MY OLDER SISTER DID NOT DATE IN HIGH SCHOOL. WE LIVED IN Altadena, California, and both attended John Muir High—a school famous at that time for firing a teacher who refused to shave off a beard (he was later reinstated). This was in the late 1960s, when hair was political, controversial. I had crushes on boys just because they had long hair. My sister’s crushes, if she had them, were secret.
She was two years older than I was, and a serious student and violinist. She came home from school, practiced, gave violin lessons to small children, and studied. She emerged from her room to eat dinner, then returned to her lair, shutting the door behind her. After she graduated, she remained at home and enrolled in the local junior college to learn Japanese. Her goal was to move to Japan and study violin and violin pedagogy with Shinichi Suzuki—and eventually she did just that. In the meantime, her college life did not seem so different from her high school years; she left in the morning and returned home around dinner time. After eating with our parents and me, she retired to her room to practice and study. She had a musician’s keen ear and was gifted in languages—she was already fluent in Spanish—but Japanese was so much more difficult, she decided she needed a tutor.
“I’m sure you can find one through the college,” my mother told her.
My sister decided on another method and confided in me. Being the ever-admiring younger sibling, I was amazed by her strategy. She had determined who was the handsomest Japanese speaker in the college library and, drawing on some untapped reserve of courage, asked him to tutor her.
He agreed.
The handsome tutor, it turned out, was almost thirty years old and himself in need of a tutor. He had been born and raised in Japan and had just moved to California from France, where he’d been for seven years. He spoke Japanese, of course, and was fluent in French, but his English was rudimentary.
As the weeks passed, my parents and I heard a lot about the tutor—how intelligent he was, how handsome, how resourceful. Soon, my sister stopped coming home for dinner. She was eating with him, she said, at a Japanese restaurant across from the school. Then they studied together in the library. She arrived home later and later, proscribed by the last bus, which delivered her around eleven p.m. Her Japanese was improving in leaps and bounds.
In the spring, long after she’d confided in me, my sister told our parents that she and her tutor were officially dating. Our parents said it was time to meet him. Concerned about the age difference, and the obvious sway he held over their daughter, they were poised to disapprove.
Sensing this, my sister put them off for a month or two—he was studying for a test, she was studying for a test, he’d taken a weekend job escorting Japanese businessmen around Los Angeles. She clearly now wanted to keep him all to herself for as long as she could. But our parents applied a steady pressure. She was eighteen and free, of course, to be with whomever she liked, but so long as she was living under their roof, well, they had a right to know the man she was dating. Now if she were to move out …
My sister waited until the right occasion presented itself, when introductions could be made on neutral territory. She announced at dinner one night that the following Saturday, there would be a morning recital of Suzuki-method violin students in West Los Angeles. She needed to be there. If we liked, we could go as a family, she suggested, and the tutor could come with us. She shrugged. Afterward, maybe we could all go out to lunch.
My parents agreed instantly. My mother lost no time in making a reservation at our family’s favorite restaurant, Robaire’s.
In our family, going to a restaurant was a great luxury. Oh, we ate dinner at a local coffeeshop maybe twice a month, and started out yearly camping trips with diner eggs and hash browns. Otherwise, we ate in a place like Robaire’s once or twice a year for a special occasion, a birthday, our parents’ anniversary. In all dining venues, we followed a strict protocol: no milk for the kids (there was plenty of milk at home), no cocktails for the adults (you could buy a whole bottle of wine for the price of two glasses), no meat with breakfasts (an entire pound of bacon cost as much as those three meager slices).
Robaire’s was a cavernous old candlelit French restaurant on La Brea Boulevard not far from the county art museum. The menu was what I’d now call medium-priced, although back then, the numbers listed discreetly to the right of each item seemed like variously sized guilt bombs, a minefield of extravagance, of instant impoverishment. Each time we went, I would scan the menu and find the one or two priciest items and announce with great, resolute primness, “I will have the Chateaubriand.”
“Ho ho ho,” my parents would say. “Very funny.”
I’d scan the menu again, locate the least expensive items, and choose from among them.
At around twelve years old, I lit on a favorite item, which had two virtues: not only was it inexpensive, it made the waiter stop and look at me with interest. Clearly, not many adolescent girls ordered chicken liver omelets. But I loved the plump envelope of softly cooked yellow egg full of wine-dark sauce and melting braised livers.
When the morning of the recital/introduction arrived, my mother was ill. So my father, my sister, and I set forth without her. I was given no choice but to accompany them, and I was curious enough about my sister’s first boyfriend not to resent it.
We drove to a street not far from the junior college, where a slim Japanese man waited for us in front of a modest white apartment building. The tutor was indeed handsome—and distinctly foreign. He clambered into the back of our Dodge van next to my sister, then reached forward to shake my father’s hand, then mine.
As my father drove, I stole glances into the back seat. The tutor’s light blue shirt had an oddly cut collar, his beige pants an unusual nubbly texture, and he carried a shoulder bag that was so much like a purse, I couldn’t stop peering back at it. I was trying to anticipate my parents’ reaction, so each of his peculiarities was deeply worrisome. In retrospect, I see that he simply dressed like a European, a Frenchman. The carrying case. Linen pants.
More strange than anything else was that this slim, good-looking man was obviously quite fond of my bookish, slightly overweight sister. Each time I looked in the back seat, they were clutching and rubbing each other’s hands. At the recital, they nervously kneaded each other’s thigh throughout the performance.
Soon enough, we were seated in the familiar, convivial darkness of Robaire’s. My father turned to our guest. “The food here is excellent. I know, as a student, you don’t have many opportunities to eat in a place like this. So please,” he said. “Have anything you want.”
I duly scanned the menu for the most expensive items, but did not make my usual threat: too shy, I think, on the unprecedented occasion of meeting the man my sister loved. A man who, incidentally, ordered a Scotch first thing. Much to my surprise, my father followed suit.
“Just water,” my sister said.
“Water’s fine,” I echoed.
When the waiter came to take our order, I went first: chicken liver omelet. My sister, frowning at the menu, needed more time.
The tutor went next. He spoke to the waiter at length in French. I watched his finger stray through the menu; it paused here in the list of appetizers, there in the salads, there again among the entrées. The waiter scribbled diligently. Then the tutor picked up the heavy leather-bound wine list.
I checked my father’s face to see how he was taking this. He wore a thin smile, but his eyes were glazed. When his own turn to order came, he said, “The chicken,” and snapping the menu shut, handed it to the waiter.
My sister asked for a small dinner salad. “I’m not hungry,” she said.
The waiter withdrew. My father, with the same thin smile, turned to the tutor. “So,” he said. “Tell me about yourself. Where are you from?”
“Osaka.” The tutor answered this and each of my father’s subsequent questions with unruffled good cheer. He was in business, a small firm, imports and exports, here to learn English, never married, parents living, and so forth until the first course arrived. His first course, that is.
We watched the tutor extricate escargots from their swirled taupe shells and sip white wine. He offered us each a little coil of black meat. My sister gamely opened her mouth.
Next came a pumpkin-orange lobster bisque. Still, he was the only one eating. This appeared not to bother him. He offered my sister a clump of stained white meat. She shook her head. Wine? A sip? What about me?
As intrigued as I was to see items from forbidden areas of the menu materialize at our table, I was far too mortified to sample them. No, no thanks. That’s okay, I told him.
Finally everyone’s entrées arrived: he’d ordered frog legs, which came battered and were blessedly unrecognizable.
A glum silence reigned. I had never enjoyed my omelet less. My sister’s salad was only slightly mussed when removed. My father cleared his plate, swept it clean with a piece of bread.
The tutor’s dessert was a thin cross-section of a many-layered gâteau resting in a pool of cream. I could not resist taking a bite, but by then the terror—the sympathetic terror I felt for my sister—made everything taste like wax. Brandy. Coffee. Would his courses ever stop coming?
When the bill arrived, the tutor reached for it, but his was not an aggressive gesture. “No, no, no, I insist,” my father said, and while his was not exactly a heartfelt protest, that was that.
On the ride home, my sister and the tutor whispered and giggled in the backseat. My father and I gazed straight ahead. When we reached the tutor’s apartment house, my sister surprised us by jumping out as well. “I’ll be home after dinner,” she said.
Alone with my father, I ventured a comment. “He really seems to like her.”
My father’s cheek twitched but he said nothing, and we rode the rest of the way home in silence.
My father duly went into a closed-door conference with my mother.
When my sister came home around ten-thirty, my parents presented a unified front to her. They did not approve of the tutor. My sister should stop seeing him immediately. The ensuing fight lasted deep into the night. He was too old, they said. He was inconsiderate. A freeloader, a mooch. At the very least, a big spender of other people’s money. Why, his meal alone had cost more than all three of ours together!
Every now and then, my sister’s tearful wail soared above the fray. “But you told him to order whatever he wanted,” she cried. And, “He tried to pay and Dad wouldn’t let him!”
All of which is to say that my parents gave my sister no choice in the matter concerning this man. She didn’t do it right away, but eventually, inevitably, she married him.
3 large eggs
Salt
Butter
Chicken liver filling (see below)
Beat 3 large eggs and a pinch of salt with a rubber spatula until mixed, no longer. Heat butter in an omelet pan until foamy. Add the eggs. With the spatula, move the cooked eggs and let the uncooked eggs run underneath to the hot surface of the pan. Add the chicken liver filling on one half of the omelet. Fold the omelet over. Cook for a minute. The eggs should be soft.
5 chicken livers, trimmed of fat and membrane
Flour seasoned to taste with salt and pepper and a few grains of cayenne pepper
2 tablespoons butter
2 tablespoons minced onion
Red wine
Dredge the chicken livers in the seasoned flour and set aside. Heat the butter in a sauté pan until foamy. Sauté the minced onion until wilted over medium-hot heat. Add the chicken livers and brown. Add a splash of wine and enough water to deglaze the pan and make a sauce. Turn down the heat. Cover and cook over low heat until the livers are tender, about 15 minutes. Correct the seasonings. Keep warm while preparing the eggs or make ahead and heat before filling the omelet.