The Dud Avocado - Elaine Dundy [78]
Larry parked the car on the side of the road and went into town to see what was going on. When he returned he was terribly excited: “Say, the whole town’s turned out en fête to watch them fix the road. I’ve never seen anything like it. Man, you can have your Pamplona Ferias and your Bordeaux Vendanges. This is it! How many people do you know can say they’ve seen an honest-to-God local Tar Festival?”
This was supposed to cheer me up. I said it was an experience I would gladly forego, but he made us get out of the car and have a drink at a café on one side of the street, so we could see what he was talking about.
We asked the waiter how long he thought it would be before the road was open. He said about four hours. Too late to try to hit the next town. So then we asked him if he knew of a good cheap hotel there, and he said all the hotels on our side of the street were full up. The only one left was on the other side.
So we were stuck.
We were all dead tired, our hair stiff with dust, our bodies aching from the inactivity of a long day’s drive. Missy and I went to wash up in one of those outhouse-chickenhouses and nearly fainted dead away from the smell.
Then we had a really lousy meal at the café and sat around and watched and waited. The town really seemed to go mad over the tarring. They were all there all right, lined up on both sides of the street—priests, peasants, police, the works. It was mad.
What with one thing and another it was about one o’clock du matin before the road was crossable and the crowd had finally dispersed and the town settled back into its Dignity (or Daxiness) and we were finally able to fall into the hotel whose dank and dismal beds we’d been so desperately awaiting.
Anyway, next day over the mountains, through the valleys and down to the sea. Bayonne, Biarritz, Bidart, Guétary, et nous voilà à St. Jean.
It’s a perfect villa. A heavenly villa, a bougainvillaea villa on top of a hill, with boxwood hedges and stone jars full of geranium plants and terraced gardens growing wild in the back. Roses and gladioli and morning glories. And zinnias and cannas and an indescribably blue flower called plumbago. Pine trees and oleanders and mimosa. Birdbaths. And stone steps leading down to the sea.
“O.K., Gorce, start grousing about this,” said Larry as we drove up the driveway. “It’s still raining,” I pointed out. Which was true.
We left our bags in the car and went inside to explore. It’s a large airy villa with the calm fresh feeling of summer houses. It has stone floors and long French windows. We wandered through, opening doors and peering out of windows, trying to decide which bedrooms each of us wanted.
Mine has a balcony and looks out onto the sea. Every night I stand there watching the lights along the shore glisten and twinkle in the rain.
“It’s cold,” I said, when we met downstairs again in the large living room. “Let’s have a drink to warm up.” There was another reason why I wanted one. My own private celebration. A few minutes before, alone in my bedroom, it had burst upon me that for the first time in my life I was in a house—actually in a whole house—without a single grownup! I felt I could have walked on air. On water I mean. I couldn’t possibly have explained to the others what it was all about, this exaggerated sense of liberty. Frequently, walking down the streets in Paris alone, I’ve suddenly come upon myself in a store window grinning foolishly away at the thought that no one in the world knew where I was at just that moment.
But Bax said no, we couldn’t have a drink just then; there wasn’t time and there wasn’t anything in the house either. Said we could have some wine at lunch if we liked. Said he’d been making a list of the things we needed. Asked who wanted to go shopping with him then. He was very fair about it all, true-blue leader that he is. Said he didn’t want to seem to be pushing us around, but didn’t we think that the smoothest way to get things organized was for us to go on a rotating schedule of chores? Two of us doing the shopping, two the cooking, and two the