It was the sound of crying that snapped me out of my reverie. I looked down the table and saw Sophie and her mother and grandmother holding each others’ hands across the table and sobbing openly. Monsieur Beaupre dabbed his eyes with the corner of his cloth napkin.
I held my breath. Everyone was crying—that had to mean something terrible was going to happen. Then Sophie said something and started laughing through her tears, and everyone else did the same, and they all leaned back in their chairs, guffawing. Eventually, I observed covertly, everyone dug back into their plates again and carried on chatting and eating as though nothing unusual had occurred. None of them seemed embarrassed or traumatized in the slightest. I finished off my plate, turning this over in my mind like a pebble, considering that maybe, for French people, tears weren’t something to be kept inside.
Next, Mamy brought a huge, worn, wooden cutting board to the table. On top sat the most gorgeous selection of cheeses I had ever feasted my eyes on. She placed it squarely in front of me, then filled my tumbler with wine again.
There was nothing on the platter that resembled the rubbery blocks of cheddar or mozzarella we found at our local grocery store. There was a large Camembert or Brie, and a crumbly wedge of pale yellow cheese with a thick brown crust, and one that had little pockets of what looked like mold—I’d be avoiding that one.There was also an orange cheese with a pungent smell, which bulged out softly without being runny exactly, and four more that looked equally intriguing. I’d always nurtured a deep love affair with cheese. The sight of this cheese platter was enough to make me suspect that France was in fact my spiritual home.
“Laura?” Mamy plopped down a clean, smaller plate in front of me. “Tu aimes le fromage?”
I actually understood that. “Oui!” I laughed. “Oui. Oui. Oui.”
“Serve yourself,” said Sophie. Everyone watched. I sensed that cheese was a decisive matter in France.
I took a large slice of every type of cheese on the platter, except the one with pockets of mold. I looked up as I passed the cutting board along. My tablemates were staring at me with round-eyed amazement.
“You like cheese,” Sophie said. It wasn’t phrased as a question this time.
“I love cheese.”
My host mother helped herself to three delicate slices—roughly a quarter the size of mine—off the platter, and Sophie and Robert took only two each.
Oh no. A faux pas already. A second one, actually, once they discover the state of the bathroom upstairs. My cheeks burned, but it wasn’t exactly like I could put the cheese back. I scraped a hunk of the creamiest looking cheese with the pungency of unwashed socks onto my slice of baguette and took a bite. I sipped the red wine and marveled at how the two tastes went so well together. I should have felt embarrassed about having the table manners of a bumpkin, but the cheese was so delicious that I didn’t really have it in me to be repentant.
The family continued to slide covert glances of amazement at me as I polished off my plate of cheese and a second glass of wine, as well as two more slices of baguette.
“You were much hungry,” Sophie observed.
“It’s a long way from the West Coast of Canada.” I smiled. “Not to mention airplane food is revolting.”
Mamy seemed thrilled by my prodigious appetite. She squeezed my cheeks and then gave me a wet, lavender-scented kiss on each one. “Elle est superbe, cette petite Canadienne,” she remarked. I wasn’t certain exactly what that meant, but I knew from the warmth in her kisses that it was a compliment.
She cleared away the plates again and busied herself with an ancient-looking coffee maker that sat on the worn, stone kitchen counter. My host mother reached over and patted my hand. She had such beautiful aqua eyes. I detected sadness in them though. Her only daughter was leaving for a year the next day. Sophie had two older brothers, but she was the youngest child and the only girl. Words of comfort popped into my head in English. I realized only then just how frustrating my lack of French was going to be.
Mamy whipped a dishtowel off something on the counter to reveal the most stunning strawberry pie I had ever seen in my life. She put it in the center of the table. On closer inspection, I saw it wasn’t exactly a pie—it was a proper French strawberry tart with fat, glossy, whole strawberries nestled against one another atop a layer of custard.
I felt as if I was going to explode after the cheese course, but I couldn’t say no to this creation. Maybe just a petit slice… I suppressed the thought of the number of calories I had just consumed.
Mamy served me a portion as generous as her upper arms and said something quickly to Sophie.
Sophie turned to me. “Mamy wants me to explain that she made this especially for me. Her tarte aux fraises is my favorite.” Sophie teared up again. I was amazed by how the Beaupres could move from tears to smiles and then back to tears again in a matter of seconds, without anybody appearing the least bit unnerved by these shifting sands of emotion.
I applied myself to my tart. The custard was lightly infused with vanilla, and the berries were perfectly ripe and tasted like strawberries that had just been picked after a morning basking in the sunshine.
While I was scooping up the last crumbs, Robert placed a small espresso-sized cup of coffee in front of me.
“Merci.” There was no more room in my stomach, but I reasoned that the coffee could flow between the cracks.
By the end of the cup, I was nodding off, despite the infusion of caffeine. All of a sudden I could no longer keep my head upright on my neck.
Madame Beaupre came over and took my arm, saying something gently in French that I didn’t understand, but which I reasoned must have had something to do with me going to bed.
I nodded, hard-pressed to keep my eyes open. Madame Beaupre led me upstairs to a little room just down the hall from the bathroom, which had two beds, both covered with well-worn, floral fabric. A lovely, old porcelain statue of the Virgin Mary with a kindly looking face smiled down at me from the antique wooden dresser.
Madame Beaupre pulled back the sheets to reveal a long, thin cushion shaped like an enormous sausage, instead of a rectangular pillow. Some different-sounding French birds were cooing outside the window. Madame Beaupre stroked my forehead and motioned at me to get into bed. She closed the door softly behind her. I shucked off my shorts and collapsed onto the bed in my underwear and T-shirt. After dreaming of it for so many months, I was finally there, in France—eating French food and sleeping in a French bed and listening to French birds. Maybe I’ll also meet a young Frenchman this year—someone whose soul understands mine. Before I could dream any more about that, sleep, along with the soft duvet, enveloped me.
CHAPTER 4
When I opened my eyes the light was still pale—early morning sun. I could hear the shower, or rather the bath with the strange shower attachment, running. Surely, Sophie was getting ready to leave for the airport.
On the chair beside her bed was a matching underwear and bra set, confectioned of delicate, multicolored, flowered fabric and trimmed with pale blue. If I were going to have a love affair with a Frenchman, as per my wildest fantasies, I seriously needed to consider upgrading my underwear.
I rolled over, dozed off again, and dreamed of French lingerie.
When I woke up again, the sun was shining brightly through the linen curtains in the bedroom. I checked my watch. It was just past ten o’clock. I had been sleeping for almost twenty hours. I had never done that before, but then again, I had never traveled to France before either.
I pulled on my clothes from the night before and headed downstairs. The chill of the worn stone steps under my feet, the smell of furniture polish and old wood, and the coo of the birds outside all reminded me I was far from home. Instead of feeling sad, I felt a shiver of excitement run through me.
Sophie’s Mamy was bustling around in the kitchen.
She heard me. “Bonjour, ma belle.” She grasped my shoulders and kissed me soundly on each cheek.
&nb
sp; “Tu as bien dormi?” It took me a few seconds, but I recognized the verb “dormir.” Sleep. She was asking how I slept. That’s what one did when guests first got up, whether in Canada or France or Uzbekistan, right?
“Bon,” I said, smiling back.
She pointed to the clock on the wall that said ten fifteen. “Café?”
I nodded. “Merci.”
She sat me down like she had the day before and passed me a wicker basket containing two croissants. I knew lunch was not far away, but I had missed dinner the night before; and besides, I could never say no to a croissant. I took one.
She served me coffee in a big china bowl with pale pink roses painted around the rim and a few chips on the well-loved edges. Why did we drink coffee only from mugs in Canada? Why didn’t we drink hot things from bowls? She poured in some warm milk from a beaten-up casserole with a worn, wooden handle. The bowl warmed up my hands so nicely as I drank. If there ever was a country that could use warming up, it was Canada.
I buttered my croissant with butter from the fresh block that Mamy had set on the table and topped it with a spoonful of delicious-looking jam that came in a glass jar.
I took a bite. The thin layers of the pastry melted on my tongue. The butter was unsalted and tasted like cream, and the jam had the strongest, purest strawberry taste that I had ever experienced in my life. It had to be homemade.
“Bien!” I said to her, gesturing with my croissant, even though that word woefully fell short of describing the nirvana of my first French breakfast. She nodded. Bien. That was a useful word.
“Regardez!” she said and took my croissant and dipped it in the café au lait. She took it out and passed it to me. I’d always been told dipping food into liquid was considered rude, but maybe that wasn’t the case in France. Anyway, the end result was too delicious to argue the point.
Just as I was finishing up the last of my café au lait, my two croissants having been conveyed tidily to my stomach some time beforehand, I heard car tires crunch across the gravel of the courtyard. Seconds later Monsieur and Madame Beaupre walked into the house. They looked as though they had aged ten years since the day before. Their faces were tear-stained and their eyes were red.
“Bonjour, Laura!” they greeted me with what I could tell, despite the language barrier, was forced cheer. I wished more than anything that they felt comfortable enough around me to know they needn’t bother hide their sorrow for my benefit. I gave them both a kiss on each cheek like Mamy had given me.
Half of me felt self-conscious about all the kissing, but another part liked it. In any case, unlike hugging, where it was often unclear whether it was appropriate to hug or not to hug, the protocol with the kissing seemed relatively straightforward.
“Elle est partie?” Mamy clasped her hands tightly against her pale green housecoat, and a few tears escaped from her eyes. They began to talk in such a rapid-fire French that I couldn’t make out a single word. They all began to cry.
I realized for the first time how it must have been for my parents after I had disappeared through security at the Victoria airport, what they must have felt as they left the airport, got in the car, drove back home…
I wanted to let the Beaupres know that, even though they felt then as if Sophie had departed into a dangerous and far away world, just like me, she would be fine. That even if she was crying the last time they saw her, by the time she boarded her first flight, she was most likely filled with the thrill of the adventures that lay ahead.
I couldn’t tell them this, of course. Why didn’t I work harder at French in high school?
“Sophie,” I tried. “Elle est bien.” My three tablemates stared at me, trying to decipher what I meant.
I pointed at myself. “Moi, je suis bien,” I said. I am good. “Sophie. Elle est bien in the United States.”
Madame Beaupre’s eyes glistened, and she reached out and covered my hand with her own. I think she was touched that I had at least tried.
“Oui,” she whispered. “Sûrement.”
It wasn’t until I had gone back to the bedroom—after inundating the bathroom floor yet again in an attempt to wash myself—that I saw my two suitcases festooned with their yellow flagging tape standing like sentinels at the far end of the bed. My stuff! Even though I longed for my clean clothes, seeing my suitcases felt oddly foreign for an instant. They were my Canadian life, and already I was living something new in France.
Still, twenty minutes later, I floated down the stairs, freshly showered and wearing a clean pair of jean shorts and a linen shirt
Madame Beaupre and her mother-in-law were at the kitchen table.
“Merci.” I gestured upstairs towards my suitcases, and promptly blanked on the French word for those same objects. “For my suitcases.” I made a sweeping gesture over my clean clothes and sighed dramatically in relief.
They smiled at me and launched into what I had to assume was an explanation for how my suitcases had arrived, while I nodded and said oui at what I hoped were appropriate intervals. I was just going to have to live with the mystery of never knowing exactly how my suitcases had materialized.
After another scrumptious lunch of roast chicken with herbes de provence and the potatoes from the day before mashed up with heavy cream, I climbed back into the backseat of Monsieur Beaupre’s car. Mamy cried as she waved us off, and I hoped I would see her again soon.
Quickly I noticed that the car seemed to be missing a crucial feature, or at least a feature I had been brought up to believe was crucial—seatbelts. I tapped Madame Beaupre on the shoulder after we left Mamy’s village and motioned to where a seatbelt should be across my lap.
Madame Beaupre rattled off a charming explanation, which finished with her smoothing down her impeccable pale blue skirt and matching jacket.
Nobody wears them. I understood. Something about them wrinkling clothes. I recognized the word “vêtements.”
Having not quite yet emerged from a three-year-long hippie phase, I didn’t own anything that was in danger of wrinkling, but I did feel naked without a seatbelt. I would choose being wrinkled over being catapulted through the windshield any day.
Going south on the autoroute, Monsieur Beaupre cranked the speed to over 150 kilometers per hour. Cars around us zoomed past. Both my parents would have had a heart attack if they’d known I wasn’t wearing a seatbelt. Luckily they didn’t. Or wouldn’t, unless my host father crashed in a high-speed pile-up.
I considered asking Monsieur Beaupre to slow down, but couldn’t find the courage to do so. I needed them to like me, and I’d been sent there to adapt to a new way of life, hadn’t I? Maybe that just included driving far too fast.
Madame Beaupre turned on the radio and tuned in to a French radio program that sounded to me like it involved a lot of shouting. I tried to pick out familiar words, but there weren’t very many. Surely we didn’t speak English that fast at home?
I leaned my head against the window and watched the green fields with the occasional fairy tale stone village fly by. I wondered what time it was back in Canada? My eyelids drifted southwards.
I was woken by the soft calling of “Laura…Laura…” from the front seat. I wiped the drool from my chin. How charming—I hoped I hadn’t snored too. I sat up and massaged my temples.
“Nous sommes presque arrivés,” Madame Beaupre murmured.
We passed funny-looking fields, which I belatedly realized contained row upon row of vineyards. They were a deep green.
Madame waved a perfectly manicured hand. “Les vignes,” she said.
So ,“vineyard” was “vigne”? I stored that away. Given the number of well-tended rows we were passing, it looked like that word could come in handy.
Just a few minutes later, we went through a tollbooth, where Monsieur Beaupre flashed a card and the barrier lifted. We took a few turns through windy streets until we arrived at a well-kept, white house. I smiled and nodded as they chattered on to me in French. The front door opened and a beautif
ul Golden Lab leapt out, followed by a handsome, olive-skinned Frenchman. My host brother Julien, I guessed. The other brother lived in Grenoble.
“Bonjour, Laura.” He came and gave me a kiss on each cheek before moving on to his parents. He had the same high cheekbones and curved smile as his mother, but had his father’s brown eyes. He wore an immaculate pair of pressed jeans, a pink-and-blue checked, button-down shirt, and what looked like expensive leather loafers. I’d never before realized that people could iron their jeans, much less want to.
He ushered me into the house while the dog leapt around our feet.
My new brother patted the dog. “This is Biscotte.”
I patted Biscotte and she licked my hand. It took me a few moments to realize that, for the first time since that morning, I had understood what was being spoken.
“You speak English?” I asked. I knew I had to speak French at some point, but I was feeling jetlagged and confused.
“I do,” he said, “but I won’t speak English with you after today. You’re here to learn French.”
So…he was the didactic as well as the impeccably dressed sort of man. “Understood,” I said.
Julien beckoned me further into the house, which was decorated elegantly with gold-hued wallpaper and bunches of flowers, as well as antiques that glowed with age and polish. “Your bedroom is upstairs. Would you like to rest for a while?”
“That would be perfect,” I said. Adjusting to a new language and a new culture was surprisingly exhausting. Also, retreating to my bedroom for a while would give the Beaupres a little time to process Sophie’s departure as a family, without them feeling the need to be polite or to include me in a conversation I was light-years away from understanding.
I was shown up to my room on the top floor—Sophie’s room, Julien explained with a thoughtful look. A poster of very French-looking people playing guitars was taped to the wall. The single bed looked inviting. The bed also contained one of the enormous sausage pillows like the one I’d slept with earlier. It was actually extremely comfortable to sleep with, almost like an extra body to hug.
My Grape Year: (The Grape Series #1) Page 3
