by Lily King
When our number was called at the cheese counter, she receded and I stood alone with the ticket as the woman interrogated me about the cheeses Nicole had named and I now repeated. When it came to how much—in kilograms—of each I wanted, I turned back to Nicole. But she wouldn’t help. She stood behind the gathering crowd of women, looking directly through me. A few people began to grumble. I blushed, then began to sweat from all the blushing. Finally I held up a triangle of fingers. When it was all over, I squeezed my way back to Nicole; she said “Très bien” without a hint of sarcasm and pointed me toward produce.
I thought this section would be the easiest, but by then I had lost even my ability to judge a good tomato from a bad and was sent back to the crate to empty the bag and start again.
Nicole made me nervous. She made me miserable. I knew if she asked me my own name I would not be able to say it correctly.
In the checkout line I began to worry about getting it all home. I wanted to ask but remembered my French teacher being very particular about the two verbs, to bring and to take, and I was certain I would use the wrong one.
She handed me a check just as the cashier announced the total. It was an incredibly long series of numbers, of which I heard only the number five. It was five hundred and something francs and something centimes.
“Comment?” I asked with mild curiosity, as if I had only missed one numeral.
He repeated the same string of digits and, seeing my pen still poised after the word cinq, pointed to the total on the register. I froze. I felt the line grow longer behind me. I didn’t know how to write 598,67. I had forgotten. I could hear the sounds in my head but had no letters for them. I felt the blood rushing up again. I could not do it. I could not.
“I don’t know,” I said to Nicole, and handed her the pen.
“You’ve got to learn your numbers. You’ve got to practice,” she said, when we were out on the street. “You’ve got to write each one fifty times.”
I wanted to tell her that I’d known my numbers before I walked into the store, that she made me so panicked I couldn’t think, that I’d had one slice of pizza since I’d landed in this country and that was nearly sixteen hours ago. It was then I remembered the groceries. We had none of them and were halfway home.
“The food!” I cried, delighted that for once we’d finally done something foolish together.
I laughed too loudly and she told me to ssss. She explained something, but I didn’t understand until later in the afternoon when all the groceries were delivered in boxes right to the kitchen floor.
Starting the following Monday, she told me, as she showed me exactly where each item belonged, I was to do all the shopping myself. She would sign the check in advance and I would take it to the store alone.
The next morning I got up at five-thirty, turned on a light at the dressing table, and began writing out numbers. I got all the way to cent quarante-huit before it was time to wake up the children for their second day of school.
Two Evenings
IT WAS AGREED THAT FIVE NIGHTS OUT OF THE WEEK I WOULD MAKE SUPPER FOR THE children. Their parents often had a dinner engagement, or they ate late at one of the small restaurants across the bridge. Occasionally they passed through the kitchen on their way out as I was doing the dishes: Nicole painted, silked, and stunning; Marc wet-haired and razor-nicked.
Despite his height, his white shirts, bright ties, and custom suits of charcoal or olive, Marc was not a handsome man. I often wondered why Nicole, with her aesthetic vigilance, her swift verdicts on appearance, her intolerance of Lola’s best friend Francine and her tête d’iguane, and her unconcealed appreciation of the chiseled face of Odile’s boyfriend Alexandre, would have selected such an unassuming spouse. But there was something about Marc that kept you looking. His was not a beautiful face—it was too thin, too full of juts and hollows and topped by tufts of wiry, incorrigible hair—and yet you kept looking because if you turned away and looked back it would be changed, still unalluring, but changed. He seemed never to wear the same expression twice, nor ever to match those expressions with his words or movements or the wanderings of his eyes. From the start I studied that protean face, patiently waiting for the one configuration that would make him a handsome man: the static, classic cut Nicole would have married.
Marc worked long hours at the hospital, and when he was home he was usually in his study. We didn’t meet until the morning of my second working day, when I found him in the kitchen at six. He was wearing the bottoms of a pair of pajamas and sitting beneath the light of the single lamp that hung low over the table. He greeted me with a routine bonjour, as if I were entirely familiar to him, though from his unfocused glance I knew he had not yet seen me. I told him my name and stuck out my hand to rouse him. He stood abruptly and scrambled to gather up all his notes and fat medical books. “Please,” I began, but he interrupted.
“I had completely forgotten. The rentrée. Excuse me.” His long pale chest, flecked with a handful of blond curlicues, flushed a deep salmon color below the pronounced ring of his collarbone. He moved quickly to cover himself behind the stack he made. At the threshold he turned around, startled again to find me still standing there. He peered over his pile of paperwork lodged in every direction between the books, the top sheets secured by his chin. His brow was raised in folds and his mouth on the verge of speech, but he spun around again and vanished down an unlit hallway.
Sunday nights, Nicole had explained, would be different from the rest of the week. We would all eat dinner together, a meal Nicole would prepare with me as helper. After only three days, Sunday was an assault on my routine. I’d quickly grown possessive of the kitchen, where I spent so much of each day. Already I knew it intimately: the smooth cobalt counters, the row of glass cupboards trimmed white by an unsteady hand, the chinked corners of the stone table, and the flaking grooves beneath every drawer handle against which bottles had been pried open. The kitchen was unlike the rest of the house; it contained none of the dark ornate museum pieces of the other rooms around which I gingerly moved. The kitchen, especially on afternoons when the sun spilled through the large southern window or, lingering on the river, kicked up upon the ceiling quavery loops of light, had the feel of a neglected cottage by the sea. But sharing it with Nicole drained it of its peace.
Nicole cooked in a frenzy with no apparent enjoyment. From the earliest stages of preparation, everything was always about to be improperly measured, poorly sifted, badly blanched, or indelicately deglazed. Most of the vocabulary for this work I didn’t even know in English, and Nicole’s frustration with my ignorance never abated. Only occasionally, in the midst of all her self-created turmoil, did Nicole surprise me. She called the sautéing mushrooms coquettes when they popped grease at her, and when I diced instead of julienned the turnips, she said glibly, “Bon, c’est plutôt à la américaine,” and threw them in the pan anyway. These moments of forgiving levity were rare, though I was thankful for each one.
When everything was ready, I transferred the food to the platters Nicole had retrieved from locked cabinets and took them out to the long dining room table. I called “À table,” and eventually everyone came but Nicole, who finally reemerged after the rest had been seated and served. She wore a different shirt, and the top strands of hair that the heat had coiled were smoothed down. She looked and behaved as if she’d had nothing to do with the making of the meal. She stood behind her chair and exclaimed how delicious it all looked, then, sitting, received with great gurgles of appreciation each platter passed to her. When Marc complimented the tenderloin and Odile the potato galette, dishes I was certain they had been eating for years, Nicole deferred immediately to me and I was given a series of insincere compliments.
After a few minutes, the conversations grew too difficult for me to follow. They overlapped or took hairpin turns or were full of words I suspected were names or places but was never sure which. I felt my breathing grow less shallow, and halfway through the meal I began to en
joy the food. They had forgotten me, and I felt snug and warm in my blanket of incomprehension. I had always wanted to go to France to learn the language, but instead I’d come and lost my own. Finally I was free of the need to explain anything to anyone.
But before I could nestle in further, I realized that the whole table was looking at me. Someone had obviously addressed me. “Excuse me?”
“Where are you from in the United States?” Marc repeated, picking out the asparagus from the vegetable sauté.
“From all”—I hesitated. Over. I searched for a word: —“places.”
His lips parted with another question, but Nicole said, “Ah, the classic American childhood,” which seemed to settle the matter.
“I had an American friend once,” Lola said. “Do you remember, Maman, when we went to Saint-Malo that summer and we played that game on the rocks?”
“No.”
“Yes, and we kept eating all those peanuts and she had a bright blue bikini.”
“Your mother doesn’t like to remember anything before next week,” Marc said.
“That’s not true, Papa,” said Guillaume.
“Why did you live in so many different places?” Odile asked.
“Her father was in the army, I imagine,” Nicole said.
“No,” I said.
“Your parents are divorced then,” she said.
“My mother is dead.” I’d never taken relish in the delivery of those words before. There was a general lowering of eyes in belated sympathy, though Nicole still regarded me with surprise, as if she had not believed that those predictable American lives could end.
Here I’d normally insist that condolence was not necessary for I’d only been a few months old at the time and had no memory of loss. What sadness I felt was for my sister, who had been six. Since then, my father had had a steady stream of girlfriends, and over the years I’d learned little more about my mother than a few expressions she’d had, which my sister imitated when we were children playing house and she insisted, as she always did, on being the mother. Hot damn! was one. Wakey, wakey was another, spoken softly in my ear after a pretend nap. But the moment had already passed for me to explain any of this, so I kept my head bowed down to my plate and tried but failed to remember any more of my mother’s words.
It was then that Guillaume knocked the glass over the edge of the table. I watched my own hand drop the fork and catch the glass just before it tumbled into my lap. A few drops spilled from either side onto my fingers, but otherwise it was still a full glass of water. I’d never had great reflexes or coordination, but my body was still protecting what was no longer there.
“Bravo!” Marc looked straight in my eye for the first time with the face of a usually undelighted child who has finally found something to marvel at. He called me leste and Lola helped define the word and everyone but Nicole reenacted the save.
All too quickly, however, I lost the thread of conversation again and they all seemed to drift in their chairs far away from me and I was no longer comfortable in my isolation. This time I struggled to keep up: Guillaume had a new math teacher with some sort of beard; Marc said something about beards that made the children laugh; Guillaume said something else which made no one laugh, though Nicole smiled encouragingly. There was mention of a place they would all go to next Saturday, some château out in the country.
“Even Rosie?” Lola asked.
I felt like the new pet, whose behavior on long car trips was still in question.
“Of course Rosie,” Marc answered. He made me feel as if I’d been their only fille all along.
“I can’t go,” Odile announced. “Alexandre called today and asked me to a dinner.”
“When? I didn’t hear the phone,” Nicole said.
“You were upstairs,” Odile said.
“When did he call?”
“Around two.”
“I wasn’t upstairs at two.”
“I don’t know, Maman. Maybe it was three. But he called. I didn’t call him.”
And then, after a few unfamiliar words strung together too quickly or spoken too softly, I was plunged back into darkness.
I examined the various styles of speech. Guillaume’s was precise, and he was by far the easiest to understand, even easier than Lola, who, when not speaking exclusively to me, tended to ball everything up in her excitement to say it. Odile and her mother spoke in almost exactly the same way, in the tone and rhythm of the women I heard shopping in the specialty shops where Nicole sent me for olives from Nyons or paté from Strasbourg. Theirs were beautiful, fluid voices, devoid of the unanticipated hitches, blunders, and gushes of real people. It was Marc who spoke with all of those. He stammered, then rambled, yet more seemed left unsaid. He was never satisfied when he came to the end of a sentence, as if it were a foreign language for him as well.
Nicole was mouthing something to me, but not in the exaggerated way required for comprehension. Eventually all other conversation stopped, and though her discretion had failed, she still did not speak up. She just gave her plate a little shove and I understood it as my cue to clear.
When I reached the kitchen and saw that the cheeses had been unwrapped and arranged on a plate, I realized that was exactly what she had been saying: le fromage.
After cheese, I brought out a raspberry tart that I carried to Nicole, who served the slices from her seat. She cut fat wedges for Marc and each of her children, nothing for herself, and a paper-thin slice for me.
As I received the plate, Lola mumbled something to her mother. Nicole leapt up, yanked Lola out of her seat, swatted her on the rear, and sent her to her room. She came back to her seat and apologized directly to me.
Marc glowered at Nicole, his face crimson, but he said nothing.
“Lola said you weren’t as fat as you looked,” Guillaume said to me with deliberate slowness.
“Guillaume!” Nicole whined gently, amused, as if he had told a very funny but very dirty joke.
There was a painting on the wall across from my seat that I’d been aware of during the meal. I forced my eye upon it now. It seemed to me a Caribbean scene, though it could have been anywhere with white sand and turquoise water. In the shallows two large women were bent over their washing, their bright skirts trailing in a wave that had just broken. A third woman stood upright, holding her skirt in one hand and the long cloth she was washing in the other. She was turned toward the other two, whose faces could not be seen, and she was laughing. The paint had been applied thickly, and the colors—the piercing blues and whites of the sea, the primary stripes of the skirts, the lean black arms, and the red of the upright woman’s lips—had texture and weight. I could smell the soap and the salt; I could feel the clear warm water swirl at her ankles. The bent women were singing. At moments like these, when I was trapped and humiliated during the Sunday dinner, I strained to hear their song.
Much later that night, Lola came out of her room and slipped into mine. She stood beside the bed where I lay with the light on but no book in my hand.
Lola’s face was so pale I could see a web of veins at her temple. Despite her long smooth neck and the Snoopy on her nightshirt, she looked terribly old.
She began to cry before she could speak.
I let her stand there a long while.
Go, I thought, just go. I didn’t want to help her, care for her, grow attached to her. But she just stood there, rolling the edge of my bedspread between her fingers. Finally I stopped their fidgeting with my own.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said, squeezing hard. Ça ne fait rien. It was an expression Lola had taught me that morning, and I’d repeated it again and again because I’d wanted to be able to say one thing exactly like a French person. We had practiced the r, the collapsing of the vowels, the hand gesture and facial contortions that went with it. “Ça ne fait rien,” I said again, exaggerating everything, and Lola crawled up onto the bed to hug me.
There was so much I would have liked to tell her, but even if I�
��d had the words I couldn’t have spoken then, for the smell of Lola’s hair, the weight of her head on my chest, and the small hand gripping my arm made it difficult even to breathe.
As promised, the following Saturday afternoon we went out to the country, to friends of theirs called d’Aubry. Odile had her own party to go to, so we all fit in Marc’s car.
On the French highways, signs are blue, not green, and their letters more rounded and shiny white. I was amazed at how quickly the city fell away, replaced on either side of the car by fields, separated by long empty roads leading to villages of which I could see, in the distance, only the tip of a spire or a cluster of flat roofs. I sat between Guillaume and Lola in the back seat. No one had spoken for a long while, and the only sound was the lock on the car’s door that Guillaume pulled up and pushed down, pulled up and pushed down. I would have liked to tell him to stop, but my efforts at disciplining Guillaume often displeased Nicole, though if I said nothing she would eventually turn around and scold him herself.
Nicole held the steering wheel firmly in two hands, never changing her grip, not even for bends in the road. Marc sank deeper into the passenger seat, his fingers half laced in his lap unwillingly, as if he could find no better place for them. The loneliness of married life astounded me. They had not exchanged a word for nearly an hour, since they decided who would drive, and now in the lengthening silence and draining light of this Saturday afternoon, the possibility of laughter or any kind of communication between them seemed remote.
“Arrête, Guillaume!” Nicole snapped finally, shooting a quick impatient glance at me in the rearview mirror.
Off the highway, the roads narrowed and buckled, then turned to dirt. The d’Aubry château sat abruptly at the end of a driveway of white pebbles. We did not approach the enormous door but followed a path lit by lanterns around to the back of the house. Here there were gardens that led into gardens, each a prelude for the next more spectacular one. There was no way of seeing clearly to the end. The boundary of the first garden, closest to the house, set up with white wrought-iron chairs and glass tables, was defined by scrolled shrubs and a gated doorway at the other end. Three families had gathered for dinner: the d’Aubrys, the Lalliers, and my family, the Tivots.
