An expatriate in my own land
Day One: Gray is the new pink
Your Disney Experience begins long before you arrive. You are supposed to pre-select the color of your wristband, which you will use as a room key, admissions ticket and credit card. It probably records biometric data.
If you don’t log into the app before you arrive to select a color, you get the gray band of shame. I am going to play it off like I chose gray because it goes with everything. It’s a sophisticated neutral.
Continue reading “My Disney diary”
Ads like this are my weakness. I tell myself I could pull it off, this two-piece print ensemble, even though I know I wouldn’t be able to shake the feeling that everyone will think I am wearing pajamas, especially if I don’t wear it with heels, which I probably wouldn’t.
Someone in my family would ask, “Are those pajamas?” or, “Are you really going to wear that?” and so maybe I could get the top, just to prove that they can’t boss me around, but of course the idea with an outfit like this is the total effect, pajama-like as it may be.
This is why doing the capsule wardrobe project last month was, for me, arbiter of bad calls in my own closet, a relief. I moved most of the clothes to the other side of the closet and enjoyed the luxury of space.
Dressing was faster and easier. I rediscovered a 20-year-old jacket and a skirt with deep, not just decorative, pockets. I acknowledged my capacity for questionable judgement and I restrained my urge to buy printed things.
I had forgotten about this, but I spent my last two years of college in a capsule wardrobe of about seven items. Very unisex. Things wore out. Hems frayed, seams came undone, coins were lost in the jacket lining until the pockets wore out entirely. All the while, other clothes languished, unloved, worn a few times while the same favorite items were in steady rotation.
There are many ways in which the Americans are not like the French. First of all, they don’t dress with irony, as with the two-piece ensemble above. But I think a big part of it has something to do with how they view clothes in an entirely more three-dimensional way, that it is a form of two-way communication rather than self-expression, my/our perusal of print media and liking of a certain color or trend or idea. I will stand in front of a mirror and contemplate something, and have thoughts about it, as I did in the communal changing room of an Agnès B. in Paris last summer. I asked the woman I was with what she thought—she gave the ensemble a once-over and commanded, “Marchez un peu!” No, she shook her head. “It does not move,” she said.
Maybe I’ve been hanging out in the wrong communal changing rooms, but an American would tell you to turn around, not to walk. We think about our self-presentation in a more static sense. It was a revelation. It explains the way French clothes can have annoying little drawstrings and ribbons hanging off of them. These are not for you, the wearer, but for others. You are not just dressing to suit yourself.
So, I didn’t buy the long black skirt or the jacket at Agnès B. I would love to have a grey or a black trouser suit that I could dress up or down, but it eludes me. It is in my fantasy capsule wardrobe. Yet I didn’t find the month of 33 items a hardship. Thirty-three items means you know your mind and you are in control of your circumstances. Four pairs of shoes out of maybe 30 or 40, if all footwear actually counts, can see a person through a month.
Sometimes I buy something like a red skirt because I wonder what it would be like to wear it. I imagine it will create possibilities. I love my red skirt but it is a troublemaker in a closet of more neutral things. You look at your clothes and it’s shouting, Me? Are you gonna wear me today?
Why would I wanna wear you? I should wear you with a neon pink blouse.
I’m thinking of getting together another capsule for April. I liked having the small selection of things that went together. But they don’t have to go together like pajamas.
Juxtaposition
In the arrivals hall, men hold digital slates and cards with names. Look for your name. Oh, the garage is small. We enter London’s morning from the west. A Lucozade sign fizzes with neon effervescence. In a field by a roundabout a pony grazes under CCTV.
Each scene is puzzling and tightly packed, like a clue in a cryptic crossword. In the field, under surveillance, at home, headless, backwards, endless, initially, oddly. We carve and slice the words to revise our understanding of what is being said. The clue is always at the end or the beginning.
Remember this road? The grey barleycorn brick houses that would look so nice on a brochure if you crop out the eight lanes of traffic in the front yard. The Hogarth Roundabout, the Hanger Lane gyratory, traffic words from morning radio reports. Exhaust, exhausted. Many B&Bs along this way, thick blackout drapes, one hopes, double-glazing.
The air is thick with pollution. A compact car is driven by an older man in a maroon sweater. Two passengers sleep with heads on pillows pressing against the windows. Long car journeys with boiled eggs and Thermoses of tea or coffee. Everything pushed together.
On the Edgware Road, a man in a leather coat withdraws money from an ATM while two minders literally watch his back. Children ride ponies in Kensington Gardens. Look at the trees, mature plantings, so much texture, so many shades of green, so many shapes of leaves.
Remember that flat we looked at to buy that might have been a bordello? The windowless rooms, something sinister about it. We are in the street where the guidebook said the magical museum of childhood would be. I remember pushing the stroller, looking at the number on the page and the enticing description of the carousel that was no longer there. The museum had closed. I’d never heard of such a thing. More cheap rooms to let, bed and breakfast, fake School of English, visa scams.
On Baker Street a beefy Russian-looking guy in his late 50s with longish hair, linen blazer: “Darling,” he says into his mobile, “I want you to give me some good news.” Who would hang out on Baker Street with all the buses and traffic rushing by?
Reversals
The Older Daughter has an English accent. “Did you adopt her in London?” a child asked me recently.
To solve the clues in a cryptic crossword, you have to read them the right way. It helps if you speak cricket and know the names of rivers. Once the answer reveals itself it’s hard to believe you hadn’t seen it all along. A clue gives the appearance of being a cohesive thought. The answer is defined by a word or words at the end or beginning. You have to work out which part is the definition, which the clue, and what type of clue it is. It is important to read each word independently of the others. The sentence is trying to push your thinking one way, but you have to resist and remember, it’s not really a sentence. You don’t understand what you’re reading yet, like being in a foreign country, where you don’t actually know exactly what you’re seeing.
Containers
There are more puzzles to solve on the tube: A man with a script for the Retiring Prime Wardens Succession Dinner. I read over his shoulder. It spells out the events to come, to take place in a hall, enacting centuries of protocol. He wears a cheap suit and gets off at London Bridge. The Guild of What? Prison wardens? Fishmongers? Cabbies?
A group of Italian girls enter the carriage, excited chatter, tourists, youth hostel. One girl with a flattened nose wears a tight tee-shirt that reads, “Bad decisions make good stories.” A souvenir to commemorate one already taken or part of her travel agenda? How good is her English?
Another mystery: those green sheds. They’re cafes for cabbies. One near us let us in once for tea.
“Oh,” our driver says, “don’t tell anyone. There’ll be an uprising. They don’t know what to moan about next. Oh, the price of diesel. Oh, the last passenger I had put his feet on the seats.”
Moaning disguised as small talk in lift in Russell Square tube station:
“It’s slightly warm in here.”
“Just a bit.”
Homophones
I buy a book of cryptic crosswords for the train to France. In France, it’s all a bit cryptic. If your grasp of your own language is tested by the crossword puzzle, you are now reduced to scrabbling for scraps of meaning. A friend who now lives in Paris says, “Five years on, I’m still Tarzan.”
A sign for Abyss Piscines and the piscine, standing up on its end, looks from a distance like the niche for a saint or a virgin, abbess, station of the cross.
The Older Daughter invents words, like “ettigency,” but is also very literal. She struggles with idioms and hidden meanings, but she is unafraid to try French. She learns to ask kids at the pool to jump in with her, to sauter avec moi. Hide and seek in French, we learn, is cache-cache. But the girls are courageous about the cold water. Not brave. In French, brave means tough.
“When I grow up,” says the Older Daughter, “I want to hang out on a farm with animals, like Shirley Temple.”
Designer of abattoirs granted MP line crookedly (6, 7). That’s a bad one, but you get the idea.
Pieds sensible are not sensible shoes, but delicate feet. I understand this is about chiropody (podiatry) but choose to find the humor in the mistranslation and the belief that others will jump to the same initial mistake. Also, the shoes are sensible and the lady looking in the window has on sensible shoes, which makes it funny, in case that needed to be explained.
A river of language, navigation, deviation. Interdit! Attention! To what? Of what? Beware of the something.
Ah, I say, tapping my pen on the puzzle, not refuse, like won’t, but refuse, like trash.
The Younger Daughter dreams you need a language license and in her dream one of the children we are with trades his language for another. He gets a bad exchange rate and ends up with only half a vocabulary.
Some things transcend language: A woman at the train station comes out of the bathroom with the back of her skirt tucked into her large white underpants.
Foreign
Dinner at the farmhouse in the vineyard. At the end of one long table is an English party of parents, grown children and their friends and partners, at the other the multilingual Dutch group staying on the caravan site. We are in the middle, with a couple from New Zealand—Liz and Jean. Jim? JEEN—and another couple from England, who create a very awkward break in the introductions when they arrive so that the slightly sunburned and apologetic girlfriend of one of the English sons is cut off just as she is about to introduce herself. English people can be mortified by introducing themselves. That end of the table are making an effort. She tries once more to go through with this humiliation, as one must in a foreign country, but the late-arriving English woman, missing the cues, is now being convivial and unwittingly casts them adrift, freeing them from the responsibility to speak to the rest of the table.
The Older Daughter talks to the Dutch party and uses some odd phrases of her own devising. I start to explain, but the man she is talking to looks over and says to me, “I understand.”
The other night my husband shared something very personal. It is something that has been present for the past two and half years and he has just now given it words. After a lifetime of considering himself to be a cat person, my husband has discovered that he is a dog person.
Midlife Animal Preference Conversion (MAPC) is not as uncommon as I had thought. The next day my friend reported that she, too, has MAPC. A staunch dog person, she was actually so pro-dog, she was anti-cat, and you know what they say about protesting too much. “I mean, I have even sent cat joke emails,” she confessed. Only in spite or, some might say, because, of her cat aversion, one has arrived at her house and twined its tail ’round her heart. “This cat is making me think that I might actually be a cat person. All of a sudden dogs seem so needy.”
I tell her about my husband. Everyone’s switching teams. I get the appeal of dogs, but I can’t imagine living without cats. I’m playing on both sides.
My husband and I both had cats growing up. We adopted as soon as we were out of school, and even in college there was D-U-G Dug (I named him), an orange tabby with a mean streak, who wandered around the Town Houses looking for food and more interesting or more violent people to hang out with; he was always itching for a fight. We were never sure about Dug, who owned him or what he was all about.
In London, we didn’t qualify for a pet through the RSPCA because we didn’t have direct access to the outdoors. Animals grow old and die in the Battersea Dogs Home, because, as the name suggests, they already have a home, thank you, and a more suitable one than yours, so sod off. We got our first London cat from a classified in The Loot. I took the tube out to a grim, grey street in East London and brought him home in an apple carton. We got him a kitten the following year. He has always been very devoted to her. We’re not sure if the feeling has ever been mutual.
Dogs, like cars, are impractical in a city. Oh, people said, when we were making plans to move to the US, are you going to get the girls a dog? What are we, we replied, the Obamas? They had just moved to the White House.
But the girls have always liked dogs. They have, I can see this in retrospect, been repressed dog people, living in a cat household. The older daughter went through a major dog phase. We learned how to ask “May I pet your dog?” in French as part of our small arsenal of vocabulary, like straw and vacuum cleaner, which they never teach you in school, not anticipating that you will travel with children or rent a house.
“Are you sure the verb is caress?” my husband asked nervously as the older daughter strode over to strangers in cafes, parks and markets.
The younger daughter really wanted a dog when we moved to America. In the same way that parents respond to requests for a guinea pig with, “But we have a fish,” so too, did “But we have cats” begin to sound a little hollow.
We got a dog.
We spotted the mother lolling by the side of a road as we were going to a friend’s house on the outskirts of this little town in the more agrarian part of Alabama. That looks like a nice dog, we all remarked, seeing dogs the way that women trying to get pregnant notice babies: everywhere.
“She just had puppies,” our friend said, “and I bet they’d let you have one. They’ve been giving them away.” And so we drove out of town an hour later, with a puppy, making an emergency stop at the dollar store for food. It was a bit like coming home from the hospital with the older daughter. I can’t believe they are letting us do this. We have no idea what we’re doing.
I found dog mentality a little frustrating at first, their need for hierarchy. We’d watched our share of The Dog Whisperer, which in retrospect should have tipped me off to my husband’s latent MAPC, and I knew that the root of all dog problems was the owners’ inability to establish dominance. Housebreaking was tedious, but the mental energy was in letting him know you were top dog. Cats just don’t care about all of that and throughout this business of puppy training they were like our elegant, childless friends, stretched out on the couch enjoying an elaborate cocktail while we carried dessicated meaty dog treats in our pockets.
You start thinking like a hackneyed sexist. Cats are aloof, capricious women, with psychic powers, slinking around in designer gowns. Dogs are boisterous, 9-year-old boys who will do anything to make the team and expect that you will be their firm coach who knows all the rules.
“Dogs are on your side,” my husband says. It is a revelation after he sees that the dog charging the cat when she reaches up the shred the sofa some more. The dog knows this is not allowed. She couldn’t care less. It feels good. She was bored. The dog is a great smelly beast and not graceful. Eats my food. And worse. I could go under the couch and get your tennis ball but then you would just run around some more.
“We’re never getting another cat,” he says.
We are leaving the farmers market when we see people in the parking lot of the Liquor Express with a box of tiny, brindled puppies, the mom on a leash. “Oh,” we all cry, “puppies!”
“Should we get one?” my husband asks.
“Yes!” we all shout. Even me.
“Ha!” he exclaims. “You would, wouldn’t you? You said yes.” I mean, it’s like the worst idea ever, obviously. Two elderly cats and a stable, happy dog. Let’s see, let’s push one or all of them over the brink of one thing or the other.
Later, when we are all bundled together on the bed—humans, cats, dog—it occurs to me that pets, cats and dogs, most animals, with their shorter life spans offer up a science fiction kind of tragedy, going from small, skittery kittens and soft, warm, wiggling puppies to old souls, with ginger tread and deep sighs, within the scope of a human childhood. More themselves than ever and moving past you and away to the end of their own days.
Back when the girls took swimming lessons at the Kensington Leisure Centre, we had a Saturday routine. The pool was in the back of a public housing estate under the Westway flyover. There were orange brick houses with tiny patio gardens. You had broken windshield glass on the path, but also unsnapped tulips under the pale sun.
We took our Rolser, an upright shopping basket on wheels, and into it would go the wet towels. We wheeled ourselves over to the Portobello Road for English breakfast at S&M (sausages and mash), which did a nice bubble and squeak. Fortified, we’d work our way down the market, piling food into the Rolser as we went.
We stopped at the family-run Spanish Grocery, at the fruit man, the rude salad and herb ladies, the Halal butcher with the winking cow sign (“Ask about our special beef.”) We were pretty sure it meant bush meat.
The mother and grandmother of one of the older daughter’s former classmates sold veg at one stall, so we might stop and say hello and swap notes on the state of the educational system, the schools and our mutual challenges. There was the coffee plant, the Oxfam book store, the schnitzel cart, the cashmere shop, the bagel stall. And then there was the candy man.
The candy man sold traditional English sweets out of old fashioned jars. The girls were drawn, as you would be, to the colors, shapes, twists, the many manifestations of sugar: striped ribbons, flying saucers, rhubarb and custard, lemon drops, wine gums. I would name an amount they could spend and they would choose, but invariably they would choose something that the candy man didn’t want them to have. Why? Why not?, we’d cry.
“Won’t like it,” he’d say. “Have this.” He would indicate something which by definition they didn’t want. Something ordinary, like jelly beans. Sometimes we’d insist. We must have these. “Won’t like it,” he’d threaten, eyes narrowing.
How, we’d wonder, could you be a candy seller at a market and be so unwilling to part with the goods, so unjolly, such a crank? And why are you selling candy that people won’t like? Other than atomic red hots there really wasn’t going to be anything they wouldn’t like. “She likes licorice,” I would tell him.
We had this idea to freak him out and make him think twice that next time we went the younger daughter would hold up her fingers like devil horns and hiss savagely at him. We practiced with her on the way home. The next time we approached the stall, still out of earshot, my husband and I would incite her. Candyman, we’d murmur, Candyman. SSSSSSssss. HHHAAaaaagghhhHHH!
But nerve failed us all, time and again.
Candy man was like the soup man, made famous by Seinfeld, based on a real person, whose soup my husband ate regularly when he worked in Midtown. One day he took an exuberant friend with along him. He briefed the friend on the particulars of ordering and moving along, but, unable to resist, the friend broke the rules. He was punished, just like George Costanza was: “No bread for you!” cried the soup man.
Being denied bread is a sad thing. If it were in France, our small city would be designated SB (Sans Boulangerie), a ghost town, where the agriculture has died out and all the people moved away, rather than a city on the up. So many people are living without access to this basic staple, a fresh loaf, a metric of economic health, like a pulse, but they don’t even know they’re missing it.
Costco is our Portobello Road, the car our Rolser, laden down with wet towels, produce, meat. And so I buy the loaves of artisinalesque bread. They come two to a pack, of course. I slice one and freeze it for later in the week.
Oh, how my husband laughs when I do this.
Back when the movie Titanic came out there were posters in the tube of Celine Dion, who sang the soundtrack, which someone tagged with a speech bubble that read, “My mother freezes bread.”
Even the toaster has foretold my downfall. Look, it has a “frozen toast” setting, a setting for a thing that does not exist, which I had not even noticed until recently, like seeing your gravestone.
Now you can buy soup man soup in the freezer section. A display of candy, the color and combinations particular to every holiday, greets you on entering any food store or pharmacy. The supermarket bakery produces cakes and cupcakes piled high with technicolor frosting. A good baguette you buy in the morning is past its prime by the evening. It is ephemeral, like the chocolate-covered, raspberry-flavored marshmallow Peep hearts that are offered in a limited seasonal edition. Put your devil horns back in your pockets, kids, it’s all yours. Except for the bread.
Excuse me, ma’am, where would one find the center of town? Is it that this is the center of town?
Well, you could say it was this, the woman said. She was selling tomatoes and other produce. She smiled ruefully. The church and the historic district are down there, across the road, she added.
One had suspected this might be the case, but one’s husband had been saying, ask, ask, and so one did.
She had nothing to apologize for. There was an oval plaza, shaded by trees, with a fountain, banks, pharmacy, bread shop, tabac. We were at the tail end of our trip, when we were winding down, only buying travel food and a newspaper.
In the historic district, we ventured down a short passage into a courtyard. A man, English, called down to us from his ancient stone balcony and told us about his renovation, how the whole side of the cloister had to be reinforced.
Were we looking? A friend of his had a fixer upper for 100 grand, four doors down. It was tempting in a very abstract way. We saw that it would need quite a lot of work. There were a lot of for sale signs. A LOT. The entire ville was a vendre. It was hard enough to keep track of simple work being done on the house we live in now, five minutes away from where we had been living. Imagine doing this time zones away in another language.
The narrow cobbled streets ran between mansions with massive wooden carved doors, the broad plate glass window of hair salon was fitted into the ground floor of one. A toddler ran around while his mother watched from the doorway of what looked like a kitchen.
We carried on up the street and saw another courtyard. Inside the ground floor flat some construction work was being done. There were signs insisting on hard hats and yet the door to the work site had been left open and there was no one around. Whitewashed walls were drying around an enormous stone fireplace and behind it was another room, walls also drying. But look at the ceiling and the beams. Let’s leave the old paintwork as it is. The entire ceiling is filled with heraldic motifs. Talk about original features and old world charm… Even if it turned out to be a bit of 19th century affectation. In NYC this might mean that you had a picture molding or a broom closet that was formerly a dumbwaiter.
What, we had wondered throughout the trip, would America be like in another 500 or a thousand years? The French have been working at this a long time, improving what they had and passing along the knowledge. Would our wine be this good? The produce? The bread? The cheese? And in America, that’s not even the point. We are after something different. A future that sees improvement in a wholly different way, improvement of that which we have only begun to imagine. Improvements which beget technology which enable faster, easier, cheaper, the elusive “better.”
Yet our technology is unevenly applied. One airline has a very sophisticated baggage app that can tell you exactly where your bag is at every stage of the trip, even if it has been put on the wrong flight, whereas when I signed my children over to another airline as unaccompanied minors, they were using carbon paper (“press hard, this needs to make six copies!”) that airline personnel could initial at key points in the journey. We are a demanding people. I want the app tracker thing installed in the plastic drinks wristlet they snap onto the girls’ wrists. The younger daughter’s friend has made such a bracelet for herself out of a bookstore giftcard because the card was already chipped with her home address and mother’s cell phone.
We are innovative.
We will continue to chemically modify and “enhance” the things we consume, so that we can have zero-calorie sweetness that is 600 times as sweet as sugar, or indestructible tomatoes or 
herbicidal wheat, unless we are forced by disasters to live in an entirely different way. Once you have tasted the fruit of progress, even if it tastes vaguely of bleach, there is no going back.
One night we drove across the vineyards and up a road towards a great stone house. On the approach the windows were either 
bricked in or shuttered and it showed no sign that it was inhabited, but we knew that it was, being both a B & B and an active winery.
As soon as we made the turn, the building came to life: cars were parked under carefully sculpted trees, dogs loped around, and a wine tasting was in full swing. Smells of rosemary, apple and pastry wafted out of the kitchen. One of the wines on offer was from a domaine that has been run by the same family and has existed since the 1500s. “Starting when I was 8, my father would take me to the cave to taste, to start learning,” said the winemaker, when we are seated at the table for dinner. She pours a taste of rosé for my daughter.
Shortly after we return to the US, I have a dream where I am involved in inventing a new snack for the car. It is a series of salads that come in little pouches. They have appealingly designed packages that are white foil with the names of the lettuces printed in bold graphics. Somehow the leaves have been infused with the dressings and flavorings thus leaving the surfaces dry so that your hands don’t become oily.
In 500 years, will the wrappers of my miracle, handsfree salad, be caught in the dried vines of the old arbor? Will my 8-year-old descendants be brought into the food lab to taste flavors of memory, something that reminds you of a place that once was, of barefoot summers, like the puff of a synthetic dandelion dancing through the biodome.
We leave France in the morning and touch down in Washington, DC, that evening. In between is a long coach journey through Hemel Hempstead, a 60s shopping center to your left, a bucolic canal walk to your right, two old ladies in sensible walking shoes, ignoring the great rush of traffic being inflicted upon their woods, their Ladybird land. There goes a dog, a bloke, some girls with sculpted, partially shaved hair and stripy tights, a mum with a pushchair.
On a sign is my favorite town name, known to me only from seeing it emblazoned on a blue commuter bus that went along the Finchley Road, the street by my work, up and down which I rode the 46 bus for several years: Leighton Buzzard.
Hemel Hempstead is one of the New Towns, settled around 8 AD and rebuilt after World War II to provide that Ladybird-like utopia of order and rightness. It has a Magic Roundabout, a Catherine Wheel of mini-roundabouts in a circle, with a logic that is beyond my comprehension. The canal runs through it. The ladies maybe came to it when it was better than what they’d got, a bombed out street. You’d be happy, too.
At Heathrow, I call my mother to say happy birthday and discuss literature. Zola (he’s really good) from me, May Sarton from her, now merged in my visual memory with the criss-cross of silver poles and swathes of glass and tarmac-y landscape of Terminal 5.
We are camped on the fake granite floor waiting for our gate to open, eating our French provisions, the last packets of salami and bag of olives from the olive man. One last wild romp through Boots: Nurofen Plus, Olbas oil, flapjacks, expend loyalty card points on purple nail polish. A last fling with the newspapers, the cryptic crossword. The British man I sit next to bemoans the loss of his wife to duty free shopping.
In the bag drop queue we meet a Scottish man working for a French company in Qatar. We chat. If we had met in different circumstances, we probably would have become friends. The state of expatriatism, which actually is much like normal life, now that we don’t live and die, most of us, in the same place, and if you do, many others don’t, so you are always having to replace people, rebond, say goodbye.
And then we are filing onto the plane, away, away.
Washington: a place for which my mother actually made me buy a beige outfit circa 1980. We were going to a luncheon at the State Department. Knife pleat skirt, knitted top. The shoes from B. Altman’s, that I would wear again if I still had them.
DC is like a reprogramming center for American citizens returning from abroad.
We are held here for a couple of days, to be reminded that this, this, this is where we live. It is all about America and straightforward democracy, and not flashy. Cure yourself of pretentiousness, appreciate your history. The reference point is indigenous decency. Stop looking to Europe. Stop laughing at the cars marked secret police. They know they’re not being secretive. They are your protecting your president.
At the Smithsonian Museum of American History we see everything and go downstairs for lunch. One of the women clearing trays decides we might be worthy of a good view and leads us to a table on the other side of the room where we sit with a view of a victory garden with the Washington Monument rising up behind it. Pure symbolism.
I grew up with a set of Ladybird books and they make me happy. The children in them liked Shopping with Mother, Helping at Home, Going to a Party. They modeled things with plasticine, milked cows, learned history. It was Richard Scarry with realism. My children liked them, too. For a while, I trawled charity shops for them and amassed a collection. I even found one on this trip. They imposed an order, like that of the diagram above, which is not always possible but to which one may aspire.
I write this on the heels of what has been the week of disorder in Britain. Children the ages of my children, the children from the mother and baby groups, the holiday playschemes, the government initiatives, those savings bonds that we were ineligible for, running riot and everyone trying to account for it. Is raiding a mobile phone shop a faster path to the material goods you want or an expression of dissatisfaction with an increasingly materialistic society? Stealing the phones is acceptance. Burning down the Sony distribution factory is discontent.
We are held in a state of waiting to go home. I walk through galleries and galleries of American art and artifacts. America: The ideas are good. The food sucks. By the time our plane touches down for the last time, we are happy to be home.
A small village in the South of France: town events are announced via loudspeaker from the church tower, always preceded by a bit of rock music so that you momentarily think it’s the neighbors.
What’s the right verb for to turn down? Will it be to lower, as one might lower a pail down a well, or turn down as one might a bed or an offer? Will you use the verb to debase, to lower the tone?
No need to reach for the two-volume English-to-French-and-back-again dictionary, it is just an announcement. There is a wedding. The family invites friends to raise a toast in front of the town hall. It is our second chance for a free drink.
Our first opportunity was the eve of Bastille Day, when the flyer posted in the boulangerie announced an aperitif with the mayor. We join the townspeople for the jeux d’enfants. Later, there would be a reasonably priced meal for the entire town, the menu of which is printed on the flyer, but instead I took the older daughter to the fireworks display on the tambourin court. It was 10 PM, to ensure a dark sky but too late for the husband or the younger daughter. Children ran about to music beforehand, teens lined the periphery, tuned into their own private frequencies with an undercurrent of perpetual significance. My daughter is alert.
How well I remember getting ready to go out into the dark night at that age, with that sense that anything might happen and that you might be on the verge of some new discovery or insight. We watch the villagers emerge. We have never seen this many people here. The old men will gather in a small group outside the cafe, or by the bus stop. There is always another customer at the bread shop, but never a crowd.
The fireworks are set off to The Doors (“Light my Fire.” I’d never put Jim Morrison and Jerry Lewis in the same category, and now I do.)
I don’t know if my daughter is disappointed by the dark, anonymity of our foray or if it satisfies expectations. We walk home together, through the medieval streets that surround the church, the lights out to the subdivision in the vineyards haloed in mist. Some nights we invite the girls to sit with us while we watch the bats test the skies and then swoop down across the swimming pool. For us, these moments define happiness, while for them, they are the pause before it begins.
You have the bits of cheese, the bag of baguettes in varying degrees of freshness. Thing is, the recetes of the maison are in French and they are someone else’s cookbooks, so you must do what you can without making yourself too crazy. There are certain basic good things that can be done without planning or trying too hard, such as sauteing sweet onions and baking things with cream. The bread becomes bruschetta, panzanella, bread pudding, croutons.
But for us this summer, the peaches are from Chilton County and we are not in France, but Alabama.
A land of contrasts.
If you drive two blocks to west, you will come to a major crossroads which has a mall with competing flagship regional department stores — one with Khiels and a decent costume jewelry department, the other with a Mac counter and a good shoe department. Across the street is “the bad Wal-Mart,” (this is not a reaction against Wal-Mart; the good Wal-Mart is to the south, the nice Wal-Mart west); the down-market supermarket (where we do our big weekly shop, because it is cheaper and, ironically, has the best cheese selection, go figure); a pay-day-loan/sell-your-gold-jewelry-for cash outlet and a gun shop.
The other corners are occupied by chain restaurants selling American food (bland, salty, sweet, overcooked) in an institutionalized version of cozy and possibly harking back to European old countryness and down-home, respectively. This intersection attracts hordes of pigeons and one day I saw a hawk swoop down and grab one.
You might think, well, both the South and the South of France are hot, but that’s about all they have in common. Okay, we don’t have any Roman ruins, or weekend markets in the real full-on market sense, and there is, sadly, not a tradition of local wine making, but you can do the seasonal produce thing; we have farmers markets and even farmers.
Last summer, arriving to the horror of supermarket cheese, chicken injected with water and broth, and bread with high fructose corn syrup, we kept looking for things we wanted to eat. We found local chevre, a bounty of okra, melons, tomatoes, Vidalia sweets (onions) and corn (which you can’t really get in France, because they grow it as agricultural feed not really for people), and then we found the farmer who would age grass-feed beef for us and from whom we now buy chicken and eggs, collecting them from a storefront church.
Last fall, as we went to collect our meat from the deer processing place, and my daughters ran off to see the pony and the goat, I thought this is the kind of experience that if we were having it in rural France would be picturesque and the kind of thing vacationing columnists would brag about in The Guardian/NY Times travel section, but because it is in semi-rural Alabama, not so much. The urban readership would not be charmed by the taxidermised bird/raccoon/bobcat/bear/bass diorama or the rack of pamphlets decrying divorce and abortion, nor that our grass-fed, organic meat all bore the message, “Smile, Jesus loves you.”
But I doubt that if my French were of a higher standard that the friendly tomato farmer we met at the outskirts of the tiny French village we went to, who thought we were Belgian (!), would necessarily share my viewpoint on all topics.
And really, as you do in the kitchen of your holiday house in French France, you make do with what you have. When you shop, you sample what looks good. Sometimes you end up with a breaded cutlet of pig’s foot, or, whoops, cheval hachette. Sometimes, in Alabama, it will be birthday cake flavored ice cream. And, if a nice glass of red wine and some really good aged goat cheese from Vermont allow you to forget where you are, go vote. Where else would you have a ballot that offers you a propane amendment?
The Other Side 