Peach Melba

My parents first took me to Las Vegas when I was 14. We were an interesting trio set loose on Sin City, the land of champagne fountains, pasties, and the Rat Pack. My mother was in the habit of wearing a wig then, a strawberry blonde 60's bouffant.(After that initial trip, we stopped at the Grand Canyon [an educational sidebar to cleanse my Vegasized brain?]. Posing under the tree for a photo, Fritzie caught the puff of hair on a branch, lifting it just enough so that everyone on the tour bus could have snapped a shot of her stockinged head.) My dad, 18 years older than my mom, grey-haired and spectacled, wore a black-and-white checkered sports coat and favored whiskey, neat. Their youngest child, fourteen years old, I spent hours in front of the mirror lining my eyes in black and checking out how my legs looked in those white hot pants (yes, the pants were HOT, but this phrase now becomes a test of how old you are...if you know what hot pants are, then you are riding the soul train, honey!)

I learned a lot on that first visit:

1. Even a 14-year-old can get into the Playboy Club if a proper tip is given to the maitre 'd. According to my dad, you can fold a fiver so that it appears to be a twenty.
2. It's possible to sneak past security to Dean Martin's room in the Riviera Hotel, where you can steal a glass from his room-service tray. (When your mother dies, forty years later, you'll find that glass in her china closet.) It is also possible to give money to a bellman in exchange for information about where Dean Martin parks his car. You can wait there, with your mother--because of your mother, to take pictures of a startled Martin and his golf partner.
3. Mascara melts when the thermostat rises above 103.
4. My mother shouldn't drink more than two Singapore Slings.
5. Women still throw panties at the fat Elvis, and apparently no one has told this Elvis to lose the white stretchy jumpsuits.
6. When you are 14, a pretty nice world exists in a paperback copy of The Godfather, an ice-cold Tab, the cool well of  a pool, and a brown and white polka dot bikini. (Did my parents KNOW what I was reading?)   

A couple of nights into our trip, after hearing Rodney Dangerfield "get no respect," we discovered the Riviera Coffee Shop, Open 24 Hours. Imagine this at 2 a.m.: a threesome of small burgers served with crispy shoestring fries (before sliders were "invented"!), a towering turkey club layered with classic blt ingredients, a quivering slice of lemon meringue pie served with steaming Joe in mugs stamped with gold curlicue Rs. Dinner food at the shows wasn't memorable, although the list of offerings printed on creamy paper and orders taken by tuxedoed waiters who called me "Miss," left with me a lust for white-tableclothed "fancy" restaurants.

Probably because I was 14 and could wear hot pants, I ordered dessert every night. One night, I discovered Peach Melba: a short dish of vanilla ice cream, the slightest coating of bean-speckled white rising up the glass, cradled by a promiscuous peach half seemingly floating in a puddle of sugared raspberry puree. I was a goner.  

 

 

The way the story goes is that in 1892 Auguste Escoffier, the legendary French chef at the London Savoy, whipped up Peach Melba in honor of La Nellie Melba, a celebrated Australian opera singer. Escoffier, ever the lover of women, created this dish for her (according to his biographers, he honored many women in this way--much to the consternation of his wife), thinking Peche Melba to be as lovely as Nellie's voice. Escoffier served the dish to Nellie in a swan carved from ice, but I can testify that it is just as enchanting without the swan. If I ever have to order a last meal, I know what dessert will be.

 

A few years back, Gary and I found ourselves in Paris, blinking in surprise at our good fortune. We fell down the proverbial rabbit hole (or should I say lapin?) one night while drinking martinis in a little Southside bar. Celebrating a turn of good luck, after a year or so lost in the desert, we let the cold gin numb our tongues and create frosty rivers down the backs of our throats. We were stunned to find ourselves suddenly nearly alone in the bar, crowds gathering on the street. Joining them, we followed their gazes upward to a double rainbow, shimmering in watery lines.

 

"I have to go to France," Gary said, taking my hand. "You're coming with me."

 

With the pressure of his hand on mine, all of my excuses lost themselves.

It's true that there are no fat women in Paris. Books have even been written on the subject, making claims that lithe limbs are the result of small plates, but I've seen these women at the cafes, their heart-shaped posteriors planted in wicker chairs facing the promenade, ice cream and slices of chocolate spooned into their pretty mouths. Here's a news flash...French women eat dessert. Every day.

Just like a craving for ice cream, Paris gets into your head--Hemingway's moveable feast and all. Sometimes, when the city fades a little in my mind, and I can't smell or taste its flavors, I read about it, and je peux parler français again. If you find yourself needing a little Paris, pick up Elizabeth Bard's Lunch in Paris.

 

 

Or visit her blog Lunch in Paris for updates about her continuing love story with her French husband,  young son, and all things French.

 

Recently, Bard and Gwendel opened Scaramouche Artisan Glacier (English subtitle: Adventures in Ice Cream) where they craft sinful confections together in Provence. Here they seem to have conjured Escoffier and Nellie.

 

 

 

Want a bite?

 

Window Gazing

My step was lighter then.

After school, after I'd dropped my briefcase on my bedroom floor and laced up my tennis shoes, after some sort of dinner (often for one), I was out the door and up the long curved driveway that emptied onto Bower Hill Road. At the top of the hill, my walk turned into a jog, then a run, and I focused on the repetitive sidewalk squares as I pounded past the synagogue, the Catholic grade school, and the entrance to the community pool. About 30 minutes later, I’d turn back, this time at a slower pace, letting my muscles cool down. I walked leisurely past the single-family homes whose lawns butted up against the sidewalk. I took note of these homes every night, chronicling and charting changes and additions: the newly-cut grass, the half-cleared picnic table, the colorful whirligig spinning in the small garden. The homes nearest the crosswalk were simple brick ranches, mostly pale yellow brick, now and then interrupted by the roughness of deep red, three steps leading to their concrete porches, overhung by patterned aluminum awnings. As I got closer to my complex, the houses grew, expanding into two-story stone constructions. Poppies and purple puffs on long stems waved in flower gardens, and redwood planters barely contained tumbling blooms. A cool darkness was just starting to fall, and sugary yellow lights clicked on up and down the street.

 Oh, how I loved to look into the windows, drawn by the emanating light like an insect. I don’t remember the sum of what I saw, save for some white lace curtains, an abandoned game on a dining room table, and a set of rich maroon velvet chairs.  I longed to curl my back into the dark plush, to roll the dice and count off spaces, to own the view from inside the lace-trimmed windows, to be part of the circle within. The soft light cutting into the near darkness comforted me, beckoning. I usually stopped at the last house nearest my own crosswalk, a rambling Cape Cod sided in white with red trim, the entrance just off kilter a bit to the right of the sidewalk. The door was a red beacon, and I had to stop myself from touching the elaborate floral wreath encircling the engraved knocker. 

Now, so many years later, I still window gaze when I pass through a neighborhood at night, the windows again backlit with promise, though more elusive. Then, I could outrun life to grasp a little of the light in my palms, to roll it and form it into something of my own. I knew just a little about loss, but nothing at all about the deep wistfulness that would follow.

 

When Gary and I looked at each other across the sticky table at Cain's Saloon and decided to get married, I told him "our daughter will have your eyes."  He foretold the future (some of which has come true, but, boy-oh-boy, he shouldn't give up his day job). His sweet "we will" list included taking me to New England, to visit the homes of Twain and Hawthorne and Thoreau. (It's probably an English major thing, this desire to stand where they stood, to breathe whatever molecules remain, to collect their discarded words, to fold up their shadows in my notebook.)

Well, we went a lot of places, but New England wasn't at the top of the list. Hold on: I'm hitting the fast forward button.

We're driving from one rink to another for the Hockey Night in Boston tourney, our turquoise Astro van bumping over roads crossing through Massachusetts and New Hampshire.

"Stop!" I yell.

Whenever anyone says anything unexpected (let's make that just plain says anything) in our family, all six of us jump into the conversation with loose lips: 

"Are you sick?"
"I'm going to be late!"
"Quiet, kids, I can't hear your mother!"
"What's going on?"
"Why won't anyone tell me what's going on!"

"Gary! Pull over right now! It's Robert Frost's farm!"

And so it was. Quietly unassuming, with no gate or box office, Robert Frost's farm rose like a mirage in its white-boarded simplicity.

 

 

But we had promises to keep, so I stood rooted in the gravel at the side of the road and breathed him in. My children had spilled from the van, looked at the nondescript farm house, and then at me through skeptical eyes.

My own eyes were fixed on the upper window. the one whose wavy glass framed the room where Frost retreated every day to write.

"It's a house, Mom."

Apparently my children haven't inherited my window gazing gene.

The next year, we made it to Mark Twain's Hartford house, a curved, spinning kind of house tucked into trees (his neighbor was Harriet Beecher Stowe!),

 

where I wanted to slip a book off of his library shelves and make myself comfortable at his table with a cup of tea. Maybe he'd join me in spirit, if I did.

 

 

The docent looked a little nervous, so we retraced our steps to the visitor's center, where we had tea at the Murasaki Cafe.

 

Last year, Gary and I flew to Boston to watch our daughter, a senior at U.C. Davis, play lacrosse. "Well, I made a mistake," he said, "but I think it might be a good thing." It turns out that a miscalculation in dates gave us an extra day, which we spent in Concord, visiting the homes of Hawthorne, Alcott, and Thoreau.

 

 

 

"See, I keep my promises!"

Before we walked the Concord sidewalk leading to Orchard House, where Bronson Alcott trimmed bed legs to match the slope of a crooked floor, to Hawthorne's pink house, that he exited through the back door and climbed the hill so he wouldn't run into Bronson, to Emerson's white square home across the street, where the Transcendentalists gathered, we ate a fine and hearty lunch at the Colonial Inn (which was Hawthorne's grandaddy's home).

 

We sat by a window and feasted on puffy omelets and chicken pot pie.

 

I like to think that the rustic chicken pot pie (such tender chunks of chicken in thick cream sauce--the crust kneaded and stretched over the dish--bright green peas, carrot coins, and ridged slices of celery coating every spoonful) was also a comfort to Hawthorne's family who might have eaten here,
 

 

and that someone might be gazing wistfully into this window as she made her way home, after first running hard, then slowing to take in the sights.