Going Topless

by Megan McAndrew

  In the mini-mart, Lucy makes a beeline for a box of lemons with the leaves still attached. “Don’t these look lovely and fresh!” she exclaims, picking one up. A sign over the box says that they’re Santerran, which pleases her inordinately, though as far as I’m concerned they just look like lemons. “We’ll have pasta al limone as a first course,” she exults, piling them into her basket. What we are indulging here is Lucy’s fantasy, fueled by Elizabeth David and The River Cafe Cookbook, of the harmonious communion with the seasons that dictated menu planning before the corruption of mankind by convenience foods and supermarkets. In this spirit we stock up on local tomatoes, too, and melons. Then Isabelle tries to slip some apples into the basket.

  “Why don’t we get some of these lovely peaches instead?” Lucy wheedles.

  “Because I like apples,” Isabelle says.

  “I do think we ought to make an effort to support local agriculture,” Lucy persists. “Those apples were probably grown in New Zealand and flown over unripe in a box.”

  Jane and I assume horrified expressions, but Isabelle is unmoved. “What local agriculture? When was the last time you actually saw a Santerran tilling the soil? I’ll bet you those lemons came from Tunisia or somewhere,” she says blithely, adding a bunch of grossly unseasonal bananas to the pile. I should mention that Isabelle is a complete barbarian when it comes to food, and can live for days on cookies and Diet Coke. Her eating habits moreover have only worsened in the Czech Republic, where the two main alimentary groups are pork and starch.

  Which is why I know we’re heading for trouble as soon as we pass the junk food isle. Sure enough, Isabelle heads straight for the potato chips.

  “I wish you wouldn’t,” Lucy says tensely. “Electra isn’t supposed to have them.”

  Jane and I glance at each other.

  “Oh, come on, don’t be such a spoilsport,” Isabelle says.

  I watch Lucy with interest. She looks like she’s either going to hit Isabelle or burst into tears. Jane moves protectively toward her. It’s something she does, I’ve noticed, without being aware of it. Not for the first time, I find myself wishing that Isabelle would grow up.

  “Come on,” I say, “it’s not going to kill you to eat vegetables for a few days.”

  “How did Electra put on all that weight, anyway?” my super-tactful sister chooses this moment to ask.

  So it’s out. Lucy’s expression goes through a series of tectonic shifts; I’m beginning to worry that she’s going to lose it, but she regains her composure and says, with icy dignity, “Don’t you think if I knew, I would have done something about it?”

  Isabelle puts back the potato chips and picks up a sack of Cheez Doodles instead.

  CHAPTER eight

  Lucy brings up the matter of the garden furniture at dinner aptly enough, since we’re sitting on it. Since the Costas haven’t shown up yet, we have the free run of the patio between our houses, which means being able to dine alfresco without having to listen to them scarfing down their pork chops and the Super-Géant’s version of Tater Tots ten feet away to a soundtrack of pulsating Euro-disco. As for us, we are enjoying a healthful meal of pasta al limone and dandelion salad dressed with the balsamic vinegar Lucy brought from London and the extra virgin Santerran olive oil we finally found, and paid an arm and a leg for, in a display of traditional native products at the Esso station. Sophie and Olga are eating cereal in the kitchen, where Odette sent them for making barfing sounds over the dandelions. Electra, it turns out, will eat anything including weeds, probably because she’s starving, Isabelle points out to me under her breath. Oddly enough, she doesn’t seem to mind Odette’s disciplining the girls—you might think out of some great respect for her authority, though I’m sure it’s more out of laziness.

  “I might as well bring this up while we’re all together,” Lucy announces after we’ve all dutifully lauded her cooking. “The cost of the outdoor furniture was fifteen hundred pounds. I think it’s only fair that we split it five ways, which comes to three hundred apiece. Jane has already given me her share.”

  A silence descends, one that Isabelle and I simultaneously break by jumping in with hasty Of courses. The expression on Odette’s face however can only be described as consternation. Yves’ eyes have begun to wander, and Jim just looks puzzled. Richard stares at the wall. Lucy smiles.

  “Of course we’ll pay you back,” I repeat. “There’s no reason you should have to pick up the whole thing.”

  Odette clears her throat. “You might have consulted us before deciding to spend such a large amount of money,” she says carefully. Odette’s English gets very precise when she’s flustered, though she never entirely manages to shake the Inspector Clouseau effect. “We could have found something perfectly adequate in Canonica….”

  Lucy’s smirk at this indicates her opinion of the wares to be found in Canonica. “Well, actually, they were on sale, so I had to make an executive decision. But in fact you’re quite right: It’s high time we had a meeting to discuss common expenses. We can’t just go on doing things in this haphazard way. The roof needs to be fixed and the stairs are falling down—”

  Odette makes a pfff sound that I interpret as meaning that, as far as she’s concerned, there’s nothing wrong with the roof or the stairs. Actually, Lucy is right. The place has been falling apart since the day Ross bought it, having been used for years as a boardinghouse for workers in the neighboring asbestos plant, one of the reasons he got it so cheap. She has once again, however, not anticipated the Gallic cunning of Odette, who chooses this moment to lift her glass and say, “Mes enfants, I think your father would be saddened to hear us squabbling like this. Let us remember why we have gathered here: to commemorate a man whose generosity and joie de vivre were legendary … and who never concerned himself with trivial details,” she pointedly adds.

  Well, that sure took care of the garden furniture. Isabelle, never one to pass up an opportunity for cheap sentiment, blurts out, “I totally agree! Look at us with our pathetic materialism! Dad would be so disgusted.” Which is easy for her to say, since she knows I’ll pay her share.

  Odette is right on target about one thing: Ross left such a mess when he died that it took a whole team of accountants and lawyers to sort out the trivial details he was so unconcerned with. He didn’t exactly leave her homeless and penniless—just nearly, so that she had to give up the New York apartment, which the bank had foreclosed on, and go back to Paris, where she’d kept a small flat. I do have to say that she handled the whole thing with surprising dignity, as opposed to Isabelle, who made a spectacle of herself, sobbing hysterically at the funeral and then getting plastered at the reception before slaking her lust on a waiter. As far as I’m concerned, Odette’s gravity throughout the proceedings was a great argument for European formality. It confirmed my suspicions, moreover, that she did not, as Lucy has always insisted, regard Ross as a meal ticket but was actually in love with him. I don’t see this as being incompatible with whatever financial expectations she may have had. I’m a banker; I don’t get emotional about money. Odette isn’t young anymore and she had every right to assume that Ross would take care of her. Marriage is a contract like any other, and frankly, Ross didn’t live up to his end of the bargain.

  What’s the best way to let people down? Raise their expectations. My father was a master at this. He understood that, though there’s no difference in value between a warehouseful of pork bellies and a thousand-year-old Persian repoussé cup, people want a little romance in their lives. Ross was never just interested in amassing wealth: If that had been his goal, he would have stayed in the foreign currency markets, where he’d done just fine in the sixties. What he craved was drama, and this he found in gold; and because gold made for such great spectacle, and because Ross could sell you anything, a lot of people got swept up in the grand folly of his vision. When I was little, my friends’ fathers were stockbrokers and lawyers. Mine owned a gold mine in Borneo. He kept his pens in a chalice th
at had belonged to the Borgias, and his cigars in a Byzantine casket from Constantinople. His gifts were so lavish as to be almost unhinged: When I had to write a report about Patagonia, he flew me there. Lucy accepted the Rome Prize with Renaissance pearls dangling from her ears, and Isabelle graduated from college in an Etruscan necklace that had once graced the neck of a princess—or so Ross said, and we took him at his word, because everything he did always had a great story.

  When the baubles big and small started disappearing one by one, sold off to pay his debts, I don’t think any of us really believed that his luck had run out. He would bounce back, like he always did. He’d find another investor, a banker with more imagination, a fool with a buck, and he’d be off again…. When it all came crashing down, we were as surprised as he was. Even more bizarre, no one thought of blaming him: Not Odette, who had every reason to, nor I, who had to clean up the mess, nor Lucy, who adored him, and especially not Isabelle, for whom he could do no wrong.

  CHAPTER nine

  Jim and I run into the village cow this morning, breakfasting at the peach tree that overhangs the Paolis’ garden wall. The Paolis have completely redone their house with the help of their local relatives and, in Lucy’s opinion, with a shocking disrespect for native building customs. Most of the houses in Borgolano belong to émigrés who use them for the two-month summer vacation all French people seem to enjoy, and then for retirement. The reason for this is that there is no economy to speak of on the island except for tourism. This somehow manages to thrive despite the terrorists, whose puzzling desire for autonomy would result in the end of the French government subventions that support half the population. For all the malaise at dinner, I am feeling elated, by sex no doubt, which we’ve been having a lot of, and now by the sight of Linda, a legacy of some long defunct EC subsidy that had all Santerrans claiming for a while to be dairy farmers, and an inspiring symbol in my mind of the triumph of grit over destiny.

  At first Jim thought it was a bit weird that I wanted to bring him along to my father’s funeral, though I had explained that it was in fact a memorial, the funeral having already taken place. He’s a pretty conservative guy—well, he’s an investment banker—and he didn’t really get the idea of having a party for a dead parent. After last night, though, I can see that he’s beginning to appreciate where I’m coming from. I don’t believe all this nonsense about dysfunctional families: If anything, our family is living proof that even the nuttiest people can function just fine. But that doesn’t mean that they don’t pose a social challenge. I can’t say I didn’t worry about Jim’s reaction: Would he find them fascinating, or merely bizarre? What was his attitude toward lesbians? Would he like Isabelle better than me?

  “So let me get this straight,” he said in bed this morning. “First your dad married your mother, then Jane and Lucy’s mother … ?”

  “Daphne.”

  “Right, Daphne. And finally Odette, which would make her his third wife.”

  “Uh-huh.” I was playing with his cock and was not all that interested in explaining the minutiae of our family tree at that very moment.

  “She seems so young,” said Jim, getting hard.

  “It’s called plastic surgery,” I said, lowering my lips to his now purple glans and slowly running my tongue around it.

  He moaned softly, like a girl.

  At breakfast (the reason Jim and I were out so early was to get croissants and go for a run), Lucy has clearly not forgotten the matter of the garden furniture, so it’s just as well that Odette hasn’t come down yet. Or Yves.

  “Shacked up together, I should think,” she exclaims disgustedly. “God, what a miserable excuse for a croissant! Next time we’re in Flore, we’ll buy a sack at the bakery and freeze them.”

  “Freeze?” says Jane in mock horror.

  “Actually,” I say, “Odette’s door was open this morning and she was definitely alone.”

  “How innocent you are, Constance: No doubt he crept back to his lair before dawn. I must say, one could live with the lack of morals of the French if they weren’t so bloody avaricious as well: I doubt I’ll ever get a penny from her—not that I care.”

  In our family, the Hundred Years War lives on, another thing Ross clearly didn’t take into account when he was playing musical nationalities at the altar.

  “What I can’t bear is the hypocrisy: They all claim to be penniless and yet they dress head to toe in designer labels. That shockingly vulgar outfit Odette was wearing last night was a Dior, if you can believe it. I saw the label in the wash basket.”

  “I’ve always found him overrated, myself,” says Jane, who is wearing her usual overalls and T-shirt. Lucy, a believer in timeless elegance, favors long floaty garments in colors like heather or sage.

  “Actually,” I say, “they don’t have to pay for them. They get clothing coupons from the state; it’s a way for the government to support the fashion industry.”

  “The laxative industry, you mean,” Jane says. “How do you think they all fit into those teeny-weeny dresses?”

  “What are you talking about?” A bleary-eyed Isabelle appears in her own idea of timeless elegance. Jane lets out a wolf whistle.

  “Must you walk around naked?” snaps Lucy.

  “I am not naked. I am clothed; my parts are covered. Do I smell coffee?”

  Jane pours her a cup and slides it across the table. Isabelle sits down, causing her nightgown—more of a slip, really—to ride even higher up her thigh. Her big nipples press up against the thin silk.

  “I’m putting the girls in that empty room upstairs,” she announces. “Sophie snores like a truck driver and Olga woke me up at six this morning. Lucy, we can drag a cot up for Electra, too; it’ll be like camp.”

  “I don’t think Electra is old enough yet to be sleeping on her own.”

  “But she won’t be on her own; they’ll have a blast,” my sister says.

  “I just don’t think it’s a good idea,” Lucy says tensely.

  “Where are the girls?” Jane says. “I haven’t heard them in a while.”

  “They are drawing seashells in the living room,” announces Odette, who has just come down, perfectly coiffed and made up as always, her face dewy from moisturizer. She still pulls her hair back into what I think of as the Air France bun, a style that is very popular with French women, probably because it gives you an instant face-lift. This morning she’s sporting her casual look: Capri pants and a sleeveless blouse, both creased and ironed, and little high-heeled mules that click on the tile floor. Her shoes are about a size three, an object of fascination to Isabelle and me, who both inherited Ross’s big flat feet. Even more fascinating is her underwear, as we discovered when she first moved in with Ross by going through her drawers: layer upon frilly layer of tiny push-up bras (though she has no breasts) and thongs and peekaboo panties that only convinced us all the more that she got Ross through sex. Except for the black hair, which Lucy swears she dyes, she just wasn’t his type, though for that matter neither was Daphne.

  Olga and Sophie, however, worship her, and when they hear her voice, they come tumbling in to the room in a rattle of glass beads and pearls. The Czech Republic is the world capital of cheap costume jewelry, and the girls own boxes of the stuff.

  “Ah, mes belles,” Odette trills as they leap all over her. “Mes princesses …”

  Electra, who has followed them, hangs back in the doorway, staring, and I find myself wishing that just once Odette would call her pretty, too, just to balance things out, which is exactly the thought that I read in Jane’s averted eyes. Lucy just looks stonily ahead.

  CHAPTER ten

  The mayor is coming for apéritif tonight, a yearly ritual that sets our protocol-conscious Odette all aflutter. Ross and he were buddies. My father took a great interest in the local politics—he really thought that some day he would retire here—and, when we first came to Borgolano, he set out as a matter of course to seduce all the bigwigs in town, lavishly sponsoring the ann
ual pétanque tournament and disco, and paying for the renovation of the gendarmerie. His efforts paid off: By the time of his death, Ross had become so popular that the proprietor of our café-bistro had named a cocktail after him: Le New Yorkais, a deadly mixture of cheap Scotch and the local wild-thistle-based liqueur.

  The mayor is expected at six, along with his wife, Madame Benoît, and Yolande Van Langendonck, who owns several properties in town that she rents to fellow Belgians. Yolande is rumored to be the mayor’s mistress. Lucy made a valiant attempt to take over the cooking but was rebuffed, Odette muttering darkly under her breath about seaweed and raw fish. This in reference to the one time Odette did let Lucy prepare the hors d’oeuvres, an event that would have gone down in the island’s culinary history had Odette not whisked away the sushi (made from sea urchins hand-gathered by Lucy) in the nick of time and replaced it with bowls of chips and peanuts.

  This year Lucy has been dispatched to Flore on a critical errand, dropping Richard, Jim, Isabelle, and the children at Orzo beach on the way. Jane and I stay behind to clean up. This is no easy task. In our eagerness to preserve authentic period detail (unlike the natives, who go wild with linoleum and Formica), we have condemned ourselves to living in a dustbowl. Practically every three-hundred-year-old terra-cotta tile in the house is loose so that the dirt underneath puffs up in little clouds with every step; add to that the drifts of plaster from the cracks in the walls and ceilings, and we’re not about to appear in House & Garden anytime soon. All of which is a matter of great social humiliation to Odette, who, for all her cosmopolitan airs, is from a nice bourgeois family in Toulouse and would like nothing better than to give the place the same kind of makeover as the Paolis’ up the street, with a shiny modern bathroom and kitchen appliances. It had been Ross’s oft-stated intention to accede to this wish as soon as he retired, a promise that I imagine must make her doubly bitter. When I suggest that, in the absence of the Costas, we might as well avail ourselves of the patio and Lucy’s fancy garden furniture, Odette looks downright grateful.