Have Mother, Will Travel

by Claire Fontaine

  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.

  The French aren’t known for their patience.

  Nothing?”

  My mom’s decided she wants to take down what few paintings and decorations our studio has.

  “Nothing,” she confirms, this time with more certainty.

  She carefully tucks a framed print of a sunflower field under one arm, gathers the vase with sixties-style straw flowers in the other, and walks them to the closet.

  “These too,” she adds, reaching for the Chinese calligraphic paintings on the wall. “Let’s make the walls disappear.”

  I’d been thinking of how to make it cozier, because it felt sparse to begin with, maybe buy a bright throw blanket for the Click-Clack, some pretty French posters for the wall. She’s so certain about wanting this, though—uncharacteristically certain—that I don’t say anything but just watch her move deliberately from one object to the next.

  It reminds me a little of how she behaved in Plovdiv, when she got suddenly sad but just let herself feel sad without feeling the need to explain herself. And I like that even though she clearly has no idea why she wants blank walls, she’s acting on her impulse. I’m beginning to suspect that more times than not, she’s ignored, or felt the need to justify, wanting certain things for herself.

  Maybe it’s a good sign; wanting a house and things to fill it with didn’t exactly work for her before. Perhaps like the wind that blows Avignon’s skies clear, emptying the apartment of all things will create a tabula rasa for my mom to reinvent herself at midlife.

  A few minutes later the room is nearly bare, just white walls, a white floor, a white desk, and black leather chairs. She strides to the middle of the room, laces her hands behind her head, and stares out the giant windows. The walls have seemed to disappear, as though our apartment is nothing more than a platform elevating
us skyward and putting us eye-level with the birds squawking in the trees.

  “It feels like we’re living outdoors,” she says happily. “I’ve always wanted a house of mostly windows.”

  I’m glad she’s pleased, so I don’t add that (a) we’re not wood nymphs and (b) when we close the shutters it’ll look like a mental ward’s isolation room.

  While she’s looking out the window I dump out the brochures and pamphlets we picked up at the tourist bureau and spread them out on the bed. An incredible number of museums, churches, and monuments are stuffed within Avignon’s rampart walls, and within an hour’s drive there are well over a dozen of the quaint Provençal villages and small cities that this area is so famous for. There are museums for absolutely everything: bicycles, lavender, wine, perfume, fruits and vegetables. Even garlic gets its own exhibit.

  “Ooh, look!” my mom says excitedly, showing me a brochure featuring a gathered silver brocade ball gown. “There’s going to be a special Christian Lacroix fashion exhibition in Arles. And check these out.”

  I take the matte, eggshell-colored cardboard brochure from her and examine the gorgeous, dramatic, larger-than-life sketches of nude or partially clothed women with the word “Extases” written below. Ecstasies.

  The local cell phone we bought suddenly rings from my mom’s purse. She looks quizzically at me.

  “Mom, pick it up before it stops ringing.”

  She hesitates one more second before answering haltingly, “Bonjour?”

  She looks at me like a deer in headlights, so I nod encouragingly at her like a toddler. Telling my mom not to bring her electronic translator was incredibly dumb of me; I’ve taken its place.

  “Un moment, Isabelle, s’il vous plaît. Oh, yes, sorry, tutoyer, s’il te plaît and I don’t understand anything else, un moment.”

  She then thrusts the phone at me like a hot potato.

  Lesson Three: The French love their language in a way that’s impossible for an American to understand; it’s central to their identity. The French are verbally clever and quick, they assess and opine strongly and well and adore spirited conversation. Patrice Leconte’s Oscar-winning Ridicule depicts brilliantly how a particularly clever turn of phrase, preferably one with cruel wit, could in a single instant win or lose you favor with the king, something that determined your entire fortune, if not your very life. There’s even a government body, l’Académie française, that protects, with force of law, the purity of the language by dictating grammar, pronunciation, and vocabulary.

  The French can also sometimes be a nervous people; in Paris, often impatient. Doing anything slowly can be a trial for them; speaking slowly feels like slow death. However, if they speak no English and you’re both stuck with your mediocre French, all is not lost—

  Lesson Four: The French are like magpies, they love the new, the stylish, the interesting, they love panache, l’esprit. You are automatically new to them, and if you are also intelligent, lively, and dressed with even a modicum of style, quelle différence. If you speak away fearlessly, as if you love the language as much as they do, they’ll overlook every mistake, or if they do correct you, they’ll come hurrying back down the block or store aisle to apologize for correcting you (this has happened to me in real life, three times).

  If you also happen to be young and attractive, as Mia is, you’ll be invited into people’s lives, and waiters will remember every little thing about you. We haven’t even left our little area and already Mia’s a big hit. She navigates both the streets and the language with me happily, if cluelessly, in tow.

  Our approach to French highlights a very fundamental difference between us that shows up in a lot of areas of our lives. I have to understand everything to understand anything. No continuing ed classes for me. At forty-three, I registered for college French, took four semesters, studied like mad, and made straight As. I’ve even brought a textbook with me here to study each day. I’m constitutionally unable to spit out the wrong words while looking for the right ones. Which means that I’m not only slow to understand, owing to nerve deafness and tinnitus in one ear, but even slower to speak, owing to, I don’t know, my brain, I guess.

  Mia glides through French as cavalierly as she does life, happy to be on a need-to-know basis. She’s had five years in school; her vocabulary’s great and her accent perfect. Her tenses and grammar, however, oy. But she breezes right along not caring about mistakes, telling folks that her mother will be going to Gordes ten years ago or that she’ll be sure to went tomorrow. They don’t care about her mistakes, either, because she makes them quickly and with l’esprit.

  Next to her, I’m a lumbering, linguistic dinosaur. However, in Provence, where life is slow and sweet, I’m treated, or tolerated, with patience and downright sweetness. They are not, however, so patient with one another when it comes to their language. Which can make for a very memorable evening.

  Ooo care what ze academy say! ‘Nique ta mère’* ees also correct grammaire,*!” Isabelle snaps angrily with an aggravated flick of the hand.

  Dear God, please don’t let her smack the maître d’, I’m too hungry to be thrown out of here. Here being a lovely restaurant in the quaint town of St. Remy de Provence. Anthony and Isabelle have brought us here after showing us the spectacular limestone cliffs of Les Baux. As classy and delicate as she is, you don’t mess with the language in Isabelle’s world.

  I look to Anthony but he’s gone from being shocked at her uncharacteristic profanity to interested in how much more entertaining this can get, because waiters are clustering around us, adding their deux centimes. Fingers are wagging, lips are pouffing, and words are flying around our heads. All because of green beans; rather, the pronunciation of them.

  Les haricots verts (green beans) was always properly pronounced with the h silent, lay ’areeco verrr; until an English queen who was unable to say it correctly said layzarico verr, running it together. Rather than correct a queen, the academy made a new rule allowing that pronunciation. A hundred years later, purists like Isabelle and Chrystelle still consider it a bastardization and say it the proper French way.

  That the waiters have joined in the fray is typical. Here, everyone’s qualified and eager to “discuss” their language. This kind of heated argument simply wouldn’t happen in public in America without someone calling the manager or possibly the police. Here it’s part of everyday life. Store clerks snap, heated discussion ensues, agreement reached (usually), everyone’s happy and on their way. Friends will have awful fights and see each other the next day as if nothing happened. A couple who never fights? We see a stable marriage, they see two boring people who have no opinions of their own or enough passion to even muster a good fight. Kind of like Paul and me. In the beginning, he thought it was walking papers every time we had a “passionate disagreement.” I called it clearing the air.

  Almost every waiter in the place has weighed in, Isabelle’s flushed with aggravation, the maître d’ keeps rolling his eyes. Things reach a crescendo, shoulders are shrugged, wineglasses refilled, and it’s once more a quiet restaurant. Mia and Isabelle continue whatever conversation they were having before and Anthony and I continue analyzing the complex mushroom bisque served in tiny little teacups.

  “Non, I don’t fink vey* are smoked, les champignons (mushrooms),” Anthon
y says.

  “Maybe they brown the butter,” I suggest. I hear the word douche and Mia trying to explain to Isabelle why it’s hard to get used to saying their word for “shower.”

  Mia to Isabelle: In English, it’s a much more private kind of washing.

  Isabelle to Mia: You mean ze shower?

  Anthony to me, about the teacup: Why do zey use zis fing, I cannot make my fingers like zis.” He tries to hold it like a teacup, but his man-fingers can’t manage it.

  Mia: Well . . . kind of, but a bath only for (she points down into her lap).

  Isabelle, puzzled: Mia, I ’ave no idea what you are saying.

  Me to Isabelle, leaning toward her for discretion, pleased I actually can say it in French: C’est un bain spécialement pour les femmes. (It’s a special kind of washing just for women.)

  Anthony, nonchalantly, to anyone: Oh, I know zis fing what you say.

  Isabelle to me: Ahhh, le bidet?

  Mia to Isabelle: Well, not exactly.

  Anthony to anyone: But I know vis fing.

  Me to Isabelle: Non, c’est seulement pour des femmes (no, it’s only for women), typiquement après sexe (typically after sex).

  Isabelle, still puzzled: Do you ’ave a dictionary?

  Anthony to anyone, insistent: I tell you I know vis fing what you say!

  Me, abruptly, to Anthony: How on earth could you possibly know what we’re talking about?

  Anthony, relieved to be finally heard, proudly: Eets for ze vajeene!

  A waiter’s face registers this as he passes, Isabelle and Mia stop talking, I cock my head.

  Anthony, pleased and quite serious: Oui, pour la balance! (alternating his hands up and down) you know, ze equilibrium, een ze vajeene!

  Mia and I burst out laughing and immediately clap our hands over our mouths. Isabelle’s jaw falls in mortification.