Aix Marks the Spot Read online

  The list looked tiny in the man’s massive hand. He read it, nodding to himself, then grabbed a paper bag from behind the counter.

  “Cinq pamplemouses,” he said, encouragingly, taking grapefruits from the display. He paused, meeting my gaze, eyes wide and encouraging, an expectant look on his face.

  I reached for the money, but he shook his head quickly, “Pamplemouse?”

  “Pamplemouse…” I repeated after him, and he put them in the bag.

  “Un kilo de tomates,” he said, taking the tomatoes. I got it this time, repeating after him as he put them in the bag. With each new word, he smiled wider.

  “Une barquette de fraises,” he said, holding out the strawberries, smacking his lips, “Et elles sont tres bonnes!”

  “Un kilo d’oranges!”

  “Un kilo d’orages!” I replied. Instead of his usual smile, he burst out into laughter, practically dropping the oranges on his counter.

  “Mais, Mademoiselle, il n’a ya pas un nuage dans le ciel!” he said, guffawing, his laugh deep enough to shake his entire stall.

  “What?” I stammered, feeling a burst of fear run through me. What had I said?

  “He says there’s not a cloud in the sky,” came a voice, “so it’ll be very hard to give you a whole kilo of storms.”

  I turned, expecting maybe to see Jean-Pascal, but instead there was just a boy. He looked about my age, wearing a light blue shirt and a pair of peach shorts. His hair, a dark shade of brown, was cropped up on the sides, though what was left was wavy and carefree, a little curl resting on his forehead like a modern, French, Clark Kent. He was kinda cute, if you were into the ‘I just got out of bed or spent hours trying to look like I did’ look.

  “Laisse la tranquille, Valentin,” said the farmer, packing up the last of the storms I ordered.

  “Je ne l’embête pas, je viens l’aider,” he said, throwing up his hands defensively. Aider, I got that word - he was here to help.

  “You speak English?” I asked, simultaneously confused and relieved.

  “I game,” he shrugged, like that answered all my questions, “need a hand?”

  “Yes, yes, please!”

  I paid the farmer, taking my bags full of food and putting them in the basket with the bread, careful not to crush anything.

  “La semaine prochaine, tu les connais tous, avant de me revoir!” he said, winking, before letting go of my small list.

  “What did he say?” I asked my impromptu translator.

  “He said next week you know zem all,” he replied, “looks like you’ve got homework!”

  I liked the way he said ‘them’, the th not even attempted, just completely replaced by a Z. Zem, like a new pronoun or something waiting to be discovered.

  I pushed my bike along as he read the list, checking my basket for the foods I had already purchased. At this point, I only had coins left, and they jingled in my pocket as we strolled along.

  “It looks like you have ezeryting but your saucisson and cheese,” he said, handing me back the list. “You shop for you?”

  “My Mamie,” I took it and slipped it in the pocket along with the money. The way he rolled his r’s… No, Jamie, stay focused here. Don’t let a cute accent distract from the job at hand. “She speaks French, I don’t.”

  “You here for the summer, then?” he asked, “visiting?”

  I nodded. He didn’t need the details. “And you?”

  “Local. I live with my mozer in the village,” he gestured down the road. “I’m Valentin, by the way. And you are…?”

  “Valentine?”

  “Valentin,” he exaggerated. It was as if the entire last syllable was scooped from his mouth before he could finish saying it.

  “Jamie,” I replied, not willing to embarrass myself further by trying again.

  “Jammy?”

  “Jay- Mee.”

  “Not hard at all to say,” he replied, chuckling. “Ok. Saucisson?”

  We stopped at one of the stalls with the dried hams, and he stepped up to the owner to chat. He seemed to know everyone in the market: perks of being local, I supposed.

  “Who’s your Mamie again?” he asked me, “She didn’t say what kind of saucisson she wanted, but Marc might know.”

  “It’s Colette,” I replied, butchering her name, “Colette Martin.”

  The butcher’s eyes went wider than dinner plates.

  “C’est elle la petite-fille de Colette?” he stammered, and Valentin nodded, the curl on his forehead sliding up and down.

  The two of them chatted as I waited in my corner, the man shooting glances in my direction every few seconds, as if to check I was still here. I wasn’t sure if he expected me to run away or if he thought I would go up in a puff of smoke. The way he was talking made it sound like my grandmother was some kind of witch.

  Valentin finally wrapped it up, and I got my log of dried meat. Was it some kind of salami?

  “What was he saying?” I asked, “About my grandma?”

  “Oh, nothing,” Valentin shrugged, “just small village drama. You know how it goes.”

  “I don’t,” I replied, “I’m from Philadelphia. That’s not exactly small-town living.”

  “Philadelphia? Rocky, yeah?” he put his fists in the air.

  “Yeah, Rocky,” I laughed, but my heart wasn’t in it. I wanted to know what people were saying about Mamie.

  “The last thing on the list is the cheese,” said Valentin, “and the note said it was for you to choose. How much coin do you have left?”

  I counted my cash, but it wasn’t even ten euro. Valentin didn’t seem to think that was an issue.

  “What kind of cheeses do you like?” he asked, before shaking his head. “Wait, don’t answer. You don’t know real cheese.”

  I scoffed. “Don’t know real cheese? Please. I shop the good stuff.”

  “Yeah? What color? And how flat?” He rolled his eyes, leading us to the table I had seen earlier with the big wheels of cheese. If I had looked closer earlier I would have seen the rows of small round ones in crates, each a different shade of white, and some covered in spices.

  “Our cheese is good,” I muttered.

  “If you left it outside, would bacteria completely avoid it?” he laughed. “Trust me. You’ve never had real cheese before. I don’t trust anything called cheese by a country that puts it in a can.”

  “We do not…” my mind flashed back to when I was eight, spraying cheese whiz on crackers.

  “Exactly. Let me make you a selection.”

  “Are you… you sure it’s not too much trouble?”

  “Oh, this is pure torture, talking to you,” he said, “I’m going to call the firemen, have you taken away for endangering a Frenchman!”

  “The firemen?”

  “That’s what you pick up on?” he asked, lifting an eyebrow, which just made his Clark Kent curl rise up. “What’s wrong with the firemen?”

  “I’m so confused right now.”

  “Me, too.”

  He didn’t look confused, though. He looked… cute. And I couldn’t believe I was suddenly hyperaware of how well-proportioned he was. While his shirt wasn’t tight, it still showed the slight definition of his pecs through the light fabric. And his eyes… his eyes were the same shade as the blue sky above, and twice as deep. If he stopped talking, I could swim in them all day.

  “Um, anyway,” he said turning to grab the attention of the cheesemaker. I felt my face flush red as I realized he must have seen the way I was looking at him. I stuffed my hands in my pockets and tried to get that piercing blue gaze out of my head.

  “To make a proper cheese assortment, you need something hard, something aged, something creamy, and something strong,” he explained. “So, I’m making sure you get some comté, some camembert, some fresh chevre, and some aged chevre. Goat’s cheese, is that alright with you?”

  Any goat cheese I ever had was in log or pre-crumbled. The little round patties the cheesemaker was wrapping i
n wax paper were practically melting in his hand. I had no idea what I had just gotten into.

  I paid the man, and Valentin had done his math perfectly: I ended up with just two euros left. I handed it to my guide.

  “For your troubles,” I said, and he laughed.

  “Wow, two euros!” he clasped it in his hands like a prayer. “Merci, My lady! I will be able to buy a new goat with these riches! My lady is fair and kind!”

  I couldn’t help but snort at the ridiculous act.

  “Seriously, though, thank you,” I said, placing the cheese delicately on top of my now very full bike basket. “I don’t know where I would be without your help.”

  “Probably still asking strangers to sell you storms,” he replied, “but if you still want one, I’ll try to track one down for you.”

  I pushed my bike forward, not wanting to go home just yet. It was amazing to finally speak English like this: it made me realize just how much I missed being home. How much I missed you. And dad too, of course: but I would always be worried about you.

  “Hey, if you ever need me to translate for you again, come and find me, ok?” he said, pointing up at an open window. “That’s me right there. Valentin Faure. Ring me, and I’ll come down. I’d give you my number, but I don’t want to sound like a stalker.”

  “Oh, please do,” I said. I practically shoved my phone into his hands. “Your number, I mean. I don’t want you to sound like a stalker either. But… It would be nice to have someone to talk to, you know, who actually speaks my language.”

  “Or, maybe, you’ve been speaking French this whole time!” He took my phone and added himself to my contacts as Valentin (Fresh out of Storms). It made me giggle an unnaturally girlish giggle when he handed the phone back.

  “If that’s too cheesy,” he said, “then you haven’t had any fromage yet.”

  It was easy to laugh with this guy. Maybe it was just the fact that I hadn’t had anyone tell me a good joke in days - or even try to - or that I missed being able to be heard, understood, but I wanted to be around him as long as I possibly could.

  “Better get your groceries to the fridge,” he said, “before the heat gets to them first.”

  “Yes, yes, true,” I said, climbing on my bike, “See you around, Valentine!”

  “Valentin,” he corrected, rolling his eyes, “See you around, Jammy!”

  As I biked back to Mamie’s home, basket brimming with fresh food and hope, I wondered why my name sounded so delicate on his tongue, even though he had butchered the pronunciation. I didn’t mind being Jammy when he said it like that.

  My mood pretty much instantly soured when I rode home to the quiet house.

  Mamie didn’t seem to have moved the entire time I was in the village. That wasn’t a big deal, but she didn’t move after I told her I was back, either. I found myself unpacking the basket of groceries alone, stuffing things into the fridge almost haphazardly since I didn’t know where she liked things to go. Dried salami: was it even a fridge thing, or a cupboard thing?

  They say the opposite of love is hate, but it really isn’t. It’s indifference. Had she always been this way? If so, I could understand why dad left. I had no idea what she was like when he was growing up: none of the stories he told me involved her. Stories of running around the hills, swimming in the Durance river, escaping close calls with boars: Mamie was either never present, edited out, or he just flat out refused to tell me stories where she actually played an active role.

  At least now I had a new activity I could add to the list of things I could do all day, and that was texting the cute French boy I met at the market, who, let me say it again for the people in the back, actually spoke English. Maybe the universe did care about me after all.

  I had only just left him at the market, though. Was it too soon to send him anything?

  Before I could even attempt to make first contact, Mamie appeared in the doorway, ashtray in hand. She dumped the contents in the trash before finally turning to me, scanning the food I had yet to put away.

  “Tu as faim?” She asked, “tu veux déjeuner?”

  Faim and déjeuner I had gotten down: hungry and lunch. Important words for survival, after all.

  “Oui, Mamie,” I replied.

  The woman opened the fridge, grabbing some tomatoes, which she promptly sliced and threw into a bowl. I did my best to be helpful, setting the table (inside, today: it was too hot out now, even under the shady pines), and taking the cheese from the fridge to arrange them on a small plate. Mamie seemed to approve.

  She ladled out a spoonful of her tomato creation on my plate: just sliced tomatoes swimming in olive oil, with chopped basil on top. She dug in without saying a word.

  I followed suit. Meals with Mamie were a mixed bag: on the one hand, I love food. On the other, well, I didn’t quite love Mamie.

  “Lourmarin, c’est…” I struggled to find the words from my tiny vocabulary list, “très belle.”

  “Beau,” she corrected curtly.

  “But a town is feminine, right? Une Ville?” The French were very hung up on the masculine and feminine of words, which seemed completely randomly assigned. A town was feminine, but a village was masculine. A fork was feminine, and a knife was masculine. No idea about the spoon, we hadn’t covered it in class.

  “La ville est belle, mais Lourmarin est très beau,” she said.

  “Je ne comprends pas.” I did not understand, I really didn’t.

  “C’est comme ca. Iz the way it iz.”

  I finished my tomatoes in silence, following Mamie’s lead by sopping the juices up with a slice of bread, which I then gobbled up. It was such a simple thing, but it tasted like heaven.

  Valentin was right about the cheeses. The chèvres, even the old stinky one, was creamy and melted in my mouth. The comté was like a manchego, but with a good salty bite to it. And the Camembert was the stinkiest of the lot: but it was gooey and strong, once you made it past the smell.

  Mamie threw some cling film over the plate of cheeses and put it back in the fridge before I could go back for seconds. Her way of saying that the meal was over. We cleaned the dishes in silence and she was off again.

  I went swimming, alone. I wandered around the garden, alone. From outside I could see Mamie typing away on her terrace, outside but somehow still locked in her room. I had no idea how she even managed to write out in this heat with those stupid cicadas chirping all day long. I couldn’t understand her. How she thought, how she spoke, how she and dad couldn’t have talked in the past seventeen years. Why she claimed to have wanted me here, but now denied me any of her time.

  I was a ghost haunting her house. I had to get out.

  “What do people actually do around here?” I finally texted Valentin, while sitting in the cool of the kitchen, my phone my only connection to the outside world. I just couldn’t wait in solitude any more.

  “Who is this?”

  “How many of your friends text you in English?”

  “Ah! American Girl!”

  “The one and only,” I replied, though that was an overstatement if I had ever seen one. Way to play it cool, Jamie.

  “To answer your question: It’s summer,” he texted back, “so we rest.”

  “But it’s so dull.” The words left my fingertips before I realized how rude I was sounding. “I mean, it’s hot out, what do we do for fun?”

  “I play video games. We swim, we hang out.” He texted back quickly. Too quickly. Probably because he was just as bored as I was.

  “But I don’t know anyone to hang out with.”

  “You know me. Come over? My mother wants to say hi.”

  His mom? He had talked about me to his mom? Unsure of if this was cultural or just a little creepy, I threw caution to the wind and texted him back. I mean, anything was better than lurking in the dark rooms of Mamie’s fortress.

  “Je prends le velo,” I said, words carefully rehearsed. I’m taking the bike. Mamie looked down from her terrace, pulle
d a drag off her cigarette, and called back a single, emotionless -

  “On mange a 19 heures.” We eat at 19 hours. Seven. By her tone, it wasn’t hard to tell that she would be eating then, with or without me.

  I biked back into the village. The market was gone now, leaving the square empty in its wake. Restaurants and bars had filled the space with small round tables and plastic chairs, locals and tourists alike sitting for their late lunches, finishing coffees and wines. It was weird to see both at the same time.

  I found my way to Valentin’s house, though it was hard to tell if I had the right one. When he had pointed it out to me earlier, I had taken a sudden interest in the curve of his jaw. A split-second fascination, but enough for my brain to memorize the perfect angular chin and not the location of his house.

  Curse these raging teenage hormones.

  I stopped by the stoop and dismounted the bike, leaning it against the wall and pulling out my phone.

  “I’m at your door,” I texted, reveling in the whoop of the message soaring off.

  I waited outside for what felt like hours, keeping my head down and eyes on my screen to avoid the passing glances. I must have stood out like a sore thumb, and the longer I waited, the worse it became. Not a single passerby was wearing sport shorts; the only other person with paint on their shirt was the literal painter who came by, carrying a ladder and casting me a questioning glance. I half expected him to stop and ask if I was his new intern.

  When Valentin finally came down, he took off his sunglasses, leaning forward.

  “Salut,” he said, extending his cheek. It was awkward, fake kissing a complete stranger, but he didn’t seem bothered by it at all.

  “Hey,” I said, playing it cool. No, I am not blushing from kissing the cute French boy, not at all. “What’s up?”

  “You can put your bike in back,” he suggested, opening his door wide.

  I was surprised he even had a garden in a place this small. The house was narrow but tall, and he led me straight through a tiny hallway, into a square garden about the size of my bedroom. We propped the bike up against the fence that split us from the house next door.