My anxiety was something I had never accepted in myself. It was not a face I wanted to show to anybody, especially not my parents, but the panic attacks had been as relentless as pounding waves over the past few days, eroding everything solid except the precipice of sanity I teetered upon. It was with a mix of desperation and dread that I picked up the receiver.
My father answered. After a few minutes of beating around the bush, I broke down and it all came out in a torrential rush: how I was sure I was going insane, how I was certain it must be deathly serious if I felt this bad, how I knew something was terribly wrong.
As I confessed my misery, cords of guilt tightened around me. My parents had supported me, not only financially but emotionally, through my two years at Oxford. I had no right to be such a mess.
Dizziness forced me to pause for breath.
“Laura,” my father said, “I have felt like you are feeling right now.”
I had already written and directed a scenario in my head where my father demanded to speak to Franck and then convinced him to haul me off to the nearest psychiatric facility; I had not expected this.
“You have?”
“Yes. In fact, I’m probably the one who is responsible for the tendency towards anxiety in your DNA.” I grabbed this like a life preserver. “Sorry about that,” he added.
“I feel like I’m going to die or something awful is going to happen. ”
“You’ve just been chronically stressed for a long time.”
“What should I do?”
“Go to the doctor,” he said. “Tell him exactly what you just told me. Ask for some Valium and take them as prescribed. Try to relax and find a new project. Trust me, you will feel better. ”
My relief was so overpowering that I had to sit down on the floor. All of a sudden reality snapped back into place. Everything lost its distorted, menacing edge. It was like finding the exit from the fun house after having been trapped inside for far too long.
“You promise to go to the doctor tomorrow?” he pressed.
“I promise,” I said, even though I could already understand the temptation not to follow through. Everything seemed fine now.
“Promise to call me when you get back from seeing him?”
“I promise.”
“Oh, I almost forgot,” he said. “Your grandfather just gave forty thousand dollars to your sister to help them finish off their renovations. He wants to give you the same amount so things are fair. His cheque is here at the office waiting for you. Do you want me to invest it somewhere safe until you decide what you want to do with the money?”
“Forty thousand dollars?” I had never received such a windfall before.
“That’s right.”
“No strings attached?” That did not sound like my grandfather.
“That’s what he said,” my father answered. “But knowing your grandfather, he’ll let you know loud and clear if you put it somewhere he doesn’t like. Do you want my advice?”
“Sure.”
“Real estate. He’ll love it and it’s always a good investment.”
“An apartment in Oxford?” I wondered out loud, but even as I said it every cell in my body rebelled against the idea.
“I don’t think you’d be able to buy a dog shed for that price in Oxford, or here in Victoria for that matter. Anyway, there’s no rush. Take care of yourself first. The money isn’t going anywhere.”
I got off the phone feeling, maybe not one hundred per cent, but definitely one hundred per cent better than when I had picked up the receiver to call him.
“Forty thousand,” Franck murmured as we lay in bed that night, my head nestled in the curve of his shoulder. “That’s not the kind of thing that happens every day.”
It was a complete windfall. Part of me was deliriously happy, but another part felt uneasy. Such good luck made me conspicuous. It made me stick out just a little bit farther in destiny’s Rolodex. I wondered if fate would notice me now, scrutinize my card, and think, “Laura needs something nasty to happen to her to even things out.”
Behind that thought, though, an idea began to percolate.
The next morning I was sure I would completely recover on my own - I wished I hadn’t promised my father that I would go to the doctor. Franck had gone ahead and made the appointment with their family doctor before I had even emerged from bed.
Thanks to my overactive imagination, doctor’s visits had always filled me with terror. By the time Franck checked his watch and informed me it was time to go I was fighting the urge to bring up my breakfast. In another frame of mind, the drive would have been stunning. The sun was shining, but to me the vineyards we passed seemed to get darker the further we drove. Franck rolled his window down and enjoyed the fresh breeze until we passed the sign which welcomed us to the little village of Ladoix-Serrigny. He parked beside what looked like a stone house on the main village square. On one side of the house I noticed a set of crumbling stone stairs that led nowhere, something I would normally have found charming but which now struck me as ominous.
“What kind of doctor is he?” I hissed at Franck as we crunched on the gravel path leading to the door. I was fighting the image of a man closely resembling Gerard Depardieu at his most dissolute coming at me with a tranquilizer dart and a straightjacket.
“Le Père Dupont?” Franck asked, surprised. Like the rest of his family, Franck often called his doctor “Father Dupont”, as if he was a priest or something. This didn’t help me - I’d always found priests almost as unnerving as doctors. “He’s just about the least intimidating person on earth.”
I could never understand why other people didn’t find doctors terrifying. Who else could have the power to announce to you that you would be dead in a month’s time from an untreatable condition? To make matters worse, this doctor was French. He would probably make me take all my clothes off in order to take my blood pressure or something.
I was a sweating, mute disaster by the time the Docteur Dupont came out in the waiting room and called my name.
He and Franck chatted for a few interminable minutes about England while I endevoured not to pass out. I got the vague impression Docteur Dupont did look a tad like Gerard Depardieu, less about forty pounds, but I couldn’t see clearly beyond the spots swimming in front of my eyes.
“What brings you here today, Madame Germain?” the doctor finally asked after Franck and I had been ushered into his office.
I opened my mouth, but no words came out.
“Laura needs some valium,” Franck said, then reached over and squeezed my hand.
Oh My God. That was as good as admitting that I was crazy.
“Ah bon?” The doctor cocked his head, nonplussed, as if people came in to ask for Valium every day. Then it struck me like a thunderbolt. Maybe people did come to ask for valium every day.
I tried to explain myself in the awkward pigeon French that always came out of my mouth at the precise moments when I most needed polish. “You see, I just finished my law degree in England. It was very stressful. I’m still waiting for the results for my final exams… I’m not usually like this you know…I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I feel terrible all the time, like something dreadful is going to happen and - ”
“You need a good relaxant,” the doctor interrupted. He motioned me over behind a screen where there was an examination table and a blood pressure cuff hooked on the wall. “First come over here, if it pleases you.”
I walked unsteadily behind him. It didn’t please me at all as a matter of fact. Just looking at the cuff made me want to pass out. I knew that every time I was within five hundred feet of a doctor’s office my blood pressure went through the roof.
He put the cuff on and began to pump it up. I shut my eyes and tried to conjure up the ubiquitous tropical beach with swaying palm trees but I couldn’t concentrate on anything but my heart beating far too fast. If only I could control my thoughts. My face was bright red from the effort of trying but I was failing mi
serably. I couldn’t bear to look at the doctor’s face when the cuff deflated. The Velcro crackled through the silence as he took it off.
“A bit on the high side, but then I’d wager that happens to you often at the doctor’s office, n’est-ce pas? The medicine I am going to prescribe you should help. Life can be very much nicer with relaxants.”
That switch flicked inside me like the day before - the anxiety was gone. It had simply vanished. All that was left was me, sitting on an examination table, feeling like a fool.
I hung my head and noticed for the first time that under his impressive girth Docteur Dupont was schlepping around in a pair of tatty espadrilles. How could I have been so terrified of someone wearing espadrilles?
He ushered me back to his desk where Franck sat, watching me.
“Is she going to live?” he asked, adopting a morose tone belied by the sparkle in his eyes.
Le Père Dupont chuckled. “I don’t see why not.” He scribbled something on his prescription pad. “Better yet, if Madame Germain takes one of these three times a day until she is feeling better she may actually begin to enjoy life too.”
He pushed the prescription over to me. His chunky fingers reached out and patted mine. “It happens to all of us from time to time, you know. It’s what makes us human. We are not meant to be des machines.”
Just then, the roar of a vineyard tractor filled the doctor’s office.
“Can she drink wine with the pills?” Franck asked.
I turned to Franck, horrified. Any doctor I knew in either Canada or England would deem his question ridiculous at best, irresponsible at worst. Health came first, of course. Enjoyment of things like wine shouldn’t even be a consideration.
“Only good wine,” Docteur Dupont answered. “I would highly recommend around two glasses at lunch and dinner. Something fortifying. A Pommard or a Vosne-Romanée would be perfect, though I would also consider a solid Savigny. I would, however, advise you to stay away from the whites at the moment, Madame Germain. They tend to have an agitating effect. ”
Franck nodded and gave me a wink.
“You know what they say here in Burgundy?” The Doctor’s brown eyes met mine and twinkled.
“Quoi?”
“Nothing makes the future look so rosy as to contemplate it through a glass of Chambertin." He stood up and ushered us out. The village church bell was chiming eleven o’clock. “I think that was our wise little Napoleon who said that. If only the state would reimburse it, I would write several prescriptions for Chambertin a day.”
When I got home I felt, for the first time in months, back to my old self. So much so that I didn’t want to take my little pill, but Franck threatened that if I didn’t follow the prescription he would phone Le Père Dupont and my father to rat me out.
Franck’s parents didn’t have any Chambertin on hand, so I took my evening pill along with a glass of lovely Savigny-les-Beaune Les Guettes made by one of Franck’s many uncles. I lay dozing in a lawn chair after dinner. The setting sun lit up the wisteria from above; summer air caressed my skin. Yesterday the world had seemed like a small, black room but now, with some help from the wine and Docteur Dupont’s pills, it became a place of endless possibility.
Chapter 3
I had never thought enjoying a cherry tarte outside under the wisteria would be such a challenge. It was all the fault of the cherry pits. Mémé, Franck’s grandmother, was the one who had baked the tarte and it was her steadfast belief that cherry pits should be left in the fruit.
“It is the only way to get the best flavour!” she explained to me in loud tones that carried into the living room where Michèle, Franck’s mother, had retreated.
“There’s nothing that annoys me more than picking the pits out of a cherry tarte,” Michèle riposted. “Besides, they add nothing whatsoever to the flavour.”
When our lapin à la moutarde and a half round of Cîteaux were sufficiently honoured, Mémé strode back into the kitchen to get her tarte. She presented it with great flourish and cut everyone a large slice. It looked delicious and I was determined, now that I was feeling better, to savour every pleasure I encountered on my daily path.
Mémé began to chew hers with sounds of ecstasy that were unmistakably aimed at her daughter. Michèle, meanwhile, picked each pit out of her mouth with a grimace and lined them up disdainfully, like a row of suspects, on the napkin beside her plate.
The silence between mother and daughter made the dappled sunlight of the table under the wisteria feel like the Gaza strip. Franck plowed through his piece unperturbed. Franck’s father André, meanwhile, polished off his slice in record time and excused himself to go into the house to do the dishes. My gaze shifted nervously from Mémé to Michèle. I took another wary bite and tried to chew as though I was enjoying it…but not too much.
After lunch I climbed up to Franck’s room and flopped on the duvet. Through his skylight clouds gamboled past in a blue sky, blissfully unaware of the cherry pit storm still brewing below. I picked up the bottle of pills Le Père Dupont had prescribed me that were sitting on the miniature wine barrel serving as a bedside table. The prescription said to take one or two more a day in times of anxiety. Did this count? I put the bottle back down. The stressful things that happened outside of me were nothing compared to the stressful feelings inside my own head. I would save the pills for those.
My thoughts drifted to my husband, who was undoubtedly now working his way through a second or maybe even third piece of cherry tarte, his digestion unperturbed by the tension around the table. A few minutes later Franck bent down and made his way through the tiny opening to his garret of a bedroom. He came down and sat beside where I was still lying.
“Is the anxiety back?” he brushed the hair off my forehead.
“Non,” I said and pulled him down beside me so I could nestle my head in the crook of his shoulder. “I was just thinking about your mother and your grandmother down there. Did you even notice they were fighting?”
“That wasn’t fighting.”
“What constitutes fighting around here?”
Franck considered this for a moment. “When things start to get thrown around.”
“Doesn’t conflict make you feel uncomfortable?”
Franck stared at me in amazement. “Bien sûr que, non. If everyone got along all the time life would be unbearably boring. Besides, there are six of us in the house right now – what did you expect?”
"Wouldn't it be great to have our own little place here?” I mused. “We could come and visit and enjoy everyone without living in each other’s pockets.”
I remembered the forty thousand dollars from my grandfather. We would always want to return to Burgundy to visit with Franck’s family and our friends. Burgundy was in Franck’s blood and it had filtered into mine as well. Sometimes we would want to come for long periods of time…
I touched the stone wall of Franck’s room and thought about how long ago those stones has been stacked. Centuries ago. I loved the old buildings in France. Most of them had been built before the Europeans even reached the coast in my part of the world. A flame of something forgotten ignited in me.
“Maybe we should start looking for a little place of our own here.” I lifted my head to get a better view of my husband’s reaction.
Franck gave a start but after considering this idea for a while he leaned over and kissed me back against the duvet.
“I found something!” Franck came rushing in through the front gate just before dinner the next day, followed by his father whom he had picked up on his way home from Beaune.
His triumph rendered him oblivious to the deep freeze that had settled like hoarfrost around the kitchen table. As far as I could tell, the Cherry Pit Incident had never been fully resolved; just five minutes ago Mémé had criticized how Michèle always let Franck’s little brother Emmanuel-Marie have ketchup on his pasta.
Emmanuel-Marie, with all the perfidy of a nine-year-old, got up to go to the bathroom and
took the ketchup bottle with him. Franck’s mother had conceived him twenty years after Franck, following a brutal treatment for a rare and deadly form of cancer that struck her at thirty-five. According to the doctors, her disease should have killed her, not to mention rendered her sterile several times over. During her illness and treatment Michèle had travelled to Lourdes and prayed to the Virgin Mary for help. The pugnacious towhead emerging from the bathroom, pulling up his shorts with one hand and clutching his bottle of Heinz with the other, was tangible proof that those prayers to the Virgin Mary were answered.
Franck flipped open the pad of paper he had been carrying. I glanced over but couldn’t decipher any of his scrawls.
“On my way down to Beaune I drove around a little,” he began. “I saw a sign in Marey-les-Fussey in front of a house for sale. Maybe two houses actually, on an incredible piece of land looking on to the vineyards.”
My heart started to beat a little faster - from excitement rather than panic for a change.
“I’ve got the number for the real estate agent. From the sign it looked like he was from Châlon. It was the only house I saw for sale, and the fact that it is in Marey-les-Fussey…” Franck caught my eye. “I believe it’s a sign.”
No-one at the table rolled their eyes at the talk of signs. Mémé and Michèle both nodded and waited to hear more. Signs and divine intervention were par for the course for Franck’s family; Emmanuel-Marie was sitting right beside us, after all.
I hadn’t been brought up to pray to the Virgin Mary, or anyone else, but now I realized that Franck had most likely been praying to her since last night for the right house to fall across our path. He always carried a well-worn icon of the Virgin Mary in his leather wallet. He lived his life convinced that he was not only protected by the Virgin but also by an assorted crew of deceased grandparents, uncles, and a friend or two up in Heaven. He considered this motley celestial crew to be his guardian angels.
My Grape Escape Page 2