The Inn at Lake Devine (17 page)

I asked, “Are you or your husband a chef?”

“He’s a lawyer,” she said. “I would be the manager.”

My mother said, “Do you
need
a chef?”

I said, “Mom, they need a space first.”

My mother opened her big loose-leaf notebook. “May I ask about renovations? Is there a budget for that?”

Mrs. Simone said they fully expected to renovate even if the space had been previously used as a restaurant.

“Newton, right?”

“We’re starting with Newton.”

“Natalie’s cooking school was in Newton,” my mother said.

“Les Trois Etoiles,” I supplied.

My mother confided to me, “I’m thinking Piccadilly Square.” She flipped to a tab in her book, which fell open to the precise listing. “It’s too perfect,” she said. “I can’t believe it.”

Mrs. Simone asked what had been there before.

“A pastry shop,” Pammy offered from across the room, “which was a gold mine, but the owner had some problem with his feet or his legs and had to close.”

“Phlebitis,” said my mother.

“It was darling,” said Pammy. “I used to love their Mexican wedding cookies.”

“Good foot traffic,” my mother said, “with a nice courtyard.”

“It’s two minutes from here by car,” Pammy offered.

The Schenkmans couldn’t have known why an entire office was doting on an unprepossessing woman in a short shiny suit. Mrs. Dr. Schenkman said, “Should we come back at a better time?”

Pammy snapped to attention. I could see her lean across her desk, presumably to explain to the ophthalmologists that they had been caught in the middle of a campaign to get her unemployed sister back to work;
please
excuse the inattention.

My mother led Mrs. Simone away, signaling God-knows-what to me with her eyebrows and her warden’s bracelet of master keys. “Any last-minute thoughts on location, Nat? Something you’d think of that I wouldn’t?”

I shrugged. “Parking?”

My mother beamed. “See. A chef
would
think of that.”

“There’s two big public lots, each a block away, and a T station across the street,” said my sister.

An hour later my mother called, triumphant, from a phone booth. No sale or lease yet, but these people were serious. I should go home immediately. The Simones were coming to dinner, and I was cooking.

T
he first thing I did was talk them out of Chez Hilda as a name for their establishment. And next thing I knew, I was auditioning for the post of head chef as if I really wanted it. Earlier, between the hours of four and seven
P.M.
, I had staged a small rebellion, shopping for ingredients that had no chic. It would serve my mother right: She clearly didn’t understand that restaurants were not created equal, and I was not so pathetic a candidate that I needed her crude employment services. So I bought chuck and cheap Burgundy and the lettuce and cellophane-wrapped tomatoes of a prosaic salad. I made a stew, which my mother billed as Beef Bourguignon à la Natalie, and mashed potatoes—all of which unwittingly hit the nail on its head.

Mrs. Simone may have been dreaming of haute cuisine and pale pink linens, but Mr. Simone loved diner food. “You understand what I’m trying to do,” he said, a solemn oath, looking up from his first bite of my Grape-Nut custard pudding.

“Have some more,” my mother said.

“These old standbys? I just made what I thought you’d like.”

“We’re in the market for a chef,” he announced.

“I can’t believe it,” said my mother. “Eddie, did you hear that? Natalie! Show him the letter from your cooking teacher.”

Mr. Simone, eyes closed, licked the front and back of his spoon. Finally he asked what else I could do, dessert-wise, in this genre.

“What genre?” I asked.

“Home cooking, but top-notch.”

My mother rose and said pointedly to my father, “Let’s do the dishes and let the professionals talk.” She commanded Mrs. Simone to sit and to have another helping.

“Desserts,” Mr. Simone prompted.

I thought of my childhood and the UMass dining commons. “Fig squares. Brownies à la mode. Chocolate icebox cookie cake.”

“With real whipped cream between the cookies?”

“Of course. And Boston cream pie.”

He said happily, “Who makes that anymore?”

By that point, I was enjoying my own acting ability. “Apple pie, cherry pie, chocolate cream pie.” I thought of the revolving pie display at the now defunct luncheonette near my father’s store. “Lemon meringue pie, strawberry-rhubarb pie, grasshopper pie, blueberry pie … lattice tops on the fruit pies—”

“Oh my,” he breathed.

I remembered the custard family. “And there’s rice, coconut, Grape-Nuts, of course, and bread puddings—”

“With raisins?”

I gave him a sly look that said Raisin is my middle name.

He was not a restaurateur. Anyone with Betty Crocker on her shelf could have passed this test. I said both grandly and modestly, “This is supposed to be pleasure, not business. We’ve put you on the spot.”

He said, “You know, hon, I’m a pretty good judge of character. She strikes me as the kind of person we’re looking for.” He asked if I had a résumé.

I told him what was on it: UMass, B.S. in biology, cum laude. Les Trois Etoiles under Chef Pierre Tardieu; Star Market; Ten Tables.

My father piped up from the kitchen sink, “Ask
me
. Natty worked for me more summers than I can count. And she was always my best worker.”

Mrs. Simone said, “We were going to put an ad in the
Globe
.”

From the kitchen pass-through, my mother said, “It’s very common
to sell a house through word-of-mouth without an ad, before it ever goes on the market. Those deals are easiest on everyone concerned.”

I asked Mr. Simone, “Do you like soups?”

He looked at me with a soulmate’s gaze of joy and astonishment, so I continued, now addressing his wife. “There’s so many modern twists on the old standbys: a chicken soup with fresh herbs, an onion soup with shallots and without the baked-on cheese, a black bean, a white gazpacho, a Mexican vegetable, a cabbage, a cream of carrot, a shrimp gumbo, a cock-a-leekie—”

“Holy cow!” cried Mr. Simone. “You do all those?”

“Of course. And dozens more.”

“It gets better and better,” chuckled Mr. Simone.

His wife murmured, “I do like the fact that she worked at Ten Tables.”

I said, “I have to be honest. If you call my boss there, he may say less than flattering things, but it’s because he made sexual advances and I rebuffed him. It’s why I quit.”

Attorney Simone liked even that—a sidebar confession. “Thanks for telling me, Natalie.”

My mother materialized with my résumé, my To-whom-it-may-concern reference letter, and a framed photo of my third and final graduating class at Les Trois Etoiles. Mrs. Simone skimmed the papers, and passed them to her husband. With a wink, he folded my vitae once, twice, then stuffed it into an inside breast pocket.

“What do you think about a salad bar?” asked Mrs. Simone.

“Love ’em,” my mother snapped.

“What do you think, Natalie? People love a salad bar,” Hilda said.

I said, “They’re a little gimmicky.”

My mother said, “You know, Hilda, I think she’s right.”

I said, “Besides, a salad bar takes up the room of several tables, and tables equal revenue.”

“Lots of time for these kinds of discussions,” said my father.

“What’s our next step?” asked Mr. Simone.

“I’ll understand if you want to place the ad,” I said.

“Why should they?” asked my mother.

“She’s too modest for her own good,” said my father.

“It’s their restaurant,” I said. “Maybe there’s someone out there who would be their dream chef.”

“More than you?” my mother cried, sweeping her hand above the leftovers, her eyes signaling that someone who can’t close a deal should know when to shut her mouth.

Still, Mr. Simone smiled broadly and asked Mrs. Simone, “Hon? Any reason to keep looking?”

She shrugged. “If you’re satisfied …”

There was a toast from their side, and one from ours. My father choked up, so my mother took over, explaining that the old softie knew someone would grab me up, but never this fast in a recession.

Finally, after two Sanka refills, the Simones said they had to run. They’d call me as soon as they found their space.

“In that case,” my mother teased, “you’ll be open for business before you have a name on the door.”

“We can’t wait,” said Mr. Simone.

“We can’t wait,” echoed my father.

“Do you have our number?” asked my mother.

As soon as they were out the door, she whirled around. “You’re your own worst enemy. Miss Equal Opportunity! They should spend another six months interviewing every
shmendrik
who ever flipped a burger?”

“She didn’t do any harm,” said my father. “Now the Simones know that she’s not afraid of competition. They feel as if they got the best.”

“You’re a
shmendrik
, too,” said my mother. “I’m surrounded by them.”

We had heard it a dozen times before, the nice-guys-finish-last harangue. She stacked the dessert dishes, making a racket. “When are you going to learn that life is a series of compromises?” she asked me. “What do you think? That if you wait long enough, Locke-Ober’s will come calling?”

“Enough, Audrey,” said my father. “It all worked out.”

She stamped her foot. “I want her to stop dreaming.”

I said, “Gladly. Get me out of Café Shmendrik. I’ll go back to real estate, or fruit. Or how about Vermont?”

“Honey—” said my father.

“Natalie, I didn’t mean—” said my mother.

“Don’t tell me what I want,” I said.

I
 heard from no one, or so I thought. My parents didn’t ask about my friends from the Inn, but talked of young men I should date from among their acquaintances’ sons. I didn’t see their chatter as a campaign; certainly didn’t see it as a cover-up of something that would clear up my rash but aggravate family relations—namely, their failure to report that a male Berry had telephoned three times since I’d been home.

“No, no calls,” was their blank, automatic answer—not messages forgotten, but deliberate lies. I had no precedent for this in my house. I had heard of crude and puritanical fathers who hung up on undesirable suitors, who revoked privileges from wild daughters. As close as my own street, Mr. Donabedian was famous for having brushed a non-Armenian admirer of his oldest daughter with his car.

But no closer, not inside my family. My father had always treated my teenage boyfriends hospitably and without suspicion—precisely the way Isadore Cohen had treated him—inviting them in for a man-to-man discourse on their part-time shelving jobs at Garb Drug or Franco’s Market, or on the near-wins of Newton South’s various teams.

“Nice guy, your dad,” they always said as we walked to their cars.

“He is,” I’d agree.

But that was before boyfriends had to be taken seriously, before Danny O’Connor’s mooning over Pammy metamorphosed into marriage, a state my father had not anticipated in anything but a far-off, misty way. Our thin walls made me privy to my parents’ self-recrimination: They had underestimated Pammy’s feelings for the boy. They had not taken Danny seriously as a suitor. They had not realized that a little grass-stained
pisher
would be putting fifteen bucks a week into a diamond-ring fund or that Pammy would enter college secretly engaged, never accepting proffered blind dates, never even attending a mixer at a Jewish fraternity. I heard them say, “Things will be different with the
klainer
”—the little one—me. They had discovered through one less than illustrious son-in-law that this was a dangerous age for a girl, an age when
sheygets
hangers-on turned into fiancés.

So when I received an unsigned postcard of the Inn, interior, dining-room view, saying only, “Wish you were here,” and, “Did you get my messages?” I took it to my room and lay down with it, relief tainted only by the simultaneous discovery that, like everyone else, I hated my parents.

“What’s with you?” my mother asked, arriving home to find me pacing the living room. I waited for my father to join us from the garage, then read, my voice shaking with anger, “ ‘
Dear Natalie, Did you get my messages?
’ ”

“Who’s that from?” asked my father.

I said it wasn’t signed, but—

“Not signed?” he repeated, as if that were the transgression.

My mother put her hand out.

I held the card to my chest. “What do you have to look at? You know who it’s from.”

They busied themselves at the front closet, handing each other hangers and arranging their coats.

“Messages,” I demanded. “Who took them?”

“I forgot,” my father snapped. “Okay? You satisfied? Your old man forgot to tell you that a boy called.”

“You forgot multiple times?”

“Once.”

I slapped the postcard and read again, “ ‘
Did you get my messages?
’ plural?”

“You know your father can’t take a message! Either he forgets altogether or he gets it wrong.”