Madame Girard’s eyes were huge. “Nothing, of course. We are sending her to an excellent school in Dijon, so she will perhaps work for a while. Then she will get married and have children.”
I didn’t say anything, but just took a sip of my drink. No wonder Élise didn’t strike me as the most satisfied of females. I could even excuse her rudeness.
“Please,” Monsieur Girard said. “Don’t encourage Bruno too much by talking about travel, or about life in Canada.”
Madame Girard said nothing, but cast me a beseeching look.
I wasn’t sure how I was going to avoid talking about Canada, especially if Bruno asked me questions. Also, even though I loved France, I couldn’t be disloyal about a country that, not only did I adore but which remained my birthplace. On the other hand, I saw that the Girards were desperate; though I thought their attempts at trying to hold their adult son hostage were futile. I debated how to respond.
“Would you like to come to the wine tasting with me for a bit?” Monsieur Girard said, changing the topic, thankfully. Even when things were bad in Burgundy, there was always wine.
“I need to make supper,” Madame Girard unfolded her petite frame and got off the couch. “We are so glad to have you, Laura,” she added. She sounded sincere, although with her two youngest children, who seemed to resent my presence, and the oldest, who could possibly attempt to flee because of it, I wouldn’t have blamed her if she hadn’t been.
Monsieur Girard led me out to the courtyard. The December wind was bitter, and the whole village—a few houses and a church huddled together on an empty plain—seemed exposed to the elements.
There was a round-topped, short wooden door inset into the side of the house. Monsieur Girard unlocked it and beckoned me down the steep, worn stone steps that descended into the darkness below. When he got to the bottom, he turned on the lights. Although they were dim, they revealed a beautiful stone cellar that was filled as far as the eye could see with barrels. Cobwebs festooned most of the corners, but I was beginning to learn that this was a treasured feature of any Burgundian cellar worth its salt. Cellars in Burgundy have a particular smell—a musty yet inviting scent of squished grapes, macerating wine, and mold.
Bruno was already down there, hunched over an ancient-looking stone sink in the corner, drying glasses with a linen dishtowel. He eyed his father with disfavor.
“Do you have cellars like this in Canada?” he asked me.
“No. We don’t really have any winemaking to speak of—not good wine anyway.”
I was hoping this would dampen Bruno’s enthusiasm for the Great White North, but instead his eyes sparkled at the idea of “no winemaking to speak of.”
“That’s all anyone talks of here in Burgundy,” he said. “Wine. Wine. Wine.”
“I love the wine here,” I said. “And I find everything about winemaking to be fascinating. I don’t think you appreciate things until—” Damn. That was not the right thing to say at all.
“Until what?”
I was going to start saying “until you leave home,” but of course that was not the right thing to say. God, it was a minefield.
“Until you realize how lucky you are,” I finished, lamely.
“I don’t think that’s what you were going to say.” Bruno was close to me now, putting the wineglasses on the barrel. His father had wandered into an adjacent cellar to select a few bottles of wine. “Maybe I’ll break up with my girlfriend and you can bring me back to Canada with you.”
I turned to him in shock. What was that supposed to be? Flirting? A joke?
I said the first thing that popped into my head. “Canada is very cold, you know.”
“Maybe you could keep me warm,” he said, giving me an appraising look that made me feel distinctly squirmy.
CHAPTER 18
With a distinctly less comfortable home life, I became more and more invested with my friends at school. Sandrine was always loyal and friendly. She and Stéphanie commiserated with me over lunch at le Square that the village where I had landed was indeed in the middle of nowhere.
“Noiron!” Stéphanie said with disgust. “I couldn’t stand living in La Plaine.”
“Why not?” I asked.
Sandrine shook her head. “When you are from the Hautes-Côtes like we are, going to live in La Plaine is like…” She waved her jambon beurre in the air, clearly searching for the right words.
“It’s like living in the enemy camp,” Stéphanie said. “Plus, it’s so flat. I had a great aunt who made my great uncle move to La Plaine and he never recovered.” She tapped her temple. “He lost his mind. Never got better.”
“Who could blame him?” Sandrine said.
“Well…for now I’m stuck in La Plaine at the Girards,” I said. “The only saving grace is that I have my own room where I can hide.”
“We were thinking of going shoe shopping next weekend to Chalon,” Sandrine, who had just gotten her license, said. “Would you like to come?”
“Yes!” I said. “I would love that.” I probably appeared overeager—desperate even, but…too bad. It was the truth.
But the next weekend, which was the week before Christmas, the temperature plunged below zero, and on Friday night the whole region received an enormous dump of snow.
Sandrine called me on Saturday morning. “I can’t come pick you up. Desolée,” she said, “my dad won’t let me drive the car in the snow.” She broke off and said something biting to her mother. “It’s ridiculous.”
My heart sank. “I understand. What are you going to do instead?”
“We have a lot of snow up here in Villers—we’re at a higher altitude so we usually get tons. We’re all stuck in the village, so I’ll probably go over to Stéph’s house. Franck made it home from Dijon last night just before the trains were stopped, so we’ll all hang out. Olivier will probably come too.”
“Olivier?”
“You don’t know him. He’s Franck’s age, and they’re really close. It’s too bad you can’t come up here and hang out with us. You really have to meet Franck. He’s so great…”
I looked out the living room window, where the snow was piling up as I spoke. The weekend stuck in Noiron dragged out in front of me. “I wish I could too,”
“What are you going to do?” Sandrine asked, concern in her voice.
“I think I’m going to go for a walk,” I said. Élise had been giving me dirty looks since breakfast, Yves had been scuttling around in the dark corners and shadows trying to avoid me at all costs, and Bruno continued to interrogate me about life in North America despite his parents’ strictures. Were the cars really as big as they were on the TV shows? Did people really drink that much Coke? I needed to escape the house, even for a little bit.
“It’s cold out there,” Sandrine said. “I’m not sure a walk is such a good idea.”
“Sandrine. Please. I’m Canadian.” I didn’t need to mention that, in fact, where I lived in Canada was actually milder than Burgundy.
She laughed. “D’accord. We’ll try to do it after Christmas, OK?”
I found Madame Girard, who was in the kitchen braising some sort of meat for lunch, and let her know that I was headed out for a walk around the village. I brandished my camera. “I want to take photos of the snow. So beautiful.”
Her forehead creased. I could tell she wanted to clear up this bizarre behavior with her husband, who happened to be out doing something to frozen pipes with the other volunteer firefighters of the village.
“It’s cold,” she said.
“My jacket is warm,” I said. “I’m Canadian.” It had worked on Sandrine, after all.
She laughed too. “I suppose you are right. Don’t be too long though!”
I headed out, deciding to go up the trail, which I knew was somewhere alongside the road underneath the snow. Where should I go? There were about twenty houses and then the church. My options were hardly overwhelming. The church was near the opposite end of the village, so I tru
dged that way through the snow. My legs were burning and my face freezing by the time I reached the graveyard.
It would be good to go and warm myself up on a pew. The churches of Nuits-Saint-Georges were always open, and I had gotten into the habit of venturing inside just to sit in peace for a few minutes and enjoy the flickering candlelight of the offerings and the way the light shone through the stain glass windows.
I hadn’t seen a soul since leaving the house, and Noiron’s church looked similarly deserted. I trudged up to the large wooden door set in the stone edifice. I pulled down on the latch. It didn’t open. I rattled the door some more. Locked. I had never come across a church that was locked before in France.
I walked around the church; maybe there was a second door. There was, but it was locked as well. I let slip an un-Christian word, then wandered out between the snow-capped gravestones and finally wiped the snow off a wide granite one and perched myself on top. All around me, big fluffy flakes of snow floated to the ground.
Without the crunch and squeak of my footsteps, the quiet reasserted itself. What was an eighteen-year-old supposed to do with all this silence? My thoughts wandered to Bruno and his flirtations. He was nice to look at—that was certain—but there was something about him that didn’t appeal to me. He was too used to getting his own way, and he transformed into a petulant boy whenever his parents were around.
My ache was back, that longing for the person I could go for a walk with in the snow and then curl up with afterwards in front of a blazing fire; somebody I could confide in about Élise’s hatred of me and Madame Girard’s shrinking demeanor and even Bruno’s behavior; someone who I could laugh with about all of this and who, in doing so with me, would make it all seem lighter.
I was brought up to believe that no well-educated, ambitious woman needed a man. I should be enough all by myself. I was enough all by myself. Still, my soul felt like it was missing a piece, and no amount of shaming myself or trying to rationalize my way out of it made any difference. Of course I was far too young to think of committing to somebody long term, but still, I just wanted to find the person with whom that could be within the realm of possibility.
My problem, I concluded, was that I was a hopeless romantic. I had always been one, but this was a part of myself that I had never shared with anyone else. With boys back in Canada, and even boys in France like Thibaut, I played the role of a cynic. I acted like I didn’t care because I cared too much. It was a secret that I might have to keep locked away forever, I reflected, if I never met that elusive, perhaps non-existent person. The thought of never sharing my true self with anybody else was the final nail in my depression. I got up and trudged back to the house, thoroughly wretched.
I opened the door. Madame Girard must have been peering out the kitchen window, watching for me, because she was there before I had even been able to shut it behind me.
“I’m so relieved you’re back.” She wrung her hands. “I was worried you got lost.”
I wanted to ask how it was possible to get lost around here, with the village visible in the flat plain for miles around.
I took off my jacket. “No. It was just so pretty with the snow.”
“Aren’t you freezing?”
My hands and toes were feeling a little numb, but I didn’t want to add any additional worry to her already-fretting mind. “Not at all. This is like a spring day back in Canada.”
She smiled at that and hurried me into the dining room with the massive dark table in the middle, and sat me down at my seat. The table had already been set, and we all had wineglasses in front of us. I was discovering that generous consumption of wine at lunch and dinner was something that was par for the course with winemakers. She poured me a glass of their delicious white. There was much good in this family—I knew it—the proof was that their wine was truly excellent.
She called the rest of the family for lunch in her thin voice. First came Bruno, who eyed me up and down suggestively, as was his habit. Next came Yves, who took his seat and stared down at his plate without making any eye contact. Last came Élise, who had inherited her petite stature and thin face from her mother. Whereas Madame Girard’s expression was sweetly strained, Élise’s was sour. She didn’t hesitate to make eye contact with me; but she made it abundantly clear through a series of eye rolls and dagger looks at me that she resented everything about my presence.
I was going to have to try to make friends with her. I wasn’t quite sure how, but it was my job there to be conciliatory. I had no inkling why she hated me so much, and was surprised to find it bothered me more than it should. I was used to being liked, or at least tolerated.
I realized that Élise and Yves were both wearing blue cotton shirts with badges on their sleeves and a kind of rolled up tie thing secured by a lanyard around their necks.
“Are those uniforms?” I asked, making polite conversation.
They were not very attractive uniforms, to be sure, but I thought of my pin emblazoned navy Rotary blazer. People in glass houses…
Élise just glared at me, seemingly furious at my innocuous question. Yves continued to stare at his plate, as though waiting for food to magically materialize on it and for someone else to answer my question.
I took a few deep sips of my wine.
Bruno laughed. “Scouts,” he said derisively. “Can you believe at their age that they are Scouts? Of all the stupid wastes of time—”
“Bruno,” said Monsieur Girard warningly, as he refilled my wineglass with red this time.
Bruno snorted. “Yves should be out picking up girls instead of hanging out with a bunch of losers, and Élise should…I don’t know…be doing girl stuff. Scouts! You wouldn’t catch me dead at one of their meetings.”
Yves looked up and snarled at his older brother. “We wouldn’t have you anyway.”
I almost jumped out of my seat in surprise. That, I realized, was the most I had ever heard Yves say in one go. He had already gone back to looking at his plate.
Bruno just rolled his eyes. Élise kept staring daggers at me, as if I was to blame for the altercation—in fact, as though I was to blame for every bad thing that had happened in the universe since the dawn of time. Maybe even before that.
Madame Girard served a delectable meat in mustard sauce. I wasn’t sure exactly what it was, but it was good. I didn’t want to ask more details, as I was beginning to think that talking was a minefield best to be avoided. Instead, I applied myself to eating and drinking my excellent wine. Monsieur Girard, bless him, always kept my glass full.
“What are you going to do this afternoon Laura?” he asked me in a friendly tone.
I shrugged. “A friend and I were going to go to Chalon, but we can’t because of the snow. I guess I’ll read a bit and do some homework.”
He nodded, but then a few seconds later looked up at me again. “I know! Yves and Élise can take you to their Scouts meeting with them. There are lots of young people there. Maybe you can even join!”
My fork froze midair. I had absolutely no desire to go to a Scouts meeting in Canada, France, or anywhere else. I had been unceremoniously asked to leave my Brownies troop when I was eight years old because I kept failing my domestic arts badge. I could never remember to set the table with the knife blades pointing inwards instead of outwards—or perhaps it had been a subversive act to thwart my old battle-axe of a Brown Owl. The day I was kicked out was a day of heady freedom. The last thing I ever wanted to do was join any kind of organization like that ever again. Then it dawned on me—as an Ursus exchange student, I currently was a member of exactly that type of organization. Quelle horreur.
“Papa! Non!” Élise cried. “I hate you!” She burst into tears and fled from the table.
Scratch that, the last thing I ever wanted to do was to go to a Scouts meeting with Élise and Yves.
That was the last thing I wanted to do. “I really don’t need to—” I began.
“You will take Laura to the Scouts meeting with you,�
�� Monsieur Girard ordered Yves, his tone brooking no disagreement.
“There’s no need. I am happy to stay here—”
“And you will introduce her to all the young people there,” Monsieur Girard added. Nobody seemed to be at all interested in my opinion.
Yves ate for a few more minutes in stony silence, then threw his utensils down on his empty plate with a clatter and stormed upstairs.
“Would you like some more wine, Laura?” Madame Girard asked.
I held out my glass. “Yes please.”
By the time Monsieur Girard handed Yves the car keys and told me to get my coat on, I was sloshed. I got up from my chair and swayed alarmingly. I admonished myself to act sober.
This was my first foray into over imbibing alcoholic beverages…except for the time in Grade 10 when I ill-advisedly drank a Slurpee heavily dosed with Peppermint Schnapps and went to a school dance, only to throw it all up in Technicolor in front of the headmaster. Since then, I always drank in moderation. Even though I enjoyed wine, I knew my limits and stuck to them. At lunch I had been thoroughly depressed about the prospect of the Scouts meeting, and the delicious wine seemed like such a blessed comfort in the midst of the Gaza Strip of the Girard children. My sisters and I grew up fighting as all siblings do, but even at our worst, we were only a pale shadow of the strife contained within the Girard’s walls. How much had I drunk? I had lost count of the glasses. Five, maybe. Or six?
Yves was waiting by the front door for me, as was Élise who was now sporting a tear-stained face and puffy eyes, her little face screwed up into an almost comical expression of hatred.
“We’re waiting for you,” she said.
“Perhaps I should drive you,” Monsieur Girard said to Yves. “They’ve cleared the roads, but it’s still icy out there.”
“Papa,” Yves groaned, turning scarlet. “I can drive.”
“Have you had your license for long?” I asked Yves.
He didn’t answer me, but Monsieur Girard did. “He just got it last month, but he’s been driving tractors for years. You don’t need to be afraid.”
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