by Jane Delury
“You have a baby,” Hélène told Adèle as the Citroën disappeared down the road, “and you love him more than anything. And then one day, he won’t stay for coffee.”
“Do you have an Internet signal?” Adèle had taken out her phone.
“No,” Hélène said, too sharply, “but we have frogs in the well.”
After the problem of the Internet signal, there had been the problem of the duck. When Hélène brought Adèle to the kitchen so she could see what was making that delicious smell, Adèle informed her that like her mother, Cécile, she didn’t eat meat.
“Duck isn’t meat. It’s poultry,” Hélène said.
“I don’t eat anything with feet, eyes, or feathers.”
“Well, then”—Hélène closed the door to the oven—“we shall go to the store and find you something that you can eat.”
First, though, as planned, she took Adèle to the Benneville square, which had been decorated with flying bells and eggs for Easter, and then to the glacerie for an ice cream. Unfortunately, the glacerie had a signal.
“Pas à table,” she’d told Adèle, who put away her phone begrudgingly. Hélène tried to make conversation (Did Adèle like school? Was she still taking oboe lessons?) as Adèle ate her Dame Blanche with abandon, the spoon whipping to her lips and back into the glass tulip of ice cream. Done, Adèle dashed the napkin over her mouth and asked if now she could use her phone. She’d left off in the middle of some kind of game and had robots to kill.
“Ten minutes,” Hélène said, as she used to tell Emmanuel and Alexis when they wanted to run in the forest before dinner on a visit to their grandparents, back when they owned the cottage. Adèle’s thumbs flew. Hélène signaled for the check. It was then that she had started to feel indignant, even mean. Across the table, Adèle had inflated from a plump girl to a fat girl, from quiet to sullen, from slightly tiring to exhausting. And Adèle, she thought now, must have sensed the hardening. This was why, when, on the way out of Benneville, they stopped at the hypermarché to choose something Adèle could eat for dinner and Hélène told her that she must choose a fruit as a base for the dessert that would follow a cheese pizza seemingly big enough for a family of eight, Adèle had picked the most difficult fruit imaginable.
“You know”—Hélène navigated the car through the sprawling parking lot of the hypermarché—“we didn’t even have a television when your father was growing up. Can you imagine?”
“No.” In the rearview mirror, Adèle was a fatter, smaller version of Cécile. “I’ll have two televisions now.”
“Will you?”
“And two bedrooms. The one at Cécile’s opens onto the roof. She says we can go out there sometimes to have tea.” Adèle scrunched deeper in her seat. “On peut voir l’Arc de Triomphe.”
“Can you?” Hélène turned the car onto the main road. “How lovely. Is the roof flat?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t seen the apartment yet. Emmanuel is going to take me there tomorrow.”
“I hope the roof is indeed flat, or that could be dangerous.”
Adèle didn’t answer. Really, Hélène thought, how could Cécile fill the child’s head with such nougat? “Cécile and I need more space,” Emmanuel had told Hélène when he called to ask if Adèle could stay during the move. “Adèle isn’t upset about it, but it would be better not to have her underfoot.” He announced what anyone else would call a separation with the same blasé tone that he’d announced on the phone a decade ago that Cécile was pregnant and that they were moving in together: “No, Maman, not getting married. We don’t believe in all that.”
This was not long after he’d called to say that he’d dropped out of university to backpack across the Orient. He and Cécile met in a souk in Istanbul and returned to Paris together to work with the immigrants in the suburbs, where men beat their wives and women wore headscarves even in summer. Hélène was not “anti-immigrant,” as Emmanuel had accused her of once—she was quite attached to the Portuguese woman who cleaned the cottage, and Jacques’s nurse was from Poland or Hungary, one of those Eastern European countries. Still, she did think that if you were going to move to France you should want to be French. Alexis’s wife, Kate, for instance, might be American, but she didn’t throw it in Hélène’s face. She appreciated Hélène’s cooking and asked her opinion about how to decorate the house they’d recently bought near Grenoble. Together, they’d found a pretty yellow for what would be the nursery.
Unlike Kate, Cécile never wore makeup, had a ring in her nose, and smoked a pipe after breakfast. Once he’d met her, Emmanuel’s leftward leanings had fallen fully west, as Jacques put it in his gentle, detached way. Emmanuel listened to American jazz. He voted for the Green Party, and had been arrested for pulling up GMO corn near Arles. He thought marijuana should be legal. He and Cécile didn’t go to church ever, not even at Christmas. And Cécile liked to hurt Hélène, as if Hélène represented everything about her own generation that Cécile’s generation wanted to destroy. They’d had a terrible blowout some years back, after Cécile had an abortion and mentioned it as casually as if the baby were one of the warts the doctor froze off Hélène’s toes.
Hélène had been horrified. She had looked to Jacques to step in, and he didn’t. He never took sides in these situations. It had been one of the worst days of Hélène’s life, until the one when Jacques had his stroke. She’d sobbed herself to sleep for weeks, sudden surges of weeping that left her spent. It wasn’t only the thought of that baby’s soul; it was the cruelty that Cécile had displayed and thus that Emmanuel had displayed. Finally, a year later, when the ice had melted, she asked him why they had told her about the baby in the first place. He said that he was sorry. “I didn’t know that’s what we would end up deciding,” he said. “I thought we would have it.”
She’d felt so sorry for him then that she’d forgiven him, but she would never forgive Cécile. Emmanuel hadn’t meant to be cruel to her. He’d told her about the pregnancy because he’d wanted the baby. And Cécile had punished him for telling Hélène by announcing the abortion so casually. Or maybe—Hélène thought in very dark moments—Cécile had punished him for telling Hélène by having the abortion at all. Hélène would always connect the death of that baby to Jacques’s stroke, even though Alexis, when she’d said this to him, said there was no one to blame and then calmly explained artery blockages.
When she and Adèle walked back into the cottage, Jacques was moaning. Adèle stopped by the door.
“It’s all right,” Hélène said, “your grandfather makes noises sometimes.”
“It sounds like a ghost.”
“It isn’t. Let’s take this to the kitchen.”
It did sound like a ghost, she thought, as Adèle, still big-eyed, followed her down the hall with the bag of groceries. The moaning started with a rattle inside Jacques’s throat and then bloomed out of his mouth. You couldn’t stop it, though she knew that the nurse was trying, running her hand down Jacques’s arm, telling him, Tout va bien, tout va bien, plumping the pillows behind his head.
She told Adèle to take the pizza to the deep freezer in the storage room down the hall. She stepped into the kitchen, which had been added on to the house years before. At the time, she had delighted in moving over the threshold from the old house into this modern room with its fresh tile floors and straight walls, and all the counter space in the world. Now, though, the addition felt like a mistake, like a taut, lifted face on an old neck that only made the neck look older.
She unwrapped the coconut from its plastic-bag shroud. The kitchen smelled of the cold duck. She emptied the fruit bowl, blown from cobalt glass and fluted at the top. Jacques had given it to her on their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, one of his many practical gifts. She put the coconut in the bowl and arranged the plums and oranges around it. The moaning faded, and then started again. Why did the ocean look blue, she wondered, when it was transparent? She had learned this in school, surely. The Atlantic was gray in Brittan
y and blue in the south. The skies of Brittany were gray and the skies in the south blue. So the water must reflect the color of the sky.
“There.” She put the fruit bowl on the table. “Doesn’t that look nice?”
Adèle clumped into a chair. “He does that all the time?”
“Why don’t you get the peg solitaire from the parlor?” Hélène said. “We’ll play a game here. I’ll go check on your grandfather first.”
Upstairs, in the bedroom, Jacques sat by the gabled window, staring out at the forest as the nurse combed his hair. A line of drool glistened in the crease below his mouth, which collapsed on one side like a failed soufflé.
“He had one of his scares,” the nurse said in her accented French. “He’s been good this morning, otherwise.”
“Did he eat his eggs?” Hélène asked.
“Two,” the nurse said. “He got a little on his pants, though, didn’t you?” she said to Jacques. “We had to change them.”
She drew the comb around Jacques’s ear, raking the scalp. She smelled like talc and perspiration and had huge breasts that Jacques tried to touch sometimes. During their marriage, Jacques hadn’t been much of a lover. In those years, when Hélène was young, it always felt as if he were borrowing her when she wanted to be taken. She’d been his secretary, and he’d declared his feelings by leaving a new blotter on her desk. She’d been beautiful in her twenties, tall, blond, and elegant, with a superbe décolleté. “You’re too good for me,” he said on their fourth date. For many years of their marriage, Hélène had agreed.
“I made duck confit for dinner,” Hélène said to Jacques. “Your favorite.”
Buried along the line of Jacques’s scalp were flakes of dandruff. The nurse teased them out with the comb. Once, Hélène had watched her give him a bath from the doorway of the bathroom. The nurse ran the sponge over his shoulders and down his chest as Hélène had done when she’d cared for him.
“Your hair looks lovely, darling,” Hélène said. She heard plodding steps down the hall.
“Doesn’t Grandpa look nice?” She turned to Adèle. “As if he were going to church.”
In the doorway, Adèle seemed terrified, and for a second Hélène could see Jacques through her eyes. He was, indeed, frightening-looking. Then again, so was she. She knew that she was not a sweet, soft grandmother. There were different kinds of wrinkles, and she had the angry ones. Lashes. The pucker of repeated frowns.
“Adèle is visiting us,” Hélène told Jacques. “Manu’s girl. We bought a coconut this morning at the hypermarché, the one off the autoroute that you and I don’t like because it’s too big. I bought steaks for lunch tomorrow there as well, all wrapped in plastic. The last time I went to Marcel’s the new butcher didn’t cut off enough of the fat.”
Jacques closed his eyes. He burrowed his head between the nurse’s breasts.
“Silly boy,” the nurse said. Backing up, she smiled at Adèle. “How nice that you’ve come to keep your grandmother company.”
“We were going to play solitaire,” Hélène said. “Weren’t we, Adèle?”
Adèle nodded. Hélène felt grateful. She’d been too hard on the girl in the hypermarché, telling her that she must choose a fruit. She’d treated her with the kind of disdain people showed to the overweight, which was not so dissimilar to the disdain people showed to the old.
“We’re off, then.” She kissed Jacques on the carefully tilled top of his head.
Back in the kitchen, Adèle said, “Could we open the coconut right away? I want to try the milk. Like in Tintin aux Antilles?”
“You know that one, do you? Well, I don’t see why not.”
The book had been Emmanuel’s favorite bande dessinée. When he was very young and Alexis was a baby, Jacques would read it to him over and over in his small bed. Jacques would take off his shoes and plump a pillow behind his head. Sometimes, after a long day at work, he would fall asleep, and Hélène left him there all night, the book open on his chest.
“Manu told me the story when I was little,” Adèle said. “He said that if we ever saw a coconut we could try it.”
“All right. Let’s get it open. And then we could make a coconut flan. You do like flan, don’t you? I suppose we could grate the flesh like cheese.”
She took the plums and oranges out of the fruit bowl. One thing about her, she could admit when she was wrong. Adèle hadn’t been trying to be difficult when she chose the fruit. She’d simply wanted to try a coconut. Tea on the roof. The poor child. Cécile and Emmanuel had managed to convince her that what was happening now in Paris—the empty corners, the two chairs at the table rather than three—was not a catastrophe. They acted as if their lives were happening to other people in a valley whom they themselves were watching from a mountain. But she knew the winds were cold and that her son was suffering.
“Have you been happy with Jacques?” Cécile had asked Hélène once, when she was pregnant with Adèle.
“I don’t ask myself that question,” Hélène had said. “He’s a good, kind man.”
And he had been, always, until the stroke. The week that they came back from the hospital, he turned over in bed and slapped Hélène on the cheek.
“You cunt,” he said. “Leave my tomatoes alone.”
The next morning, as she poured his coffee, he tried to punch her in the stomach. A day later, he almost pushed her down the stairs. She caught herself on the railing. She didn’t tell the boys or the nurse who came afternoons, or the physical therapist. He’d pushed her again one morning when she was trying to give him his bath, and she slipped on the tile. Her hip snapped. Pain forked up her side. Jacques still in the water, she’d crawled to the phone in the hall to call the doctor. He put her on pain medication and put Jacques on sedatives. He said, “Madame, you need help, and I am going to arrange it for you.” He patted her hand. He said, “This must be so difficult.” He reminded her of Jacques. She had started to cry. Now she regretted having called him.
“Let’s spread out some newspaper on the table,” she told Adèle. “Your grandfather is calm again. The nurse will take him for his walk to the forest.”
They examined the coconut. “I suppose we’ll have to smash it with a hammer,” Hélène said.
“Then the milk will spill out.”
“That would be messy.”
“And we’d lose all the milk.”
“How did the islander open the coconut in Tintin to drink the milk, then?”
“I don’t know. Manu didn’t tell that part. He’d only say the islander opened the coconut.”
Jacques had started to moan again.
“She’s getting your grandfather ready for his walk to the forest,” Hélène said. “Remember how he used to take you mushrooming?” Adèle didn’t answer. She looked terrified again.
Hélène took the coconut off the table and handed it to her. “I’ll call your father to ask what we should do. Why don’t you bring this outside? We’ll open it there. Less mess that way.”
Emmanuel’s cell phone blared several times before he picked up.
“Oh, good,” Hélène said. “You made it back safely.”
“I meant to call. The phone died, and then the movers were here. How’s Adèle?”
“She’s fine. We bought a coconut. She said you’d told her the story of Tintin.”
“Told it to her, yes. I didn’t buy it for her, though. The drawings are racist.”
“Really? You read it and you aren’t racist.”
“I’m not a lot of things I could be.”
Hélène could hear men talking in the background, feet thudding under furniture. A cupboard slammed. Cécile would be taking half of the pots and the plates, the knives, forks, and spoons.
“Do you remember how they open the coconut in the book?” she asked.
“I think the islander hits it against his head.”
“That doesn’t help much,” Hélène said. She paused. On the floor above, the nurse and Jacques were sta
rting down the stairs. “Adèle says she’ll be able to have tea on the roof at her mother’s apartment.”
“Maybe she will. You know Cécile. Elle en est capable.”
He still loved her, Hélène thought, despite what she’d done to him and what she kept doing. What more does she say she wants from you? Hélène wanted to ask. Passion? Adventure? Of course she had thought about whether she was happy with Jacques. Of course she’d asked herself the question that Cécile had once asked her. She’d been that age once. She’d been beautiful too, though in a more groomed way. But she could no more have this conversation with her son than she could have had that one with Cécile.
“I’m making steak for lunch tomorrow,” she said. “Don’t hurt your back if you help with the couch.”
“Thanks, Maman,” Emmanuel said.
She hung up the phone. Your daughter is fat, Emmanuel, she would continue on to say. She needs to go on a diet. Cécile has left you. She knew she would leave you one day, and that’s why she didn’t want to have your baby. Maybe Tintin is racist, but that story made you happy. You would put your head on your father’s shoulder as he read. You would say, “One more time, Papa. It isn’t too late.” Some things you have to make simple even though they aren’t. You will see this when you look back after I’m dead. You will think: I’m glad I had that lunch with my father, even though he didn’t recognize me and moaned all of a sudden for nothing and spit out his food. You will think, I’m glad my mother made me.
She walked down the hall, by the nurse and Jacques.
“We’re off to get our fresh air,” the nurse said, brightly.
“Have a good walk, darling,” Hélène said to Jacques.
In the storage room, the freezer hummed and the air smelled of old onions and dirt. She looked at the boxes, stacked with her parents’ wedding portrait that had hung over the fireplace when she and Jacques lived in Paris, his mother’s sewing machine, a crate of Guy’s few belongings sent to them after his suicide, the boys’ crib mattresses like slices of bread against the wall. She opened the box labeled Livres/Enfance in Jacques’s precise writing. Several books in, she found Tintin aux Antilles. She stood in the circle of light from the bulb on the ceiling.