I smile encouragement. This is the Carol I’m familiar with. My mother always had the answers, backed by strong personal preference, on what any one of us should love, on what constituted beauty, on what was valuable. She just knew.
The Beverly Hills Hotel was trash, but the Bel-Air was treasure. Bedding should be all white. Florals belonged indoors and outdoors. Birkenstocks were hiking shoes, not for the beach or lunch. Your closet should be color coordinated, and you could and should drink red wine all year long.
“The lobby is this beautiful, open-air place, but it’s so stuffy. They have love seats that look like they were stolen fromVersailles, and there’s a wooden horse on the wall. A wooden horse!” Carol rolls her eyes. “I see this beautiful blue-and-white lobby that spills out onto the terrace. Mediterranean, clean, lots of tile and texture, white, yellow, and blue, complementing the colors of the sea.”
Carol gazes out at the ocean, lost in thought.
“Are you going to propose that?”
Carol nods. “They’re hearing pitches in a week. It’s very old-school. You show up with sketches and you meet with the owners. It’s a family business. Has been for decades. Most places here are. In Italy in general, I guess.”
“I don’t know anything about design, really,” I tell her. “But that sounds beautiful.”
I never had an eye for aesthetics the way my mother did. She picked out most of my clothes and furniture, designed my home. She had better taste than me, had seen more, been exposed to more, and had far more patience for the trial and error that comes with transforming a space. She knew how to eyeball a room; she understood spatial relation. She understood that however long a dresser was, you needed to factor in an additional six inches so the room wouldn’t look crowded. She could tell what would look good on me and what wouldn’t. She knew how to organize a kitchen so that all the appliances were exactly where you most needed them. The glasses were to the right of the sink, not the left, because everyone in our family was right-handed. The silverware was underneath the plates. The mugs were beside the coffee maker.
I think about the stories I’ve heard from my parents about their young marriage. My father started his clothing company, and my mother worked in the back office, keeping the books.
“She kept everyone in line,” my father used to say. “She was the lifeblood of my business.”
“Ourbusiness,” my mother would remind him with a pointed smile.
“It is,” Carol says. “The hotel, I mean. Beautiful.”
“You said you once stayed there with your parents?”
She nods. “The place means something to me, you know?”
All at once I remember that my mother lost her own mother, my grandmother, when she was just twelve years old. I was always disappointed that I never met Belle. She was gone far before I ever arrived. What was it like for my mom to meet my father without her? To be married without her? To become a mother without her? Her father remarried, soon after. What did it feel like to have her replaced?
“I do,” I say. “Very much so.”
She smiles. “I’ll take you there,” she says. “You’ll love it.”
Our first course arrives. It’s a plate with fresh-cut tomatoes, peppers marinated in olive oil, and the freshest farmer cheese I’ve ever seen. It oozes cream, like blood, onto the plate. Warm breads are set down in a basket next to our wine.
Carol rubs her hands together. “Yum,” she says. “Here, give me your plate. Have you ever had burrata?”
I hand it over, and she serves me vegetables and cheese. As she’s handing it back another bowl is set down with greens tossed in what looks to be a mustardy vinaigrette.
“This is amazing.”
“Just wait,” Carol says. “This isn’t even the appetizer.”
I spear a piece of tomato. It’s perfect. Sweet and salty, and I don’t even think it has a thing on it. The cheese is sublime.
“Ohmygod.”
Carol nods. “So good,” she says.
“You were right.”
She winks at me, and it stops me, my wine suspended in myhand in midair. It’s something my mother has done for years, that wink. That acknowledgment that says without words:I know I’m right, I’m glad you’ve come around.
“My dad was big into food,” Carol says. “He loved to cook and eat. He’d bake, too, which was unheard of for a man of his generation. He used to make the best hamantaschen. All my friends would come over and demand some.” She laughs.
“You take after him,” I say.
She smiles. “I guess I do.”
