Ghosts by Daylight (22 page)

Meanwhile, my son spoke French at school and French with everyone but me. To me, he spoke English and when I asked him a question in French, he ignored me. I once heard him explain to a shopkeeper, ‘
Ma maman est en train d’apprendre Français
,’ – my mama is in the process of learning French. I have friends who have ‘mixed’ parents and they have always told me how mortified they were to hear their mothers open their mouths to speak French with strong New York accents. So I did this weekly
supplice
with Alice partially for Luca. A victory was doing
devoirs
with him as he was sounding out letters, and him giving me the thumbs-up: ‘Mama! You said it perfectly.’

Twice a week, I climbed up Alice’s crooked stairway. I dragged the heavy book back and forth, often cursing, it, and did my
devoirs
– my homework – which was usually a written essay, while lying in bed. It had been a long time since I studied, done homework, or drills with someone pointing a pencil at me, someone getting annoyed when I made a mistake with complex verb tenses. But it was for that reason – I did not want Alice’s displeasure – that I kept on going. And I read the newspapers every day in French, and bought novels by Louis Aragon and poems by Baudelaire and struggled at night with Proust, then gave up and bought the English versions. And I knew, somehow, that this was all about self-improvement and independence from Bruno, about breaking out of my bubble.

We did endless
dictées
, where Alice read from complicated art magazines and I copied down her words; we had conversations about the difficulties of mothers or men, but mostly we studied grammar. It was mind-achingly boring, but somehow strangely satisfying, like going on a stringent diet and seeing the results.

Through Alice, I felt that somehow I had made my peace with France. I remembered going to the Monoprix with the Mary Poppins nanny in the earliest days of Luca’s arrival, Luca strapped to my chest in his kangaroo carrier, and literally freezing in terror of the rows and rows of dairy products: what was the difference between
fromage frais
,
fromage blanc
and
faisselle
? Was
crème legere
sour cream or whipping cream? What kind of butter did I need when there were twenty different varieties: salted, unsalted, some for baking, some for cooking? And why couldn’t I find the pasta I had always used, the mozzarella, why couldn’t I find a pizza in Paris that was not made by Tunisians?

I chastised myself, because I had shopped in these kind of places all over the world and managed: factory-sized Jordanian supermarkets to buy supplies for Baghdad, with rows and rows of food identified in Arabic; crowded and noisy Jakarta food markets to bring tinned tuna and juice cartons and vitamins to East Timor; under-stocked outdoor stalls in Zagreb during the war to bring siege food to Sarajevo. That was fine. This, the act of feeding my family and having to do it in another culture, was – like the birth – daunting.

My friends at Monoprix, the people who comforted me with their soft smiles and their own stories of homesickness, were the Sri Lankan cashiers who told me about their families and how they missed the wild landscape of their country, and how to choose the best and cheapest apples by the kilo. And later, I would come and see them crying when the tsunami hit, and they could not reach their brothers, their sisters, their mothers. I identified with these sad and lonely and lost women, not the chic French women in tight trousers holding a near-empty basket with a few slices of jambon, a bottle of Badoit, and a pot of yogurt.

Alice also taught me other things that my mother-in-law or Bruno did not: after a man riding a bicycle on a pavement nearly knocked me off my feet then shouted ‘
Dégages
!’ at me, she told me to give it back to the French in the same manner they gave it to me. She told me to not allow shopkeepers at Le Bon Marché, the elegant Parisian department store, to get away with insolence. She said it was her personal mission to do battle with every single Parisian shopkeeper or waiter who had bad manners (this seemed completely pointless to me, but never mind) and she taught me exactly how to do it. She told me where to buy cheap bath mats and how to bargain for prices; she told me stories of her girlfriends’ online dating adventures; she told me about the difficulty of French men. ‘Never go near,’ she once said sternly, ‘any man who dyes his hair.’ She told me where to go to get the best skin cream in Paris for the best price, and gave me the name of a dermatologist. Soon the sessions were more like going to a shrink, but in French, and with the occasional correction of the
passé composé
.

The second wave of relenting to French life was to learn how to cook French food. This I resisted for the longest time. Even though I felt I was now liberated by being able to curse in French at shopkeepers or people who deliberately tried to run me over with their bicycles on the rue de Rennes, I felt I would lose that identity – whatever it was – if I started cooking like my mother-in-law, with all those
rognons au riz
or
pot au feu
.

I resisted selfishly even when Bruno – who never complained, who ate everything I cooked, when he did eat – occasionally spoke longingly of his mother’s
mousse au chocolat
, which she heroically produced by the basinful at our wedding, and which was gone in an instant, along with the foie gras she made from scratch, painstakingly picking out the veins of the goose liver.

I would resist when we were on holidays in the mountains in Grisail; when she tried to show me how to debone a lamb shank or make a flourless chocolate cake, I would feign boredom. I daydreamed when she and Monique, her glamorous best friend who had long blonde hair well into her sixties and looked like another Brigitte Bardot, took me to the organic vegetable nursery and bartered over courgettes and peppers and pumpkins, and showed me how to pick the best ones, and how to make confit and jams and pastries.

I rolled my eyes in boredom when she talked to me about the wonder of Picard, the French frozen food market that is beloved by French cooks because everything is so beautifully done and packaged, and because you can serve
coquilles St Jacques
at a dinner party and no one would know you had not cooked it yourself. ‘This is how easy it is to puree leeks,’ she said, washing the stalks one by one in a basin of cold water.

My resistance to making a
daube
or a
tarte aux pommes
was also something to do with lingering homesickness, being in exile. When I cooked, it was the food that came from my family: risottos, pasta and chocolate chip cookies for Christmas, Easter eggs dyed red, like the Greeks did, in April. When I went out, I did not want foie gras. I craved food I never used to eat. Cheeseburgers, for instance, or turkey sandwiches. Once, I saw an American friend who had lived in France for many years walking down the rue Princesse smiling to herself. She had just come from a Parisian coffee shop renowned for serving American-style food. ‘I just ate a tuna fish sandwich,’ she said in a dreamy voice. ‘And my entire life in New York City flashed before my eyes.’

While I was pregnant, in the isolation wing of the hospital, and then after Luca was born, all I wanted to eat were tuna fish sandwiches, which are not easy to find in Paris. Bruno would bring them to me, but they weren’t the crustless kind on white bread that you got in an American deli – they came on baguettes with lettuce and sliced egg. And so, for these reasons, trying to maintain my own piece of America, I dug my heels in firmly and refused to learn to cook French.

Eventually, I found the only Italian restaurant that did not use Tunisians as cooks, and another place thirty minutes away on the metro that had real mozzarella. I paid outrageous prices for a jar of Skippy peanut butter and when people came from America, I made them bring me Pepperidge Farm Goldfish and Arm & Hammer baking soda instead of trying to abandon my cravings and eat what the French ate –
rognons
, snails, oysters, quivering foie gras (the fresh kind, cooked with apples and served slightly raw),
tarte au saumon
and macaroons from Pierre Hermé on rue Bonaparte that people loved but that I thought tasted of fish.

My yearnings were satisfied by less satisfactory equivalents of what I desired. So the pizza I finally found after five years searching in the 18th arrondissement was not ever going to be the Neapolitan pizza that you eat at long tables and that is as thin as air. And the Anglo-style bakery, Bread and Roses on rue de Fleurus that served Earl Grey tea and a very good carrot cake was lovely, but it was not Tom’s in Notting Hill that served pink fairy cakes and ginger cookies and fried eggs and ham. And the waitresses in Bread and Roses, who charged seven euros for a glass of iced tea, were charmingly pretty but extraordinarily rude. ‘Yes, seven euros for iced tea, and what of it?’

One day, like the resistance to speaking the language with the proper grammar, I gave all this up. I was in France. Why was I fighting my internal battles through the cuisine? I went to London at least once a month and could eat curry and chilli squid there. Also, there was Moineau.

Moineau did not have daughters – Bruno was sandwiched between an older and younger brother – and she always treated me like the daughter she never had. The first time I met her, she opened a bottle of champagne and kept the bottle, always, on a kitchen shelf in Grisail. She gave me a sapphire and diamond pendant when Bruno and I were together for a year, which her father had given her. When things grew difficult with Bruno, she would phone me, to make sure I was all right.

But my memories of my mother-in-law will always be about food. The first meal she made for me in Grisail was like eating a burst of sunshine: it was a tagine of lamb and aubergine in a tomato sauce that she had baked for hours in the oven, and a
citron tarte
for dessert. At our wedding in Grisail, our lunch was roast lamb, gratinée potatoes, and a
pièce montée
– the traditional cake for weddings, births baptisms and communions, made from small circles of glazed hardened sugar, stuffed inside with cream and towering in a triangle: an act of love.

The day after the wedding was Bruno’s birthday. Moineau cooked the picnic lunch: prawns, foie gras and her flourless chocolate cake. At Luca’s birthday parties, she did not make the American Duncan Hines cakes with frosting, she arrived with elegant creations that came in small boxes and were as neat and perfect as she was. When she picked Luca up after school – the tradition is that French grandparents come once a week to collect their
petit-fils
– she arrived with a white cardboard box tied with a pink ribbon and inside was one perfect, nearly warm caramel éclair. I knew that Luca would grow with this memory of food, of his grandmother at the door of his little school, with something sweet and delicious and loving for him to eat. She even got him to eat pureed leeks. And it was Moineau who had fed him his first bite of solid food when he was three months old, a spoonful of carrots with crème fraiche.

And slowly, very slowly, I fell in love with France.

I once read somewhere that French women have the most difficult job on earth, the job of being perfect in every way, and that they consume more antidepressants than any nation on earth. When I look at Moineau I understand the enormous pressure these women feel, which is perhaps unique in the world because there is such an emphasis on perfection. Now I understood why the midwife had been so scornful of the sugar I had eaten while pregnant; I had gained more than 20 kilos while carrying Luca. The competition in France for women is fierce.

Moineau is tiny and beautiful. She had three boys, but like Monique, she still looked like Brigitte Bardot: a tiny upturned nose, a blonde bob, elegant clothes. When I saw photographs of her holding Bruno as a 2-week-old baby she is already back at her pre-pregnancy weight and wearing a tight sheath, her hair and lipstick perfect.

She told me that it broke her heart to go back to work when her boys were small, but she had to, and so she hired a teenage nanny. But she ran home from her job during her lunch break so that she could prepare a perfect dinner for her husband and sons. She worked full-time, plus ran the household, plus reconstructed the family
mas
at Grisail.

Her early life was about order and perfection, but even as she grew older, she still maintained her rules: she always seemed to be on a diet – something about respecting the rules of time of eating – and lectured me about eating only 70 per cent dark chocolate (the best brand, she advised, being Lindt).

Before dinner, she usually drank a glass of whisky, which she called a ‘
petit apéro
’. She and my father-in-law, Philippe, who was as handsome as my husband, and had served as a mountain guide on skis during his military service, were a couple that remained in love until he died snorkeling in Tahiti while they were there together in March 2011. They were
petite bourgeois
Catholics, and family loyalty was everything.

She made her own jams from strawberries and raspberries in the summer, and in the winter knitted all of Luca’s sweaters and my hats and scarves. She knew how to find the best price for good handbags or shoes. She smelled, like my own mother, of expensive perfume, of Guerlain.