This wasn’t Georgia’s take on it. Georgia said, “You’re exactly alike.”
“What? I’m flakey and judgmental?”
“Not flakey,” Georgia conceded, which shut Ellen up.
Every cell in Georgia’s body was powered by honesty and loving-kindness. She was entirely without ego or wiles. Georgia deserved her own constellation.
The proprietor of the six-hundred-year-old house had stocked it with tourist brochures. Discovering it was market day in a nearby village, Ellen left a note for Celine then drove off in the rental car along narrow winding roads, past tidily arranged vineyards and olive groves. Even on the curves dozens of lead-footed Provençals, heedless of the dividing line or death, overtook her. Of course they could die. They’d already been to heaven, which, Ellen soon realized, was a Provençal market. On the return trip the hatch of the Clio was stuffed with proof—a waxy yellow chicken, black and green tapenade, four kinds of chèvre. Baguettes. A pink, frilled, bridal bouquet of a lettuce. Two bottles of Châteauneuf-du-Pape. She would have bought more, but they were leaving in two days and she would have to carry it all on her back.
That evening, with still no sign of Celine, Ellen set to cooking in the three-year-old kitchen in the six-hundred-year-old house, happily into the wine, so happy for the first time since Jack died, which was the purpose of the trip, Celine had claimed. To cheer Ellen up. She sang to herself, rubbing the powdery fleur de sel into the puckered skin of the bird. Sang and sang.
Until Celine shouted from her bedroom down the hall. “Can you be a little quieter in there, Ellen, for Christ’s sake?”
Two days later Ellen was packed and ready and waiting for Celine. Waiting for Celine to finish her yoga routine, then waiting while Celine reorganized her backpack so the heavier things would be on the bottom. There were no heavy things in Ellen’s backpack. It was practically weightless with newly purchased, featherlight, scrunch-able travel clothes, including a wrinkle-free peony of a little green dress that Ellen adored.
But for the first day of their hike she had put on the skort. She turned a circle for Celine. “What do you think?”
“Slimming,” Celine said.
The remark deformed in Ellen’s ear. She’d already lost ten pounds. That was the only good thing about her father’s suicide. When you take to your bed with the covers over your head, you don’t eat so much. But she was still too fat for Celine. Celine was too thin. Ellen suspected fasting and (shudder) herbal colonics zealously self-administered.
Finally, finally, Celine was ready. Bidding adieu to the hilltop village, they drove off to return the rental car in a town forty minutes away, Celine at the wheel because she’d been to the area several times and knew the roads. On the way, she pointed out various landmarks. “See that château? It belonged to the Marquis de Sade.” “That crossroads? That’s the exact spot where Beckett got the idea for Waiting for Godot. Later in the week we’ll come to the town where Camus died. We can picnic on his grave.”
“Why didn’t you tell me this before?” Ellen complained. She hadn’t even considered Justine or Molloy or L’Étranger. She’d brought Colette.
The rental car office was closed, not just for those two-hour French lunches. According to the handwritten message Celine read on the door, it was shut for the whole long weekend.
“Is it the weekend?” Ellen asked.
“This is outrageous.” Celine stormed over to the Clio, snatched the Europcar contract from the glove compartment. “It says we return it here. Today. Saturday, May 24.”
They found a pay phone a block away outside the train station. Celine bought a phone card, then called in her complaint in French. Ellen didn’t think Celine sounded angry enough, stammering like that, so she muscled her aside and grabbed the receiver.
“Do you speak English?”
The woman did, about as well as Celine spoke French, giving Ellen the upper hand. Yet this lackey didn’t crumple the way her North American counterpart would have done if blasted with consumer discontent. She didn’t even apologize, merely explained in a charming accent that they should drive to the TGV station in Avignon, where one of their offices was open. The two friends stomped back to the car, arms linked, for there is nothing more unifying than a common grievance, except maybe love.
After the two-hour wait in Avignon for the forty-minute train trip back to the same town they’d failed to return the car in, then a costly thirty-minute cab ride, they arrived at the trailhead. It was in another hilltop village, this one partially abandoned, long-weekend tourists elbow to elbow among the ruined castle and the tiny ruined houses and the restored sixteenth-century church. The reinhabited part was full of shops. Ellen wanted to see the pottery before they left.
“I have a plan,” she told Celine, poking through the brightly glazed touristy stuff. She’d hoped for faïence, a kind of marbled pottery from the area. “I’ve worked for years promoting creative people. I’d like to be creative myself.”
“How?” Celine asked.
“I’m going to start making pots again.”
“It’s so hard to start a small business, Ellen. Take my advice.”
“I’m less interested in the business part than the pottery part.”
“How are you going to live?”
“The house is worth about ten times what we bought it for. Plus, my dad socked his money away all his life.”
“Well, that’s lucky,” Celine said. “Can we start now?”
Again, Ellen felt that twist. She was lucky that her father had killed himself? Was that what Celine meant? When Ellen would give up every cent she had to buy him back to life?
She tailed Celine out of the shop, frowning, careful that her pack didn’t knock the tchotchkes off the shelves.
By then it was four-thirty in the afternoon.
Before this trip, Ellen hadn’t known that all of France was netted with walking trails. Celine showed her a red-and-white blaze on a wall, consulted the map, pointed straight ahead. Ellen tightened the straps of her pack (which was not, by then, weightless, but fairly heavy), and followed Celine along what was at first a cobbled medieval road, then an ascending footpath. They’d already talked themselves out on the train, venting their mutual anger, and now Ellen let Celine’s comment in the shop pass. No particular emotion replaced that umbrage for some time. Up they walked, through a forest ringing electrically with cicadas. At their feet were wildflowers of the sort Ellen cultivated in her own garden at home—candelabra primula, candy tuft, Lenten rose, muscari, euphorbia, daffodil—all in miniature. Even the trees seemed stunted. The insects, on the other hand, were gargantuan. A bee the size of her thumb bonked her on the temple. It felt like a stoning’s introductory blow.
On the treeless crest, a wind reared up and almost blew them over. They bent into it, scrambling over the rocks, moving slowly, hair whipping around their heads. Below was the town where they had a reservation for the night, a manageable distance away, not that far, ten kilometres by the map. It would be easy now that they were going down, but down by the most up-and-down route possible, it turned out. Sometimes they missed the trail markings and had to backtrack. Or they stopped to consult the map, then argued about which way to go. If they took Celine’s suggestion and met up with a bold red X on a rock, she wouldn’t admit fault. She’d say, “Oh, not this way, I guess,” despite how she had insisted they take that turn. If Ellen was wrong, though, Ellen would say sorry.
Meanwhile, Ellen was in pain. Feet, knees, back. “You’ve done this hike?” she asked.
Celine had not. “I told you that, Ellen.”
She’d only admired these mountains from a safe distance. Compared to their mountains back home in North Vancouver, these were barely foothills, she’d told Ellen, another French miniature, which was technically true but ignored the fact of the very challenging terrain.
The thing about walking is that it frees the mind. Ellen’s mind, freed, was inclined to brood. To brood about her father these days, how the l
ast time she’d seen Jack alive he’d told her that he loved her. The alarm bells should have sounded right then, but no. Ellen had been pleased. Pleased, too, that he’d come out of the airport to wave goodbye. And Ellen, in a hurry that day, had waved back, then turned and strode away. Except he wasn’t waving to her. He was flagging a cab, which he then rode to the Iona Jetty for the purpose of drowning himself. Any remotely sensitive daughter would have picked up on these clues. But Ellen hadn’t.
She would have liked to share these dark thoughts with Celine as they walked, but after Celine’s comment in the gift shop, Ellen was wary. Celine was just as likely to reinforce Ellen’s self-blame as she was to lift it off her shoulders. So on Ellen trudged, wordlessly self-flagellating herself in hindsight.
Dusk fell around eight, by which time Ellen had finally managed to shift the focus of her brooding to something Celine could sympathize with. The outrage perpetrated on them by Europcar. This was when Celine let slip a shocking fact: the office had been open.
“It’s too bad we didn’t get there before noon,” she said.
“What?” Ellen roared. “I was ready to go by nine! We could easily have gotten there if you hadn’t taken two hours to pack your stuff!”
“There you go again, Ellen. Don’t. Don’t start with this blaming stuff.”
“Why shouldn’t I? It’s your fault.”
“Am I blaming you?”
“For what?”
“For dawdling in every one of those shops even though they all sell the same Provençal crap. We could have been on the trail an hour earlier.”
“So you are blaming me.”
“I’m saying you bear some responsibility too. I choose not to blame. Blaming is toxic.”
This was exactly Ellen’s complaint to Tony: Celine’s passive-aggressive tendencies. “You blamed Europcar!” she shrilled.
She itched, just itched, to kick the skinny Lululemoned ass she’d been forced to look at for the last four hours—the ass she ended up looking at for two more, or rather, could barely make out in the dark as they stumbled into the town and found the guest house and roused the owner, who, as he showed them their room, confessed that he’d lost hope they would show up.
“J’ai perdu l’espoir.”
Even Ellen understood that.
ELLEN didn’t kick Celine’s skinny ass. She couldn’t because Celine’s baby died all those years ago when Ellen’s and Georgia’s babies were born healthy and lusting for life. It had squirmed in its incubator for two days, and then it died. It had no brain.
When Ellen woke the next morning after eight hours of undrugged sleep, she remembered that terrible time, Celine’s milk coming in for nothing, her tranced shuffling around her house of grief, belly still huge with the dead space the baby had left in her life. And Ellen’s heart went out to Celine snoring lightly in the adjacent twin bed. Celine, her dear friend whom she loved. Celine, who was not half so annoying when unconscious.
At breakfast, Ellen asked, “How far today?”
Celine showed her the map. Twenty-five kilometres. At least they would be on the trail in good time. They agreed to rest more frequently, to eat more, to be kinder to each other.
“I’m sorry I lost it yesterday,” Ellen said.
Celine said, “Oh, Ellen. Never mind.”
Stiff from the day before, they hobbled back through the stone town, stopping for the baguettes they stuffed arrowlike in the quiver of their packs. Celine, a vegetarian, waited outside the boucherie while Ellen bought herself a donkey sausage.
Every muscle screamed. The tender spots on Ellen’s feet pulsated, despite the moleskin. Two hours of slow, silent climbing back up the rock-studded, thyme-scrubbed side of the mountain, the descent of which had wrecked their knees the night before. Gradually, Ellen felt herself detach. It was as though she was already out of this situation telling someone about it later. Who? Georgia?
Tony. En garde-ing in the mirror with the scissors, rolling his eyes. She was telling tell him about the trip, how Celine hadn’t come out of her room the first two days, how bossy she’d been with the map.
“A country of what? Sixty million? And you couldn’t find one single horny Frenchman to screw you?”
They rested on some boulders next to the trail. While Celine drank her boiled water, Ellen, taking an advance on lunch, joked about Tony’s hopes for her. Celine’s lips tightened.
“Don’t be such a prude,” Ellen said, poking her with the gnawed-on baguette.
“I’m just not into those types of relationships. You know that, Ellen. I would find it demeaning.”
Celine got off the rock she was sitting on, swung her pack onto her back. She was visibly shorter with it on, three inches at least. “You charge at men,” she said.
“I used to,” Ellen said. “I haven’t for some time.”
This was less because she’d stopped waving the red cape of her need than because no one came near enough to see it.
“They don’t respect you and you don’t respect yourself.”
“Okay, okay,” Ellen said, holding out her hand. Celine helped her up, Ellen groaning loudly, not just for effect.
“Let’s sing,” Ellen said, trying for a lighter tone. “Let’s make a joyful noise.”
They didn’t know the same songs, so they took turns. Celine’s repertoire was meagre, Ellen’s vast—all the jazz standards her mother used to sing, the hippy songs from Cordova Island. (“We Shall Overcome” seemed particularly apropos.) Soon Ellen was doing all the singing, and when she realized it, she stopped, thinking that maybe she was annoying Celine. Maybe Celine was at that moment far in the future complaining to Georgia about how Ellen wouldn’t stop singing on the trail. How she actually wasn’t that great a singer. Ellen couldn’t tell what Celine was thinking, since her back was to Ellen as she set their bovine pace.
“Moo,” Ellen said.
Celine looked over her shoulder. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing. I was just mooing.” Never had putting one foot in front of the other seemed so gruelling! “Celine? My feet? My metatarsals? They’re aching like you would not believe. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced pain like this. Childbirth was nothing.” And her shoulders—so tight. It wasn’t hot, the temperature was, in fact, perfect—everything so fucking perfect!—yet she poured out sweat.
After lunch, when precious energy had been diverted toward digestion, when jet lag struck again (it had not been vanquished after all, only temporarily staved off), Ellen’s default switch tripped to the brood position. If she’d only given her father a second glance, she would have seen him getting into that cab. She could have raced back and hopped in one herself, given chase.
That scenario played out over and over until—Stop it! She swigged some water. Slogged on. Her bra was saturated. There were wet patches, like when she had nursed her babies.
Larry’s abandoned babies.
And then she was brooding again over those early months in North Vancouver, with a newborn and a two-year-old, Ellen doing most of it on her own, in the rain. It never stopped raining, a fact no one had mentioned before they bought the house. Ellen had only two friends at that time—Georgia and Celine. Georgia had her own newborn. Celine couldn’t help Ellen. Celine’s baby was dead.
Meanwhile, Larry was in sunny L.A., writing his crap TV show and screwing Amy.
“I get so angry!” Ellen said.
Vainly, she wished for Celine to say the right thing.
Celine sighed. “Issues, Ellen.”
“I know I have issues. I’m trying. Don’t you ever think of Richard?”
Ahead of her Celine stiffened, reclaiming her three lost inches. “No.”
Ellen herself hadn’t thought of Richard in years, could barely picture the effete-looking man of the pre-natal classes, the stunned one from the funeral. Before the baby, Celine had been a meat-eating, middle-class suburban wife with a government job. Richard hadn’t made it into the After frame of Celine’s B
efore-and-After life. Larry, though, was still very much in Ellen’s life, because they had children. Also, Larry had moved back to Cordova Island—a surprise to everyone. Ellen saw him whenever she visited Yo and Sean.
There had been an additional, private surprise for Ellen—sex. A couple of times over the last few years she and Larry had found themselves alone and atingle with nostalgia, and so they’d reached out for old times’ sake. Last Christmas they’d coupled in Larry’s office while Amber, his child bride, was tucked upstairs in bed. Ellen blushed, remembering. What did it mean, these intermittent reunions? Not much. After all they’d been through, Ellen and Larry were simply connected, for better or for worse.
Celine and Ellen were walking in the woods now, which seemed eerily quiet for a holiday weekend. They’d encountered no one on the trail. When eventually they came to a gravel road, Ellen looked at Celine. Hair sticking to her pale face, Celine was obviously suffering as much as Ellen, maybe more, just not complaining about it. She pointed her chin up the road. Ellen deferred. Moments later, they saw the rude red X on a tree trunk, turned and headed the other way.
“Oh, great,” Ellen said, pointing at another X.
“It must be here,” said Celine, walking straight into the trees on the other side of the road.
Ellen had no opinion now, was simply stumbling along behind Celine. Celine could lead her off a cliff if she wanted.
The trees were deciduous. Ellen marked each syllable with a step. Dee-sid-you-us. She sensed them, these trees, their straight grey trunks so evenly spaced in her peripheral vision. You-us. Dee-sid. And something flipped. She and Celine were standing still and the trees were advancing on them, surrounding them. But trees didn’t have feet. (Oh, not to have feet!) She turned her head and saw this was silly, the trees weren’t moving. Someone was watching them and had been for a long time.
Not the trees, from them.
But no one was there. All Ellen saw was ashen bark, the bright green coinage of leaves. How old were they, these French trees? Young. Someone must have planted them after the war. Which war? They’d had so many. Also this terrible massacre of a Protestant sect a few centuries ago. Ellen had read about it in the guidebook.
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