“No, no. Painting like art.”
“You’re a painter, your mother’s a gardener. Art runs in the family, I guess,” he said, making a “Come on” wave with the menu. I was surprised—I’d never made the connection between my mother’s gardening and my painting, but hadn’t I learned about color from gladiolus and phlox, about repetition of form from ornamental cabbages, about texture from lamb’s ear and dill? Maybe I owed more to her than I thought.
Henry led me back into what had been the Schulers’ living room, now cozily filled with tables, most of them empty by now. In one corner, a couple leaned together, their conversation tense and low. Across from them, a table of four was finishing up their desserts, leaning back in their chairs in satisfaction. It looked like they had demolished something chocolate, and I restrained myself from grabbing the plate and licking it. Note to self: Buy some damn groceries. “How’s this?” We had arrived at a table in the corner of the back room.
“This is great, actually,” I said. Henry pulled out a chair and I slid into it.
“I’ll get a cheeseburger going for you pronto. Medium? You want a salad while you wait?”
“Please and thank you.”
He clicked his heels together like a butler and headed off toward the kitchen. A few minutes later, a waitress, a little wisp of a girl, pale and delicate in her all-black uniform, came by bearing a water glass and a salad. I had barely finished it when the burger arrived, and it was as amazing as it had smelled, so high I had to smash it down to get it into my mouth, a perfect balance of salt and crisp vegetables and a sweet-and-sour spread on the bun that puckered my tongue. I was fairly sure I could have eaten another one.
By the time I finished the burger, the room had emptied. I dragged the last of the French fries lazily through ketchup with one hand as I wiped off the other and used it to open my grandmother’s notebook, disappearing back into her story.
I had just finished reading my grandmother’s report on her evening with the Surrealists when Henry arrived. “Mind if I join you?” he asked, and then, without waiting for my answer, spread his hands on the table and slid into the chair opposite mine with an audible sigh of relief. “What a night. How was your dinner?”
Pulling myself out of the Jazz Age and into the present, I refocused, looking over at my plate, now entirely empty except for a few crumbs and the thin remnants of a pool of ketchup. “Horrible,” I said.
“Clearly. You want some dessert? There’s a really great apple cobbler with homemade vanilla ice cream, or a moist chocolate lava cake, with this fabulous chocolate sauce in the center that oozes all over the place when you put your spoon into it.”
In my head, my mother admonished me not to eat dessert, pointing out how easily I gained weight, and that it wasn’t appropriate to eat dessert in front of a man.
I told my mother I was having a tough time of it and a little chocolate would help.
My mother informed me that this was eating my feelings.
Yes, I agreed. Yes, it was.
“I want that chocolate thing, with the moist and the ooze,” I said.
Henry nodded. “An excellent choice. Ava,” he said, raising his hand to call over the waitress who had brought me the salad. “Would you please bring us a chocolate lava cake?”
“On it,” she said, and disappeared again.
“So what are you reading?”
I flipped back to the cover, as though to show him the title, but of course there was only the blank front of the notebook. “It’s interesting, actually. These are some of my grandmother’s journals. I’m reading about this trip she took to Paris in 1924.”
“Paris in 1924? Like, F. Scott Fitzgerald Paris? Hemingway Paris?”
“I don’t think she was hanging with Hemingway exactly. At least not that she’s mentioned. But she was definitely enjoying herself. Before, she was this quiet, bookish wallflower, and now she’s hanging out at cafés with artists and bobbing her hair.”
“Maybe she changed.”
“Maybe,” I said slowly, closing the notebook and running my finger along the edge, as if to seal the words inside. And then she must have changed again, because the grandmother I knew hadn’t been like this at all. My grandmother had been like my mother—stiff and formal, judgmental and proper. What had happened to her? Why had she come back from Paris? And how had she turned from this fun-loving girl who drank with Surrealists and loved books and writing and couldn’t bear committee meetings into . . . well, into my mother?
“It’s been funny reading these, getting this look inside her. I mean, I’m sure she was different when she was younger. And these were her journals, so she was pretty unguarded. You don’t get to see that kind of honesty often.”
“Or ever,” Henry said. “Does it make you feel guilty? Reading her private thoughts?”