Life From Scratch (16 page)

The croques monsieurs found in Parisian bistros are gloriously indulgent, dripping with toasted cheese and ham, under a layer of bubbling béchamel. There are many variations on what is essentially a fancy grilled cheese, some made on a panini press, others in the oven. The most popular rendition is made with Gruyère, a sharp cheese known for its fantastic melting qualities
.

Though many choose to replicate the croque monsieur at home with homemade béchamel sauce, Monique taught me the simplest method of all, which relies on crème fraîche—a fermented dairy product similar to sour cream—for richness. As the sandwich bakes, the tangy spread melts into the bread, softening the center—a striking contrast to the blackened outer edges. Crème fraîche can be found in the dairy case
.

For bread, Monique prefers
pain de mie
—good quality sandwich bread, often square in shape, though I find the recipe excellent on most anything the bakery has to offer. Though Monique doesn’t pre-toast her bread, some might prefer the added crunch this gives the center of the sandwich
.

2 slices good quality sandwich bread

2 tablespoons crème fraîche

3 or 4 thin slices Gruyère cheese

1 slice ham cold cuts

Preheat the oven to 425°F.

Toast the bread, if desired. This can be done in the oven during the last few minutes of preheating.

To assemble the sandwich: Spread a slice of bread with a tablespoon of crème fraîche. Add a slice of cheese, a slice of ham, and a second slice of cheese. Add the second slice of bread and spread the top with another tablespoon of crème fraîche. Finish with a final slice of cheese.

Bake for 6 minutes, then transfer under the broiler until the top of the sandwich is bubbling and lightly browned.

Enough for 1 sandwich

CHAPTER 10

Salt of the L
a
nd

S
HORTLY AFTER
G
RACE LEFT
, Patricia and Pierre announced that we’d be moving to Luxembourg, a pencil tip of a country several hours north of Paris. Pierre had secured a contract at a small manufacturing firm there. As their financial director, he’d be monitoring the money on a special construction project for a Fortune 500 company in parts of eastern Europe. There’d be a lot of travel. He spoke enthusiastically about the project and told Patricia and me how much we’d love pastoral Luxembourg. Patricia didn’t say much.

At 16, I received the news with equal parts trepidation and excitement. My fears of starting over again—of building yet another home—were mostly quelled by the prospect of a clean slate, of unhinging the walls I’d so determinedly constructed in Paris. Over the four years since Michael’s death, I’d formed an identity there as the wild one, the wounded one, the loose cannon. The exertion had exhausted me.

By nature I am not an extrovert; that had been Michael’s role. As much as I’d like to think I reinvented myself in Paris, I was still struggling, mixed up in a fast crowd. I often wondered if Pierre and Patricia realized this, and decided that the only way for me to move forward was to cut me off, once and for all, from the Doc Martens—to give me a fresh point of view, literally.

Three months later, we moved to a three-story cobbled farmhouse in a small town on the outskirts of Luxembourg City. Across the street, three goats bleated and two cows bellowed behind a weathered stone wall. My long, skinny bedroom had been converted from the days when attics were reserved for mice and hay.

I slid my bed under an angled skylight, where I could watch Orion’s Belt glimmer in the blackness. I wondered if Mom saw the same stars from her bedroom window. Somehow the world felt smaller when I believed that she basked in their brightness, too. Where Paris had consumed me, Luxembourg cradled me; its undulating hills and valleys, thick forests, rolling pastures, and trim town squares were humble and quiet after the gritty grandeur of Paris.

Patricia must have felt it, too. Almost immediately her cooking shifted to the salt of the land: lamb stews, green bean soup, plum tarts, easy roasts. Her new kitchen was smaller than the ones she’d previously had, filled with the narrow darkness typical of a home constructed in the 1800s.

To ensure that I got my grades in order, the Dumonts enrolled me in an American school and had me repeat tenth grade. The school had once been a convent. Vines trailed along the crumbling stone and plaster walls. The windows were long and pointed, like enormous pope hats. A statue of Saint Mary still graced the tiny courtyard.

My entire class was made up of just 18 students, most of whom had known one another their whole lives. Unlike the rough-edged Doc Martens, these kids wore polo shirts, khakis, and Mary Janes. Not only did the girls
not
wear black lipstick, they didn’t wear makeup at all (unless sheer lip gloss counts). Social events included basketball games. And from what I could tell, being a good student was
cool
. Only a few juniors and seniors operated on the fringes, sneaking off campus to smoke for ten minutes during lunch, or staying out until midnight on the weekends.

I gravitated toward these relatively tame rebels out of habit. But every time I ran across the street and hid behind a stone wall for a hurried smoke, every time I threw back a beer after class, I tasted disappointment. I couldn’t believe how easily I’d settled back into my bad habits.

My failure to reinvent myself ate away at me. Two months into the school year, I sunk into what felt like depression. At first I was listless in the early evening. Then my eyes glazed over during class. Pierre chalked it up to the move. “Take a shower, you’ll feel better,” he said.

But this was unlike any fatigue I’d ever experienced. Unable to concentrate, I excused myself from classes to sleep on the cool floor of the darkened auditorium until school let out. I crashed when I got home, only waking for dinner, generally eating little more than a crust of bread or thimble of stew. After a couple of weeks, I stopped waking up for dinner. I wondered, in passing, if this is what it felt like to be a bear—to hibernate.

With Pierre’s urging (he didn’t want me to fall behind), I continued going to school through fever and chills. And because I didn’t know how to stop, I also sleepwalked through my social life. One Friday afternoon, I drank half a pint of beer that came back up on the public bus. The next day my skin was yellow, and I couldn’t keep water down. Pierre and Patricia took me to the ER for a battery of tests. While the lab processed my blood work, the doctor did an ultrasound. He looked grim.

“We’re not sure what’s wrong with you. Your symptoms seem to point to hepatitis C, but it could also be a severe case of mononucleosis. Your liver is
very
damaged. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

He pointed to the ultrasound, a wash of incomprehensible black, white, and gray. He put down the image and took off his glasses. “Miss Lombardi, you might not make it,” he finally said, speaking English slowly, trying to make sure I understood. His eyes were clear and blue, soft but unblinking.

I nodded and closed my eyes. The illness had overwhelmed any desire for self-preservation. I wanted to tell him I knew why my liver was damaged, that I was stubborn and stupid and unable to control my drinking. I wanted to tell him I needed help.

Instead I retreated under the paper hospital bedding and slept. When the lab work came back, I learned I had mononucleosis. Though mine was the most severe case they’d ever seen, the doctor said that in time my liver would fully recover. For two weeks, nurses pumped fluids into me, took more ultrasounds, and monitored my white blood cell count. Color gradually returned to my cheeks, and I was moved out of intensive care.

One day a chipper redhead popped into my room.

“Hi, Sasha, how are you feeling?”

I looked at the girl blankly. She seemed familiar, but I couldn’t quite place her or her British accent.

“It’s me, Annie. Can I come in?”

Before I had a chance to object, she rushed into the room. Her ear-to-ear grin all but caught her freckles on fire. That’s when it hit me. This girl was in my class. We hadn’t spent time together; she was almost a year and a half younger than me, and didn’t smoke or drink. She deposited a tote full of homework and a signed card from classmates on the edge of the bed and then sat down at my side.

“Now onto the important stuff—let’s talk boys!”

None of the other kids I’d been hanging out with had come by. In fact, aside from Patricia and Pierre, Annie was my first visitor.

“How come you’re being so nice to me? Coming all the way out here, to the hospital?” I asked, overwhelmed.

“Why not?” She shrugged her shoulders.

“It’s just that it’s really far away—”

“Nonsense. I know what it’s like to move, and to be the new kid. Where are you from? Do your parents move a lot?”

“Nowhere, really.” I looked down, “Actually, they’re not my parents. I’m adopted. That’s why I don’t have red hair.”

I don’t know why I lied. I’d always said Patricia and Pierre were my guardians before.

She reached across the bed to pet my hand. “You and I are going to be good friends.” She smiled again. Her warmth immediately dissolved my defense mechanisms.

After I got out of the hospital, Annie and I were inseparable. With her friendship, I no longer felt the urge to sneak off campus and smoke. Instead I threw myself into my studies and activities. I joined the basketball and softball teams. I continued theater and choir. I was the yearbook editor. I made the honor society.

This is not to say I didn’t rebel anymore. Though I still stayed out late and socialized with some of the older kids in school, they were on a serious curfew. When I pushed the limits, I was only out until 2 a.m.

Patricia and Pierre let me be as long as my grades didn’t suffer. And they didn’t. For two years, I excelled in every subject and slowly built my confidence.

But Patricia seemed to be sinking under the pressures of yet another move, another language barrier, another world. Though she’d grasped a fair amount of French when we lived in Paris, the shopkeepers of Luxembourg seemed to favor Luxembourgish and German. Whereas the expat community at school insulated me, Patricia kept more and more to herself, only connecting with the other mothers in passing.

She perked up when her girls came home for the holidays. Patricia and Pierre made a point of flying their daughters home every Christmas and Thanksgiving, often extending the invitation to their boyfriends, who’d be put up at a nearby hotel. For two precious weeks Patricia would bubble over, laughing and cooking the way she’d done when I first arrived in Atlanta: preparing roast chicken with tight, crackling skins, silken gravies, and cheese soufflés that never fell. One year she replaced our Christmas stockings with tights, which stretched to accommodate three times as many gifts.

But after she dropped the girls off at the airport, the gloom resurfaced. Patricia spent an increasing amount of time locked away in her bedroom. Sometimes I wouldn’t see her face for weeks, though dinner would be on the table when I got home from school, fresh and steaming.

I wondered if it was my fault that Patricia was so sad.

Every time I called her “Patricia” and Pierre “Papa,” I felt a twinge of guilt. But I couldn’t undo the past. When an unwitting parishioner at our church looked from me to Patricia and remarked, “Oh, I see the family resemblance!,” neither of us knew how to respond.

I hunkered down, head tucked firmly in my shell, waiting for Patricia’s smile and big laugh to echo through the house again. When she’d finally emerge from her room—and she always did—I tiptoed around the house in an effort to keep the peace as long as possible.

One day in the winter of 11th grade, I sat at the breakfast table, eating a bowl of cereal before a basketball game. It was 6, maybe 7 a.m. I hadn’t seen Patricia for days. Suddenly, in the early morning quiet I heard a rustling upstairs, and then a stomping. Someone was coming downstairs—fast.