“Oui, chérie,” he says to Isabelle, “c’est pour le vagin, ce truc (it’s for the vagina, this thing). You tell me zis.”
She smacks him, blushing. “I never say you anysing about zat!”
“Oui, chérie, you did.”
“I don’t use such a sing, eet’s not naturel!”
We’re laughing so hard I have to turn my face to the wall and Mia buries her face in my back.
Anthony shrugs, then suddenly says earnestly and completely out of the blue, “Do you know zat seventy-five percent of all women do zis?” He holds up a piece of bread and dunks it in his broth. “But only twenty-five percent of ze men do. Zey don’t know why.”
This makes Mia laugh even harder. “My God, you’re as ADD as my mother!”
Laughing till no sound comes out is typical of our outings with Isabelle and Anthony. It’s a combination of wine, complementary personalities, and the fact that none of us is fully bilingual but we have grand ideas and odd fascinations that we simply must discuss.
One of them is language. We all spent an hour in stitches at Célestins the other night just trying to get them to pronounce the initial “th” sound, which the French tongue finds near impossible. The only reason Chrystelle can is because she was an au pair in London for a year and, well, she’s Chrystelle.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Avignon
We Are Living Like This!
There may be a Starbucks at the Great Wall of China but no one in Avignon’s heard of it. Instead, people hang out in quaint bar-cafés; our favorite is Bar les Célestins. Marked with a neon-pink sign and smack in the middle of Place des Corps Saints (the plaza a stone’s throw from our studio), it’s a long and narrow café with an old wooden bar, bright crimson walls, black trim, and a warm, humorous staff.
Despite making a detailed list of things to do in and around Avignon, ten minutes into our daily coffee at Bar les Célestins, we forget all about our plans. In a country where smoking and talking is a national pastime, being productive can begin to seem rather passé. Some restaurants and shops are rarely open, because whoever owns or runs them is on one of their six weeks of annual vacation, or smoking and talking at a table nearby.
Stephan is my favorite waiter, a student around my age with a sharp wit and deadpan humor. He’s boyishly handsome, with pouty, Cupid’s bow lips, wispy chestnut hair, big, brown eyes, and a daily uniform of faded plaid shirts and well-worn jeans. Then there’s Christine, a gentle and soft-spoken single mother with peaches-and-cream skin, and Edith, who has a bitsy hourglass figure, mischievous black eyes, and short, spiky red hair. She reminds me of a middle-aged Tinkerbell, flitting about the café as she washes dishes and mixes drinks with dizzying speed. This is all watched with amusement by Roman, a breezy, affable eighteen-year-old who looks like Ashton Kutcher, but with a French accent and more sensuous lips.
During the hours we’re there, the bar fills and empties with a colorful mélange of local artists, shabby-chic dressed twentysomethings, neighborhood residents reading books or newspapers, men in business suits (a definite minority), and high school students who smoke, talk softly, and sip espressos with remarkable maturity.
Like any proper French establishment, Célestins warmly welcomes dogs, and an immaculately groomed white Scotty named Bijoux and a floppy-eared brown mutt named Charlie trot freely from table to table. The only time I’ve ever seen Edith still is when she’s kneeling down to coo and feed them long strips of prosciutto.
My mom and I have come to recognize Bijoux’s owner, a spry woman who’s the quintessential professor, complete with a thick plaid scarf, nerdy-chic glasses, and artfully disheveled gray hair. Charlie’s owner is a bald British expat with a round belly stretched tight as a drum and steel-rimmed glasses that continually slide down his nose while he reads the morning paper and chain-smokes.
Entire mornings are easily whittled away, people watching, reading, talking. When Stephan’s not helping customers, he’ll join my mom and me in conversation, and we never seem to run out of things to discuss: people, art, politics, fashion, religion, books, men, history. And what better environment to discuss history than Avignon, a city with such a rich and colorful one; the papacy resided in Avignon for less than a century but it influenced the history, feel, and architecture for centuries to come.
The kings of Europe had vied for power with the popes for decades but there’d never been quite so grand a pissing contest as the one between the French king Philip IV and Pope Boniface VIII (pronounced, as I was corrected, bonAfachay—not bonyface). At stake was the issue of a king taxing clergy members without the pope’s consent, and if we think the smear tactics used by politicians now are bad, try the accusations Philip leveled at Boniface: sodomy, sorcery, blasphemy, murder, and, my personal favorite, the keeping of a small black demon as a pet (which people actually testified to having seen running around Rome). Boniface ultimately excommunicated Philip, who in turn had Boniface captured and beaten, arguably to death.
In came Boniface’s replacement, Clement V, a weak-willed pope who was crowned in Lyon and proceeded to appoint French cardinals to please the thuggish Philip. On his way back to Rome from Lyon, Clement stopped in Avignon and, though intending to stay briefly, never left. Rome was a dangerous city with an unruly population and murderous mercenaries. Avignon was peaceful, central to the powerful realms of France and England, perched above a scenic river, and had famous wines. Where would you rather be? It was like a seventy-year papal spring break, with so much greed and corruption that the Italian poet Petrarch dubbed it “Babylon of the West, the sink of vice and corruption.”
Granted, papal corruption was hardly new; many popes had mistresses, and the sale of indulgences (buying forgiveness for various sins) helped finance Rome’s St. Peter’s Basilica. During the Avignon Papacy, however, it reached an all-time high, particularly under Clement VI, a pope who stocked his closet with a hundred and thirty-eight ermine robes, threw lavish—and quite lascivious—parties, and created a zoo for his pet lion and bear.
Much like the Forbidden City was built to express power and glory, the colossal stone walls of the Palais des Papes clearly convey the papacy’s dominion and infallibility. But adjacent to the palace is an area with quite a different feel. My mom and I have dubbed it “the bluff,” and while we spend our mornings in Bar les Célestins, the bluff is where we invariably spend our evenings.
The bluff isn’t a heath-covered, Wuthering Heights–esque mountain lookout; rather it’s the elevated stone terrace of Notre-Dame-des-Dômes, a twelfth-century cathedral sitting on the hilltop adjacent to the second story of the palais. Like all Romanesque cathedrals, it’s sturdy and strong, with thick walls, round arches, and a huge tower shooting up from its brawny base. At the very top of the tower, rising even higher than the palace itself, is a tall, gilded statue of the Virgin Mary.
I increasingly look forward to the time when the buzz of the city calms and the streets empty, and my mother and I climb the stairs to the bluff to watch the sunset. Sitting quietly, each of us lost in our own thoughts, feels like the right way to end our chatty days.
At least it did. Until about a week ago, once the sun had set, we’d leave the bluff and stroll leisurely home to read, head out for a glass of wine, or meet Chrystelle for dinner at her house or in town. When you live somewhere, however, the nights you stay in outnumber those you go out, and I was getting mighty tired of reading every night in the absence of TV, radio, or the Internet. Most shockingly, so was my mom, who offhandedly mentioned missing TV to me last week on the bluff.
Now, my mom went eight years without even owning a TV (if she hadn’t married Paul, I doubt she ever would have bought one), and they didn’t get cable until my senior year of college.
“Mia!” she called me one day, “there are channels jus
t for travel or gardening! There’s an entire channel just for military history! And French! And book TV!”
“Ma, it’s called cable, it’s been around since the eighties.”
“What about ‘unplugging’?” I tease her now. “What happened to our summer sans Internet, TV, or connection to the world outside of Avignon?”
What happened was the accidental discovery of a video rental store and a new routine of utter nighttime debauchery. Now, the second the sun sets, we race from the bluff to get to Video Futur before it closes, swing by Marché Plus for avocados and lemon sorbet, scurry home, throw on jammies, mash up avocadoes, garlic, lime, and salt for guacamole (this has become our favorite dinner, which is kind of odd, but my mom, who normally enjoys cooking elaborate meals, seems to be on strike), pour two glasses of white wine, fire up the computer, and arrange everything carefully on the Click-Clack. We’ve gotten this down to twenty minutes, which includes taking turns showering.
Period pieces are the best rentals; it’s a trip to fall asleep with images from Medieval, Renaissance, or Imperial Europe in our minds, and then eat breakfast the next morning while looking out at a thirteenth-century defensive wall and eighteenth-century townhouses. We quickly advanced from renting movies once a week to three nights a week, but it was The Tudors that did us in.
My mom had never followed a television show before, yet now we’re up till one in the morning watching back-to-back episodes. The theme song alone is rousing, with trumpets playing over clips of galloping steeds, swinging hatchets, and naked, writhing limbs. She’s as much fun to watch as the show itself—“Look at the embroidery on that codpiece! Wouldn’t you love to have those goblets!” When I tripped on the computer cord last night and the screen went black I thought she was going to stab me with her fork.
I’ve never indulged so completely with my mom before; every night it’s like two schoolgirls playing hooky. My mom and I are different in many ways and it’s kind of thrilling to discover that, while I obviously love her, I really like her, too. If we’d been little at the same time I bet we would have been friends, and it’s fun to picture us giggling under the covers in pigtails and pajamas. Though we’d probably have drifted apart when I discovered punk rock and started cutting class while she remained an A student, still in the Girl Scouts until the ripe old age of sixteen. And to think she missed the early signs of my drug use.
“Can you believe this?” she said to me the other night. “We’ve spent the last five hours wandering around a beautiful city, eating tarts, looking at art and a gorgeous sunset and we’re about to eat guacamole, drink some wine, and watch The Tudors. You know, Mia, I could really live like this.”
“Mom,” I shouted. “We are living like this!”
Mia thinks I cook well because I love to, but I have a love/hate relationship with the culinary. Oh, I still love to invent tarts and ice creams. Before we left I created a creamy basil pear sorbet I could kick myself for not writing down.
But getting meals on the table every day? Or even most days? Just the thinking, day in, day out, of what to make, ech. When I was holed up alone in a little cabin writing part of Come Back, I got to cook and eat what, when, and where I wanted. Not having to think about anyone else’s stomach after two decades of doing it daily was incredibly liberating.
I taught myself to cook in my twenties because I was into nutritious food for Mia and me. After years of making healthy versions of everything, in my forties I got into gourmet. I explored exotic cuisine, sugar and butter were back, and I began to drink espresso and wine for the first time in my life.
Now that I’m fifty-one, I savor time a lot more than shiso or pink Himalayan salt. If they stopped selling salad in a bag, I’d weep. My pal Leah nailed it: “So I’m standing in this long, slow-moving line yesterday, and I’m looking at my watch, and I just want to yell, ‘Couldja hurry up already, I’m aging!’ ”
And that’s just the cooking part of my association with kitchens. There’s also the personal history part, which includes great memories: it’s where I bathed Mia in the sink when she was tiny, where we banged pots and pans to songs and made play-dough, where she realized that you could spit peas farther than any other vegetable and that corn was just the right size for an earplug.
It was also where she tried to stab me with a screwdriver when she was on drugs and Paul wrestled her to the floor. Where he slammed his fist into a cupboard when he learned she’d taken off, again. It was where I was washing dishes when she was missing and I first heard Emmylou Harris’s “My Baby Needs an Angel.” When she sang the line about her baby swimming with the sharks, out where none could save her, I slid to the black-and-white tiles and buried my face in soapy yellow rubber gloves. Took me years before I could cross a black-and-white checker tile floor without a Pavlovian sinking-gut response.
I was actually relieved that there’s not even an oven here, just a sliver of a kitchen with a stove-top, teeny fridge, and ten inches of counter space. Yet one of the first things I did was start a list of what to stock it with, on autopilot. We assumed our historic roles: I cook, she eats.
Mia’s always been a sensuous person. She’ll jump in the ocean just to feel the waves in the dead of winter, she’d cuddle every pet she passes if she could, she loves sculpting because she likes the squish of the clay between her fingers. And she loves food. Even as a kid she remembered scents and flavors like a chef. Not that she’s big on cooking food, but she adores smelling, savoring, and talking about it.
She’s not alone. I’m not sure why, but younger women have embraced food in a way my generation never did. For boomers, getting out of the kitchen was part of being liberated. Our kids dined out more in one year than most of us ever did in the entire 1960s.
Young women seem to have skipped a generation in their embrace of cooking, crafts, and gardening—they’re more like their grandmothers, only online and on speed. Even some of the cuisine is a throwback, much of it a return to the red meat and martinis of the Mad Men era.
“The last thing we wanted to do when we left home was cook or do housey things; it was all about career,” I mentioned to a friend, Elise, the grande dame of food bloggers, in a recent call. She began simplyrecipes.com in 2003 because she found herself back in her parents’ home and realized that at forty-one, as a Silicon Valley MBA, she had no idea how to make even a roast. What had started as a way to share family recipes has become one of the most visited blogs on the planet. Which I doubt would have happened when either of us was in our twenties.
I suggested it might be because cooking something great or knitting a beret and then blogging about it provides instant gratification for a generation with a short attention span. She thinks a lot of it is because the Internet is such a perfect medium for women. When BlogHer was created to give women a stronger voice on the Internet, she assured them that in a few years, that wouldn’t be an issue.
“I knew we’d dominate the Web—women are verbal! We love to share what we know. And food’s so much more interesting and global now. There’s just been so much more attention, there’s the green movement, farmers’ markets, first there was Food Network, then came blogs. Cooking has become a want to rather than being the have to it was for our moms. Food became cool.”
But for a lot of women, she added, it’s still about getting food on the table economically; in other words, cooking will always be a have to for many of us. Including Mia, who’d eat out every night if she could, or at my house if she lived close enough. She attempts to cook to save money, though she’s as clueless in the kitchen as Elise used to be.
I’m watching her stack big basil leaves to make chiffonade for a pasta, clumsily, under my direction, because I never taught her to cook, and realize that, in yet another way, I’m becoming my mom. Because she never taught me, either.
The answer to “what’s for dinner” in our house was always “Food.” To her, cooking was a mother’s job. Our jo
b as kids was to play, do well in school, and avoid killing our siblings. The kitchen was her world and she didn’t want us underfoot. And I’m willing to bet that for all the moms who love cooking with their little girls, just as many treasure the kitchen as a refuge, as one of the few places they can have two minutes to themselves, where they can be alone with their thoughts and feelings.
Since we’ve come here to spend time together, I offered to teach Mia how to cook some of her favorite foods (those that don’t need an oven). Today we shopped for ingredients for a pasta with fresh tomatoes, herbs, garlic, mushrooms, spicy sausage, and Parmesan. We’ve washed everything, laid it out, and chopped the sausage and garlic to sauté.
We’ve spent half the day on this project already, and it’s gorgeous outside. Mia carefully (read s-l-o-w-l-y) rolls the basil leaves to chiffonade them.
“Now,” I hand her the knife. “Thin ribbons like I showed you.”
She cuts slowly, bruising the basil leaves instead of cutting cleanly through them.
“Cut with authority, Mia. Keep your fingers clear and just”—I put my hands over hers on the knife and make one staccato downward push—“cut it.”
“Hey, be careful!” she says nervously.
“You gotta cut boldly, Mia. A dull knife or a weak wrist is dangerous.”
What I really want to do is take the knife and tell her to go dust or something while I whip through this so we can eat and go for a hike. Actually, I’d rather just chop the tomatoes, garlic, and herbs, throw on olive oil, salt, and lemon, toss, eat, done in ten minutes. But, you know, this trip being about bonding and all.
“Hey, Mia, do you think you never cared about cooking because you thought I didn’t want you in the kitchen?”
“Why? Feeling guilty?”
“It just would have taken too long to show you what to do.”
“Would have? I know you’re dying to tell me to hurry up right now.”
Have Mother, Will Travel Page 18
