Picnic in Provence (9 page)

I
’m reconquering my kitchen. Clearing the counters and throwing out the rice cakes. Pitching the leftovers and Wildberry fruit roll-ups. After my mother’s five-week visit to our new home, I’m in need of a scorched-earth campaign: leave nothing behind that the enemy can use. Not her instant Vietnamese noodle soup, not her Skippy chunky peanut butter. Following in her Napoleonic wake, I had no choice but to dump it all, exorcise it with the ritualistic pleasure that some girls get from burning pictures of old boyfriends.

Let me be clear. I love my mother and I
hate, hate, hate
throwing away food. Yet every time my mom leaves France, I’m saddled with a huge bag of leftover, canned, partially hydrogenated horrors that neither I nor my family want to eat. Food is one of the central pleasures of my life here, and particularly at a time when I am doing my best to lose the last of the baby weight, I simply cannot tolerate putting (excuse my French) shit in my mouth.

When we lived in Paris, the evening she left I would discreetly deposit the bag outside our building, where it would be recycled by the local population in less than fifteen minutes. Here in the village, there is no spot to discreetly do anything. I can’t imagine what my neighbors would say if they saw me throwing away a shopping bag full of instant Raspberry Cool iced tea and processed chorizo pizza. Would anyone here even know what to do with Raspberry Cool iced tea? For now, the bag is sitting in the vaulted stone cellar, awaiting further study.

I THOUGHT THE
August heat and the extra leg to Céreste would force my mom to pack light, but no. As we hauled the five suitcases, the four carry-ons, and the computer bag down the hill, my mother looked exhausted. “We’re never doing this again.” She sighed. Which is exactly what she said the last time.

“What the hell is in here?”

“Paul has to bring his mask.” Paul is my stepfather, a title that doesn’t describe at all how I feel about him. Since he came into our lives, the year I turned twenty-one, he’s been my third parent. Introduced by a mutual friend, Mom and Paul had their first date on a Friday night. My mother called me in my dorm room on Saturday morning—way too early—and announced: “If this man is still around on Monday, I’m going to marry him.” He moved in on Wednesday and has been with us ever since. I sometimes call him my fairy godfather, because he appeared out of nowhere and made so many things better. Paul loves his gadgets: computers, adapters, telephones—you name it. He also has a super-cool Darth Vader–like mask he wears for his sleep apnea. As if this contraption the size of a dust buster could account for the camel caravan that just arrived in my courtyard.

After clomping the suitcases up the stairs, my mother began the ritual unpacking. Along with a pair of silver grape shears, out came a package of marshmallow Peeps (I do love a good marshmallow Peep) and the apricot Jell-O.

“Look,” she said, as if pulling a rabbit out of a hat. “Instant pistachio pudding!” I knew that this display of powdered American ingenuity was partly for me and, now, partly for Alexandre.

The parade of American objects began almost as soon as I moved to France. At first it was nice; my mom brought over the serrated bread knife with the wooden handle that we used when I was a kid. She brought over the chipped flowerpot in the shape of a Tudor house that resembled our own; it once held an ivy plant in our den. Some of it was practical: she brought over sheets and towels (they were so much cheaper at Marshalls) and clothes for the baby (you could buy a whole toddler wardrobe at OshKosh for the price of one impossibly cute French-made Catimini sweater). She brought over the silver asparagus tongs, a treasured family heirloom. I think it comforted her to see familiar objects take their place in my new, and often perplexing, foreign life. I call it the “stuff is love” theory: If you transfer enough objects from your old home to your new home, you never left.

Overpacking aside, my mother has always been supportive of my living abroad. Once, when I was giving tours at the Louvre, I took around an American couple whose daughter had done her junior year abroad in France and was now applying for a job in Paris. “I can’t help it,” said the woman, reaching into her handbag for a mint, “I really hope she doesn’t get it.” My mom was never that person. She supported each and every one of my far-flung decisions—boarding school in Massachusetts, junior year abroad in Scotland, grad school in London, new life in Paris—even as they took me farther and farther away from the world she knew.

But now it wasn’t just me living thousands of miles away; I had kidnapped her grandson as well. And if he didn’t grow up with a taste for meat loaf made with Lipton’s onion-soup mix, some part of him would remain distant, unknowable. “What if he doesn’t speak English?” she said to me, staring down into Alexandre’s crib. “What if I can’t talk to him?” As if stuffing his face with instant pistachio pudding would somehow make him bilingual.

I always try to keep mom and Paul awake for as long as possible on that first day, to help them get over the jet lag. “So,” said my mom, readying herself for the highlights tour, “where to?” This is the part of village life that might take some explaining. There is not, strictly speaking, anywhere to go.

We tried taking them for a walk around the village. Between the time change and my parents’ retiree lifestyle, this required more organization than you might imagine. I tried to explain that with the summer heat (and Paul’s history of skin cancer), it was best to run errands before 11:00 a.m. But somehow they never got out of bed before 10:30, and they were still sitting at the table drinking their morning coffee when I started preparing lunch. Early afternoon was nap time all around, and in any case, the shops were closed between 12:30 and 4:00. It was 5:00 before we managed to get everyone out the door.

Before our move to Céreste, my mother and I shared a rather Gertrude Stein attitude toward nature: a tree is a tree is a tree. It helps to understand that she was born in Brooklyn and has spent her entire life within a twenty-mile radius of the Empire State Building. (Paul, as Mom never tires of reminding him, was born in the Bronx.) Her family made a brief foray into Connecticut when my mother was in her teens, but after my grandmother discovered a cow blocking the entrance to the kitchen door, they gave up and moved to Levittown. Wide-open spaces didn’t play a big part in my childhood. After my parents’ divorce, my mother and I went on a “girl-bonding” trip, canoeing down the Delaware River. The six other people on the trip turned out to be a group of psychologists on a professional retreat. All I remember is the skinny-dipping.

We followed the curve of the village downhill (downhill was better; no one in my family could be described as athletic) to the parking lot past the small stone chapel. I’m not sure it’s been open since Char and his band hid guns in the rafters. The sun was still high. The lavender field had been shorn down to gray-green stumps, and thousands of white snails, no bigger than my thumbnail, clung to the tall grass at the edge of the road. Alexandre sat on Gwendal’s shoulders, his chubby hands holding clumps of his father’s hair. He seemed perfectly at home in his new surroundings.

On the Pont Roman, Paul stopped to study the text of the plexiglass explanation panel. “It’s not actually a Roman bridge, or even Romanesque,” I said, feeling that even our historical monuments were slightly inadequate. “It’s a nineteenth-century copy. There was a real Roman bridge, with two arches, a bit further down near the edge of town; they uncovered the foundations a few years back.”

The stream that ran under the bridge was almost dry; small pools of water fluttered with insects. This was the quietest part of the day, after the bees have turned in for the night. We passed dense hedges of quince trees, hard green knobs of fruit just beginning to form among the leaves. I wondered what my parents were thinking, if they saw what we saw. If they thought it was beautiful or just…empty.

“WHY NOT?”
asked my mother.

“We just don’t need it,” I said, trying to keep the irritation out of my voice.

“There’s not even a park.”

“Mom, we live in the
middle
of a national park.” We do—you can’t put up so much as a cable antenna without asking how it’s going to affect the local flora and fauna.

The subject at hand was a green plastic slide in the shape of a dinosaur that my mom wanted to buy for Alexandre. A few days into their visit, my parents found a familiar landmark, the local
hypermarché
—a reassuringly vast supermarket in the industrial outskirts of Apt. It doesn’t close for lunch. On the last run there, my mom spotted the slide, and she’s been nudging me about it ever since. I imagined a six-foot monstrosity that would block the view and take Gwendal the better part of a month to put together. Instead of just giving in and then throwing it off a cliff when she left, I decided to dig my heels in.

“Fine,” said my mother brightly, meaning
This discussion is not over.

It’s not that I don’t understand the appeal of a good supermarket. When I go to a foreign country, I love to browse the aisles, check out the tins of preserved octopus and sweet sesame paste, look at the different girls on the shampoo bottles. What my parents can’t fathom is the limited—very limited—role the supermarket plays in my life in France. For most Americans, the supermarket remains weekly one-stop shopping. Here, I go to the supermarket once every three or four
months;
we buy pasta, baking chocolate, toilet paper, cleaning supplies, and a brand of Indian-style lime pickle imported specially for the Brits. When my mom goes to the supermarket in France, she buys flabby Danish salami (I get fresh sliced ham at the local butcher) and rubbery processed Babybel cheese (I prefer the oozy Gorgonzola at my Sunday cheese monger).

And then there’s the salmon roll. It’s a con. Each and every time my mother comes to France, she falls for this attractive Yule log wrapped in appealingly pink smoked salmon. But—aye, there’s the rub—lurking underneath is a dense grayish cylinder of fish paste.
The horror, the horror.
I eat blood sausage,
fromage de tête, andouillette,
but I’ve simply never been able to get near this thing. It’s become a running gag, like the uncle on a sitcom who’s always farting. She often buys it when it’s marked down on
offre spéciale
—which translates roughly as “two days away from giving you food poisoning.”

If seeing the salmon roll once is bad, seeing it twice is a violation of the Geneva Conventions. My mom has an affection for leftovers and a long-standing love affair with plastic containers. From thirty paces, she can judge exactly what size Chinese soup container will hold the chili you need to put in the freezer.

“Mom, the cheese is
alive
. It needs to breathe. Or else it gets damp and moldy. Bad moldy.” In France it’s important to distinguish between good mold and bad mold. Good mold makes Roquefort; bad mold is what is growing on our bedroom ceiling. Despite my warnings, all sorts of things get hermetically sealed and shoved to the back of the fridge—wilting salad, slices of red onion, half a piece of quiche. I could be excavating for weeks.

The fridge stuffing made me feel squashed; violated even. Since I’ve come to France, cooking has become an essential everyday pleasure. The kitchen is my territory, and by filling it with things my family would never eat, she was ignoring my wishes, my independence—simply turning my house into a version of hers. Ease up, you say, she’s just trying to be helpful. I know, I
know
. She can see I’m a little underwater with the move, the baby, trying to get back to my writing. And yet, this kind of help makes me want to curl up in a ball in a dark corner of the coat closet and suck my thumb.

One morning, Gwendal slunk off, bewildered, to Angela and Rod’s bed-and-breakfast for an espresso and a croissant. I think he might have been tempted to check in for the week. “Sorry I snuck out,” he said when I handed him a tray of tomatoes and fresh mozzarella to take out to the garden for lunch. “I opened the refrigerator,” he said, “it was completely full, and there wasn’t a single thing in there that I wanted to eat.”

WE FOUND A
great babysitter for Alexandre. Amandine is a few years younger than me, but she had her first child right around the time I was sitting for my AP European History exam, so she’s fifteen years and three kids ahead of me in experience. Her daughter Rose is four months older than Alexandre. They look like twins, two blond heads bent over a set of blocks.

As the weather cools and the tourists and summer-home owners head back to London and Brussels, the locals have begun to notice our presence. Older women with their woven straw shopping baskets now stop me in the street with the stroller. “You are staying the winter?” they ask.
“Si c’est pas indiscret.”

I’ve noticed that whenever people ask me a question that doesn’t involve the time or the weather, they first ask if they are being indiscreet. I find this charming, but it also makes me giggle to myself. It makes me think of a friend of mine in New York. He introduced himself to me for the first time
after
he’d walked up behind me at a table in Starbucks, put his hands on my shoulders, stared at the grad-school application on my computer screen, and then said in an incredibly snide tone: “Why would anyone want to go to Yale?” He, of course, went to Harvard. Sometimes, a little discretion wouldn’t kill anyone.

One afternoon, when I came to get Alexandre, Amandine was outside with a broom. Like us, she is in a constant battle with a flock of pigeons roosting over her door.
“Tu veux un café?”
She has tan shoulders and a trim, girlish figure that belies her three pregnancies. She had been sorting a wooden crate of tomatoes. “Would you like some?” she said, already filling up a plastic bag. “They are from my friend’s garden.” I watched Alexandre and Rose crawl up and down the two steps between the kitchen and the dining area. There were no baby gates, no plastic covers for the sockets. I’ve never seen a French home that meets the American definition of
baby-proof.