Tender at the Bone (10 page)

He turned to me. “Have you ever had a soufflé?” he asked. I thought about La Belle Aurore, but heard myself saying, “No, never.”

I was rewarded with a huge smile. Monsieur turned to his wife and said happily, “What a pleasure, to watch a child eat her first soufflé!” She inclined her head in regal agreement. He winked at me.

“Close your eyes,” he commanded as I took the first bite. I did, and my mouth closed over the hot, fragrant air only to have it disappear at once. But the flavor stayed behind, the chocolate reverberating from one side of my mouth to the other. I took another bite, hoping that I could make the texture last a little. I couldn’t, but I kept trying, my eyes closed, until my spoon went back to the plate and found nothing there.

“Do you always eat like this?” I asked Béatrice after we had thanked her mother for dinner and climbed back up to the children’s quarters.

“Oh no,” she said, “only when I dine with my parents. And that happens very rarely.”

But on Sunday the table was once again set for four, and Monsieur du Croix was smiling with anticipatory glee. The first dish was a clear consommé that tasted as if a million chickens had died to make it. Eating it I suddenly laughed and Monsieur looked quizzically in my direction. I didn’t know what to say; I had been thinking of one of my mother’s prize dishes, canned consommé chilled until it jelled, topped with sour cream and supermarket salmon caviar. I had to say something, so I blurted out, “I was wondering what happens when you chill this soup.” Monsieur looked to the heavens and exclaimed, “She even
thinks
like a gourmet!”

“Ris de veau à la financière!” he announced next; it was one of the dishes from Aunt Birdie’s wedding menu, but I had never tried it. Alice didn’t like sweetbreads; “Pancreas!” she’d said, as if the idea were absurd. My stomach twisted a little but I did not want to disappoint Monsieur du Croix and I resolutely picked up my fork. It crunched through the crisp vol-au-vent pastry to skewer a bit of sweetbread. “Who could not like this?” I thought to myself, savoring the softness of the sweetbread against the pastry. “It’s wonderful!” I cried.

“You must bring your friend again,” said Monsieur du Croix to Béatrice.

“Oui, Papa,”
she said meekly. As we climbed the stairs to pack she said, “You will come again, won’t you?” She said it again, after we were settled on the train. At the very last minute the chauffeur had handed each of us a package. Inside were a dozen pastries far more beautiful than anything we had seen in the pastry shops. “I think my father likes you,” said Béatrice simply.

I went back the next weekend, and the weekend after that and then it was just assumed that when Béatrice went home I went with her. We saw very little of her mother, but her father almost always ate with us. He called us “
mes deux filles
,” and he set out to please and surprise us at each meal, introducing us to caviar, lobster bisque, marrons glacés.

“What a bore!” said Béatrice, “I wish he were interested in sports.” But I had begun to see that her rebellion was just a pose and that she was secretly thrilled to have her father’s attention. “Will you help me bake something for his birthday?” she asked, and we began combing through cookbooks, looking for something to please him. “What about a lemon soufflé?” I was remembering the recipe from La Belle Aurore.

“Aren’t they difficult? He would be so pleased.”

I didn’t know enough to know that soufflés were hard to make, and the recipe Béatrice found was very precise. “I wonder why we are supposed to clean the bowl with lemon?” I asked.

“Because,” said Béatrice with authority, “the smallest amount of grease in the bowl will keep the egg whites from whipping properly.”

“How do you know that?” I asked.

She didn’t answer. “We have to make sure the top of the soufflé dish has no butter on it either,” she said smugly. “That way the batter won’t slip as it rises.” I realized that she had been doing some studying on the sly.

Monsieur du Croix beamed when we carried the soufflé into the dining room. Even Madame du Croix smiled. Béatrice went pink with pleasure. “I think that is the first present I’ve ever given him that he really liked,” she said later as we lay in bed. Even in the dark I could hear the smile in her voice.

Having Béatrice as a friend had improved my status at school. And I had learned enough French to start catching up with the class. I spent the first week of May memorizing a Ronsard poem,
and when Madame Cartet called on me in recitation class I began, “
Mignonne, allons voir si la rose”
and realized, suddenly, that I was going to get it all, every word, correctly. When I finished there was a sigh and I knew that the entire class had been with me, holding its collective breath as the rose faded on the vine.
“Vingt!”
said Madame Cartet. She actually sounded happy to be giving me a perfect score.

But I wasn’t the only one doing my homework. One lunchtime in late May Monsieur du Croix began to talk about the coming summer and his favorite vegetable, the tomato. “No, Papa,” said Béatrice, “the tomato is a fruit.” Monsieur looked slightly stunned and then said, “I beg your pardon,” as he reached out and rumpled her hair.

“You’ve been studying!” I said as we climbed the stairs. Béatrice blushed. “He’s never really talked to me before,” she said quietly.

And then, suddenly, it was June. School was over. I spoke French. I could go home.

I wasn’t nearly as happy as I had expected to be.

“You’re coming back aren’t you?” asked Béatrice. I hadn’t considered the future, but now I did. I thought about my friends in New York. Jeanie suddenly seemed hopelessly unsophisticated. I thought about our small apartment, with its peeling gold bathtub. I thought about my mother’s moods and her poisonous messes.

“Yes,” I said, “I’m coming back.”

DEVIL’S FOOD

And I did go back. But after three years in a French school I was tired of girls and uniforms and Catholic school. Jeanie’s letters were filled with the assassination of President Kennedy, civil rights marches, and guys with guitars in Washington Square. She was listening to Joan Baez and going to coffee houses. I wanted to go to a real high school, have a boyfriend, and learn to drive a car. I had visions of sock hops and proms and flirting in the hallway.

My plan was to finish high school in New York, but my mother had different ideas. In one of her more manic phases she sold the house Dad had built in Wilton and bought a different one, on the water, in the next town. “It’s a surprise,” she said when she presented my father with her fait accompli, “you’ll love it.” I think Dad hated the house on sight, but he was too polite to say so. He accepted it. What else could he do? My grandmother, the impresario, had paid for the land on which my father’s handmade house stood, and the title was in my mother’s name.

Our new house was white, with bay windows and an attached garage on a street of proper houses. The kitchen was fully equipped with avocado-green appliances. There was even a dishwasher, something we had never had before. The sprawling living room had wall-to-wall carpeting and a fireplace. The dining room had a view of Long Island Sound. Downstairs there was also a book-lined, pine-paneled den that Mom called “the library,” a screened porch shaded by an ancient willow, and my parents’ bedroom. Upstairs was my domain.

I think Mom had visions of some cozy mother-daughter relationship, where we would sit in my fluffy pink bedroom and whisper secrets in the dark.

But I immediately painted my bedroom red and made friends with all the wrong people. I didn’t want to talk to my mother, much less whisper with her, and it would have taken torture to make me tell her any kind of secret. “Just leave me alone!” I found myself shouting, over and over.

Mom and Dad were taken aback to find that their adorable daughter had turned into such an awkward, troublesome teenager. When I started teasing my hair, wearing tight pants, and circling my eyes with black eyeliner they looked at me as if I were some creature from another planet. When I came home drunk they pretended not to notice. They weren’t thrilled with my new best friend Julie either. “She’s
fast,”
Mom insisted, using one of those words I hated. And occasionally she would ask in a plaintive voice, “Aren’t there any boys in your class who don’t want to be mechanics?” I didn’t even deign to answer.

My parents were upset and annoyed and they had lost the habit of caring for a child. On top of that, Dad found commuting tiresome and Mom hated suburban life. My mother began spending her days in town and staying for dinner. By ten I’d find myself listening for the inevitable phone call: “It’s so late. Do you mind if we
don’t come back?” In the end my parents gave up all pretense of coming home during the week. As my mother said to her friends, “Ruthie is so mature.”

I proved my maturity by hosting an endless party. My new friends were happy to have a place to hang out when we skipped school. Which we did regularly. By November I had convinced myself that I had better things to do than read
Moby Dick
and learn about the Continental Congress. Cook, for instance.

I had been cooking all my life, but only as a way to please grownups; now I discovered that it had other virtues. I wasn’t pretty or funny or sexy. I wasn’t a cheerleader or a dancer and nobody ever asked me to the drive-in. I yearned for romance and dreamed of candlelight suppers, but I didn’t have the nerve to invite Tommy Calfano to dinner. It was so much easier to say, “Why doesn’t everybody come over to my house?”

They were happy to: it was a parentless paradise. The party was on. We drank. We danced. We watched television. We played strip poker. Mostly, however, we ate.

I started with the recipes I had learned from Mrs. Peavey and Alice, but I soon branched out. My mother’s cookbooks all had titles like
How to Make Dinner in Five Minutes Flat
but I started going through magazines, clipping recipes. It never occurred to me that a recipe might be too hard; hadn’t I mastered soufflés at the age of thirteen? I understood the rhythm of the kitchen and I was very relaxed. And very lucky.

If anyone had cared about the outcome things might have been different, but everything I cooked turned out fine. I had a perfect audience: anything would impress my friends and nothing would impress my parents. And so I tried recipes that took four days or had twenty-five steps, just for the fun of it. I developed the asbestos skin of a cook, stirring the pans with my fingers if there were no handy spoons and occasionally forgetting a potholder before reaching into the oven. I learned to ignore minor burns. And
to improvise: my mother’s kitchen was ill-equipped, so I used a wine bottle for a rolling pin and beat egg whites with a forty-year-old eggbeater.

When I shopped, I wandered greedily through the supermarket, picking up any item that captured my imagination. If my parents wondered why it cost so much to keep a teenage girl in food they never said. Mom handed over a wad of cash at the beginning of each week murmuring, “Teenagers are so hungry.”

They are. But they like sweets best of all, and that year I discovered the secret of every experienced cook: desserts are a cheap trick. People love them even when they’re bad. And so I began to bake, appreciating the alchemy that can turn flour, water, chocolate, and butter into devil’s food cake and make it disappear in a flash.

Boys, in particular, seemed to like it.

DEVIL’S FOOD CAKE

1 cup milk

¾ cup cocoa

⅓ cup white sugar

1 cup butter

1 cup brown sugar

3 eggs

¼ cup sour cream

1 teaspoon vanilla

2 cups sifted cake flour

1½ teaspoons baking soda

½ teaspoon salt

Preheat oven to 350°
.