Picnic in Provence (21 page)

“Hmm,” I smiled, backing Alexandre away from the pen.

Gwendal didn’t say much as we drove the tight turns back to Forcalquier. He was due to talk to the headhunter later this week. The sun flashed through the rows of pines like a hypnotist’s coin at the end of a chain.

THE NEXT DAY
after lunch, I wandered up to Gwendal’s office. He was sitting at his desk, the detritus of our administrative life strewn around him on the floor, the extra bed for guests without its sheets. Our decorating efforts had not quite extended to this part of the house. The English wicker colonial couch didn’t match the Moroccan rug, and the mirrored door of the art deco armoire we found at the
dépôt-vente
was in danger of falling off. True, it wasn’t the most glamorous workplace for a man of his abilities. I sat down on the edge of the bed.

I’ve given Gwendal many American-style pep talks over the past few years, and he’s risen to every occasion. This time he just needed to be let off the hook. “You never wanted to work for a Hollywood studio,” I said softly, “to be a cog in the wheel. You don’t like office politics. There are some people who are good at it, made for it. But that’s not you.” Gwendal swiveled slightly in his chair. “Your honesty, your integrity, your unlimited capacity for work,
these
are the things that make you great, that force people to take you at your word. You’re an entrepreneur. You should be in a place where who you are is the greatest asset you have. I don’t think we should try to stick a round peg in a square hole just because it’s a nice next line on your résumé.”

I saw his relief. I forget sometimes that he needs me to say these things aloud, that he’s afraid to disappoint me.

“I think we both underestimated the toll these last two years have taken. It’s been bad for a long time. Look how starved you are for this tiny bit of validation of what you’ve done. That doesn’t mean it’s right.”

I know my husband. He has a bit of an Atlas complex—if there’s no one else to do it, he’ll hold up the whole world. He’s so invested. He treats every job he’s ever had like he owns the company.

He took both my hands, rubbed his thumb gently over my wrist.

“I’m never doing this again,” he said quietly. “I just don’t have it in me. If I’m going to put in those kind of hours, that energy, time away from my family, it has to be mine.”

I WANTED TO
find a way to say thank you to Didier and Martine. I debated carrot-saffron muffins but decided to go with the old standby no French person can resist—Toll House chocolate chip cookies. I brought the plastic-wrapped paper plate of goodies to the market on Sunday.

Martine wasn’t there, but there was Didier, leaning against the truck, the stub of a hand-rolled cigarette between his lips.
“Mais, il fallait pas”
—you shouldn’t have.

Mais, si.

By way of response, he handed me a small jar of saffron; the threads caught the morning light, glowing slightly around the edges.

“Mille quatre cent soixante quatorze,”
he said, looking at the collection of jars laid out on his checkerboard cloth. Translating numbers is one of the last lags in my French vocabulary, along with driving directions and tax jargon. (Come to think of it, maybe it has nothing to do with my French.) I slowly worked it out, repeating every syllable in an attempt to visualize the accompanying number in my head. “One thousand four hundred and seventy-four flowers last Thursday,” he repeated with a certain satisfaction, as if to say,
Not bad for a New Yorker who doesn’t know a sheep turd when she sees one.

I tucked the jar into my bag and gave Didier
bises
on both cheeks. For the time being, this is the only golden parachute I need.

H
oly Empire State Building, Batman. I’ve just been taken for a tourist in the city of my birth.

After I’d spent a week at my parents’ new place in Delaware, Gwendal flew in. We headed up to New York together and walked out of Penn Station onto the sunshine-soaked concrete. I sucked in the noise and the car exhaust like the air at the top of Everest. Gwendal started to veer toward the forty-person taxi line.

“Uh-uh,” I said. I walked twenty-five feet up the block and did what any native New Yorker would: I flagged one down in the middle of moving traffic. One has better things to do with one’s time than wait in the taxi line at Penn Station.

We hoisted our suitcase and two large shopping bags of French liqueurs (samples for a friend) into the back.

“A hundred and forty-nine West Tenth Street.”

I must have been distracted by a fly or something, because it was nearly twenty blocks before I noticed what was going on.

“Excuse me, sir. Why are we going uptown?”

“I thought you said Tenth Avenue and Amsterdam.” (Never mind that this is geographically impossible.)

“Tenth Street,” I screeched. “Tenth Street. Sir, I’m not a tourist, and you heard me perfectly well. Please reset the meter to zero and take us downtown.”

And that’s exactly what he did—but not before my pride was wounded, an identity crisis ignited, and a half hour that I could have spent in my favorite hat shop in SoHo wasted.

When we got out of the cab, Gwendal looked at me like I had just peeled off my face. “Do you think he was really trying to cheat us or he just didn’t speak English very well?”

“Doesn’t matter,” I snapped. And it didn’t. The damage was done. Sometime during my ten years in France, I’d crossed a line. New York is in my blood, but somewhere else is in my voice, my hair, my clothes, and the fact that I now have to carry a suitcase out of Penn Station.
Merde
.

GOING HOME, BACK
, back home—
whatever
—to the United States is getting confusing. It’s hard to explain to Gwendal what happens to me when I land in the States. He’s supposed to be disoriented; I’m not.

The first sign we’d left Europe was the little girl in her pajamas. The plane was late and it took Alexandre and me an hour to get through customs. When we finally rounded the bend into arrivals, there were only four people left in the room: my parents, a young mother, and a five-year-old. It was four thirty in the afternoon, and the little girl was rolling on the couch in a pair of pastel cupcake pajamas. It was a tiny thing, but as a cultural signifier, it was as clear as the banner-size American flag in immigration—
Welcome to the Land of Anything Goes.
Just as you’d never see a French woman on a plane in sweatpants, you would never see a French child out in public in her pj’s.

Surely most people are not this porous about their environments. The first thing that goes out the window when I return to the States is my carefully cultivated sense of moderation, patience, and, dare I say, order. There’s a change of frequency, like a slight twist of the knob on one of those old-fashioned radios, when I start speaking English full-time. I become impatient. I look for opportunities to have a little rant.
This is unacceptable. I’d like to speak to a manager.
Just for the sheer pleasure of knowing it might work.

Like that little girl at the airport, my schedule gets all mixed up. (Truth be told, I always thought it was a shame that the French have no word for “spend the day in your bathrobe eating leftover Chinese food and watching reruns of
Law and Order.
”) Food has no specific time or place, it’s just abundantly, constantly
there
. I get overwhelmed by all my options. I order blueberry pancakes and bacon for dinner at the diner. I heat up leftover stuffed cabbage for a four o’clock lunch. I’m forever eating and never hungry. I inhale Dots, boxes and boxes of fluorescent-colored, high-fructose-corn-syrup, Antichrist-of-your-orthodontist Dots. These foods are at once wildly satisfying and a reenactment of
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
. Forty-eight hours after my arrival, I can usually be found in the bathroom nursing a sugar-induced migraine and throwing up a stray package of Twizzlers.

THE WEEK I
arrive, my mother always buys a celebratory bone-in pork roast—for eight. It takes three hours to cook, and what with talking and unpacking and my usual digging through my mother’s jewelry drawer, we never seem to remember to turn on the oven before six o’clock. I rarely have time to marinate the roast, and there’s always a dead peach and a half-frozen Granny Smith apple lingering in the back of the fruit drawer that my mom insists we throw in the pot. At eight thirty, well past the American dinner hour, the roast is still raw in the center. We give up and cut it into eight thick pork chops dangling from the bone and blast it under the broiler. Sometimes we
really
give up and order pizza.

As I prepare the pork roast, I can hear my mother at the table with Alexandre. “Where does the purple one go? No,” she says gently. “Which one’s the purple? There it is. Bravo. Can you show me where this goes? How many spots are there? One, two, three. That’s
right!
” She hasn’t seen him in four months—a lifetime at this age. Maybe it’s the way she uses her high-pitched teacher’s voice, but to me, this kind of play seems so…directed. I feel like she’s testing him.

My mother is a wonderful teacher. She spent the first part of her career teaching teenagers with disabilities and the second half in an administrative role, making sure kids got the appropriate therapeutic services. This means she has a checklist in her head—occupational hazard—of things Alexandre’s
supposed
to be doing. You will never—ever—hear a French teacher trying to evaluate a child’s skill set at age two and a half.

Alexandre recently started taking a kiddie music class in Reillanne. For the moment this is his only formal activity (unless you count watching tractors). No one in France seems terribly concerned with programming kids with lots of activities. On the contrary, scheduling too many activities for them is seen as negative—an imposition on their time to play. Claire, our next-door neighbor in Céreste, has recently gone back to her work as a speech therapist. “Sometimes a little
ennui—
boredom—is good for the kids. It obliges them to invent things—develop their imaginations.”

The music class for the two- and three-year-olds is called
Éveil Musical
—Musical Awakening. Unlike Mommy and Me, parents are not invited to stay. I don’t think they are practicing scales or learning to identify Mozart. When we come to pick him up, he usually refuses to put down the flute. The phrases I hear tossed around translate to “awaken the senses” and “take pleasure”
—prendre plaisir
. The theory goes, if you instill a sense of pleasure, learning will follow. I feel like American kids—including myself—were raised with the equation reversed: If you learn something, you will have the pleasure of accomplishment. Pleasure, for the American child—and, I have a sneaking suspicion, for the parent—comes not just from doing, but from doing better than everyone else. I want my child to be successful and happy; I don’t think there is a parent the world over who doesn’t wish for the same thing. It’s the cause and effect that differs between cultures: Does success make you happy, or is being happy a success?

“‘ARE YOU MOM
Enough?’”

Are you kidding?

My mom likes to save articles for me. She leaves them on my night table so when I go back to the States, I learn all about the latest eye cream for my dark circles, the hot new chef who opened a restaurant fifty yards from our old apartment in Paris, and the success of the charter-school movement. This trip, there’s a cover article from
Time
magazine with a picture of a slim, ballerina-like blonde nursing her three-year-old son. The headline “Are You Mom Enough?” confirms some of what I’ve come to suspect: Parenting in the United States has become an extreme sport.

I have conversations that I never expected to have.

“I’m obsessed with car seats,” says a friend in North Carolina who decided to leave her PhD program in psychology to stay home with her three kids.

“Why?” I blurted out before I could stop myself. I hope I didn’t sound arch. I’m sure I did.

“Because it’s really important.”

Well, yes. But.

She wasn’t alone. When I called Maya, an economics professor in LA, she repeated a version of the exact same thing. “We’re looking for a new car seat for Serge. Did you know a car seat can expire? The plastic becomes brittle, and therefore less crash-resistant, so you have to replace it.” Maybe I’ve been in France too long, but if one of those flimsy blue plastic bags can sit unchanged in a landfill for thirty thousand years, how is your car seat going to expire before your kid is out of diapers?

It’s not that I was hearing opposing arguments in France. I simply wasn’t having these conversations at all. The best word I can find for the moms around me in France is
décomplexées
. It means “relaxed,” but also “uncomplicated,” “anti-neurotic,” if you will. French parents don’t seem to worry that they are screwing up all the time, sickening their kids with dirt or stifling their kids’ creativity with discipline. It has nothing to do with competition and a lot to do with common sense. There is no peer-reviewed study you could brandish that would convince them that throwing spaghetti is a form of self-expression.

My own family was not immune to these “Mom Enough” insecurities.

One morning, Aunt Joyce, my mother’s younger sister, walked in the door, keys jangling.

“Hi, shortcake,” she said to Alexandre. “High five.” She is teaching him some local lingo.

Aunt Joyce is a great favorite with Alexandre. She has a Big Wheel in her driveway and, often, a pack of peanut M&M’s in her bag.

She poured herself a diet Coke, no ice, which she drinks at all hours of the day and night. “You’re not going to make us take Grandma Classes, are you?”

“Grandma Classes?”

“I have a friend in Pittsburgh, and before her daughter would let her babysit the kids, she had to take Grandma Classes.”

“You raised us, and we’re all still here. I think we can skip the diploma.”

THERE WAS ANOTHER
reason I went to New York: to see Linda. I hadn’t seen her since my father’s funeral. I meant to keep in touch, but years, and soon oceans, got in the way. Linda was my father’s last girlfriend, but she was also the little sister of his best childhood friend. She had had a crush on him when she was barely a teenager. Thirty years and two divorces later, they found each other again. If my father hadn’t been ill, I’m sure she would have been my stepmother.

Manic depression, like all mental illness, is insidious. Though it’s physiological, like diabetes, instead of restricting your access to cheesecake, it changes your personality. Sometimes it made my father silent, unable to muster the energy to trim the hairs in his ears. Sometimes it made him loud, irrational, delusional. He would scream at waitresses, sue his doctors. In the end, he drove Linda away, as he did most people. Everyone, really, except me. He died of a heart attack, alone in his apartment, a few months before I turned twenty-four. When the police called me at work, I asked the sergeant if there were any pills, gas. When he said no, a tiny part of my sadness turned to relief.

I’ve felt better these past few months. The thyroid pills are making a difference, and my doctor and I are gradually upping the dose. But after the hole I fell into this past winter, I’m still scared, tired of waiting for the other shoe to drop. Alexandre gives these questions of heredity a new sense of urgency—I don’t want to pass on this weight, this fear.

Linda agreed to meet me at a coffee shop near her apartment on the Upper West Side. I spotted her as she walked up the street in a tracksuit, with a cane. She was older, and blonder, than I remembered.

“Oh, honey, it’s so good to see you.” She gave me a big hug. “Sorry about the sweats. I just came from physical therapy.”

Inside, I slipped into the faux-leather banquette. The tables were close together; the man to our left, eating a bowl of oatmeal, nearly brushed me with his
New York Times
whenever he turned the page. Linda told me about her daughter, her twin grandsons.

“I guess I just want to know…” I was surprised at how hard it was to get this sentence out. “What I wanted to know is…was he always like this, even when he was young? Did anyone know?” Behind these questions were others. Did I miss the window? Will this happen to me?

I’ve heard about this phenomenon. As children approach the age when a parent got sick or died, they wait to pass the threshold, the magic number, like kids on a road trip holding their breath when they pass a cemetery.

I stared into my coffee, biting my lip to keep back the tears.

“Oh, honey, you’re not…you always…he was so proud of you.”

“I just wonder if it was always there or if he woke up one day and felt like this. Was there something that set it off?”

“Honestly, if he was sick, I don’t think we would have recognized it. He tried to tell me, later on. And I said, ‘Oh, everyone gets depressed sometimes.’ I didn’t really know what it was. For the families of alcoholics, there’s Al-Anon. But for us, there was nothing.”

She paused, taking a sip of her herbal tea. “I feel like I was robbed of something.”

I’d never heard anyone put it quite that way, but so did I. The early childhood I didn’t remember, the fragility I felt when Alexandre gripped my knees, all this was wrapped up in that empty space, something stolen.

“I’m sorry I haven’t been in touch,” I said. “I thought about it, and then all this time went by. I always thought we should have been family.”

“Your father was a warm soul,” she said, staring over my shoulder into another life. “He was terrific. Such a wonderful dancer. When we were kids, we used to dance in the basement. He would turn me upside down and sweep the floor with my hair.”