Florida(53)
* * *
—
The mean-mouthed woman at the town’s only épicerie laughs at the mother when she tries to fit all the groceries into the reusable bag she brought from Florida. The mother feels ashamed: she saw an excellent burgundy at an astonishing price, one fifteenth of what the wine would have cost in the United States, and bought all four bottles on the shelf. They make the cardboard box the woman gives her heavy.
The boys pass the bakery slowly, sniffing. They speed by the butcher shop because the window is gruesome with dead flesh. They are vegetarians, though only when it comes to creatures with faces.
It was simple to get to the center of town, but now the mother appears to have lost her way. The streets were silent and eerie with drizzle when they arrived in the morning but are now thronging with visitors. The boys run ahead; she yells to prevent them from being hit by the cars sliding along in the tight roads between the houses. They look back at her blankly.
She asks someone where their street is, but the man, clearly a fisherman, responds in an impossible French, a French that makes her fear she has somehow lost her French entirely. Yportais, she’ll learn later, is its own dialect, as knotty as old rope.
At last she puts down the groceries and rubs her arms. She won’t cry, she tells herself firmly. The older boy has found a tall round pole beside a set of stairs leading up to a bricked-in front door. He is showing his little brother how to climb up, slide down. Dark hair, gold hair, dark, then gold.
Guy was also the beloved older brother of someone smaller and blonder, Hervé. But Hervé was the even more tragic mirror of his tragic brother, and the parallel feels like a curse on her own boys, and she rushes it out of her mind.
The littlest playground in the world! her sons shout, sliding.
She watches, feeling each slide in her own body. She had a battery-operated toy when she was little, a set of penguins that marched up a staircase only to launch down a curvy slide and start the march again. The thrill was vicarious, the adrenaline outsourced. Good training, the mother thinks, for a life in books.
She comes up the sidewalk, pushing the box with her feet.
What’s wrong, Mommy? the little one says.
I think we’re lost, she says. Don’t worry. I’ll figure it out.
He makes a pinched face as if he’d sucked a lemon, then slides down the pole and runs up the stairs again.
The older boy comes over and stands on her feet, pressing his head into her sternum. He looks up at her face questioningly. Isn’t that it? he says, pointing to a great cracked terra-cotta pot with red geraniums, beside which is the gap in the houses that leads into their narrow street. He knew where they were for a while but was being careful of her feelings, she sees. Sweet child. Or not so sweet, because when they arrive at the house, while she fumbles with the key, the older boy either pushes his little brother off the step or doesn’t mean to knock him off, it is hard to tell; he has gone watchful in his graceful predator’s body, but the little one’s wails are echoing in the close street and his knee has a dab of blood on it, and she hustles all three inside as quickly as she can and shuts the door against their noise, for fear of the neighbors.
* * *
—
She cleans the house while the boys play with Legos, though the place was supposed to have been already cleaned before they arrived; this is why they had to wait until the afternoon to see it. There is nothing she can do about the smell but keep the windows open and hope for a speedy decay. They eat pasta and carrots, and go for a walk before bed, and on the way home there are cooking odors, people just beginning their evenings in vacationland, the sun still bright overhead.
She sings the boys the Magnetic Fields’ “Book of Love” and reads to them from The Little Prince, and they fall asleep quickly in their sleeping bags because they can’t understand French and she might as well have been singing whalesong. Oh, but she loves the language in her mouth, the silk and bone of it, the bright vowels and the beautiful shapes a mouth makes to speak it.
Downstairs, people keep passing the window, and their voices are loud. She closes it, closes the curtain. The wifi won’t work, though she turns the router on and off many times, though she follows the instructions in the binder the house owner left, each time more carefully than the last. She isn’t going to talk to her husband; he is in the thick of work by now, would respond curtly, would hurt her feelings and make her feel unloved, but maybe she has some good email, she doesn’t know. She opens her notebook but finds it impossible to write. She opens a bottle of the great cheap burgundy and is startled when she goes to pour another glass to find the bottle empty so soon. There must be an invisible her in the room, drinking from the same bottle, a second her, in yoga pants and a fleece jacket and smudged glasses, a doppelg?nger just like her, right next to her, but unseeable. The only explanation.
Maybe she’s imagining this because Guy’s later stories had many doubles, because, as Guy’s disease progressed, he began seeing a ghost of himself. One of his many lovers was Gisèle d’Estoc, bisexual, a demimondaine, famous for a bare-breasted public swordfight with a female lover who wronged her. She had such a fiery temper, she was suspected of bombing Le Restaurant Foyot to get back at a nasty critic. In her posthumous tell-all about her love affair with Guy, Cahier d’Amour, Gisèle says that he once told her about his double: