Today, I’ve been watching a woman make crêpes. The outdoor café where she’s working is set back from the sidewalk. She ladles the batter on the hot griddle, swirling the spreader—a tiny wooden rake that’s lost its tines—with a quick twist of her hand to make a perfect circle. Actually, it’s the uneven contest that intrigues me. The runny mixture is delicate, on its own no match for the brute slab of hot steel. The moment she pools a ladle-full on the griddle, a race against time begins. Fiasco is only seconds away, but she flips a perfect crêpe off the griddle, every time.
My grandmother used to make crêpes when we visited her for holidays. She’d stir the sauce of caramelized sugar, butter and add Cointreau from the bottle that always stood on her counter. She’d say, “Can the kids have liquor?” And my mom or dad would always nod, “Okay, just this once.”
She never flambéed the crêpes because she was afraid she’d set her kitchen on fire. It was her great fear, an innocuous flame, untended, spreading quickly to consume her apartment, then the entire building. That’s why she had an electric stove. “Gas cooks better,” she once told me. “But not in my house.”
My grandmother didn’t have a fancy griddle, only a pan. It was old and warped, so her crêpes weren’t always thin and delicate. But she swirled the batter with her mangled spreader just the same. Because of the electric stove, her timing was off occasionally and a crêpe got burnt. “That one’s mine,” she’d say.
I remember much later seeing a cook make crêpes on three griddles. He was a heavy man. His white apron, folded under the waistband of his trousers, was spotted with a lunchtime’s worth of stains. He poured the ladle-full of batter in the center, the swirl of the spreader pushing it to the edge, repeated twice more, three quick flips, the looming fiasco avoided in triplicate. This was in a crêperie, not a stand on the street but a sit-down restaurant.
My friend John and I would sometimes go there for an inexpensive meal. We were both at the university then, and money was tight. It was my third semester and he was in his fourth. We had long hair and the studied, sloppy appearance expected of students back then.
The crêperie made sweet and savory crêpes. We both had ordered ones with lamb and eggplant and were talking about life after university as if we knew what awaited us. John was thinking of becoming a pastor. It was either that or teacher. I studied economics, but wasn’t ready to settle down and wanted to travel abroad first. We liked hatching such adult plans, they made us feel less at sea about our future.
The cook must have been preparing an order of crêpes Suzette and maybe he’d been too generous with the Cointreau—I knew by then that it was a liqueur, not liquor—or the sauce was too hot, in any case, when he lit the liqueur, the alcohol burst into a tall flame with a startling whoosh. Like all the other patrons in the restaurant, I looked at the cook, who tried to mask his own surprise by pretending he’d planned the show for our amusement all along. I smiled and noticed a young woman sitting at a table across from the griddles. She looked back at me, also smiling.
We held each other’s gaze longer than the cooking mishap warranted. I felt a connection with her that went well beyond a mutual amusement over the flaming spectacle. It was a sense of shared intimacy I had never experienced before.
John nudged me.
I turned toward him, startled. “What?”
“Food’s here.”
I nodded, confused.
The waiter had slapped the plates in front of us and the task of eating the crêpe seemed both inordinate and banal. I glanced over to the woman, seeking her eyes and that feeling of intimacy again, but she was focused on her meal.
“Eat, man,” John said. “These things aren’t any good cold.”
He was right. The lamb and eggplant filling smelled of spices from countries I hoped to visit.
After we finished and paid, we walked outside to the cobblestone square. She’d asked for her bill when we did, and I turned to catch another glimpse of her. In the noon hour busyness I didn’t see her again.
Throughout the years, I remembered this moment in the crêperie. I wondered what would have happened had I spoken to her. Would we have hit it off? Met again? Maybe fallen in love? As often as not those thoughts held a tinge of loss, of an opportunity unrealized.
Even after I got married, the memory would surface, unbidden and unrelated to anything going on in my life. Those thoughts seemed unfaithful. My marriage was happy, most of the time, and I had no cause pining for someone else, certainly not for someone so fleeting.
The memory of the woman in the crêperie still visits me on occasion. In restaurants I sometimes look up from my book and scan the room for a face I don’t really remember. I see other patrons in parties of two or four. Sometimes one of their gazes comes to rest on me for a moment. I smile and I imagine they feel sorry for me. Then again, maybe they don’t. Maybe they too are missing someone they’ve never met.
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