Elin Hilderbrand - The Blue Bistro

TO: DrDon@toothache.com

FROM: Ade12177@hotmail.com

DATE: June 7, 2005, 8:37 A.M.

SUBJECT: See and be scene

At first I thought the Bistro was all about the food but after a week of work I can tell you, it’s all about the drinks. It’s a huge scene. Some nights it’s like a fraternity party and some nights it’s something else entirely (think of a dozen women in for a fiftieth birthday party belting out “New York, New York” while doing chorus line kicks). Last night, I let a man into the bar and he tipped me five hundred dollars. I told him I couldn’t possibly accept it and he said, ‘You want me to give it to the bartender instead?’ So I put it in an envelope and mailed it off to you this morning. Only five hundred to go!

I never considered myself a night owl but since I started work I haven’t gotten to bed before two. I sleep until at least eight then take a nap on the beach. I haven’t gone jogging even once! But I am brushing and flossing and doing my best to stay away from the candy plate. How are the smiles in Maryland? Love.

TO: Ade12177@hotmail.com

FROM: DrDon@toothache.com

DATE: June 7, 2005, 8:45 A.M.

SUBJECT: Nobody knows the troubles I’ve scene

I’m not sure how I’m supposed to handle being the father of the doyenne of Nantucket nightlife. Should I be worried or proud? Or both? Mavis says she wants to visit Nantucket-I know I always promise and never come, but this time I think we might. Can you research some B & Bs? And book us a night at your restaurant, of course. I’d love to see my little girl in action. Love, love.

TO: DrDon@toothache.com

FROM: Ade12177@hotmail.com

DATE: June 7 2005, 8:52 A.M.

SUBJECT: Don’t book ’em yet, Don-o

Let me get my sea legs before you show up, okay? Promise me you won’t book anything without double-triple-checking with me first?

TO: Ade12177@hotmail.com

FROM: DrDon@toothache.com

DATE: June 7, 2005, 8:59 A.M.

SUBJECT: I promise

Love, love, love.

TO: kyracrenshaw@mindspring.com

FROM: Ade12177@hotmail.com

DATE: June 7, 2005, 9:04 A.M.

SUBJECT: sex, drugs, and lobster roll

Duncan has spent every night here for the past nine nights. They always look so tuckered out in the morning-thank God the walls are thick! Caren thinks it’s this big secret, but one of the other waiters at work said he was pretty sure the only reason Duncan shacked up here was because he doesn’t want to sleep in the same apartment with his sister. I, of course, pretended like I didn’t know what he was talking about.

Aspen seems like a million years ago. I haven’t thought about Doug in weeks. I miss you, though. How’s Carmel? Seen Clint Eastwood?

Reservations

Adrienne wasn’t sure how long her father’s affair with Mavis had been going on. When he set up his dental practice in 1984, the office had three employees: Adrienne’s father, whom everyone called Dr. Don, Adrienne’s mother, Rosalie, who worked the reception desk, booked appointments, and did all the billing, and Mavis, the hygienist. Five years later, when Adrienne’s mother got sick, Adrienne was old enough to fill in for her mother after school and on Saturdays-and to work during the week they had hired a retired woman named Mrs. Leech.

But there had always been Mavis with her blond Dorothy Hamill haircut, her smell of antiseptic soap, and the Juicy Fruit gum that she chewed to freshen her breath after lunch (despite Dr. Don’s fatwa on chewing gum of any kind). When she was first hired, Mavis was a single mother with three-year-old twin boys named Coleman and Graham, who was deaf. Mavis’s husband had left her, and Mavis’s family lived in the French part of Louisiana, which she described as a “stinking swamp.” She had no desire to return. Adrienne’s parents took pity on Mavis, especially Adrienne’s mother, who was prone to fits of do-gooding. As a happy coincidence, it turned out that Mavis was a talented hygienist. She had a light touch, a Southern accent, and because she dealt on a daily basis with her deaf son, she took great pains to make her communications with children gentle and clear. How many times had Adrienne heard her go through the brushing spiel? Now I’m just gonna put a little bit of paste on the brush-see, it tastes like bubble gum. Don’t tell the doctor! The brush is gonna move in really fast circles so it might tickle a bit. You’re laughing already, I can’t bee-leeve it!

It was impossible to think of Mavis without thinking of Rosalie, not only because Rosalie and Mavis were best friends, but also because as Rosalie’s presence in Adrienne’s life waned, Mavis’s increased. Rosalie’s illness came on very strong and suddenly. There might have been a clue in the fact that Rosalie had lost her first child in a hard labor, and after Adrienne, Dr. Don and Rosalie had not been able to conceive another child. But Rosalie’s outlook was that some people were blessed with many children and some with only one, and she reveled in the fact that her one child was as well-adjusted and delightful as Adrienne. Then when Adrienne was eleven going on twelve (and was, at that age, neither well-adjusted nor delightful) Rosalie started having pains. She went to her gynecologist and came home looking like she had seen a ghost. A biopsy a week later at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania had diagnosed her with inoperable ovarian cancer and four to six months to live.

Adrienne knew these details now, as an adult, but at the time she had not been well-informed. Her father, a graduate of the dental school at Penn, was friends with the head of internal medicine at HUP and Adrienne was aware of her father’s conversations with him and other doctors at the hospital. Initially, she thought it was Dr. Don who was sick because it was he who looked like he might die. Eventually both her parents sat her down and told her that Rosalie had cancer.

It was Mavis’s idea to send Adrienne to Camp Hideaway in the Pocono Mountains. Adrienne didn’t want to go. She claimed she wanted to help take care of her mother, but really she didn’t want to leave her friends and she was addicted to General Hospital and she knew from reading the brochure that Camp Hideaway didn’t have a single TV. She begged her father to let her stay home and when begging didn’t work, she threatened him. She would run away. She would hitchhike. She would accept a ride with any stranger, even if it was a man with yellow teeth. Finally, Adrienne appealed to her mother. Adrienne knew her mother loved her to the point of distraction. Once she had snooped through Rosalie’s desk, where she found a tablet on which Rosalie had written Adrienne’s name a hundred times, and in the middle of the page, it said, “Unconditional love.” When Adrienne spoke to Rosalie about camp, Rosalie said, “Please do as your father says. He and Mavis think it’s for the best.” Rosalie’s tone of voice was distant; it was as if she were already gone.

Adrienne went to Camp Hideaway for six weeks, and when Adrienne looked back on her life, she could say that she went to Camp Hideaway as one kind of person and left as another. Her first day at camp was up and down. The cabin was musty, her top bunk stared right into the cobwebby rafters, her cabin mates were all scrawny and knew nothing about puberty, the bathhouse smelled like a chemical toilet, the water at the fountain tasted like rust, and the dining hall served stale potato chips. However, things improved during taps, the flag lowering, and the campfire where one very cute male counselor played the guitar. There was the promise of swimming the next day, and canoeing and a scavenger hunt. After lights out, in the dark musty cabin, where some of her cabin mates were actually crying, Adrienne started telling lies. She told the twelve girls she had just met that she had been sent to camp because her brother was dying. Maybe she had meant to say “mother,” but she didn’t. She said, very distinctly, “brother,” and the girls were hooked. Adrienne felt bad almost immediately and wished that she could retract the claim or amend it, but there was no way to do so without being labeled a fake, a liar, a person to be gossiped about for the next six weeks. She told herself it wasn’t a complete lie because Adrienne had had a brother once upon a time-her mother had delivered a stillborn baby three years before Adrienne, a baby named Jonathan. Adrienne had wondered for years about Jonathan and what he had looked like and whether or not he was technically her brother if he had died before she was even born. She wondered why Jonathan’s name hadn’t been on her mother’s tablet with the words “Unconditional love.” When the girls in her cabin asked her what her dying brother’s name was, she told them, and saying it out loud had made him seem real.