by Lily King
The two other jeunes filles were sharing a cigarette on the rim of the fountain in the middle of the garden. Above them, a pair of granite children struggled with a fish twice their size. Water trickled from its wide mouth down its belly into the pool below. The filles’ bracelets fell jangling as they took turns raising their fingers to their lips. They both had on black dresses and spoke to each other in a limited but careful French with the crisp overenunciation of the women who employed them. I’d contracted instead Lola’s slurred slang: I said ouai instead of oui, bouquin instead of livre, bagnole instead of voiture, and often dropped the ne in negative sentences. After a series of questions, Mme. Lallier commented on this.
“Hasn’t she started at the Sorbonne?” she asked Nicole.
“No, she’s not attending classes this term.”
Mme. Lallier looked at her inquisitively, for everyone knew there was something illegal about employing a foreign fille who didn’t go to school.
Nicole ignored the implication. “She studies in her room for hours on end, often before the sun comes up and nearly all day while the kids are at school. I’m sure she’ll run rings around those at the Sorbonne by springtime.”
Though I’d understood every word, I feigned an unconcerned obtuseness. I wanted no debts to Nicole.
The children had run off together around the other side of the house, and the men stood talking above the bottles of liquor M. d’Aubry had brought out to a table.
Mme. Lallier lustily eyed the plate of stuffed artichoke hearts put down beside her but did not reach to taste one. Though she was the same height as Nicole, she had a long waistless torso and lumpy ankles that made her appear far shorter. “Leyla,” she said, glancing toward the fountain, “has already placed into the cours superiéur.”
Nicole tilted her head in polite surprise.
“She’s that one there. With the long legs.”
Below such short dresses, both pairs of legs seemed exceedingly long.
I could feel Nicole prodding me with her eyes to go over and meet them. She wanted me to have friends, dates, and soirées like Odile, but I’d stayed in every night since my arrival. I knew my place was at the fountain, but what was there to say?
“Is she Spanish?” I asked.
“Leyla? No, no. She’s from Istanbul,” Mme. Lallier said, fascinated by her own words.
Mme. d’Aubry murmured her approval. “And I thought I was exotic with a Dane.”
The two filles, oblivious to this conversation and having finished their cigarette, now tested the water with their fingers. To reach it, they each had to lean way over; their long straight hair, blond and black, spilled over the side while their feet were lifted high off the ground. There was a small shriek and they straightened up laughing. One had splashed the other.
“They’re beautiful girls, aren’t they?” Nicole said, as if admiring figures in a painted scene. I was relieved I hadn’t gone over and marred the spectacle.
“It’s funny,” Mme. d’Aubry said to her. “You can only hear your Provençal accent in a few words, can’t you? I don’t know why you try to disguise it.”
Nicole scowled playfully as she denied the accusation, but she didn’t manage to disguise her irritation at the comment.
“I don’t hear it at all,” Mme. Lallier said tactfully, then looked with relief as she saw the husbands coming with their cocktails.
The three women were handed drinks in slender glasses and took seats on the sloping edges of the wrought-iron chairs while the men moved to the garden’s east boundary, where M. d’Aubry pointed out various buildings on the neighbor’s property, barely distinguishable now in the dim light. Marc stood a good deal taller than the other men and hung his head like a drooping flower to listen.
The filles remained at the fountain and there was no place for me to go but toward them. Then I heard, miraculously, Lola calling my name from around front and hurried to her.
Five children stood in line at the edge of the driveway. Lola beckoned me over, but before I could inquire, Claude d’Aubry, who looked about Odile’s age, came zigzagging toward them on his dirt bike with Guillaume on the seat behind him.
“I’m next! I’m next!” Lola shouted, and swung herself on. I told her it was a bad idea, but all three d’Aubry children insisted they did it every weekend they came out here.
When they came back, Lola’s hair was blown to one side, her cheek pressed against Claude’s shoulders, her arms locked tight around his waist. She didn’t hesitate, but I could feel how she didn’t want to get off so soon. Guillaume claimed it was his turn again and got on before the two little Lallier boys could stop him.
When they had gone, Lola tried to describe how it felt to ride the pitted trail through the woods across the street.
After a while, one of the boys said, “They’ve been gone twice the time anyone else has.”
And a few minutes after that, the other said, “Now it’s triple.”
When they came back, Claude was walking the bike and Guillaume was crying beside him. He made no sound but his face was in the contortions that by this time I knew well. I didn’t understand one word of Claude’s explanation and waited for Lola to translate. They had skidded. It was nothing, but Guillaume had refused to get back on or be left to walk on his own. Claude, disgusted with the lot of them, wheeled his bike back to the barn.
We tried to stop Guillaume from running to his mother, but it was no use. As Lola and I came into the garden she was wiping his face with a cocktail napkin. She was livid. I braced myself.
But Nicole looked past me to Claude behind us.
“Do you have a license to drive a motorcycle?” she called.
“It’s not a motorcycle, Maman,” Lola said.
Nicole kept her eye fixed on Claude. “It is a motorcycle.”
The men at the edge of the garden turned, and their pale faces began to float closer through the sudden darkness. Guillaume stood beside his mother’s chair but no longer touched it, his eyes cast down.
Claude in fact never had to speak. His mother, M. Lallier, and several of the children all leapt in at once. But Nicole was not daunted by the opposition. I didn’t need to understand the words to hear what was said. It was all done without raised voices or accusatory fingers. Drinks were refilled and the artichoke hearts passed around, but Nicole got the argument she wanted. Eventually, people began to listen to Marc, who had been muttering from the beginning, Laissez tomber, laissez tomber, and stopped responding to her. After Mme. d’Aubry had insisted that the dinner would be spoiled if they didn’t come in that minute, Nicole made her last remark, very nearly under her breath as she put down her full glass. It was something about the raising of children, and it made the other adults recoil visibly.
At the table, Marc followed the conversation with belated glances at the speaker. His face reflected the reactions of others without having grasped the topic. I felt his detachment as if it were my own.
But for Nicole, the incident had been a purging, and she now entertained the table with a long story about the prime minister’s sister. M. Lallier giggled through his nose, while M. d’Aubry chortled so deeply it caused him to cough; Mme. Lallier honked like a goose, and Mme. d’Aubry laughed in silent seizures with tears rolling down her cheeks. When they had all pulled themselves together they looked at Nicole fondly, less with forgiveness than in sheer gratitude. At the end of the night she was kissed warmly by the women and held a bit too long by the men. The flush of her face gave her skin a burnished luster and her dark blond hair gleamed its thousand shades beneath the single lamp in the hallway. By the time she was through with her good-byes and afterthoughts, Marc had already started the car. I sat alone in the back seat; the children lingered on the lawn with their friends until the last possible second.
The barrier of language closed down around me like bars. Until this moment I’d enjoyed the impossibility of communication. Without words, I was released from the basic obligations of courtesy and social
interaction. At dinner, I’d overheard Guillaume telling the other filles that I didn’t speak much French, thus setting me free from anything but occasional sympathetic smiles across the kids’ end of the table. And Nicole would never know that I’d heard her speech in my defense at the beginning of the evening. In this way, life could be kept extraordinarily simple. But now, just for a few seconds, I would have liked to slip through the barricade in order to say something to Marc. I would have liked to see his head knocked back by a brief laugh, for when he laughed he looked like Lola and was full of the same delight and hope she carried, as if his adulthood were still ahead of him.
Nicole’s shoes crunched in the gravel behind us. I remembered Mme. d’Aubry’s comment about her southern accent. I wondered when she came to Paris. Clearly she had worked hard at becoming the kind of person who could tell a story about the prime minister’s sister at a château just outside the city. Marc had mentioned his mother in Neuille, and his sister in Munich. But I had never heard Nicole speak of relatives anywhere, just as she had never heard me speak of mine.
Seeing their mother, the children leapt into the car, continuing an argument. Lola punched Guillaume and he punched back, shoving Lola into me. I shouted “Hey!” louder than I’d planned. The unexpected English made them stop and imitate me. “Hey!” “Hey!” they cried to each other. I could tell, though I didn’t know exactly how, Marc was smiling. Perhaps it was his head, which gave a little toss, or his shoulders, which shook slightly. Perhaps it was nothing visible at all.
He reached over to switch on the radio.
“S’il te plaît,” Nicole said, and snapped it off.
He said something gently, beseechingly, and Nicole did not counter him when he turned it back on. He found a station playing “The Boxer” by Simon and Garfunkel. One whole summer, the summer after fourth grade, my sister and I listened to nothing else but this one album, lying on the floor of our room and memorizing all the words written on the back cover. I was relieved to hear that they were still only on the first verse. It was painful not to sing along. I almost wished Nicole had succeeded in shutting it off, though I enjoyed the sudden conspiracy with Paul and Art, whose lyrics only I could understand. I worried that Lola would ask, as she often did, what the song was about and I would have to speak in French and then it would be over. But Lola was too tired and soon fell asleep against me. Guillaume followed, sinking slowly into Lola’s lap.
We swished on through curved roads toward the highway, through strands of mist that rose up over the windshield at the last moment. I mouthed the words to the song, grateful for the feel of them on my lips. In the silence that followed, I could hear in my head the next song on the record. Then they played it. They were playing the whole album.
Lola shifted position against me. “You have a beautiful voice,” she muttered. I hadn’t realized it was audible.
Up front, Nicole’s head rocked from side to side until, as they turned onto the highway, it slid onto Marc’s shoulder. He stroked her hair tentatively, then, sensing the depth of her sleep, with more confidence.
I sang them back to Paris.
La Sequana sat ringed in opals of swollen light. We moved through the watery haze in a small cluster, as if still confined to the car, and while we waited for Marc to unlock the door with the long black key that hung on a nail above it, the wet air fell on our bare hands and faces and traveled through our bodies as we breathed.
Lola leaned on me heavily. The night was absolute around us, so shrouded and close and damp that I saw in Lola’s half dreams Claude riding toward her in the rain on an old bicycle.
“But I don’t really love him,” Lola murmured, and for once I was the only one to understand her.
Marcelle
LUCIE AND I HAVE SOUP AND BREAD, AN OVAL LOAF I BOUGHT THAT MORNING INSTEAD of the usual baguette, which has made her smile because yesterday she told me about the oval loaves her mother used to bake at this time of year, the end of spring. The day has stayed cold. Clouds we thought would burn off by noon have only bloated, squatting on their heavy haunches above us.
We planned to eat quickly and get back to the garden but her hands won’t warm. She looks angrily out at the sky, then back down at her fingers. To straighten them causes her a pain she tries to conceal from me.
I get up to light the fire beneath the kettle and, when it boils, pour the water into a wide breakfast cup, which will soothe her hands when they hold it.
She has been nearly silent all day, but now the tea flushes her face and heals her hands and I know she wants to talk. I worry what she might ask and what I might tell her, so I quickly circumvent: I hold up a photograph I found in the drawer by my bed. It is a young woman alone, in a plain white dress, leaning against the door of a stone barn. At her side, in her left hand, are flowers hanging upside down. Her gaze is stubbornly averted from the lens. “Who is she?”
Lucie takes the picture from me and holds it a long time. “Nicole’s mother, Marcelle. When she died Nicole came to live with me for many years. The room you’re staying in was hers. This was taken on Marcelle’s wedding day.”
“What was she like?”
“Ah,” she says, shaking her head. She looks down at her hands, trying to stretch the fingers.
I pour her another cup of tea and wait for her to continue.
* * *
Her name was Marcelle Maunier, and she married Octave Guerrin when she was seventeen. He was from the next farm over, and their fathers had been planning the union since the evening their wives sat side by side and heavy-bellied in the Guerrins’ garden. The agreement was not made in words exactly, but it was understood that if one was born a girl and the other a boy, the farms would be consolidated in the next generation. The women smiled, followed the curve of their taut stomachs with a lazy but careful hand—and each prayed fervently to God that hers was the boy.
Marcelle grew up alone in her house, but right next door were Octave, then Xavier, and finally Max Guerrin. They all headed off to the same schoolhouse in the morning and were put to chores in the afternoon. The boys often worked over on the Mauniers’ farm, and Marcelle was called regularly to the Guerrins’ to help in the kitchen or with all the laundry the boys produced. It wasn’t exactly an even exchange—three boys for one girl—but the parents had removed the stone wall in their minds, once Octave and Marcelle had been delivered to them safely.
On her sixteenth birthday, her parents took Marcelle to Limne for dinner. It was July and they were seated outside in a courtyard with white pebbles on the ground that flushed pink, then scarlet, as the sun slipped into the dip between two blue hills. Before they left the house her father had pinned a gardenia to her dress, and now its smell hung before her in the humid air. She felt uncomfortable with her parents, whom she’d rarely seen beyond the boundaries of the two farms and her grandfather’s porch, where she was served tea that smelled like a chimney fire and the most delicious chocolate wafers that dissolved on her tongue. She wished they were on that porch now, though her grandfather had died and her parents had sold his house in Roussillon, the house where he would nod to the sky and announce the arrival of the mauve hour and put the kettle to boil.
The restaurant owner came for their order. Marcelle watched his contempt dissipate as her mother ordered for them all with confidence and relish. She had once, long ago, lived in Avignon. They ate cold salmon mousse and stuffed lamb shoulders and a hot lemon soufflé. They drank white wine with the first course, red with the second, and a sweet champagne with dessert. The sky turned violet and her parents’ faces softened, becoming the faces she had known when she was very young.
Her father held up his glass. “My precious daughter, whom we twice almost lost to sickness and now have had for many full, beautiful years, we thank the Lord for you every day. And we shall do so even more frequently this year, our last year with our only child.”
Marcelle looked quickly to her mother, whom she could count on to explain her father’s stories, to t
race the lines of his ellipses. But this time her mother offered nothing but tears.
Marcelle pulled her mother’s hands from her face and pleaded with her to explain, all the while suppressing an unexpected blend of panic and joy she felt at the suspicion that they were sending her away as her mother had been sent, perhaps to her father’s godmother in Toulouse or to her mother’s older sister, Aunt Anne, in Paris.
Instead, they told her she would marry Octave this time the following year. She refused. They insisted. She refused again. Her voice grew loud, and just as the owner appeared in the archway her mother slapped her.
“All right,” said her father. “You do not have to marry Octave.” He took another sip of his sweet champagne and by the time his Adam’s apple had risen and fallen, she guessed it was a ploy.
“You think that if you forbid me to marry him, I’ll want to, is that it?” She had never spoken to her father like this. But the thought of marrying Octave—the predictability that would envelop her, the routine, the precise repetition of their parents’ lives. She pictured his hands working a knot for hours instead of simply cutting the rope. He would never cut the rope, never act on impulse or frustration. He would contain each and every surge of emotion. There would never be anything the least unexpected. And soon enough she would be as predictable and bland as he. And what if they had children—she couldn’t let herself think of it further.
“No,” her father said, “that’s not it. You will marry Octave or you will marry one of his brothers. It will be shameful for you to marry younger, but if you are so hard set against Octave, who is the best of them, who is good and kind and honest, it is our only option. Though you are beautiful to us, my child, it will come as no surprise—”
