“You must try these,” he said.
“Where did they come from?” I asked, mystified.
“The boot of my car.”
“Fantastique!” said Gaspard. “We all need to try. Louis is a winemaker in Gevrey Chambertin. Sublime wine, although he should watch his tannins.”
The table erupted in hilarity at this jest. I joined in, even though wine humor was still a bit of a stretch for me. Everything seemed hilarious all of a sudden.
Louis’ wine was my favorite. It was sublime. In the end, we had tasted so much wine that I had completely lost my nerves about my speech. In fact, I pretty much forgot about it altogether.
As I was polishing off the final crumbs to my chocolate-and-raspberry pastry, I thought I heard my name amid a jumble of other French words being spoken up front by a man at the podium. I squinted in his direction.
“Your discours, Mademoiselle Bradbury!” My neighbor patted me heartily on the back. “It is time for your speech! Allez-y!”
I grabbed my index cards on which I had nervously penned my English to French translations only a few hours before. The room swayed… Oh my God, a sober voice in the back of my head observed. I was drunk. How did that happen? More importantly, how was I going to convey my already unintelligible French in this state?
I took my place behind the podium, knocking the microphone askew. There were at least eighty or so expectant faces turned to me. I had to steel myself not to turn and simply hightail it to the nearest washroom, or outside, or anywhere but where I was standing—front and center. My cheeks were on fire but I managed to smile at the crowd. Then, I was overtaken with a sincere wave of love for everyone in the room. I loved Burgundy so far. Then the wave drew back and I was left with frustration. How on earth was I going to get this point across?
No way out but through, I reminded myself. I launched into my speech, peppering it with mercis while being vaguely aware that I was completely butchering the French language as I lurched along. I got to the end and lifted my head to see everyone in the room observing me with stunned expressions. They hadn’t, I could tell, understood a word.
“Merci!” It must have been the wine, because I lifted my fist and did an air pump. “Vive la Bourgogne!”
The men at my table burst into a round of applause, which segued into the celebratory song they had been singing. The entire room joined in, and I stayed behind the podium, laughing. I may have even given the crowd a royal wave.
When I made it back to my table, my winetasting teacher squeezed my shoulder. “You have a Burgundian spirit, Mademoiselle Bradbury. I knew it the second I met you.”
CHAPTER 9
I was given a cafeteria card by the head nun the next day, although I still had no idea where I was supposed to go when lunchtime rolled around. I was in the hall staring at it when Sandrine, the kind girl from the day before, stopped in front of me.
“Bonjour, Laura,” she said.
“Bonjour.”
She leaned in for les bises, which took me by surprise. Luckily, I clued in just at the last moment and didn’t botch it up entirely. So…friends kissed each other every day? Was it just reserved for good friends? Sandrine had just met me… She scowled so much that I wasn’t certain whether she actually liked me or resented having to take me on out of pity. This whole kissing thing was a minefield. Hugs were basically reserved for people you knew very well or for family—way less complicated.
“Cantine?” she asked me, pointing at my card. I remembered that word from Julien and Madame Beaupre the day before. It was French for cafeteria.
“Oui.”
“Come with me,” she said in heavily accented French.
I followed Sandrine like an obedient puppy. We crossed the courtyard with its statue of the Virgin Mary and climbed up three flights of an extremely steep spiral staircase that looked like some sort of remnant from the Middle Ages. Then it dawned on me—the stairs could actually be from the Middle Ages.
At the top of the staircase, there was a long and very noisy room built under the eaves. There didn’t seem to be any trays. Strange. Instead, places were set with china plates and silver knives and forks and spoons and squat glasses at long monastery tables.
I wondered what the food was going to be like. Gross soups thickened with too much cornstarch and a salad bar like the cafeteria food in my high school? Also, I wondered how much time we had to eat. In high school in Canada, we had half an hour—just enough time to bolt your food, but so fast you got a stomachache.
Sandrine sat down in the middle of a group of other students, mostly guys, at a table that was almost full except for two empty places. Sandrine kissed a few of the students, and then she said my name and introduced me to the group.
“Laura. La Canadienne.” She waved over at me.
Should I go around and kiss everyone? No. That would be too weird. We had just been introduced. I stayed at my seat and smiled instead. Why did no one have any food?
The people at the table studied me with undisguised curiosity. I was grateful that at least my clothes blended in. I was wearing a pair of Levi’s jeans, a loose linen top, and a pair of sandals. My hair was pulled back in a simple ponytail.
“Do you speak French?” The burly guy with brown eyes who had said “trop bien” in English class the day before was sitting across the table from us.
I made the hand motion that meant “not much,” as if I was squeezing a tiny atom of air between my thumb and my forefinger.
The boy grinned at me. He had a contagious smile, like he was inviting me to share in a joke with him, or maybe the joke was on me… I couldn’t be sure. I smiled back.
He flipped his glass over. “What number do you have?”
My confusion must have been evident, because he reached over and flipped over my glass and pointed to a little number engraved in the bottom. Apparently each glass had a different number.
I read mine. “Twenty-seven. I mean, vingt-sept.”
The boy read his and then turned his glass back upright. “Mine is soixante-neuf,” he said. “Sixty-nine. Do you know what that means?”
I did and I suspected, given the boy’s sneaky look, that it meant the same thing in France.
Sandrine, who must have been listening to the exchange, snarled at him, “It is not.” She grabbed his glass and flipped it over. “Yours is seventeen. Thibaut is an idiot sometimes,” she explained to me while still glaring at him.
Thibaut just laughed. “C’est vrai,” he admitted. It’s true.
I felt a stab of despair as sharp as an ice pick. If Thibaut was anything to go by, French boys were no different than Canadian boys—obsessed with sex. Had I crossed the Atlantic only to be confronted with more of the same bullshit?
A bunch of people wearing white clothes came out from behind a partition bearing plates of colorful but unidentifiable food. They placed a plate in front of me.
“C’est quoi?” I asked. What is it? That, although probably not grammatically correct, was another one of those multi-purpose phrases. Maybe not polite, but serviceable.
“Trio de salads.” Sandrine pointed at her plate. “Carrot, celery, and beet.”
A trio of salads? That was all we got for lunch? Wicker baskets of baguette were placed in the center of the table.
I tucked in. I didn’t want to go through the whole afternoon starving like I had the day before. This was a bit of an odd lunch, as well as a bit on the sparse side, but maybe I had just solved the mystery of why French people tended to be skinnier than North Americans.
The salads were surprisingly satisfying. They were all dressed with different dressings—a vinegary one for the carrots, a creamy one for the celery, and one that had the heat of Dijon mustard for the beets.
I bolted my food like I always did back in Canada, only to look up and see that my tablemates were taking their time, pushing food onto their slices of baguette and using the bread to mop up the sauce on their plates. They were all in what sounded to me like invol
ved conversations, punctuated with laughter and debate. In Canada, we all usually fell silent while eating—we had no time to eat, let alone talk and eat.
After what seemed like a long time, the kitchen staff came back, whipped away the plates and disappeared back into the kitchen. I couldn’t figure out why my fellow students weren’t collecting their backpacks and getting ready to leave. I knew meals were longer in France than they were in Canada, but surely not at school.
Just as I was flipping through my dictionary to find the words to ask Sandrine what was going on, the kitchen staff appeared with new plates, filled this time with artfully presented breaded meat of some kind and long, thin green beans.
“There’s more food?” I asked Sandrine. She looked at me, her eyes wide.
“Bien sûr!” she said. “Of course there is more food. That was just our entrée.”
“Lunch…?” I asked. “Combien de temps?” How long do we get for lunch?
“Two hours,” she said.
“Deux heures?” I answered. “We get two hours for lunch?”
“Of course. All over France.” She flicked her hand around to encompass the whole country. Two hours for everybody.”
The meat turned out to be chicken cordon bleu—chicken breasts stuffed with cured ham and melted cheese, then breaded and baked. I never thought I liked green beans, but these ones were crisp and redolent of butter and parsley.
I liked green beans, I realized, with the same shock I’d felt a few days earlier when I’d discovered I loved snails.
After the main course came bowls of what looked to me like thick cream.
“Fromage blanc,” Sandrine said, pointing at mine with her spoon. “Delicious.”
I sprinkled some sugar over mine, copying Sandrine, and dug in. Where had fromage blanc been all my life? It was like heavy yoghurt, but tarter and creamier. I had found yet another Favorite Thing.
I figured the fromage blanc was dessert, but as Sandrine explained to me in a mix of English and French, it had in fact only been the cheese course. There was always a dairy course before dessert, Sandrine explained.
Next came a trio of miniature éclairs—one chocolate, one vanilla, and one coffee- flavored.
We actually get to eat this kind of stuff for lunch every day? Not only that, but have time to unwind and chat with friends? I had no idea what was being discussed most of the time but I picked up on the relaxed, social vibe.
After dessert was cleared, surely it was time to go, I reasoned. We had been there well over an hour and a half already. But no. Coffee arrived for each of us, served in white, china espresso cups. Even Thibaut, for all his muscles and juvenile taste in jokes, drank from his diminutive espresso cup with a sort of unstudied nonchalance that I had never before seen in a North American guy.
Sandrine took out a pack of Gitanes from the pocket of her jean jacket and gestured that she was heading outside for a smoke. Did I want to come?
I grabbed my backpack and followed her. My friend Alice had smoked in high school and she was forever looking for a new hideout to do this forbidden act—in the showers, behind a clump of trees, even in the bathroom stalls.
Smoking was something I occasionally did at parties, mainly to give myself something to do with my hands when I was feeling awkward. The truth was cigarettes made my chest wheeze and my mouth feel like the bottom of a birdcage.
I followed as Sandrine and the rest of the lunch gang made their way down the medieval corkscrew stairs and out into the courtyard.
At the first windowsill at the base of the stairs, we stopped, and more than half of our group whipped out packs of cigarettes and lit up. Thibaut, I noticed, wasn’t smoking.
Sandrine extended her pack to me and nodded for me to take one. I shook my head. Maybe I would feel more French if I smoked, but if I established myself as a smoker then I would feel pressure to actually smoke.
“Non merci.”
“You no smoke?”
“Non.”
Still, I hung out with them in the balmy air and enjoyed watching the blue smoke from their cigarettes curl up over our heads.
I spied one of the nuns in full habit coming out the far door. I squeezed Sandrine’s arm and gestured towards the nun. I needed to warn her to stub out before she was caught in the act.
Sandrine raised her eyebrows. “Quoi? We are allowed to smoke here.”
“You are?”
“Of course,” Sandrine shrugged. “We are eighteen, après tout.”
I surveyed the courtyard more closely and noticed for the first time that the ground was festooned with cigarette butts.
A two-hour, multi-course lunch and sanctioned post-meal cigarettes… I was on a steep learning curve here.
The weekend came quickly. Back in Canada I would have worked at my part time job in a women’s clothing boutique and made plans with friends, but in France I had no friends yet.
On Saturday, I helped Madame get ready for lunch—melon wrapped with a type of prosciutto-like ham for starters, then barbequed sausages from Lyon studded with pistachios, and a large salad that she called tabouleh, which was made with tiny round grains and chopped vegetables mixed in a lemony dressing. She also asked me to wash some tender buttercrunch lettuce that, she told me via Julien, she had bought at the market the day before.
“Can you make a vinaigrette?” she asked me, as I separated and carefully washed the lettuce leaves.
“Vinaigrette?” Like…a salad dressing? The only kind of salad dressing that I have ever seen came from a Kraft bottle.
“Here, I’ll show you,” she said…I think.
She added a dollop of Dijon Mustard from the ceramic mustard pot that always sat on the kitchen counter. Then she poured in a little bit of white wine vinegar and stirred it around quickly with her fork. Then she put in a bit of olive oil and mixed that with similar vigor. The ingredients merged together to make a pale yellow emulsification that looked and smelled delicious.
She added a twist of freshly ground pepper directly from the pepper grinder, mixed that in, and then stood back and said, “Voila!”
I nodded. I thought I could handle that. She minced a shallot and scraped the little bits into the vinaigrette and mixed it again.
That actually wasn’t that hard. How many other things had I been eating from bottles or boxes or cans that weren’t that difficult to make?
During our cafés—which Madame Beaupre and Julien always drank from a clear glass because they swore it tasted better that way—after yet another delicious lunch, Julien said, “I’m going to visit my friend Adalene. Would you like to join me?”
Adalene came up often in Julien’s conversations as the reference for all that was feminine and beautiful. I was curious to meet this paragon.
“I’m going to change,” Julien said, getting up from the table, which I found odd, as he was already wearing one of his pairs of ironed jeans and an impeccable checked shirt. Was she his girlfriend? Or did he want her to be? “Do you want to go and change too?”
I looked down at my Birkenstock sandals and tie-dyed T-shirt. I shrugged. “No. I’m good.”
Earlier that morning, I had finally finished unpacking and had found my crystal necklaces at the bottom of my suitcase. I had put three of them on, one on top of the other, and was feeling very loose-limbed and bohemian in the way that hippy crystals make you feel.
I accepted a second cup of espresso while Julien changed. He was certainly taking a while, I thought. This made me even more curious to meet Adalene.
Finally, he returned wearing pressed Bermuda shorts and a different checked shirt, this time a lovely madras plaid with pastel colors. He had also added a pair of sunglasses, which were strategically placed on his head. He looked so meticulously dressed and 100 percent French that I almost burst out laughing. He was also wearing loafer-like shoes that looked expensive and Italian made, with no socks.
“Are you ready?” he asked. I didn’t understand the question. Of course I was ready.
/> We walked through the center of town and through some winding streets on the opposite side of the main street. Julien led us to a huge wooden door that was built into a massive, ancient-looking stone wall.
Mounted just beside a brass doorbell was a modest plaque that said Domaine Hudelot.
“She’s a winemaker?” I asked Julien, after he had rung the doorbell.
“Her father is,” Julien said. “She is an only child. It would be very unusual for an unmarried woman to take over a wine domaine. Her father insists she marries a winemaker so the vines stay in the family line.”
That sounded highly chauvinistic. “So you’re out then,” I quipped.
Julien cast me an affronted look. “Adalene and I are just friends.”
“I was joking. Sorry.”
The door opened and an elderly, stately man who looked very proper was on the other side. Adalene’s father?
Julien didn’t greet him as such. There was no handshake or bises. He just said a polite “bonjour,” and the man said that Mademoiselle Adalene was to be found in the living room. The man, I did notice, was casting curious glances at me.
I followed Julien across a pea gravel courtyard and into the grand, ivy-spangled house. He opened the main door and led us down a wallpapered hallway and then turned right. The air smelled of old money and prestige.
Adalene was ensconced in an antique armchair, which was upholstered with blue and gold silk.
“Julien!” She jumped up, gave him les bises and, still holding on to his arms, started talking in rapid-fire French.
Julien said something and I caught my name. She pulled back and gave me a welcoming smile.
“Ah! So you are the Canadienne that the Beaupres have been waiting for all these months!” Her English was excellent.
My Grape Year: (The Grape Series #1) Page 7
