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Tita

Page 4

by Marie Houzelle


  “Where’s Coralie?” Mother asks. But I can hear Grandmother in the next room urging my sister to dry her hands more thoroughly.

  After the asparagus, which I don’t mind, Loli brings the main dish and sets it in the middle of the table. When mother takes the lid off, I stop breathing. She lays two pieces of veal on my plate. “It’s very lean,” she says.

  I examine the stringy fibers, the gelatinous texture. “Please, no sauce,” I whisper. I’ll eat the rice, at least the side of it that hasn’t touched the meat or the sauce.

  “Just a little meat,” Mother says, cutting it up for me. “You know how important it is to eat meat. If you don’t, you’ll catch another ear infection. Or throat infection. You don’t want to be ill and miss school again, do you?”

  Luckily she forgets about me as she starts telling Father about the wonderful crocodile handbag André gave Cami for her birthday. This is hardly news: Cami turned thirty-one more than a month ago, and I thought her friends were done with the oohs and aahs by now. Not to mention the fact that Father has never shown any interest in handbags. “André got it in Montpellier,” Mother goes on, “at Maxence & Fils, avenue de Pézenas. That’s where Estelle got her beautiful suitcase too.”

  This must be the beginning of a campaign. Mother’s birthday is April twenty-sixth, in hardly more than a week, and she wants her own crocodile. But I don’t think her approach is going to work. Father has been different for a while. Preoccupied. Everybody says that our local wines don’t sell as well as they used to. Eléonore’s parents are even talking about bottling theirs instead of dealing wholesale. It’s the sensible thing to do, they say. They wouldn’t need their two tank trucks, then. Father has three. Sometimes, for short errands, I’m allowed to sit next to one of the drivers, high above the netherworld of the streets. But when I happen to see one of these trucks in town, I cringe at my name out there on the back and sides of the tanks, green on yellow, bold and huge.

  “Maxence & Fils, avenue de Pézenas, just after the Crédit Lyonnais,” Mother repeats.

  Heedless of crocodiles, Father slowly savours a new wine and considers. For him, Mother is babbling; he has no idea what’s at stake. Every lunchtime, he brings three or four small bottles to the table. All morning, in the tasting room, he’s been sampling a dozen or two that various brokers came to submit, each with a handwritten label (grower’s name, broker’s name, date). Here are the ones he’s interested in — he’s written his opinion of them on index cards. Before buying a wine, he likes to taste it with food.

  Coralie’s plate is empty. She points towards mine — I’ve dealt with the rice but haven’t grappled the veal at all. I nod, and she deftly picks up the bits of meat with her fork while Grandmother concentrates on tossing the salad. Mother is still expatiating on the glories of Maxence & Fils. Father asks her if she wants to taste a fruity Minervois, which might be a bit on the heavy side. She swills nearly half a glass and says, “Yes, too sweet.” She’s irritated because Father hasn’t caught on to Maxence & Fils. I think he has other problems on his mind. Mother doesn’t like problems, except the ones she can solve immediately and brilliantly, like a drain to unstop, a room to paint, a child’s dress to make. She is proud that she managed to marry a man who has vineyards, a business, many friends, a great reputation. A good-looking man. Very tall, which is essential for her: she is tall, and needs taller. All her girlfriends from Lyon envy her. She’s made it, that’s all she wants to know.

  Cheese time, and Mother makes sure Loli puts two petits-suisses on my dessert plate. “Please, just one!” I beg. But Mother is adamant. “Remember, without calcium, your bones will crumble, your body will be crippled, and you’ll never grow tall. Is that what you want?”

  What I want? A life without food. To go to heaven as soon as possible, or hell, or limbo, or any place provided there’s no food in it.

  Petits-suisses are less offensive than Camembert, and less slimy than yogurt, but anything made from milk has this sour smell. Grandmother peels an apple and cuts it up for me. She urges me to hide spoonfuls of petits-suisses between slices of apple. I try; the chalky paste ruins the cool purity of the fruit. Two spoonfuls, and I give up. Thank God Mother is busy again, pronouncing on the last two wines while eating her Roquefort. How can she put that ancient curdled milk into her mouth, so rotten it’s covered with blue spots, so putrid that, if she didn’t know it was Roquefort, she’d look for a dead rat behind the furniture?

  She professes that wines are always best tasted with cheese. She doesn’t use her nose, as Father always does before his lips touch the liquid. She swallows fast, and empties her glass. “Excellent, this one,” she says with complete self-assurance. Father tries to explain its pros and cons, but she isn’t listening.

  On school days, as soon as we’re done with lunch, I have to go and practice the piano for half an hour before we go back to school. Loli brings coffee, Mother takes her cup and saucer and leads me up into the music room, where she sits in an armchair and waits. Not that she enjoys listening to my mindless exercises, but she wants to make sure I never stop.

  Mother never had to play the piano, by the way. Why do I have to suffer what she didn’t? Because. Parce que c’est comme ça.

  Cartwheel

  Again we’re getting ready for a show. “We” means madame Robichon and her ballet students, of whom Coralie and I are the most unwilling. There are nine of us, eight girls and one boy, Jordi Puch. He won’t come back next fall, he told me. He’d rather play rugby, but his mother wants him to finish the year. He says it’s okay, he likes our company. I like him. He is six, and in the downstairs class at Sainte-Blandine. Slender, with pale curly hair. Nimble, energetic. His gestures never look contrived. His feet stretch easily even though he never practices apart from the classes.

  The classes! Who ever got the idea of standing on their toes must have been demented. Justine has friends in Paris who take ballet lessons, and she says they don’t start pointe work until they are ten or eleven, because it can hurt your feet if they’re not “ossified”. Since the Easter vacation I’ve been calling Justine every Sunday morning, around eleven. Father wouldn’t allow it at first, but Justine explained that I’m her confidante. Father said, “All right, six minutes maximum, you’ll have to use the egg timer.”

  The show is next Wednesday, and today we rehearse at the theater. Madame Robichon decided that the way it will start is we’ll all walk onto the stage, one after the other, very fast, and do a cartwheel. Zip zip zip, the nine of us, across the stage. After which most of us will stand at the back and let the stars do their stuff. Eléonore will wear six different tutus, all kinds of lengths and colors. Her mother and aunt will be in the wings to help her change. Coralie and I hate tutus. Anyway, according to Justine, you shouldn’t cartwheel in a tutu. She discussed it with her ballerina friends, who called it “sacrilege”.

  “Can’t we wear our leotards?” I ask madame Robichon.

  “What a ridiculous question!” she answers, rolling her globulous eyes, whose eyelashes are always congealed by a thick layer of mascara. “This is a show we’re putting on! The whole point of a show is dressing up.” There’s something uncanny about madame Robichon: she wears her hair rather short, in a pageboy, and it’s always exactly the same length. It doesn’t grow.

  “Jordi will wear his leotard,” I say. “Why couldn’t we?”

  “You are not boys, are you? Please, we have a lot to do, there’s no time for silly talk.”

  “I’d like to be a boy,” Coralie says. “I’d wear a leotard. No, I’d play rugby.”

  Madame Robichon makes us rehearse our cartwheels. On a beach, it’s fun to turn a cartwheel. Or two, or three. What I don’t like is doing it on a small stage. Anyway a cartwheel, according to Justine, is gymnastics, not ballet, and shouldn’t be part of a ballet performance.

  While Eléonore capers and pirouettes, Coralie turns to me and makes a pig face with her nose and lips turned up. I’m so tired of the whole thing, I
squat for a while. “Stand up, please!” madame Robichon cries. “Think of your parents, how proud they’ll be to see you on stage in your beautiful tutus next Wednesday!”

  “I’m so looking forward to this show!” Eléonore exclaims in the changing room. We’re all ready to go, but she’s still busy with her many layers of undershirts, blouses and cardigans. “She’s always as covered up as a honeypot,” Mother likes to say. Which doesn’t make any sense to me, but is certainly derogatory.

  Mother is waiting for us outside, with Cami Espeluque and Estelle Vié who, like her, take classes with madame Robichon, twice a week. Not ballet: culture physique, to enhance their figures. Estelle is lean and brisk, she says she’d like to become more flexible. Cami wants to lose the weight she put on when she was pregnant with the twins and breastfed them for more than a year, but I don’t think she should: she’s beautiful as she is, all chubby and sparkling. Mother’s aim is to remain as slim and perfect as she’s always been. For ever.

  Eléonore comes with us in the car. “How’s it going?” Mother asks. Eléonore explains how hard it is to remember all her moves, in the right order. After we drop her in front of her house, Mother says, “That girl shouldn’t do ballet. Not with those thick ankles.”

  “She has strong legs,” I say. “She’s a good dancer.” Actually, I don’t think she’s so great — she tries too hard, and worries too much about how she looks. But I won’t let anyone disparage my friends.

  “Don’t talk nonsense,” Mother says. “She’s a nice enough girl, but her mother shouldn’t put it into her head that she’s pretty. It won’t help her. With her heavy limbs, her pasty skin, her mousy hair, she should realize her prospects are very limited.”

  Mother pays huge attention to appearance. As if she’d never heard of souls. According to school, church, and the comtesse de Ségur, being good is what matters, not looking good. Of course madame Fichini is cruel when she makes Sophie wear a coarse cotton dress with a dirty spot on it to visit her friends. That’s rude. You need to be clean, to dress in a way that suits the occasion, your social situation and your age, neither too coarse nor too elaborate. But having an attractive body is just luck, there’s no reason to gloat about it.

  At home, I look for Father. He’s in the music room playing the piano, trying out some composition of his. The same tune in various keys, with a few variations. I wait on the landing, because I know that if he sees me he’ll stop. Then when I haven’t heard anything for three minutes I go in.

  “Hi, Tita, how’s life? Do you want the piano?” How can he be my father, live in the same house with me, and not know I never want the piano!

  “Have you met madame Robichon?” I ask.

  “Who?”

  “Madame Robichon, our ballet teacher.”

  “I don’t think so. Why?”

  “She’s the stupidest person I’ve ever met,” I say. “I just wondered if someone more stupid could exist. You know so many people.”

  “How would you define stupid?”

  Now. This is difficult. You can see that madame Robichon is stupid. If he’d seen her he’d know. But define it? “She’s like wood,” I say. “Her face never moves.”

  “Is she paralysed?”

  “No. She’s normal. But you always know what she’s going to say.”

  “Our words are often pretty predictable,” Father says.

  That’s not it. How can I explain? “She’s more stupid,” I say. “Most people, they mouth the usual phrases, but you can feel something else going on, underneath. They’re alive. With madame Robichon that’s all there is, and it’s... contagious. You end up feeling stupid too.” I’m not making my point. “Try to talk to her on Wednesday after the show.”

  “Oh,” Father says, “a show? Your mother didn’t tell me. I’ll have to call my bridge friends.”

  “You don’t have to come,” I say. “Honest, don’t come for me, or for Coralie. We’re no good.”

  “But I want to come!” he says. “You must have worked hard for this show!”

  “We haven’t,” I say. “We hate it. We’d like not to do it. I guess it’s too late for this year, but could we please not take ballet after the summer?” I hadn’t thought about this, it just comes out. And as soon as I hear myself, I know I should have kept quiet. Father looks at the piano stand, at the notes he’s been making for his song, in lead pencil, and the revision, in green.

  “You’ll have to see about it with your mother,” he says.

  Time for the show. Coralie and I squeeze into the back seat of Eléonore’s car between Eléonore’s large father and her larger grandmother, under a mountain of tutus. Coralie hugs me and whispers in my ear, “If we suffocate, let’s be buried in the same tomb.” Eléonore is in front next to her mother, with a few more tutus in her lap, including a rainbow one with, her mother says, seventeen layers of tulle. When we arrive at the theater, Coralie grins. “I think I forgot my demi-pointe shoes,” she says, looking into her bag. But madame Robichon sends Eléonore’s mother to the office to call our parents. Coralie should have waited. It’s no use anyway. We’re doomed. What can we do? Grow up, but it takes for ever.

  Mother arrives in time to re-braid my hair and stick in some flowers. Then it’s Coralie’s turn. She yells. Madame Robichon is giving a speech on the other side of the curtain. Thanks, art, support, Mr Mayor. Now it starts! Coralie goes, then Jordi… “Your turn!” Madame Robichon whispers loudly behind me. I throw my hands onto the wooden floor, but my legs don’t stick up in the usual way. I don’t know what they do, but my feet are back on the floor on the wrong side. “Hurry, try again!” madame Robichon urges. But I don’t feel like trying again. I just step to the other side of the stage. I don’t run away, but behave as if nothing had happened, looking straight at the audience. I bungled my cartwheel, and I want to laugh.

  We’re done. It’s been amazingly fast, and almost painless. Now there’s clapping and stomping. The room is full. We bow and re-bow, and come back onstage twice. That’s the most strenuous part.

  Father doesn’t talk to madame Robichon after the show. Everybody presses in to congratulate and exclaim. In the car, Mother says, “You have good muscles, Coralie, but you need to exert yourself.”

  “I want to play rugby,” Coralie says.

  “If you work hard,” Mother says, “I’ll make a new tutu just for you.”

  “I could go to La Patriote.” Coralie says. “With Nicole, and Roseline.”

  “What is La Patriote?” Father asks.

  “An athletic club,” Mother says. “On the place du Marché.”

  Coralie bounces up and down. “They do asymmetric bars, springboard, vaulting horse!”

  “Isn’t this a good idea?” Father says.

  Something has happened. Father has spoken up for once. And Mother is a sportswoman. It must be obvious to her that Coralie will be good at this, will be able to make her proud, for a change. Coralie might be freed!

  “Coralie is enough of a tomboy already,” Mother says. “And the children at La Patriote are a mixed lot.”

  So we all know there’s no hope.

  Lyon

  Mother likes to talk about me. I might even be one of her favorite topics. Along with dresses, coats, hats, shoes, rings and handbags. There isn’t much difference, for her, between me and a scarf. That’s because I’m quiet.

  “This one?” she says, when people ask how I’m doing — tradesmen, visitors, neighbors. “This one is a dream! She never makes a sound.” Unlike Coralie, noisy Coralie who clamors for candy, juice, toys, playing outside on the street.

  My impression is, I was born a listener. I only speak up when there’s a reasonable chance of achieving a result, while many people keep flaunting their feelings and opinions, and seem to enjoy expression for expression’s sake. I am odd, in quite a few ways.

  But how odd? This afternoon (Thursday, so no school) Mother is having tea in the sitting room with her friends, and I’ve just finished passing the petits fou
rs. The women are admiring my smocked dress (Mother’s latest masterpiece) and exclaiming over the fact that I always look so neat, spotless and wrinkle free. I stop listening, as this is the kind of prattle I find embarrassing, not to mention terminally dull. But something in the air warns me that they must have moved on to another topic.

  “Two months!” Mother has just proclaimed in her clear, buoyant voice.

  Everybody’s staring. At her, not me — I’m sitting on a low stool now, pretty much out of sight.

  Estelle Vié smacks her cup down on the enamel table. “My God,” she says. “That child must have been a total prodigy.” I can hear, in her placid, slightly raspy voice, a hint of irony. “None of mine,” she goes on, “were out of diapers before their third year. I thought it was because the first two were boys, but Mireille was no different. She sat on the potty quite happily, but nothing much happened until she was two.”

  Among Mother’s friends, Estelle is one of my favorites. She always wears interesting little scarves on her head that she ties at the nape of her neck. She keeps them on all the time, even inside, even in her own house. Mother says it’s because her hair is so thin she’d rather hide it. “She’s not quite bald, but nearly,” I’ve heard her say quite a few times. I wonder how she knows.

  “Yes,” Mother goes on breezily, “with some children, it takes a lot of time and effort.” (She should know: Coralie still has accidents pretty often.) “But this one was marvellous. From two months old she never dirtied a diaper again. Not once! All I had to do was hold her above the toilet once in a while. I never needed to use a potty. She immediately knew what a lavatory was for.”

 

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