Chapter Twenty-Nine: The Head Chicken Comes to Roost

In which my mother and one of her best friends come to stay for a month. No pressure.

Once Charles and my sister had gone back to America, I had just a week to prepare for an even more consequential pair of guests who were coming to stay for another whole month: my mother and one of her oldest friends, we’ll call her Linda. Both of these ladies are in their 80s. They earned their prerogative to comfort and ease. I was hoping that they would have enough of both on this trip, and that I would survive so much back-to-back human contact. I figured the odds were about 50-50 all around. I reminded myself that my giant house was bought and furnished for the exact purpose of having people I love come visit, and now I was learning what that actually meant. Learning is awkward.

Linda walks with a cane, and my mother has some aches and pains due to post-polio syndrome, and others to no longer being 32, so in terms of planned activities, I knew we were not going to storm the forest paths for a brisk daily run. My morning yoga sessions would stay solo. But my mother likes to front load trips with ten thousand plans. This has always been true. There was a time, when we kids were young and tearing each other to pieces like pointy-toothed puppies, that it made sense to lean into activities when on the road. Now that we were all old and tired, I had developed a position not to plan anything on trips except for food and maybe, maybe a museum. I figured we’d play it by ear and still see and do good things. I sometimes raised this perspective in the many, many conversations we had that summer about what we were going to do when they got here.

Mom and my brother. She put him in those lederhosen a lot.

In pressing to do less I knew I was speaking into the void. My mother is the biggest Francophile I know. She lived in Marseille and Toulon as a Mormon missionary in the early 1960s, where she tootled around on the back of a scooter in a bright red coat on her off hours, and by day knocked on doors trying to convince confirmed lovers of wine and adultery to convert to a deeply un-sybaritic new spirituality. I think she even managed to seal the deal a few times. That seems to me like a miracle.

After she married my father, she worked in HR for Air France up until my older brother was born, and so she used to come back to France and Europe all the time. Then she had another kid and another, and became an interior decorator, and things were a bit less mobile and a lot busier, so of course now she wanted to do stuff.

As you enjoy vintage mom, if you want a visual picture of her now, think Martha Stewart meets Blythe Danner in Eileen Fisher and, lately, slip-on Vans. (I have plenty of pictures of her now but one doesn’t post without pre-approval.) Coastal grandmother with a holster full of coasters, c’est elle. I was raised to respect the wood. She looks fifteen years younger than she is.

Yes my mother wore Pucci to give birth to me. (That’s the two of us.) She also put on false eyelashes. The benefits of induced labor.

There is not much in the way of A-list tourism in Le Perche, but she was itching for road trips to visit the American Cemetery at Utah Beach, and to see the Bayeux Tapestry. I told her no problem, we’d get it done, and that we’d surely go antiquing. I reminded her I would also have to work while they were here. The best laid plans.

If I get my depressive and disengaged tendencies from my late father, who was brilliant but had a high tolerance for physical sloth and a honed skill at tuning out other people, my anxious side comes from the main woman in my life.

Life gave her plenty of reasons to develop vigilance. She raised three kids on a freelance wage with inconsistent help from my father, whom she divorced when I was eight. Except when I was 14 and 15, I never blamed her too much for being a bit highly strung. (There is always a teenage exception.) It also needs to be said that I am in my 50s and still paying off the down payment she lent me to buy my apartment in 2006 because even though we both work independently in highly unstable professions, only she managed to crack adult financial planning. I profited from her vigilance many times over.

Through my sister and Charles, I had seen that there is a kind of idyll that overtakes people the more time they spend in my corner of the world. Charles managed to motivate us to visit the American Cemetery on his visit—it was stunning, of course I would go back with the ladies—but other than that pilgrimage, mostly we just tootled around and cooked and flopped. Secretly I hoped Linda and my mother would fall under that same languorous spell, aided by early dinners and long runs of British episodic TV. Didn’t everyone need that?

I also knew Linda would be a team player no matter what arose. She has ten million ideas about how things should be done, and about two thirds of the time she is right, especially as it concerns design and food. (James Beard himself gave her cooking classes when she was a young lass in Manhattan.) With short hair and giant square tortoise shell eyeglasses, she is saltier than the last pretzel at the bottom of the bag, and basically fearless. She traveled the world many times over, most recently a few years ago to Turkey, by herself. Linda never had any kids of her own; my siblings and I are as close as it gets. She loves us fiercely and openly and even with some wonder, and is generous and fun as hell to be around. If anyone needs to be told to jump in a lake, she is either going to volunteer, in that chewy New York accent that is almost going extinct, or cheer on whoever else might step up to the plate.

No major museums or chateaux nearby but at least there are gardens.

I picked them up at the airport and watched the effect on them during the three-ish-hour drive from Charles de Gaulle airport as the surrounding scenery turned greener and hillier. It was like a puff of oxygen and half a valium that hit, along with jet lag, at the same time. They were charmed by the forests and the village, which was in full flower in early September.

My mother has epic bed issues, so she took the guest room with the double bed, which, in preparation for her arrival, now had both a down and a memory foam topper, one atop the other. (She bought the memory foam herself and had it shipped. On top of it!) The effect was so exaggerated when you lay down you were encased like a hot dog in an expensive bun. Sheets would not stay put on it, but it was kind to her aging bones. Linda, stalwart as ever, got the daybed in my office and said everything was just perfect.

We all worried about the wonky stairs and indeed, a few days in, my mother tripped on the steps of the small passageway leading into my kitchen. She wasn’t able to brace herself, and when she fell, the bridge of her nose collided with the roughly mitered edge of the tomettes, the very ones Marina looked at when they were first installed and said, “We may need to put in a banister.” Guess what we never did? Through some miracle, despite a massive bruise that became a black eye for a few days, my mother didn’t break her nose or have a concussion, but she was understandably very rattled. I was pretending everything was fine, because I am the rational one. You can translate that to: I was secretly guilt-ridden and didn’t say anything because I lock down when I am upset and I just wanted it all to go away.

The injury was distressing but it slowed us down, and slowing down was fine by me. What wasn’t fine was the reminder of both my mother’s mortality, and by extension, my own. After her fall, I realized that unless I peaced out unexpectedly young from a disease or some unforeseen accident, I would probably not be ending my life in that house, unless something in that house, like the stairs, ended it for me. Too many potential hazards, too far from hospitals.

There are ten million profound and horrible reflections that go along with yet another reminder, however ultimately low-stakes, that one of the people you love the most in the world will not live forever. To avoid spending too much time in that hole, I switch into inventory mode. Let’s make the terror of the end about stuff. With every object I have acquired since that day, and there have been many, including quite a few procured on my mother and Linda’s trip, I remind myself that I will eventually need to get rid of it when the house’s many stairs and high-sided bathtubs finally prove to be too much. It brings a certain tang to decorating. And yes, I have a shrink and we discuss this.

We will revisit the gals next week, as we go on a homewares shopping spree with fairly disastrous consequences.