That summer my father was in charge of making lunch, which wasn’t unusual; my mother embraced shared housework the moment Betty Friedan put pen to paper. But Dad’s repertoire was not large: scrambled eggs, spaghetti, applesauce—and tongue. He specialized in big, boiled tongues. Because grocery shopping had broken down in the face of escalating hostilities, a hunk of tongue always seemed to be on the kitchen counter, labeled “lunch.” I would stare at it, repulsed, until I became so hungry that I would douse a piece in salt and choke it down, my own tongue curling in an effort to avoid the pebbled texture. My sister, who was both more sensitive and more slender, skated near anorexia from pure tongue-loathing. My appetite was stronger than my revulsion; I did not lose a pound, but I did lose all respect for my parents.
Had anyone asked me at the time, I would have confidently asserted that I would never expose my future children to the revolting sights and sounds of marital strife. To our credit, Alessandro and I largely succeed in avoiding acrimony; steering clear of infidelity helps. Still, as they were for my parents, vacations are when we break into open warfare—and our flash point is money. To put it in a nutshell, I like a good splurge; my husband, on the other hand, can be frugal to a fault. Vacation puts such differences front and center.
Even before we decided to move to Paris, we had talked of a visit to the Loire Valley and its castles, and eventually we decided the trip should also celebrate Luca’s sixteenth birthday. I was in charge of finding a suitable restaurant for the birthday dinner itself; Alessandro’s mission was to find a hotel within driving distance of several castles. On a website boasting cheap deals, he found a hotel offering a suite, with a living room and kitchen, at an amazing rate. Because the hotel was brand-new, it hadn’t been reviewed. That was a bit worrisome, but the price was low enough to overcome such fiddling fears.
By this point in the book, you may have deduced that I have a weakness for luxury. When it comes to hotels, sheets with thread counts higher than the national debt make me happy, as do little bottles of shampoo, particularly if labeled in the imperative: “Nourish,” for example. Or “Enhance.” From our first glimpse of the Cheapskate Hotel, I realized there would be no such civilizing treats. The rental car’s GPS disclaimed knowledge of the address, but somehow we chanced on an unpaved road running around an industrial complex, ending at a construction site on which a naked concrete building rose from the dust. Voilà. Our hotel.
Having checked in at a linoleum-covered counter, we were directed to a room on the fourth floor, where we emerged from the elevator to discover—the hard way—that the corridors were illuminated by motion-detector lights on a slight delay. Standing in the pitch dark, we froze until fluorescent tubes spasmed on, revealing dispiriting gray industrial carpeting—whose color continued straight into the rooms. Not that the color of our suite’s carpet was much in evidence: the previous occupants had thrown quite a party, judging by the dirty dishes, the pyramid of empty wine bottles, and the way cigarette ashes sprinkled the carpeting like dandruff on a church warden.
Downstairs, the manager threw up his hands and sent us to another suite, this one on the third floor. We opened the door to a room that had apparently been shared by about three dozen backpackers, if the sand dune–size debris pile left behind was any indication. By this point I had moved from dismay to open revolt, and headed back downstairs prepared to make a break for freedom and a hotel with three stars—or even one. And then came the moment of truth: Alessandro confessed that he had prepaid the entire week. “Third time lucky!” he said, trying for a jaunty air. But he came off sounding like a flight attendant offering a second bag of pretzels during a five-hour tarmac delay. In response my face took on the snarl of a saber-toothed tiger. While this is a look those long-suffering flight attendants are probably used to, my children were not.
Will it surprise you to learn that the third time was not lucky? This time we schlepped our bags to the second floor, where the kitchen sink turned out to be free from dirty dishes. But we hardly noticed, too riveted by the smoke-blackened windows, intricately crazed in cobwebby patterns. It seemed that the hotel backed onto train tracks (which, as we learned later, handled an active timetable), and there had been a fire under the railroad bridge. One might surmise that the fire originated in the ramshackle shantytown under the bridge, but such speculation was irrelevant. We had identified the tenor of the neighborhood just by checking in.
“If I push this,” Anna observed, running a finger over the crazed glass, “the window kind of bulges out. See? Isn’t that cool?”
My heart was beating in a way that suggested an imminent stroke, so I retreated into the master bedroom. The bed bore a concave impression, perhaps of a person who had relaxed there to watch television while she should have been cleaning other rooms, and who was kind enough to have left the TV on so that guests could enjoy it. By that point, I wanted nothing more than to charge back into the living room and scream insults at my spouse while throwing my suitcase through that disintegrating window. But the ghost of my sixteen-year-old self stood at my shoulder, whispering, “Not in front of the children.” I gritted my teeth, lay down, and watched TV—which, of course, was in French, so I didn’t understand a thing. At that point, I couldn’t have imagined that things could get worse.
But the day was not over.
I had made reservations for Luca’s birthday dinner at a charming country restaurant, acclaimed for its traditional cuisine. Accordingly, we bundled the children into their best clothes—even though getting a teenage boy into a button-down shirt practically takes an act of Parliament—and took off. Yes, there was some tension in the car during the drive there. Luca was brooding over the indignity of my sartorial choices, and Alessandro had taken umbrage at my dislike of the hotel. But I practiced taking deep breaths and calling on the Zen side of myself that I’d always meant to cultivate. No time like the present!
The restaurant’s exterior was hung with ivy and flowers; inside it was all hushed white tablecloths and bowing waiters, and a big sign specifying NO CELL PHONES in several languages. We were ushered to our table by a very, very French waiter.
I suspect most people grapple with a prejudice of one kind or another. Given how they beam while announcing that they would never have guessed I was American, I rather think a lot of French people have zeroed in on my countrymen as the objects of their contempt. As for me? I have, over the course of my life, developed a deep intolerance for the archetypal French waiter: a supercilious, sanctimonious, self-important man in black. I particularly loathe the way such men intimidate their customers into a state of cowed gratitude, from which submissive posture the customers beg for advice—which is invariably delivered with a barely concealed Gallic sneer.
Alessandro now embarked on just such a conversation with our waiter, about champagne. We had decided that a sixteenth birthday should be celebrated with a toast, but because I am wary about children drinking alcohol (a notion both Italians and French ridicule), I had stipulated mimosas. As our fluent family representative, Alessandro was thus forced to explain the concept of a mimosa to our ever-more-haughty waiter.
It hardly need be said that Monsieur did little to contain his distaste at the idea of pouring juice into wine. I felt defensive, judged, and outclassed; even Alessandro grew flustered. At that point his cellphone rang. Monsieur’s brow darkened, but Alessandro flipped the phone open and then proceeded to punch the wrong button, putting it in speaker mode at precisely the moment a group of Italian relatives gathered together to scream “Buon compleanno” to Luca. A second later they began singing their birthday greetings.
“Close the phone!” I snapped at Alessandro.
“I can’t!” he hissed back. “It’s my mother.”
I was now in the throes of deep humiliation. Sedate, decorous couples all around us turned their heads in our direction. To judge by the clamor emitting from the phone, Marina was handing the cellphone around on her end, and a whole tableful of Italians were taking tu
rns shrieking their best wishes to Luca. At this point, Alessandro looked up at the waiter’s glittering black eyes and asked—humbly—“Would it be all right with you if we ordered glasses of champagne for the children?”
Confirmed in his conviction that he was master of the universe, Monsieur stalked away, shoulders tight with scorn, and returned with four large bell-shaped glasses of champagne. Then, with a withering flourish, he put down two unopened bottles of orange juice.
We managed to place our orders, but by then my sixteen-year-old ghost was long forgotten, and I had lost both my control and my self-respect. It wasn’t until Alessandro ventured the opinion that I had better look out or I would turn into my mother that I decided it was time to remove ourselves from our children’s presence.
“But where are you going?” Anna demanded.
“Tell the waiter we’ve gone to smoke a cigarette,” Alessandro replied.
“You don’t smoke,” she wailed.
Some moments should be relived only between spouses, so I will draw a discreet curtain over the wretched way we screamed at each other in the quiet cobblestone street. By the time we returned to the table—pretty much reconciled to marital existence—our entrées had arrived, and the champagne was gone. Luca, the guest of honor, sat stone-faced, in the grip of an adolescent disgust that I instantly recognized. His face threw me straight back to the summer of the painter’s pants, the boiled tongue, the impending divorce. Meanwhile, Anna had taken advantage of our absence to gulp not only her own champagne but ours as well. She was giggling madly, an empty walnut shell balanced on top of her head. The walnut was serving as a witch’s hat, and she had been amusing herself by acting out the Harry Potter characters one after another for the benefit of her mortified brother. (Have I mentioned this was an elegant, and very dignified, restaurant?)
Early on in our year in France, I had resolved to eat adventurously while here, and in that spirit I had ordered a local delicacy: tête de veau. Calf’s head. Now I saw that the tête had been transformed into a little pie—over which was draped a limp, ruddy-colored rooster’s comb. Monsieur le Waiter reappeared and explained that a boiled cockscomb was the perfect accompaniment to a pie made of brains, and that they should be eaten together. At this point Luca abandoned his silent protest and made his first contribution to his sixteenth-birthday party: an exaggerated retching noise.
I didn’t even look up to see what the other guests or the waiter made of my children’s behavior. I was too transfixed by the boiled rooster comb.
My father’s penchant for boiled tongue—as well as my mother’s wrath over lavish purchases that the family could not afford—came back to me in a rush.
In one day, I had reproduced an entire summer from my childhood.
The rooster comb brought back the deep despair that reverberated through our family that July—the way no grown-ups noticed that my sister had virtually stopped eating, and the way no grown-ups ever spoke to each other quietly, let alone civilly. Alessandro and I, on the other hand? We could sleep on thousand-thread-count sheets or sheets that felt like grain-sack burlap, and we would still be talking to each other the next morning. We will always notice if one of our children stops eating. We have learned not to hold grudges over Cheapskate Hotels and snide French waiters.
The rooster comb was quite good, in its own way.
The brain pie? Inedible.
Château de Blois was the scene of the Duke of Guise’s murder in 1588 by King Henri III, and there’s a truly creepy feeling knowing that the bedchamber was, as Henry James put it, “the scene of the principal events of [Henri III’s] depraved and dramatic reign.” Children being the depraved and dramatic creatures they are, Anna and Luca fought to stand on the exact spot where Guise was stabbed by eight assailants.
After our visit to the Blois castle, Anna and I decided that the scariest gargoyles aren’t lizardlike or dragonlike, with scales and tails and pointed ears. No, the human gargoyles are far more terrifying, with their blank eyes and toothless, open mouths. They look like the souls Dante describes in the Inferno, mouths stretched open in an eternal howl.
In the main square of the town of Blois is a Maison de la Magie—i.e., a magic museum. Six golden dragon heads emerge from windows on the upper story of the museum and roar into the plaza. They have long, wicked snouts and pale blue eyes that seem all the more ferocious for being such a limpid color.
My favorite place in Orléans is the Chocolaterie Royale, where we bought chocolate oranges, almond bark, white chocolate cranberry bark, and—the best—chocolate medallions featuring the Joan of Arc statue in the main square. Feeling guilty over the hotel debacle, Alessandro kept bringing more to the counter until we had spent approximately half the price of our hotel room on an artisanal-chocolate bender.
For someone like Anna—who spends her days (a) reading Harry Potter books, and (b) examining her hair to see if it curls like Hermione’s yet, and (c) trying to find a stick that might be a magic wand—a jaunt around French castles is like a repeat visit to Disneyland. She squealed at Chambord’s great hall (just like Hogwarts!), greeted the Blois suit of armor (in Hogwarts, suits of armor are quite chatty), and became joyously lost in the maze at Château de Chenonceaux (alas, no magic cup to be found).
The Château de Chenonceaux was the site of great jockeying between Catherine de’ Medici, queen to Henri II, and Henri’s mistress, Diane de Poitiers, to whom he gave the castle. When Henri died, Catherine took it back. Diane had had a portrait of herself painted in which she was depicted as the goddess Diana, so Catherine did the same—and the two portraits now hang together in one of the salons. Diane makes the more delectable Diana.
Beatrice adroitly holds her place as the Queen Bee of the fourth grade by arbitrarily dismissing some girls and then welcoming others (though never Anna). Today she summarily jettisoned a classmate named Maria from the cool group, for reasons known only to Her Majesty. “Maria cried all day,” Anna told me. “I felt bad for her, but she thinks I’m weird, so I couldn’t help.”
My friend Anne and I explored the tiny Musée Bourdelle today. Antoine Bourdelle (1861–1929) was a sculptor; the museum was his house and atelier. In the garden, I fell in love with Le Fruit, a statue of Eve with a luscious little smirk and a sinuous twist to her hips. In her right hand, three apples. In her left, behind her back, another apple. Woven into her hair … apples! And then upstairs we found an exquisite Bacchante, one of Bacchus’s female groupies—a wilder version of Eve, with the same sexy twist to her hips, but ivy in her hair instead of apples.
Luca says that the fact that Alessandro and I launched into a battle during his sixteenth-birthday celebration has undoubtedly scarred him forever and he will never go on vacation with us again. In the meantime, he would like his computer back so that he can communicate with other teens whose parents are raving nuts. We are united in our decision that he will have to survive without the tender support of his peers until he passes ninth grade.
Today I made great headway in Claude’s book, as Alessandro kept me waiting in a café and I had it with me. Claude held forth on the “unconscious grace of movement, the gentleness of manner, the instinctive courtesy” that characterizes the upper classes. He says that aristocracy lingers “like a perfume above bare existence.” I’m afraid my response was rather hostile. You were born in Duluth, Minnesota, Claude. Just who do you think you are kidding?
Last night Alessandro and I walked home as the sky turned periwinkle blue, on the cusp of twilight. At the end of rue du Conservatoire is La Pause, a tiny bar where music students hang out at the end of the day. Two men sat outside playing guitars; one of them started whistling, and the clear, twinkling music followed us down the street, filling the air all the way up to that darkening sky.
I’ve become obsessed with tracking down a song I heard in a store, a French version of Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind.” It turns out there are many covers; the one I was chasing was Richard Anthony’s 1964 “Écoute dans le ven
t.” (Despite his Anglo name, he’s an Egyptian-born Frenchman.) In the video I found online, he stands in a black sweater, his hands nonchalantly pushed into his pockets, and sings while behind him musicians in narrow-lapelled suits and ties strum their guitars. In 1963 and ’64, Dylan belted out that song as a protest against the American idea of manhood and its celebration of violence and war; he was singing at time when our military involvement in Vietnam was escalating rapidly. Much as I love Anthony’s version, he turned a protest song into supper-club music … it makes you wonder if he even understood the lyrics.
Today we actually bid on a painting at Hôtel Drouot, though we didn’t win. It was a gorgeous little seventeenth-century Madonna. Following the directions of more experienced friends, we had determined an upper price. But someone else, behind us, wanted our Madonna. He bid; Alessandro bid. Up and up it went, until we reached our limit. Alessandro looked at me and hesitated. The auctioneer helpfully jumped in: “Madame says yes!” We laughed and went higher, until Alessandro gave me another nervous look, and I shook my head. “Monsieur,” the auctioneer said as we stood up to leave, “we have more paintings that Madame will say yes to!” But we avoided the siren call of winning for the sake of it and went to lunch instead.
Today I went to Le Phare de la Baleine, which translates into the Whale’s Lighthouse, a store where locals buy those fabulous striped T-shirts—the authentic version, not the ones for tourists. They also have adorable children’s clothing, and thick beach towels, cherry-colored and sprinkled with little white whales. I bought a fabulous pale blue straw hat, shaped with four square points and a bow. Now I’m home, I think the bow is rather twee, though perhaps on a French madame it looks retro and ironic.