Dark Water - Laura McNeal [37]
Twenty-three
“It is always the pity when my husband hires young ones,” Agnès said to her windshield and me. “I tell him, non. The young ones, non. Only the married who are having other family here, like brothers and uncles. This one, he is new, non?”
She waited, so I said, “Yes.”
She shook her head. “America. All friendly-friendly outside—‘Hi! Bye! Have a nice day!’ Beneath: nothing.”
It was amazing to me that my uncle had persuaded this elegant, decisively critical person to leave Paris for Fallbrook. It had something to do with Western movies was all I knew. My uncle liked to joke that the real best man at his wedding should have been Clint Eastwood, who had apparently been the first dusty American to impress young, movie-watching Agnès Pleureux.
“Hmm,” I said. I never liked to hear her thoughts on America.
Then she launched a zinger. “You are in love with him, non?”
I had never thought of Agnès as perceptive, maybe because to her I’d never been worth perception.
“No,” I said flatly, inwardly ringing like a struck bell, and she shrugged.
“L’amour, la tousse, y la galle ne se peuvent celer!” she said with an amused smile. “The love, the cough, and the scab cannot be hidden!”
I coughed uncomfortably. It seemed to me that lots of scabs would be easy to hide if you kept your clothes on. I was going to argue that point, but she went on.
“It is not you, but the culture,” she said with what I think was fondness, though it might have been amusement. “The culture says you cannot have, so you want. You think my maman was wanting American rancher for me?”
I was glad we’d switched to talking about her. “I’m guessing not.”
“She tried to tell me that the tortoise cannot live with the parakeet.”
I assumed she was the parakeet in this metaphor. “Is that another proverb?” I asked. Agnès was full of them. You’d think the French spoke in nothing but taglines for Aesop’s fables. My favorite was the bizarre “You cannot teach old monkeys to make faces.”
“Non. We had these animals in our house.”
“Really? You had a tortoise?”
“Oui! Monsieur Pouf. He is still living with my maman. Do you know, tortoises they live for a hundred years or more? He wanders off, but we find him.”
A strange image came to me of Agnès’s mother, a beautiful freeze-dried flower of a woman in a gauze scarf, walking slowly through the Tuileries in search of a tortoise while my father passed by in one of his impeccable shirts, an impeccable lover on his arm. Would my father nod? Would he help look for Monsieur Pouf? I tried to think how many times my father might have encountered Agnès’s family. Had there been three vacations there before I was born or just two?
I thought of confiding in Agnès so I could hear her thoughts about my father’s departure and his attempt to lure me to Paris. I was afraid, though, that for Agnès the correct answer was always “yes” when offered an invitation to Paris.
We were idling at the place where Willow Glen met Mission Road. A bunch of animals grazed on the grassy slope beside us: pygmy goats, llamas, a miniature horse, a bristly pig, but no hinnies, mules, or misbegotten geeps. As often happened, cars were hurtling both ways on Mission Road, one after the other like missiles, and Agnès looked right, then left, then right, then left, watching for the gap that would allow us to dart out and join them. The car kept up its steady breathing of cool air on our legs, and I shivered. The angle of the sun illuminated the face of each driver in the cars heading west so that you saw, with weird clarity, each woman or man talking, thinking, worrying, squinting, or laughing and then folding down the visor to blot out the glaring sun. I watched each fleeting person as if they were characters in a silent movie, and then I saw someone I recognized: a pretty woman in a silver-green car, her chin tilted slightly up, her brown hair loose and wavy around her shoulders. Mary Beth Farlow didn’t glance our way, just held the steering wheel with one hand, adjusted the visor, and raced past us toward