Picnic in Provence (23 page)

Tears sprang to my eyes. “So that’s what you meant by taking the long way home.”

This wasn’t even a big birthday, just part of the late thirties’ countdown to the big four-oh. It’s the nicest I can remember.

BOB AND JANE,
a British couple who retired to the region, live up a winding road on the outskirts of Céreste. It’s the kind of dirt track that turns to tire-spinning mud with the first rainfall, quickly becomes impassable in the winter snow, and dries into deep ruts in the spring. By now, tufts of early-summer grass had appeared in the center of the road. It was cherry season (how did it sneak up so quickly
again
) and Bob and Jane had invited us, as part of our first ice cream experiments, to come and pluck their tree.

Bob and Jane’s cherry tree is a beauty. It sits at the bottom of the garden, just beyond the pool by the old wooden shed. Branches of waxy leaves shade neat bunches of yellow cherries touched with the merest blush of red. It would make a wonderful children’s story: a gossamer fairy, her wings glowing in the Provençal twilight, assigned to paint each one by hand.

We brought three buckets, the largest ones we could find. Our plan was to pick fast, rush back to the blender, puree the cherries, and freeze them to make sorbet. Up the ladder, I couldn’t help tasting—the cherries were tart; the sweetness followed behind, like a baby sister trying to keep up with the boys. If we could get this taste, this sunny glow, into a bowl, we might be onto something.

Let me say in my own defense: Nature hates amateurs. Amateurs are disrespectful. Amateurs die trying. It’s worth noting that all the books written by castaways washed up on a desert island are written by
survivors
. The people who suck dew off the leaves and know which berries will kill you and which ones will make a nice pie. If you and I were shipwrecked together, I could do you a very fine rendition of
Paradise Lost
. Someone else will have to reinvent the telephone.

I’d had fair warning. When we picked cherries in Jean’s garden last summer, he made sure we picked them with the stems attached, carefully turning just below the burr-like knob that held them to the branch so a bunch would grow back in the same spot the next year. But as we were going directly back to the kitchen, we decided to take a shortcut, ripping the ripe cherries straight off the stem and dropping them into the plastic buckets below. When I realized our error, it was too late. A ripe cherry is like a water balloon; our unceremonious plucking had bruised the delicate skin and created a leak. As we finished filling the first bucket, the cherries were already slick with sugary juice, the top layers pressing the ones underneath as surely as if I’d been crushing them with my bare feet, like the episode of
I Love Lucy
where Lucille Ball makes wine with her toes.

It seemed a shame, if not downright impolite, to leave without accepting Bob’s offer of a white wine spritzer by the pool. The whole time we were there, the juice was slowly seeping from our precious cherries. The flies, at least, seemed to approve of our method, buzzing excitedly around the buckets, rubbing their stick legs together in delight. As we strapped Alexandre into his car seat, I was overwhelmed with the heady perfume of oxidation, the slightly regurgitated smell of warm sugar.

The rest of the evening was a race against time. We weren’t equipped for such an operation. A single cherry pitter is fine for Jean’s
clafoutis,
but when you’ve got a whole tree to de-stone, it’s something like emptying the ocean with a thimble. Some of the juice made it into the ceramic dish on the kitchen table; most of it ran down the blue veins on the inside of my wrist straight to the bend of my elbow. On contact with the air, the sunny color of the cherry pulp quickly turned a mustardy brown, the color of my childhood corduroys. By midnight, Gwendal and I, not to mention the blender, the table, and the floor were slick with cherry juice. My engagement ring was glued in place by bits of pulp caught between the pale sapphire and the tiny diamonds. The kitchen smelled like an overboiled hard candy, a cherry compost heap. I wiped my nose on the shoulder of my T-shirt; the juice had made it only as far as my biceps.

I licked some juice off my palm. It tasted like a cherry soda someone had spilled in a parking lot—three days ago. “I think we should go to bed,” I said, trying to maintain an optimistic tone.

By the time we shut the freezer and turned out the light, the entire contents of that lovely cherry tree had been reduced to three plastic containers of pale brown slurry that resembled nothing so much as…diarrhea.

The next day was a Sunday; I called Maya in LA.

“Sorry,” I said, yawning into the phone. “I was up half the night making cherry sorbet.”

“Are you pregnant?”

“No.” I tried to think how to explain. “We’re just starting an ice cream company.”

T
his wall needs to come down,” said Rod, patting the door frame above his head. Never mind that it is directly under their fireplace upstairs; the beam is probably holding up their living-room floor.

Gwendal, Rod, and I are standing in the soon-to-be ice cream shop. The project is taking shape. Like a team of bank robbers, everyone has a job: Gwendal is in charge of production, Rod in charge of construction, and I am in charge of cookies—and aesthetics. When we get through with it, the vaulted ceiling and exposed stone walls of Rod and Angela’s cellar will be very cozy—and, in the summertime, very cool. When Mom gets here, she and I can roam the flea markets looking for mismatched teapots and maybe a three-tiered cake stand. We’ll need some marble-top tables. Kitchen space is limited, but I’d love to find a glass-fronted buffet to store the ice cream dishes.

Looks like we are going to get those interest-free loans after all. One of the masons working on the shop is on the jury. He keeps walking in while Gwendal is covered head to toe in plaster dust from clearing the old joints in the rough stone walls. I think this helped our chances. It reassured them he’s not afraid to get his hands dirty and counters the more dilettante aspects of his résumé. I guess the dreaded goat-cheese man never got plaster dust in his hair.

We still don’t have a name. I can never seem to get going with my writing until I have a great first sentence, and that’s how I feel about this; it’s hard to imagine what we want our ice cream company to be without first knowing what it will be called. Lots of artisans in France use their own names for their brands, but the only famous Gwendal in France is an Olympic figure-skating champion—not exactly what we’re going for. I was up in the office looking for the checkbook when I noticed it, a folded paper hanging off the top of the art deco armoire, the one with the mirrored door hanging by a thread (the décor in here hasn’t improved). It was a six-by-four-foot poster for one of Gwendal’s favorite childhood films, a swashbuckling Technicolor adventure from the 1950s. He had named his consulting company Avanti!, after a Billy Wilder film from the 1970s; why not continue the tradition? I brought the unfurled poster downstairs, holding it over my head so it wouldn’t drag on the floor. It was perfect—just weird enough for people to remember: Scaramouche—Adventures in Ice Cream.

SO THIS IS
why I pay my taxes. Today I took Alexandre to have his
goûter
—that’s French for afternoon snack—at the new village crèche he will attend as of next week. I’ve decided that state-subsidized day care (from the age of eight weeks) and the right to full-day preschool (for every potty-trained child over the age of three) are the fundamental secrets of low-stress French parenting. Simply put, the kids are out of the house a lot longer, and a lot earlier, than in the States. Funny, I think I was just starting to get the hang of being a mom (now that Alexandre and I can have a conversation about Dr. Seuss), and now he’s going to forge his own way in the plastic playhouse—as he should.

My mom remembers my first day of school very clearly. Me walking down the flagstone path, Mary Janes on my feet, plastic lunchbox in hand. Now I know why. Alexandre is out in the world now. If we do our job right—if he spreads his wings, as I hope he will—except for rice pudding, laundry, and, hopefully, the occasional bit of advice, he’s never coming back.

After filling Alexandre’s cup with water, I tried to steer him away from the food table. Thoughts of his future girlfriends and career in extreme sports aside, my immediate concern is to keep my son from giving his American roots a bad name by eating too much cake. He actually gets his love of cake from his French father, but where cultural stereotypes are concerned, you can never be too careful.

IT’S A PRESIDENTIAL
election year—both in France and in the United States. I’m feeling the cultural dissonance. François Hollande, the French Socialist candidate, is proposing a 70 percent tax rate on salary after the first million euros, which makes the capitalist in me want to flee to Ohio. But when I describe the services available to working mothers in France, my American friends are incredulous, then furious. My son goes to a brand-new facility with a fully qualified staff and a five-to-one child/adult ratio. He goes from 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., five days a week. It costs a whopping 2.80 euros an hour—on a sliding scale. We are at the very top.

They say all politics is personal. I hate to sound trivial, but the thing that impresses me most about the crèche is the lunch menu. They post it in the foyer at the beginning of every week, right next to the box of plastic foot covers they ask us to wear to keep the floor clean. I feel like I’m looking at one of the founding documents of French society—the culinary equivalent of the Declaration of the Rights of Man. So this is how they make little French people—they start with the lentil salad and work up from there.

I’m sure there’s a method to all this. I went down the list: Wednesday was
macèdoine mayo
(a salad of carrots, turnips, green beans, and green peas in mayonnaise), followed by roast beef with mashed potatoes, cheese, and fruit compote for dessert. Many of the vegetables seem to be up front. Do they introduce new foods in the appetizer course, when the kids are hungriest? In my general enthusiasm, I asked to come in and observe a meal for research. The director smiled the way she does at the kids. Then I was politely, but mysteriously, put off.

“They didn’t say no,” I explained to Gwendal that evening. “But they didn’t say yes either.”

“Of course they don’t want you to visit during the day. Not when Alexandre is there. It’s not fair to the other kids. It’s about equality. The crèche is a place where parents are not. They get all the kids to accept this—then you walk in, and suddenly everyone wants to know where their mommy is, why she can’t come to lunch.”

Sometimes I forget: Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité. Égalité is right there in the middle, flattening things out, while at the same time holding things together.

When I talk to my American friends about the crèche, half of them think I’m making it up, half of them want to emigrate. On my last trip back to the States, I had lunch with a friend, a fellow writer. She and I lead sort of parallel lives. She is married to a French artist, and they have a son who is exactly Alexandre’s age. But they live in Brooklyn, and she has just started filling out preschool applications. “It’s a nightmare,” she said, taking a bite of her salmon sashimi. (When I’m back in New York, I try to make sure as many outings as possible involve sushi.)

“We are looking at three schools; one is twelve thousand dollars, and one is eighteen thousand.” I almost spit miso soup all over the table. “For a half day. There’s only six spots and they have this sibling policy, where brothers and sisters of current students get priority. And that’s if he gets in.” He didn’t.

I’ve also had this conversation with American friends in France. “There’s no way we could afford to go back to the States now,” said Michelle, who has a French husband, two kids, and a nice tax-exempt salary with a Paris-based NGO. “How would we pay for college?” This kind of educational calculus goes on between every international couple we know. The math is intimidating. Tuition at my college alma mater is now just over $47,000 a year. Add in room, board, books, and beer, and that’s nearly a quarter of a million dollars for an undergraduate degree—God knows what it will cost in fifteen years. The average salary in France is between 25,000 and 30,000 euros. Even when Gwendal was earning what the French consider hefty executive pay, he wasn’t bringing in what a Goldman Sachs analyst makes the first year out of business school in the States. We couldn’t have saved for college if we’d wanted to. There’s no such thing as a college IRA in France.

Once again, this is a conversation that French parents just aren’t having—at least, not at this level. Tuition at the Sorbonne this year costs between two hundred and five hundred euros, plus an obligatory two hundred euros for health insurance. Gwendal earned a full-time employee’s salary while he was getting his PhD. The super-competitive Grandes Écoles—France’s Ivy League—are absolutely free.

Of course, my son is just at the beginning of his schooling in France. But I’ve heard the talk—the French teach to the middle, stifle creativity, and reward conformity. If I’m being honest with myself, I’d like Alexandre to spend a portion of his education in the States. I’d like his classics to be Shakespeare and Steinbeck as well as Racine and Proust. I’d like him to be able to write a term paper on
King Lear,
not just a quick e-mail, in English. I want Alexandre to believe that his opinions are valuable, work can be passionate, and that his very best effort will get him somewhere in life. I don’t want his American-ness to be some kind of recessive trait, a dangling modifier. It feels like my job to promote these things, and my job alone. I start with the little things. He likes raw cookie dough, so there must be an American in there somewhere.

And if we can’t pay for Stanford? (A mom has to dream.) What if Alexandre is two hundred thousand dollars in debt when he turns twenty-one? What kind of life choices does that really give him: doctor, lawyer, banker, Internet millionaire? He certainly won’t be able to work in a museum or a cinema archive like we did.

In an election year, these questions seem particularly urgent. What kind of options do we want for our children, and what are we willing to pay for them?

“EIGHTEEN POINT FIVE
percent. That’s terrifying.” We were in the kitchen listening to the radio. The French have two rounds in their presidential elections. Everyone gets equal airtime during the monthlong campaign, and the two candidates with the largest percentages in the
premier tour
run against each other in the final election. The Front National, the extreme-right party, came in third, only a few percentage points behind the Socialist Party and the centerish-right UMP. Immigration is a soapbox issue with the Front National—they have a sinister way of equating immigration and security issues, deliberately lumping together illegal immigrants and anyone of North African, African, and Roma origins—even if they were born in France.

“I better get on that citizenship application,” I said to Gwendal as I spread raspberry jam on my toast. “You forget—I’m still an immigrant. If Marine Le Pen has her way, soon no one will have the right to become French.”

Asking for French citizenship is not a formality; it’s an admission. Acceptance of a worldview. The truth is, I’d been putting it off. Though I’ve been living in France for ten years, paying taxes and making homemade mayonnaise, I still don’t quite exist here under my own steam.

My legal status, my work permit, my health insurance—my very presence in France is entirely dependent on my being married to Gwendal. I pay into a retirement account, but I can’t vote. I have the right to work in France—but not in the rest of the European Union. Alexandre has been a dual citizen since birth, but if tomorrow Gwendal wanted to accept a job in London, or Krakow, or Rome, I would be transformed into one of those “trailing spouses.” What a terrible term—it makes your life partner sound like a piece of toilet paper stuck to the bottom of your shoe.

Applying for citizenship now requires a French-language test, and a woman I know in the village heard they were thinking of adding a cultural part to the exam. What would that look like? Should I memorize the names of French presidents or the lyrics to Edith Piaf songs? This is the myth of culture, that there is a set of facts or opinions everyone shares that somehow make up a country. Do you call what happened in Algeria from 1954 to 1962 a war or a police action? The questions say as much as the answers.

Americans are lucky; we can maintain dual citizenship. I won’t be forced to choose. As much as I love my life in France, I can’t imagine renouncing the country of my birth. The longer I spend outside the United States, the more attached I become to the American Dream. Europe is great at celebrating the past and enjoying the present, but at hurling itself into the future—not so much. That said, it’s all well and good to say that the French hate risk and discourage entrepreneurship, but without the security of Gwendal’s eighteen months of unemployment benefits—at 50 percent of his old salary—there is no way we could take the leap into our new ice cream business.

If I want to put in my application before the end of the year, there’s a mountain of papers to be gathered: fingerprints, criminal background check, marriage certificates, official translations. But it’s time—past time. My life is here, my family is here. I should share a passport with my son and husband. In the event of a biblical apocalypse, we should all be running for the same embassy. That, and it would be nice to be in the same line at the airport.

I WAS WALKING
back from the butcher at noon and ran into our neighbor Josette with her straw basket of errands tucked under her arm.

“How is Alexandre settling in at the crèche?”

“He loves it.
Merci
.”

“
Alors, c’est pour quand la princesse.
So, when are you going to have a little girl?”

I don’t get it. The French never ask personal questions. It could take months of preliminary small talk to find out what someone does for a living, if his parents are alive or dead. But now that Alexandre is firmly ensconced at the crèche, people keep coming up to me on the street and asking when we are having another baby. The state makes it so easy, they can’t imagine anyone would have one child by choice. Or does my American tummy already look pregnant to them? Ugh.