Picnic in Provence (13 page)

E
very once in a while, my agent calls from New York.

“What do you
do
all day?” she asks tentatively, trying to hide the sound of her carefully manicured nails tapping on the table as she awaits my next project. I’m loath to explain. There’s my morning workout—carrying logs from the cellar, around the corner and up the steps to the wood-burning stove. There’s finding where Alexandre has hidden his slippers (he can’t walk on the freezing tile without them). Then there’s the half hour with the balled-up newspaper and egg cartons to light the smoky fire (thanks to our green, wet wood). The ten-minute walk to and from Alexandre’s babysitter often takes the better part of an hour. In a village this size, there is no question of rushing past people in a hurry. I stop for the all-important
bises
and a brief but solemn evaluation of how this winter’s frost will affect the peach trees. The prognosis,
bien sûr,
is grim. In France, optimism is akin to hubris; better to expect the worst and be pleasantly surprised. After the weather report is a frantic calculation: butcher or e-mail? The butcher closes at half past noon; the Internet is always open.

Then, of course, there’s lunch.

Our social life has become frantic since we moved to Céreste. Our agenda fills up weeks in advance, like the dance card of a busty cashmere-clad sorority girl. Luncheons, dinners, barbecues,
apéro
—maybe it’s the new-kids-on-the-block effect, but we’ve had more nights out in the eight months that we’ve been in Céreste than we did in the eight years we lived in Paris. Despite this flurry of kind invitations, there’s one of my own I’m having trouble extending. It’s Passover this week, and though I’d like to celebrate, I’m not sure we know anyone here well enough to ask them into our home for a religious occasion.

A Passover Seder at my mother’s house was thirty-five people—airline seating—once you sat down, you didn’t get up till Moses freed the slaves. My mother led the Seder herself, first out of divorcée necessity, and then, when she married Paul, to keep up the tradition. My aunt Debbie was always in the kitchen with a vodka tonic, supervising the soup and giving gefilte-fish juice to the cat. There was always a feminist contingent who wanted to get into an argument about whether we should refer to God as He or She.

Passover was the only meal at our house that required a twenty-pound turkey and a yearly washing of the Lenox china, gold rimmed with tiny enamel flowers. My mother always set the table a few days in advance. I loved to come downstairs in the morning and see the Lalique crystal wineglasses, bought on my mother and father’s first trip to Paris, sparkling in the early-spring sun. If I were back in the States this week, everyone around me would be making matzo balls, grating horseradish, and dipping into the freezer for a slice of Grandma Elsie’s mandel bread. In Céreste, no one even knows I’m Jewish.

It’s not that I’ve kept it from people on purpose, exactly. But I haven’t been screaming it from the rooftops either. This may sound weird, even cowardly, but Judaism in Europe is not something casual, like
Seinfeld
and whitefish salad in New York. It lives in the shadow of the Holocaust, and there are residual fears and cautions. When I hosted my first Seder in Paris, at the end of the meal I asked each of my guests to sign the inside cover of their Haggadah, the book used for the Passover service. It’s a family tradition; I love going back through the signatures. I can trace a whole lifetime of family, friends, colleagues, and lovers. There were two French Jews at the table that night; they both hesitated. “It’s no good to leave traces,” they said.

Religion is a topic that confused me when I first arrived in France. There are hundreds of churches in Paris, but almost no one we know goes to Mass. Gwendal has a few Jewish friends; they knew I was far from home, but we were never invited for a holiday.

Both France and the United States guarantee freedom of religion, but they go about it in completely different ways, from different starting points and with different consequences. Among America’s first settlers were Puritans who came to the New World to escape religious persecution. So America guarantees religious freedom by making sure that all citizens can practice their religions openly, whether it’s by wearing a turban in school or swearing on a Bible at a presidential inauguration.

France has a very different history. The French Revolution sought to sever the State from the Catholic Church and the king—God’s divinely ordained representative. So the French definition of
laïcité
—a secular state—means that all signs of religion are absent from public life. Children are not allowed to wear veils, or crosses, or yarmulkes in public school; a French president never mentions God in his speeches. Religion in France is considered a purely private matter, and, as a result, no one knows much about other people’s traditions. I understand the historical forces at work; I also think it’s a shame. Hidden religion breeds ignorance and sustains stereotypes. I always loved having my Catholic friends at Passover, and I’ve enjoyed being invited to Persian New Year and Midnight Mass.

When I went into the huge supermarket in Manosque for matzo, the woman at the customer service desk had never even heard the word
Passover, Pessah,
or
Pâques Juive
(Jewish Easter, as it’s sometimes called here). Asking for the kosher aisle didn’t help. I finally found a box of
pain azyme,
unleavened bread, in the diet aisle.

I came home in a funny mood, ready to skip the holiday altogether. Gwendal insisted I celebrate it; he knows how lonely I feel when I don’t. In the end we invited Angela and Rod for a mini-Seder. I made a lamb and dried-fig tagine and steamed asparagus. Rod was a little suspicious—he has a firm anticlerical streak—but I think he enjoyed my revised version of the holiday, which is less about prayer and more about a universal search for freedom. Angela brought one of her mother’s porcelain teacups as a present—such a lovely thought—and Alexandre got to use my mother’s silver asparagus tongs, which may have been the point of the whole exercise.

TRANSITION PERIODS ARE
never easy for me, which is problematic, since I’ve basically been in one for the past thirty-five years. Right now, Provence is in transition too. March is that kind of month; Wednesday the fog was so thick you couldn’t see the
vieux village
from the parking lot by the chapel. Today the sky is cloudless blue and the bees are hard at work among the blossoms of the apricot tree across the way. It’s like the set of a Disney movie: the whole town seems ready to open the shutters and burst into song.

This changeable weather is a perfect parallel for my mood.

Since I got back from the United States in February, something hasn’t been right. I’m simply amazed at my body’s ability to manifest what’s going on in my head. Getting to sleep is a challenge. So is getting up. Pushing the stroller the half mile to the sitter leaves me winded and wishing for a Sherpa. Young mothers are supposed to be tired, right? But this feels different.

I’ve been trying to focus my attention on small tasks. This week, I’ve decided to tackle the herb garden. We haven’t paid much attention to the garden since our sudden hibernation in late October. We left everything as it was, the hortensia bush cut back to a stub, last season’s mint brown and matted. I was afraid to do too much; I didn’t want to dig up the lilies of the valley by accident or kill a rosebush with ill-timed pruning. But there is a bare section on the left, separated from the others, maybe five feet long and three feet wide, a small patch of earth that I can make perfect and orderly, beautiful and useful.

I dug a shallow hole in the dirt—not unlike the one I’m trying to crawl out of right now. I’m in what the French call a
creux,
and it happens every time I have to leave one professional project and start another.

I used to think of success in terms of before and after. I had this fantasy that at some point in my life, in my career, I would just
arrive
. I kept waiting to cross the threshold and find my final, complete self on the other side. The self I could settle into for good, the self I wouldn’t have to reinvent every time the sun set on a project. Constant reinvention; most people would call that, well…life. But at the moment, I’m finding the whole thing, well…exhausting.

Many writers, artists in general, see misery as the price of creation. Personally, I’ve never been able to do diddly-squat when I’m miserable. When I was young, I found a book in a secondhand shop called
Impressive Depressives
that was about historical figures—Chopin, among others—who may have suffered from manic depression. As if being depressed might somehow be useful to me.

As someone who grew up with a close personal relationship to mental illness, bathed in its sour stream, I know there’s nothing romantic or inspiring about it. My father wasn’t an artist, or a genius; he was sick. Like drinking polluted water, I absorbed a tiny bit of his sadness every day—it built up in my brain and my organs. I will carry that sediment around with me for the rest of my life.

Because of my family history, the line separating a bad day or a long winter from something clinical has never been easy for me to judge. Every gray day presses some kind of internal panic button.
What if this is it, the day I never quite recover from?
My thoughts quickly spiral out of control. My husband won’t love me anymore, because all I want to do is sleep and I never brush my hair. I condemn my son to watch what I watched: a parent melting into the stone floor like the Wicked Witch of the West. I can’t write a word, and because I never leave the house, I have nothing to write about. It’s like the chick-lit version of a Paul Auster novel—an upright, Manolo-wearing member of society reduced to a bag lady, padding around in an army surplus coat stuffed with crumpled pages of the Style section, pushing a shopping cart full of empty cans of Coke Zero.

My therapist once told me that if I got through my twenties without a major depressive episode, it probably wouldn’t happen. I just don’t trust that anymore. I look at the life I have, how full and rich it is, and I think:
If you’re not happy every minute of every single day, you must, objectively, be a little crazy.

The therapy I did after my parents’ divorce and during the long years of my father’s illness focused on coping mechanisms, small practical things I could do to combat these feelings in the outside world. It still works. If I force myself to get out of the house for an hour, I feel better. If I write, even a few lines, I feel like I’ve accomplished something. If I stop watching programs about serial killers on YouTube, I feel less afraid in my bed at night. I try to focus on manageable tasks. Hence, the herb garden.

When we lived in Paris I treated myself to a bouquet of fresh herbs every Saturday at the local market, the way some women buy themselves flowers. I put them in an old jam jar full of water on the kitchen counter or on the door of the fridge. I ripped off fresh mint leaves for tea, dill to stuff inside whole fish, flat-leaf parsley and sprigs of thyme for my braised beef, cilantro for my chicken tagine. In the spring, I waited patiently for slim blades of chive to appear for my swordfish tartare. In the summer, I bought bunches of purple basil for a tomato salad.

When I first arrived in Provence I searched the market in vain for my weekly bouquet. Nowhere to be found. Sometimes, the vegetable man would throw in some free parsley with my salad and leeks. When I asked where I could find some thyme, he looked at me like I’d asked him if he could please bend down and tie my shoelaces:
“Mais ça pousse partout.”
It grows everywhere.

He had a point. Thyme grows with wild abandon, anywhere there is a patch of sun between the trees. Up in the hills, you can’t walk ten feet in any direction without stepping on a small tuft. The vegetable man’s meaning was clear: in Provence, you never buy what you can grow or gather for free.

Taking his advice, on our last walk up the hill at Montjustin, I dug up a bunch of thyme by the root. We’ll see if it will grow in captivity.

When we’d arrived in Céreste, our neighbor Arnaud said we should go to the Musée de Salagon, in Mane. In addition to its twelfth-century church and Gallo-Roman ruins, the museum has a wonderful medieval garden. The monks used these herbs to heal as well as to flavor. I’ve met many people in Provence who use herbal remedies, not because it’s trendy, but because it’s what their grandmothers taught them. My friend Lynne puts lavender oil on bug bites to reduce the swelling; I recently found Arnaud on his front steps tying small bundles of wild absinthe, which he burns to fumigate the house. Many of the pharmacies in France still sell licorice root for low blood pressure. We drink lemon verbena herbal tea for digestion.

I also like the more poetic symbolism of the herbs. I’m planting sage for wisdom, lavender for tenderness (and, according to French folklore, your forty-sixth wedding anniversary), rosemary for remembrance. Thyme is for courage, but there is also the Greek legend that when Paris kidnapped Helen of Troy, each tear that fell to the ground sprouted a tuft of thyme. All things being equal, I prefer courage to tears in my pot roast.

In addition to the regular sage, I planted
sauge ananas;
when you rub its leaves, it smells exactly like pineapple. I don’t know if it has a particular medicinal value, but I can’t wait to try it with a pork roast.

I patted the earth around the thyme. Maybe I was the one who needed planting. When I was back in the States, Mom and Paul announced that they’d decided to sell my childhood home in Teaneck, New Jersey, and move to Wilmington, Delaware, to be near my aunt. “I don’t want a lawn to mow anymore, or a driveway to shovel. I don’t want to worry about replacing the oil burner,” said my mom, trying to sound casual. Sell our little Tudor house on the corner, with a turret in the middle that you can access only through a low door in the back of my mother’s bedroom closet? It’s where we stored extra wrapping paper and scarves and my mom’s collection of antique handbags.