Have Mother, Will Travel: A Mother and Daughter Discover Themselves, Each Other, and the World

by Claire Fontaine

  I believe my mother sees herself similarly, at least when it comes to me.

  We flew here separately and agreed to meet at the airport Sheraton Hotel lobby at noon. I waited for her but after an hour jet lag kicked in, so I propped my head up with my backpack and dozed off until I heard my name harshly whispered. I looked up to see my mom standing with perfect posture, a blue silk scarf tied around her neck just so, and visible disapproval at seeing a situation that was “pas (not) comme il faut.” She informed me that this wasn’t a hostel and not only was I asleep in a nice hotel lobby, but asleep in sweatpants and flip-flops (that’s what grungy teenagers wear, Mia—do you know how many people find jobs or meet spouses on planes?).

  My mother has always been very French in her ways; she just never knew it until the first time she visited and found sixty million other people “Just like me!” A whole population in love with ideas, who find politics and religion perfect dinner topics, who love to fuss over food and correct others.

  Having a cultural guide to ward off potential faux pas is terrific, but we’re unpacking now and I see her eyeing what I’ve brought. I’d bet money that if she wasn’t so jet-lagged she’d already have commented on what I packed, didn’t pack, should have packed, and shouldn’t expect to borrow from her. I’m surprised it never occurred to me that rooming together (in a studio, no less) gives the most critical person in my life a front-row seat to the action. The amount of junk food I eat, how late I’m sleeping in, if I’m slouching, if my nails are neatly trimmed—without things like jet lag, skewered scorpions, and one-humped camels to distract her, this might be like living under a microscope.

  The fact that it’s a spacious studio should help; it’s open and airy with high ceilings, a separate bathroom, a full kitchen, and two enormous windows that open into the robust cluster of trees growing from behind the alley’s stone wall. Isabelle has simply but tastefully decorated it with two white desks, a circular glass coffee table, and matching black leather chairs. It looks minimalist and modern, although decidedly un-modern is the complete absence of anything electronic; no TV, no telephone, no Internet connection.

  My mom sees this as a good thing, happily noting how this will force us to unplug and be present for each other and ourselves. I wait for Isabelle and her boyfriend Anthony to leave before telling my mom that just because Avignon looks medieval doesn’t mean we need to live like we’re in the Dark Ages, but she just shrugs me off.

  I’ve just opened my groggy, half-blind eyes to find my darling daughter’s face bent right over mine, framed by the bright morning sun. She leans in and pulls out my earplugs.

  “Hey!” I protest.

  “Mother, you can never plop into this bed again, do you hear me, ne-VER,” she barks. “This thing will swallow us up like a Venus fly trap! One minute you’re mumbling by the bed and the next—BAM!” she smacks her hands, “you pass out! You’re lucky I grabbed the other end of it.”

  It being le Click-Clack, the big hybrid futon/hide-a-bed/sofa Isabelle introduced with a Vanna White sweep of the arm, just after she introduced her boyfriend, Anthony. He’s as tall and gregarious as she is tiny and quiet, with big blue eyes and curly blond hair. They launched into an enthusiastic demo of le Click-Clack, which involved a symphony of maneuvering and grimaces, during which we were instructed to listen for the distinct CLICK! Aaaaand, voilà, ze bed!

  And indeed, it looked kind of flat. Then Anthony touched something that made it snap shut like a mousetrap. There was some fast prying and pushing (and I’m sure I heard a merde or two) and finally, voilà, le sofa! Perspiring, Anthony praised it as a feat of engineering, all ze mechanicals inside ze bed, where you cannot even see eet!

  Apparently I fell asleep before le clack fully CLICKED, because I’m in the gully of a V—not that it kept me awake. When Mia doesn’t sleep, your best hope is to mollify, mitigate, and make every kind of nice you know. Which will be easy now that (a) I’ve had ten uninterrupted hours of sleep and (b) I’m in France. There’s a lovely cacophony of birds coming in the windows along with a cool breeze.

  “Isn’t this place lovely?” I sigh. “Let’s—”

  “Listen up!” She crawls over me to get to her side. “I’m gonna rig this thing into place and then we’re not going to touch it, got it? We’re going to leave it open for the rest of the time we’re here.”

  “Okay. Can I go to the bathroom first?”

  “No! Just go to the foot of your side, slowly,” she orders.

  I move by inches, not because I’m afraid of getting jackknifed between click and clack, but because I’m scared I’ll be clacked inside with her.

  She curls her top half under the bed and starts futzing around down there. Muttering is occurring and merde has already become her expletive of choice.

  “And you failed to notice how nicely your messy daughter unpacked and organized everything!” she calls out. “I had to do something while you slept for ten hours!”

  “Welcome to my world! I’m always waiting for you to wake up. How long will this take? I have to go to the bathroom.”

  “Well, you’ll just have to wait! My God, you’re like a baby!”

  And I actually turned down long-term care insurance last month.

  “No problem, honey! Just tell me what to do next.”

  “Feed me!”

  Lesson One: The French generally think they know everything. The good news is they usually do and they want you to as well (I just love this in a person). Along with any request, and sometimes without it, they may correct, instruct, or advise you. Take it as the kindness it is intended to be and be grateful you’re not a child-size French person, in which case the lesson is sometimes reinforced with a smack, sometimes upside the head. Like American parents of yesteryear, the French have no taboo against disciplining children strictly, loudly, and publicly when deserved, in ways most Americans today would find shocking and disturbing. Consider yourself warned and try not to stare. French parents are keenly aware that they’re raising citizens of France. They see allowing poor manners as abuse, handicapping a child’s ability to become part of civilized society. You needn’t worry about les enfants. Clearly, it has not caused any loss of self-esteem.

  Lesson Two: The only thing the French like better than knowing everything and gastronomie is solving problems. It allows them to engage in logic and discourse (they’re taught dialectics in grade school: thesis + antithesis = synthesis) all while helping their fellow man, something also very important to them. If it’s a group effort, all the better.

  Case in point: I once went into a shop in Chartres for directions to a monastery. Now, a monastery is a big thing and Chartres is a tiny town in the middle of cornfields. The shop owner couldn’t believe she didn’t know it.

  She called in a neighbor to help, a big woman with a ruffled dress, plenty of rouge, and fabulous, aqua, side-button kidskin shoes that looked as if they came right off Jean Harlow. The sky darkened and it started to rain as they pondered and debated. Arms waved, shoulders shrugged, lips pouffed. In another country, they would have apologized, made suggestions, and moved on.

  Madame Ruffles took my arm and walked me around several blocks, in the rain (nous ne sommes pas faites de sucre, après tout!; after all, we’re not made of sugar!), looking high and low, as if a giant Romanesque structure might have somehow escaped her notice all these years. We returned to find the shop owner joined by two men. Incroyable! Il n’existe pas! I assured them it existed, showing them a card with the address, which, like most big buildings in small towns, has no number or street, just Maison St. Yves, Chartres, France.

  They puzzled for twenty minutes. It was getting late and I was going to miss check-in, but I felt worse for them. They were trying so hard. They finally sent me off with great regret, free candy, and hotel phone numbers (turned out they had no idea the monastery had become a hostel with a new name). I’ve found this kind of effort fairly typical.

  Till today. I’ve stopped into a gourmet shop to as
k the salesclerk where I could find the tourist bureau.

  “Oh là là,” she says, with a doubtful expression. “C’est près d’une église, je crois.” She thinks it’s near a church, which describes half of Avignon.

  A policewoman with a blond chignon perusing mustards overhears and says, Non, non, non, madame, c’est somewhere else I can’t understand. Then a gorgeous, rail-thin woman in all white chimes in with her non, non, non. After some friendly “discussion” between them (in the United States it would be called un petit argument), the woman in white cedes, and they turn to me and announce with great regret:

  “Desolée, madame, mais je ne pourrais pas vous l’éxpliquer. C’est tout simplement pas possible.”

  Not possible to explain? Say quoi? The women do the shoulder-shrug-lip-pouf thing.

  Basically, Avignon ’ave too many leetle rues (streets) going zis way and zat. All they could offer was that it’s near a church that actually may not be a church anymore.

  No problem, I’m thinking, the entire intramuros oval is one mile wide and less than a mile across. If I can find a giant fish head served on a banana leaf in Singapore while under-slept, underfed, and under pressure, I can find the tourist bureau in Avignon. And find our way home, too, because we found a second landmark. Painted on a window on the other corner of our building is a life-size pair of woman’s legs, naked and spread-eagled, with Royal Tattoo on a fat red heart over the crotch. Right at eye level. If for some reason we miss this gem, fifty yards away is her pal Pleasure Max.

  “Okay, Mia,” I announce as I join her at Bar les Célestins, a charming bar/café near our studio. “Avignon awaits us and today I shall be our guide. Let us away!”

  BASIC RECIPE FOR A FRENCH BLOCK

  2 hair salons

  2 bar-tabacs (cigarettes, maps, lottery tickets, soda, espresso, wine)

  3 bar/cafés

  2 bistros

  2 restaurants (there are laws about what constitutes a café, bistro, brasserie, and restaurant)

  2 patisseries (pastries, desserts, sometimes bread)

  1 boulangerie (breads, croissants, sometimes quiche)

  1 traiteur (deli/ready-made food, wine)

  2 sandwicheries (a sliver of space with a deli case of sandwiches, pizza, drinks)

  1 or more of the following shops: boucher (meat), poissonnier (fish), produce

  2 pharmacies

  4 immobiliers (real estate offices with photos posted on the windows)

  1 librairie (bookstore, often used or antiquarian)

  1 optometry shop

  5 piles of dog merde

  Five hours later, I realize zey weren’t kidding. While it may be handy to be able to get a pastry, haircut, eyeglasses, and baguette all on one block, it’s completely disorienting when you can do it on almost every block.

  Add to that the fact that, designed to baffle both the powerful winds and an invading cavalry, almost every street of Avignon is either curved or deliberately zigzagged; often even the connected buildings on a single street zig and zag at the seams, as if early city planners took pinking shears to their blueprints. Meaning you can rarely see farther than a single block, or even half of one. Oh, and the same street usually changes names each block. And except for tall church steeples and the occasional tower, the buildings are almost all the same height, the same sandy-gray stone, with the same dusty blue, or occasionally jade, shutters. Wherever you are looks like wherever you just were and wherever you’re headed.

  No matter, we’ve spent a lovely day wandering into antique and clothing shops, sampling patisseries galore, and peuple-watching over limonades. The most delightful discovery was a row of huge ground-level windows that were bricked in and painted with life-size trompe l’oeil scenes from plays performed during Avignon’s famous yearly Festival of Art. It’s arriving here in a month, along with an extra hundred thousand people.

  By sundown, I’m just looking for the way home. We duck into a dark, vaulted passageway that spits us out onto yet another unfamiliar plaza. I suggest we rest while I figure out how to get back. It’s growing cool and Mia’s shoulders are bare so I pull out my blue pashmina and hand it to her as we sit in one of the cafés in the square. She sinks into the chair, orders for us, yawns, and leans back to rest.

  The waiter brings a rosy kir in a tall flute for Mia, house red for me. Even with the euro, wine here is cheaper and included in all fixed-price meals, including lunch. I got free champagne, wine, and a sweet after-dinner drink on the plane, in economy. If you white-knuckle your way up the narrow, twisting road to the peak of Mont Ventoux, the highest in France, what’s waiting to fortify you on the equally dangerous and terrifying way down? A long table of cookies, sausages—and wine.

  French wines are “lighter” and sharper than what they call American-style wines, which are oaky and dense, “friendlier” as the French say. When a French vintner who was trying to make an American-style wine finally succeeded, he named it Fat Bastard.

  “Sorry I’ve walked us so far away. But I know it has to be that way from where the sun’s setting.” I point south, though I know Mia puts no stock in my orienteering skills.

  “Mother.”

  Uh-oh, I know that tone.

  “Do you recognize the glass phone booths behind me?”

  “No, there are glass phone booths all over the place.”

  “Well, do you see that stone madonna up there?” She turns and points.

  “Don’t you love that the madonnas are everywhere here? I imagine each has its own story. I bet we can Google—”

  “Well, she’s red,” she interrupts pointedly.

  As a matter of fact, she is. High on the corner of a building is a carved stone madonna with a toddler Jesus on her hip. She’s perched on a half-sphere of curling leaves and has a little weathered dome above her head. She’s a little chipped and faded, but definitely red.

  “She was red the first three times I saw her. We’ve circled the same area all day, Mom. That’s the madonna over the boucherie. Where we got our twenty-dollar stuffed tomato. Our studio is just past it,” she turns and points, “one long, curved block from the Royal Red Crotch.”

  Now that she mentions it, I do remember seeing the red madonna, vaguely, once. Okay, and maybe Betty Boop’s hearted-over nether parts, once. Nothing else looked at all familiar.

  “Well, if that block is curved, Magellan, how can you be so sure the tattoo parlor is there? You’re just guessing and hope I’ll fall for it.”

  “Oh, Mom,” she sighs, shaking her head ruefully. “See, here’s how it works.” She leans in, quoting Jon Lovitz in A League of Their Own, “The train moves, not the station.” Gesturing for the slow students, she adds, “Buildings are stationary. The sun is not.”

  “Well, I think you’re wrong,” I retort. Actually, I kind of don’t, because the scavenger hunt made clear that I somehow gave birth to a homing pigeon. “And that way is south, so we’d have run right into it.”

  “Mother, the only thing you’d have run into would have been Le Petit House of Condoms, and that’s because it’s sticking out a foot.”

  “Well, I don’t know how you can tell any of these streets from the other, they all look the same!”

  “I know,” she says sweetly. “That’s why you do this little thing called pay attention, where you notice things, you know, on purpose.” She smiles, raises her glass. “Guess who’s navigating from now on.”

  Bonjour, mes filles,” Chrystelle calls to my mom and me, waving as she walks toward us in a chic little black dress and big, dark sunglasses.

  As we exchange kisses and hellos, she winks at me and casually slips a black sweater into my purse. I smile. She must have heard my mom chiding me earlier this week for not bringing a sweater.

  “Now, girls, I ’ope you come ’ongry because today I take you to my favorite lunch place.”

  We follow her toward Place des Pénitents Blancs, a small plaza near our apartment.

  “So, girls,” Chrystelle says,
gesturing up toward the tall buildings encircling the plaza. “Can you guess why eet is my favorite place?”

  “It’s the light!” my mom immediately exclaims. “It’s different from anywhere else in the city!”

  “Like you can touch the air eetself, non?” Chrystelle finishes for her with a smile.

  No wonder they’re such good friends. I was busy squinting up at a gargoyle spout, clueless about what Chrystelle might be referring to, while my mom instantly noticed some infinitesimal change in atmospheric conditions. They move into a conversation about some French photographer as we walk into a funky little café. It reminds me of Matisse, a similarly eclectic restaurant in the plaza just outside our apartment, Place des Corps Saints.

  The name literally means Plaza of the Bodies of the Saints, named after Pierre de Luxembourg, a young cardinal who insisted on being buried in the cemetery for the poor despite his noble status. The cemetery has since been paved, and a bustling little plaza sprung up in its place, complete with several eateries, a burbling fountain, and a fourteenth-century Célestin monastery whose chapel now houses art exhibitions.

  Our neighborhood’s very hip, with a blend of artists, university students, longtime residents, and a thriving gay community. The side streets are filled with small shops selling artisanal products, books, antiques, and cell phones, and designer and consignment shops. There’s a smattering of street art and clever graffiti. During the day it’s rather quaint, but at night Place des Saints Corps is a real hot spot (though not as hot as it used to be; according to Chrystelle, our neighborhood used to be plagued with crime, drugs, and—on the appropriately named Rue de Coq—“ ’Ow you call them, peemps?”).

  Because the area within Avignon’s fortress walls is so small, “neighborhoods” often consist of only a few blocks, and just two blocks away is Place St. Didier, the former executioner’s block. A prominently placed plaque details the plaza’s bloody history, including the time when the tables were turned and the executioner was executed. He’d been doing an exceptionally poor job decapitating one fellow (their instruments were often dull) and, fed up with his excessive hacking, the crowd turned on him and set the intended victim free.