My Grape Year: (The Grape Series #1)
Page 6
He nodded, satisfied. I slipped the textbook into my bag and walked out of the room. When I was halfway down the stairs, I realized I had absolutely no idea where I was supposed to go next. I took out my timetable: Anglais. Ah-hah! English class. My salvation. That was, if I could find the room.
Students pushed past me on both sides. The girls all seemed petite and intimidatingly chic with their hair clipped back in messy twists and scarfs tied around their necks with such skill that I wondered if in France they started learning this in toddlerhood. No one stopped to help me, or even smiled. They just jostled me like I didn’t exist.
I looked for a room number on my timetable. Nothing. Was I just supposed to know where the room for English was, or was that something else that had been lost in translation? I blinked back tears. This had somehow never been part of my exchange student fantasies.
I felt a tap on my shoulder and whipped around. A girl about my height with wavy hair and piercing blue eyes stood there. She wasn’t smiling, but didn’t look mean…not exactly.
“You are lost?” she demanded with a very heavy French accent.
I nodded.
“Moi, Sandrine.” She pointed to herself and then extracted the timetable from my hands.
“Laura,” I said.
“La Canadienne?” she asked. I nodded in confirmation. “Ah! Anglais,” she said. I nodded again. “Moi aussi,” she said, pointing to herself to demonstrate her point. “I have English too. Follow me.”
I followed her down the stairs, back into the courtyard, then up another different but almost identical set of stairs. We slipped into a classroom that boasted a huge map of the British Isles covering half of the chalkboard.
She slipped into a desk and indicated for me to sit down in the one beside her. I gave her a wide smile. She didn’t smile back and her manner was brusque, but I wasn’t in a position to be difficult.
I wracked my brain for something to say to her in French in a desperate attempt to cement our friendship, when a young man with completely round glasses came into the room. At first, I thought he was a student.
“Hello,” he said. “Welcome to English class.” He spoke slowly and with the oddest accent. I couldn’t place it as either British or Irish or Australian…there was definitely some French in the mix, as well.
He consulted a list of names and said. “So…who do we have here?”
He called out the names and pronounced mine in what I was coming to recognize as the French way. The second syllable of “Laura” was emphasized instead of the first, and the two “r’s” in “Bradbury” were rolled as only the French can do.
“Where did you learn English?” I asked. “I just can’t figure out your accent.”
He stared at me, stunned.
“You speak English?” He pushed his glasses up his nose.
Now I had the full attention of the other students in the class, but this time I didn’t mind the staring so much.
A tall, husky guy leaned back in his chair and began to laugh. “Trop bien!” he said. I didn’t know exactly what that meant, but he said it the same way I would say “awesome.”
“Yes,” I said. “My French is still pretty pathetic, but I grew up on the West Coast of Canada, near Vancouver. I’m here in Beaune on an exchange with the Ursus Club—”
“Slower, please.” The teacher motioned at me to slow down. I probably was speaking rather quickly. After days of feeling as though a crucial limb had been cut off, I could finally communicate. Also, I had a language class where I was actually better than the teacher! Trop bien, indeed.
“Are you sure you want to be taking this English class?” the teacher asked. “What could I possibly teach you?”
They were not going to take this away from me. “It’s the only class where I understand anything,” I said. “Besides, I could help my fellow students if they need it—that would be an excellent way for me to make friends.”
The teacher pursed his mouth, giving the distinct impression that he was not thrilled about having a fluent Anglophone in his class but wasn’t quite sure of how to eject me.
Sandrine, at last, smiled at me. “Géniale!” she whispered to me under her breath. I wasn’t sure exactly what that meant, but it sounded good.
I was supposed to stay for lunch at school but realized I’d brought no money to pay for it—somewhat of an oversight. Besides, I had no idea where the cafeteria was even located, and while Saint-Coeur school had a plethora of nuns and crosses and Virgin Mary statues, it appeared to be completely devoid of directional signs.
I couldn’t even be annoyed. The whole lunch thing had probably been explained to me and I’d probably answered oui—one of those 10 percent of the times when oui was a disastrous answer. I found an empty classroom and composed a couple of letters back home to friends to make myself look busy and to distract myself from my grumbling stomach. I was starving by the time the end of the day rolled around.
Thankfully, Madame was there when I emerged from the big wooden door. She asked me how it went.
“Bien!” I nodded cheerfully.
She looked at me with an air of skepticism, but didn’t press the point. “Are you hungry?” she asked.
“Oui.”
She drove underneath the mini Arc de Triomphe and down a busy, narrow thoroughfare. Beaune was as lovely as it was described in the guidebooks—cobblestoned streets, old storefronts, picturesque-looking people buying bread and doing other French-looking errands. We ended up on a big circular place that had a merry-go-round on it surrounded by several different cafés.
She got out of the car and beckoned me across the street. “Une petite crêpe?” she asked.
“Super,” I said, with what I hoped sounded like a French spin on the word.
I gobbled down my crêpe with Nutella and sucked back a café as well.
Next, we went to a stationery store where Madame Beaupre bought everything on my school supply list. I was thrilled to realize that in France, instead of using ballpoint pens, high school students used actual fountain pens with little refillable ink cartridges. It was the little differences that enchanted me even more than the big differences between France and Canada.
On the way home, I reasoned that even though the day had been tough, school would become slightly less disorienting with each new day. I needed to be brave and give it time and enjoy the fact that I was, for the first time in my life, the top student in a foreign language class.
CHAPTER 8
When we got back to Nuits-Saint-Georges, Madame Beaupre reminded me that there was an Ursus meeting that night and that we would be eating dinner there. How had I missed that important chunk of information?
My face ached from smiling at strangers all day long. I wanted nothing more than to collapse in my bedroom to recharge my batteries.
“What did you have for lunch?” Julien asked, patting Biscotte who’d come to give me a warm welcome.
“Um.” I kneeled down to give Biscotte a hug. “I didn’t have lunch.”
“Are you sick?” he asked, alarmed.
“No. I just couldn’t figure out where the cafeteria was and I didn’t have any money to pay for it. I’m sure it was explained to me. My mistake.”
Julien translated this to Madame Beaupre, who was horrified and assured me that it would all be taken care of the next day. She talked to Julien some more and then waved at him to translate.
“You do understand that you have to give a speech at the Ursus meeting tonight?” he asked.
My head snapped towards him. “What?”
“I suspected you might have missed that part as well.” He looked at me with pity.
“A speech? In French?”
“Yes.”
“I can’t do that. My French is atrocious.”
He turned and asked his mother a question. Madame was looking at me with concern in her lovely aqua eyes.
“It need only be a few minutes,” Julien said, as though that was going to console me.
“Maman says you’ll be leaving the house at twenty minutes to seven,” Julien called after me as I left the room. I consulted my watch. It was already six o’clock.
I ran up the stairs to my bedroom, where I feverishly consulted word after word in my French-English pocket dictionary. No lounging in silence for me.
Within a few minutes I was sweating. How was I supposed to give a speech to the whole Ursus Club of Beaune in French? Me, the French dunce…how had I gotten myself into this?
I wrote the speech in English first—generic stuff that should be easy to translate, like saying how happy I was to be there, that I found France beautiful so far… It felt so good to be writing again that I forgot myself and began to wax poetic about local wine and snails. I was running out of time by the time I’d started to translate everything. I had no idea how to conjugate the verbs and, frankly, no time to look them up, so I figured that I would just leave verbs in their infinitive. Desperate times called for desperate measures.
At seven o’clock, as was his habit, Monsieur Beaupre arrived home late from work, and we sped off in his car. It must have enjoyed an interlude at the garage because the rear view mirror was reattached.
We sped off towards Beaune, past my new school, and under the mini Arc de Triomphe.
Monsieur Beaupre stopped in front of a spot on the street that looked far too small for his car. He began to wedge it in though, using his bumper to push the cars in front and behind him so that he could squeeze in. Is that what bumpers were really for? If so, we had been under utilizing them back in Canada. How he was going to extract his car when the evening was over remained a matter of fascinating speculation.
I carried my Ursus blazer over my arm. Even though it was now early September, the hot summer weather hadn’t loosened its hold on Burgundy, and I didn’t want to have to don the itchy wool until the last possible moment.
Monsieur Beaupre led us to the doors of what looked like a charming hotel on a cobblestone street not far from where he had parked. The antique street lamps illuminated the storefronts and stone buildings with a yellow light.
When we got into the hotel lobby I reluctantly pulled on my blazer. How was I going to get through the evening? Muscles around my mouth that I didn’t even know existed already ached from smiling so hard all day. My role as an Ursus exchange student was to be outgoing though, so I let Madame launch me into the crowd to begin the introductions.
On my way to my table I was introduced to about twenty people who chattered away at me in French. My head swam with French words, none of them connecting or making any sense. I was not seated at the same table with the Beaupres because, as an Ursus exchange student, my job was to interact with everyone.
I was the only woman at my designated table. I smiled at the men while wondering to myself what the hell I was going to talk to them about in my limited French.
Luckily, a beautiful entrée of some kind of silky paté adorned with lettuce leaves and artfully cut vegetables and cornichons arrived at the table—it would stay my anxiety about awkward silence.
The man to my right lifted the bottle that had been placed on the table in front of him and asked me in French, “May I serve you wine, Mademoiselle Bradbury?”
I thought briefly back to the “No Drinking” rule—this was an Ursus meeting after all, so my behavior here had to be impeccable. However, I could sense that he wanted to me to answer yes. I concurred.
“Oui. S’il te plait,” I answered.
“Ah, on se tutoie alors?” he declared. “Sympathique!”
Crap. I was probably supposed to use the more formal “vous” when addressing him like he had done for me. The distinction between “vous” and the less formal “tu” had never been successfully beaten into my head during French classes. The English way just made so much more sense—using “you” whether addressing the Queen of England or a five-year-old child. Why complicate things?
To hell with it. I was a foreigner, and if it was considered sympatique to address everyone with “tu,” then that sounded like a good thing. Besides, “tu” was far easier to conjugate.
He poured me a glass of red wine.
“You know to drink wine?” he asked in fractured English.
“Yes,” I answered. I had been a fan of wine ever since I was fifteen or so and my friend Gordon absconded with a bottle of his parents’ Blue Nun, which we drank behind a bush. It was safe to say I had mastered that skill. I tipped my glass back and gulped down several mouthfuls of wine.
“Non! Non! Non!” He shook his finger at me. “Not drink wine. Taste wine.”
I felt my forehead wrinkle. There was a difference?
He pointed at himself and spoke slowly. “Je suis un oenologue, a professional wine taster.” He pointed to his various tablemates. “Louis is a négotiant. Simon and Maxime make wine.” He pointed to the last man at the table. “Gaspard exports wine.”
“Ah,” I said. I was surrounded by wine experts. Now this wasn’t at all intimidating.
“Regardez!” he said to me. “Look! I show you.”
He held his glass up to the light and swirled the wine around.
“You see? First, the color. This one…lovely. Garnet with rust tones.” His English became much more fluent as he described the wine.
He took my hand and wrapped it around the stem of my glass. “Now you.”
I followed his instructions and swirled my glass around, then examined the color. It was still red, of course, but it did warrant a closer look. The ceiling lights shone through the wine to show different shades, from almost black to brown to ruby.
“Joli,” I said. The men all laughed and I joined in.
My teacher lowered his glass so that he was looking at it from the side. “Next, we need to examine its legs.”
“Legs?”
He spun his glass around, then put it in front of me so that I could watch where he was pointing to on the inside of the glass. The wine was viscous and ran back down to join the rest of the liquid in distinct rivulets.
“These are legs,” he explained, pointing to the rivulets. “They indicate the sugar content in the wine. All good wines need beautiful legs, just like women.”
I was still thinking up a suitable response to that when Simon, the winemaker with the reddest nose of the two, said, “Next is the smell.”
“Not smell! Smell is for…how do you say…skunks! The bouquet,” my teacher said. “Like flowers.”
He swirled his wine around in his wineglass and stuck his thin, hooked nose in it as far as it would go. Then he swirled some more. Wasn’t he worried about getting wine up his nostrils?
All the men at the table did the same thing. There was much sniffing and swirling. I picked up my glass. The wine smelled good. Then again, wine always smelled good to me.
“Black currant,” my teacher concluded.
“Cerise,” said Louis. That was one of the few French words that my brain had retained from my eleven years of school French. “Cerise” meant “cherries.” I sniffed again. The wine certainly smelt good but…cherries? Maybe…or was that just the power of suggestion?
“An undernote of leather,” Gaspard the wine exporter declared.
The men seemed to take exception to this statement, and plunged their noses deep into their glasses once again. “Not leather,” said one. “Sous-bois.”
“Sous bois?” I quickly leafed through my French-English pocket dictionary. Much to my surprise “sous-bois” was there. It roughly translated as “earth.”
I took a deep sniff of my wine again. There was a deep, earthy smell but I wouldn’t say it smelled like dirt. Anyway, wasn’t that considered an insult?
I was forgotten for several minutes as a debate broke out in rapid-fire
French—first about sous-bois versus leather and then about a wide range of other wine-related subjects from what I could tell—which wasn’t much. They could have been arguing the merits of mistresses versus wives for all I understood.
Then Gaspard took a sip and began to swish his mouthful of wine like a swig of Scope before swallowing. How could all this not be considered appalling table manners? Rather than objecting, however, the rest of the men joined in and seemed to be in competition with one another for who could make the most noise and contort his face into the most comical grimace as he swished the wine around. Suddenly my teacher must have realized he had forgotten about me.
“Now,” he said, as though there had been no interruption, “you must taste the wine. You mustn’t just gulp it. You cannot properly taste it that way. You must let it sit on your tongue for a time, then roll and swish it in your mouth. Give it time to play in there. This is the only way to taste the wine’s nuances and to start having a relationship with it.”
I had drunk wine before—mainly bad wine. This was the first time it dawned on me that maybe I needed to develop a relationship with my wine. I swished the wine around in my mouth like all the other men were doing. It actually did taste different. There was the first spark of it on my tongue and then a mellow warmth that ran down the back of my throat.
“What do you taste?” Simon asked from across the table.
“Black currant,” I said, repeating what somebody had mentioned in regards to the bouquet. I did not want to reignite the debate over sous-bois.
“There are strong notes of cassis,” my teacher said. “We have a prodigy!” With that, the entire table erupted into a song that consisted of “la la la la la laaaas” and applauding, which I couldn’t really make heads or tails of, but which sounded definitely on the celebratory end of the spectrum.
For the next hour and a half, I was plied with a myriad of different wines and taught the fine Burgundian art of winetasting. The courses of food came and went, each as delicious as the last. With each course, the men had me taste a new wine and start the process from the beginning. Color. Legs. Bouquet. Taste. When I was busy selecting a stinky Époisses amongst other cheeses from the cheese trolley, Louis disappeared from the table and returned with three dusty, cobwebbed bottles of unlabeled wine.