My Grape Year: (The Grape Series #1)

by Laura Bradbury

  The baggage carrousel came to life with the sound of screeching metal. Even though they had been waiting a good forty minutes, everyone around me looked surprised, as though they hadn’t expected it to happen so soon.

  Still, no suitcases came off. People momentarily looked perplexed then lit up more cigarettes.

  In the distance, I could hear another carrousel begin to grind. A few minutes later somebody shouted something in French, and the crowd turned and took off towards the other moving carrousel. I hesitated and examined the screen again. It still showed our flight number. This was where our bags were supposed to come out, not somewhere else. Still, I saw that people from my flight had begun to pluck bags off the other one; so I gave up logic and ran over there too, using every muscle in my upper body to wrestle with my wonky cart. Those French could run fast, even with cigarettes dangling from their lips.

  Suitcases were being spat off. I looked up at the screen—LAN Vol #115 Buenos Aires, it said. That was completely the wrong flight, but contrary to logic, people from my flight continued to grab their bags.

  The crowd was thinning out. Soon there were only five of us watching three Adidas bags circle around and around.

  After a few minutes of this, the machine clicked off and froze again. An elderly gentleman wearing a silk neck scarf—which I felt was a bit overkill on a stifling summer’s day—just shrugged. “Eh merde,” he sighed.

  My French left much to be desired, but I knew what “merde” meant. The question was, What did it mean for my suitcases? I remembered checking them in at the Victoria airport. There had been a layover in Calgary, and another in Toronto… My bags could be in the North Pole now for all I knew. Merde indeed.

  The elderly man with the silk scarf walked towards a sign that read Sortie, and because I didn’t know what to do, I followed him.

  A pair of sliding doors opened and then closed behind me, disgorging me into some sort of arrivals hall, which held what looked like people from every corner of the globe—beautiful African women dressed in brightly colored dresses and headwraps, a bunch of kids from an American high school wearing matching jackets and chattering in Southern accents…

  “Laura!” I heard my name, though pronounced completely differently than I was used to hearing it, with the “r” rolled and the second “a” drawn out at the end.

  I scanned the crowd, but couldn’t place who was calling me. Then I heard it again, coming from a beautiful woman in a knee-length skirt and matching jacket. She had blond hair and turquoise eyes. Beside her stood a man with an irrepressible smile and a girl about my age, whose messily twisted chignon and scarf around her neck marked her as undeniably French, hence light-years more stylish than I could have ever hoped to be. Could this be my host family—the Beaupres? My heart leapt with hope. They didn’t look like the type of people who would abandon a freshly arrived exchange student at the airport, even one without her luggage.

  They rushed to me with outspread arms, and all gave me two warm kisses, one on each cheek. I enjoyed being enveloped in a cloud of perfume and cologne and soft fabric, hoping that it overpowered my own stink from travelling for so long.

  “Where are your bags?” Sophie, the daughter, asked in stilted English, although it was far more than I could manage in French. “Are they…I cannot remember the word…perdus?”

  I took out my pocket dictionary and looked up the word. Lost.

  “Oui, perdus,” I agreed. Look at that! I was almost fluent in French already!

  My French prowess dried up the minute we arrived at the baggage return office, a place that closely resembled Danté’s version of Hell. Luggage was teetering in precarious piles all around the desk, and a sweaty young man appeared completely overwhelmed by the task at hand.

  I thanked the heavens that my beautifully attired host parents seemed intent on finding my missing suitcases. Before leaving Canada, I had been informed by my local Ursus club that I was going to stay with four different Ursus host families during my year in Burgundy. That was quite a few, even by Ursus standards. Two host families generally was the norm. I was daunted by the idea of adapting to four different families and wondered if I could blame their enthusiasm to host me on the multi-year ban on Ursus exchanges to France. In any case, if all the families were as lovely as the Beaupres, maybe it wouldn’t be so terrible after all.

  Madame Beaupre somehow glided up in front of the crowd to the man at the desk and spoke to him in the most melodious French I’d ever heard. He paused and actually leaned over the desk to take in her statuesque figure, which was highlighted by her beige outfit that revealed tanned legs and feet shod in perfect, dark red pumps. A smile illuminated his face, and he listened to her with rapt attention.

  She paused eventually and turned to me, asking me a question in French. I had no idea what she was saying. Pretending to understand occurred to me, but I quickly concluded that I wouldn’t be able to play that game for long. I shook my head instead and shot her a look of apology.

  Sophie stepped forward and asked, “Your sacs…what did they look like?”

  My suitcases were standard black Samsonite, but I thanked my father, who’d never let any of us leave the house without a suitcase unless it was all trussed up with at least ten flapping ribbons of neon yellow flagging tape, which he used when moose hunting. I would tell them that there were neon yellow ribbons bedecking both my suitcases.

  “They are black, but they have yellow ribbons all over them,” I said.

  “I’m sorry?” Sophie shook her head. “I do not understand what you say.”

  They all waited for my answer in French—except for the man behind the desk, who was still staring at my host mother with worshiping eyes.

  I opened my mouth. I couldn’t remember the French word for “ribbon.” I couldn’t remember the French word for “yellow.” I couldn’t remember the French word for “suitcase,” even though I was certain Sophie had just said it. I certainly couldn’t remember the French word for “neon.”

  My eyes roved around the room—I was desperate for help. An irate man almost prostrated himself on the desk trying to get the baggage man’s attention. He was wearing a bright yellow wristwatch—the kind only a French man could pull off. I jabbed my finger at it and repeated the English word “yellow” several times.

  “Your sacs are yellow?” Sophie asked.

  “No. No.” I shook my head. “There are yellow ribbons on them. My two suitcases are black.”

  I clearly had lost Sophie, as she just stared at me with her brown eyes wide.

  Again I scanned the room in desperation. I grabbed a luggage tag off a pile on the counter. I flapped it around in front of me. “On suitcase. Yellow.”

  “Ah!” Sophie conveyed this crucial tidbit of information to her parents, who were wearing identical frozen smiles as if trying hard to not look too appalled at my French, or rather my lack thereof.

  I was equally distressed. I had taken eleven years of French in school, for heaven’s sake. True, it had always been my worst subject and the bane of my existence, but somehow I thought that after all those years I would have retained at least the word for “yellow.” I remembered my French teacher asking me, “How can you be so terrible at French and so good in your other subjects, Laura?” Maybe Flemish would have been a wiser choice after all. No one would have expected a person to know Flemish.

  The baggage man was talking with my host mother again, a regretful hound dog look in his eyes. I divined what he was telling her even without being able to understand French. He had no suitcases with yellow flappy things to give her, and he was heartbroken about this fact. Madame Beaupre gave him a gracious smile and an eloquent shoulder shrug. She turned on her perfect heel and sashayed out of the tiny room. I glanced back at the last moment. The baggage man was still watching her.

  CHAPTER 3

  We walked for so long in the suffocating building that I could feel another layer of sweat bead through the layers of travel grime encasing my body. Ther
e was garbage everywhere—random pieces of paper and food wrappers, and even an abandoned shoe. There didn’t seem to be any garbage cans, but there were several sets of ominous-looking guards patrolling the terminal. They were dressed almost entirely in black and armed to their teeth with automatic weapons—the kind of thing I had never seen outside a Hollywood movie. Was France involved in a war that I knew nothing about?

  Finally, we reached a multi-story car park. The concrete was crumbling in several places, and what was there was decorated with every style of graffiti imaginable (though showing a distinct predilection for the hastily rendered, oversized penis). This wasn’t at all how I’d pictured France. I’d imagined that Charles de Gaulle airport basically stood at the junction of the Eiffel Tower and the Champs-Élysées.

  We drove at a snail’s pace in bottlenecked traffic on roads that were bordered on each side with huge walls covered with yet more graffiti. I craned my neck to see if I could catch a glimpse of anything, but it was impossible to see beyond the concrete barriers.

  Madame Beaupre kept turning around and asking me nice-sounding questions, to which I just kept answering oui, even though I had no idea what she was asking. Sophie smiled, but seemed preoccupied. I knew from the letters we’d exchanged that she was leaving early the next morning for her year in the United States. I remembered how I had felt a day earlier…or was it two? Scared, excited, overwhelmed… I wouldn’t have been up to carrying on a conversation in a foreign language either.

  Sleepiness snuck in like a bandit. My head dropped.

  I woke up with a jerk at some point en route to Sophie’s grandmother’s house that, they had written me, was in a village about an hour’s drive from Paris. Monsieur Beaupre was navigating the car at breakneck speed through impossibly narrow streets. The concrete walls had been replaced with houses made from pale cream stones and decorated with bright red geraniums.

  “Oh my God,” I murmured to myself. The village outside my window looked just like the villages depicted in Snow White and Cinderella and all the other Disney movies I had grown up watching. Somehow it had never occurred to me that the images in those films had actually been inspired by a real place—Europe—and that the real place still existed. “It’s beautiful.”

  Sophie and Madame Beaupre looked over at me and smiled.

  I must have dozed off again, because I woke up just as the car was pulling past a worn, blue gate into the courtyard of a rambling stone farmhouse. A snowy-haired, round-faced lady was on the front steps, waving at us with lovely plump arms.

  Sophie leapt out of the car and threw herself into the woman’s arms. “Mamy!” she said, and promptly burst into tears.

  Monsieur Beaupre went over and kissed his mother’s cheeks and started crying as well. Madame Beaupre joined them, perfectly formed teardrops running down her exquisite cheekbones.

  She beckoned me out of the car. “Voici Laura, notre petite Canadienne,” she said. Mamy grasped me by both cheeks and gave me a juicy kiss on each.

  “Bonjour,” I said.

  She wrapped me in a hug that smelled of lavender and butter. Tears pricked at my eyes. She was so huggable, just like my own grandmother who lived by the beach on a tiny island and swam in the ocean every night.

  She hurried us all inside, laughing and crying at the same time. Something was bubbling on the stove. Four scrumptious-looking baguettes were in the center of the table, which was already set with flower-sprigged napkins and mismatched plates.

  “Tu veux te doucher, Laura?” Madame Beaupre asked me, and I turned to her wide-eyed and quite uncertain of what to answer. Then I remembered the boys snickering in French class back home whenever the teacher mentioned the verb “to shower”—“te doucher.”

  I nodded. So, I couldn’t remember the words for “ribbon” or “yellow,” but it appeared that I could remember every French word that had made the rude boys laugh in high school French.

  Sophie led me upstairs to a tiny room off the top of the stairs. She showed me an old, white bathtub, which had a shower nozzle attached to the tap with a long metal cord. She opened the cupboard and took out two towels for me.

  “Do you need…clothes?” she asked.

  I eyed Sophie. She was several sizes smaller than me, not to mention many inches taller.

  “I have a few in my carry-on.” I gestured at my backpack slung across one of my shoulders.

  “À bientôt!” She shut the door behind her.

  I dropped my backpack to the floor and surveyed the room. My head felt wonky, as though I was still on the airplane when it was banking steeply. Thank God I had packed a clean pair of underwear, a pair of shorts, and a T-shirt in my carry-on.

  I shucked off my clothes and turned one of the knobs on the bathtub. It squealed, and hot water began gushing out of the tap. After a few minutes of consternation, I found a lever under the tap, which I pulled up, and the hot water began running out of the shower attachment in my hand. I turned on the other tap to cool it a bit, then focused on my most immediate problem. How, exactly, was I supposed to wash myself with this set-up? Should I stand up or sit down? How was I supposed to hold the spray handle and shampoo my hair at the same time? There was a bottle of what looked like shampoo and the biggest square of cream-colored soap that I’d ever seen on the ledge of the bath. Well, there was water and there was shampoo and there was soap… I would just have to figure out the rest.

  Twenty minutes later I emerged from the bathroom smelling like coconut shampoo and savon de Marseille (I noticed this was what was stamped on the big block of soap). Although I had soaked both towels Sophie had left for me trying to clean up all the water on the bathroom floor, the room still looked as though a tsunami had swept through it. How did French people wash themselves like that every day, and end up looking so pristine?

  I was embarrassed. I couldn’t find any more towels and was almost dead on my feet from fatigue. How was I going to explain the deluge that happened in there? No English words came to mind, let alone French ones.

  I walked gingerly down the worn, wooden staircase in my shorts and T-shirt—which I had also managed to get rather damp—wracking my brain for the French word for “towels.” Halfway down, my nostrils began to twitch from the delicious smells coming from the kitchen. My stomach rumbled, demanding food.

  “La Voilà!” Mamy exclaimed as she caught sight of me in the hallway. She beckoned me to come and sit down at the table.

  “Salle de bain…,” I began, remembering the word for “bathroom,” but she waved away my attempts at trying to speak and, with a surprisingly strong grip on my shoulder, maneuvered me into one of the wooden chairs. She slid a large piece of quiche onto my plate, along with a healthy portion of bright green salad.

  I examined my quiche. Back home in Canada, like most girls my age, I’d developed atrocious eating habits. I’d experimented with vegetarianism, restrictive diets, binge eating, and living off meal supplements. The only food I actually enjoyed eating was food that was “bad” for me. Anything “good” for me—broccoli, poached salmon, or one of my mom’s moose roasts, for example—invariably tasted like chomping on something that had been left rotting on the compost pile.

  The quiche was dotted with green things, but nothing that looked too suspicious. Anyway, I was starving. I put a forkful in my mouth and chewed. The quiche, even the green things—which I suspected were leeks, though I had only ever tried them a handful of times—was creamy and delectable. The salad made me entirely rethink my prejudices against salads. It was fresh and satisfying and covered with tangy vinaigrette.

  Mamy poured red wine into my tumbler.

  “Pour moi?” I asked. I sat up straighter and tried to look nineteen, until I realized I was no longer in Canada but in a country where there was no minimum legal drinking age.

  She nodded and said something very quickly in French, and then laughed.

  “Merci!” I said.

  Having forgotten my sleepiness momentarily, I gobbled up my lunch. T
he meal was one of the best things I’d ever tasted. Luckily, eating meant that I wasn’t really expected to talk.

  Mamy took the empty plate from in front of me, and busied herself with all the pots and pans at the stove. I was really hoping for some dessert, thanks to my intractable sweet tooth.

  I took a few sips of wine and then a few of water. Wow. Wine at lunch. This was fantastic.

  Mamy returned a few seconds later and placed a full plate in front of me.

  I stared down. On my plate lay two beautiful slices of pork roast that were rolled with bacon and some sort of herb butter mixture. To the side were five perfect, little boiled potatoes, and beside them were creamy-looking white beans swimming in a sauce redolent of garlic and fresh rosemary. Sophie passed me the breadbasket, and I took a hunk of roughly sliced baguette, which felt airy soft under my fingers. So…this was the second course of lunch? I checked in with my stomach. Yes, it could handle the challenge.

  “Merci,” I said, then sniffed my plate again. “Merci. Très bien.”

  “You are hungry?” Sophie asked me.

  I nodded.

  “And you are tired?”

  I nodded again and picked up my fork. A ceramic jar that appeared to contain some sort of mustard was passed around. I took some, cautiously, but found that its spiciness went perfectly with the sliced pork roast. I had never realized potatoes could be so delectable. They were the texture of silk and soaked up just the right amount of sauce.

  The conversation around me lilted along musically in French, but I couldn’t make out more than the occasional word. Everyone was speaking so fast. I stopped trying to follow and instead used my little bubble of incomprehension to better enjoy the incredible flavors that gave me the odd impression that I was tasting food for the first time.