Blue Plate Special (21 page)

That was a great relief to me; when I spoke French, I could feel my imprisoning cage of self-involvement lifting away and setting me free. Apparently, the French part of my brain was capable of a detachment and maturity the American part of me could only stumble toward.

I was starting to like life at La Mhotte, or at least to feel like I had become part of the place. I was fond of the little boys I took care of; and I liked Vivian, whose nonchalant warmth was a great relief after Mary Sterne’s constant harried resentment of me.

And the longer I lived there, the more I learned about food. In addition to the vegetables I took from the big kitchen garden shared by everyone who lived at the château, there were things around the place that just grew naturally, things I could go out and get and bring back for us to eat. I picked up basketfuls of glossy chestnuts in the forest beyond La Mhotte that we roasted in the fireplace around Christmastime. Peeling them hurt our fingers, but the meat was so sweet and rich, it was worth it. In the spring, I gathered the peppery, bright-green watercress that grew in a large, stream-fed stone pool, and put it into salads with lamb’s ear lettuce.

Foraging in this way was something of a revelation to me. The only other time I’d ever done it was in 1969, right before we moved to Arizona, when my mother and sisters and I spent
the summer with my grandparents in a rented farmhouse in Maine. It was near a beach whose name I don’t remember; we called it Blue Boat Beach because of an upside-down dinghy that was always there. That summer, we picked wild blueberries that grew in a meadow for anyone to eat. They were warm and sweet and bursting with juice. My sisters and I gorged on them as fast as we could pick them.

O
ne of the students at the
seminaire
was a six-foot-tall blond Swedish girl named Elisabeth. She was fearless and funny, and we instantly became friends. One night, on a whim, we’d set out on foot across the fields together, following the sound of live rock music. It sounded pretty close, but it took us two hours of bushwhacking past sleepy barns, barking dogs, and dark woods before we came to a faraway little country village where a street festival was in full swing. We drank wine and danced, and then, because it was very late and everyone back at La Mhotte was surely asleep, we had to ask two gendarmes for a ride home. They were nice enough about it, but they came back to La Mhotte the next day and demanded to see our papers. The della Negras were nervous: I had no visa or permit, so I wasn’t supposed to be working there. I told the gendarmes I was visiting. They said sternly, with fussy French bureaucratic fervor, that I could stay exactly three months from the stamp on my passport, maximum, and then I would have to cross the border. They drove off, leaving us all very consternated. I could tell the della Negras blamed Elisabeth for this misadventure. She was twenty-two, so much older than I was, and should have known better. I tried to defend her, but there was nothing I could say.

In February, the night before
le Carnaval
, which was celebrated as a medieval church festival at La Mhotte, Elisabeth and I painted our faces and dressed in wild colors, then headed
to a party at the farmhouse down the road. We showed up to find the seminarians sipping tisane, herbal tea, talking softly by beeswax candlelight with the biodynamic farmer and his wife. We came in, raucous, with wine, and sang medieval drinking songs:
“Si vous avez du vin claret,”
and
“Quand je bois du vin claret,”
songs we had learned at morning assemblies with the school in the château but evidently not in this context appropriate. Again, Elisabeth was blamed for what was perceived as our joint misbehavior. “She always does everything too much,” I heard someone mumble. “It is not carnival yet.”

Then, one weekend in March, Elisabeth invited me to hitchhike with her to visit a count in a medieval village in the northwest of France. Back then, it was still considered safe for young girls to hitchhike around Europe, so we got a ride with a teacher to the highway near Moulins, and then stuck our thumbs out, headed northwest. Within minutes, a trucker pulled over, and we were off on our adventure.

The count lived in a rambling medieval house built on the road that wound through the village, the upper floor acting as a bridge, spanning it, curved on its underside so cars passed underneath an arch and between the outer stone walls of the first story and traffic literally drove through the house.

The count himself was a fat, sardonic, lonely man with a pendulous, wet lower lip who looked like a Roald Dahl character. He was married to a tiny, much younger Japanese woman who, as soon as we arrived, took Elisabeth and me to gather stinging nettles,
les orties
, for a soup.

Wearing white cloth gloves, we pulled the weeds from the side of the cobblestone road and put them into a big straw basket, being careful not to brush them against our forearms. When it was full, we carried it into the big kitchen where we washed all the sand and grit off and chopped them into small pieces. Then we sautéed a diced onion in lots of butter in a soup pot, added the nettles, chopped potatoes, and enough water
to cover it all, and boiled it until the potatoes were soft. After that, we added some cream, salt, and black pepper and ran it through a Mouli. It was velvety and savory and surprisingly good. We ate it that night with a plain lettuce salad and a loaf of chewy
boule
and a board of good cheese to go with it, and wine, of course. I felt that it was wonderful to be in a French household that served wine as a matter of course with food. At the château, we almost never had it.

After supper, while Elisabeth helped with the dishes, the count took me up to his study, a book-lined room in the bridge part of the house whose two windows on either side looked right down at the road so that headlights and taillights of passing cars showed in them. He poured me a cognac, which I sipped while he had a cigar. We discussed literature; I pretended to be much better read, much more erudite, than I was. His English was far better than my French, but I tried to speak French with him. I didn’t dislike him, but I was wary of him. Even so, I was thrilled to be drinking cognac with a count in his library. It felt like a scene in a novel.

After I had befriended and perhaps charmed the count by discussing novels and poetry with him, he confessed to me that he was in desperate need of real companionship and hoped I would come to live here with him and his wife. I balked and demurred, but I was secretly, weirdly flattered. Ever since my own father had disappeared, I’d been open to a replacement. Talking to the count felt a little like trying to win my father’s approval. I felt like a boy with him, like a “hail fellow, well met,” an expression I liked because it sounded exactly like what it meant.

Meanwhile, Elisabeth had befriended the count’s wife, who confessed to her that the count treated her cruelly and beat her. Hitchhiking home the following day, as we stood by the highway with our backpacks on and thumbs out, Elisabeth told me she was disappointed in me for flirting with the count.

“I didn’t flirt with him,” I said, feeling misunderstood and miffed.

“You did,” she said. “You should be careful.”

When the count kept telephoning me at La Mhotte long after I stopped taking his calls, Elisabeth’s disappointment in me became clear. I knew I should have taken what she said as a warning. Instead, I defiantly chose to ignore it. I’d done nothing wrong. I’d been misunderstood. I hadn’t been flirting; I had behaved with the count as if I were a guy, like him.

In the decades since, this particular misunderstanding has plagued me again and again and again. I am still defiant about it. I have never been able to take Elisabeth’s caution properly to heart.

Shortly after this trip, Elisabeth’s mother got very sick, and Elisabeth went back to Sweden to nurse her. She wrote later to tell me that her mother had died and that she wouldn’t come back to La Mhotte at all. I’d lost my only true friend there. I could never bring myself to write back to her; she wrote again a few times, and I tried to answer her letters, but something stopped me.

By then, I was well and truly in the habit of letting people go.

My high school friend Jason had written to me earlier in the fall, inviting me to Israel for Christmas and New Year’s. He was living there that year, studying intensive Hebrew at an ulpan and working on a kibbutz. His whole family was gathering in Jerusalem to take a trip into the Sinai desert in jeeps with Bedouin guides. “Come with us,” he wrote. “Christopher will be here, too.”

I felt a lurch of simultaneous dread and excitement. I had to leave France for the holidays anyway; the gendarmes would check to make sure I had. Because my salary was so small and I’d worked so hard for them all autumn long, I summoned the nerve to ask the della Negras for a plane ticket to Israel, the equivalent of about a hundred dollars, as a sort of Christmas bonus. They had no extra money that I knew of, but they graciously paid for me to go all the same.

I met Jason and Christopher in Jerusalem, where we hung around together for a few days. We flew in a prop plane down to Eilat, a town on the Red Sea near Aqaba, where we met up with Jason’s family. There were a dozen or so other Americans and a handful of Bedouin guides. We all piled into open jeeps and drove into the desert.

On the first night in the Sinai, we camped in tents near an open corrugated-tin shed that housed a number of camels;
I shared a tent with Jason’s younger sister. I awoke at dawn to the sound of the muezzin on the radio, the Muslim morning prayers broadcast from Mecca, and the snorting of camels nearby. When I poked my head out of my tent flap, I saw our guides lying prostrate on mats in the sand, praying.

Our breakfast was Turkish coffee, very strong and sweet, made in tiny brass pots over an open flame, and halvah, sesame-honey candy. We drove all day into the Sinai, through a warm wind, lurching over rocks. It was the winter of 1980–81: the Sinai Peninsula was slated to be given back to Egypt soon according to the Egypt–Israel peace treaty signed by Sadat and Begin and brokered by Jimmy Carter. This was the last year that it would be in Israeli hands. But whomever the place belonged to, this was a holy land for everyone, travelers and guides alike.

This desert was so different from the verdant, bursting-with-life rocky one I’d grown up in—the Sinai was nothing but undulating dunes from horizon to horizon. Out in the sand, there was just the wind and the shifting shapes of the dunes. We all stood shoulder to shoulder in the open jeeps, holding on to the roll bars, staring at shades of gold and straw and beige, watching each mountain as it hove into view far away and grew until it towered before us. There was nowhere to hide here in the frank bright sunlight and wide-open baking landscape.

At mealtimes, we got the Middle Eastern version of camping food. The Bedouins baked flat disks of dough on hot rocks in an open fire; these fresh pitas were unlike any bread I had ever eaten before, fresh and chewy and full of flavor—a hint of ash, a metallic tang of rock. And it was on this trip that my lifelong passion for potato chips began. We were supplied with enough to last an army two years, and I loved them with Turkish coffee and halvah for breakfast. But I didn’t realize I was putting on weight until one day, as we all took turns
sliding down a giant sand dune on our asses, Jason’s father made a remark about how having a nice big butt made it more fun to slide. He meant me. I tried to laugh it off, but I was mortified.

Near Sharm El-Sheikh, we rode hired camels to the Red Sea. It was a cheesy tourist thing to do, but I found it completely thrilling. A Bedouin helped me mount and settle on a platformlike saddle, and then we were off, lurching like a ship on high seas along a sandy road, the ocean in sight ahead. We rode single file, Jason ahead of me, Christopher behind.

I was right back in that same paralyzed, wordless, shy welter of love for Christopher that I’d been in for two years at Green Meadow. It was unbearable, one of those feelings that’s too intense to stand for long—euphoria, pain, yearning, and dread all at once. I could barely talk to him, and when I did, it was with mock bravado and an arrogant hardness I didn’t remotely feel.

In fact, I was completely self-absorbed the whole time. Here I was in the biblical wilderness, surrounded by natural beauty and ancient history and present-day complexity, and all I could think about was myself. I told my dreams at tedious length to Jason’s mother. I interpreted everything Christopher said and did as a sign, all of it having to do with me. I looked straight out at the wonders we drove through and saw everything only dimly, through the thick scrim of my adolescent egocentrism. I was all too aware of this, and would have done anything to be able to lift myself out of it, but I couldn’t. My private phrase for my ailment was “self-blindness.”

After the Sinai trip, Christopher, Jason, and I took a bus up north to a kibbutz called Hazorea, where Jason was living. Most of his fellow volunteers seemed to be beautiful Scandinavian girls. The three of us slept like puppies piled together in Jason’s room. On my last night there, we got drunk with a group of kibbutzniks, then all went off to sleep. The three of us all got into the one bed together; Christopher and Jason, on
either side of me, gently pawed me for a while. All I wanted to do was push Jason away and glom myself onto Christopher and fuse with him and never let go as long as I lived, but instead, Christopher slithered down to his sleeping bag on the floor, I disengaged from Jason, and the three of us fell asleep separately.