Picnic in Provence (4 page)

When I finally did get pregnant, my first decision was not to read any books about pregnancy. I know myself, and my natural paranoia doesn’t need any encouragement. I don’t want to know what to expect when I’m expecting. I want to sleep at night.

At first, I thought I would do it the American way. I wanted a doctor, preferably one with a fancy degree and a cell phone I could call in the middle of the night. Someone who would accompany me to the delivery room and whose office would send a card on the kid’s birthday. I gave it my best shot: On the first of every month, I dutifully called the hospital, and every time I was told that my doctor was skiing, or at a conference, or just fully booked. Why didn’t I see a
sage-femme,
a midwife, instead? Doctors in France are technicians. They don’t talk a lot. They look at test results and nod. Like car mechanics, they go in only when something needs to be fixed. The few times I did manage to see MDs, they would squint and stare, no doubt searching for the reason I was there. In France, doctors are people you see when there’s a problem. I didn’t have a problem. I was just pregnant.

It’s not that I didn’t have fair warning. As soon as I peed on the stick, I called a family friend, an older man who was a family practitioner on the Breton island of Belle-Île. “I’m being really careful,” I said. “Not standing on any chairs.”

“Attention,”
he scolded playfully,
“tu es pas malade.”
You’re not sick.

After five months of silent nodding from taciturn doctors, I decided that if I wanted some advice about hemorrhoids or someone to actually ask me how I was feeling, I would have to approach pregnancy
à la française
. To this end, I decided to put myself in the hands of the System. The French are excellent at systems. The trains run on time. You just put yourself on a track and wait to be swept along like a letter in one of those pneumatic tubes. I made an appointment with one of the rotating cast of
sages-femmes
at the hospital where I was planning to give birth.
Sage-femme
translates literally to “wise woman,” and now I understand why. All of a sudden, the process seemed more human. The
sages-femmes
asked me how I was sleeping and what I was eating and scolded me gently when I gained more than the allotted amount of weight. I didn’t know which one would be with me in the delivery room; they all blended into one reassuring pink uniform with a manila folder.

Now, two weeks before my due date, I shut the fridge with a thud. There was officially nothing in there. So I went hunting for a bag of orange lentils I was sure I had stashed at the back of a cabinet some months ago. For iron and pep, I wanted to make a cold lentil salad with a zingy orange-ginger vinaigrette, handfuls of chopped herbs, and slices of white peach. (The purple-green Puy lentils, more common than the orange ones in France, just seemed too dark for a summer salad.) After unpacking half the kitchen while standing, against my better judgment, on a kitchen chair, I ended up not with orange lentils, but with a bag of yellow split peas. That would have to do.

The split peas had been hiding up there for a while—I’m pretty sure I bought them after a trip to Puglia, where we were served warm split-pea puree drizzled with wonderful glass-green olive oil and a grind of fresh pepper. Still hankering after a cold salad, I tried cooking the dried peas al dente, as I would the lentils, but a half hour later, when the lentils would have been perfect, the split peas were a chalky, starchy mess. I decided to boil on past defeat and transform my salad into the silky puree I’d eaten with such gusto in Italy.

When the peas were sweet and tender and the liquid almost absorbed, I got out the power tools. I’m deeply attached to my hand blender—the dainty equivalent of a serial killer’s obsession with chain saws. The orange-ginger vinaigrette was already made, so I dumped it in. The recipe’s necessary dose of olive oil would have some lively company.

The result was a warm, golden puree with just enough citrus to deviate from the classic. I toasted some
pain Poilâne
,
slathered the bread with the puree, and chopped some dill. My
tartines
were still lacking a bit of sunshine, so I placed a slice of white peach on top.

Lunch was delicious, but more effort than I’d anticipated. Time for a nap.

I’M TRYING TO
multitask, cooking rabbit with pastis while packing for the hospital. Pastis is the universal aperitif of Provence, the anise-flavored symbol of the south, a subtle reminder of our life to come. Frankly, I think the pregnancy hormones are blocking full consciousness of our decision. That and the sheer number of things left to do before the baby arrives.

I know the very idea of eating rabbit makes most Americans want to run home and hug the Easter Bunny. When I first arrived in France, the small flayed heads in the window of the butcher took some getting used to, but over the years it’s become a one-pot staple—more interesting than chicken, fancy enough for a dinner party but easy enough for a weeknight dinner with leftovers for lunch.

While the rabbit was browning, I cut the tags off some baby clothes. I was beginning to notice a disturbing trend. When I laid the French baby items on top of the American ones my mother sent, I found that the American clothes were about two inches wider—not longer, but
wider
—than their French counterparts. There’s a book in here somewhere:
French Babies Don’t Get Fat.
The baby-clothes discrepancy was one of many I’d noticed during my pregnancy, particularly with regard to weight. The doctors and midwives, as well as the official government handbook (of course there’s an official government handbook), recommend a weight gain of one kilo (just over two pounds) per month—that’s a total of twenty to twenty-two pounds. When I first read it, I thought it was a typo.
Twenty-two pounds—that’s a pimple, not a pregnancy.

It’s true that French women have babies the way they tie scarves: with an ease that belies effort and years of cultural conditioning. In fact, unless you saw the basketball belly peeking out from under a French woman’s shirt, you wouldn’t know she was pregnant at all. You can’t tell anything from the back; they continue to wear high-heeled sandals and tight little sweaters, or ironed white blouses with low-rise jeans and polished ballerina flats below their decidedly unswollen ankles.

Now, I’m hardly a French pixie to begin with. I come from hardy Russian-peasant stock; I have what my grandma would politely call “buzooms” and hips designed to give birth in a field, digging potatoes. I’m an American size 10, which, to put it kindly, puts me at the top end of the sizes sold in French boutiques. Yet so far (fingers crossed, ankles crossed, everything crossed), I seem to be pregnant the French way. Frankly, I can’t imagine gaining any more. As it is, I’m running my hands over my stomach every day, looking for the eject button. I’m carrying around the equivalent of a Butterball turkey in here.

I shook the rabbit, added a big splash of pastis. To finish it off, I added a cupful of fresh peas, but also a quarter-cup of crème fraîche. There is certainly nothing inherently virtuous about French cuisine. And while I’m sure there’s no ideal weight for a pregnant lady, I’m more and more convinced that my Parisian eating habits help keep things calmly and, I must say, rather deliciously in line. I know I can’t take any credit. If I were home in the States right now, I’m pretty sure I’d be eating Pillsbury vanilla frosting out of the can with a plastic spoon. This is nurture, not nature, at work. The reason that French women are back in their jeans a few weeks after giving birth is the same reason they can slip into their bikinis every summer with a minimum of fuss—they make sure they never have more than a few pounds to lose.

I think there’s another reason why I’m clinging so tightly to the French prescription for weight gain: I don’t want there to be a before and after. It’s taken me such a long time to carve out a life for myself in France. I’ve just started spreading my personal and professional wings in Paris, and I can’t help wondering how motherhood will change my identity. I don’t want to belong to the “woman” tribe one day and the “mommy” tribe the next.

There’s something else: I’m an only child, and to ask if I’m close to my mother is like asking, as Angela would say, “Does the pope have a balcony?” My mother and I have one of those relationships a French psychoanalyst would call
fusionnelle
—as in nuclear fusion. Nothing less than perfect synergy or catastrophic meltdown.

When my mother wants to tell me she’s proud of me (and, I’m lucky to say, this happens quite often), she says: “You’re the best thing I’ve ever done.” Since I got pregnant, this phrase has started to irkle me, by which I mean it wakes me up in the middle of the night so I can stare at the ceiling.

To be fair, I don’t know any daughter who isn’t living at least a little of her mother’s stolen life. I went to Cornell because it was a good school and a good deal for in-state students, but also because my mother once had a chance to go and didn’t. She’s supported all my crazy (and minimally remunerated) professional choices partly because her own parents refused to pay for full-time law school for a girl. My mother had a safe career at the New York City Board of Education, which at times she loved. She had health insurance for her type 1 diabetes and an excellent pension plan to balance out an ex-husband who wasn’t always capable of holding down a job or paying child support. I’m not sure how much of her life turned out exactly the way she’d imagined, except for me. And this scares the bejesus out of me. It sounds so final, as if all my future dreams are about to be transferred onto this tiny person. I want my life to be full to overflowing with stuff I haven’t even thought of yet. I have an inkling that someday I might feel differently. But right this second, I’m not sure I want my kid to be the best thing I’ve ever done.

IT’S BEEN A
heavy week. Literally. Here I was, so pleased with myself for being pregnant like a French woman, only to discover at yesterday’s appointment with the
sage-femme
that I’d gained eleven pounds in the past ten days—most of it, it seems, in my toes. With ten days to go, I am filling up with water like a fish tank.

I used to have very long skinny toes, but now they look like little sausages. Pigs without their blankets. It’s depressing and uncomfortable. I shudder to think of the opinion of a certain foot fetishist I dated after college. He would flee in horror.

It’s also been quite a French week—by which I mean a week in which I find out something stupid and ridiculous about this country that I must learn to accept. It’s about my family name. Or, more specifically, my child’s family name.

As an only child, I’m the last to carry the Bard name, and I feel strongly that I want to pass it on. But in France, it seems to be illegal to use the mother’s maiden name as a middle name. Okay, not exactly illegal, but problematic. The French state has a judge who is responsible for approving the name of every child born in France, to keep parents from burdening their children with stupid (
Caca Rhubarbe
) or offensive (
Hitler
) names. In the States, of course, the First Amendment guarantees our right to be as stupid or offensive as we like.

Apparently, this judge sometimes rejects the use of the mother’s maiden name as a middle name, thinking it should be part of the last name instead. Even more bizarre, there is a new law that if you want to hyphenate your last name and your husband’s last name for your child’s surname, you have to use a
double hyphen
(- -). I think it’s to distinguish plebs like my husband and me from people who are born with proper double-barreled aristocratic names. This absurdity can only lead to spelling mistakes and administrative woe for the rest of the child’s life. I imagine my sixteen-year-old son stuck in the purgatory of secondary passport control at JFK trying to explain to a pasty-faced security officer that no, it’s not a typo, no, he’s not a terrorist, he’s just…French.

I try to be philosophical. Some days I succeed, some days I don’t. Who knew when I moved here that I’d willingly trade my civil liberties for a decent slice of pâté.

Despite the heat, I had some dry-cleaning to fetch, so I hunted around for a pair of flip-flops that wouldn’t bother my swollen toes. Just as I opened the door, I heard the jangle of keys on the other side of the hall, and I immediately shut it again.
Non, merci.
I simply couldn’t face her. Just across the landing was my nemesis or, rather, my platonic ideal of womanhood, my neighbor Juliette.

Let’s be honest, every woman has someone like this in her life. Maybe it’s the Pilates-toned high-school friend you run into at the supermarket
only
when you haven’t washed your hair. Perhaps it’s the red-soled powerhouse that stands in front of you every day at Starbucks. The one woman who makes you feel like you should retreat back into the cave and seriously reevaluate your eye shadow. These women have two distinct qualities: They always look their best, and they always show up when you look your worst. Mine has an additional, home-court advantage: she’s French.

Juliette is a thoroughbred—a pure
Parisienne,
raised in the sixteenth arrondissement. She’s an editor at a popular magazine, married to the equally gorgeous and scruffy Luca, who, after business school, went to work for UNICEF. She wears fashionably louche sweaters with suede elbow patches in touch-me-soft fabrics that
do not
allow for a ring of fat bulging out of the bottom of one’s bra. What’s more, she’s unbearably, unfailingly nice. On a good day, I admire her. On a bad day, I pray for an open manhole cover.

Juliette and Luca have two children: Horace, five, and Zoé, two. Naturally, Juliette came home from the maternity ward in her skinny jeans. She always has on eyeliner, mascara, and chunky high-heeled boots when she takes the kids to school.

She seems genuinely excited that I’m pregnant. At thirty-eight and thirty-five, Gwendal and I are on the old side for French parents; many of Gwendal’s childhood friends have near-teenagers by now. It’s always difficult to get together—Parisian couples are so busy—but one afternoon, the four of us paired off over beers at the local café.