A French Farm

 

IF HER LIFE were a romance novel, she would fall in love with the disgustingly handsome widower Nicholas Martin. His face belonged on romance novel covers.

Denise Sullivan was the American semi-nanny spending the summer with the Martin family. The object was for her to improve her French while improving the nine-year old twins’s, Sylvie and Anton’s, English. They would speak only French Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays and English Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. Sundays could be either, Franglais, whatever.

“Call me Nicky,” Nicholas, who spoke perfect English, albeit it with a sexy accent, said, when he picked her up at the Montpellier train station after her overnight flight into Charles De Gaulle. Tomorrow we’ll be going to my parents’ farm in the middle of France.”

They didn’t go.

“Papa’s in one of his sad moods, triste,” Sylvie said and went off to join her friend next door. Anton went to his room. She heard the click of computer keys. She took over the meals.

“Mama cooked better,” Anton said.

“But anything is better than Papa's,” Sylvie said.

Nicky didn’t merge until Monday morning, full of energy and packed up the car. “It’s the first of July, half of France is on holiday. The roads can be a catastrophe.”

The roads weren’t that much of a problem. They were not going south but northwest, mostly on national roads, through little French villages that belonged in the movies. Denise had never seen so many sunflowers.

The family farm was a huge 400-year-old plus house with additions cobbled on from who knew what century. Only one other house was anywhere nearby. Its barn reeked of cows that could be seen grazing in a nearby field.

Coming from Washington, D.C., Denise felt not that she was in another country but on another planet.

Besides Nicky’s parents, whom she was told to call Monsieur and Madame, there were Nicky’s two brothers, their wives and children, six of them from age four to 12. And there was Rosco, a big black lab who burst out the door each morning. He ran in circles until exhausted and then slept the rest of the morning.

On her third morning, she went with Monsieur into the village, a 20-minute drive, to pick up food from the farmer’s market. Monsieur rocketed around the narrow roads circumventing a tractor that left Denise thinking she might need to become religious before the month was out.

Monsieur spoke no English, but he did slow his French down to a point that she understood some of it. He spoke Arabic, Russian and German, she learned. He was the first person she ever met who spoke Arabic and Russian, but that didn’t surprise her. Nicky had told her on her first night after the twins were in bed and they were sipping a mint tisane on the terrace that the family had lived in Alexandria.

Nicky had been born and lived there until he was ten. He said he dreamed of living in Egypt again. “My father would never tell me why we moved. I woke up one morning and instead of going to school, I was poured onto an airplane with the rest of the family. We stayed with my grandparents in Paris until we found our own place. We’re not really black feet.”

She’d found herself staring at his sandaled feet.

“French who lived a long time in Africa and move back to France area called black feet, pieds noirs,” Nicky said.

“Frank Sinatra? Aimez vous?” Monsieur asked on the way back from the marché.

“Oui.”

He handed her a box full of old-fashioned tapes. They were all Sinatra and he pointed to a place for her to insert a tape.

“C'est vous qui choisissez.” He motioned with his hands. She didn’t know how to say, please keep your hands on the wheel so we don’t die.

The first song was Strangers in the Night, which Denise found almost appropriate. She was stranger in the day.

The village had a café, pharmacy, a doctor’s office, bakery and a news stand. Five stands sold fish, meat, cheese, and a few vegetables and fruits. Denise guessed since the people who came were mostly farmers, they had their own crops.

Every time Monsieur went to the village, he invited Denise. They worked their way through the Sinatra tapes. Denise began to appreciate music from her grandparents’ era: My Way, April in Paris, The Birth of the Blues, Come Fly with Me and more.

When they weren’t listening to Sinatra, Monsieur talked about his life in Egypt, how hard it had been for his wife with three babies under three even with household help.

Only once did Monsieur put his hand on Denise’s knew and he withdrew it so fast she wondered if it were an accident. He was an older version of his son, or maybe that should be vice versa. She thought Nicky would look like his father looked now in another 30 years.

Back at the farm, she helped Monsieur unload his straw basket onto the kitchen table, which looked really old.  Denise wondered what the lives had been like for those who had sat there over the years. “L'agneau et le bœuf pour nous et le foie est pour Rosco,” Monsieur told his wife.

Denise thought Madame asked, “How would the dog like it cooked?” but she wasn’t sure until one of the wives who had just come into the kitchen said. “Flambeé avec Cognac.”

At the point, Denise excused herself to round up the kids for their English lesson. The cousins agreed to the English-only days every other day. Denise couldn’t make them stick to it, and the language every day was more of a Franglais. The mixture would probably give a language purist a heart attack, she thought, but it did make understanding what was going on around her a little easier.

The days melted into meals, naps, walks and trips to the pond at the back of the family’s land. The pond was surrounded on two sides by some kind of straw-colored reeds. The path to the pond was through a grove of trees that lent its shade to the grassy beach area. All the children must have fish genes in their DNA, she decided as she watched them swim. They beat her in all the races. She was helped in watching them by a frog on a lily pad.

One afternoon, the farmer next door, Pierre, came over and asked if the kids would like to see the birth of a calf. They traipsed over to his barn just as the calf emerged from his mother. Pierre covered the calf in salt.

Denise worried he was preparing the calf for dinner, but he explained that it encouraged the mother to lick the calf, giving it strength. Anton translated for Denise, because she found Pierre’s French as hard to understand as if he’d been speaking Icelandic or some African tribal language.

Nicky spent some days when he never left his room. His mother would take him a tray ladened with a meal that would have cost a fortune at an upscale French restaurant in D.C. Mostly they came back untouched making Rosco happy.

When Nicky emerged, he was full of plans for the kids. They had treasure hunts, became cowboys and Indians and took long hikes. On one they discovered a giant ant hill, almost as tall as the three-year old daughter of . . . Denise still couldn’t place which kid was with which parent.

Halfway through the month, everyone but Monsieur and Madame left. The house grew quiet. The kids spent more time in their rooms as the heat wave made being outside unless they were at the pond unbearable. The French/English division of days became ingrained in their daily lives.

On a Friday, Marc and his two teenagers arrived and were warmly greeted by everyone. He and Nicky had gone to university together and stayed friends. Marc was now divorced. July was his month to keep the kids and they were on the way to the south of France to go sailing.

It was no problem for Marc’s kids to speak English. The family lived in London. Marc wanted them to speak French on the two days they were there. He didn’t want them to lose their mother tongue.

The first night, after everyone went to bed, Denise padded into the kitchen for a glass of water. There was an old-fashioned pump instead of a faucet in the sink.

She found Marc sitting at the table with a glass of wine.

“Join me,” he said.

His pass was half-hearted. Her reaction was not. At 18 she’d read about men making passes. Marc was her first. She locked her bedroom door in case his acceptance shrug was a delaying tactic.

After Marc left, Nicky seemed normal. He suggested that he and Denise go for a walk through the nearby forest.

“We’ll be back in Montpellier next week, and I’ll be back at work. You’ll be alone with the twins. Have you enjoyed the farm?”

“It wasn’t what I expected, but it has been fantastic.” She meant it. Never had she had a holiday like this. Her parents would take her to historical sights around the U.S., Cape Cod, skiing in Colorado, but nothing like, like, like. . . Denise wasn’t sure of the word. Authentic maybe? Seeing how French farmers live?

Her French had made some progress. At the dinner table, especially before the brothers and their families left, when everyone was talking at once, she didn’t stand a chance. However, after dinner, when they were sitting on the terrace, just the brothers and their wives, they spoke more slowly for her, or at least they did until politics came up.

Nicky and Paul were liberal while Guillaume was conservative. Then the pace and the talking over each other made any hopes of understanding impossible.

The wives would remind their husbands to slow down for Denise. Sometimes it worked. Denise just tuned them out unless they asked her a question.

Denise picked her way carefully as she and Nicky walked. The path was strewn with fallen branches, pine cones and stones. She should have worn her sneakers, or baskets as the French called them.

She tripped and would have fallen had Nicky not caught her.

This was the moment in a romance novel where their eyes should have met, and his lips would caress her soft ones. Their bodies would have sought each other out and they would live happily ever after.

Denise knew, no matter how handsome Nicky was, how lovely the month had been, how great the kids were, she did not want to spend her life with a bi-polar French man. She looked forward to her next adventure.