I wonder what’s coming next. She has a container of salt next to her and a worried look on her face. I think she wants to put some of the salt inside the bowl of pee, but I don’t know why.
Mama doesn’t like any of it, the salt or the prayer or the funny hand gestures warding off evil spirits. But she’s not home today. Grandma’s babysitting me and Grandma says that sometimes the old ways work better than new ones like doctors. She says magic fixes what magic causes, and that no one knows more than the healers of the old country. What old country, I don’t know. But that’s what she says.
Grandma taps my knee with her hand, and I scooch over so she can peer inside the pot.
“That’s my pee,” I say, giggling.
She sprinkles a tiny spoonful of salt into the palm of her hand then tosses it past my leg into the toilet. Still giggling, I watch her say funny words to the water filled with pee.
“Will you put in pepper too?” I ask, still giggling.
“Don’t be silly.” She sounds stern, but she’s smiling a little.
“It's not going to taste good, even with salt.”
“This is not funny, young lady.”
“Oh yes it is!" I grin up at her nice wrinkled face.
“I am saying a prayer,” Grandma tells me, “to cure you of the Evil Eye.”
“Oh. Who gave it to me?”
“It is difficult to say. A jealous person, perhaps. An angry person.”
“Grandmother Russell was angry. Did she give the eye to me?”
“No one knows, Pilar.” Grandma clucks her tongue. “You are such a beauty. People are jealous of a child like that. Even if they do not intend to harm you.”
“Am I harmed?”
“Not if I can help it. This is why I am trying a prayer. My grandmother knew this prayer. It was from our village.”
“Does Daddy need a prayer too?” I ask—and Grandma changes, her nice voice gone.
“May his name be blotted out!” she cries. She looks and sounds like a rooster: pulling back her arms and calling out the same things over and over. Next she makes little puffed spitting noises and waves these sounds into the air with her hand—chasing away dark wishes.
I slap my hands over my ears.
To my surprise, Grandma bends down and gently tweaks my nose again. Her hands are cold and skeletal, but her body smells of old blankets. She reaches into the pocket of her sweater and takes out a bright blue stone. The chain holding it is the color of Hannukah gelt.
“Here, put this on. You are so smart and talented, you have ten miracles on all ten fingers. If we cannot cure you, we should take you back to the healer.”
“Am I fixed yet?
“I don’t know. Maybe we should try the prayer one more time.”
“Okay,” I say. “But I want a toy.”
“All right, which one?”
I ask for my baby doll Chizera, which is what Mama calls me when she wants to say I’m like a little witch. Holding Chizera close, I clutch the pretty necklace in my hand and feel better.
The magic spell must be working.
IV
I opened my eyes to see the piano, cover open, keys smiling their dead black and white smile.
Jeannot’s piano, both covers splayed wide open as if readied for surgery.
And my fingers poised over the keyboard, ready to sprinkle it with a pinch of—I squinted at the small container in my left hand—fish food?
Goldfish food, to be exact, from the time before he met me, when he had been the proud owner of two fat and elderly poisons rouge—literally “red fish.” He had told me all about them: Arnaud and Agathe, a promiscuous pair though all of their babies died young (one eaten by the mother, alas).
And here I was, about to sprinkle their fishie flakes into Jeannot’s Hamilton piano. Carefully I covered the container. I placed it on the piano bench and closed both the small and large lids.
All better. No harm done. So what if I dreamed about salt being poured into pee and then walked around the house while sleeping, reached under the bathroom sink to pull out the fish food, and carted it to the piano to heal Jeannot’s poor jinxed piano keys?
I get it. Sort of.
I really hated going to sleep in one place and waking up in another.
Jeannot still lay sprawled on the sofa, snoring louder than usual. For a moment I watched him, listened to him. What time was it, anyway? The living room shutters spread like oversized hands against morning light. I touched my neck, feeling for the chain of Grandma’s blue stone necklace. But of course it wasn’t there. I wasn’t wearing it—had never worn it since arriving in France since even looking at the thing made me feel guilty. The necklace remained in my fanny pack with my passport, ensconced inside Jeannot’s armoire.
Our armoire.
I wandered into the kitchen, made some coffee and drank it black, almost enjoying the bitterness. And when the phone rang, I snatched it up, expecting to hear my mother, expecting for her to tell me she had dreamed of me too, that she knew something was wrong; and was so worried that she wanted to cart me back to the lady with the parakeets so I could be cured of whatever hex had been thrown at me.
Instead I heard Monique. “Pilar. It is me. I am sorry to bother you so early on Sunday. But I am downstairs, in front of your building. Let me in, please?” She sounded small and scared, like the child sitting on the potty waiting for magic spells.
“What happened? Are you sick?”
“No, it is something else. I will explain,” she said, and broke into sobs.
V
I had never heard Monique cry before. Maybe I didn’t believe women like her ever had a reason to cry. I was waiting at the door when she sailed in glassy-eyed, not stopping for a kiss.
And that scared me most of all. Monique never forgot to kiss. That would be like me forgetting to bathe.
We tiptoed past the sleeping Jeannot into the kitchen where I spent an awful ten minutes watching her wipe her eyes with an ironed handkerchief. “I'm sorry I ruin your Sunday,” she kept saying between nose-blows.
I poured her coffee and told her that she hadn’t ruined anything; that Jeannot was passed out from drink and we had our own problems with which to ruin our Sunday.
“Yes, I ruin,” Monique insisted. Her skin was blotchy, as if her freckles had merged from all the crying. Her eyes held a sadness that resonated in my own solar plexus.
“Tell me what’s wrong. You’re scaring me.”
“My husband…”
Louis had lied to her. He had told her he needed to go to work early that morning, even though he never, ever worked Sundays. How could he stoop to something so cheap, so obvious? He must have thought she would be too naive to catch on. Too trusting. But she called him at work. He wasn’t available because the office was closed. Of course.
Afterward, searching his desk at home, Monique discovered a phone bill with an unfamiliar number dialed a little too frequently for too many minutes. So she called it herself. A female answered: a girlish-sounding female whose voice sent my friend into another frenzy of spying.
Monique called the operator and got an address for the number. Now she had that address tucked in her purse and wanted me to go with her. She wanted to knock on a stranger's door and catch her husband red handed.
“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” I asked. “This could be painful.”
“I do not care about that. Pilar, you must understand. How would you feel if Jeannot has sex with another woman?”
“Terrible, of course.”
“Then you understand.”
“But…you know he loves you. Maybe he made a mistake.”
She stared at me.
So I jumped out of my chair to wrap my arms around her. “I’ll do whatever you want, okay? Let's go investigate. I’ll leave Jeannot a note.”
VI
To access the property in question we opened a yard door that shrieked Eeeeeee like something in a Halloween Fun House. Monique hung behind me, mutterin
g, “Merdemerdemerde” as if expecting to encounter monsters and witches and flesh-eating snakes.
On the other side of the door there were no monsters, though. Also no garden, table or chairs: just a flat dusty square with a dead tree in front of a boring modern edifice built by someone with no imagination. Faint radio voices emanated from one of the windows. Gingham curtains billowed like vertical picnic blankets from an upstairs balcony.
“Louis hates gingham,” Monique murmured into my ear, sounding strangely triumphant.
She turned to the doorway and recoiled from a spider hanging low from its web. Monique was clean to the point of obsessiveness. She ironed bed sheets. She ironed denim jeans so tiny they seemed to be more creases than fabric. Cobwebs did not form inside her world.
“Hurry,” she said. “Before I lose courage.”
Maybe he won’t be here, I thought as we climbed. The stairway was dim and cool, but my hands were already sweating. My heart tripped and hammered so hard I thought: Another panic attack! I didn’t have time for that, though, not with Monique like this. I wiped my palms on my jeans and knocked.
The door opened. And there stood Louis Fontaine, terrycloth bathrobe untied, shorts flashing. No shirt.
“Pilar.” Then he looked over my shoulder at Monique. “Non,” he said.
From behind him a female voice pealed. “Louis, who is there?”
When he didn’t respond, the owner of the voice peered out and scowled.
She was young. Oh so painfully young! Not that Monique was old. But this person—definitely girl more than woman—had no lines on her face; she hadn’t discovered life yet. She had no wisdom. Nothing that shone from Monique's anchored place in the world. The young woman did have hair the same beige as Monique's, cut into a short fluff. She wore shorts and an oversized T-shirt that probably belonged to the man himself.
She turned to Louis. “So! Is this the wife?”
Monique stared, mouth in a grim line.
“Isn’t she going to talk?” the girl demanded.
“Merde,” muttered Louis. “Merde, merde, merde.”
Finding my tongue, I said to Louis, “You don’t know what you have”—but Monique’s voice overrode mine.
“Please ask this”—her voice broke—“this person to excuse us. I prefer to speak to you without her listening.”
There was a small pause. Monique’s fingers dug like talons into the flesh of my arm. The girl exhaled loudly, tossed her head, and with a withering glare at both Monique and Louis, stalked off.
We were alone, the three of us. And I stuck in there like a third wheel because I knew damn well that my friend wanted me to. Monique had been helping me since I first set foot in Montpellier. Now I had the chance to reciprocate.
With visible effort, she lifted her chin. Her gray eyes looked watery, squinting; almost myopic. But her voice came out as dignified steel.
“Louis, we have been married for…for five years.” She paused to compose herself; to painstakingly compose her words while Louis just gaped at her. He reminded me of those mug shots you see on TV, the personality gone flat, all hope gone, mouth gone stupid.
She said, “We have a baby together. I have always been there for you. It is—unconscionable—that you should seek intimacy elsewhere. And...deceive me and risk…our new, precious family.”
She took another breath, eyes blinking rapidly. The mug shot of her husband did not change.
“That baby has required sacrifice. You think I don’t know that. He brings us worry and boredom and fatigue along with the joy. Yet”—another crack in her voice—“instead of holding my hand on this journey, you want to be free? And you find this freedom by lying to me? By having sex with someone else…?”
Finally she stopped. The talons of her hand loosened. I took another breath. Now the anger was coming; the real anger.
And with anger comes strength…
“I have lost respect for you, Louis-Marie Fontaine, you son of a bitch!”
Marie? That was the second part of his first name?
“And perhaps a small amount of love, too. You are…a very small man.”
Ouch. He was, too. Small.
“And petty. And selfish.”
Double ouch.
“If you wish to talk, you may call me at home. Maybe I’ll be there to listen, maybe not. But don’t you dare call until you are ready. I have no desire to speak to this Louis!"
She turned on her heel and descended the staircase, leaving me to stare at her petty, selfish, and very small husband.
Funny, but the deadness of his expression seemed to melt before my eyes. And with tears rolling down his cheeks, he didn’t look free at all. He looked trapped and defeated, as if the illicit sex meant nothing to him after all: certainly much less than he had originally imagined.
This man, like so many others, needed the power and thrill of sex to sustain him…and now sex was destroying his life.
Triple ouch.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
I
There is, I’ve always believed, a change in the atmosphere of a house when a loved one has left it even temporarily. And I don’t mean a shift in energy fields, an aura fading or vanishing, a vibe psychically extenuated or communicated.
Rather, the house and all its belongings just know that something has changed. The clock ticks differently, a deliberated thwock resonating through abandoned rooms. Dust motes are stiller as they cluster in sun stripes from over-cheerful windows. The refrigerator sighs fitfully. Couch cushions hold their breath; the tap in the bathroom thump-thumps like an anxious, palpitating heart.
Years later this idea would return to me in the form of my first published children’s book: The House That Sneezed—which included a big old house in the spasm of a huge ker-chooo! and a little girl wandering through the house trying gallantly to make it healthy again despite her broken family.
Typical of me, right? Not exactly a cheerful story. No singing dinosaurs. Yet school psychologists and social workers and counselors did buy that book at the time of publication, and they buy it still. I guess they use it to discuss divorce or death and emptiness and change with little kids who know when their house is forever altered but can’t really talk about it.
What I’m getting at is this: when Monique and I returned to my apartment, when I turned the key in the lock and called softly, “Jeannot?”—I already knew he was gone.
Several of my own heartbeats later I found his note. It was stuck on the fridge with a magnet screaming Radio Fun! in googly-eyed yellow letters.
Remember, this was in the days before cell phones. So when I read that Jeannot had gone to Villefranche sur Lez to talk to his parents about his new plans, I couldn’t just call and stop him. That is, unless I wanted to get through them on the phone first.
Which I didn’t.
All I could do was show the note to Monique, explain what was wrong, and beg to borrow her car so I could follow him and deal with it in person. Because I was not going to let Jeannot trash his dreams and ruin his life. I was not going to watch his father wreak havoc on the man I loved.
I was not going to let him make the same mistake I had made so many times in my twenty-something years…
“Oh, you know how to drive on French roads?” Monique asked me doubtfully.
I told her yes, I knew how to drive, and she handed over the keys without asking how long I’d be gone. She just gave me her bright yellow midget of a car. And she set off for town on foot, to fetch her child from her mother’s and face her own emptiness while I faced mine.
The only problem was: Monique’s car had a manual transmission. I didn’t know how to drive a manual transmission though I’d always intended to.
No time like the present.
II
Settling behind the wheel of the Mini Cooper, I tried to figure things out. I had two feet; there were three pedals. Do the math; it doesn’t work.
Fortunately I’d watched Jeannot and Monique drive often enough to re
alize that you had to release one pedal—the left one, the clutch—while yanking and twisting the gearshift, depending on what speed you were going or wanted to go. Except…when during all that activity did a person use the gas pedal? God forbid I wreck Monique’s car!
Make your own luck.
Pushing both the clutch and brake pedals to the floor, I turned the key. The engine started with a rattling snarl.
So far so good…Now what?
Unable to decide, I lifted both feet. The Mini lunged and jerked to a crawl, muttered, shook, died.
The gas! I was supposed to move one foot to the accelerator pedal.
Oh crap. Merde. Whatever. I pushed the clutch and brake pedals down again and restarted the engine. Lifted my feet and immediately slammed the right one onto the gas pedal.
The car erupted forward, accelerating with a tinny scream. I jerked the wheel to stay on the road and succeeded, sort of. The Mini was moving at a brisk jog. But despite the shrieking of the engine, it refused to go any faster.
Oh, yes. That’s what the shifter is for! Leave the brake alone. Push in the clutch. Jerk the shift knob down, the way Jeannot does. Release the damn clutch.
My head snapped back as the car leaped forward. Faster now, bumping over cobblestones, swerving maniacally out of the city onto a bridge that looked like a toy.
Stop thinking—just drive!
I slammed on the brake and jerked the little car around a curve, tires squealing. Speed dropped away as I put my foot back on the gas. Except now the bucking engine grumbled like a crabby old man.
Before it could die I shoved the clutch back in. The engine sighed with relief.
I shifted back into the first position. Clutch out. Another lunge. Why aren’t these gear positions labeled? And why the hell didn’t the French put bumpers on the sides of their roads? I wasn’t the only one who couldn’t drive worth a damn.
After I jerked the shifter around furiously for a few seconds, it crashed into a different slot. I let the clutch out. The Mini groaned forward and finally gathered speed. Not a lot, but enough. I'd creep all the way to Villefranche sur Lez if necessary.
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