by Lily King
I pulled the string for the overhead in the kitchen and began setting up for breakfast. I cut long slabs of butter, spooned out the English jam, warmed the remaining half of the baguette from the night before, and heated a large pot of milk. Every gesture was by rote: a straw at Guillaume’s place for his apple-pear juice, a particular silver spoon, small and deep with a vein running down its center, for Lola’s cornflakes. I saw myself from some other part of the kitchen as I slit a corner on a second box of milk and placed a banana beside a bowl for Marc. Was this why people went on trips, to feel this sort of impending departure from routine?
Marc appeared in the doorway, holding one of his books on Spain. “Rosie, what’s this here?” He turned it around so I could read three words in italics just above his finger. He wasn’t dressed in a tie for work; he didn’t smell like the perfumed soap in the master bathroom.
“The Winter Palace.”
“Invierno is winter? How do you know that?”
I pointed to the cassette player.
“You’re pretty clever, aren’t you?”
I was tired of his fatherly admiration. “It’s just a tape. I listen and repeat. Like a parrot.”
“I’m sorry. I hope you didn’t think I was being condescending.”
“Europeans always think Americans are stupid. I’m getting used to it.” We were both surprised by the hostility in my voice. “I’m sorry.” I looked down, pretending to arrange the condiments on the table.
“No, it’s true. We’re terrible snobs.” The sound of his voice made me raise my head. I had hurt him. His mouth had caved in slightly, and he held the book on Spain closely to his chest. He didn’t look like he’d slept as I had.
“I’m sorry,” I said again, without meaning to. I hadn’t meant to say anything else, for how could I explain the sight of him in his weekend pants and faded T-shirt, the way he’d held out the book, the way he hadn’t issued a formal good morning but had just begun speaking, the way he looked up at me as if I were real and whole and good—how could I explain all that and the hand on my stomach and the strange new sensation snaking through and down, coiling heavily between my legs?
“Don’t be. I’m an ass,” he said, and left the room.
I went to the sink and leaned toward the wide window. Cold metallic air came through the glass. My groin brushed against the cabinet handle below, and I pressed hard against it.
Lola bolted toward me from around the corner. Guillaume was right behind, screaming at her to give them back. A pair of plastic goggles was placed in my hand, and just as Guillaume began to yell at me instead, Nicole came in.
“She won’t give me them, Maman!” he hollered.
I gave them to him immediately, and Lola let out a great whelp of betrayal.
“You can’t put me in the middle like that,” I told her. Especially, I thought, when your mother is watching.
“But they’re mine, Maman, they’re mine!”
I slipped out of the kitchen then, hoping I wouldn’t run into Marc, not now, and not ever again. I couldn’t go to Spain with them. That much was clear.
Safely back in my room, I thought of my options. I could go into the kitchen and quit. I could get lost in the airport. I could jump out the window right now and swim away. Then I thought of the perfect solution. I could leave my passport here. I wouldn’t be let on the plane at the last minute, and they would have to go on without me. It was perfect. I took it out of my purse and hid it under the mattress.
Two taxis arrived at eight-fifteen. Their exhaust matched the color of the sky all winter. A strong wind pierced through our sweaters and jackets as we waited to climb into the backs of the small white cars, but no one suggested fetching coats that would only have to be lugged around for ten days. I tried to imagine a clear blue sky, a windless day, a sun so hot it could change the color of skin. Dry heat, thin clothing, bare feet. For a moment I let myself forget I wasn’t going. I stood between Odile, whose face was badly painted and slightly swollen from sleep, and Guillaume, who was dangerously awake and restless, while Marc climbed down belowdeck with the drivers for the rest of the bags and Lola searched the house one last time, she promised her mother, for her favorite fountain pen. I stood between Odile and Guillaume so that the three of us could share a taxi, but once the trunks were closed and the doors unlocked, Nicole said, “You ride in that one, Rosie,” and took my place. Go where you belong, she seemed to be saying, and so I squeezed in with Lola and Marc.
“Papa wants to ask you something but he’s too embarrassed.”
“Lola!” he said.
“He wants to know if you could fit this in your bag. I can’t in mine.” She leaned over her father to hand me the fat book on Spain. There was plenty of room for it in my knapsack. I’d just have to remember to give it back before he got on the plane.
It was warm in the taxi. The road was wet from the rain the night before and the tires sang as we rolled up the narrow ramp to the street. Ahead of us, the other taxi yielded to the stream of traffic from the left. Nicole sat forward between her children, her arms braced on the tops of the seats in front of her. Would she tell the driver, like she always told Marc, exactly when to go, and how fast, and, no, he shouldn’t risk it just yet? She would be angry at herself for not asking me if I’d remembered my passport. I could see the look on her face perfectly. Their taxi lurched forward and we pulled up into the space.
Lola was making Marc promise he’d play cards with her on the beach.
“Only if Rosie promises too. Americans, they aren’t very smart, but you should see how they shuffle a deck of cards.” He turned and gave me a certain look I’d seen him give Nicole. It was more than an apology. It was a look that let down all guard, that did not attempt to hide vulnerability. In it there was not the slightest trace of self-protection. It was an intimate look and seemed to promise a lifetime of effort. When he gave it to Nicole, she hardened further. She couldn’t return it.
I could. And after I did and we swung out onto the main road, I said what I knew I’d say from the moment I got into the back of the warm taxi beside him—“I forgot my passport”—and he had the driver turn right around.
* * *
At the airport, we checked our bags and hurried to the gate, only to be told that the flight was now delayed two hours. Odile and Guillaume went off to the duty-free shop while the rest of us had a snack at the cafeteria next door.
Nicole was in a miserable state. She’d given me some spending money for the trip, but instead of following Marc and Lola to the table, she waited for my total. I no longer had trouble with numbers. I didn’t have to translate them first into English, then into numerals. I could see them as I heard them. But before I could count the change I’d fished from my pocket, Nicole reached over and plucked the correct amount from my hand.
I walked over to the booth Marc had chosen. When I put down my tray, he peered into my cup. “Hot chocolate. That’s exactly what I should have gotten.”
I swung into his side of the booth. I didn’t care. Beside him, my irritation at Nicole melted into relief and gratitude and a soft longing that felt pleasant and manageable.
Halfway through her snack, Lola saw a boy come out of the duty-free shop with a long piece of black licorice. “I thought they only had alcohol and perfume in there,” she said, and after securing a twenty-franc note from her mother, she left the three of us alone at the table.
There had been many times in the past months when, left alone with Marc and Nicole, I put on myself the burden of conversation. I would tell stupid stories simply to fill the spaces that made me, far more than it made them, so uncomfortable. Today I felt no such compunction. I wanted to be witness to the silence between them. But before it became too pronounced, Nicole got up and crossed the room to a cigarette machine.
“She smokes?” I asked, enjoying sitting so close to him in the booth and speaking of Nicole in the third person.
Marc shook his head and said she’d quit years ago. He sta
rted to say something else but stopped when he saw Nicole returning.
“I’m sorry,” she said, peeling off the cellophane. She wasn’t sorry at all.
“I know traveling makes you nervous”—Marc began, but she cut him off.
“It doesn’t make me nervous. It makes me furious. This trip is already a full-scale disaster. No one knows why the plane isn’t ready. I can’t get an answer out of anyone. And if it does ever go and if we’re lucky enough to get to Spain in one piece, the transportation system there will make today look easy.”
“It is easy, Nicole. We’re sitting here. We’re drinking coffee and hot chocolate.” He gave a glance toward my cup. I could feel his leg shift beneath the table. To press mine against his would have taken the slightest movement.
“I don’t want to leave Paris,” she said, as pouty as Guillaume. “And I know how I sound; I can hear myself. But I don’t want to go.” She caught a cigarette between two nails and drew it out of the pack. “I don’t know how you got me to agree to this.” She struck a matchstick on the side of its bright blue box, brought the flame up, sucked in, and with shut eyes blew it out with her first lungful of smoke. “It’s a bad sign, this delay. But it gives us a chance to just go home.” She pulled an ashtray toward her, then looked at Marc as softly as she could manage. “Please, let’s just go.”
He turned to me. “Nicole has never been on a plane before.”
“That’s not it, Marc.”
“Then what is it?”
“It’s everything. It’s the whole absurdity of calling this a vacation when it is sheer work and worry and dragging bags around from one place to another.”
I only dimly recognized the sentiment from the early morning. It was impossible to feel it here in the airport amid all the travelers and flight announcements and sounds of planes leaving or touching the ground. How could you want to turn around and go home now?
“We’ve already talked about all this. There will only be a few days of moving about and then we have over a week on the beach. No work. No worry. And we have Rosie.” He presented me to his wife with an open palm, as if I were a large empty receptacle that by the trip’s end would be full of all the trouble they’d averted. “Please,” he said, and reached for Nicole’s hand, which did not respond but remained flat on the table. He softly called her a name with several u’s that forced my eyes down to my tray. Within the periphery, his fingers fretted across her motionless knuckles. Her rings made it loud and embarrassing. “Please,” he said again.
“All right.” She pulled her hand away and hid it from him in her lap while the other brought the cigarette to her mouth again. When she stubbed it out and moved the ashtray to another table, she said to me, “Please don’t tell the children. Especially Guillaume. He’s frightened enough of my death.”
With ferocious flaps of her hand in front of her, she waved off lingering traces of smoke.
“Yes, thank you,” she said, accepting the mint I held out to her.
The plane climbed quickly into the green-gray clouds, which condensed and streaked on the window beside Lola. The small cabin grew dim. Then the clouds lightened and scattered and suddenly all there was was blue, a deep rich blue in every direction. As the plane leveled out, the sun glittered along its wings.
Across the aisle, Nicole let go of the cross around her neck and opened her eyes. The unexpected light forced them half shut again, and if I hadn’t known her I might have glanced over at those tender eyes and the brown hollows below and the broad bone of her cheek and the spread of her lips and thought hers a warm face, an uncomplicated face, a face you would never dread or avoid. And yet I planned to avoid her the entire trip. I would be sure to sit the farthest from her at every meal, stand apart in every museum line, spread my towel away from hers on the beach.
I slept a little and woke up to the sun beating in on my hands in my lap. Lola had been waiting in the seat next to me and said immediately, “Look down.”
Below us were mountains, deep dark jagged mountains capped with white.
“Don’t they look like the most delicious chocolate dessert you could ever taste?”
“Yes,” I said. It looked as if a few spoons had already dug in. “Las Pyraneos.”
“Sí.”
My eyes followed the earth to its rim, where it met the sky in a deep indigo curve. Everything seemed excruciatingly beautiful from up here.
Beside Nicole, Marc was reading about Cuenca, our first stop. I wanted him to look out his window and feel this pain as I felt it, the pain of the sight and of the overwhelming, breathless hope that can fill your chest when you are lifted far above the earth momentarily.
Leaving Lucie
THE SUN IS DIRECTLY ABOVE ME AS I WALK BACK DOWN THE DRIVEWAY FROM THE mailbox. The silver birches out on the road shiver white in the strong breeze, as if they’re laden with snow they can never shake off. Through the open door, I can hear slow steps on the stairs, then the kettle being filled at the sink. She’s up from her nap; it’s nearly time for lunch. Another letter has come. I slip it into the bin with the others and go inside.
We eat outside at the shady end of the picnic table: a cold lemon soup, sliced tomatoes, and a flat yeast bread called fouace. Lucie is groggy and distracted. She drags a piece of bread around the bottom of her soup bowl but doesn’t bring it to her mouth. She’s getting weaker. Her death swells up beside me, its back slick, its purpose unwavering, and the fear I feel only at night seizes me now in broad daylight.
A ladybug crawls onto her finger. “Have you ever heard Nicole sing this song to her children?” she asks. Then, taking in a deep breath, she lets out a series of high tremulous notes.
I want to lie and say I have, for how would she ever know? But deceit is too exhausting; it makes endless demands. “No. How does it go again?”
She sings more slowly this time. It is in Provençal, and though it has a lighthearted tune, it emerges dolorous from her tight, tired throat.
Parpaiolo, volo!
Vai-t’en a l’escolo!
Prene ti matino,
Vai a la doutrino.
When she stops, I imitate what I heard. It has been a long time since I’ve sung, and the pleasure of it breaks in great waves inside me. Lucie listens, territorially at first, then teaches me four more verses. We sit singing at the table, the shade lengthening but the afternoon growing hotter, the horseflies drinking up the vinaigrette left on the tomato plate, and the long leaves of the cherry trees clapping in the wind like soft-gloved hands at the music we make.
Later, in the cool of the kitchen, she tells me how Nicole left Plaire.
After her mother’s disappearance, the land seemed to want to give something back. Black fat grapes, juicy plums, melons as wide as sun hats—never had the yield been better. Octave buried himself in the work, and Lucie Quenelle continued to come to their house in the evenings. On Saturdays, Nicole walked down to Lucie’s for the day and after a few weeks started taking a small bag to spend the night. She preferred to be at Lucie’s now. Her father no longer liked to talk in the evenings or take walks on Sundays. He’d stopped going to mass with her altogether. After the harvest, she asked her father if it would be better for her to move in with Lucie. She had hoped to provoke a response, to resuscitate his paternal claim on her, but he simply brushed a hand through the air and walked away.
She went to Lucie’s because the house was warm and familiar. She went because Lucie put on a soft blue bathrobe at night and let Nicole lie against it while they read together in silence on Lucie’s thin bed. She didn’t know that her mother and Lucie had been friends, that her mother had come down the hill, just as Nicole had been doing on Saturdays all summer, for lunch several times a week. But Lucie had a pair of socks her mother had knitted for her, and jars of fruit with her mother’s handwriting on the labels. And she had stories, lots of stories, about Marcelle, which she fed to Nicole like candy, one at a time. Nicole was happy there, and gave her thanks in prayers for Lucie, and hope
d she was not betraying her mother, wherever she was, in doing so.
It was another cold day, the day the letter came seven years later, the same white writing paper with the same looped letters. It was sitting on the kitchen table this time, not floating on a blue blanket, not a rope in her mother’s hands. And this time it was addressed to her. She stood holding the envelope for a long while, waiting for Lucie, whom she could hear walking above her, to come down. It had been written with a fountain pen with an extremely thick nib in a color she could not name, a dark sinister blue. The fancy paper was so coarse the lines were mottled, and she stared at them until they became snakes, twisting and halving themselves across a rough white plain.
It was from Aunt Anne, and it would have news of her mother’s reappearance.
She ripped open the expensive envelope, delighting in the extravagance. She read quickly:
Dear Nicole,
I am your Great-Aunt Anne. Do you remember me? I saw you once when you were very small but very pretty.
I live in Paris in a big apartment, too big for one person and one small dog. We would like you to come live with us. There will be lots of yummy things to eat and beautiful dresses to wear.