The World in My Kitchen (3 page)

We walked across the street to Central Park. I was astonished. The weather had changed, the sky was blue, and the park, as in Paris the previous week, showed signs of spring. There were daffodils on the lawns and buds on the trees. I pointed them out to John, picked a flower, and gave it to him. He tore it apart in two seconds and laughed. He had such a lovely smile, but he never said a word, just laughed.

The playground was surrounded by a cast-iron fence. There were benches all around, and a large sand box in the center, swings on one side, and in one corner a sort of wooden sculpture on which children could climb. So different from a Parisian park where “Défense de marcher sur la pelouse” (Keep off the grass) is the rule. I plopped John in the sandbox and sat and watched him play. I looked around. Women were sitting, talking, and once in a while, one got up and said something to her child. I was bored; I should have brought a book with me. A mother, a tall blonde woman, came and sat next to me.

“Are you new to the playground? Did you just move here?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Is this your son?”

“Yes.”

This was a lie. It had flown out of my mouth. Why did I say yes? I felt foolish, but claiming to be John’s mother seemed to give me some stature with this woman who started to chat about the weather and the maids in the playground. Pointing to a small, little girl, she said that she was very nasty. I should watch that she did not hit my son. Suddenly I heard a scream; it came from the little girl. John had taken something from her. I jumped up and ran to him. He had a piece of what looked like bread in his hand. The little girl’s babysitter arrived, saying in an angry tone of voice, “Your son took Molly’s pretzel. Get him his own.” She pulled the piece of bread away from John. I picked him up and put him back in the carriage. The blonde woman walked over again and told me that the pretzel man was at the park’s entrance. “Children love pretzels. You should get him one.”

Naima had given me a couple of dollars, and so I bought a pretzel, cut it in two and gave half to John. As I bit into the slightly warm pretzel, I spit it out immediately. It was disgusting! Chewy, salty, and with a taste of gasoline…I pulled it away from John, who started to cry, and threw the pretzel in the garbage can. “Don’t cry,” I whispered to him. “Colette will buy something good right away.” As I looked at Naima’s map, I saw that there was a large avenue on the other side of Seventy-seventh Street, and so I walked toward it. I read the sign—Columbus Avenue. Naima had told me that this was where I would find all the shops. I pushed the carriage along the avenue, peering inside the shops. I passed a shoemaker, a butcher, and a dress store. The butcher looked nothing like a French butcher. As I looked at the window display, I recognized nothing, so I continued my walk. Then I saw a bakery where I thought I could get something for John. As we entered the empty store, the woman at the counter asked me what I wanted. I said, “Good morning!” and she looked startled.
Well, maybe here you don’t greet anyone as you enter a store.
In France you have to say, “Bonjour messieurs, mesdames…” If not, no one will serve you. There were long loafs of sliced bread on the shelves, but no baguettes. There were cakes, sweet pastries, and in a bin, round circles of bread—some with sesame seeds. As I pointed to these, the woman said, “How many bagels? Plain or with sesame seeds?” So these were the famous treats Jimmy had been talking about in Paris. This was a bagel. They looked good, so I asked for “One sesame bagel, please.” I gave a piece to John, who stopped crying and sucked on the bread. I took a bite, and I was very surprised. The bagel was chewy, and the crust hard but very tasty, so much better than the pretzel. Happy now, we walked for an hour before heading back to the house.

Back home, Anne was preparing John’s lunch. Maxwell would return from school after three, and Naima was out shopping downtown. Once John was asleep in his crib, Anne prepared our lunch and called me in. In front of me was a sandwich. I wasn’t sure I knew what it was. White bread, no crust and very soft. The sandwich was stuffed with, my mother-in-law told me, tuna fish salad. It was a sickening beige color. I took a bite, and I nearly choked. It was sweet with bits of what I thought were celery.

“What’s in it?”

“Mayonnaise.”

I knew two things: It was not really mayonnaise, and I couldn’t eat this sandwich. I looked around not knowing what to do. While Anne went back to the kitchen, I quickly wrapped half the sandwich in the paper napkin she had given me and hid it in my pocket. I told Anne I could not eat the remaining half and brought it back to the kitchen. As I sat at the table sipping a cup of weak coffee, I thought of Paris and the ham sandwich in a crisp baguette I would have eaten in a café. I suddenly missed Paris and felt out of place and lonely. I wished Jimmy was there with me to cheer me up, and tell me everything would be all right.

I will never know if Anne knew I had thrown out the sandwich, but she never served me another tuna fish sandwich.

Later that afternoon, Jimmy came back and announced that in a few weeks there was going to be a large planner’s conference at Harvard. We would go together to Cambridge. Lots of architectural and planning firms were going to be there, and he could find a good job. I felt better, and my spirits rose further when he whisked me away for some sightseeing.

Times Square overwhelmed me. I found the space exhilarating, with its lights, its immense advertisements panels, the crowds pushing you around, and the traffic. I stood speechless for a while, looking at the large panels of advertising with moving forms. One was advertising cigarettes, and real smoke was coming out of a woman’s mouth. There were so many people, so much noise, and so much color. I loved it and found it astounding. Then we walked over to Fifth Avenue, toward Rockefeller Center. I stood for a while watching people skating in the center of the complex. Suddenly Jimmy whispered in my ear. “What do you want most from New York?”

“An apartment.”

“No, what’s something you want to eat.”

“An ice-cream sundae!”

Hand in hand we walked to a small restaurant near an elegant department store called “Saks Fifth Avenue.” The restaurant, Schrafft’s, was on the side street. As we were ushered to our table, I looked around. The customers were mostly women sitting at small wooden tables, eating ice cream or drinking tea. There were banquettes against the walls, and the low round soft lights gave the restaurant a sort of genteel look. Jimmy ordered a sundae—the dish I had dreamt of for so many years. A bowl of ice cream was placed in front of me. I looked at it in disbelief. It was a monstrous architectural construction. The ice cream was hidden under a mountain of whipped cream with chocolate sauce dripping artistically, topped with toasted almonds. A bright red cherry gloriously crowned it all. It was exactly like the one I had read about years before. But I took one bite and found the ice cream far too sweet and very creamy. The whipped cream was not like Chantilly, the cherry inedible. The dish was so rich that after two teaspoons I couldn’t eat any more. I whispered to Jimmy, “Can you finish it?”

Why did I ever think that an ice-cream sundae would be so marvelous? I don’t even like sweets!

We then went by subway to Wall Street. We first stopped in front of City Hall, which looked like a lovely copy of a French chateau. We walked around the park in front of it and then continued to the Woolworth building. Jimmy explained that the building was famous for its intricate façade.

“I love skyscrapers; there is so much poetry in them. You know it was the tallest building in the world at the time. Look up, Colette. Don’t you think it is like a giant towering cathedral?”

I looked up and looked at the building with Jimmy-eyes, listening to what he was saying. The building was beautiful! But I did not know if it was as beautiful as a French cathedral, and I said so.

“Colette, look at the terra-cotta skin. Its machine made and celebrates the world of today, but it is able to produce a version of medieval stone of the Gothic architecture, just like the Gothic churches celebrated in their own way, the merchants and the artisans.” I wasn’t sure I really understood, but I tried to look at New York though his eyes.

Then we walked to Wall Street. The streets in this part of town amazed me; they were so narrow, and the buildings were so tall. I felt like an ant crawling in the street, looking up and barely seeing the sky. Suddenly, what seemed like an army of people came out of every building, pushing and shoving us.

“What is happening?”

“People are going home, Colette. Downtown is filled with offices and at 5:00
P.M.
they all go home. In a few minutes, Wall Street will be deserted. Let’s wait, and then we can walk around Fulton Street and down to the Battery to look at the Statue of Liberty.”

A half an hour later, Wall Street looked like a ghost town, empty and silent. Slowly we walked to the tip of the island and stood together, admiring the Hudson River and the Statue of Liberty in the distance. New York, once again, seemed to me so extraordinarily beautiful.

The next few days went by slowly. I had little to do. I took John for rides in the park and walked around the neighborhood for hours. There were no cafés where I could just sit and look at people passing by. I also felt shy about entering a restaurant alone, not knowing what to order. I explored the shops on Broadway, looked at the clothes and the beauty salons. I noticed women had very strange hairdos; their hair was teased and puffed up. I thought as a young woman of twenty-three, I must have looked very old fashioned with my curls.

Every night, Murray and Jimmy came home late. Jimmy was busy renewing contact with his old friends and job hunting. At night he often told me who he saw and what he did. The search for an apartment did not seem like a priority to him. We had been in his brother’s house for three weeks, and I felt tension building up in the family. I felt there was tension between Murray and Naima—we were still staying in their bedroom—and between Murray and Anne, who spent every summer with them. Dinners were difficult. There were many silences. Murray would talk about people he had seen without any explanation of why or for what: “I had lunch with the CEO of…” or “As the mayor said to me this morning…”

Growing up in Cairo, the conversations my family had were lively and interesting. The family was large, prosperous, boisterous and loving; my grandmother had had nine children. Here it was more like my French grandmother’s house. No one talked because there was no love between her and me or between my brother and me. Here it seemed it was the same. Anne resented Naima and seemed not to like her very much. Also, Naima and Murray did not seem, at least in my eyes, to love each other. I started to dread these dinners. I tried to tell Jimmy about it, but he thought I was imagining things.

There was also the problem of the food. Naima was a good cook, but on the nights Anne cooked, I ate nearly nothing. I was not invited to help in the kitchen and was too shy to offer. I spent these awkward dinners dreaming of a tomato salad, a good Camembert, and above all, a French baguette stuffed with ham. I would make my escape at lunch. I had discovered a restaurant that did not have tables, just a counter that made it feel more like a French café. The luncheonette, Chock full o’Nuts, served a cream cheese sandwich on very good walnut bread. I became addicted to it and went there every day, telling Anne not to wait for me for lunch. A few days later, I received a phone call from an old friend of my mother’s inviting us to dinner. The night of the dinner, I went looking for a flower shop to bring flowers. I could not find any, and I was worried. Go to dinner to someone’s house and bring nothing? Jimmy kept on telling me it was all right.

My mother’s friend was a tall, slim American woman with dyed red hair. Mr. and Mrs. Lowenstein lived on Park Avenue in a very grand apartment. They had lived in Paris for a year after the war, where they met my mother. “It was a relief to find someone who spoke English so well,” Molly said. “She helped me shop, and we had a great time together.” Philip, her husband, a banker, was slightly pompous. He made fun of the French, saying they took long hours for lunch and did not work hard. At the same time, he told me how delightful my accent was. This was something I would hear time and time again. There were many other guests, but I could not distinguish one from the other as everyone was introduced by their first name. I didn’t know who was married to whom. The men stood at one end of the large living room and the women at the other. They all drank hard liquor. I was offered whisky but turned it down. I would have loved a glass of wine but ended up drinking orange juice. The women talked about shopping, babies, and baby-sitters while I tried to listen to the men’s conversation. Their conversations were about politics and the stock market. I would have liked to join them but decided it was best if I stayed with the women. I had nothing to contribute to the women’s conversations, as I had no children and no home of my own.

Dinner was served from a buffet by a black maid in uniform. We didn’t sit at the dinner table but on chairs and couches. I was not used to it and was afraid to spill my food. The whole evening was painful and boring. As we took our leave, I thanked Molly for the lovely dinner. “We must see you again soon,” she said, as I thought that I would have to find friends of my own very soon.

A week later we left for Boston. I was so happy to leave the house and be alone with Jimmy. The city delighted me. I loved the row of town houses around the Green; the scale of the buildings was a relief after Manhattan’s skyscrapers and mammoth apartment buildings. On our first night, Jimmy took me to his favorite restaurant—a small fish place where we ate broiled flounder and where I had my first taste of clam chowder. The light creamy broth, filled with chopped clams and cubed potatoes, had a wonderful aroma of the sea and fresh thyme. Oysters followed, thick fatty oysters so different from the French ones but still wonderful. They slid down my throat in one gulp. The next day we went to Cambridge for the conference on planning. I liked Cambridge with its small streets, funky boutiques, and cafés with students sipping espresso and discussing their classes, books, or politics. Jimmy left for the conference and mingled with his friends, while I walked around Harvard Yard. What an extraordinary campus, so beautiful, so free, and so peaceful. There were students lying on the grass, talking or just sunning themselves. I thought of my own experience at the Sorbonne. Dreary, immense amphitheaters where the teachers never knew your name. You sat with your friends on hard benches, never meeting the other students. Our only fun was after class, where we’d meet in a café over a ham sandwich and a glass of beer, discussing world politics or Sartre’s latest novel.