Picnic in Provence (30 page)

Holy pistachio,
I thought.
The health and safety people are here—in advance—and they got the wrong address.
I raced down the stairs, past the ants on the kitchen floor and the suitcases blocking the door and the toys scattered everywhere.

I stopped short. Thank God.

It was only Guy, the plumber.

“WHAT DOES THYME
look like?” asked my mother as we got into the car. She’d spent the morning scrubbing rings off our vintage water carafes with denture cleaner. This afternoon, the whole family is going to the field behind Marion’s yurt. The thyme is flowering; we need another batch for the honey-and-thyme ice cream.

“Look at it this way,” I said, evoking my mother’s first trip to the French countryside, “it should be easier than trying to pet a chicken. At least the thyme won’t run away.”

Gwendal clicked Alexandre into his car seat. “And if it starts running, Karen, you know it’s not thyme. It’s a fox.”

“I sense that I’m being made fun of,” said my mom as we turned off onto a dirt track.

“Admit it. You love it.”

We walked over to see if Marion was at the yurt. “See, Paul,” I said, placing my hand on the tin coffee can covered with a plastic bag, “this is how she gets her Internet access.” He looked unconvinced.

Marion was working in a nearby field; she waved her floppy straw hat in greeting. Alexandre ran to join her, following her sunken footprints in the freshly turned earth—a giant game of mulchy hopscotch.

“Come see my babies,” she said, gesturing toward her brand-new greenhouse. She had baby Swiss chard, a dozen varieties of tomato plant. Outside, growing wild, were chives with tufted blue flowers. I always learn something when I come to visit Marion. I never knew onions had flowers.

“I love the green-tomato smell. I could wear this as perfume,” I said, rubbing a leaf between my wrists. “We should make an ice cream out of this.”

“Non, non,”
said Marion, frantically waving her hands in the air.
“Toxique!”
My botany still has a ways to go.

We left the greenhouse and walked through the brush into a sunny clearing surrounded by small oaks and juniper. The spikes of
genêt
were showing their first bright yellow blooms. There was a warm green smell, like a cat sitting on a pile of clean laundry. We were up on a small rise; you couldn’t really call it a hill. There were patches of thyme everywhere, just starting to burst into purple flower. My mom held the shopping bag while Gwendal and I cut the branches. Alexandre, such a big boy at three and a half, insisted on having his turn with the clippers.

I
’m going to film my own infomercial—“Lose Ten Pounds in Two Weeks: Open an Ice Cream Shop.” No time to eat, and the number of steps back and forth between the sink, the ice cream display, and the terrace is roughly equivalent to the New York marathon. I’m thinking of buying a pedometer, just for fun.

Yesterday was the first of May. The sun came out in the afternoon, and suddenly there was a line. People came out of nowhere, filling up the terrace and perching on the stone staircase of the seventeenth-century house next door. I went home with a blister on my foot and whipped cream in my hair.

All this will be leading you toward the conclusion that I’m just coming to myself: in thirty-eight years on this planet, I’ve never done a real day’s work. Owning the place makes the day more rewarding but no less tiring. Nor does it improve my memory, my math skills, or my dexterity with a squeeze bottle of homemade hot fudge. Why did I go to rare-book camp instead of taking a waitressing job in college? There are mornings when I think the coffee machine is more intelligent than I am.

Today was calmer; we found time to commiserate over photos from the opening. We got lucky; after three days of rain, the clouds parted just long enough for a hundred and fifty people to crowd the street and line up for free samples in miniature cones. It was less a line than a merry-go-round; the kids in particular kept circling back to try new flavors. The honey-and-thyme ice cream was a hit, and so was the pastis sorbet. We decided we needed to change the name of our ras-el-hanout ice cream with grilled almonds. Even the adults wrinkled their noses at the idea of couscous-spice ice cream, but everyone loved it when it was called One Thousand and One Nights. The kids were attracted to the bright colors, so in addition to the strawberry sorbet (Gwendal was right), we had a lot of takers for our fuchsia beetroot sorbet. The vanilla was exceptional. Finally. I’m not sure I’ve ever been prouder to be a part of something than I was that night.

I passed the photos to Rod; our friend George got some great shots of kids with chocolate mustaches and toothy grins. I filled a broken cone with strawberry ice cream (have to use up those broken cones somehow) and sat down at an empty table. Two fourth-graders arrived with the director of the village school to hang a poster for the student film festival. Red carpet and everything. The sun set and the chill returned. Time to take the terrace in and close up for the night.

Angela leaned her head out the upstairs window. “Good day?”

I nodded and smiled. Good day.

SPRING ARRIVED WITHOUT
us noticing. When I walked Alexandre to school on Monday morning, the lilacs were in full bloom. The irises are out again along the Roman road. I used to pass this way every day on the way to Alexandre’s nanny. Now that he’s in school, I pass this way only when we forget a tub of saffron ice cream or a batch of toasted almonds at the lab. Because of all the rain, the grass is growing at a prodigious rate. Fields that were muddy brown only a few weeks ago have sprung to life, covered in knee-high grass. The tractor lines are still faintly visible, like someone has run a finger through an especially plush carpet.

Alexandre’s suddenly become very popular at school. At that age, the only thing cooler than a daddy who’s an astronaut or a fireman is a daddy who’s an ice cream maker. I walk with him to the shop every day after school. He goes behind the counter and asks Gwendal for a cone of lemon or strawberry sorbet, sometimes coffee ice cream. Even if his parents have been a little preoccupied these past few months, he seems to be pleased with the net result.

There’s a new crop of kittens in the garden across the way. When I opened the gate this morning, I found one sitting, still as an Egyptian idol, in a square of sunshine under the apricot tree. They are learning to jump. When I go to print something in Gwendal’s office, I watch them take flying leaps from the longest branch to the sun-warmed
tuiles
of Denis’s roof.

I’m still tired, but it’s a different kind of tired, a better kind. One thing’s for sure: writing has taken on a whole new meaning for me. A few hours to myself in front of the computer seems like a vacation.

I FORGOT HOW
hard this is. Not since long division have I spent this much time trying to write neatly on a chalkboard. The flavors change every week now that fruits are coming in. Gwendal needs to take the truck up to Saint-Martin-de-Castillon this afternoon to get the first bouquets of fresh lemon verbena for sorbet. The mint that we can’t control in our garden has finally found its raison d’être—fresh mint and shaved chocolate ice cream. I’m looking forward to the cherry sorbet. I think we’ll make a sundae with hazelnut and vanilla ice cream, cherry sorbet, and Jean’s cherry marmalade sauce—with a fresh cherry on top, of course.

The shop looks exactly the way I’d hoped it would. I commandeered the wrought-iron chairs from our dining room and found some bright stripy cushions. The exposed stone vaults of the cellar are cool to the touch, even in the midday heat. On the marble bar, there’s a candy jar full of pastel Smarties that are doled out with one of my mother’s silver gravy ladles.

If I think about it, there’s almost no one we know who hasn’t contributed in some way. The logo—Scaramouche with his sword inside an ice cream swirl—was done by a local graphic designer, the husband of the director of the village crèche. The sewing lady across the street made the cushions for the bench inside the shop. We get the three-liter
bidons
of fruity olive oil for our rosemary–olive oil–pine nut ice cream at the butcher, and the saffron,
bien sûr,
from Didier and Martine in Reillanne. Mr. Simondi, whose farm is down the hill near Marion, has promised to hand-pick our melons for sorbet when the time comes. Angela has become our gardener in chief, making sure the terrace is full of bright spring flowers.

“JUST TO LET
you know,” Gwendal said over lunch. “Laure is coming on Friday.”

“Laure. Laure?” I repeated, searching my internal Rolodex. Oh.
Laure
. Laure is his ex-girlfriend. More specifically, the girl he dated for five years, lived with for three, and left just before he met me.

“I know you like to be aware of these things.”

“Okay,” I said, trying my best to sound nonplussed. “I’ll remember to brush my hair.”

There must be something sexy about this ice cream business, because both of Gwendal’s serious ex-girlfriends have popped up in the last six weeks. I’m not the jealous type. But Laure is recently divorced, and, frankly, I’m suspicious of her motives. The fluid nature of French relationships means that no one ever completely hangs it up, throws in the towel. There’s always the possibility, the frisson of sex. It’s what makes the air crackle. It probably makes the cheese taste better. One reason why French women always look so good is that nobody ever stops looking.

I admit it, I dressed with more care than I usually would on a random Friday afternoon: my most flattering jeans, a white eyelet fitted blouse, and my favorite crocheted mohair cardigan. Jewelry: simple, tiny diamond studs and, of course, my engagement ring. I slipped on my new Matt Bernson ballerina flats. The idea, the lesson, if you will: Start every day as if your husband’s ex-girlfriend is coming to dinner—and knock her out of the water. There is no such thing as a French MILF; all mothers are meant to be inherently fuckable. I made sure my bra and underwear matched—for inner confidence.

The anticlimax was inevitable. Laure arrived with her new boyfriend in tow. She was taller than I expected and not quite as pretty as I’d made her in my head. She does have a beautiful, infectious smile. She also has a PhD in history, spent a year or two at Cambridge, did a graduate fellowship at Princeton. We clearly share a passion for the past, for text, for the ivory-tower life.

She was so much more open and enthusiastic than your average French girl, leaning in to ask me questions, tasting the ice cream flavors with abandon, waving her sample spoons in front of herself like Madame de Pompadour with a fan. If it weren’t for the slightly suspicious reappearing-French-ex thing, we could be friends.

She’d arrived with a bottle of champagne to celebrate the opening and two books for Alexandre. She had clearly told the new boyfriend quite a lot (too much, perhaps) about Gwendal. Women are idiotic that way.

Just after six o’clock, Nicole arrived at the shop with Alexandre. With only a few tiny gaps, either my parents or Nicole will be here through the end of August. We are working nights, weekends; we could never do this without them.

Even after a whole day spent taking care of a small child, Nicole still has her red lipstick in place. My mother-in-law would no sooner go out of the house without her lipstick than she would without her pants.

Of course, Laure had known my mother-in-law for years, and they fell into easy conversation. I sat to one side as Laure leaned in—she had a nice way of leaning—and asked my mother-in-law questions I’d never dared. “Nicole,
si c’est pas indiscret,
would you like to meet someone?” Her tone was warm, conspiratorial.

“Mais oui,”
answered Nicole. “But men of my age,
c’est des ordures.
” It was like she was talking to a close girlfriend.

I walked inside in a huff. Turns out I
was
jealous, not about Gwendal, but about Nicole.

Three years had passed, and she and I never quite talked about the book. Never really talked about how it felt to lose her husband, what she hoped for from her new life in Paris. We talked a lot about the past, family history, recipes, but not about the future.

“Ça va?”
I said to Nicole when she walked inside with the champagne glasses to rinse.

“Et toi?”
said Nicole. “If it had been me, I would have been—” I forget the exact French word she used, but it meant something between “icy” and “apoplectic.”

For whatever reason, this encounter made me feel sad, and a little brave—so I jumped off the cliff. “I saw the way you were talking with Laure, the questions she was asking.” I hesitated, searching for language and feeling. “I sometimes wonder if it would be easier for you to have a French daughter-in-law.”
Someone who knows all the lyrics to Brassens and could read Lacan in the original. Someone who always knows what’s appropriate and what’s not. Someone who isn’t constantly in danger of tripping over these cultural lines in the sand.
“And sometimes, I want to…”—already my French was getting jumbled—“say things, ask things.” I took a minute to collect my words. “I don’t know if it’s a question of culture or temperament, but sometimes I just don’t dare.”

She looked at me in surprise. Whatever qualities she attributed to the American girl who had wandered into her life, I’m pretty sure a lack of daring wasn’t one of them.
“Tu as tort,”
she said kindly. You’re wrong.

“Oh,” I said, taken aback that it might be that simple. It was an invitation, one I desperately wanted to accept.

Tu as tort.

Maybe I was; maybe I had been all along.

When I got home that night, I was full of questions, openings. It must have shown on my face.

“Was that okay?” said Gwendal.

“It was fine for me. Not sure what Laure’s boyfriend thought.”

“Yeah.”

“Actually, I feel lucky. People that are really happy don’t normally drive an hour and a half out of their way to see an ex.”

“Wow.” He looked up from his computer. “I never thought I could get points off a meeting like this one.”

“I’m just saying,” I said, walking up behind him to put my arms around his neck. “I’d rather be married to the coolest guy I know than talking about the coolest guy I know with another man.”

WE HAD MINIMAL
time to set up before the paparazzi arrived. We have an ice cream stand at the student film festival tonight. The nineteenth-century schoolhouse is decked out with banners, and a red carpet stretches from the wrought-iron gate to the stage. There’s a barbecue, a crepe stand, someone making homemade waffles. The teachers and the kids have done an amazing job.

The parents, all in dark shades, made a convincing crush of celebrity photographers. Dozens of flashes clicked away as each class paraded up the red carpet. Some of the boys were wearing white dress shirts and bow ties with their jeans and sneakers. The girls had all been allowed into their
mamans’
makeup drawers.

It’s May 25, and two hours south of here, the real Cannes film festival is ending. I remember how excited Gwendal was the first time he went. One year I called him; he had cut himself shaving just before the premiere of the new Indiana Jones movie. Holding the phone to one ear, he tried not to drip blood on the collar of his tuxedo shirt.

“Do you miss it?” I asked.

“No,” he said without hesitation. And I knew he didn’t. We had stumbled into an unlikely life. All the five-year plans in the world wouldn’t have gotten us here. Yet it’s exactly the right place to be.

Perhaps René Char said it best:

Impose ta chance, serre ton bonheur et va vers ton risque. À te regarder, ils s’habitueront.

Impose your chance, hold tight to your happiness, and go toward your risk. Looking your way, they’ll follow.

The translation is mine, and rather liberal.

Gwendal handed me the ice cream scoop and walked toward the stage. He’d been asked to present the award for Best Director. Alexandre sat on the ground beside me with a cone of lemon sorbet. The wind started to pick up. I squinted into the evening sun and turned toward my next client, a little girl wearing too much of her mother’s sparkly green eye shadow.