Cafe Brasserie, 1977

I am ten, my mother is 49 and we are out to lunch.

I order: escargots please with extra bread for the sauce please and a Shirley temple with an extra cherry, thank you.

Mum orders a bottle of champagne and the pate.

And then for seconds, it is steak au poivre with frites for both of us and the steak very well done, please. Mum wants hers almost burnt please. She will send the steak back once. I beg her not to send it back a second time. She laughs at me and then tells the waiter the pate is too cold and the champagne is not cold enough. She orders more bread. We eat bread and butter as if it is the last day for bread and butter on earth.

Something about her fur coat sliding off the banquette as she pours the champagne makes me think that everything should be toasted and that I can't wait until I can drink champagne and pull it out of it's silver ice house and make clinking and banging sounds for emphasis.

Certain hands are meant to be wrapped around bottles. Manicured hands, long fingered and freckled. Pale hands with red varnish as she liked to call it.

Over mousse au chocolat, we talk and talk. I am never bored at lunch, just the two of us. It's about friends and and a new party dress, and what sonnet I should memorize for acting acting class.
She recites this line: "Being your slave what should I do but tend upon the hours and times of your desires." Her eyes fill with tears and she says Sonnet 57 is her favorite. She cries a little more, so I tell her about the A I got on my geography report on the Panama Canal. I explain the canal's complicated system of locks to her.

She says we really must go to Panama sooner or later but we better get moving or we'll miss the double feature and the Carnegie Hall Cinema. It's two Fred Astaire movies. Fred Astaire is the first man I have ever deeply loved.

In the cab, close and hot, she smells of brandy and sweet  Fleur de Rocaille perfume. I nestle into her fox coat, like an animal. I like to wrap myself around her. I know where she is if I am holding her tight and I know she can't be sad if I am close. She pets my head me and whispers I am like a cat but I kno the truth.

I miss that meal the most.

I also miss the daughter I will not have because I would have given her long lunches and matinees and big celebrations for small victories and she would miss them when I was gone and fill the ache by passing on some small echo of a lunch long ago to her daughter.

Everyone should have a daughter for at least one lunch and a double feature circa 1977.