Indolence

Miller

Maria, fair of face, full of impish grace. 

I’m headed north on the train. The Mediterranean passes by the window. I’m sitting at one of the café car tables, my legs crossed, my arms crossed, my suitcase at my feet. The steam of my coffee uncoils like a thread into the air, a rope I wish I could climb away. 

At a far table a little girl sits in her mother’s lap as the mother braids her hair. A small group of tourists huddle together and pose for photos. Others queue for their coffees, tiny cans of soda, and plastic wrapped baguettes. I bring my coffee to my lips, but it’s too bitter to drink. 

I’m going home. My father will be washing the sheets, combing the market for vegetables and wine, talking to the locals about the weather in his sweet, hackneyed, American French, Oui, Il fait beau, beau temps d'hiver, not able to understand their replies. But I forget, of course, his French must be better now. It’s been years he has searched for me.

The station announcement crackles over the speakers. I could get off here, or the next stop, or the next. I scramble in a sudden panic through my pocketbook for my passport and wallet, lay my finger on the smooth faux leather. I’m doing this every half an hour or so. 

I return to my seat, lean back and shut my eyes. I can’t remember the last time I slept properly, each night full of nightmares that I immediately forget upon waking, only the fear remaining. If the fear had a name it would be his—Omar of Rabat, Omar of the Tarn, murderous Omar, amorous Omar, Omar by the swimming pool. My scalp tightens. I keep my eyes closed. 

I’ve always been an insomniac. As a child, my insomnia allowed me the exquisite pleasure of slipping into my parents’ big four-poster bed at night. 

Squeeze all the muscles in your legs and arms tight as you can, my father said.

I tensed my muscles and gritted my teeth.

Now let go. Feel your body relax. 

But I couldn’t relax, the squeezing made me more excited, and I would roll onto my side, my stomach. I would nuzzle into their backs or arms, so happy to be there.

My father was a physical man. He had been an all American soccer player and reduced everything to the body. If I was sad, it was because I didn’t get enough exercise. If I was bored or tired or had bad grades, it had to do with the body’s discipline, not enough stretching, not enough of the vitamins that came in hard, dry pellets that I was loathe to chew. I had to jump, to bend, to sprint my way toward balance. And don’t forget, posture was of utmost importance. One could not perform in any manner without perfect posture. 

My mother was more imaginative. In that way, she was more like me, with a hyperactive life of the mind. 

I want you to imagine a hot air balloon, she said. I rested my hand on her bare arm. We had the same small line, an extra crease on the inside of our arms where the elbow bent.

It’s red, I said.

Yes, it’s red, she said. 

Now, smell the cool air, look at the trees beyond. Listen to the sound of the flame that propels the balloon. It’s taking off from the ground. The sky is big and blue and the red balloon is going up and up.

Her voice was deep but quiet, not quite a whisper, stronger than a whisper, and the tone was the same as when she told me that I had been good that day, or that she loved me. I could see the balloon so clearly.

It has a basket. There’s a girl in there, she’s waving, I said. 

There the little girl goes, up and up into the sky. It’s flying slowly away. Soon it will be only a speck in the sky. Follow it through the blue until it disappears. Let’s count to ten. When I get to ten the little girl will be far away, someplace safe and warm. Think of where she might be going, think of the nicest place you can, that’s where she’ll be. Just listen to my voice counting to ten. 

Just listen to her: 

One.

There you are, Maria, fair of face, full of impish grace. There you are. I can still smell the lavender, clean and bright. I can hear the water sprinkler. The sun beats down on me, the cool wind blows my skin dry. I am in my bikini by the pool, in that triad of white triangles, two small, one large, still wet from my swim so that I can see a patch of dark in each triangle. I turn onto my stomach, stretch out my long legs, my long arms. My hair is long and black, and drips water down my chest. This is my sixteen-year-old body.

Beside me, so close I could touch them, are the butterflies flitting around the wild lavender hedges, pumping their wings on a shoot of fragrant purple, and a hummingbird moth, an odd mutant with a long black proboscis, as long as my finger but skinny as a wire. It dabbles precariously until it probes the purple bud and finds what it’s looking for inside: a tiny bead of pollen, a tiny drop of nectar. They compete with the bees, hovering and collecting. A black butterfly with blue lace on its edges lands on my arm and pumps its wings and then flies away, almost drunkenly. 

I turn onto my back, look at the texture of the towel imprinted on my stomach. The view is marvelous over the Tarn, the sweeping view, the incredible order of a hay stack, round and compact in a geometric field, the lay of the land visible, quantifiable, like a topographic map. The green needles of the pines, like a gradient, lead into other shapes and stalks of all kinds, corn and wheat and sunflowers with their explosive blooms lining the side of a steep granite cliff, sunning their faces like the stunned bodies on the beaches further south, and closer, cows face east, some laid down in the sun, the whole scene a laziness that could be mistaken for death, except for the horses swatting the flies from their behinds with their thickly haired tails, the tops of cypresses bowing in the wind, and a river snaking its way slowly through the valley, irrigating the vines and vineyards, with the occasional appearance of a miniature fleet of tourists on red, blue, and yellow canoes.

And Omar, he’s there watching me, still just a shadow. I can see his dark figure in the big window, and the whole scene reflected in the glass like a damp painting—Omar, the shadow of the artist behind the canvas. I move my body so that he can see me, the new curve of my hip, the new curve of my breasts. I get up to the pool’s edge and bend over, dip my toe in to save a drowning bee fluttering madly on the surface, then turn back to the window, to the figure there and my tiny reflection inside of him, just a speck of white and tan in the frieze. What was he thinking? Ha, what are you thinking old man?

That was me, not the woman on this train. I was completely and utterly me. I was younger, did what I wanted, not knowing that there were other ways to be. 

Always there was the long journey from school. I had mastered it the year before and travelled alone despite the potential difficulties it could cause me. I always seemed to manage it well. A bus to JFK, a plane to Paris, from Paris the TGV to Toulouse, then another, smaller train to Albi. The red city. 

My mother waited for me at the station. Our reunions proved difficult. I had never wanted to be the cloying child, the calling-in-the-middle-of-the-night child. There had been tears and arguments early on, but my indifference over the years had become routine. I had been only a girl when my parents sent me to school and moved to France. 

The train slowed down about a mile before the stop. Through the window I could see a thin woman from far away walking briskly toward the station in a simple brown dress with a black sequin vest on top—a touch of Paris in her country style. Underneath, her legs pulled at the cloth in severe lines.

I jumped off the train. Her black hair had grown out, now just long enough to be clasped into a ponytail, although still thin. She wore a thick band of gold bangles on her arm. I could hear them, that chaotic melody. 

There you are! Are you all right? she asked.

Our eyes met, her bulging blue eyes almost silvery and clear, a mirror of my own.

It was just a small delay.

Where are the rest of your things? she asked, looking behind me as if a spare suitcase were a stray dog that would come following.

I’ve learned to travel light, I said because it was her mantra. I didn’t have to look at her to know she was pleased.

She took me by the arm the short distance to the car. Only a few people were milling about that afternoon, and I immediately felt the shocking quiet of the small town. I could hear the hum of the train, gears clanking on an approaching bicycle. She paused for a moment in the middle of the parking lot, took my suitcase from my hand, and looked me over as I had seen other parents look at their children, in a kind of fascinated awe and wonder at their creation.

Six months is too long, she said. 

It was your idea to send me . . .

Maria, I can’t believe how beautiful you look, and she hugged me hard, the suitcase falling to the ground.

Jesus, Mom.

Behind her two girls my age walked past, laughing at something. All skin. Legs and arms in short A-line skirts and shirts that rode up to reveal their perfect brown stomachs, as flat and thin as birch-wood ice cream spoons. 

Tell me all about your trip, Mom said as we headed to the car.

It was good, on the plane I had chocolate chip cookies and they don’t give you silverware anymore, they give you this plastic spork thing, and I had wine . . . I said, but she had already gotten in and closed the car door.

 I threw my suitcase into the back of our tiny, beat up Renault. That thing was old, the tape deck hanging onto the dash for its life by a few vital wires, the bird’s nest in the glove compartment, the rough tweed seats. I loved that car. It had the personality of an old, reliable horse. As I shut my door, eaten sunflower husks fell into my lap from the pocket in the door handle. Mom crunched the clutch, nearly hit a boy on a bicycle when she reversed, but soon we were off through the village along the one-car lanes.

A few dark threads of hair had come loose from her ponytail, and she tried to tuck them behind her ear. Although her hair had grown back, still the pink of her scalp showed through at places like bright wounds.

How are you feeling? 

It was the first and last thing I wanted to ask.

Better.

Really?

You know the Old World idea about going to the countryside to get well. There might be some truth to it after all, she said.

So no doctors?

No more doctors, no more treatments. Nothing like before.

She had already tried so many—hypnosis for anxiety, yoga for fatigue, acupuncture for pain, nutritional cures of flaxseed oil or cottage cheese or powder mixes that were purported to rewrite her DNA. An African witch doctor in Paris had tried to exorcise what he called the parasites from her blood by calling upon the spirit of her dead mother, and psychic surgeons who, after receiving payment, told her they had already removed the disease. I, too, had searched for answers in the past, at the library at school, talking to teachers, writing to cancer centers for information about clinical trials. Chemo no longer worked. The worst were the complete blood transfusions she had endured at the nearby alternative clinic. She only returned from these expensive sessions drained—her wallet, her mind. No more treatments.

That might be a good idea for now, I said.

I’m still doing the tapes though. 

Which tapes? 

The power of positive visualization. What you imagine, you create. 

We drove along over hills, past hayfields and a medieval village shaped like a snail, curling up and around to a summit on a mountaintop. There weren’t any cars on the road, just us. I rolled the window down and caught the smell of the damp hay in the fields as we turned onto the final stretch to our house.

During my time away I had looked forward to the things to come: the incessant visitors from all parts of the world making their way here, the parties, the freedom to roam. To those we knew well and others that we barely knew, we were their very good friends in the South of France. I could see the maps in my mind, all the red lines leading to their nexus, here, summer holiday, the games in store, the stolen bottles of wine.

I’m home! I yelled, grabbing my suitcase and running around back. My father, shirtless, looked up from what we called his gulag, a clearing at the side of the house. His wall had grown significantly since last year, finished on one side and the corner articulated. He was piling fieldstones on top of one another, to build an extension, a guest suite. He was tanned and dusty and looked as if he, too, were made from stone, save for his cut off shorts and trekking boots. 

I eyed him like a soldier in a field, slowly closing the gap of grassy space between us. I knew what he was doing, sneaking one more stone onto his pile before having to stop, just one more stone, have to finish this part by today, he’d be saying to himself. He never really fit in here, this land of doing nothing, of four-hour lunches that lead to four-hour dinners that lead to all morning hangovers. 

My first instinct was to ignore him, to show him how it felt to be me those long months away, but he put down his pickaxe, kissed me with his rough, blonde beard, and rubbed his dusty hand on the top of my head. It was hot, and insects were chattering in the tall grass behind us. We didn’t speak, he just looked at me abstractly. I didn’t know what to say after six months of silence. 

Make yourself at home, he said, kissing me brusquely again. I swung my suitcase and kept on through the grass, my mother following. 

Verscal. That was what the home plot was called, the sign on the door hand painted in lavender letters. The farmhouse made of beige stone was as living and as organic as any of us. It had been built by hand in the early 1800s, stone by stone, smothered in mortar with a few rocky faces peeking through. The house bulged, it crumpled, the roof looked like the thatched hat my father wore sometimes when working in the mid-day heat. This was his sculpture.

As I stepped inside, I could hear the hollow sound of my feet on the floorboards. I ran my hand along the stairway railing, the twisted branch of a chestnut tree, fixed to the wall. My father had found it one day when we were on a walk through the forest. Now it was here, the bark fallen off, as white as bone, and smooth under my fingers. My mother had said it was the spine of an extinct reptile that once lived in these valleys, that she had seen one herself, and for too long I had believed her.

Upstairs there were three bedrooms. In mine sat the skull of a horse on the dresser. She had put it there a few years ago when I was at school. I never knew what attracted her to it, why she had to put it there on top of my dresser, and why in the corner she had put an abandoned beehive in a glass box as if it were a work of art. 

More cheerfully, on the wall above the dresser was a painting they had picked up in Paris, bright purple and blue landscape of the Seine near St. Michel: blue trees, plum buildings, amethyst water, lilac sky, done in odd, fauvist colors except for the tiny realistic blue, white and red flag that flew at perfect attention at the top of a turreted dome. What a patriot, that painter! I opened the curtains of my two windows and light filled the room. Except for the painting, the walls were bare, and I could see fine cracks in the plaster and dust on the dresser and the dried lavender buds that had fallen between the floorboards over the years.

I threw my suitcase on the bed and opened the top drawer of the bedside table to find a photo of a stranger in a heavy cloth suit and beret. This house came full of odd treasures. My parents had bought it when I was ten. The owner, an Argentine-German woman whose husband and son had disappeared in an avalanche while skiing in the Alps, had sold it in a hurry, leaving everything inside. Photos of them were still tucked away in drawers, tennis trophies in the cellar, chests that held the son’s toys: rusty pétanque balls in a pyramid, a jump rope, a ball on a string attached to a wooden cup. The son was lovely, his face so kind, a face I wanted to kiss because of the sadness I could see in him. It was strange to think that just last summer I was in love with a ghost, a boy whom I’d never meet, who’d never arrive tired and hungry with a ruddy face from the cold on my doorstep to claim me. 

My parents always talked about moving their stuff out, but in the end we left most of it where we had found it. The furniture was useful, my father enjoyed the bottles of Armagnac in the cellar, my mother used the husband’s old pens and the buttons from their clothes. And there was that thousand year old jar of pickled pig’s trotters in the kitchen that I liked spinning around and around so that it looked like a little stampede in a glass. I guess we liked old things, old things with many lives that made our lives more rich, or maybe it was just because we were untidy. 

On the bedside table were books with fraying edges, the paper inside as grayish-tan and thin as my mother’s skin, feuillemorte, the color of dead leaves. I took my art history textbook out of my suitcase, opened the highlighted pages. Cézanne, Matisse, Van Gogh, Bonnard, Renoir. At school the paintings had been only distant windows to this place.

I sank my head deep into the pillow, and dust motes crawled through the air. The night before my trip I had had a dream in the style of Starry Night. I was walking out onto a third floor terrace. It was a warm summer evening, but the dark blue night was lit up with yellow blooms, almost phosphorescent, their pollen dusting the ground with yellow powder, the air thick and scratchy and full of lemon-yellow scent, the wind moving the trees so that the blossoms were undulating slowly in fluid movement as if underwater. 

The dream was meaningless, like many dreams, except for the feeling it left with me. I had entered a painting, the terrace door its frame. It gave me a feeling of gratification.