Maybe things would get back to normal once we were back home.
“Dad, don’t you think it would be all right for me to have just a little taste of wine at the vineyard?” I press. “I mean, we are supposed to be having a foreign experience, right? I can get soda at home,” I say, knowing this logic will drive my father nuts.
“I don’t think so,” my mother says, cutting her eyes to catch my father’s attention. For all of my parents’ outward coolness, they’re so old-fashioned when it comes to stuff like calling boys on the phone, white bread, and underage drinking.
“We’ll discuss it,” my mother says, drumming her plum-colored fingernails on the side mirror.
“Mom.”
“I said we will discuss it.”
“So…let’s discuss it.”
“Your father and I will discuss it.”
“Oh, fine.”
I launch back into my mantra.
I know all about mantras because my mother started taking yoga classes last year, when she turned forty. “I’m giving it to me as a gift from myself,” she said, as if anybody could deny that woman anything. My mother’s mantra is “I’m free and I’m enough.”
My mother was so free and so enough that she posed half naked for her painting teacher last summer. The teacher gave Mom the painting, and Mom gave it to my father as a gift. The painting is of Mom in blue jeans, no shirt, no bra. Topless. Just hanging out. Looking right at you. Like somebody surprised her in the middle of getting dressed. Every day for weeks, I’d take that painting down from their bedroom wall and stuff it under their bed. I mean, what if one of my friends saw that?
Word was already all over school that my parents often had dinner parties—none of my friends’ parents were ever invited—where they played Creedence Clearwater, the Grateful Dead, and the Rolling Stones and dinner wasn’t served until nearly midnight, and then it was often Chinese or Thai, or something in a communal pot you ate with sticks. There were no pigs in a blanket, no chicken divan, and absolutely no pudding in a cloud. After they’d finish a bottle of wine, my father would take it and roll it across the dining-room floor, and it would bang into the wall with a crash, and they’d all laugh like they were the funniest damn people on earth. How did they think any kid could sleep through that? Sometimes guests fell asleep on the living-room couches, and somebody would throw coats over them. Once the beanbag chairs ended up in the back flower bed, and an antique end table got smashed one night when it was used as part of an obstacle course in the living room to determine who was the least plowed to drive home.
Finally, my parents just stopped hanging that damn portrait up.
“Good grief,” my mother said, when she confronted me. “It’s art! The female body is beautiful.”
“It’s not the female body,” I reminded her. “It’s you.”
But it wasn’t just the possibility that my friends might see it and think my mother was a slut or a nudist weirdo. And it wasn’t my dad looking at it all the time; he never seemed to care one way or the other whether it was hung up. It was me. I couldn’t bear seeing her like that. It made me sick knowing one day that would be me.
The portrait was still under my parents’ bed, Mom’s liberated boobs gathering dust bunnies.
“Oh, Woogey,” my mother coos, and leans her head on his shoulder. He kisses her.
Even from the backseat I can see my dad going in for the breast grope. I shut my eyes.
“Would you just cut it out!” I yell. “We’re children, for God’s sake!”
“I should think you’d be comforted by the fact that your mother and father are so in love,” my mother says. “In this day and age, when divorce is on the rise, isn’t it nice to know your father and I are going to grow very very old together?” She plants her hand on his thigh.
“No,” I say under my breath.
Dee laughs.
“What was that, honey?” my mother says, but in that fakey voice that means she heard exactly what you said.
I tear the rock ’n’ roll magazine we got at the airport out of Dee’s hands. If she got Keith Moon sticky, I have license to kill her. Dee likes Roger Daltrey because he has long wavy hair. I love Keith, because he’s a wild man. He once set off a bottle rocket on The Ed Sullivan Show and that’s why Pete Townshend is deaf in one ear. I like that he’s a drummer too, not the show-offy guy out front. You have a better chance of getting the drummer than the lead singer. Of course, my mother loves Mick Jagger. She and Dad have seen the Rolling Stones three times! Have I seen them once? No, of course not! I’m too young!
My father says he isn’t threatened by my mother’s crush on Mick. Yeah, right.
“You’re speeding, Daddy,” Dee says. She leans over the seat and sticks her finger in his ear.
“Yes, sweet baby. We have to speed if we’re going to make the four o’clock vineyard tour. The light should be about perfect for photos.”
My father had been driving us all crazy on the trip, stopping the car over and over again and hopping out to go shoot a church, or a town square, or a field of poppies. Even Mom was starting to get annoyed with him. But I bet she’d like a picture of those pears growing inside those bottles.
“Don’t you want to see the caves, Deedle-dee?” my father says in this silly voice, and reaches around into the well behind his seat to grab Dee around the ankle and give her foot a little shake.
“They’re full of bats, right? Bats with gooey ears that fly into your hair,” Dee says with a screech, and leaps over onto my side of the seat. I punch her in the back, and she pinches the soft inside of my arm and twists it.
“Girls!” My mother whirls around and glares at us. “This is my vacation, and I will not tolerate fighting! Don’t make me come back there and sit between you.”
As soon as she turns around, I kick Dee again, hard, that time for my mother.
“Do you want me to pull over!” Dad shouts. For an instant I think he’s going to cross two lanes of traffic and do it. “I will, I will pull right the hell over if you two can’t behave yourselves!”
We are silent. My father is scary when he’s mad, which is seldom. He seems even scarier with the beard, like he’s a kidnapper. I chant my mantra, stopping at Pouilly-Fumé. I remember fumé means smoked. I imagine that the Pouilly-Fumé grapevines are set on fire to make the wine—snakes of flame crawling slowly along the thick curlicued vines, sparks bursting from the leaves, the grapes plumping with heat, then disappearing under heavy blankets of smoke.
“How do they smoke the Pouilly-Fumé grapes?” I call over the backseat. Dad likes it when I ask him questions.
“It’s not smoked,” he says, accelerating around a turn like he’s driving a race car.
“Fumer means smoke, or fire, in French. I know I got it right on my vocabulary test,” I say.
“Well, in this case,” my mother interrupts, “fumé refers to the morning mist that lies across the landscape and the fact that when the sun burns off the mist it looks like smoke is rising from the fields.”
“So it is smoke, in a sense,” I say.
“It looks like smoke, but it isn’t,” she says. “I wish I’d brought my sketchbook, I’d love to capture that,” she says.
“That’s stupid,” I say. “Why confuse people?”
My mother sighs. “Anything you don’t understand is stupid. Anyone who doesn’t think just like you and your girlfriends is stupid. It must be nice to be so perfect.”
“Smoke is smoke,” Dad says. He shakes his head, like I’ve committed some failure of imagination.
Nobody talks. It’s quiet in the car.
“So, Dad,” I say, “what’s the deal with the Pear William?”
I know it’s an eau-de-vie, but I’ll play dumb if it’ll make him happy.
“It’s an eau-de-vie,” he says.
“Oh, water of life, right?” See, Dad, I think, I speak French. I’m learning.
“Well, that’s the pretty name for it,” my father says. “It’s re
ally just brandy distilled from the fermented mash of fruit.”
I can’t win.
“I think I’d like to experience this eau-de-vie,” I say. “I don’t see why I can’t have one little glass.” I lean forward and put a hand on my father’s shoulder. “There’s no drinking age here, kids as little as Dee have wine with their dinner. Why can’t I?”
“Because I said so,” my mother snaps. “Please, Evelyn, let it go.”
“You’re not old enough to drink,” Dee says in this annoying told-you-so voice. She doesn’t even care that her hair is all mashed to her head, or that she’s wearing crappy Tweety Bird sneakers.
“I am so old enough,” I snap. “This is France, idiot.”
“You can’t let her, you can’t, Mom,” Dee says in this pleading baby voice. “What if she gets drunk? Who knows what she’ll do!”
“You wish, you spaz.”
“Listen, your mother knows best, Evie,” my father says. I try to catch his eye in the rearview mirror, but he won’t look at me.
“But Dad, you said I could!”
“Well, I thought about it some more and I made a mistake. Don’t think your old dad doesn’t occasionally make mistakes,” he says, and shrugs. I glare at him.
“Listen, let’s play a game, okay?”
My father always does this after he’s gotten us lost and he’s yelled, or it’s going to take longer to get where we’re going.
“All righty!” says Dee. “Whaddya wanna play?”
“A new game, it’s called magic or true—is that agreeable with you, Evie?”
“Evelyn?” my mother repeats when I don’t answer.
“Whatever,” I say. I know what they think, but I won’t forget that he said I could drink booze.
“Okay,” Dad says, eager to play. “Magic or True is a game we used to play in school when I was a kid. You’ll like this one.” He laughs. “It is possible to remove the skin from an entire apple in one long continuous peel. Magic or True?”
“True,” Dee shouts out, pleased with herself.
“Of course,” I say. It’s so dumb, so simple it has to be a trick question.
“Smart girls. Smart girls. When I was a boy I said, ‘That’s impossible, that’s got to be magic,’” my father says, driving a little too fast up the road and into the parking lot, gravel shooting out from under our wheels like bullets.
Dee laughs. “No way, Daddy. No way you were that dumb.”
The tour is just getting started when we arrive.
“Right on time,” my mother says as she locks her door. My father slips his money belt under his shirt and the two of them link arms. My mother winks at my father and he gives her a long kiss, a kiss that seems staged just to get under my skin. Then he grins, like he’s pleased with himself for getting here without killing us.
“Yay Daddy!” Dee sings out, and my father bends down and launches her up into the air and onto his shoulders. My mother puts her arm around my dad and sticks her hand in the back pocket of his jeans so her hand is on his butt. I don’t need to see this. You can bet if I ever did that to some guy my parents would cut my arm off.
“Oh, just give me a break,” I say, and hang back. Dee is clapping her hands like a deranged monkey, but for a second I’m jealous of her. When I was younger Daddy used to carry me upstairs to bed when I fell asleep on the sofa or in the car driving home from dinner out at somebody’s house. I remember the feeling of being weightless in his arms. Even when I’d wake up as he carried me up the stairs I’d pretend to be asleep and keep my eyes closed tight so he’d carry me into my bedroom and tuck me in.
I hurry to catch up with them. I wrap my arm around my father’s waist. I’m embarrassed by how good it feels to be so close, the four of us, but he doesn’t put Dee down to put an arm around me like he should. Instead he reaches up and places both hands on the small of her back, like he’s protecting her from falling backward.
“Hey, kiddo,” he says, barely looking down at me.
I try to hold tight to him so we can all walk together, in sync for a moment, but my mother’s arm is in the way, and it’s hard to keep ahold of him when he won’t put his arm around me, so I just let go. I watch as the three of them move on ahead of me, until anybody seeing us wouldn’t even know we were together.
“Okay, Princess, you’re killing your old man here. Down, down,” my father says, and lifts Dee from his shoulders like she doesn’t weigh a pound.
“Wow, this is something.” He motions to the big château and the gardens. “Very nice.”
“C’est magnifique,” my mother says in her goofy French accent. Unless I am wrong, this whole crappy trip is about my mother’s happiness. France itself exists just to amuse her. It’s so unfair I can barely stand it.
Our guide is a plump, bald-headed man in a rumpled black suit; the pants are floods, so you can see his yellow socks. As we assemble with the dozen or so other tourists, he straightens up and smiles at us, the way teachers do when they want you to stop talking. My parents squeeze to the front of the pack. My father has his hands in his back pockets, his head tipped back admiring everything, like he’s taking notes. He lifts up his camera and snaps a few pictures. Dee clings fast to my mother’s leg like it’s a fence post and she’s facing a hurricane. She tugs on my mother’s jeans and my mother takes off her sunglasses and hands them down to Dee, who slips them on. She looks like The Fly.
I stay at the back of the crowd. There’s a cute French boy, who looks about seventeen. I bet he rides a Vespa. His black hair hangs over one of his catlike eyes. He smiles at me. I turn away for a second because I’m blushing. He’s staring at me like he’s wondering what I look like in a bathing suit. Why can’t American boys be into me like this?
He walks right up to me and stands there, inches away. The boy has a scar cutting through his eyebrow that looks like a knife cut from a fight, or maybe he gashed his face climbing over the barbed-wire fence of his reform school. He is so close I can smell his b.o. and I don’t even care, it doesn’t even seem that gross. In fact, maybe I like it. How come French boys can smell but American boys just stink?
I lag behind the group as we weave through the vineyard toward the château. I look at the hard bunches of black and green grapes and wish they were burning right now, wish that the air was full of smoke. When my father scans the crowd with his camera and the lens fixes on me, I just flash him a quick smile that lets him know I see him looking at me, and I’m fine, but I don’t wave or do anything that might tip the boy off that I’m with my parents. My father doesn’t act like he sees me at all, but he lingers on me for a second, adjusting his lens, and I wonder if he’s taking my picture. I wonder what it is he sees.
My mother turns her head to look for me. Posing in profile, I nod at her, willing her to stay where she is, and she flashes me her I-am-giving-you-space-to-be-an-irrational-teenager smile. The same annoyingly patient smile she gives me when I won’t let her hold my hand when we cross through the parking lot at the mall.
The last leg of the tour is through the fruit orchards. Small hard peaches dangle from the branches, their pink-and-pale-yellow skin covered with fuzz, like a girl’s mustache. The air is full of flies and bees that cling and crawl on the puffy and split skins of the overripened peaches that have dropped onto the ground.
Our guide pauses and waits for us all to assemble in the pear grove. “There are several varieties of pear grown in France.” He pauses. “The tender yellow cuisse-dame pear, which translates into English as ‘lady’s thigh,’” he says, and his icky lips pucker a little like he’s dreaming right now of sinking his teeth into the soft white skin of a woman’s thigh. “There’s also bright green tant-bonne pears, which some of you may know means ‘so good,’ and the brute-bonne pear,” the guide says with a sneer, “is brown and stout and ugly, but oh, she tastes like heaven.”
Some of the people laugh like this is such a surprise, or it isn’t a surprise but it should be.
But the pear tha
t sounds the best to me is the Louise-bonne pear, which the guide says “was named to immortalize a woman in Les Essarts, but no one knows why or who she was—it’s still a mystery,” he says with a romantic sigh.
“Sort of defeats the purpose, huh?” jokes a man whose wife is wearing an identical khaki outfit, pockets bulging with phrase books and Kleenex. This is just the sort of romantic thing that an American man can’t understand.
God, what would it be like to be loved like that? I imagine holding a Louise-bonne, my heartbeat being absorbed the same way a pear absorbs the sun. I look at the French boy with the sexy scar and imagine the letters we’d write each other, mine scented with my mother’s Chanel No. 5, his with bike grease and sweat.
We follow the guide up a grassy path that winds through the pear trees. The boy pauses on the path and looks up at the sun like he can tell the time this way, as if he’s had to live by his wits and instincts like some kind of alley cat, and for a moment I’m afraid he’s going to bolt. I smile at him and catch his eye, cocking my head like, Come on. I signal him, Keep up. My heart is going crazy as I turn away and unbutton another button on my shirt. Up ahead I notice a weird glimmering in the flat green leaves, light bouncing off of something crystalline, a shimmer like heat trapped in glass. When we reach the glen, I stop.
Here is the pear orchard my mother had seen in the magazine. I turn to look for her, imagining her getting right up close to the trees and checking them out, but she and Dad are standing back from the group holding hands. Dee is back up on his shoulders. Standing on tiptoe, I can spy the pears growing inside the bell-shaped bottles. Some branches have pears that are tiny and hard looking, little green baby fists of fruit, others are pulled down low with the heavy, fully grown and ripened pears. Some of the pears are pale brown and have long tapered waists and big broad bottoms, others are nearly spherical gold balls. All of the pears look like the bodies of women grown in bottles, captured women slowly being lowered to earth. I wonder if this is what was so interesting to my mother, if this was what she wanted me to see.
The French boy reaches out and touches a bottle, turning it in his hand so that the little pear inside jiggles on the branch, nearly snapping loose. He grins at me, like that bottle is my body he’s handling, and my stomach scrunches up.
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