Picnic in Provence (26 page)

A
utumn is here, suddenly, vibrantly. Clouds swept by the wind cast giant shadows across the hills. The wind has pushed aside the summer haze; the sloping angles of the roofs against the sky are sharp, clear. Falling chestnuts are deadly (in a Bugs Bunny–cartoon kind of way). Alexandre has made a collection of the smooth dark globes, the perfect size for his small fist. It’s crisp, do-something-new weather. It’s
la rentrée
.

Like Bastille Day, and maybe the beginning of the January sales,
la rentrée
—the official start of the French school year—is one of those days when the majority of French people are doing precisely the same thing. The atmosphere is expectant, electric; an entire nation plugging in after three or four weeks of holiday.

On the way down the hill, Alexandre picked up a leaf bigger than his face. Today is his last day at the crèche. Tomorrow he starts full-day preschool, just across the street at
la maternelle
. I opened the gate to the crèche and waved to the team, still applying sunscreen to small faces despite the morning chill. Alexandre doesn’t even say good-bye anymore; he just runs in. No looking back.

For the kids’ last day, Charles brought in a makeshift bubble maker—really just two long sticks and some string. I stood across the street and watched the sun glinting off the giant bubbles as they wobbled into the air. Alexandre ran with his arms lifted to the sky, the sun shining through his blond hair. He won’t remember this part of his childhood, but I will. His pants are too short; he’s grown so much over the summer.

The night before, I decorated his
classeur,
the required binder where the new teacher will place all his drawings, collages, and little poems to give us at the end of term. I went to town with the pirate stickers; there’s even a little parrot sitting on the
A
in his name. There are days when I think my mother and I live on different planets, and there are days, like this one, when I think we are the same person. I remember her sitting at the kitchen table wrapping math textbooks in brown-paper book covers made out of grocery bags, sketching my name in big graffiti letters on the cover. This is what was known in our house as Arts and Craps. She used to draw stick figures on my lunch bag for a field trip so I could easily find my meal among the pile of lumpy brown sacks. She sent me off to boarding school with a cardboard box to slip under my bed that was full of fuzzy pipe cleaners, construction paper, rubber cement, and an ancient tub of magenta glitter that never seemed to run out, no matter how many sparkly Valentine’s Day hearts I gave away.

Once the goody-goody, always the goody-goody: we arrived for Alexandre’s first day of school at 8:36 for a 9:00 start. I wanted to get a few pictures along the way. I imagine it’s the same tumult in every preschool in the world, the choosing of hooks and hanging of bags. Although Alexandre had visited twice with the staff of the crèche, I’d barely seen the inside of the classroom; I’d never shaken hands with the teacher. She was a fixture, well liked. There were at least one or two young moms in the village who’d had her as their teacher twenty-odd years before.

Parents were being ushered out quickly, no introductions, no explanations. French education, like French pregnancy, is an all-enveloping system; teachers don’t particularly need or want parental input. It was clear I was meant to drop him off and then good-naturedly get out of the way. (Gwendal and I have our own tricks to stay involved: I volunteered to give short English lessons to the kindergartners through the fifth-graders; Gwendal offered to teach a class in cinema history and technique—the teachers are planning a student film festival for the end of the year.)

Alexandre walked in and said
“Bonjour”
to the teacher (score one for the all-important
politesse
), then put a plastic stethoscope around his neck and went to stir something in the play kitchen. It’s clear I was more nervous than he was. I backed away; he was already surrounded by pigtails and little hands. There’s an expression that French parents use a lot to describe this kind of early independence:
Il vie sa vie
. He’s living his life.

The French preschool day is long—9:00 to 4:30—and absolutely free for all children over the age of three, on the condition that they are properly toilet-trained. You can send them for half a day or take them home for lunch, but Gwendal and I both work full-time, and Gwendal thinks it’s important that Alexandre eat at the
cantine
with the other kids. Besides, he’s not likely to get the equivalent of a four-course lunch every day at home with me.

At the end of the day, when I came to pick him up, there was already a gaggle of parents waiting by the gate. There were plenty of familiar faces, but even so, I found myself fighting the instinct, left over from my own awkward first days of school, to hang back from the group, to hide behind a book.
La maîtresse
had them sitting calmly by the door. She handed the children out one by one, sending them down the ramp to the waiting parents. I couldn’t help thinking of cattle going down the chute. When Alexandre grabbed my hand, his head was down; he looked so sad.

“Was it good?” I said. He hesitated, then shook his head and nodded at the same time, as if he were confused.

“Gâteau. Gâteau,”
he beseeched as we walked across the parking lot to the
boulangerie
. He looked like a tiny POW, dazed to see the sunlight.

“Let’s get a cookie and you can tell me all about it.” He still wouldn’t look at me.

“Alexandre, are you sad? Why are you sad, sweet boy?” This is what makes me crazy. He’s so private already. You can see he’s deciding how much to tell me. How much to let me worry.

When we got home, he started wailing when I tried to open the bag of madeleines for him. He stuffed them into his mouth one after the other with a fierce concentration.

“Laisse-moi,”
he said. I was sitting too close. He just wanted to eat in silence. I adjusted my posture away from him, trying to give him some space. I have a vague memory of this feeling, how invasive and unnecessary it felt when my own mom would come home early from work and quiz me about my day. I just wanted to veg out in front of the TV. As Alexandre ate, his bone structure seemed to return, and so did his smile. He leaned forward and put his forehead against mine. What I took for a catastrophic first day at school was beginning to look more like a mild case of hypoglycemia.

GWENDAL IS ALSO
starting school, ice cream school, this week. In order to produce your own ice cream in France, you need a diploma from the state, a CAP Pâtissier/Glacier. The course runs for one year, one week a month, and it’s two hours away, in Toulon. Often these courses are a pre-professional track for students who decide not to finish
le bac,
the traditional French high-school diploma. There’s a diploma for butchers, chocolatiers, even hairdressers. So ten years after finishing his PhD, Gwendal will be heading back to class with a group of sixteen-year-olds in plastic hairnets. I smiled as I watched him pack his neatly folded chef’s whites and kit of knives and pastry bags. While he went to look for his plastic no-slip shoes, I tucked a little note into his Dopp kit. I used to do this when he went on his first business trips. Little postcards of odalisques and Degas prostitutes drying themselves with one leg perched provocatively on the bed. These postcards wished him luck, courage, told him that I loved him. I hadn’t done it in a long time. All this commiserating, setting out on a new adventure together, is doing something good to our
vie de couple
. There is a sense of renewal, of building something together, which I always found the most exciting part of marriage. You and me against the world.

When he arrived in Toulon, he sent me a snapshot of himself in uniform in a gleaming industrial kitchen. He looked a little bit like the Swedish chef from the Muppets.

CRAP. I MEAN,
happy New Year. Like every year since I’ve been living in France, the Jewish holidays sort of snuck up on me. As we live out in the middle of nowhere now and as Gwendal no longer works in the cinema industry, where he had all his LA studio meetings canceled for the High Holidays, I forgot it was Rosh Hashanah. I got home from my driving lesson (I too have gone back to school) with a piece of Morbier cheese for dinner and five bars of hard-to-find dark chocolate with cocoa nibs. At least I bought apples yesterday at the market. Then again, I also bought my usual Monday-night pork roast. “Why apples and honey?” said Gwendal as I quartered a small yellow apple. When I couldn’t give him a better explanation than “for a sweet New Year,” I was forced to type
why apples and honey + rosh hashanah
into Google. The fourth site down was judaism.about.com, which ought to be followed by a site called lapsedjew.com/guilt.

These lapses tug at me in a different way since Alexandre was born. Over dinner (I shelved the pork roast for another day) I tried to explain to him what was going on. “This is a special day”—I hesitated—“because Mommy’s family and Mommy and, therefore, you are Jewish. Rosh Hashanah. Can you say that?”

“Wosh Yahyahyah,” he said, touching the picture of the giant Red Delicious apple on the computer screen. He has so many identities to absorb already, what’s one more?

Since it’s
la rentrée,
maybe I should start thinking about his religious education? At this rate, I don’t know if Alexandre will feel the slightest identification with Judaism. He won’t go to traditional Hebrew school or belong to a temple (neither did I). I went to a Yiddish Sunday school. My grandparents spoke Yiddish when they didn’t want me to understand what they were saying—a perfect incentive to learn. Instead of having a bat mitzvah, I wrote a research paper on the tensions between the Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox Jewish communities in Teaneck, where I grew up.

If we stay in Céreste, Alexandre will probably know very few, if any, Jewish kids. Growing up in the New York tristate area, I didn’t have deep feelings about being Jewish, the same way I didn’t have deep feelings about being white. Those were the facts, matters of casual ease and generalized cultural identity, like bagels and lox. Being Jewish didn’t require particular courage, inconvenience, or tough decisions. It’s hard to explain why something should be important to my son, when I never quite asked, or answered, that question for myself.

Explaining to Alexandre how I’m Jewish is like explaining how I’m American—it has more to do with Grandma Elsie’s mandel bread than God. I loved my Children’s Bible, but I read it alongside Greek myths and classic fairy tales. I wonder if my mother still has those cassette tapes of David and Goliath and Daniel in the lion’s den? Can you even buy a cassette player anymore?

As usual, the easiest thing for me to pass down is food. I called Aunt Joyce, keeper of the family recipes. She’d just finished making my Grandma Elsie’s apple Bundt cake. Funny—when we moved to Provence, I vowed to wheedle the recipe for Madame N.’s homemade apple cake out of the local
boulangerie
. In fact, Grandma Elsie’s cake looks very similar; Aunt Joyce showed me on Skype. Rosh Hashanah apple cake over the Internet. It’s a modern-day miracle any biblical prophet would be proud to call his own.

Two years ago, Nicole gave me her grandmother’s handwritten recipe notebooks for Christmas. I’m sure I saw a recipe in there for
gâteau aux pommes
. Why hadn’t I ever made it? Life is like that. We are often chasing our tails, looking for stuff that was there all along. Alexandre and I would bake it together.

Of course, Alexandre can’t eat cake over Skype, so I brought out the apples and some lavender honey from Reillanne market. Alexandre didn’t take a nap at school today, so at first he wanted a whole apple and pouted when I gave him just a slice. He finally let me give him a piece after I peeled it and promised him he could lick the honey off the top. He seemed to enjoy it. I don’t know if he understands being Jewish, but he understands dessert.

After dinner, I looked at my Facebook wall for the first time in months. I hadn’t sent a single New Year’s greeting. A solitary feeling overwhelmed me. Here I was in this tiny village, a million miles from home. I felt like an astronaut looking down at planet Earth, a glass marble, below.
EB phone home.

I don’t know if I feel far from my religion, but I feel far from my family, which may, in fact, be the same thing.

AS THE TEMPERATURE
drops, I’ve slipped into a mild culinary panic. We barely had time to begin our experiments with peach sorbet, and now it’s too late. The last of September’s abundant figs and plums are disappearing—the quince, herald of a long winter’s simmer, are ripening on the hedges at the edge of the fields. These abrupt seasonal changes make me mourn (who knew you could mourn a tomato?). They also make me realize that I’ve gone yet another busy summer in Provence without learning how to can.

I may have mentioned this before, but fruits and vegetables in Provence don’t leave a lot of room for free will. When the apricots are ripe, they’re perfection. When they’re gone, it’s
hasta la vista,
baby
. I used to wonder what the women here did all day, before cable television. Now I know; they were busy picking, cooking, and canning this summer plenty so they could sock it away for the long winter.

I thought a book might be helpful, but the books all make the same assumption—that your mother, your grandmother, and your grandmother’s grandmother have been making jam and preserves since time immemorial. A book is simply an
aide-memoire
for something already in your blood. Sure, my grandmother’s grandmother probably knew how to make jam, but somewhere on the journey from the shtetl to suburban New Jersey, we picked up Smucker’s. The French recipes are patently unhelpful: “Put one kilo of fruit and one kilo of sugar in a pot. Boil. Jar.” They never say much about timing, temperature—or botulism.