Picnic in Provence (10 page)

Sitting at her kitchen table, I asked questions gingerly, not wanting to violate the code of discretion that has so kindly been extended to me.
“Non, non. Je suis pas d’ici, moi.”
No, no, I’m not from here, she said, laughing at my surprise. Her local accent was thick enough to cut with a scythe. “
Je suis Parisienne, moi.
We left Paris and came here when I was nine.” Nine? Twenty-five years, a local husband, and three kids later, and she’s still not
d’ici,
from here. The French take the idea of
terroir
very seriously. Just like the wine and strawberries are proudly, irrevocably
from
somewhere, people are too.

“I DO LOVE
to watch you squeeze the fruit,” said my mom, peeking over my shoulder at the Sunday market in Reillanne. “You used to do this with the Rembrandts.” Not squeeze them, exactly, but it’s true that I now study figs with as much attention and enthusiasm as I once studied Old Master paintings.

Like the magnificent wrinkles in a Rembrandt self-portrait, figs are something my mother and I can agree on. Every September, I throw myself a little fig festival. A fig par-
tay
. Figapalooza, if you will. One of the many pleasures of living in Provence is that fig season seems to go on and on. I made my first fig tart over a month ago, and my favorite fruit is still very much at the market.

A fresh fig is a coy fruit. Fresh figs hide out a bit. Their exterior is sober, matte—a dignified, often dusky, royal purple. But crack one open, and you have a pulpy, fleshy kaleidoscope of seeds. A ripe fig, like the cheeks of a well-fed child, should give slightly when you squeeze.

Figs make an excellent transition from summer to autumn cuisine. This is particularly useful this time of year in Provence, when we are eating in the garden one day, turning on the heat the next.

Fresh figs are at home alfresco, in a rocket salad with Golden Delicious apples, pine nuts, and picnic cheeses or roasted with slices of Roquefort and a drizzle of honey to begin a fall fireside dinner.

The other day, Amandine let us in on a little secret: the village has a public fig tree. It’s just behind the post office; I pass it every morning on the way back from the
boulangerie
.
See,
I wanted to say to my mom,
we may not have the Metropolitan Opera, but we have a communal fig tree.
Like paid maternity leave and Camembert for school lunches—that’s my kind of public service.

That afternoon while Alexandre was asleep upstairs, my mom and I decided to make a fig tart. It was not just for us. We would be deepening our village social life that week—inviting the neighbors over for tea. Between you and me, I had an ulterior motive. I was trying to sweet-talk (or feed) Jean into taking me mushroom hunting with him when the rains came.

My mother and I talk best while doing things—cleaning out closets, shopping for clothes. She didn’t necessarily get all the fun bits of my childhood. My father did the weekend things, museums, theater, Christmas windows at Bendel’s. My mom handled the weekday necessities: homework, laundry, dirty ol’ chicken on the barbecue grill. We’ve had some of our best conversations just sitting side by side in the car headed to the dry cleaner. We could talk about anything.

“I’m just nervous,” I said, measuring out the sugar. “The book is out there, doing its thing, and I’m completely cut loose, without a concrete next project.”

“I wish you could stop worrying and enjoy all this.” My mom has been telling me to stop worrying since—I can’t even remember when. Where, she says, did I inherit this lousy habit of accomplishing a goal and then ten minutes later pushing it aside in favor of something new to panic about?

“You just don’t know how lucky you are,” she said, putting the measuring cup in the sink. My mother and father had been through a miscarriage and a still birth and were on the verge of adoption when I came along. I too had been through a miscarriage before Alexandre was born; I was not oblivious to the gift of a healthy child.

My mother is a very clean cook, always washing and wiping as she goes. I’m a messy one—I use every pot, spoon, and spatula in the place, then leave most of it in a sticky jumble in the sink. She was rinsing the whisk when she said:

“You just don’t seem invested enough in being Alexandre’s mom.”

“How dare you say that to me?” I said, tears suddenly streaming down my cheeks. “I’m his mother!” I was as close as I’d ever been to walking out of the room during an argument. “Take it back.”

“What about the stroller?”

“Oh!”
I said, raising my voice in a way I never did to my mother. “We’re back to the stroller? I’m a bad mother because I wasn’t excited to go shopping for
a stroller
.”

Apparently, I had failed my first test of motherhood before Alexandre was even born. I couldn’t fathom it. Why would my mother think that her daughter, who loves vintage coats with fur collars and rare Victorian picture books, would be ass-over-teakettle excited to shop for a stroller? It’s not a hot pair of stilettos or even a hand-embroidered bassinet cover. It’s a stroller. As long as it rolls and turns and doesn’t fold up like a Venus flytrap with the kid inside, what do I care? It needed to be light enough so I could drag it up three flights of spiral stairs in Paris, sturdy enough to handle the paving stones and potholes in Céreste. It didn’t matter if it had a coffee-cup holder; there’s no such thing as takeout coffee in France.

But my mother was right; this argument was part of a larger—and, as I was quickly learning, unacceptable—ambivalence. There’s no other way to say it: Babies, and certainly all the trappings that accompany them, just don’t interest me that much. There are people who are gaga for small children. My mother is one of them. I prefer kids a little later, in the Greek-myth and first-crush stage. My mom took five years off from work; it was never my intention to be a stay-at-home mom. The judgment was enormous, the guilt was even worse.

This was not the first time I’d been made to feel this way. Before Alexandre was born, my gynecologist recommended something called
haptonomie
—an affective technique invented in the 1950s by Dutchman Frans Veldman. If there is an American equivalent, I haven’t heard of it. The goal is to bring the new family together. We did this cool exercise where Gwendal put his hand on the side of my stomach, and the baby actually moved over to nestle in his palm. I think
haptonomie
is useful for bringing fathers closer to their future children. But in our case, Gwendal wasn’t the one who needed to be brought into the process—I was.

The sessions were at the hospital with a female pediatrician who was trained in this technique. Things immediately got off on the wrong foot. The first thing the doctor told me to do was stop my twice-weekly yoga lessons, which I loved. “If you are thinking about your own
respiration
—breathing—during the birth, then you will not be fully present with your child.”

Then she asked me to lie down on the table and put my hands over my stomach.
Haptonomie
begins when you’re about four months pregnant, right after the baby starts moving. “How do you
feel
about your child?” she said, staring down at me with a beatific smile.

I panicked. I’m a good student, and I don’t like to give wrong answers. It was clear what was expected of me:
I feel joy. I feel wonder. I feel life.

What I actually felt was…pregnant. Afraid. Worried about whether the child would be healthy. Unsure if I would enjoy the first years of motherhood. Gwendal and I had talked about this. One day, we were walking down the street, trying to imagine who this little person would be. “I love it already,” Gwendal said with the calm yet elated tone he maintained throughout my pregnancy. I answered truthfully. “How can you love someone you’ve never met?” It seemed a wonderful, but illogical, leap of faith.

On the table in the doctor’s office, I searched for an answer to her question. I paged through my mental dictionary, looking for an adjective that was true but inoffensive. The only thing I could come up with was
responsable
. “I feel responsible.” I knew as soon as I said it that this was inadequate. Apparently, there was no window to settle into the idea of motherhood. As soon as the egg was fertilized, I was supposed to be
on
—like an actress who never suffers from stage fright. When Gwendal and I left the office, I was in tears. I felt completely alone, damaged. As if my feelings were somehow deformed.

Now here we were, a year later, a beautiful baby boy thriving, and I was getting the same treatment from my mother as I’d gotten from that doctor—a complete refusal of my doubts, a negation of my feelings. I consider myself a fairly confident person, but having a baby has made me as wobbly as the apricot Jell-O, hypersensitive to criticism yet doubting myself at every turn.

And yet, I knew in my heart that we were doing something right. Alexandre was born smiling, and he hasn’t stopped since. He slept through the night at two and a half months. At one year old, he feeds himself with a spoon. He eats fish and broccoli—and liver. At least by French standards, we were right on target.
Just look at him,
I wanted to say,
he’s happy all the time.

A baby is a wishing well. We walk by every day and throw our pennies in. Most are bright and shiny, full of smiles and possibility. Some are tarnished with bad memories, unlucky genes. Others have been hiding under the couch cushions all these years, just waiting for someone to dig them out.

A baby is a wishing well. Everyone puts their hopes, their fears, their pasts, their two cents in.

ON THE WAY
to Alexandre’s new babysitter (Amandine, like the vast majority of French women, was going back to work), we passed by the
boulangerie
and picked up two baguettes for lunch. We rolled down the narrow asphalt path bordering the fields. I enjoyed these morning walks. I think my mom was pleased to be out and about, participating in my daily routine.

Valerie is a brisk grandmotherly type who has been watching village children in her home for fifteen years. Her house has a sunroom with lots of toys, a big garden with a birdbath, and a friendly, fluffy dog who ran to greet us at the gate. But what caught my mother’s eye was the sandbox. It was made from an old wooden construction pallet, and the corners had four rounded metal prongs that stuck up about two inches over the edge. After my mother retired from the board of education she took a position as the executive director of a day-care center. So she knew all about the latest playground regulations—foam tiles, heights of swings, appropriate plastics. She stared at Alexandre, who was happily scooping sand into a purple bucket. Valerie was sitting just beside him, nodding in enthusiastic agreement every time he burbled with excitement and raised the shovel. My mother seemed oblivious to Valerie’s supervision and Alexandre’s pleasure. I could see the wheels turning in her head. Maybe it’s the fact that one in three hundred U.S. citizens is a lawyer, but where the rest of the world sees fun, Americans see liability.

One problem with my mother and I being as close as we are: I can read her mind. Paris was far away from home, but it was logical, beautiful, sophisticated. Céreste, it seemed, was a bridge too far. A mysterious step sideways, if not downright backward. All parents want their kids to live better than they did, and my mother couldn’t see the “better” in this. On the one hand:
Oh, those crazy kids, but never mind—you know Elizabeth, she steps in shit and it turns to gold.
On the other hand:
All those degrees. I paid for a field trip to
Venice,
for God’s sake. All this so you can hang your laundry on the line like a peasant and bring up my grandson in some backwater where they don’t have a decent Chinese restaurant or a natural history museum?
As if just by leading our lives in this different place, in a different way, Gwendal and I were somehow damaging our son.

Underneath the incomprehension was fear.
You are slipping away from me.
This is the ultimate paradox of good parenting. I’m certain that my mother raised me to live a life that is wider, grander, and more free than what she grew up with. But in giving me my liberty, she sent me running straight into the arms of a world she doesn’t always understand. This makes her uncomfortable. I could hear her internal monologue.
What about the schools? Won’t you be lonely here?
Barely having unpacked the moving boxes, I couldn’t answer her questions. The truth of the matter was, I didn’t know.

We walked back from Valerie’s house in silence, wheeling the empty stroller in front of us.
“Bonjour, mesdames,”
said Mr. André as he overtook us on the path.

I meet old Mr. André every morning as he heads to the sunny stone bench in front of the
mairie
. There he sits, with two other men for company, until it is time to return home for lunch. He’s always very friendly, though his two remaining front teeth and long tobacco-stained fingernails do suggest the character in a fairy tale who carries a sack of tasty little children over his shoulder. Even in the heat of summer, he wears so many layers it is difficult to know if that lump is the hunchback of my overactive imagination or just an arthritic stoop. He shook my hand, pointed at the baguettes in the empty stroller, said something, and laughed and laughed.

“What did he say?” asked my mom.

“He asked if I sold the baby for a loaf of bread.”

“Is he kidding?”

“Maybe.” I shrugged, in no mood to lessen her discomfort.

I can’t say for sure if it was the sandbox, Mr. André’s fingernails, or just an overdose of chlorophyll, but the very next day my mother came home from the supermarket with Paul lugging the green plastic dinosaur slide behind her. It was only three feet tall, but it was so wide it barely fit through the garden door. I was crisp with rage. Alexandre, of course, was delighted. “See,” she said, bending to give him a kiss, “Grandma knows what you like.”

THE NIGHT BEFORE
my mother left, I made lentils with sausage. It’s normally a winter dish, warm, slow, and hearty, the big hug I often forgot to give my parents this month. By the time she began repacking the endless suitcases, we were both exhausted. I felt overwhelmed; she felt marginalized. I felt judged; she felt stupid. A baby was supposed to bring everyone together. This was as far from each other as we’d ever been.