by Don Wallace
But before we could meet the couple, they submitted plans for a three-story McMansion to the Mairie de Sauzon, or mayor’s office. Once enough people had taken a look and gagged, Gwened the Archer led a charm offensive. The couple blew her off. Gwened took our protest to the Mairie de Sauzon, who dismissed her as a mere second-home owner, even though her grandfather was from Belle Île and she had been coming here her whole life.
When she informed him about the regulations on the books and how they forbade a third story, he patronized her. That did it. Gwened went door to door with a petition, the first, some said, in island history. About half of the second-home owners signed it, but not us—Gwened felt having un étranger Américain would backfire. The Bellilois elected not to sign: such is the strength of feeling here about imposing one’s opinions on others. When Gwened returned to the Mairie, he shrugged. Madame, we have never been presented with a petition and this is not the time to start.
That left the fate of that lot to our village’s widowed matriarch, owner of the surrounding fields. No way the stern and reserved Madame Morgane would sign anything so forward as a petition, but she agreed to go to the post office, which was next door to the Mairie de Sauzon, who happened to be in, with his door wide open to the street. Naturally he greeted her. A conversation took place. The subject almost didn’t come up. Then he scoffed at all this foolishness. She replied that the new house would be “too tall.”
Too tall? The Mairie frowned. The first plan was rejected. A second came in with two stories—but enormous glass walls. This was actually easier for the Mairie to reject. There are laws against that sort of thing. Belle Île enjoys national heritage status, which specifically covers home construction and renovation.
The couple responded by building a house without any windows facing the square, which was fine with us once some ivy grew up the blank white wall. In fifteen years, I can’t remember them once waving hello. It’s really too bad.
Oh, well. They don’t come from here. They don’t even come from somebody, as the political machine hacks say in Chicago.
At least we come from “somebody”—and gratefully. Gwened. She lured us here—invited us to Belle Île when we were reeling around Europe fifteen years ago, our dream of living and writing in Paris having come undone. Mindy had been her student long before, in the campus abroad program where Gwened taught. Gwened had offered us her house and ended up changing our life.
The wife runs off, hippity-hop, classic le jogging style. Spooning out black mounds of cheap supermarket coffee, as good and aromatic as any of the expensive beans I noisily grind in our kitchen back in New York, I pour the boiling water into a cone filter wobbling atop a brown pot hand-thrown by our Scandinavian potter neighbor. Suddenly a voice echoes in my head: My very own randy Dane up the lane…
It’s my sister’s joke, from her visit a year ago, and a bit unfair—though the potter certainly did trail Anne around his atelier in the fields. What a view to a seduction he had: fat yellow heads of buckwheat bending to the breeze, then a dark dense green windbreak of cypresses, and after that, the wide, glittering blue-steel sea. The Atlantic. Pure horizon.
His tanned fingers kneading Anne’s arm, finding more muscle than expected, he cried out in English: “But you are strong!” Excited, as if imagining her churning butter on his Viking homestead, walking behind the plow, a baby crooked in each arm.
“Merci,” she said, mustering all her French. With a flutter of her eyelashes she pulled away. “Unfortunately, we really must be going.”
“Just think,” Anne sighed that day, after we rode away on our rickety bikes, the potter waving forlornly to our backs. “If I ran away with him, we could live in adjoining villages and pay each other visits at teatime.”
“That would be nice,” said Mindy.
“We could have Earl Grey in cups made by my very own randy Dane up the lane.”
“Anne!” Mindy shrieked. Et voilà! The quip attached itself to the pot like a superfluous handle.
Mindy always says Anne is the sister she never had. They laugh together, joke together, surf Huntington Beach’s Chair 16 together. But we don’t see enough of her. Since at different hours of the day Anne is a mother, a wife, a stepmother, a daughter, a schoolteacher, a golf teacher, and a writer, I’m sure nobody sees enough of her. Living on opposite coasts doesn’t help, which is our fault for moving to New York City.
As I sat there, watching the coffee drip into the brown potter’s cups, I missed my sister and considered how hard that trip must have been for her. Getting Anne over here is a project of ours. She’s chafed at living in our hometown all her life. Once or twice she almost left, but for some reason at the city limits, life always pulled a U-turn.
The first time she was about to make her escape from Long Beach, on a yearlong surf safari down to Mexico and South America with her boyfriend, the car broke down on the freeway on-ramp. Our parents came down hard on the guy, and they broke up. Before I even heard about any of this, she was engaged to the son of our father’s business partner, who proposed, I think, on the golf course. Anne had two young kids before the marriage went bad. She might have gone south to make a new start, but in the same week she was diagnosed with stage IV throat cancer. Divorced and healed up after miracle surgery and radiation, she found a man. He wouldn’t commit.
Then the current one came along, a carpenter who surfed and read The New Yorker. Ideal, right? She married him. But already there were strains. Anne’s teenaged daughter was acting out big-time. And, underlying everything, a deeper tension rattled my sister’s confidence. She’d confided to me that she’d glimpsed the pattern of her life and vowed that, no matter what, she’d bust out one day, if only to Seal Beach, just across the county line.
As I was helping Anne to engineer her escape to Belle Île, I fed her air routes and plans for her whole family to come. Circumstances combined to whittle it down to just her and her son. When she hesitated, I supplied rationales for a vacation from the tempestuous daughter, the teaching job, the old dog, cat, and plants—oh, yes, and from her husband’s three kids on alternate weekends. She definitely needed a break, I argued. And successfully.
But what I didn’t realize was how selfish that was. All these people loved her and had legitimate claims on her. I was beginning to see I really wanted her to validate Belle Île for me. I wanted to see Belle Île through her eyes. And to watch her fall in love with it. After so much family criticism over our coming here, of all places, rather than closer to home in California, I wanted to see her pick up on the way the island was like all those idyllic Pacific coves and beaches we knew when we were children, before the bulldozers and housing tracts. Like those places, but better. I wanted to give Anne this, and then surely she’d do as we’d done—make every effort to return every year.
Belle Île was already Mindy’s and my alternative base from home, established over the protests of our families. Now, like every breakaway republic, we were recruiting, and because Anne was the shining light, the radiant one, among the Wallaces, I’d introduced a conflict of loyalties, forcing her to choose between us and the rest of the family. She saw it. I didn’t, not yet.
Once I got my wish and she was here, of course Anne would be Anne. On her third day here last summer, she watched me prepare for a picnic with the kids at the Hidden Grotto of Swimming Lizards. “I want to play that thirteen-hole golf course,” she said. “Sarah Bernhardt’s golf course. The first course started by a woman. I can sell a story about that to Golf for Women and pay most of my expenses here.” She tossed her head back and laughed, as if feeling the fingers of the wind coursing through her hair. “You can write one, too, Donny. And you, Mindy. We can make so much money and expense dinners at the Hôtel du Fart.”
“Du Phare,” corrected Mindy, laughing at Anne’s wicked mispronunciation of our island’s most picturesque restaurant. “Pronounced far, meaning lighthouse.”
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��Wait! Then what’s that dessert we had at Hôtel du Pharrrrt?”
“Far Breton.”
“Lighthouse cake?”
“Noooo…”
Anne was having such a good time mangling the language that it actually made me jealous. Normally that was my gig. At dinner at the Hôtel du Phare she’d feigned confusion at every menu choice, fruites des mer becoming “fruit of a female horse” instead of a seafood plate and so forth, ending with the rubbery egg and prune concoction called “Far Breton.”
“Wait—how can phare be a lighthouse and far a cake?”
“One word is French, the other Breton,” I explained.
“Well, I think that for you, Far Breton means ‘sweet distance,’” she replied curtly.
Snark from Anne was a surprise. “Meaning?”
“You didn’t just go for the Far Breton,” she said mock accusatively. “You went for the Far, Far Breton.”
“Look, I like Long Beach.” Our hometown.
“Funny way to show it, going ten thousand miles away.”
“Only five. Look at Mindy. Hawaii’s even farther.”
“Far, far, far.” Anne shook her head. Message delivered: we were too far away. Though I still didn’t know from whom, I could guess: Mom.
But, being Anne, she immediately deflected the point of the barb toward herself. “And I still can’t get out of Long Beach.”
This actually caused a pang of remorse. I felt she’d read my mind, that she thought that I thought she’d missed out on life. Stuck in the old hometown, repeating herself. I couldn’t reply.
• • •
My morning reverie comes to an end when our eleven-year-old, Rory, and David, Anne’s son, tumble downstairs and briefly struggle over which of the deep wicker chairs to sit in. There’s no difference, except for a matter of placement. The far end of the table is the prize. Mumbling good morning, they attack their waiting cups of hot cocoa and Krispy Rolls “Suedoise”—a kind of Swedish hardtack.
But all is repetition here, too, I should’ve protested to Anne. If only she had come this year, too—but, instead, she sent her giant teenager to eat us out of house and home. Fortunately, we love Devo, a six-foot-four high schooler. Even better, he came bearing an envelope of cash with “Feed Me” written on it.
Mindy has been upstairs for a while, writing in her journal. Now she comes for her coffee and Krispy Rolls. We have only a few scrapes of blackberry jam left in the jar but plenty of butter. Only in France do we put butter on bread. There’s no point in trying it in the States; I’ve tried, and it doesn’t taste anything like the incomparable beauty of French beurre.
Crunching and sipping, the boys lean over the chessboard and begin setting up the pieces.
“No!” shouts Mindy. “No chess until you make a surf check.” Mindy can’t plan her day unless she knows whether there are waves.
“Hmm,” says Devo. “No surf check until checkmate.” He moves his pawn.
“No lunch unless you make surf check. Chop-chop! Now!” Mindy claps her hands loudly. Yesterday the boys started playing a game and didn’t leave the house until early afternoon. This plays hell with our schedule, such as it is. The threat of no lunch usually works. When it doesn’t, and we abandon the boys to their own devices, there is a definite danger that the house won’t be there when we return, due to the combination of Devo’s appetite and the stove, knobless after several explosions.
“Your move.”
“I’ll make you an omelet if you check surf now,” Mindy pleads.
“Hmm. What kind of omelet?”
“Chorizo and tomatoes and Gruyere.”
“Okay.” Devo looks at Rory. Then, with a crash, both shove their chairs back and race for the door. There’s a struggle at the handle that Rory loses, being a foot shorter and seventy pounds lighter than his older cousin. But he’s faster and arrives first at the bikes leaning against Gwened’s barn. One bike’s chain slips; the other doesn’t. Another struggle begins.
“Peace at last,” I murmur. “More coffee?”
“Sure. And an omelet.”
“Hey!”
“I want to write while it’s quiet. Everything is so noisy here.”
This is a slight exaggeration, considering that in New York City, garbage trucks groan and drunks sing and clubbers fight and hookers hook and then swear at each other under our windows from midnight to dawn. But everything is relative. I understand that.
Through the window I see the boys whiz past down the rutted lane. I grit my teeth and wait for the crash at the bottom turn. Nothing happens. Good.
A surf check means we have at least twenty-four minutes of peace—nine for the boys to pedal madly up the road, take the shortcut across the fields, descend the treacherous dirt lane to the paved road, pedal madly up to the turn to the village of Kerhuel, pedal madly through Kerhuel dodging free-range chickens and sleeping dogs and one-eyed cats, then pedal madly to the cliff and the overlook. You can’t do an honest surf check from where the road ends, so they’ll have to run to the cliff edge, which takes three minutes. We’ve charged them with providing specific answers to our questions, so that means at least two minutes watching, though we’d prefer ten. The return trip is a bit faster, involving less uphill.
“Maybe we have time?” Mindy nods at the stairs and arches an eyebrow.
“Well…” I check my watch. “Twenty minutes.” We look at each other, counting off the seconds. Once the boys made it back in nineteen. We trade glances: too risky. Not relaxing.
“Okay,” Mindy says. “Make sure they rinse their feet at the door.”
Back to the stove I go. Chop garlic and onion, slice rounds of hard Spanish chorizo, the Don Moroni brand that I smuggle back to the United States each year. Diced green peppers and tomatoes also go into the skillet. While they’re cooking, I crack six eggs into a bowl, add some milk, and stir.
Spatula in hand, I drift over to the front door, open it, and stand barefoot on the concrete stoop, worn by weather and summer feet. Pushing through the billowing hydrangeas that mask her patio and front entrance from the square, Gwened emerges holding a paper high in the air.
“Oh, Don! I have a letter from Daniel!” She’s wearing a simple floral frock with a scooped neck that shows off her deep tan, cleavage, and a gold orb on a chain that dangles there. On her feet are the rope espadrilles that Gene Kelly and Bridget Bardot made famous. You can always rely on Gwened for a fabulous entrance.
She switches into French for my daily grammar workout. We talk about Daniel, her son who lives in the United States. He’s found a job doing art therapy at a hospital. Life is good. His wife is trying her hand at writing articles for a newspaper. Will I correspond with her, pass along advice and encouragement? Of course.
Recalling my duties at the stove, I dash in to slide the sautéed vegetables onto a plate and pour the beaten eggs into the skillet. Gwened waves and moves on down the lane, letter in hand. I suspect she will stop at Suzanne’s plain stone house. Then, if Le Vic is out sunning himself while his sons and wife garden, she’ll pause at his white picket fence for a chat, then sweep up the road to Madame Morgane’s.
That is, if she doesn’t do a quick hook around to the house of the Accomplished Academics. Yes, she’ll go there. Their daughters are wonderful musicians, budding professionals whose violin and viola sweeten the air all summer. After that, it’s on to Celeste and Henry, the village psychiatrists. (Freudian.) Yes, Kerbordardoué is a full-service gossip stop for anyone, but especially empty-nest parents like Gwened. We’ve got everything you need right here.
• • •
As Gwened moves off, letter held high as a flag, I smile. If only my Anne had seen her like this, she wouldn’t have been so suspicious. “Tell me more about Gwened,” Anne had demanded early in her visit. “That’s her house above ours? She’s the one? The reason you’re here? You said
she’s a professor. What else?”
“She’s a witch,” I said.
“No! Not really.”
“Mom believes she tried to seduce Dad with some kind of potion.”
“What? I can’t believe this! Mindy—Donny’s making this up, isn’t he?”
“She was doing some kind of witch thing,” Mindy confirmed. “Right in front of your mother, she was casting a spell. And he really was falling for it.”
“I can’t believe it! This is so bizarre! How did she cast a spell?”
“Near the end of the trip, your dad cut his leg in the hotel swimming pool, and it got infected. Gwened noticed when we were having aperitifs. So she went over to her well and pulled out a handful of this slimy green moss and made a poultice out of it. Put it on his shin.”
“You’re telling a story. You’re both making this up. Donny? Is Mindy telling the truth?”
“All I can say is, it really did feel strange. I couldn’t believe it was happening myself. Gwened was chatting away in this very lulling voice, and Dad had this big smile on his face. He couldn’t take his eyes off her.”
“He couldn’t take his eyes off her boobs, you mean,” said Mindy. “She kept bending over right in front of him. She found a way to pop a button.”
“You mean he was falling for it? Dad? Nooooo!”
“Women have their ways.” Mindy looked wise. “French women especially.”
“I think she scares me a little,” Anne said with a little shiver. “And I can’t wait for her to come to dinner tomorrow.” Laughter. “What will you guys cook?”
“Lotte, tomatoes, green beans, chorizo, zucchini, green salad, goat cheese.”