Picnic in Provence (15 page)

S
pring has sprung early this year. Nothing could have prepared me for the magnificent bloom of the irises along the old Roman road or the snap of the first local peas. We discovered the short-lived fields of narcissi sprouting across from the old train station. Once cultivated for perfume production, they now grow wild in the tall grass. For a week or two, everyone stops to gather the small daffodil-like flowers, their scent powerful, almost sickly sweet.

Alexandre is learning to talk; his first sentences are “Weed a book” (you get the general idea) and “I’m a cook” (thanks to Pixar’s
Ratatouille
). I always thought we would raise our children in Paris, that I would take Alexandre to the Louvre on Saturday mornings and we would slurp miso ramen at our favorite hole-in-the-wall Japanese restaurant for lunch. But the spectacles are different here. We can spend a whole morning on the steps of the town hall spotting tractors; watching the three guys raising beams for the new roof of the butcher shop is like a night at the ballet.

Now that Gwendal is working from home, he’s around a lot more than your average executive. He and Alexandre are so natural together; I am having a harder time. Now that he’s out of the baby stage, I’ve realized that I don’t really know how to play.

These past few months, there’s been a quiet abdication going on, like a queen gracefully (but begrudgingly) handing over power to her more genial younger brother. I still do the cooking, the bath, and Alexandre and I go to the butcher and the bakery together, but the giggles, the wrestling, the circus acrobatics, even the quiet-time hugs are Gwendal’s domain. It’s hard, maybe impossible, for a mother to admit that she is not her child’s primary parent, that maybe his father is just more fun.

If I don’t know how to play, I sure have learned how to squeeze.

For better or worse, my relationship with my son is also a male-female relationship. I’ve never chased a man in my life (okay, once—very bad outcome). My mother taught me never to wait by the phone. I never made the first move. I knew how to play the game. At least I thought I did. Alexandre is the first boy in a long time—maybe the first boy ever—who makes me feel needy, insecure. So here I am, at the age of thirty-seven, chasing my son around the kitchen table like some crazed lover in a 1930s bedroom farce, grasping in vain after one more smooch.

Where’s a good old-fashioned Oedipus complex when you need one?

I discussed it with my friend Keria, the one who gave me such sound advice about who should look where during the actual birth. “They’re little men,” she said. “Simple as that. Respect the space. The same thing happened to me. I was screaming at Theo one night, trying to get him to go to bed. Marco explained it all.

“‘He’s a man, Keria,’ he told me. ‘You don’t talk to a man like that, belittling him. He has pride. Accept his innate superiority as a man and he will accept your innate superiority as his mother.’”

Her husband, of course, is half Italian.

TODAY ALEXANDRE WOULDN’T
let me sit next to him on the couch. With his full weight pitched forward, he shoved me away, both hands against my invading thigh.

There are days, most days, when I’m unprepared for the fundamental asymmetry of maternal love. The tug of it. I wonder if it’s always going to be like this, me asking for more love than he wants to give.

When I talk to Gwendal about these feelings, I end up sounding like a wounded, whiny child myself. “I know you think it’s annoying to have him all over you all the time, but he never, never comes to me. Only by default, when you’re not around.”

“Do you play with him?”

“I don’t know,” I said honestly, bewildered. “You think I don’t play with him enough?” It was half question, half accusation.

“I don’t know.”

I don’t know
means “yes.”

I’VE BEEN ACCEPTED
as an apprentice in Jean’s garden, a hidden oasis of plum, pear, cherry, and walnut trees down by the river. This means getting up at dawn and making my way across the Pont Roman, walking along a deeply rutted dirt road, and taking a sometimes smelly left at the sanitation plant. The last thing I grew was a potato on three toothpicks (that was in kindergarten), so we’ll see how it goes.

Jean’s garden is a secret garden, a square plot surrounded by a thick hedge and a padlocked gate. Even if I were to be shut out forever, like Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, I would always remember this place, keep a map of it in my head.

Just beyond the gate is a neat circle of giant irises. My middle name is Iris, and they are among my favorite flowers. The blooms are almost as big as my hand; there are the royal-purple ones, which I knew, but also colors I’d never seen before: bright yellow, white, even burgundy, a deep red with the texture of crushed-velvet.

Behind the irises, in the sunniest spot, are the beds for tomatoes, eggplants, zucchini, parsley, and potatoes. Jean likes to plant small round eggplants and also round zucchini; pale green and the size of softballs, they are the perfect shape to hollow out and stuff with sausage and spices.

To the left is the shade of the walnut tree and just beyond that the shed. The walnuts are already ripening in their fuzzy green pods. In June, Jean soaks the young nuts with
vin de table,
eau de vie,
and sugar to make a winter’s worth of his own walnut wine. There are two rows of muscat grape vines and two plum trees, one for tiny green
mirabelles
(I like to freeze them and use them as ice cubes in summer drinks) and one for
quetsches,
oval and dusky purple, perfect for making compote. There is a border of rosebushes, pale peach, feathery pink, and lavender, and an apricot tree that hasn’t given fruit in several years.

Jean walked me up the central path. Next to the cherry trees, only a few feet from the river, is a concrete
puits,
a well. “A neighbor told me a few years ago, ‘You’d better cover it, or someone might put a dead deer in there to poison the water.’” I tried to trace this story back to its origins. Between the Marseillais gift for exaggeration and the
paysan
gift for paranoia, the truth could be a long way off. Maybe one day a rabbit tried to drink from it and fell in. Give it ten years and two more tellers, and it would be a grizzly bear.

Of course, I was not there simply to admire. I was there to work. We made our way back to the shed, where Jean handed me a pair of large canvas gloves. I thought of the white felt gloves I’d once aspired to, the kind used to handle Renaissance manuscripts. As my mother would say: Life leads you to amazing places.

Jean approached his garden the way I imagined he’d approached his engineering work, with precise gestures and all the right tools. In addition to small hand rakes and spades, he had a series of short metal poles he had cut himself to measure between the rows of vegetables. Thirty-two centimeters between each row, eighteen centimeters between each potato. He gave me a bag of spuds he’d saved from the previous winter; they were already sprouting knobbly green buds from the eyes. I soon abandoned the gloves; they only got in my way.

Just short of his eightieth birthday, Jean still squats in the dirt with relative ease. When we finished with the potatoes, he picked up a thicker, longer metal pole that was lying in the grass. “I was wondering what that was for,” I said.

“This,” he told me with a laugh, implying everything had its purpose, “is to help me get up off the ground.”

Jean doesn’t like chemical fertilizer. His trinity for a healthy garden is a mixture of sheep shit, pellets of dried cow’s blood, and ground goat horn. “When we were first married, Paulette had a cousin that worked at the
abattoir
—the local slaughterhouse. He would send us buckets of blood to pour around the base of the trees.” I thought about my pregnant cravings for
boudin noir
and raw steak—maybe the trees feel the same way.

Jean left me a bare patch behind the plum trees to plant beans. It took me a few days to rake it clear; it was covered with the debris: last year’s tree trimmings, vine cuttings, and dead leaves. When I was finally ready to turn the earth, I expected a Colonial Williamsburg–style hoe, but instead he brought out a bright red
motoculteur—
a sort of handheld tractor—its undercarriage spattered with mud. It had a narrow head, a spoked wheel underneath, and two handles perpendicular to the earth like pointy ears. It looked like a large red poodle riding a unicycle.

As soon as he turned it on, the poodle began to buck like a calf at a rodeo. I tried to press the rotating head deep into the soil, maintaining a straight line. The sound was deafening.

“Tiens bien,”
yelled Jean as I veered to the left like a drunk driver. I was dangerously close to the heirloom rosebushes when he finally flicked the switch and the beast came to a halt.

“Here,” he said, handing me back my rake.

After Jean finished turning my plot—he controlled the red devil with a grim determination and more upper-arm strength than I possessed—he needed a break. He sat down on a tree stump in a spot of sun near the cherry tree, his stomach settling between his knees. Talking is his way of resting, and sensing that I am more interested in cooking than in nuclear submarines, he often narrates his favorite recipes.

“Do you know
sardines à l’escabèche?
” he began, taking out his handkerchief and wiping his brow.

“You take sardine fillets, or whole sardines with the guts and heads removed, dip them in a bit of flour, fry them, and then let them cool.” I wondered if this was the recipe he had been making underneath Mireille’s bedroom window all these years.

“Make a sauce with chopped onion and olive oil, add a glass of red wine vinegar and a
cuillère à soupe
of honey.” A
cuillère à soupe
is a soupspoon. In France it’s not a precise measurement—the size depends on the heft of your great-grandmother’s silver service.

“Let it boil a bit. Pour over the sardines, store in the fridge for
un apéritif
.” He looked pleased with himself, as if he wanted to go home and make some right then. “I might chop some parsley,” he added, by way of conclusion.

Every day, before we leave the garden, Jean cuts a bouquet of peonies and roses for Paulette, carefully trimming the thorns with a pocketknife. He cut one for me as well, wrapping the stems tightly with kitchen string.

“Do you have a recipe for bouillabaisse?” I asked as we hung the gardening tools back on their hooks in the shed.

“For that you must go to the fish market in Marseille.”

“Do you think that one day, when you go”—they still had their apartment in the city—“I could come?”

“
C’est de l’authentique.
This is what you do.” For this, like everything else, Jean had his method.

“
Tu arrives de bonne heure.
You must arrive early. I ask, ‘How much?’” he said, eyeing the imaginary fish with an air of disdain. “Bah.” He threw up his hands at the temerity of the imaginary fishmonger. “‘If you want to keep it, keep it.’ Then I walk away. Later, about half past twelve, I come back.
Il en reste toujours,
he still has plenty of fish,
et là,
you have it for half price.
Si non, c’est trop cher
—they take you for
un imbécile
.”

I held my bouquet while Jean closed the padlock.

“But if we go,” he said, wagging a finger under my nose, “
toi, tu ne parles pas!
You don’t say a word. If you do, they’ll take me for an Englishman.”

His pride would never recover.

I’M AN OLD
soul. Three going on thirty, as my mother used to say. In this, as in so many things, she’s not wrong. Everyone has a natural age, and there’s something about my thirties that just fits. When I hit thirty-one, I somehow felt right in my skin. My mental age and my actual age finally merged, like overlapping film negatives synchronized for a perfect Technicolor image. Gwendal has a natural age too—about five and a half. He still approaches the world with a sense of wonder—it’s one of the things I love best about him. He and Alexandre understand each other perfectly; every stick is a sword, every puddle demands to be jumped in. I’ve tried it, and no matter how hard I concentrate, I still see a stick. I’m kind of a party pooper that way. Gwendal is a much better knight-errant than I.

So how did such an old biddy find herself, this past week, giggling, six feet off the ground in the limbs of a cherry tree? Since the sun came out for good in April, nature seems to be on fast-forward. The lilacs were wilted by the first of May; now the cherry trees are groaning with fruit, several weeks in advance. We’ve been invited down to Jean’s garden this afternoon to help pick the cherries before the crows do.

We arrived with a wooden crate. We barely had to touch the fruit; it almost fell into our hands. Alexandre squealed every time a cherry accidentally hit the ground; he ran around our feet, picking up the strays. Jean sat on his tree stump, pointing us toward branches we had missed. Somewhere in the stretching, tugging, and plucking of the cherries was a childlike sensation that I couldn’t remember feeling ever before. Not to mention the forbidden pleasure of staining a perfectly good white T-shirt with fresh cherry juice.

I don’t have many childhood memories. In fact, I don’t remember anything before the day, just after my seventh birthday, when my parents called me from the den, where I’d been coloring, up to their bedroom and announced they were getting a divorce. It was the first time I’d seen either of my parents cry. My father was packed and a taxi was already waiting outside. I sat on the steps thinking I should do something—scream, kick—but I did not.

When I try to remember anything that came before that, there are only snippets: my mother at the sink pulling the beards off steamers; my father, head propped up on one arm, reading Dr. Seuss on my bed with the Strawberry Shortcake sheets. When Gwendal and I find ourselves kissing in the kitchen (this happens quite a bit), Alexandre will invariably come and insert himself between our knees. He loves this tent of legs; the pillars holding up his universe, I guess. Every time this happens, I feel a lump rising in my throat. I have no memories of my parents in the same room.