by Lily King
So Marc and I walked down this street just gabbing and laughing. I walk a lot in the afternoons, and it was wonderful to be one of those pairs of people I am always so envious of. There was suddenly so much to say. It was like being with you. How can I explain this? It’s as if life rushes at you day after day and things happen but you never really think about them afterward until there’s someone else there who brings it up and it all comes out in a kind of hilarious shape that you couldn’t see before. There are some people who can pull things out of you that you didn’t even know were there. I can hear what you’re thinking but I’m not falling in love with him. And he would never fall for me. He’s got a gorgeous wife, and the last thing he’d be interested in is an affair with the postpartum au pair!
Jan. 11
Today I taught Lola how to make chocolate chip cookies, and the taste of the batter and the smell as they cooked made me miss you terribly.
Jan. 25
Out on the deck at dawn, if it’s calm and clear, the bridges’ arches are long loops all the way across. The buildings, the iron railings, and the bare trees on the opposite side all quiver slightly in the current, and sometimes I dream of that world in the water. I dream of the people who inhabit it and
Feb. 4
In every dream I have I am still pregnant and always protecting my belly, and when I wake up and remember that I am empty it is like being drained of every drop of blood
Feb. 7
I want to try and explain
Feb. 12
In Nicole’s room there are chocolates in a silver box by the bed and silk stockings pressed flat and laid in drawers and a closetful of hourglass dresses. There is a carton of letters, nearly all of them in yellow envelopes. She gets at least one of these once a week. I haven’t read them. They come from the town she grew up in, Plaire (which is also the verb to please), and when one arrives her mood changes. She never opens it with the rest of her mail. She saves it to read in her room. If she writes back she must mail it off in secret. I haven’t ever read one but I’ve studied the envelopes. They’re addressed as if someone were in a great hurry—or afraid of getting caught. And there’s never any return address—just the postmark to give it away. You need to be here. You were always a better sleuth.
Feb. 15
I still don’t sleep very well
Feb. 22
There are two parts of my routine here I love, making dinner and Sunday mornings. Dinner is easy. It’s just for the three kids and they’ll eat anything. At six, a radio mystery show comes on, and I listen to it while pressing garlic or stuffing a chicken. You’d faint at what I’ve learned to do in the kitchen. Sunday mornings everyone goes to church but me and Marc. Sometimes Odile sleeps instead of going to mass but she won’t get up until midafternoon. Nicole calls us les infidèles, and we have coffee (which I’ve learned to love) together while they’re all gone. We exchange insomnia reports and it is comfortable between us somehow, despite my French, which is improving but not fast enough. Sometimes this feels like home, a real home, kind of the way the house in Lyme felt before
Feb. 27
I’ve been thinking about Cal today. When I think of him now he seems so young. I should have
March 2
I finally feel a part of this family. At Easter we’re going on a big trip.
The Wide Room
ON THE ROAD HOME, THE LATE-MORNING SUN IS HOT ON OUR BACKS. IN THE SAGE and mint and heather beside us, the clacking voices of insects diminish as our feet approach, then resume with a great swell in our wake.
We’re returning from La Douille, the dairy farm on the other side of the hill. Lucie is in a playful mood, having teased the young farmer about the strange shapes of his roosters’ wattles. He blushed, as if she’d said something tremendously personal, and she teased him about that. Despite his embarrassment, he seemed to enjoy the attention, and as we were leaving he handed us a thick slice of goat cheese.
“Before you arrived I hadn’t been to La Douille for years,” she tells me. “And not because of my health, either.” Above all, she hates to be thought of as weakening.
“Then why not?”
“A number of reasons, I think.” I can hear that she won’t yield, and I know not to prod her. We walk in silence until she goes on. “But I enjoy going with you. You love all those calves, don’t you?”
“They’re like children.” There is one, older than the other calves, with spindly hind legs that make her rear rise way up, giving her an ungainly walk and a look in her eye that seems to acknowledge her awkwardness. She reminds me of Lola.
“And the way you veer away from the sows. They’re big but they won’t hurt you, not if you stay away from their food. But what I like best is watching Jean-Baptiste watch you.”
“I can’t believe he didn’t notice our clothes.”
We’d headed out that morning and walked nearly a mile before realizing we were wearing the same thing: white shirts, black sweaters, and tan pants. It was the spark for her silly mood.
“Don’t change the subject. I think he was quite distracted by you.”
“I don’t think so.” These are Lola’s words and tone when her father teases her. J’crois pas, papa.
“All I know is that I used to have to wait in that henhouse a full hour before he’d bring me a bottle of milk. Now he comes in a hurry, smoothing down his hair”—in her throat is a bubble of laughter she is trying to keep down—“tucking in his shirt.”
I try to remain serious. “It’s not true! I’ve never once seen him …” I can’t recall how she said tucking in.
“You see, you’re all flustered just talking about him.”
“I’m not!”
We laugh hard and loud, coming over the crest of the hill that leads down to our driveway.
Henri Peyraud is heading toward us. Perfect timing, for going down the steeper slope isn’t easy for her.
“What happy faces this path has brought to me,” he says. Then he sees our clothes. “Is there a uniform on the hill now? Or have you joined an army?”
He smiles without teeth. Unlike Lucie, whose youth remains in her soft downy cheeks and childish heart-shaped grin, Henri has a crumpled face. Creases merge with deep cracks. His hair is white and stuck straight up, like Guillaume’s brosse. But, as he is the first to tell you, he’s still strong as a cart horse. He and Lucie have been friends for seventy-six years, since they were eleven and made to share a hymnal in confirmation class. They sang the verses backward—faltered not has faith our, faith Our—until they were given a switching on the backs of their knees and made to do a hundred and fifty Hail Marys on a bare kneeler.
He takes Lucie’s other side. Her face soon furrows in concentration as the decline worsens and her shoes slip on loose gravel. She slows and steps sideways, then turns her toes inward as if learning to ski. Henri coaxes her down with soft words, spoken more gently than I could ever utter them: Doucement, soigneusement, comme ça, ça y est, oui, oui, oui, oui.
I concentrate on the ground as well, helping her in my mind to place each foot carefully. We pass without comment the driveway to Nicole’s family’s house, where the shutters are sealed and the ceramic roof tiles one by one slip and smash on the ground below. On the way up she pointed to the largest window, the only uncovered one, made up of several long rows of panes. Nicole, she said, had been the last to sleep in that room.
When the road flattens, her grip loosens and she becomes chatty again, telling Henri about the effects of Monday’s storm on the Monbet farm, about the tree that fell on a pasture wall at La Douille and how all the cows are nibbling at it. “You’d have thought them giraffes! And how efficient Jean-Baptiste is becoming. Haven’t you noticed, Henri?”
“I have noticed only that he works at the same snail’s pace he inherited from his father.”
“You should try taking Rosie with you.” She glances over at me with a mischievous smirk. Her face is glistening from the strain of the slope.
“Plea
se don’t listen to her, Henri.”
We stop at the mailbox and she hands me a letter without ceremony, as if it isn’t the first letter I’ve ever received here. I drop it into the dairy bag, careful to avoid the handwriting, though the two stamps are unavoidably American flags. She has found me.
Henri leaves us there, saying he has to make it to the dairy farm before Jean-Baptiste takes his lunch.
“I don’t think he’ll be eating much today. Love ruins the appetite.”
I smile distractedly, and when she takes my arm again her clutch seems tight and her pace too swift. Now that the land has leveled, her steps are sure and steady and force the rapid approach of the house. I want her to say what we’ll do once the groceries are put away. I want a full day’s schedule, busy hands and mind, with no time to sit in my room and wonder what to do with the letter in my lap. But she wants to rest and, handing the letter to me once again before hanging the straw bag back on its hook, tells me to go out onto the back porch and read it in peace.
Instead I go out the front door, tug open the woodbin, toss in the letter, and sit down on the stoop. From there I can see, for a few seconds at a time when the wind gusts the trees in certain directions, a corner of the long window on the second story of Nicole’s house.
* * *
After Marie-Jo married Paco Paniagua with the bright red hair—the Spanish carrot, he was called, though he’d lived in Plaire all his life—Nicole was the only child who remained in the big house. As soon as her sister’s belongings were boxed and carried out, Nicole, like Marie-Jo when Juliette had left and like Juliette when Monique had gone, moved into the wide room, the master bedroom with their grandmother’s canopy, the enormous window, and its long pillowed seat. From that perch, she and her sisters had spent months of their lives peering through the myriad panes, whose glass warbled and warped the long leaves of cherry laurels, the luminescent skins of plums, and the rows and rows of vines, as if you were glimpsing the world beyond through a fat sheet of rain.
Now finally in full possession of the room she had coveted for so long, Nicole stretched herself across the whole window seat, arms above her head, seeing if she could touch one end with her hands and the other with her feet. Not quite yet, she told herself, knowing that she would grow and eventually be able not just to lie down and reach but to sit on the first cushion and cover the last with her legs. The room was finally hers, and unlike her sisters, who’d each only had it briefly, she would have it from now, age eight, until who knew when, maybe forever. She stretched herself with all her strength. Maybe her legs would be as long as her father’s. Maybe she would never marry.
All alone on the seat, Nicole suddenly found the view less intriguing, and her gaze often drifted away from the patterns of purple and green and the haze strewn across the valley’s floor into the room itself. As her eyes traveled from wall to wall, she remembered each sister and her reign here.
Monique, who was in it from age fourteen until her marriage at twenty, had been fanatically neat and clean, and more than once Nicole found her standing on the great bed, having removed the canopy so all that remained was a skeleton of wood. While the white lace soaked in a tub of bleach downstairs, Monique polished with lemon oil those walnut bones until they glistened and scented the whole room. She also slept immaculately, utterly still and in the exact same spot each night, so that Juliette, when she moved in, had to flip the mattress because of the impression Monique’s body had made. Then Juliette could sleep as she liked best: in the middle of the bed, her arms spread straight out on either side. Like Christ on the cross, Marie-Jo liked to say when they spied on her, though the expression on Juliette’s face was pure unequivocal rapture, for she loved to sleep and slept deeply. Nicole could slip in and play in her room in the morning without waking her up. Marie-Jo, with all her impatience to acquire the wide room, was the one to spend the least time in it. She crept out the window nearly every night to meet up with friends at the quarry, and if she returned to find Nicole in her bed, she did not force her out, for fear that Nicole’s revenge would be to reveal her nocturnal secrets at breakfast. So instead, without ever a word between them, Nicole moved dutifully over to the far side of the bed when her sister slipped in near dawn, smelling always of tobacco and whiskey, her hair wet from a dare. In the morning Marie-Jo would ask, “Was he here last night?” and Nicole would respond yes, for Frederí Lafond stood outside the window every night, waiting for Marie-Jo to accept him.
Whether he watched her comings and goings, they were never sure, but at some point on any given night a moon-shaped face was sure to appear below and would remain suspended, supported on bare knees in the courtyard dirt, for hours at a time. Whether he saw Nicole studying him was never clear either. When she came to the window his expression never changed; it continued to hold all the bitter hope of all the longing in the world. It was a pious, grave face, and she was not surprised when she heard, just after Marie-Jo’s wedding, that Frederí had gone into a seminary up north.
Like this Nicole sat on the window seat, looking in and conjured up each sister as she had once been in this room. Being so much younger, Nicole had been exempted from the intense rivalries among the three elder girls and so did not really know her sisters as well or as devastatingly as they knew each other. But suddenly, with Marie-Jo gone and the house silent, their memory seemed sacred to her.
She didn’t sleep nearly as well with Marie-Jo out of the bed, and her nightmare about a little boy and a stone came back again and again. Even Sundays with her father and evenings with her mother seemed different. As she headed out with her father for their usual long walk after church, Marcelle’s figure in the window moved with desperate languor through rooms that seemed darker and emptier than ever, and as she sat with her mother in the kitchen at night, she became aware as never before of the slow scrape of Octave’s newspaper across his leg while he sat alone in the next room. Suddenly every move Nicole made seemed to be a choice between her mother and her father, whereas before there was at least Marie-Jo to balance things out. But none of her sisters had spent the time that Nicole did with their mother. There was a certain devotion Marcelle lavished on her last child that she had withheld from the others, but none of them envied Nicole and what they saw as her suffocating burden. They had never truly forgiven their mother for what had happened during the war, and they no longer wished for her face so close to theirs; they couldn’t imagine having things to say to Marcelle for hours after dinner.
Within a few years, Nicole wouldn’t be able to imagine it either. She would strain to remember actual conversations, real words that were spoken, and would fail. All she could later recall was a certain game they had made up from the patterns of flecked color and shallow crevices on the surface of the stone table. It was a fortune-telling game, and when she remembered it she could feel how the windows slowly blackened, and how the oil lamp strained to reach the corners of the room, and how the objects before her eyes (the wooden back of a chair, a bearded iris in a jar, her mother’s knuckles on the table) sharpened and seemed to inch closer and closer, and how this shift was always both soothing and frightening to her. It was at this time of day that she needed her mother most, though it was different from the need she had for her father, who coddled her, lifted her up, and held her, breathing his pipe breath in her ear. Her mother rarely touched her, save to brush her hair roughly from her eyes before school or to give her two weightless kisses good night.
Alone in the wide room, Nicole did not have to make choices—or so she thought until the afternoon in February, eight months after Marie-Jo had gone, when her mother appeared in the doorway with a letter in her hand.
“May I?” she asked.
“Of course.” Nicole put down her book and sat up a bit straighter on the window seat. She couldn’t recall ever seeing her mother in this room since she had vacated it years ago.
She came and stood at Nicole’s feet.
“Is it for me?” Nicole asked.
&nbs
p; Marcelle stretched out her empty hand flat before the windowpane. “I can feel the wind through the glass. This is probably the coldest spot in the house.”
“Here.” Nicole offered her the other end of her blanket.
Marcelle folded a leg beneath her and sat down exactly the way Monique did when she came to the window. The white envelope floated on top of the dark blue blanket she pulled over her. Nicole couldn’t recognize the handwriting or make out the letters, though she could see that one side had already been torn open.
“Who is it from?”
In this light, a bright gray just after a noon rain, her mother’s skin was coarse and bluish. The rims of her lower eyelids were a deep dry red. She looked at Nicole without the slightest idea that she had been asked a question. Instead she began to speak, in a slow, stilted, rehearsed way.
“I would like to ask you something, Nicole. It is something I’ve been turning over in my mind for a great long while. It is actually a dream of mine, and now finally seems a time when I might achieve it.” She stopped to run a fingernail along one of the red rims, which then flared an even more brilliant color. When her arm fell back into her lap, she said, “I would like to go to Paris, and I would like you to come with me.”
“For how long?”
But Nicole didn’t need to ask, for in her mother’s voice and in the unwavering underlined eyes was the defiant challenge: I have never asked anything of you before this.
“It’s from Great-Aunt Anne, that letter?”
“Yes.”
They looked down at the envelope, quivering between Marcelle’s fingers.
“She has invited us. They have an apartment that’s terribly big for them. She was never able to conceive.”
