It is September 2003 when we first see our house on rue de L’Eglise and immediately put our fantasy of riding bikes down the treacherous hill to Le Café Bellevue on hold. It won’t be our first fantasy to hit the dust. So what if we will have to drive six kilometers each morning down the winding, serpentine hillside road that leads to L’Isle sur la Sorgue below.
The house is just right—a medieval, attached townhouse with cunning shutters and a heavy, planked wooden front door, located directly on a narrow street meant for carriages, not cars. The house is so old that the plumbing’s on the outside. My heart leaps when Catherine takes a large, toothy key out of her purse, the kind that might have hung from the belt of a Shakespearean chambermaid, and opens the door.
The inside of the house is just as appealing. We enter onto a small landing from which two steps lead down to what Catherine calls the “salon.” To us, salon summons up a gathering of bright and witty, high-bosomed women, one of them Mme de Sévigné, lying about, holding forth on an encyclopedia of subjects. But those Renaissance days are over. These days, French salons are merely living rooms, and this one is comfortably furnished with an attractive mix of contemporary and antique chairs, a sofa and a glass coffee table. The kitchen is very small but modern and well equipped. There are no closets in the two bedrooms—only armoires. We have a wall of sliding-door closets at home, but here we love armoires; they’re old, inconvenient, and hardly hold anything. And the floors are terra-cotta. On the very distressed, antique dining room table stands a bottle of champagne, along with a note from the owners, which reads in sweetly broken English, “Have a nice days.” Buddhism is beginning to look good.
Unlike our town, where a street named Bonnie Brook Lane doesn’t necessarily have a brook, rue de L’Eglise has a church, the tiny, chaste twelfth-century Romanesque church of St. Trophime, built against the town’s ramparts, with a view of the colorful patchwork of the Sorgue Valley below, silver with olive trees, and purple with grapes ready to be harvested. The church is just a few steps from our door.
At the very top of the village is a twelfth-century château where the Marquis de Sade, the literary pornographer and advocate of the no-pain, no-gain school of sexual intercourse, spent his childhood inventing sadism. He probably started small, by pulling the wings off flies. He would spend his adult years, when he wasn’t in jail or an insane asylum, loving it up in a castle in nearby Lacoste.
The only commercial enterprise in town is a bistro, Lou Clapas. At first, we figure the bistro was named after someone named Lou Clapas. Then, as we become more familiar with the area, we notice a number of restaurants named Lou Something or Other, causing us to deduce that all of these Lous comprised a chain of restaurants, like Howard Johnson, owned by a guy named Lou. Days after we’d gotten comfortable with that explanation, we find that Lou, in the ancient Provençal language called langue d’Oc, means “the,” and clapas means “stone.”
We notice, too, as we drive around, that the signs designating town names appear first in contemporary French with the ancient Provençal name printed just below. There is a concerted effort, at least in the Vaucluse, the region in which we will rent for four consecutive years, to preserve the Provençal language. Vaucluse means “closed valley” or Vau-Cluso, and closed it is, surrounded by various mountain ranges, including the highest peak in the Luberon range, Le Mont Ventoux, windy mountain. A storm in the Vaucluse, we will soon find out, is a tympanic thrill as the thunder, trapped in the valley, bounces repeatedly off the valley walls, unable to escape.
The region is also bounded by two of France’s greatest rivers, the Durance and the Sorgue. The Sorgue is fed by runoff from Le Mont Ventoux, which, after traveling through a network of underground caves, bursts forth into a huge cavern in what will become one of our favorite towns, Fontaine de Vaucluse, once called La Fònt de Vauclusa.
Buddhism is still looking good, until we attempt to get my computer and Larry’s cell phone to work. No matter what house we rent in the future, no matter how much adaptive technology we bring with us, no matter how strongly our landlords assure us that we will have no problems getting online, we can’t. It’s il ne marche pas over and over again, ensuring that we will spend too much of our first three days in any house dwelling in a digital dystopia. Plugging into another country’s electrical current is such a challenge that it makes us wish we were home, but neither of us dares say so out loud.
We have neighbors across our narrow street, the Rogets. They introduce themselves. René and Danielle are a retired couple. In French, the condition of being retired is à la retraite, which translates literally as “in retreat,” as if one were a soldier in a defeated army. Is that better or worse, I wonder, than American retirement, which suggests it’s time to go to bed.
He was a banker; she the director of a girls’ school. They invite us into their home for an introductory drink. I had thought the French were unfriendly and rarely invited foreigners into their homes, but that is not the case in Provence, as we will continue to learn.
The dominant feature in the living room is a full-color, life-sized, acrylic sculpture of Louis Armstrong. René explains in slow, easy French, enhanced by gestures, that he was eleven years old, living in Paris, when the Americans liberated the city. They gave him du chocolat and introduced him to le jazz.
He loves Americans. During the month, they will invite us for cocktails and take us to an American movie, Man of La Mancha. The subtitles are in French. We are at first surprised, but then delighted, to learn that there are no movie theatres in Saumane, nor, for that matter, in L’Isle sur la Sorgue. Nothing is coming to a multiplex near you. It’s coming to a grange in the nearby town of St. Didier.
The grange is a modern building, located on a side street where tourists never go. There we are, helping our neighbors set up the folding chairs and putting them away at the end of the show. We chat with them and munch on cookies. Danielle and René introduce us to their friends.
“You have only been studying for two weeks and you speak so well?” they say, and we smile sweetly, forgetting to mention our three years of high school French. One of them will invite us, along with René and Danielle, to her house the next day for an aperitif. Meeting one’s neighbors is an important component of belonging. Tourists don’t have neighbors.
We meet more neighbors during our stay in Saumane by attending La Fête de la Musique, a potluck event to which Larry contributes a dish. The music is recorded. Yves, Catherine’s partner, is the emcee, playing records over a loud speaker. He introduces us to some of the villagers. Larry is determined to knock their Provençal socks off by making mac and cheese. He has thoughtfully modified this dish for French palates by using gruyère instead of cheddar. He explains in his best French to the housewives who are serving up their coq au vin, tartes aux tomates, or quiches lorraines, that his dish is called “mac and cheese” and that it is uniquely American. He repeats its name slowly, carefully, like a teacher—“mac and cheese.” They smile, taste it, and tell him how much they enjoy it. In the fullness of time, we will find out that mac and cheese, made with gruyère, is an authentically French dish, a regular offering on pretty nearly every bistro menu in Provence.
Our lives in Saumane are organized around our French lessons. The need to understand and be understood is critical to any pretense at Frenchiness. One of my great regrets is that I didn’t take my junior year abroad in France. As a result, I am now trying to learn a foreign language at the same time that I am forgetting words in my native tongue. Still, we must work with what neurons are left. It’s probably a losing game, but we figure it’s how we play the game that counts.
We have been lucky with Catherine, and we are lucky with Monique, who we quickly learn to call “Mo.” She, even more than the house and the sweet town of Saumane, makes this experience better than anything we might have dreamed. This may be the first time that one of my fantasies turns out as well as I’ve imagined. I suppose that is bound to happen every once in a while.
She is a superb French teacher, animated, humorous, intelligent, artistically talented, disciplined, and inventive. Sometimes we study grammar per se, attempting to drill verb declensions into our heads. More often, we learn grammar, vocabulary, and French culture by singing songs, listening to tapes, watching films, cooking meals, and taking field trips.
In class, we are totally immersed, as promised. English never crosses our lips. When we don’t understand the meaning of a French word, Mo explains it by using other French words. When we can’t find le mot juste to say precisely what we think or feel, we settle for some circumlocution that we hope gets to the heart of the matter. The air fairly buzzes with the strain of trying. I enjoy the effort, although failure always lurks. I often launch myself into the conversation with only the vaguest idea of what I’m going to say or how I’m going to say it, a sense of dread that sailors in medieval times must have experienced when they approached the place on the map that read, “Beyond here there be dragons.” Because there are so many words I do not know, I am obliged to beat around the verbal bush. The unknown noun for interview, entretien, becomes “a meeting where you ask people questions and they answer.” I am by nature longwinded. At home it’s because I think out loud and like to hear myself talk. Here it’s because I’m stalling, searching for words.
I love words, all words, written or spoken. One of my earliest childhood memories is my delight in learning “cat,” the first word I could spell and read. I must have been in first grade. I ran all the way home that day, spelling and saying “C-A-T cat, C-A-T cat” over and over again to myself, as if I held the word in a saucer and the letters might spill out and be lost. “C-A-T cat!” I cried as I burst through the kitchen door in search of my mother, eager to present her with my prize.
Each word I learn in Mo’s class is a little treasure I add to my trove. The French language is as beautiful and subtle as it is difficult to learn. All French parts of speech are annoying for one reason or another, verbs especially. If they don’t feel like acting rational, they don’t. If they prefer to be indirect and subtle, they are. Take the verb manquer, which means “to miss” or “to lack.” You’d think that if you wanted to say, as we so sensibly do in English, “I miss you,” you’d say, “Je manque vous.” But no, that would be too straightforward. Well, then, what about “Je vous manque.” I you miss, now that we’ve learned that the pronoun always precedes the verb in the French language? You’d still be wrong. The French would have you say, “Vous me manquez,” you are missing to me. And don’t even get me started on the subjunctive. Of course English is at least as difficult to learn as French, but you’re missing the point. I’m not trying to be fair. I’m trying to be French.
Larry and I have different speaking styles in class. I talk a lot. I’m a glutton for attention. When Larry is finally able to get a word in edgewise, he shows himself to be very strong on nouns and verbs but weak on all other parts of speech. And sometimes his efforts to roll the French letter r bring on fits of glottal stoppage. As a result, he speaks like a French Hemingway, very spare and muscular. Whatever words he doesn’t know he simply leaves out, and you get to fill them in and make sense of it all.
I prefer to talk rather than to listen, another flaw I’ve imported from my real life, which is undoubtedly why I, more often than Larry who does listen, do not understand what Mo is saying. Since I’m not fond of humiliation, when I don’t understand what’s being said, I sometimes fake it. Usually this happens near the end of the classroom day when I’m as overstuffed as a goose’s liver. I affect a fixed, interested smile, not too wide in case she’s talking about a murdered loved one, and I nod but not too vigorously, hoping that she won’t ask any questions that will betray my deception. I worry that she may detect the absence of intelligent light in my eyes. Perhaps she can smell my fear.
Sort of but not quite understanding is just as perilous. I pick up a word or two. I think I get the gist. Somebody is building something very large, something très grand in her backyard. I fairly vibrate with frustration. A very large what? It’s like standing on tiptoe, trying to pick a delicious, ripe pear that hangs just a millimeter out of reach. When I actually do understand, I tend to get extravagantly animated. My eyes sparkle, as if Mo were saying the most exciting things to me. Now I’m not faking. To me, merely understanding is a very big deal. I cry out “d’accord,” I understand, or “tout à fait,” absolutely! I hang on her every word.
Mo is determined that we should learn to tell time in the traditional French twenty-four-hour system, this in spite of the fact that lots of French people will make a dinner date for sept heures, seven o’clock, instead of dix-neuf heures, nineteen hours. No matter how hard I try, I rarely get it right, which is why René and Danielle show up at nineteen hours, my time 7:00 p.m., an hour early for our cocktail party. I had meant to invite them for twenty hours, eight o’clock my time. They sit stiffly in the salon while I rush about preparing hors d’oeuvres and apologizing for getting the time wrong. “Je suis désolée,” I tell them. “I’m sorry.” (One adds an extra e if the speaker is feminine and an s if two or more people are désolés, or a double e and one s, désolées, if the speakers are both feminine. Even French adjectives are sex-driven.)
“Désolé” to my ears seems an overly dramatic way to say you’re sorry for getting the time wrong. “My best friend is dying.” That’s désolé. And then there’s merde, which sometimes means “shit” and at other times means “good luck.” Go figure.
There are many more French utterances that seem over the top to native English speakers. For instance, I stifle a giggle every time I ask directions from a stranger. Mo has taught us to say, “Excusez-moi de vous déranger,” literally, “Excuse me for deranging you,” as if the person might otherwise go bonkers. When introduced to someone, it is proper to shake that person’s hand and say “Enchanté de faire votre connaissance,” or just plain “enchanté.” Maybe I really am happy to meet you, but enchanted? It also seems to me that “Je t’embrasse,” I kiss you, is a bit of a bodice ripper of a sign-off at the end of a letter, when all you really mean is “Love.” But, hey, they’re French.
When it comes to numbers, I’m in deep trouble. The left side of my brain, the side that’s thought to be in charge of numbers, is the size of a garbanzo bean. On the college math aptitude tests, I scored 30 percent of a possible 100. I add on my fingers. If I can, I secrete them under a table and count by pressing them on my knees. I also can’t program the TV or balance my checkbook. This is not because I am lazy, or rather not merely because I’m lazy. It is also because I am hardwired numerically hopeless. If, God forbid, Larry should predecease me, I would have to move to assisted living in order to watch Netflix.
Larry has no difficulty with numbers. When he’s bored on the road, he adds and multiplies the numbers on license plates, which makes him very adept at dealing with the way the French count. I have no trouble counting to twenty in French, since there’s a single word for each number. But once past twenty, or vingt, all hell breaks loose. Twenty-one is vingt et un, twenty plus one. The seventeenth century is le dix-septième siècle, or ten plus seven. And it gets worse. If someone is ninety years old, he “has” quatre-vingt-dix ans. That’s four times twenty plus ten. And that’s not all the “haves” you have to worry about. One isn’t hungry, thirsty, or cold; one has hunger, thirst, and cold. But the weather doesn’t have hot; it makes hot.
And why does every article that precedes every noun have to be either masculine “le” or feminine “la”? I complain to Monique. Why couldn’t they settle for a simple “the” like normal Americans? It’s not as if le or la make any sense. One might conclude that the French are oversexualized. The word for magnet is the same as the word for loving, aimant, but when it comes to gender, they are merely bewildering. The word for vagina is le vagin, and it’s masculine. The coarse word for penis is la bite, and it’s feminine. The word for garbage can, la poubelle, is so lovely that I want to dab some behind my ears.
Larry and I like to pit masculine words against feminine words to determine which gender wins the moral high ground. Peace, la paix, is feminine, I submit, but so, counters Larry, is war, la guerre. Yes, that’s true, I allow, but la vie, life, is feminine, but so, says Larry, is death, la mort. Fed up, Monique has to separate us like the class clowns we are and explain that the le-ness and la-ness of French derives from ancient Latin and would we please stop wasting time.
Talking French with Your Mouth Full
At noon, after two hours of French grammar cum culture, Larry and I go downstairs to Mo’s dining room where Ange joins us.
Mo sets a pretty table, with tablecloth and matching napkins. The first course, what we would call the appetizer, the French call the entrée which in this case consists of pâtés and sausages accompanied by the ever-present baguette. Then she serves a soupe au pistou a vegetable and bean soup resembling minestrone but seasoned with a mixture of basil, parmesan cheese, and garlic. Just when I think that’s got to be it, Mo presents le plat, the main course, a brined pork served with her own onion jam. That is followed by the requisite green salad and a cheese plate.
In the South of France, we learn, they eat their major meal at noon. That way they can eat and drink themselves into a stupor, just in time for their siesta, which starts at around two o’clock and goes on until about four. Eyelids and shop doors close for at least two hours.
Without being aware of it, we have been drinking a mild Provençal rosé throughout the meal, and we’re pleasantly looped. In vino we find not veritas but a soupçon of uninhibited fluency. Lunchtime conversation chez Mo—at Mo’s house—while sometimes incomprehensible, is never boring. However, to stand a chance of participating, we must remain in a state of heightened awareness. Ange, we learn, is Corsican, which is why this household is so well supplied with figatelli, a Corsican sausage that tastes like Genoa salami but chewier and more gamey. He is a retired naval engineer and helixophile, someone who collects and sells antique corkscrews, a popular hobby in France. Ange displays his collection at a booth in the antiques section of the Sunday market in L’Isle sur la Sorgue. Occasionally he sells one.
Ange tells us that there’s a corkscrew museum in Mènerbes, another pretty nearby hill town. We decide to go. The corkscrews are all just corkscrews at the operative end, but each of the more than thousand handles are different—a dog, a sailboat, a pencil, a crescent moon, a rainbow, a pig, a cart, a hat, a wine bottle, and, our favorite, a naked man with his legs spread wide. There’s a bottle cap museum near our home, but in forty years it has never occurred to us to go. Here, out of place, devoid of our usual cynicism—a corkscrew museum? Let’s go! We’re up for anything. We like ourselves better this way.
Mo and Ange seem genuinely sad and hurt by how anti-French so many Americans seem to be because the French oppose the war in Iraq. The French we know are very well versed on American politics. They are bewildered that the US Congress has recommended that the french fries served in the cafeteria be listed on the menu as “Freedom Fries.” (Never mind that so-called french fries actually originated in Belgium.) The French, say Monique and Ange, love Americans even when they dislike our political leaders. Why then, they ask, can’t Americans disagree with their government and still love them? They seize upon us as exceptions. Inadvertently we find ourselves cast in the role of ambassadors of good will from a country of ill will.
Both Larry and I are surprised by how much the French people we meet know about America and about their own culture. Our sample is small, but that doesn’t keep us from leaping to conclusions. Monique, Ange, and others we will meet at chez Mo may or may not be college graduates, but they seem to know as much or more about our culture than we do, and a great deal more about France than most Americans know about America. The first may be due to the high quality of France’s public education; the second to the worldwide dominance of American culture.
We laugh a lot and tell stories about children and grandchildren, likes and dislikes, our friends, their friends, the pros and cons of dog ownership, what we did yesterday after school, and whether or not we should buy a French Scrabble set (too many e’s). Many of our conversations are political. Mo and Ange are liberals who are horrified, as are we, by our doctrine of preemptive wars, our country’s increasing conservatism, and failure to properly separate church and state. We discuss the differences between our legal and educational systems. Other big topics, upon which we agree, are the shameful rise of French anti-Semitism, terrorism, and the increasing hostility toward the peaceful Muslim citizens in their midst.
A particular lunchtime conversation starkly contrasts French and American attitudes toward marriage. Is the idea of commitment learned or felt? Mo wonders. But what Mo and Ange, both of whom have been divorced, find laughable is the whole concept of “for better or for worse, until death do us part.”
“Why suffer?” they ask. What’s the point? And they practice what they preach. Ange will soon be replaced by Marc, and Mo by another woman. And it won’t stop there. Before we leave Provence for the fourth time, Monique will have gone through three lovers, and Ange will be in Canada living out of wedlock with his first wife.
And why bother to marry at all? We Americans, they say, are too earnest in our attitudes toward marriage. I am so eager to be French that I find myself questioning my fidelity. Why did Larry and I marry? And why haven’t we split up? God knows those thoughts have occurred to us both. We’ve stuck it out through plenty of “worse.” What was the point anyway?
For the moment, I seem to have forgotten that I am not French. Part of immersing oneself in a foreign culture can be a temporary loss of one’s moral compass. To prove I’m not a hopeless bourgeois, I tell them about my late, free-spirited aunt Lily who had five husbands and didn’t waste any time in between. Lily practiced what she called “serial monotony.” As soon as one husband lost his allure, she’d move on to another. Mo and Ange express their admiration, but they fault her for bothering to get married, especially after the first time.
It is at Mo’s table that we first meet her good friends Sylvie and Alain Prétot. Sylvie is a dark-haired, lively, bright-eyed charmer, a proud housewife and mother of two teenage daughters. Alain, a tall, sturdy fireman by trade, sports an impressively full, long, black, Provençal handlebar moustache that reaches to his jaw line and encloses the lower part of his face in bold parentheses.
He speaks French with a twangy, Provençal accent. The difference between the Parisian accent we study with Mo and Alain’s is as distinct as clipped New England speech is to an Alabama drawl. For instance, the way to say “tomorrow morning” is demain matin, pronounced “deh-meh meh-teh.” Alain pronounces it “demang matang.” He speaks slowly. I find his accented French easy to understand. His manner is gentle, even courtly. I develop a crush on him. He speaks no English. I hardly know him. I don’t need to know him. He is my fantasy man, the living embodiment of ancient Provence.
Alain, who is deeply devoted to his Provençal heritage, is the first contemporary person anywhere to make the long, narrow barque-like fishing boats called les nego-chin, pronounced “lay nay-go-sheen.” Extrapolated from langue d’Oc, it means boats so skinny and shallow that even a dog standing in the widest part, the middle of such a boat, is likely to fall into the Sorgue and drown. Chien is the modern word for dog. Noyer, to drown, is the modern infinitive for nego. Alain tells us that during the Middle Ages, when the pope was in Avignon, fishermen wielding implements similar to Neptune’s trident, speared trout each Friday and delivered them in les nego-chin, and then, when the river narrowed, by cart to Avignon as a tribute to His Holiness.
Alain has made almost 150 of these boats so far. They are his passion. After lunch one afternoon, Alain invites us into his world. He shows us his workshop. He demonstrates his age-old chiseling technique.
Would we like to go for a ride? We walk a couple of blocks toward the center of town, where he keeps his boats tied on the banks of the Sorgue. Larry and I go on separate trips. Three people in a nego-chin is asking for trouble. Alain stands in the back of the boat, propelling it forward with a pole, like a Venetian gondolier, while each of us scooch down on all fours, like a nego-chin.
That first season we also meet Ellen Grenniesen, an American transplanted in Provence and one of Mo’s former students, who occasionally joins Mo’s table to visit and to get a French language booster shot.
She makes her first appearance at the end of a lunchtime conversation class. It has been what I call one of my dreaded “days of malediction.” I can’t put a French sentence together. Mo likes to joke that mon cerveau est en panne, that my brain has broken down, the same phrase they use to describe a car that won’t start.
Ellen is married to Bob, the European representative of Back Roads International. Along with their three young children, they have been stationed in Provence for almost two years. Bob, because he deals mostly with Americans, has managed to avoid fluency, but Ellen has seized the opportunity to go native, to integrate herself into the Provençal culture with élan. She trades English lessons for French cooking lessons with her next-door neighbor. She tried to raise chickens in her backyard. The foxes literally raided the hen house, putting an end to that earnest effort, but her vegetable garden thrives. She now speaks French well enough to serve on the PTA of her daughter’s school, where wine is served at the meetings. I am charmed by the fact that as her children outgrow their shoes, she fills them with dirt, plants flowers in them, and lines them up on the stone wall in front of her house.
We go on hikes with Ellen and Bob who are so well integrated into la vie Provençale that they know the territory and its hidden delights. We are their tourists. When we’re with the Greeneissens, we don’t have to pretend we’re French; we just have to pretend we’re young.
On one of our frequent hikes, we follow their lead on what must be at least a three-mile-long, uphill trail through the woods to a restaurant biologique called La Pause. How so specialized a restaurant can sustain itself in the woods, so far from anywhere, amazes me. When we arrive, I need more than the pause that refreshes. I need a massage, a nap, and a performance-enhancing IV drip.
As we are eating our biologically correct crêpes and salads at the outdoor picnic table, the owner comments on how the children have grown since their last visit. “Ils poussent comme des mauvaises herbes.” They’re growing like weeds.
After lunch, Ellen has something else she wants to show us, an abandoned hamlet called Barbaranque. Amidst the cluster of tumbled-down stone houses and underbrush, we find a plaque to the memory of its citizens who were massacred on that very spot by the Nazis during the Second World War, a grim reminder that Provence is not all sunlight and lavender.
On the way down, trailed by a gang of goats, we pass the two-story troglodyte dwelling, carved into a cliff, where the local goatherd and his wife live; the goats on the first floor, the couple on the second. Ellen’s been trying to get the goatherd to teach her how to make goat cheese. She’s been phoning him for days, but he hasn’t returned her calls. In spite of its primitive appearance, his cave is equipped with a phone and a fax.
Never Try to Act Out “Sausage” in a Supermarket
Our first attempt to figure out a French supermarket is a disaster of confusion. No matter how hard we tug at the last cart in the cart corral, we can’t get it loose. Then we realize that, as in an airport, one must insert a euro into a slot in order to release a cart. French women still push supermarket carts, but even more of them come equipped from home with large canvas bags on casters, which skip the middleman by serving as both cart and bag.
Once inside, Larry, food lover extraordinaire, slips behind the linguistic barricades and morphs into commander in chief of all that’s purveyed.
Larry thinks of supermarkets, whether French or American, as food museums, or maybe libraries. He loves to read the shelves. He’s especially excited by the display of fruit juices. “Jus d’orange, jus de poire, jus d’abricot,” he exclaims and puts one of each in his wagon. He can spend two hours fully engaged in a supermarket doing research, or merely marveling that the French sell bouillabaisse in vacuum-sealed glass jars and foie gras in the meat department.
Supermarkets overwhelm me by their size and the variety of goods they offer. They make me feel stupid. First of all, the same side of my brain that struggles with numbers handicaps me when it comes to spatial relations. I have trouble finding my way through the aisles of my local Super Stop and Shop. It’s way too super. I encounter a profusion of green leafiness: romaine, mâche, radicchio, frisée, Boston, bib, kale, arugula, spinach, baby and grown-up, in addition to mixes of all of the above. I remember when lettuce was iceberg. I have the same problem in the shampoo department. I yearn for the days when mustard was a matter of Dijon or French’s, and shampoo was either Breck or Prell.
Now imagine me trying to navigate a strange supermarket in France where not only must I locate each item, I must translate it. It takes me fifteen minutes to find the milk and another two to figure out that écrémé means skimmed.
If I hadn’t run into our neighbor René, I never would have found the garbage bags. I didn’t know the French word for garbage at the time, les ordures, so I shifted into charade mode and acted out a garbage man carrying a heavy bag over his shoulder.
At first René looked perplexed, he must have thought I was doing Père Noël, Santa Claus, but then his eyes lit up in recognition, and he led me over to les sacs à ordures.
I make my way to the cereal aisle. I know the word, les céréales, but I face yet another stupefying challenge. I’m looking for bran flakes, but I haven’t any idea of how to say it, so it wouldn’t make any sense to launch into my “excuse me for deranging you” routine.
Trying to settle down in another country is not for everyone. Feeling disoriented and stupid on a daily basis is not everyone’s verre de vin. Neither is losing your way, or the embarrassment you feel when you carefully look up all the French words you need to ask someone for directions to the pharmacy, “Où est la pharmacie?” only to realize that there’s pas une chance that you will understand the answer.
To make matters worse, I am unfamiliar with French brand names. I look at the pictures on the packages but cannot tell the difference between one kind of flake and another. When at last I find Kellogg’s All Bran amidst the alien Corn Chex, I hug the box as if it were a long-lost friend.
The produce department presents a puzzling challenge. Some of the fruits and vegetables are displayed loosely in bins, much as they are in my supermarket at home. Others are segregated in slatted wooden crates, labeled with their country of origin, often Spain, but sometimes other countries, including England and Belgium. I learn later that this produce segregation is the indirect result of a food fight of a complaint brought by the Commissioner of European Communities in 1997 against the French Republic, for failing to take “all necessary and proportionate measures in order to prevent the free movement of fruit and vegetables as required by treaty.” It seems that French farmers had been massing at the borders of Spain and Belgium, sometimes destroying or otherwise preventing lorries full of fruits and vegetables from entering their country. As a result, foods must now be labeled with their country of origin. I assume the unlabeled produce comes from France, and so, being French myself, I select what I want from the bins.
Meanwhile, over near the meat counter, Larry’s sausage imitation is drawing a crowd. “Just point!” I cry desperately, turning his attention to the phalanx of sausages lined up in the glass display case. Larry has no trouble choosing. He chooses them all. Then he moves on to breads. While I worry about which one is best, Larry takes four and tosses them in his cart, which already contains the juices, organ meats from assorted animals, hard, soft, and semisoft cheeses from cows and goats, and a variety of regional red wines.
Checking out is a nightmare of incomprehension: we should have weighed certain items before showing up at the cashier’s line. You can’t separate the bananas the way you can at home. You have to pay for the plastic bags. I barely understand a word the checkout lady is saying to us. My eyes well up with tears of humiliation and frustration. Larry, who can’t wait to cook up a pituitary gland or two, is in high spirits. He sorts his way through our ineptitude and pays the bill, 150 euros. When we return our cart, the slot spits out a euro.
Once home, we carry the bags of groceries from the street into the house. Here, because our street is so narrow that no other car can get past ours, we are obliged to unload the groceries as fast as we can. That done, one of us drives forward to the square, turns around, drives past our house to the church parking lot, and walks home. How wonderfully inconvenient! How French! Ditto for the garbage. Since no truck can enter the village, we must walk the bags partway down the hill to the green bins.
While unpacking Larry’s juice collection into our refrigerator, I break one of the glass shelves. If that happened at home, I’d mutter an expletive, pick up the phone, and call the local glass repair store. In Saumane, a minor disaster presents both a challenge and, depending on your mood, an opportunity. Larry reaches for the French-English dictionary to find the French word for shelf. It could be l’étagère or le rayon. We decide to go with rayon, since the only étagère we know of was in Larry’s mother’s living room and held books and bric-a-brac. We look up “glass”; it’s la vitrine. In the yellow pages we find un vitrier, which is what they call a guy who deals with glass. Then we play rock-scissors-paper to determine which one of us will be unlucky enough to have to dial the number and speak French to whoever answers. And then, of course, we have to find the place.
Larry was born with silver taste buds in his mouth. Just as Yo-Yo Ma at a very young age could accept nothing less than Pablo Casals for his musical mentor, and covered his ears when his mother played Montavani, so little Larry’s inner gourmet complained of stomachaches when confronted by his mother’s cooking.
Larry’s mother believed that food was necessary but dangerous. To render it harmless, food should be submerged in boiling water until it gave up and turned gray, after which it is best buried under cream of mushroom soup. The only exception was chicken or fowl. He will eat duck but only if it’s crispy. Birds should be sautéed quickly until medium rare, which is why Larry doesn’t eat chicken or even turkey. On Thanksgiving, he makes himself an omelet.
Larry didn’t want to hurt his mother’s feelings, so at meal times he faked stomachaches. Eventually, his concerned parents sent him to the hospital for tests, where he drank barium and endured all manner of probes and other intestinal indignities. Like the stoic Spartan boy who stole a fox and hid it under his cape, allowing the fox to eat into his stomach rather than confess to stealing, loyal Larry suffered rather than confess to being revolted by his mother’s cooking. His ordeal did not end until he went away to college and encountered what at first he thought was gourmet cooking. Then he married me and learned better.
“I don’t eat anything that flies,” he warned me when we got engaged. For a while he was satisfied to be out of pain and bird-free. I cooked all-American recipes from Fanny Farmer and Irma Rombauer’s The Joy of Cooking.
Then, in the 1980s, Julia Child introduced Americans to French cooking. Larry sat up and took notice. Her recipe for French bread filled eleven pages. It required that Larry rise at three in the morning in order to pound the dough down for its third and final rise and then insert a steaming brick into the oven to ensure that the bread came out varnished, like a Strad.
Ever since Julia, Larry’s been reading cookbooks for fun. He is not discouraged by complex recipes. I, by contrast, read them to find fast and easy meals. One half hour of preparation time is my limit. I skip over recipes that begin, “The day before, peel and poach 12 plover’s eggs,” or include words like cheesecloth, blanche, reduce, knead, whisk, parchment paper, or nasturtium petals. I am attracted to those that have no more than eight ingredients, including salt and pepper. I also avoid recipes that require one to soak anything overnight in favor of those that begin with the reassuring words, “Preheat oven to 350 degrees.” We are a culinary odd couple, worse than Jack Sprat and his wife.
Now that we’re in Provence, Larry prefers cookbooks written in French to comprehensible ones in English, although English versions are readily available in the bookstore in the center of L’Isle sur la Sorgue. As a result, Larry needs a dictionary to translate some of the ingredients, and a table of equivalences, which French cookbooks don’t provide, to decipher the measurements.
“Is a litre more or less than a quart?” he wonders, tossing a few cups of water into the pot. Larry can be very careless about amounts. He tends to double the garlic. He can also be pretty devil-may-care about ingredients. He used to think that Worcestershire sauce and anchovies enhanced pretty nearly every recipe with the exception of Toll House cookies. In that respect, I am also his opposite: I follow directions like a fascist.
Occasionally I cook. I have noticed that tomato pie is the sine qua non of Provençal fare, or at least in September when there are a lot of tomatoes around. We’ve gone to a few petite soirees, and someone invariably brings a tomato pie. It is clear that I cannot even pretend to be a French woman unless I can make une tarte aux tomates.
What stops me from trying is that I have never made a successful crust. I do exactly what the recipe says about ice cubes and butter, but I end up with a large lump that looks like a brain and crumbles like plaster. Imagine my delight when I mention my fear of pastry to Monique, and she tells me that it’s easy, any “femme stupide” can do it. Real French women, she says, no longer make crusts from scratch; they unroll them from Pillsbury. Sic transit gloria mundi.
For the most part, the recipe conforms to my culinary prerequisites: not too many ingredients; degree of difficulty, one; degrees of temperature, around 400 degrees F. Our oven is French, so I must twist the knob to the approximate French equivalent, which Larry estimates is 200 degrees C.