Things I Want My Daughters to Know_ A Novel - Elizabeth Noble [124]
She’d abandoned formal tuition herself, after the second year. Not for the same reasons as Stephen, but rather because she decided that she preferred her humiliation to be less regimented. The Ecole du Ski Français was not renowned for its sympathy and gentleness. At thirty-three, she had reasoned that she didn’t need to take unreasonable orders barked impatiently at her by some suntanned kid smoking a Gauloise and planning a night out with his mates on a mobile phone. She skied alone, pouring over the piste maps to find the longest, widest green runs available, the ones with the fewest lift hazards, as she had come to think of them, and the most opportunities to stop for hot chocolate. Occasionally one of the other wives or girfriends would tag along with her, but they usually got bored and peeled away after the first three or four times around, and that suited Jennifer. She would rather fall down in front of total strangers than people she would be sharing raclette with later that evening.
She was rescued by the baby years. In the fourth year, she had been, suddenly, the only wife or girlfriend not chalet bound by a small infant or a large bump. She had skied the first two days that year, but then realized that a decision to stay home and help could be entirely “blamed” on the babies, and how adorable they were, and how maternal she must be, and could easily enough have nothing whatsoever to do with skiing. In years five and six she hadn’t even bothered to rent skis and boots. (That was the stage in the skiing holiday when she really remembered how much she hated it—the never-ending, winding route through the Alps from Geneva could be slept through, the chalets were hospitable enough, but the sensation of pushing her socked foot into a hard ski boot in a crowded and sweaty ski shop on the first night brought it all flooding back.)
This year, there were ten adults and seven babies. The oldest were three or four now, old enough to be indoctrinated, careening down the nursery slopes with no discernible skill or fear, wearing helmets that practically outweighed them; and it was the second round of children, the youngest of whom was six weeks, who held court in the chalet all day. They were all getting more affluent, and the chalets had increased in comfort and grandeur over the years. Now there were ruddy-faced, perpetually smiling nannies, bused in at 8:00 A.M. to free the women up for a morning’s sport.
They had no business being there, really, she and Stephen. It was in the company of these perfect nuclear families that Jennifer most felt a failure. She just wasn’t performing as she should. These people were not good enough friends to ask the inevitable questions. She assumed that they assumed there was a problem and were too polite and frightened to ask. Without being unkind, they had their heads down in the task of obsessive motherhood, and she could help out, and she could make the right noises about their babies, but she couldn’t really belong.
It spoiled the fun, too. Late nights of screaming drunken hilarity were out completely. Now, it was two glasses of wine with dinner and an early night, because the nannies did not sleep in, and the babies did not sleep through. At night, not too tired from a hard day’s skiing to lapse into the coma that seemed to creep up on everyone else, Jennifer lay listening to the traffic of young parents. Babies being fed, and burped, and comforted. And toddlers being lifted for the toilet and calmed down after nightmares or, more spectacularly, falls from bed.
They’d driven her out of the chalet, these babies and their sunny caregivers. Back onto the mountain. Talk about Hobson’s choice.
So, in a last-ditch attempt to conquer her fear, she’d booked a course of private lessons. With an English company, who promised her an English instructor. She was to share with one other—a woman, her own age, who had never skied before. That sounded all right.
And she was on the chairlift to find the instructor for her first lesson. Stephen had been a bit sneery, she thought, when she