Chapter Thirty: Charity Begins at Home
In which I pretend to be a decorator's client and end up five years old.
Once my mother felt her feet back under her again, she, Linda and I started to venture out bit by bit.
Real time fact checking alert: last week my mother informed me that the two of them only stayed two weeks, not a month as I had written. I now contend that it was two and a half. Regardless, I was aware that the clock was ticking and that these two were resources I needed to tap.
If there was one area where I remained resolutely tied to the apron strings, it was around renovations and decorating. Who could blame me? In addition to good taste, my mother has a heightened ability to imagine in 3-D, an organized visual mind and a strong foundation in ergonomics. I’ve had the opportunity to redo three kitchens and five bathrooms and she planned each one and they all work. (Don’t get her started on having to do metric conversions using US graph paper. She had to give up 50 years of shortcutting to help me out.) Linda has equal skills in furnishing and paint color, with a flair for dramatics, and she is an epic gardener. It would be idiotic not to put them both to use.
The first field trip was visiting a nursery about 15 minutes away. My backyard would continue to look like a low-stakes children’s war zone for another year, but I still made Linda walk the grid and advise on what kinds of climbing vines and where to put bushes and all that. At the nursery, she counted out how many Virginia creepers I should put in the front yard to one day cover my stark façade so it would look like Charlotte’s. Every other plant we’d stumble upon and entertain as an option came with detailed coaching. “OK,” Linda would say in her mustard-thick New York accent. “Here’s what you do…” and then came instructions for things with companion plants I could barely imagine.
The nursery was run by a taciturn Dutch man who seemed to speak almost no French or English. Pretty much everyone is fluent in English in the Netherlands, and a guy living in such an un-cosmopolitan corner of France would need some French. Curious. As Linda and my mother continued to make the rounds, I went over to speak to him, haltingly, about packing the vines in my car, and immediately squished, in my sandaled foot, into a massive, oozing puddle of mud. I laughed way too loud and he waved me over to the back of a little house on the other side of the greenhouses where he must have lived.
By the screen door that let out onto his small poured concrete porch there was an empty mug with a heart on it, as if he had just been drinking tea and staring off into the misty distance when we arrived. Peeking further around the back where I found the outdoor tap, there was a festival of free range water fowl: ducks, geese, babies of both. His lack of linguistic flair now made more sense. Our man was simply communing with the plants and animals too much to bother much with people. Respect to you, sir.
My trunk now filthy, back at the house we unloaded the vines and undertook a ruthless inventory of my furniture. The Danish leather couches that I brought from Paris were too thin and ungenerous for a giant space like my living room. Fine for a shrink’s waiting room. Not great for elderly tushes to rub up on what felt like a flannel nightgown encased in earth toned buffalo leather. Linda and my mother had already objected many times. What we needed was something dignified enough to hold the space, and comfortable enough to spread out on by the fire. They also sniffed at the dumb little 1970s chrome and brass coffee table I had picked up for nothing at an auction. A room with such movie star proportions needed something with more volume.
I had never bought furniture all at once to assemble a room from scratch before, that seemed insanely luxurious to me. But I had a pile of cash earmarked for the rest of renovation: the unpainted living room and entry, the garden, the attic bedroom and second bathroom. When you see tens of thousands of euros sitting in an account, even if the money was long ago spoken for, it whispers at you until it starts to scream. And when you have two terrible enablers working for free, well, you shop.
At breakfast the next morning I got into the spirit, finally feeling what it might have been like to be a decorator’s client rather than her daughter. With a little consultation, I ordered a pair of couches with a wave of my hands. They were pale grey, which is about the dumbest color a woman with two cats can get, but there is so much sun in my living room, and I no longer had juice-slopping adolescents living with me. I wanted to lean into light. I realized as I hit “buy” that in the eventual downsizing of my dotage and demise, at least one would have to go, and then I told myself to shut up.
Next we needed a dining room table, we needed a coffee table, we needed some unexpected drama. We needed mirrors and bits and bobs to fill out shelves and corners. Le Perche and its surrounding regions are exceptionally rich in vintage junkyards. In a cluster of big ones outside the town of Verneuil-sur-Avre, we wandered the hangars with measuring tapes and questions. The two ladies knew what things were worth in America, where customs and shipping add zeroes to price tags, so to them everything was crazy cheap. They continued to perch themselves on my shoulder and urge me to give in.
Scoped: a large, cream colored screen with jumping deer in the style of Jean Cocteau for a couple hundred bucks. That was a no brainer. Two enormous mirrors, one a convincing rococo-reproduction, the other a sober Louis Philippe. An outdoor bench, which was a present from Linda. A massive Indonesian black lacquer coffee table that likely dated back to the 1970s, with just enough chips so you could see it was real. It looked too big to me, because I didn’t have the eye. My mother and Linda pressed me hard as I started bargaining with the dealer. Prices were agreed upon. I could pay with a check on delivery.
Georges and Geneviève were coming over for dinner the following night, and Linda, who lived in Italy for some years, was going to make us a lasagna. Just a few kilometers from the departmental road we’d take back home, my mother saw a patch of wildflowers in the rear view.
“Back up honey, just drive straight back,” she urged. “Let’s pick those for dinner!” I screwed my neck around as much as I could without straining it and backed up. They were pretty enough, those flowers. I mean we had plenty sort of like them nearer to my house, but she was feeling inspired and so OK, God, fine, let’s go. Better not to argue.
“Keep going,” she said, as I backed up a little too jerkily and fast, for petulant teenage emphasis.
And then I drove us into a ditch. I heard the steel fender over the back right hand tire bend and there was another loud, deep, metallic snap. My stomach flew into my throat and I cried out, “What the fuck did I just do?” With patience we pulled out of what I could now finally see was a long line of drainage along the side of the road, grown over with tall grass.
My car wobbled like Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn at the end of Death Becomes Her as we herked and jerked at 20 miles an hour to a garage about fifteen minutes away, the only place that was open on a Sunday. My adrenaline was coming down from its spike as we dropped the thing off. (Yes I should have called a tow truck to the site but I was still inexperienced with self-inflicted shit like this.)
My mother was guilt-ridden and apologetic. She figured her insistence on the flowers and her less-than-stellar directions were why it happened. In fact, I was the person behind the wheel. I was entirely at fault. She didn’t make me accelerate that fast backing up. She didn’t make me not slow down and look harder. But when she insisted on covering my insurance deductible, I did not argue. I just wanted to get fetal under a blanket.
The tin can rental I had to pay for out of pocket for a month before they would even get an estimate on the repairs was too chintzy and threadbare when it rained, as it did almost every other day now, for us to think about the American Cemetery or the Bayeux Tapestry. Like my mother after her fall, I was also a little too twitchy for the next few days to want to drive much. My mother’s tourism dreams were crushed but she did not complain.
Meanwhile I was in another kind of whiplash, having gone from grown up lady manically spending the renovation budget on fancy décor to dependent child in the space of one wrong turn. Indeed there is more than one area in which I remain resolutely tied to the apron strings. There are many.