Chapter Forty-Four: We've Come Full Circle

What a difference a year makes.

The morning of the Fête de Village, on the second Sunday in August, 2022, I took the same bath as did the year before, but it felt like almost everything else had changed. Everything except the non-existent bathroom curtains, whose rods and voiles still sat in their packaging. People who visit my house and see those two massive windows looking right out onto the center of Saint-Maxime think I’m nuts. But I had discovered that only bodies at eye level get a proper look in, and nobody had, as of yet, tried to scale the church steeple across the street just to glimpse my perimenopausal form.

There was a metaphor in there if I wanted to find it: I was no longer content to simply stay out of sight. I was open to the outside world. Best of all, nobody stormed the gates. The biggest fear of an introvert is to be overrun with people and the demands and desires that hang around them like clashing, cloying perfumes. But all of us who hold ourselves apart from others instinctually—raise your hand if you’re one too—suffer from some form of FOMO from the choice to self-protect. Now, at the literal center of Saint-Maxime, I missed out on nothing, and I had the choice of when to engage or not. I felt like I had cracked the riddle.

No longer living in a dysfunctional couple, nor loathing your own behavior, also gives you less incentive to hide. I surprised myself constantly with how much I wanted to engage. I had come to the other side of mourning in this friendly, complicated little place.  

The saying goes, wherever you go, you bring yourself with you. When I first arrived, I had wondered what of myself I would keep and what would wash away with the 180-degree change of circumstance I had engineered for myself. The most self-hating part of me wished rebuilding my life would bring a complete personality transplant. But once I got out to Saint-Maxime, with no choice but to look at every part of myself—my mindless habits, organic rhythms and ways of relating—even if I once thought everything about me was broken, I discovered that many things didn’t need fixing. I will always be a gossip. I will always be the first person to leave your party. I will not always remain loyal to people who don’t deserve it. I will be relieved to discover that the pain of that eventually passes.

Reclining in the water I could see the streamers someone on the Comité des Fêtes had hung the day before—likely Benoit and Angélique. They fluttered in the breeze as I realized how many other mysteries I had solved in the last twelve months. I learned who my neighbors were, and had gotten quite close to some of them, a feat you just never imagine you’ll master when you live in a big city. I knew where the lines of cleavage were among them, and how to avoid them. I knew whom I liked, whom I loved and whom to smile at and keep walking past. With only one exception, I felt no pressure from anyone to do more than I wanted to, and yet I also felt known enough, and appreciated enough, by people whom I had come to adore. These were friends whose very existences I so recently knew nothing about. It was a lot to process, in a way that gratitude can be, for something big and unexpected like answered prayers you forgot you ever said.

Once wrapped in a towel, I approached the edge of the windows (where I would be very visible) and looked down toward the front of my house. Michel and Pauline were already there, their card tables and racks set up with extra kitchen stuff and not-loved-enough jeans and tchotchkes that were cute enough to draw a stranger’s eye but didn’t quite make the grade at home. They saved some extra space for me, so I threw on jeans and the Kamala Harris for the People t-shirt I saved for statement occasions (yes, even in 2022), popped outside, kissed everyone hello, and then started hanging up the pile of Zara whatever I had long ago grown bored with that I had accumulated in the living room the night before. I brought out some supermarket crackers and dip, and settled in for the gossip as the organ grinder Cassandre engaged turned his crank and reminded us what country we were in.

Already by ten o’clock it was a letter-perfect weather day. The sky was intensely blue, which made the yellow sand mortar of the church across the street pop as much as the streamers. Random outsiders none of us recognized pawed through our shit in droves, and Pauline, Michel and I acted like the club we were in, snickering together under our breath at the weirdest ones, which we would then promptly apologize to each other for, so as to maintain our illusion of niceness. Young moms with apple cheeks went heavily for Pauline’s hand-me-downs. My bits and bobs got enough money to cover the snacks.

Angelique popped by with the same friendly hippie Germans as last year, when she took pity on my ill-advised housewarming party. This time one of them, a lady in her early 60s with sun-streaked hair and an embroidered pastel vest, was going to lead interested passers-by in a movement technique a little like Tai Chi. Yes, the Comité des Fêtes had upped its game. I had my doubts she’d have too many takers, but said I’d see them soon, as they walked off to the gravel lot that usually served as a pétanque court, where the dancefloor had been set up.

In another hour, my shift selling beverages at the grill stand next to the lot got started. I was booked for the lunch rush, and I am proud to say that we had a proper crowd, with flush-faced parents and sticky kids filling up rows and rows of picnic tables inside our community shed. The post-Covid doldrums were a thing of the past in the Perche. They weren’t ever really that awful out here where there are more cows than people and plenty of fresh air. But people felt even more unconstrained than before, and happy to be in each other’s company. Or perhaps they always felt that way, it’s just this time, I did too. Across the blacktop at the other end of the shed was a massive grill where Stan and two of the more delicate weekending Parisian gays were turning ass sausage and manning an enormous fryer. The gays were backslapping Stan and showed a remarkable tolerance for grill heat without seeming to break a sweat.

This togetherness did not surprise me by now. Today was about collective work, when everyone appeared to forget their diverging accents and taste in shoes and what kind of car they drove. That, more than making a buck off cheap beer, was the real point of the party.

Jean-Yves’s neighbor Jeff, a former raver who now runs an events construction business, was by my side working the malfunctioning keg, cracking off-color jokes. Jeff was once adjacent to a French social tribe called punk à chien, which literally means “street punk with a dog.” You’ve seen the hardest of these cases panhandling at Metro stations, covered in tattoos, dressed in military surplus or grimy black. They look mean, but if you see them in their glory at the techno festivals they frequent, they’re not. (Usually they’re just drunk.) Jeff had climbed his way out: now in his mid-fifties, he still chain-smoked hand-rolled cigarettes and maintained a (thinning) bird’s nest for hair, but he also owned an apartment complex in a suburb east of Paris and the former mill just beyond the north entrance to Saint-Maxime where he had an apple cider press and harbored a dream of opening a street art gallery. Thankfully this dream has so far been unrealized. The closest thing we had to “the streets” in Saint-Maxime was the colony of feral cats that had set up camp in the graveyard.

This afternoon was the most time I’d spent with Jeff since I went over with Jean-Yves once for lunch in his cobbled-together camp kitchen, which was mostly sourced from the enormous garden he had around back near his chicken coop. I realized that as convivial as he was, there was a quiet sadness that hung around him. I guess we all stick it somewhere.

After two hours of uncorking supermarket wine and handing out ice cream drumsticks and making small talk about home repairs, it was time for me to hand the till over to Stan’s mother. She greeted me a lot more warmly since the first time we met, when I knocked on her door looking to wash my hands after unloading tommettes with her granddaughter.

By the time I was done, so was the flea market, so when I got back to my front door, Michel and Pauline were wrapping things up. A few hours later, I was back at the shed, this time in a proper sundress, to help with the setup for the big sit-down dinner that night. We strung crepe paper streamers through the rafters and covered the tables in bright paper tablecloths and received credit for our good works.

It was a rousing success that night. Every seat was filled, and people had gotten dressed up too. One older gentlelady was in a corsage. I sat with Tom and Callahan and their daughter, who babbled greetings to my older brother into my phone camera. One table down were Cassandre and Jean-Yves and the grill gays, who had cleaned themselves up into bright summer whites. One over from them were Michel and Simon and Pauline. Angélique hired a pianist friend to play jazz standards that lilted in the air while we ate and drank and drank. By the time the last dessert plates were cleared, we were sauced enough for the dancing to begin. Think French wedding hits from the 80s. Everyone knew the words except for me, but that didn’t stop me from joining them.

When “Stand by Me” came on, I felt a strong hand grab me from behind and give me a twirl. It was Monsieur, three sheets to the wind as usual, with the most massive grin. He threw me around the floor with surprising strength for his small size. When the song ended, I bowed and thanked him for the dance, and he grabbed me for a big hug. It was somewhat delightful, but my social battery was on empty. It was a good time to go home.

I made my good-byes and sauntered off in the dark. As I reached the edge of the blacktop, I could just hear Monsieur calling out to me over “The Macarena.”

“Alexandra! Come on! Let me come home with you! You can’t stay in that big house all by yourself! Let’s make love all night!”

I doubled over in laughter, pretending he was kidding. In fact, I would stay in that big house all by myself.

To borrow a line from Candide, it was the best of all possible worlds.