Finding me in France

by Bobbi French

  Fuelled by my superhuman success, I sauntered down to the physiotherapy clinic to rustle up a rendez-vous with a gal reportedly skilled with glass spines. But by the time I got to the door my strength had faded and I started my internal retreat. It’s just so much easier to charm Neil into doing everything for me. I copied down the phone number and walked away. But something wasn’t quite right. I started thinking about how busy my sugar daddy is these days and that nag called my conscience started whispering in my ear. So, I summoned the forces necessary to go back and, shazam! I managed to have a whole conversation (sort of) and I walked out with an appointment for next week. Well slap my arse and call me Harry! I practically skipped down the street. The sun was shining, the breeze was warm, the cherry trees in the churchyard were in full bloom and I had just saved civilization.

  But my most heroic act was the defeat of the villainous French dinner party. We were invited to dine with a woman from the mayor’s office to be introduced to another foreigner, a South African architect with plans to transform Semur’s ancient hospital into a luxury four-star hotel and spa. I understood about a third of everything that was said (a personal best for me) and I don’t mind saying I was feeling rather full of myself. It was a miracle I didn’t break into a soliloquy from Hamlet. I was solid as a rock until our hostess said something about six months followed by incroyable. Blank stare. What the hell was she saying? Finally, after a long pause, Neil leaned in, “She said it’s incredible how much French you have learned in six months.” He’s well acquainted with marriage by now so he didn’t add “you doofus” at the end. What can I say? Even Superman had kryptonite.

  APRIL

  BY THE SKIN

  OF MY TEETH

  So here’s something I’ve learned about living in a foreign language: context is everything. I had already learned that plenty of understanding comes less from words than gestures and facial expressions, but I didn’t realize how much I’d been getting by with full-scale theatrical productions of what I’m trying to say. Of course all this goes away when you’re on the phone. Neil, with his Spanish, French and a bit of Italian just to show off, has always told me that he has great difficulty speaking any foreign language on the phone, which I never understood. Either you parlez-vous or you don’t. I put it down to his fundamental weirdness when it comes to phone finesse. Here’s a perfect example: he answers the phone. I wildly gesticulate how unavailable I am at the moment, which involves mouthing, “I’m in the shower,” while rapidly sweeping my hand back and forth across my throat, which, as every single person on the planet knows, means I’m not here. He says, “Sorry, hold on a minute, Bobbi’s trying to tell me something.” I then politely say hello, my shoe goes sailing toward his head, and he looks confused. Every single time.

  Well, it looks like a feed of crow is on my menu tonight as I just got off the phone with a receptionist at a dentist’s office here in town and it was a narrow escape to be sure. The good news is I’ve reached my target heart rate for the day and lost a couple of pounds in sweat. The bad news is I have a whole new language challenge. Recent claims about my French progress were clearly exaggerated. I’d rehearsed everything I needed to say but I forgot that someone would be responding to me. Every time she spoke it was a stream of gobbledygook. But it takes more than that to keep me down. Being made fun of by snotty mainlanders your whole life eventually pays off. I just kept right on talking through all her sighs and audible eye rolls with no concern at all for her disdain, much like any Newfoundlander would behave when faced with an Air Canada employee. At the end of the day I’m the big winner and she can kiss my lily-white derrière. I’ve developed an empathic understanding of my husband’s phone difficulties, plus I have a dental appointment at the end of May ... or a date on Saturday night with a dental hygienist named Celeste. Either way, not too shabby.

  YOU SNOOZE,

  YOU LOSE

  So while my clever husband and I conducted our great Wreck conversations, all those tremendous back and forth sessions of should we or shouldn’t we, while we studied the town sewage line diagrams, while we considered how much we could save on the renovation using a DIY (also known as DIN—do it Neil) approach, something very interesting happened. We finally got a mortgage and within days of receiving it someone else swooped in and bought the house. To be honest, I’m relieved. I love when decisions are made for me as it leaves so much more time for other pressing matters, like eating and navel-gazing. I think it was meant to be because at the very moment the Wreck was snapped up from under our noses, we were advised that France has officially declared us fit to be renters.

  The universe has spoken and I’m listening carefully for a change. We’ll rent a place here and officially hit the longest period in our relationship without a major renovation. But I will have to keep an open mind with this. Having no income requires a fair bit of sacrifice and I’ll have to learn to lower my standards accordingly. I bet it’ll be easier than I expect. I’m not asking for much, just a place that’s cozy, comfortable and easy to maintain. Maybe something like this little place in town …

  Or maybe not. I’d need horses and footmen and scullery maids and quite frankly, I’m not sure I have the energy to break in a new staff. I’d have to stand on the balcony all day in jodhpurs and polished riding boots, my white chiffon scarf trailing behind me in the breeze, sipping an ice-cold cocktail while waiting for Neil to serve dinner on the terrace. Then after dinner, I’d have to change into one of my many gowns and stand motionless on the balcony gazing at the moon. Never mind the mortgage payments, it’s the wardrobe that would put me under. No, maybe all I need right now is a place that is peaceful, a spiritual sanctuary if you will, somewhere I can sit quietly and wait for a sign of what to do.

  Clearly someone is on to me. Maybe it’s true what they say, everything happens for a reason. That house was simply not meant to be. Today I’ve learned that maybe, just maybe, Wreckless is the new sensible.

  SUNNY WITH A CHANCE

  OF HAPPINESS

  La vie goes on and the weather here seems to have taken a turn for the consistently beautiful, with relentless sunshine and temperatures soaring into the low 20s. Oh I’m excited about experiencing my first spring in Semur. Probably because growing up in the North Atlantic I had only heard of this “spring.” Usually we had three nice days every second July between months of snow and ice and our other season called rain, drizzle and fog. It’s not much better in Nova Scotia this time of year. Last check in Halifax it was five degrees with wet flurries, suckers. Never in my life have I gazed upon a bright green lawn that is long overdue for a mowing in the early days of April. Apparently this spring business can last for weeks and weeks, like say … the length of a season. Who knew? Clearly we’ll need some time to adjust. We’ve left the snow tires on the car because, as every East Coast Canadian knows, a raging blizzard in the middle of May is not unheard of and always happens the day after you paid a couple of hundred bucks to have your bald, all-season radials put on.

  The Semurois have obviously seen this weather phenomenon before. They’ve been gardening for weeks now. All their pots are full of flowers and their hedges have been trimmed. My flower rule has always been nothing goes in until the end of May, a lesson learned from many a frostbitten geranium. But because I’m a woman who likes to live on the edge, this weekend I’m off to pick up a few fleurs for the patio.

  Of course not all things spring are lovely and peaceful. Here on the river we’re surrounded by dozens of ducks now into their fourth week of robo-mating, quack whores the lot of them. Holy merde, what a drama and what a racket! The poor females are being chased to the point of desperation. The other day, one poor lady duck was so besieged by suitors that she flew smack into the house. It’s quite a sight to see a full-grown duck splat herself, then slide down the full length of a glass door. She’s fine, but she did look quite embarrassed.

  Who knows if this will last? It’s not for me to say; my job is simply to enjoy every minute of it
, yet another benefit of unemployment. When I was slaving away in hospitals, I wonder how many gloriously warm April days I missed. Let me see. Seven years in Newfoundland followed by nine years in Nova Scotia. That makes exactly six days.

  CLOSING DOORS AND

  OPENING WINDOWS

  Something happened recently that caused me to stop eating for a minute and think. My two favourite activities, stuffing my face and turning a thought over and over until my head aches with the strain. There I was, minding my own business, heading home after a day of poking about rural France, when my old life reached out and smacked me in the face. We were whizzing around a corner as it came into view but somehow my brain was on autopilot and managed to piece together the necessary details. Without even thinking I told Neil to stop the car, and suddenly I was running toward her. An-all-too-familiar scene, a pale and shaking human being lying on the ground, blood all over her legs and terror all over her face and a few worried strangers doing their best to help. Cue my former life with, “I’m a doctor,” a phrase as familiar to me as my own name. I de-years termined that she’d fallen off her bike and was not seriously hurt. I told her that she would be all right and then the ambulance arrived. I walked back to the car, we motored on and I thought nothing more of it.

  Later that night, I remembered that Neil had asked me when I was halfway out of the car if I was sure I wanted to get into this. I don’t think I answered him. As I saw it, there was no choice. But now I’m not so sure. Did I really have any business being there? My response was so automatic, so instinctual, that I hadn’t even stopped to consider it. What if she’d been severely injured? Would I have known what to do or would I have forgotten the very basics already? The point is, a decision will need to be made about this doctoring business and it’s not a small one. After being away for a year or two, it takes a lot of effort to get back in the game—studying, refreshing, sometimes even taking exams and being approved by colleagues. I’m too lazy to learn French pronouns so I can hardly imagine having to face that debacle. Even if I fell out of love with France and returned to Canada, would I go back to a life in medicine? I don’t know.

  There’s no measure of how wonderful it is to help people when they need it the most but there is also no measure of the bullmerde that the business of medicine has become. I miss my patients and co-workers, but in all honesty the system is a situation best coped with by sticking a fork in one’s eye. In July it will be a year since I resigned and I’ll have to decide one way or the other. As I always say, no one likes to jump unless they’ve got a soft place to land. For now I’ve decided to just keep on eating. That way, no matter where I leap, my expanding arse will cushion the fall.

  SQUARE ONE

  When you leave one life behind it is inevitable that you have to start building another. So far it’s been easy. We live here in a little house that has everything we could ask for—furniture, dishes, towels, even a flat-screen television. But now it’s time to start thinking about moving on. First there was The Great Canadian Purge and now comes The Great French Acquisition. When I think about having to set up a house yet again I just want to crawl into bed with a couple of pounds of chocolate and an IV infusion of a nice cold Meursault. See this is when I wish I were Beyoncé or Gywneth Paltrow or some other queen of fabulous. I would click-clack around in my six-inch diamond encrusted platforms, bitch-slapping servants and screaming top lung about the chinchilla bedspread clashing with my hair. Or better yet, I could just jet off to my villa in Italy, play a few hands of poker with George Clooney and the gang, and arrive home to a fully arranged palatial abode.

  But instead I spent last weekend in my orthopedic loafers and a decade-old jean jacket checking out discount dishes and linens at Ikea. On the one hand it’s great fun, a chance to start all over and face the challenge of purchasing exactly what I need and not one thing more. On the other hand, when I think of how many times I’ve moved and how much I’ve sold or given away over the years, I get hives coupled with an intense compulsion to stuff an entire cake in my mouth. This one will do just fine …

  I’ve been doing a little digging through the things we brought from home and as I go through it now I wonder what I could have possibly been thinking at the time. Par exemple, I carefully ironed and vacuum packed my long-searched-for bed skirt. Very smart. Except that queen beds here are a different size and the bed skirt won’t fit a French bed frame, so that was a stroke of genius now, wasn’t it? Packed in with it I found a single white towel. Now what kind of birdbrain brings one lousy towel all the way across the Atlantic? Me.

  So here we go again. We need just about everything so maybe the answer is to throw myself a shower. Instead of a bridal or baby shower I’ll have one of those I Lost My Mind, Ran Away to France, Sold All My Shit and Now I Need All New Shit showers. That will look just beautiful embossed on an invitation.

  MAY

  CREATURE COMFORTS

  Zut alors there’s a lot to get used to living out here in the wilds of France. Perhaps I’ve already said this but the language is killing me, slowly but effectively. I went to the shoe store the other day and left empty handed and red faced from my ridiculous attempts at a basic conversation. Same merde, different day. But today I’m on about the critters.

  I had no idea when I signed up for this that I was moving to a medieval zoo. Hairy pigs, goats and alpacas around the corner. Ducks frantically screwing and now pooping wherever they please as if they owned the place. They had better get it together tout de suite because I have two words for them, orange sauce. Now I’ve got giant snails, river bugs and mosquitoes by the thousands, bats swooping around my head at night, exotic horror film spiders in the bathtub, and the odd rat scurrying across the terrace chased by a huge black cat that frightens the life out of me every time it darts over my feet. Last night a pterodactylish moth bigger than my head appeared out of nowhere. It’s like living in a Harry Potter book. But now we’ve reached a whole new level of vermin invasion.

  This morning, as I innocently stepped out onto my sunny terrace, I was greeted by a loud buzzing. I looked down and there at my feet was a large dead bird covered in a swarm of black flies feasting on the carcass. Holy son of satan. I mean I’m all for this all god’s creatures crap but Dr. Doolittle I am not. Who wants that mess on their doorstep? Oh, I know who does, my husband. Yesterday he came through the door practically bursting with excitement, “GUESS what I saw out in front of the house?” Ever the optimist, I was thinking a guy selling Miracle Whip but no such luck. “A snake,” he said with a smile as wide as the sea. I suppressed my alarm and calmly replied, “What do you mean, like, a little skinny garden snake?” But I could tell by the look in his eyes that he was swept away by the love for anything gross that boys so often seem to share. “No, a real snake, like, four feet long, and it was all mashed up in the middle.” Lovely. Apparently the hills are alive with les serpents. Neil will think he’s died and gone to heaven. Later, as we set out on our daily walk, he was quite distracted by a desire to show me this mangled reptile and was disappointed to find it had since disappeared. “Oh no, somebody must have cleaned it up,” he said sadly. Now if that’s not a great date then I don’t know what is. If I had a dollar for every smooth talker who tried to show me a limp snake …

  SECRETS AND LIES

  While narcissistic self-disclosure seems to have overtaken my life these days there is one piece of information I’ve kept under wraps. The secret is that for the past nine days I’ve been all by my lonesome, abandoned yet again. Neil’s been off in Canada doing whatever he does to keep me in the scaled back style to which I am trying to become accustomed. What surprised me was that it wasn’t remotely as terrifying as the last time. Of course this time there were a lot of things in my favour. The river has been reduced to a mere trickle, the weather has been glorious and I think I’m now able to communicate that I’ve fallen and I can’t get up. I also had a lot more to do.

  Anne came for a visit and presented me with beautiful silver e
arrings she’d made as a thank you for Neil’s help with her computer. It seems I got the better end of that deal. I had a divine lunch served to me at the home of some new globe-trotting gourmet friends, then drinks with my new Irish friend Carmel at the Café Des Arts. Later in the week, there was more lovely lunching with my neighbour Elizabeth, and a dinner in town with my new physiotherapist, the young, adorable and very skilled Elodie without whom I couldn’t move my head. A dinner, I might add, during which she and I spoke only French. Very simple and very slow French, but still a triumph to be sure.

  On the whole, I did very well, I think. Although, there was the Chicken Incident. Convinced that I was now fully competent to live on my own, I decided I’d be bold and make myself some breaded chicken. I mean if I can manage a violently psychotic individual then surely a chicken breast shouldn’t present a major problem. I was in the clear right until the cleanup when somehow the raw chickeny-eggy breading mess went flying all over every surface in sight. Because I am a germaphobic lunatic when it comes to dealing with raw poultry, I had to bleach the whole kitchen. I completely forgot about my chicken and finally removed it from the oven, charred into a black piece of concrete. Special K for dinner, again.

  But here’s the real shocker. While the cat’s away the mouse will work. For almost three hours I was employed here in the village. Jacqueline sold her lingerie shop and I offered my services to assist with the inventory. Cut to a sunny cobblestone street, racks of clothing blowing in the breeze, cafés filled with people drinking espresso, pots and pots of flowers covering the sidewalk and then me, tallying fine French underwear while Jacqueline meets her clients with grace and elegance. There really is magic in the life of a French boutique. See, I’m all right here in the wilds of Burgundy alone. No problem whatsoever. Why, I could do this for another nine days. Who needs a brilliant and charming husband to cook and get groceries and answer the phone in case there’s a French person calling? Not me baby. I’m as tough as snails.