"Ruth Reichl - Tender at the Bone V1.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Reichl Ruth)

They did. Where my mother expected a thirteen-year-old girl to wear the suit she bought I'll never know, but she could not resist a bargain. It was a beautiful outfit. The rust-colored jacket had
leather buttons and the green plaid blouse was made of soft wool and buttoned up the back. The skirt was rust-colored too, with a band of green plaid running around the hem; I kept looking at it, trying to find the seam, but as far as I could tell it was a single piece of cloth woven in a tube.
My mother was palpably pleased to be inside a house of haute couture. I could already imagine her voice as she said, casually, to her friends, "When Ruthie and I went for the final fitting at Balmain. . ." I gritted my teeth. The fittings took hours.
When we went for the final fitting Dad looked miserable; I knew he wished he were looking at art. "Ernst, why don't you just leave," Mom said irritably. Dad looked at me, helplessly, over her head. I stared back, thinking how much more fun it would be at the museum than in this warm room with women kneeling at my feet. I imagined myself floating down the stairs in front of the Winged Victory like Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face. Dad and I looked at each other and then shrugged simultaneously. I was stuck; he wasn't. Dad left, looking guilty.
The fitting took so long that we had to go straight from Balmain to dinner. Dad was waiting for us at La Belle Aurore with a glass of champagne in his hand; I could see the worry in his eye and the tentative set to his head. He was wondering what price he would pay for pleasing himself. When my mother looked at him flirtatiously and said, "Champagne, what a good idea," he looked incredibly relieved. He jumped up to pull out her chair.
Disaster was always simmering just below the surface and we cherished every peaceful moment with my mother. By then we were starting to suspect the truth, that my mother was a manicdepressive, but neither of us knew what to do about it. When lithium entered our lives a few years later we were deeply grateful:
up to then we both believed, in our secret hearts, that my mother's moods were our personal responsibility. Mom never knew who she was going to be when she woke up in the morning and Dad and I
danced around, doing our best to avert trouble. When we somehow managed to do it we were so grateful we grew giddy with relief.
In moments like this I often said too much, I did now. "I wish I spoke French the way you and Daddy do," I babbled. More than anything I was trying to flatter her; her French was fluent from the years she had spent at the Sorbonne but even I could tell that her accent was awful. Something lit up briefly in my mother's face and I wondered what she was thinking. But she didn't say anything and I concentrated on the food.
The meal we had ordered was incredibly rich, but I thought it was perfect. We had lobster bisque, filet of sole duglщre and a lemon soufflщ that I thought was the most amazing thing I had ever eaten. I liked it so much that Mom asked if the chef could give us the recipe. 'Mom!" I said, with that teenage whine, She waved me away.
"You could make this," she said.
I would have, too. But I never got the chance. Because a few weeks after we came back from Europe my mother sent me to Mars.
Х Two weeks after my thirteenth birthday Jeanie and I came giggling out of junior high school surrounded by our friends. It was a Friday, and we had big plans. Hot fudge sundaes and then a slow stroll down Eighth Street, looking in the windows of the beatnik jewelry stores.

But my mother was waiting on the sidewalk. Even though it was late January, she was wearing her big poppy-covered straw hat so I wouldn't miss her. Nobody could. "We're going to Montreal for the weekend," she said. She had a suitcase by her side.

"Wow," said Jeanie, wistfully, "lucky you." Then she smiled bravely and said, "Have fun," in a little voice that made me realize that her weekend was ruined and she envied me going off on a great adventure. I wasn't so sure.

We took the train, riding through fields that got whiter and bleaker as we sped north. By the time we crossed the border it was snowing hard and the immigration inspectors got on the train stamping their feet and blowing on their hands, the tips of their ears red above their earmuffs. My mother flirted with them a little as she showed our papers. I pulled my coat over me and went to sleep.

When I woke up, the train was pulling into the station in the gray early morning light and Mom was putting on lipstick, using the window for a mirror. She took a little on her finger, daubing it across her cheeks like rouge. "I look so tired," she explained. I wondered, sleepily, who she was dolling herself up for. "Aren't we going to a hotel?" I asked.

"Later," she said, climbing into a cab.

We pulled up in front of a three-story brick building on a broad
avenue. Across the street people streamed up the steps of a huge domed cathedral, but the sidewalk on our side was deserted and there were no signs to indicate what it was. Then my mother opened the taxi door and the chant of children's voices came sweeping out from behind the building. I fell back onto the seat, away from the door. I wanted the taxi to turn around and go straight back to the station.
But Mom pulled me after her, out of the cab, through a gate and to a door. She rang the bell. A tall, hawk-faced woman, her hair chopped off just below the ears, peered suspiciously out at us. "Oui?" she inquired, wadding up a white handkerchief and stuffing it up the sleeve of her blue cardigan. The sour smell of disinfectant came rushing toward me; behind the woman I could see a line of girls in blue filing silently up a staircase. It looked like something from the Charles Dickens books we had been reading in Mrs. Perrin's class. I shivered. The only French I knew was from the books that Mrs. Peavey had read to me, so I could not understand the negotiations between my mother and the hawk-faced woman. But it was pretty clear that this was a school, and clearer that my mother meant me to attend it.
Outside, the taxi was waiting. It had started to snow again and we twisted through pretty streets muffled in white. The taxi pulled up in front of a hotel that shimmered and gleamed as if it had been carved out of sugar. My mother adjusted her hat as a bellhop led us through the high-ceilinged lobby and down long halls carpeted in red.
"Why?" I asked my mother. "Why do I have to go there?"

"You said in Paris that you wanted to learn French," she said.
"I didn't mean. . ." I said hesitantly. And then, "Does Daddy know about this?"

"You were the one who said you wanted to learn French," said Mom. "And Daddy agrees that it will be useful in the future if you
speak a foreign language." She turned, as if there were no more to be said. "Just look at this glorious tub!" She began opening all the jars and potions in the sumptuous marble bathroom and then we went off to spend the afternoon shopping for school uniforms. They were loathsome navy jumpers with three big pleats in the front and I hated them on sight.
Mom spent the weekend trying to cheer me up. She took me out to dinner. She took me to see My Fair Lady. But Sunday night, after pickles, potatoes, and big, bloody steaks at a famous Montreal restaurant named Moishe's, I went back to the hawk-faced woman and my mother went back to New York.

I watched miserably as the door closed behind her. I felt empty inside, and I was overwhelmed by nausea. The smell of disinfectant battled with floor wax as I climbed the stairs behind Hawkface. The building was old, and the reception area, where Mom had been received by the directrice, had high ceilings, carved glass, and an elegantly winding staircase; it looked like the entrance of a turn-of-the-century Paris apartment house. I clutched the carved banister, pulling myself up. But the grandeur ended at the second floor. Up here the stairs were narrow, the banister just a businesslike piece of uncarved wood.

"Voozet treesta?" asked Hawkface. "Nap lura pah. Toola mond ette tray jantie." She babbled incomprehensibly up three flights of stairs and down a hall. She opened a door into a small room with hospital-green walls, barred windows, and three cots with gray blankets. Two round faces peered at me. 'Lanu vel fee," said Hawkface, pushing me in the door. "Elsa pel root."

"Root," the girls chorused, gathering around me.

"What?" I said.

"Root!" they insisted, pointing at me. The one with long dark hair pointed at herself and said, "Janine." She indicated the one with bobbed hair, round rosy cheeks, and glasses and said,
"Suzanne." Then at me again. "Root!" she insisted, I understood, finally.

It did not seem like an auspicious beginning. On Mars even my name was different.