cartoons and sent them in to
The New Yorker
. They were never printed, and I never got the jokes, but I laughed dutifully and admired the drawings, which were done in a series of minute black dots.

But mostly, I avoided Juliet and Alan and their friends. I sat alone in my room listening to the radio in the evenings, comfortably full of Humphrey's cooking. I cursed my wasted life, all the years of Twinkies and hot dogs (though I missed them, too). It wasn't soybean curd I needed, it was crêpes d'épinards, it was aubergine en pistouille, it was salmon mousse with a ribbon of my own mayonnaise across it.

“U-R-KA-RA-ZEE!” Crystal, the fat tanned waitress, scrawled across my bill once. I suppose I must have looked it, eating with my eyes closed and curling my tongue around each little flavor. I was as happy eating Humph's quenelles at Grand'mère as I had been years before eating the Frontenacs' Oreos in the kitchen above Hector's.

Another reason I liked to eat there was to give my feet a rest before I started home. I cut my fingers up a bit during my first couple of weeks (before I learned to keep my weak right hand away from the knife), but the greatest casualties were my feet. After being stood upon for eight hours straight, they were swollen and painful. I had a stool to sit on, but it wasn't really tall enough for me. I did a better job standing up, and if I stood I didn't have to keep jumping off the stool to go to the refrigerator. The first week, I barely made it to the bus stop, and when I got home I had to soak my feet in Epsom salts. Juliet and Alan were no help. Predictably, they thought my job was vile; my swollen feet weren't the worst of it.

“When are you going to take your life seriously, Cordelia?” Juliet asked me, while Alan's disappointed face hovered over her gaunt shoulder. “A salad girl!”

“Salad person,'” I corrected.

“And then the food! The junk you deal with!”

“But they use all fresh vegetables!” I told them. I described vegetables done à la grecque, figuring that would soften my Grecophile sister.

“Why do they have to junk everything up?” she demanded petulantly.

“They use eggs fresh from the chicken, fish right off the boat, pure butter.” By that time I knew I was talking poison—cholesterol, hormones, mercury, insecticides. I wasn't really trying to convince them, I just wanted to see their faces. Revolted tremors passed from Juliet to Alan and back, but neither said anything. I think it was then that they officially gave up on me. I was lost, a hopeless heathen.

And it was then that I began to worry a little about Juliet. I feared she was going beyond the bounds of harmless eccentricity. She had always been judgmental, but now she was rigid, and a sense of humor no longer softened her. She even stood stiffly, perhaps because of her bowel troubles, and her lips seemed thinned out. She was as skinny, as pale and languid, as a bean sprout. She seemed to have no breasts, no superfluous flesh at all, and bones showed sharply in the oddest places: above her eyes, behind her ears, along her shoulders. She ate almost nothing, as far as I could see. It was she Alan always looked approvingly at when he said to me, “Eat as little as possible, eat just enough to keep your body functioning.” Sometimes he would stroke Juliet's smooth, bony arm or her knobby knee appraisingly, as if she were a statue he was working on. I thought of that old movie about Svengali and poor Trilby.

But my concern couldn't reach her. I see now that I should have tried harder. I should have taken my intuitions more seriously. But she held me off. Most of the time we avoided each other, mutually willing. And though I felt guilt and inadequacy cling to me like the odor of beef and wine and butter, I kept thinking, I need to be with
my own kind
.

Grand'mère was my only refuge. I would gladly have moved into the hot, friendly kitchen with its good smells and its constant activity. And people I could talk to. I talked all the time, so much that Humph had to remind me once in a while, “Food before conversation, Delia.” I talked to Crystal and Anne, the waitresses. I talked to Cynthia, the elegant bartender, who was sleeping with Humph. I talked to Archie, whose function in the kitchen I never did find out—he did a little of everything, but mostly he sat somewhere with the unlit weed between his lips, silent and smiling, and his fingers would tap out convulsive rhythms along the sides of his pantlegs. When I talked to him, he would nod and his smile would widen. I used to wonder if he was perhaps retarded until I later discovered he was a gifted classical pianist. I found this, literally, unbelievable, I was so used to thinking of Archie as practically an inanimate object, like the refrigerator, only not so useful. But eventually I heard him play, and became convinced.

That was after I met Nina. I went to work one day, and there was this beautiful, overweight, auburn-haired person out in the kitchen in a Grand'mère waitress uniform. She was listening closely to Humphrey, frowning as he talked. A new waitress, I thought, and then I noticed she was writing in a notebook spread out on the counter. An overconscientious new waitress, I was amending, with disgust (that's how Juliet would approach it, taking notes), when Humphrey called me over.

“Delia Miller,” he said. “Nina Treat. Nina's a reporter for the
Nickel Bag
. She's going to fill in for Crystal this week.”

The
Nickel Bag
was a local weekly, it only cost a nickel, and it prided itself on being a muckraking alternative to the regular newspaper. Juliet and Alan sometimes had it around, so I knew what it was, though I'd never read it. I couldn't imagine why one of its reporters should be waitressing at Grand'mère.

“I'm doing a piece,” Nina said. She had the most beautiful dark blue eyes and long black lashes I'd ever seen. She looked like Brenda Starr, plus about thirty-five pounds. “On waitressing,” she added when I just looked at her. “I'm being a waitress for a week so I can write about it.”

“Wouldn't it be easier just to ask the waitresses what it's like?” I asked. “I mean, you're probably not going to enjoy it much. It's even harder on the feet than salad making.”

She turned to her notebook and wrote this down—or I assumed she did. At any rate, she scrawled.

“Wouldn't it be easier?” I persisted.

“The
Nickel
likes first-person, true-life tales,” said Nina.

“Nina's trip is investigative reporting,” Humphrey added. “Like Woodstein and Berwitz.”

“She'll still hate it,” I said, slipping my shoes off. I put on the soft slippers I kept there to wear while I stood. Nina looked at them.

“Feet,” she said, and bent over her notebook again. “I see my angle.”

I found out shortly after, when Archie came in and she grabbed him and gave him a passionate kiss, that Nina was Archie's girlfriend, and it was because Archie was Humph's best friend and right-hand man that Crystal had a week off with pay so Nina could step in and take notes on us all.

Nina worked harder than I did. She stayed there all day, watching everything and writing and helping out in the kitchen, and at five o'clock she started waiting tables as if she'd been born with a tray in her hand. I watched her admiringly; I like competent, practical people. Humphrey told me she was the
Nickel's
star reporter.

“That girl is worth her weight in gold to that crummy little paper,” he said, licking a saucepan with a spoon. “She ought to go on to better things, she ought to shoot right to the top, she ought to be in New York or California standing them on their ear, but she stays here because of Archie.” He crooked his neck fondly in Archie's direction. Archie was standing at the stove, stirring something in his out-of-it way, the cigarette between his lips.

“Archie,” I said.

“He's a dear boy,” Humphrey said with a sigh. “He's my best friend. I love that little guy like a brother, and you know I mean that, Delia. But Nina—” He shook his head, his California rhapsodies unable to do justice to the superlative Nina.