The first time I ever went to a restaurant, the waiter, I have been told, thought me delightful and my little sister even more so, in spite of the sad truth that children to waiters are professionally hell.
She was four, and I was six. We behaved nicely; we spoke neither too high nor too low, we sat up straight, we spilled almost not at all, and at the end of the meal she said to our man, “Oh, I am so sorry to leave all these dishes for you to wash, and a nearly clean napkin too!” He, who already loved us, or so it appears in Apocrypha, grew dewy-eyed.
Whatever his feelings then, he took care of us for some thirty years more in one or another of the respectable restaurants in Southern California, and when I strolled, a little while ago, into a beach chop house, there he was, celebrating his last night in the profession, and we embraced and touched several glasses together before he left for his chicken farm. If he wanted to take time from his capons and his poults to write a book, I cannot help believing that he would speak kindly of the two little girls who got such a fine start under his snowy, flickering napkin.
That was in Los Angeles, at Marcel’s, in 1914 or a little later. There were a few good small restaurants there at that time, a kind of backwater from San Francisco, undoubtedly. Marcel’s was, according to my parents and a great many other hungry provincials, very good indeed. And Pinafore was playing a matinee at the Mason Opera House. So my mother took us twenty-five miles each way on the trolley to see it and have our first meal in public, which she and my father decided—with no dispute—should be as fine as possible. I can remember nothing about it until we were sitting in the small room lighted with candles behind pink silk lampshades, with incredible expanses of snow-white linen, and a forest of glasses sparkling everywhere at our eye level, and with a fine, thin-nosed man dressed in black to take care of us—only us.
I do not know if Mother ordered in advance. I do know that she threw any dietetic patterns overboard. It seemed almost unbearable that a little fire should burn there at our table so dangerously, under a silver pan, and that the man could lean over it without going up in flames, and put the plates so tenderly before us with a napkin over his fingers, while candles flared in the middle of the day and people we had never seen before ate in the same room, as if we were invisible.
There was no mention of milk to drink, but instead we lifted the tall goblets of forbidden ice water waveringly to our lips, and looked up over them at the pink rose nodding in a silver vase between us and the world. There may have been other things to eat, but the chafing-dish chicken is all my sister and I can remember now, and of course the wonderful waiter who kept on remembering us too, after that first hushed luncheon.
It was a good start for us, that is if, in a world of shifting values, it is good to start two humans off with such firm high ones. I often think of it, almost as strongly as I did one day in Paris when I was lunching in the back part of the Café de Paris and saw that the table next to mine was being dressed with particular care. Finally people came to sit at it: a handsome, famous actor, his beautiful British wife who was divorced from him, and their two children. The little girl was very English and of course lived with her mother, and the little boy was completely Parisian, as any reader of the gossip columns could have told you. But they all spoke easily together and were charming and happy. It was obviously a rendezvous that had been kept often by the four separated people, there in that opulent, gracious eating house.
The father and mother drank a cocktail and talked pleasurably, while the children sipped with courtesy at a very good sherry, enough to cover the bottoms of their proper little glasses. I forget the rest of the meal, but I sat long after I should have gone to keep an appointment, watching the cautious delight of the children at the rather elaborate dishes the waiters brought for them, and the quiet enjoyment of the parents. I was watching myself and my little sister, and feeling within me the way my mother and the English mother must have felt before the wide eyes, the hushed voices, and the trembling polite hands of their children.
Now I have Anneli, almost ready for it: in a year she will be a little past five, halfway between the ages of my sister and me when we first sat ecstatically under the ministrations of a well-trained restaurant staff. In spite of the world-sickness that her father and I feel, we still want her first restaurant meal to be good. We have discussed it pleasurably, recognizing without shame the same eagerness in us that makes some parents buy elaborate electric trains and five-foot sailboats for their uninterested offspring. There must be chicken à la king in a chafing dish, and perhaps a baked Alaska because the heat and the cold of it are so exciting to a person like Anneli, and a gentle white wine for us and, if possible, cooled water in a little French bottle for her.
Meanwhile Anneli is being prepared with infinitesimal bites of whatever we find most subtle, slipped to her—without benefit of pediatrician—between her daily rounds of chopped green beans and pears and such. When she behaves unusually nicely, we think with complacency of what it will be like—that first lunch.
We will arrive about one-thirty at the very best, most formal restaurant we know in our city, having sustained ourselves with a short nap and two whole-wheat crackers spread with sweet butter. She will wear some sort of smocked short dress made of wine-colored linen, white cotton gloves, white sandals on her thin little very brown feet. I suppose she should have a hat, though she doesn’t often wear one. Her eyes are as big and purple-brown with excitement as well-cooked prunes and she stands up like a minuscule princess to the salute of the maître d’hôtel.
We go to a table perfect for three, half facing the door to the kitchens so that she can watch the waiters and learn from them, half turned from the bar where a great many people are drinking—as she has often seen us do—but without as much enjoyment as we have. There is a drowsy diminuendo of chatter, and the human beings who have given themselves the time to be leisurely seem much more human than they may have earlier that noon.
Anneli looks at the strangest of the women, and the men most like her father, and then watches solemnly, tremblingly, as a split of Perrier water is poured for her, for her alone into a stemmed glass, and a waiter—we know the very one, past sixty, with the sly monkey-face of a college professor (but will he be there then?)—her own waiter, prepares on a wheeled table the silver bowl and the flame. Yes, we see her, my husband and I, as much this minute in our minds as we ever will at Voisin or the Café de Paris or dead Marcel’s; and she is those other children; she is us; she is whatever tender creature can thus begin the long nibbling through the invisible tunnel of the world.
—Hemet, 1955