An Invitation to a Friend, to Supper
October 10 | 7 PM
Charles Island | Milford CT
Please join us for an evening of food, wine, and hearty conversation with renowned chef and restauranteur Alda Bennet.
***
Frances Hill watched intently as the seagulls traipsed back and forth looking for food. They were discerning, these gulls, in the way they prodded, tested, exalted their favorites from the sand. Frances couldn’t remember the last time she’d eaten something with such curiosity and focus.
The train to Milford, Connecticut was less than three hours from Boston, and Frances spent the majority of the ride re-reading everything she’d learned about Alda Bennet and Charles Island: the former, a Michelin-star-chef-turned-recluse at the height of her career, and the latter, a “thrice-cursed” island sitting just beyond the Milford coastline in the middle of the Long Island Sound. Both were equally mysterious in their accessibility: Bennet had been photographed numerous times visiting farmers markets in the small coastal town. Now in her early sixties, she was petite with short gray hair and carried the expression of any mother or grandmother: peaceful, inquisitive, warm.
Charles Island was now a bird sanctuary.
Frances had arrived at Silver Sands State Park one hour before the scheduled event. She’d followed the boardwalk down to the water and laid a thinning, blue-and-white-striped hotel towel on the sand to wait. Charles Island, she saw, was closer than she’d imagined – close enough to swim to, if you really had to get there – or back. As she shielded her eyes from the sun, she noticed the tombolo: a waxing stretch of sand that connected the island to the mainland for a brief period during low tides. A few people moved cautiously across the exposed sandbar. From where she sat, it looked like they were walking on water.
The weather was still warm in early fall, and Frances had opted for an “elevated casual” look as no dress code had been provided. She wore light linen pants, a sleeveless black blouse, and a pair of black sandals. She’d relished the opportunity to do her makeup in peace – she’d even glued small fake eyelashes to the corners of her eyelids. When she saw herself in the hotel’s bathroom mirror, she smiled at the stranger before her.
“What’s happening, Frances?”
She turned toward the voice, but the man was already passing her as he sat reclined atop a bright orange beach cruiser bicycle. She watched as he abruptly stopped the bike ten feet down the sand, his back now to her, and hopped off hazardously, the handlebars crashing to the ground as he dismounted.
Oh, no,” he said, regaining his balance and turning toward her, then back to the bike, his eyes darting feverishly between the confused woman on his right and the fallen cruiser on his left. It was only then that Frances was able to see him fully: small in stature and dressed in gray-green coveralls. He wore thick-rimmed glasses that had tilted during his whimsical arrival. A camera swung from his neck as he approached her.
"Fraaaaances,” he half-spoke, half-sung as if they were old friends. He made no effort to shake hands but instead grasped his camera in front of his chest and beamed up at her, silent. At five-foot-seven, Frances felt unusually tall next to him, but he didn’t seem to notice or mind. She nodded and raised her eyebrows expectantly.
“Oh right yes, I’m Mark,” he said, turning quickly to snap a photo of the water. He looked back at her, his smile even wider. He must have been in his mid-forties, but he was boyish in the way he moved with the speed and attention of a hummingbird, drawn from one thing to another with equal intensity each time.
“You ready?” he asked, already walking away. “We’ll take the tombolo,” she could hear him call, his voice muffled by the wind. “HA, just kidding. Although I’ve always wanted to. The boat’s right over there. But my bike. Hmmm. Do you think it’ll fit? What do you think I should do with my bike?” He was looking at her again, this time with childish wonder, a genuine plea. It reminded her of the way her oldest daughter had looked at her when she lost her first tooth.
“I can help,” she said. She took a step forward.
Between the two of them they wrestled the bicycle down the sand and onto the bow of a mud-crusted little boat idling at the edge of the shallows. Mark climbed in first, then reached back for her hand – an unexpectedly steady grip, apparently reserved just for this – and steered them out past the sandbar, where three strangers were picking their way across the last of the exposed tombolo, ankles wet, heads down, careful as gulls.
As they covered the short distance, she watched the island grow – low, wooded, ringed with dark rock. Someone had strung small gold lights through the branches nearest the water. At the top of a short stone path stood a long table draped in white linen, lit by that same string of bulbs. Two place settings.
“Don’t worry about the size,” Mark said, following her eyes, setting his camera down at last. “Alda likes it small. Intimate. She says a big table is like a book nobody’s read.” He laughed. Frances shrugged. “I’m a Buddhist,” he announced to nobody in particular.
A woman appeared from the direction of a low stone chimney – not Bennet, Frances understood immediately, though it took her a moment to say how she knew. This woman moved like an apparition through the dim light, appearing to float instead of walk, her slight frame occasionally lost to Frances’s eyes as she set down a carafe of something without a word.
Alda Bennet came around the same corner a moment after, unhurried, wiping her hands on an apron that had clearly seen forty years of service before this one. In person she was even smaller than her photographs, softer at the edges – the kind of woman you’d trust immediately with your Thanksgiving turkey or your children.
“Frances Hill,” she said, not as a question, and took both of Frances’s hands in her own, cool and dry as paper. “You wrote about a woman who ate a whole peach standing naked in her kitchen. I think about that peach more than I think about most people I’ve met.”
Frances laughed, startled, flattered despite herself.
“I didn’t think anyone still read that book,” she said.
“I read everything once,” Alda said, already turning toward the table, already finished with the moment. “And the true things twice. Sit. Here – some wine.” Her abruptness reminded Frances, already, of Mark. She wondered if they were lovers, or perhaps siblings.
As if on cue, Mark appeared with the first course: a shallow bowl the color of low tide, pale gray-green, with three unshelled oysters resting in it like stones. “Chowder,” Alda said, though it looked like nothing Frances had ever been served. She didn’t know what she’d expected, but a gray soup wasn’t it. In the months leading up to the dinner, she had let her mind wander – less about the type of person Bennet would be and more about the kind of food she’d have the chance to taste. She had pictured vibrant colors, luscious fruits – foams, purées, pink fishes and crimson meats, jellied eggs and wet sugared garnishes, edible flowers, delicate sauces, animal innards presented with such craft and balance that she’d suck her own teeth when she was finished and wonder how she’d gone her whole life without it.
Alda watched as Frances lifted the soup spoon to her lips. “Well?” she asked.
The texture was velvety and the flavor robust. Salty, herbal, a hint of spice, a surprising oakiness that reminded her of chardonnay. Frances felt transported but couldn’t place the flavor in her past. She tilted another spoonful onto her tongue, hoping to excavate some memory, some Proustian flood of things past – but it remained just out of reach.
“It’s good,” Frances said finally.
Alda stared intently at her guest. Up close, Frances could see that while her hands were worn – scarred from years of burns and accidental slips of the knife – the skin on the woman’s face was full and taut. A pale purple vein curled around her right eye as if placed there on purpose, and Frances had the intense desire to reach out and trace it, to follow the woman’s blood river to the mouth where everything converged in its own hot, scarlet soup.
Frances could feel Alda become aware that she was being studied. The woman’s soft, maternal smile begun to fade. Her head tilted downward and she pursed her lips. Suddenly, she clapped her hands once in front of her. Thwack.
“A meal is a story,” she said, lacing her fingers together. “If this soup were the beginning of a story, what kind of story do you think it would be?” She was staring up at Frances with the same desperate innocence Mark had shown her on the beach. But something was different. Alda’s eyes were squinted not with curiosity or hunger but with the unsettling glaze of expectation. Her smile returned, but Frances had the unmistakable feeling that her host – who had yet to explain why she was there, why any of them were there – was losing patience.
“Um,” Frances began. “Something set in New England? A dreary landscape. Yeah, an almost oppressive setting.” She was actually thinking about Alda’s question now, about how she would describe this understated chowder in narrative prose. “Ordinary characters, not much happens with the plot, but they feel deeply. Maybe one of them has a secret the others don’t know. And something happens between them, something that alters their relationships permanently – ”
“Yes,” Alda said calmly. She had moved so close to Frances’s face that Frances could see the brown flecks in her eyes as she licked her lips just inches from her own.
“You know how to compose,” Alda stated as she took the spoon from Frances’s hand and slurped some of the chowder herself. “You understand what a story needs, how to match character and object – like that woman and the peach. You would never stand in your kitchen naked and let peach juice drip down your arms, would you? But she would. That woman would. Because you made it so.”
“And you do the same with food, then?” Frances asked.
“Oh, I have no idea,” Alda chuckled. “I’d hope people would say that. But really, I’m no composer. I’m more of a translator.”
Suddenly, Mark was at her side, clearing the first course and setting the second down in front of her. On the plate were two small round cakes so yellow they were almost orange, with hot pink spots settled like mold atop the crust. Frances lifted a fork and lightly poked at one of them: spongey, sticky – they looked like something her daughter would have asked to have at her birthday party.
“Far cry from dreary New England, huh?” Alda winked, and nodded for Frances to take a bite.
It continued like this for the rest of the meal: a course was delivered, Frances would taste, and Alda would ask for a story on the spot. As Frances became increasingly thoughtful in her responses, Alda grew energized, almost child-like in her desire to be told a tale nobody else had heard before. Occasionally the nameless woman would appear at Frances’s side to refill her wine glass, and soon Frances began to feel at ease in this strange space. Like a jazz musician, she found herself loosened – riffing, laughing. Alda laughed along with her.
Somewhere in the middle of course nine, Frances – foggy from the wine and sweating softly beneath her blouse – put her fork down and closed her eyes. She breathed in the familiar scent of the earth, of garlic, of an extinguished candle and a woman’s perfume – was it her own? – before turning toward Alda and musing, “that peach was never supposed to be a peach. It was supposed to be a bulb of garlic. They wanted beautiful, sensual, feminist. I wanted grotesque.”
Alda, now reclined in her chair with both hands rested atop her belly, nodded slowly, satisfied, the way a doctor nods at a symptom she’d expected to hear. “What would that version have looked like?”
And Frances told her. She described to Alda the original manuscript, the incomplete but true version of the story she’d written during graduate school, when she was still proud to tell people she read books for a living. She heard her own voice going warm and easy across the table, luxuriating in the strange relief of being listened to like this, and it was only when she reached for the bread and found she’d already eaten all of it that a thought surfaced, distant and cold: she’d said this before, tonight. Three times. In three different ways.
She looked up. The woman with no name was refilling her glass again, silent, watching the water.
“Where’s Mark?” Frances asked, realizing she hadn’t heard the camera in some time.
“Photographing the birds,” Alda said. “He does that. Don’t worry – the boat isn’t going anywhere without you.”
Frances turned toward the water on instinct and found only water – no sandbar, no ribbon of wet sand, no strangers picking their way home. The tombolo she’d watched that afternoon from Silver Sands had vanished beneath a flat sheet of black tide. She hadn’t noticed it going.
“How long until he’s back?” she asked.
“Hours,” Alda said, not unkindly. “Plenty of time for dessert.”
It arrived as a small dark tart – purple flower petals candied and flattened across the top of a glistening black custard. Pansies freaked with jet, Frances thought to herself, a favorite line from a favorite poem from a time that wasn’t so distant as she remembered.
“I have a proposal,” Alda said, and for the first time all night she looked older than she was. “I want the ending to that story. The real one. The one you haven’t said out loud, not even to yourself.”
“And if I give it to you?”
“Then it becomes something,” Alda said. “Something people taste. Something finished, instead of something going stale on a desktop for another decade.” She glanced, without quite looking, toward the woman still standing at the edge of the table. “Ask her how it feels, finally being finished.”
The woman said nothing. She had never, Frances realized, said anything at all.
“And if I don’t?”
“Then you go home hungry,” Alda said, “same as you came. Nothing lost – except you’ll always know exactly how it ends, and exactly what you were too tired to do about it.”
Frances thought of the poem on the invitation, the one almost no one read anymore, and its old promise that nothing said at that table would ever be repeated outside it. She understood now that Alda had never promised any such thing. Only that it wouldn’t be repeated in words.
Somewhere past the dark, the tide kept coming in.
"As she shielded her eyes from the sun, she noticed the tombolo: a waxing stretch of sand that connected the island to the mainland for a brief period."
"It arrived as a small dark tart – purple flower petals candied and flattened across the top of a glistening black custard."