“How many years have you been coming here to do the harvest?” I asked.
“About four. My father buys quite a lot of wine from Girard every year.”
The dinner progressed much as the lunch had, but even more leisurely. The wine being served warmed my blood and made me feel sparkling, despite the drying mud on my scalp and various unwashed parts of my body.
Florian and Henrich joked and flirted with me, and when I got up after the cheese course to use the washroom, Florian followed me.
I was both alarmed and intrigued. The wine had caused a certain madness in my blood that made me want to be alone with him just to see what would happen. I was vaguely aware that Monsieur Girard’s warning merely compounded that desire. There was nothing, I was discovering, that made me want to do something like having someone forbid it.
“I’ll wait.” Florian gestured at me to go in and use the bathroom.
There was a mirror inside, but the light bulb was dim. I tried to freshen my teeth with a finger dipped in water and rub the most visible splotch of caked mud from my hairline. When I emerged Florian took my hand and led me to a little closet-like space underneath the wooden staircase. It was pitch dark inside once he had shut the small door behind us and smelled as I imagined cobwebs would smell. He pulled me to him and smashed his mouth against mine in a kiss that was forceful and highly reminiscent of pinot noir and red wine sauce. I vastly preferred the light kiss he had surprised me with after lunch.
Part of me was caught up in the covertness of it all, but another part of me remained detached and observing. The latter part registered that Florian was either drunker than he appeared or simply not a very good kisser. His technique—if that was what one could call it—involved a wide-open mouth like a grouper fish and lots of tongue. His big teeth banged against mine. No lightning bolts. At one point, I actually began to worry about missing out on dessert.
There was a knock on the door. I jumped. Oh God. Monsieur Girard?
“Merde,” the French word slipped out of my mouth and, for a flash, I was impressed with the fact that a French swearword came out of my mouth before an English one. If it was Monsieur Girard, would the Ursus Club send me back to Canada? All of a sudden, I was furious with myself. Those sloppy, Swiss kisses hadn’t been worth it.
“Who do you think it is?” Florian whispered.
“I have no idea,” I hissed. “Be quiet.”
Maybe the person knocking would believe that there was no one inside and go away.
We waited, barely touching now.
The door creaked open and there stood the wizened grandmother, the very one responsible for the coq au vin and mousse au chocolate. She looked about a thousand years old, but her eyes were a bright amber and sharp enough to cut diamonds.
“You’re missing the tartes aux fraises,” she said calmly.
“We were just—” Florian began in French.
“Do you honestly believe that you are the first people who have had the idea of using this closet during the vendanges?”
I thought about it. “Uh…non.”
She narrowed her eyes at Florian. “As a matter of fact jeune homme, I remember catching you in this closet last year. I have been keeping an eye on you. I do not think I should allow you to get this petite Canadienne in trouble… She just arrived freshly off the airplane.” She shooed Florian away with an imperious flick of her claw-like hand. He gave my arm a quick squeeze and scuttled off. Coward.
This left me caught in the impenetrable net of her gaze. I stumbled over words of apology in French, making a complete mull of it.
She sputtered her lips not so much with disgust as with impatience. “You are seventeen,” she said. “Of course I was going to find you in here with a man. Now go. Eat your dessert.”
I scurried around her imperious finger and back to the table. Florian was already digging into the tart, and I could tell he was purposely not looking at me as I sat down. Monsieur Girard, on the other hand, most definitely was. I could feel my face burn.
A wave of despair washed over me. Risking my year here for a few terrible kisses was epically stupid. Why had I done it? I despaired yet again that no man would ever live up to my imagination. Maybe I had just watched too many romantic comedies and read too many romance novels. Was there a man out there who was worth breaking the rules for? I was starting to entertain serious doubts.
CHAPTER 12
It was inevitable, perhaps, that I came down with a humdinger of a cold after my weekend grape harvesting. Once I told Florian that I was simply not willing to take the risk of getting into trouble with my host families or the Ursus, or, God forbid, being sent back to Canada, things between us cooled off.
In the end, I met with a few other wine harvesters and made some new friends, ate delicious food, drank copious quantities of wine, and basically had a thoroughly Burgundian experience.
However, I woke up Monday morning with what felt like razor blades in my throat and my nostrils pouring like an open faucet.
Madame Beaupre’s eyes opened wide when I dragged myself down for breakfast.
“Ma puce!” she exclaimed. “I should have known. Sophie gets a terrible cold every year after the harvest.”
“I’m fine,” I reassured her, my nose honking.
“No you’re not!” She felt my forehead. Her fingers felt cool and lovely. “You’ve got a fever. You’re not going to school.”
“I’ll just take some aspirin,” I said, giving the word a French spin and hoping she would understand what I meant.
“You are going straight up to bed. I am calling the doctor.”
“You don’t need to do that. I’m fine.” Doctors always made me nervous and a foreign doctor added a whole new level of anxiety.
“No arguments.” She pointed upstairs. “Allez, ma puce!”
I made my way back upstairs and collapsed into bed. I’d been brought up to believe that colds were just inconveniences one soldiered through. One could drink a bit more orange juice than usual or pop a few aspirin, but a mere cold shouldn’t stop anybody from going to school or work. That would be…wimpy. Un-Canadian. We all liked to think of ourselves as tough lumberjacks. As I lay in the bed though, I noted that my body did seem to want to be horizontal instead of vertical.
I dozed off and was awakened by my bedroom door opening.
“Comment ça va, ma puce?” Madame asked, hovering over me. She brought me a mug of something hot that smelled like lemons.
“Ça va,” I said.
She moved further into the room, revealing a man in a black suit and tie behind her, who was holding a black leather doctor’s bag like he had stepped straight out of a Dickens novel. Julien brought up the rear.
My heart skipped a beat. A foreign doctor. He was probably going to want to give me a bunch of shots or do other weird, painful stuff. Anyway, what was he doing here? Since when did doctors still make house calls?
I sat up in bed and fought off a wave of dizziness. The doctor strode over to my side and strapped on a blood pressure cuff before I could formulate a protest. I scrambled to remember Grade 10 Biology to think if blood pressure was even impacted by a cold.
He listened to my chest and back with his stethoscope, peered down my throat and in my ears and up my nostrils, and instructed me to cough via Julien, who acted as translator. I waited nervously for the verdict, but instead he extracted his prescription pad from his bag and wrote on it for what seemed like an unusually long time, filling up several squares of paper.
“Julien,” Madame Beaupre instructed. “Can you go to the pharmacy and pick up these medicines for Laura?”
“There’s no need,” I said, in English to Julien. “I’m sure I don’t need any medicine. I’ll be fine.”
“Don’t be silly,” Julien said, not even bothering to translate this for his mother and the doctor. “Of course you need medicine. How else are you going to get better?”
The doctor patted me kindly on the head and said something in
French that sounded reassuring, although I had no idea what it was.
“Go back to sleep,” Julien instructed. “When you wake up, I’ll have your medicine ready for you.”
After they left, I lay back in bed but couldn’t fall asleep right away. What were they going to get at the pharmacy? Something foreign, no doubt. For the first time since arriving, I longed for my own bedroom and my own bed and my own bottle of extra strength Tylenol. It wasn’t homesickness exactly…more a longing for everything to be familiar and comfortable until I felt better. I loved France, but I had been thrown into unfamiliar situations on a daily basis since my arrival. Most of the time I found that exhilarating, but in my current state it just seemed more than I could cope with.
I reached over for my pocket dictionary that was sitting on my bedside table. Madame Beaupre kept calling me “ma puce.” What could that mean?
I flipped through the pages in the French section and found the word. “Ma puce” meant “my flea.” That was an endearment? She also called me “mon choux” sometimes, so I went to that word. It meant “my cabbage.” I closed my eyes, trying to fight off nightmares about what kind of strange medicine they would prescribe me in a country where people used “flea” and “cabbage” as terms of endearment.
I woke up with a grumbling stomach. I checked my watch. Ten minutes until noon.
I staggered downstairs, feeling rested, but still sick.
Julien and Madame Beaupre were in the kitchen making lunch.
“Enfin,” Madame said when she saw me. “I’m so glad you slept. Julien has all your médicaments.”
My medications? As in plural?
I watched in awe as Julien plunked two very large, white, plastic pharmacie bags on the kitchen table.
“I will explain everything to you,” he said.
“Great,” I replied, thanking God he’d chosen to speak English.
He opened the bags and poured their contents on the kitchen counter. The array of bottles, or bottles and boxes, made me begin to wonder if Julien hadn’t in fact brought the entire pharmacy to me.
“Those can’t all possibly be for me,” I said
“What? Do you not take medicine in Canada?
“Not this much!”
“What do you do when you get sick?”
“With a cold?” I shrugged. “I don’t know…nothing, I guess. Just wait until it passes.”
Julien stared at me, incomprehension coloring every finely carved feature on his face. “That seems silly. Why feel sick when you can use medicines to feel better?” I remembered his parallel comment from my first meal chez Beaupre. Why would anyone bother eating food that wasn’t delicious? I wondered if we North Americans weren’t indeed making life much harder for ourselves than necessary.
Julien had already launched into his explanation. There were three cough syrups: one for daytime, one for the evening, and one for night-time.
He held up the biggest bottle. “Do you know what this one is made out of?” he asked.
“No.” Something from the curve of his sculpted lips told me I didn’t want to know.
“Snail slime!”
Madame must have seen my eyes widen in horror and chided Julien.
“That is not the only ingredient,” he said, “but it is one of them. You see, it is called ‘Helexia’ and ‘Helix’ is—”
“Latin for snail,” I finished for him.
“Bravo! Did you take Latin in school?”
“No. I just read a lot…but I’m not drinking snail slime.” Just then, I was caught out by an untimely coughing jag.
“It is very effective. You must take it,” Julien said, brooking no opposition. He continued to go through the medications like a collection of greatest hits. He reminisced about ones that had been particularly helpful, or others that had not seemed to do a lick of good at the time but in the end had been a wise decision to prescribe on the doctor’s part. This affection for both doctors and medicine was novel for me.
I wondered how I would ever remember to take such a mind-spinning array of pills and potions. Julien opened a long, flat box and drew out some pills that I was supposed to take three times a day. They were huge, like regular pills on steroids, and were shaped like torpedoes.
“I’ll never be able to swallow those!” I protested. “I’ll choke.”
Julien blushed. It was the first time I had ever seen him do so. “They are not for swallowing.”
I stared at him in confusion. “How am I supposed to take them?”
“They’re suppositories.”
My blood ran cold. “I’ve never taken a suppository in my life,” I said. “We don’t do that in Canada.” What sort of barbaric country had I come to?
“I will drink the snail slime,” I bargained. “But there’s no way I’m using suppositories.”
“Hmmmmmm,” Julien shared the problem with Madame Beaupre and they talked in rapid-fire French for several minutes. I gleaned that the French word for “suppository” was “suppositoire.” This piece of knowledge, it seemed, could come in handy in France. Non suppositoires. Non suppositoires, I practiced in my head.
Julien finally turned back to me. “We think you can probably do without those,” he said.
“I will be doing without those.”
We sat down for a lunch of quiche Lorraine with a lovely green salad and a type of chocolate pudding called Dinette for dessert. It was the one food, Madame said, Sophie always wanted to eat when she was sick. I could find no fault with that program.
Then they mixed and coaxed a vast array of medicines, including the cough syrup with the snail slime, down my gullet and ordered me back to bed.
I fell into a deep sleep until dinner. Maybe the snail slime worked, or maybe it was just the fear of those suppositories.
CHAPTER 13
When I finally returned to school on Wednesday, I was touched that Sandrine and her gang—even the brawny Thibaut—seemed to have noticed I had been away.
I told them as much as I could about the grape harvest, and as they were mostly from winemaking families and had been doing it all weekend as well, we had a satisfying commiseration about the epic mud.
The next week, as we gave each other the obligatory bises outside the school doors in the morning, Sandrine asked me if I wanted to go out to a café with her during lunch instead of to the cafeteria.
“We will grab a jambon beurre,” she said.
“What’s a jambon beurre?” I asked.
“It’s a sandwich. You know, ham and butter on a piece of baguette.”
I didn’t know actually, but it sounded good.
“Which café do you want to go to?” I asked, delighted that my dream of hanging out in the cafés of France was finally about to come true.
“There’s a café called le Square.” She pointed around the ring road that passed in front of the school. “A lot of kids from the public high school, Clos-Maire, hang out there. I’ve arranged to meet my friend Stéphanie. I’ve told her about you.”
“Does she go to Clos-Maire?”
Sandrine nodded and dropped her cigarette as the school doors opened and ground it out with the heel of her leather boot. “She’s from the same village as me. Villers-la-Faye. We’ve known each other forever. We try to meet up at le Square for lunch at least once a week.”
“Villers-la-Faye?” I remembered that village. “I’ve been there before.”
“You have?” Sandrine’s eyebrows flew up. “Are you sure?”
“Yes. Why?”
“There are many people who live in Beaune who have never been to Villers-la-Faye. They think it’s too out of the way. Not important.”
“How far away is it?” Granted, we had been driving at Monsieur Beaupre’s habitual speed the night we had been there, but I didn’t remember it being very far.
“About ten minutes from Beaune.”
I laughed. “That’s funny. The university I will be going to next year in Montréal is a six-hour plane ride from my ho
me in Victoria.”
“Really? And it’s still in the same country?”
I nodded. “I guess the whole concept of distance is different for us Canadians. I went to a restaurant in Villers-la-Faye and I ate snails for the first time in my life.”
Sandrine’s surprised expression did not abate one iota. “Quoi? You never ate snails before?”
“No.”
“Now that’s crazy.”
I remembered the group of young people in the road by the brown gate across from the bakery. I examined Sandrine more closely to see if I could remember her being there that night. No. Still, it was an interesting coincidence, she being from Villers-la-Faye.
“I have to get to class,” Sandrine said. “I’ll meet you at the gates at lunch.”
“Super.” I now pronounced this word the French way/and found it to be a multi-purpose way of expressing agreement or pleasure.
I strolled to my first class, philosophie—mandatory for all students—feeling pleased. Here I was, not only able to make plans in my stilted French, but able to make plans to hang out in a café with actual French people my age.
At lunch I hurried out of my science class and towards the heavy wooden doors that let the students in and out of the walled schoolyard.
There was quite a crowd of older students huddled around, also waiting to leave.
“Do you have your student card?” Sandrine asked. She had already lit a cigarette, as had most of the people in the crowd.
I extracted the card from my backpack. “Oui.”
“You have to show it to le Dragon.”
“Who?”
Sandrine rolled her eyes. “The woman who controls the doors. We all call her le Dragon. She’s evil.”
I laughed.
“I’m not kidding,” Sandrine said, scowling.
Just then a woman with shellacked brown hair and dark eyes reminiscent of a shark stalked up to the doors with a large ring of ancient, long-handled keys jingling around her wrist.
The crowd of smoking students parted for her like the Red Sea for Moses. She narrowed her eyes, like she hated us all.
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