Picnic in Provence (18 page)

I
checked the fridge twice. I want everything to be beautiful. Tomatoes, a whole shelf of fresh peaches, peach compote, ginger root, lemons, red onions, and a ripening melon.

My dear friend Courtney is arriving today. We’ve known each other since college; she is a fellow writer and journalist, my mentor, really. She’s worn a burka in Afghanistan, covered the haute couture shows in Paris, and been embedded with the Singapore army after the tsunami. After several years in London, she’s just moved to New York to take up her rightful place in the elevator of the Condé Nast building. She’s done all of this while managing binge eating and bulimia that have sent her weight zigzagging wildly over the past twenty years. She’s in a good place with food right now, so for this trip, we made a little pact. She wants to learn more about cooking. I want to learn more about dieting. Since I had the baby, since I wrote a cookbook, there’s a stubborn ten pounds that refuses to go on its merry way.

Last time I went back to the States, I had lunch with another friend from college who was five months pregnant. “God, you look great,” I said, patting the baby bump. “It’s so much better not to gain it in the first place, because, wow, I’m finding it really hard to lose.” She looked at me with the disdain of a hardened war veteran lecturing a weekend reservist. “Of course it’s hard,” she snapped. “You have no skills.” Yikes. Apparently dieting, like scuba diving or a plumbing license, requires some kind of special training. I spent thirty-five years feeling pretty comfortable with my body. I was never model-thin or Madonna-toned, but being embarrassed to prance around in my underwear is a new feeling for me. I know I’m a little late to the party—but here I am.

No matter how long it’s been since Courtney and I have seen each other, it always feels like we’re picking up in the middle of a conversation. She is curious about the contents of my cabinets. “I swear, I never do this at anyone else’s house.” I think she feels safe here, which I’m really glad about. I’m her private chef for the next two weeks, so she knows she’ll be eating fresh, whole foods. We just found a Provençal kitchen armoire at a flea market. It’s open on the top with wire netting over the cabinets, so you can see my glass jars of lentils, quinoa,
riz rond
for rice pudding, several bars of dark chocolate, a big jar of raisins. I have a passion for dried fruit, particularly dried apricots, cherries, and—since I’ve been in France—figs.

“A hundred calories! Are you kidding me?” I was holding one of my favorite dried figs from the market. Courtney is full of these fun facts—stuff that I’ve blithely ignored all these years. “That means two figs is basically the same number of calories as a box of Dots.”

“The fiber will probably keep you full longer, but yeah.”

Huh.

“THESE ARE BEAUTIFUL,”
said Courtney as she helped me set the table in the garden. The right plate is the oldest diet trick in the book. I recently bought a whole service of Limoges dishes at a local flea market. They are white with small blue flowers, the gold rim faded by years of use. Like the French baby clothes, these old French plates are a good inch smaller in circumference than the modern set I bought at Ikea.

Today for lunch I’m making monkfish with a quick pan sauce of tomatoes, white wine, and fresh peas. Monkfish is meaty, as fish goes; if it’s not overcooked, its texture resembles lobster.

“Why do you put peas into the sauce?”

“It just looks nice—and it’s a nice contrast of textures.” I throw in the peas at the last minute so they don’t lose their crunch and their bright green color. I get the feeling that thinking about the aesthetics of food is something new to Courtney. She knows everything there is to know about the chemistry—the building blocks of food—calories, fat, carbs, protein. But a holistic approach, putting together a pretty plate, is not something she’s focused on before.

This morning she picked up the box of Alexandre’s chocolate LU
petit déjeuner
cookies.

“They’re not very good,” I said, in case she was thinking of wasting one of her allotted snacks on them. “But he used to like them.”

“No wonder—they’re almost two-thirds sugar,” Courtney said, studying the nutrition panel.

“How can you tell?”

“There are a little more than eight grams of sugar, which is four calories a gram. So thirty-two calories’ worth of sugar, and there are fifty-eight calories in a biscuit. The rest of the calories are fat, pretty much—there are two grams, so that’s eighteen calories. What’s not to like about sugar and fat?”

Courtney is a lot more laid back than she used to be about the timing of meals, but waiting to eat past a certain hour will bring out the gremlin in anyone. I still have a hard time convincing friends that fish is fast food in our house, but with precooked organic quinoa out of the bag (even the French don’t make everything from scratch) and steamed broccoli, this is no more than a fifteen-minute operation.

Above all, I want the food to be relaxing for her. Eating outside in the garden is a good start. I know that serving—judging a reasonable portion—is a problem area for Courtney. The French have an excellent solution to this: they never buy more than one piece of protein per person. Meat and fish are expensive.

I GET A
lot of work done when Courtney is around. We sit at the kitchen table, our computers back to back, trading sentences like baseball cards. We talk about future projects. She just started a novel. I think her life is a novel, if she would just sit down and write it.

And then there’s nap time. I have to admit, I still feel pretty sluggish. This winter’s fatigue has not subsided. I work around it. Gwendal makes no comment when I go to sleep in the middle of the afternoon, knowing that mine is not likely to be a twenty-minute power nap, like his, but a full-scale two-hour siesta, after which I often wake up—head aching, mouth dry—feeling worse.

Just like Courtney is trying not to binge in front of me, I’m trying not to sleep in front of her. She’s succeeding. I’m failing. There’s always an excuse: period, migraine, we stayed out late at a concert, maybe I caught a cold. The fact is I’m just bone tired. I spent my birthday weekend hiding the rash from a case of shingles. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I thought people my age aren’t supposed to
get
shingles.

My new doctor in Reillanne thinks it might be my thyroid. The numbers on my blood tests are not off the charts, just on the low end of normal, which, come to think of it, is exactly how I’ve been feeling for the past two years. When I look at the list of symptoms for hypothyroidism—fatigue, weight gain, depression, loss of concentration—I’m shocked by how spot-on it is, and also how similar it is to the clinical depression I’ve always feared. The doctor started me on an infinitesimal dose of thyroid hormone. The first day I took it, I felt a buzzing through my whole body—a double espresso that lasted all day. He might be onto something.

We all have habits we’d like to change, but staying up late talking about them in the dorm room and doing it on the other side of thirty-five are two different things. We are no longer “going through a phase”; there are now firmly ensconced bad habits, official patterns, not to mention a toddler, to work around.

Having Courtney here this week inspires me. It also comforts me. We all hide things. We want to show only our best selves to the world.

Upstairs, looking through the dresses in my closet one afternoon, I feel like I need to show Courtney the baby fat. She is one of my very few go-to girls; we stay up all night talking because we look to each other for solutions. She asks me why I put raw tomato on top of the ravioli; I marvel at her ability to meet us at the market by
running
to Reillanne—ten kilometers, uphill all the way. I remember hearing about a sorority in college whose members made their pledges strip down to their underwear and then circled all their cellulite with a permanent marker. This is the friendly version of that twisted ritual—full disclosure.

“It would probably come off if you exercised,” said Courtney, examining a necklace on my dresser. “Of course, that would be breaking your rule: ‘I reserve sweating for sex.’” She’s been quoting that line back to me for fifteen years. She knows me way too well.

The problem is, I’m surrounded by women who look the same way they did when they were twenty, and
they’re
not going to the gym. They may go bike riding on a Saturday afternoon or on a walking vacation in the mountains with the kids. They are taking tango lessons and going on yoga retreats, not running marathons.

Here’s an example. The other day I spotted my friend Virginie at the market. I hadn’t seen her for two weeks, so I came up from behind and gave her a little squeeze. Except it wasn’t her. It was her mother. From the back, they look exactly the same. Same skinny jeans, same ballerina flats, same oversize Indian scarf, denim jacket, and sunglasses perched above a low ponytail. I apologized profusely and everyone had a good laugh. But I was mortified. France is not a country where you just wander down the street squeezing women you’ve never met.

I saw Virginie a few days later at the café. I apologized again. “Your mom just looks incredible.”

“Oh,” said Virginie casually, “but she was quite young when she had me.” I did some quick math. That still put her over sixty. When I’m sixty, I fully expect to have a turkey wattle.

Growing up, I was told that women gain an average of two pounds a year every year after they graduate from high school, which is about where I am right now. That may be true in the States, but it’s simply impossible that the French women around me are forty pounds heavier than they were in high school. If that were the case, there would be entire
lycées
full of girls with the protruding ribs of famine victims. There’s just no way.

Without lingering on the topic, I brought it up with French friends who were here over the summer. Unlike most French women, our friend Catherine is a low-maintenance gal. Her dark curly hair is usually pulled back in a ponytail; she favors painter’s pants and Birkenstocks and T-shirts that don’t necessarily show off her figure. But she has a figure.

Catherine spent the weekend toting around her six-month-old son, her third little boy. “There’s no reason to gain weight after you have a child.” Catherine is a scientist, and she expresses herself with empirical certainty. “Maybe you go up one size after your third. Size forty by age forty.” I did a quick conversion in my head: that’s an American size 8 at age forty. The national message is clear: there is no earthly reason why I shouldn’t look exactly like I did before I had this baby, or better.

“What do you guys eat for dinner on the weeknights?” I asked as Catherine and I snapped the ends of haricots verts in front of the sink.
“Les enfants mangent à la cantine,”
replied Catherine. Her kids eat a four-course lunch in the school cafeteria, and she and Paul both go out to lunch with their colleagues, so dinner at home is consistently the lighter meal. “Often I make soup at night, with bread and cheese. Yogurt for dessert. Or pasta. Sometimes I make crepes.” Naturally. Catherine is from Brittany; she has the pro equipment at home.

When I add up these tidbits of conversation, it’s clear that in France, the American equation of a quick salad for lunch and then steak and a baked potato for dinner is entirely reversed. What emerges is a smaller, simpler meal, even a kind of de facto evening vegetarianism. Soup is a recurring theme. I’ve never met a French person who does not extol the virtues of soup.

SPEAKING OF SOUP
. We’ve been invited to La Roulotte this evening for a
soupe au pistou
party.

Alain and Evelyne, who helped us with the tiles, have a brightly painted circus wagon (a
roulotte
) that they park outside of Céreste in a quiet corner of one of Marion’s fields. Since they don’t have a proper garden attached to their house, they go out there on summer afternoons to read and relax, and sometimes they have evening
fêtes
—simple picnics, or concerts with musician friends.

Soupe au pistou
is the quintessential Provençal dish—economical, full of seasonal ingredients, easy to stretch for a crowd. At its basic level, it’s a vegetable bouillon packed with white and cranberry beans, cubes of zucchini and potatoes, chopped green beans, yellow beans, and elbow macaroni. Like Italian minestrone, there is a different—and definitive—recipe for
soupe au pistou
in every family. Some people add chopped tomato or a piece of slab bacon to the broth; some add sliced broad beans in addition to the haricots verts.
Soupe au pistou
is served warm, rather than hot, which works out great. There is no electricity at La Roulotte.

I’d been asked to bring a dessert, so Courtney and I decided to make oatmeal raisin cookies.

“How many calories are in an oatmeal raisin cookie anyway?”

Courtney stood up, holding her hand out like a stop sign, shaking her head to toss the thought away. “I just. Can’t. I’m having one of those moments. I just can’t stop thinking about all the things I want to eat, all at once. I can’t talk about calories.” We’d been holed up in the kitchen for the last hour, mixing butter and brown sugar and raisins. What was I thinking? The smell alone—it’s like asking an alcoholic to spend all day working in a bar.

WE ARRIVED JUST
after dusk. You can drive only three-quarters of the way to La Roulotte. We parked behind the other cars on the side of the dirt track and then followed a deeply rutted path through the juniper bushes. Wooden picnic tables were arranged in the field. They were set with colorful striped bowls and lanterns to light after dark. Alain and Evelyne arrived just after we did, lugging an industrial-size soup pot between them.

We drank wine from plastic cups and ate sliced
saucisson
for the
apéritif.
When the soup was served, the cranberry beans bobbed to the surface. I love their dense texture, their pink and white spots. We passed around bowls of grated cheese to stir into the soup. It makes the broth just a bit saltier, a bit thicker—a little
richesse
in a peasant dish. It would never occur to me to call this diet food, but packed with vegetables, beans for protein, and just a soupçon of fat from the cheese to give it body, this isn’t food that Courtney would object to.