Welcome back to another installment in The History of the Anne Samuel! Last week, this fine establishment finally received its formal name (you can read that chapter here, if you missed it) and, today, the secret club is going to heighten its security as it engages in some (fairly innocuous, pardon the pun) nefarious business…
Chapter Four — The Anne Samuel Breaks the Rules
The weekend after it received its name, The Anne Samuel opened its doors yet again, this time as a cocktail bar and exclusive nightclub to augment Elias’s pre-planned dinner date for two in honor of my first week of student teaching.
Although we would be dining out that evening, we once again dressed as if we were headed to an exclusive event in New York or Hollywood and devoured the drinks and snacks set out by mom in the “lounge” (formerly the family living room) before driving downtown for dinner. The half-hour wait for a table, mediocre service, and painfully unromantic atmosphere clarified what we had both begun to suspect: not even the finest restaurant (according to Google) in our small town could compare with The Anne Samuel.
It couldn’t even try.
A week later, Elias went on the record to state that The Anne Samuel “always has the best food in town.” His opinion—and my own, for that matter—has been immutable ever since.
We were so playfully concerned, in fact, about our “exclusive club” being overrun by hungry, noisy, aesthetic-altering patrons that we decided to institute a secret passcode, the recitation of which would be required by the management (or, rather, myself, since I was always the one to answer Elias’s knock at the door) prior to entry. After a bit of consideration we decided upon “A Red, Red Rose”, an antiquated poem by Robert Burns that seemed synonymous not only with our air of old-fashioned exclusivity but also the budding wonder of our romance. We split the verses between ourselves, committing to jointly memorizing a new stanza for each Anne Samuel event.
The first week was easy enough:
O my Luve is like a red, red rose
That’s newly sprung in June,
Quoth he.
And my response:
O my Luve is like the melody
That’s sweetly played in tune.
We chuckled, then, at our cleverness before I opened the door wide, allowing him to escape the January cold and enter into my waiting arms. We first embraced, then disappeared into the playroom to indulge in the first of the Anne Samuel’s many feasts featuring Asian cuisine. These dinners became a perpetual favorite of both Elias’s and mine—even though my poor mother, the chef, had been forced to develop a taste for it. (Chinese takeout famously sent her into fits of nausea during her pregnancy.) It couldn’t be helped; Elias and I were both equally adept at wielding our chopsticks, and, between the Anne Samuel’s homemade satay sauce, cream cheese rangoons, and white chocolate sesame fondue, there was plenty of food for us to fight over. That night also featured the Anne Samuel’s first mocktail—a modern old fashioned proudly prepared by Elias under the direction of my mother—as well as a Chinese fighting fish in a bowl on the table named Ike. But Ike isn’t important to this story, so we’ll have to move on. Suffice to say, the evening was memorable for more reasons than just one.
However, the next weekend, when my longsuffering mother was once again relegated to work a weekend shift as maitre’d, chef de cuisine, waitress, busboy, and dishwasher, memory became a bit difficult for one of the Anne Samuel’s patrons. We hadn’t planned on another date night in—although I can safely conjecture that we were both hoping for one anyway—but my first week of in-person student teaching had already led to a Coronavirus exposure in my grade level. Per the instructions of state officials, I (and all of my brand-new co-teachers) had been ordered to quarantine for a week. I was not supposed to leave my house, and no one was to visit, either.
Being a classic introvert, I wasn’t particularly disappointed by this order…especially when my mother offered to host The Anne Samuel’s “First Annual Quarantine Soireé”. The three of us figurred that, though Elias was supposed to keep his distance, the Anne Samuel had seen enough scandal in its first official month in business that one more broken law would be of no consequence. And, if I actually had contracted the illness? “What could be more romantic than dying for love?” Elias winked as he said it, and I laughed. Neither of us performed particularly well in the rule-following department, especially when it came to capricious governmental orders and whims.
So, we turned our evening text conversation from that of quarantine to one of clothes, deciding, once again, to dust off our finest fashions for the occasion. For me, this meant donning one of the myriad evening dresses I had collected for formal dinners on various ocean liners over the years. For Elias, it was simply another opportunity to wear a bow tie without receiving strange looks from anyone in our small country town of less than 25,000 individuals, for many of whom “dressing up” involved cowboy boots and camouflage. I was thrilled for a chance to wear another of my long-neglected floor-length gowns, and, since quarantine had given me the perfect opportunity to avoid going anywhere or doing anything else, I spent the entire day of the event with my face cloaked in one mask or another. (For once, they weren’t the COVID-19 kind.)
In between her stints in the kitchen, Mom found time to twist my hair into a chignon that, with help from my sparkling seafoam gown and a few favorite jewels, made me feel like an old-Hollywood movie star. When Elias’s quiet knock tap-tapped at half past six that night, I hurried to answer it with passcode in mind. I threw open the door, a smile on my face that felt like a physical outpouring of my excitement over the evening. Elias opened his mouth to recite, but nothing came out.
He stammered for a moment, and I nearly bit my freshly glossed lip to keep from laughing. Something had rendered him speechless, and I would be lying if I didn’t admit that a small part of myself hoped that the thing that had stolen his words was me.
He finally surrendered in his attempt to recite the poem, settling, instead, for three lovely little words:
“You Look Beautiful.”
Cheeks warm, I returned the compliment, for he was clad in an exceptional gray Italian dinner jacket. I was, however, never the type to show mercy. Elias was going to recite that passcode, even if I had to keep us both standing in the cold all night long. Eventually (with a little help from his friend…namely, me) he blundered his way through the first two stanzas, and I let him in.
I was letting him into my heart, too—slowly yet surely, with every course served at dinner and every turn around the “dance floor” that had once seen childhood roller skates whisk across it at breakneck speed and served as the basis for many intricate arrangements of American Girl dolls. We wrote love letters on the precious painted paper notecards I had bought on my trip to Venice years ago, and, when we held each other tight that night, our hearts beat together in a sort of unison that came only from the deepest of loves.
The old playroom was growing up, and I was, too.
And there you have it! Another chapter in the life of the Anne Samuel…and now I’m curious—if you could go to an exclusive dinner featuring a specific cuisine (Asian, Italian, etc…) what type of food would you request? Let me know in the comments, and stay tuned for another installment coming soon…