Blue Plate Special (20 page)

I got into my new bed, which sagged a bit but was otherwise comfortable and warm. I was so tired I was almost hallucinating, but I lay awake a long time, my head buzzing, listening to the rain and hearing the empty old building creak all around me. It was pitch-dark, there in the rural middle of France. Omar and the past night in Brussels seemed a thousand light-years from here. I didn’t dare think about my mother because I was suddenly, stabbingly homesick. I pushed it away: it would pass. I would not give in to it.

The next morning, a little bleary-eyed, I got up and put on my tan corduroy overalls and Frye boots and twined my hair into two French braids. I clumped downstairs and went over to the della Negras’. The household was in a full-out welter of chaos, it seemed to me, but Vivian sat calmly at the breakfast table, peeling a tangerine and smiling at her offspring. Four small, thin boys tore around shrieking, throwing their boots at one another’s heads, making a mess of toast crumbs and spilled milk: the oldest, Mark, was ten; the youngest, Jeremy, had just
turned three. They barely acknowledged me. Pierre flapped around them like a mother duck, laughing, shouting at them in French, marshaling them into their sweaters and rain boots, swiping at their faces with a wet rag while Vivian combed all four of their heads.

“I hate it when I find lice,” she told me. “They don’t have it now, but they all get it sooner or later when the school year gets under way. We all do. You will, too.”

Then the horde of boys was suddenly gone, off to school like four ducklings quacking behind Pierre, and the house fell silent.

“Well,” said Vivian. “How did you sleep, Katie? Why don’t you have some breakfast before we do the washing up. I’ll put the kettle on.”

And so my life in France began.

I spent my first three months in France, the entire autumn, struggling inarticulately to express the most simple phrases. The two semesters of French I’d had at Green Meadow had vanished, leaving only the more-familiar Spanish in my brain, so I knew nothing when I arrived beyond
merci
and
bonjour
. Mark, James, Alain-Michel, and Jeremy all spoke English, of course, since their mother was British. It would have been easy to speak nothing but English with them, but I tried to get them to speak French with me as often as I could. We played Monopoly in French. I read their French storybooks aloud to them at bedtime; they sleepily corrected my pronunciation and helpfully translated into English. I asked them to teach me the names of things—tree, bush, wall, road, field—when we went for walks in the woods. I helped them with their schoolwork in French as well as I could.

Every weeknight, in order to help me learn French, and to alleviate my isolation, I was invited to eat in the château dining room with the seminary students. They were about two dozen French people in their twenties, all of whom seemed incredibly good-looking and cool to me. We all sat at a long candlelit table together. I listened to them jibber-jabber away and tried to imitate the way they ate, which they seemed to do better, being French, than anyone I had ever observed at a table before.
They interacted with their food, looked at it, chewed thoughtfully. They made clucking noises at a particularly good
potage
, buttered their bread with ostentatious ceremony.

The food at the château was not typically French. It was, in fact, not much different from the wholesome, simple food I’d eaten at home. Most of what we ate came from the biodynamic farm attached to the château. The evening meal was always a light one; the main meal was at midday, when I ate with the della Negras, who came home for lunch. And the cook at the château was, in fact, American. His name was Jeff. He was something of a ne’er-do-well who loved to discuss Schiller and Hegel with anyone who would engage with him, but who wasn’t much good at supporting his family. He was married to Hélène, a tiny, beautiful, rather dim-witted Frenchwoman with deep dimples and huge brown eyes and a helpless expression. They had four tiny milk-pale urchinlike kids with walleyes and snotty noses. They were a sweet, lost, struggling family who’d washed up at La Mhotte and who hung on here because Jeff was the school cook. They lived in the apartment above the kitchen, the spacious grand rooms on the second floor of the château.

One night, the entire supper consisted solely of boiled zucchini, boiled potatoes, and homemade bread and cheese. They called the zucchini
courgettes
, but they didn’t fool me: I knew that stuff when I saw it. I remembered all too well the horrible stuff from our Phoenix backyard, the zucchini bread at the Threefold guesthouse. I sat down with disappointment and dread.

And then I tasted the zucchini. It was sublime, subtly multidimensional in flavor and velvety in texture, not like zucchini at all but some fairylike, delicate thing of palest green, very fresh, with an herblike essence.

That zucchini woke me up to the idea that food had possibilities and qualities that I had not suspected. After that supper,
I began to pay closer attention to what I ate; I began to see it not as a substance to assuage hunger or homesickness but as something to savor when it was good, like a well-written book or piece of music.

T
hroughout that autumn, as I tried to speak French with a thick tongue and total unfamiliarity with the language, I fought to stave off my homesickness. I kept up a cheerful bravado with everyone at La Mhotte and also in my long, frequent letters home, but I was horribly lonely there, and I missed my mother and my sisters terribly. My letters were full of amused stories about the kids’ troublemaking, wry asides about how bad my French was, confident cheer; but sometimes, in the evenings, after I’d finished the dishes, I would lean out the casement window of the della Negras’ kitchen and weep tears of loneliness.

At night, alone in my little room, I sat at my desk with my red French verb-conjugation book, my dictionary, and my phrase book. I made charts, wrote notes, memorized, studied, until I’d stuffed my cranium brimful, and then got into bed, hoping osmotic energy would sear it all into my brain and I’d wake up magically fluent. I read in bed, before I went to sleep; I’d found a box of English-language novels up in the attic in the della Negras’ storage trunks, Vivian’s books, a mishmash of writers—Irving Stone, Jane Austen, Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Ernest Hemingway, Nikos Kazantzakis—and that year, I read through all of them.

Every morning, I woke from a deep sleep, not quite sure where I was at first. My days were long and busy and full of blundering mistakes and cringe-worthy misunderstandings and hard domestic labor. Vivian had a cold-water washing machine with a faulty wringer and no dryer. My hands were constantly chapped from squeezing load after load of wet, cold laundry and hanging it up outside. She had a straw rug that I
had to sweep underneath and then water, flinging drops from a pitcher, so it wouldn’t dry out. Dust was everywhere. “France is crumbling,” said Vivian cheerfully; I dusted the whole house every other day. Alain-Michel set the wastebasket in the living room on fire while Jeremy had a tantrum on the toilet, waiting for me to wipe him. I didn’t know a thing about small boys, and I had no special affinity with little kids.

I put salt instead of baking powder in a birthday cake because the boxes they came in looked identical and I couldn’t read French yet; I had to throw it out and start over, with expensive ingredients. Cooking was a whole new thing here. Under Vivian’s tutelage, I learned to make dishes that I had never made before—soufflés and mousses, stews and soups. When I encountered crème fraîche for the first time, I could not believe it existed. I ate spoonfuls of it when no one was looking.

In mid-October, Vivian told me it was time to make the mincemeat for Christmas. “I’ll show you how,” she said. “It’s an English tradition. My mother taught me.” In the kitchen, she stood at my elbow while I roasted and chopped beef heart and liver and mixed them with minced apple and dried fruit and spices and nuts, then bound the whole thing together with beef suet and brandy.

I had decided to be a vegetarian before I came to France, simply as an experiment, to see what it was like not to eat meat. A lot of people were doing it, so I thought I’d try it, too. I wasn’t moralistic or puritanical about it; I just wanted to do it for its own sake.

And so I found this mincemeat-making exercise disconcerting but thrilling. The resulting mixture looked like the aftermath of a psychopath’s murderous spree—small, firm chunks of organ meat interspersed with luridly moist nuggets of fruit and fleshy nuts—but it smelled amazing. I packed the
redolent, dense mess into a large glass vacuum-sealed jar and didn’t see it again until just before Christmas, when I baked it into two pies.

Those Christmas pies, when they came out of the oven, looked magnificent. I stood over them, filling my nose with the steam that rose through the vents in the top crusts. After the heady brandy updraft came a fierce admixture of currants, apples, cloves, nutmeg, and cinnamon, with pungent meaty bass notes. I couldn’t eat them, but I was comforted by their smell, which reminded me of cinnamon-raisin toast, that dessertlike staple of American childhood breakfasts. It was a dark, rich smell that simultaneously alleviated and intensified my homesickness.

E
arly in the spring, I was still a vegetarian, still trying to commit to something that wasn’t at all compatible with my character and inclinations. Then one morning, I was confronted with a whole rabbit, sinewy and red. Vivian took me through the steps of turning this poor creature into a
lapin à la cocotte
for dinner: when it was done, I sat at the table with the della Negras, eating salad and buttered egg noodles with grated cheese and watching them devour the stew I’d made. After I’d cleared everything away, I stood in the kitchen over the pot of leftover stew, of which there was hardly any, and forked a small chunk of rabbit into my mouth. I couldn’t help myself. Then I ate another bite, and as I finished the stew, I knew I was done with vegetarianism forever.

Being around kids who didn’t always finish their food made it very easy to overeat. Nursery food is both comforting and fattening, and French nursery food was totally irresistible: buttery scrambled eggs with brioche;
tartines
made of baguette and Nutella, that cracklike chocolate-hazelnut goo; four platefuls at a time of uneaten potatoes au gratin—I was the family dishwasher; instead of scraping it all into
la poubelle
, it seemed so much more responsible to eat it.

After five or six months of this, I was husky again. So, early in the spring, just as I was rediscovering meat, I put myself on yet another stringent, ascetic, no-nonsense diet. Since I was adamantly strict with myself and never once deviated from it, I lost all the weight I’d gained since I got to France, but it was no fun. I ate fruit, salad, meat, and vegetable soup, drank a lot of tea, and took myself on three walks a day. I awoke before dawn every morning, even weekends, and struck out into the countryside for a brisk half-hour walk. I repeated the exact same circular route just after lunch, when I had a short break, and in the evening, when the kids were in bed and the dishes were done and I was free to leave the della Negras’ and do as I liked until it was time to eat with the
seminairists
.

I walked fast, swinging my arms, marching along. Cars passed me in the mornings, parents driving their kids to school. Often, they waved and honked at me. When I saw them later at
the morning assembly in the château, kids often pointed at me and shouted
“la marcheuse!”
and laughed.

Evidently I walked like a German soldier on patrol.

My French was improving slowly. I was beginning to be able to make jokes at dinner with the
seminairists
; I could understand at least the gist of almost everything they said. I started dreaming in French. The more French I spoke, and the more often I spoke it, I felt myself developing a sort of French personality: more wry and snappy, less naive and earnest than my American one.