The mother drives, feeling fat and wasteful and American in the Mercedes. She has never understood the purpose of luxury cars, but she couldn’t drive a stick shift on the tight cliffside roads or she would stall the car and kill them all.
The trip should take an hour, but they get lost in the twisty tiny villages, and the four-year-old pukes on Whoopie Pie, then falls asleep; and the six-year-old cries quietly to himself when she yells at him to stop whining about the smell, and she has to crack the window to settle her own stomach, and then drizzle whips incessantly into her eyes, and she pauses in Fécamp to ask directions of a man who pretends not to understand her French when she knows, irritatedly, that her French is, in fact, quite good. She is shaking when at last they swing down a steep hillside into Yport.
It is a fishing village, all silex and brick and stone streets and hills. There is a small curve of beach covered in fist-sized stones, bracketed by extreme cliffs that are disappointingly not white but creamy beige limestone with horizontal veins of gray flint. The air here, she thinks, has some kind of fizz to it, something thrilling, which makes you feel drunk, makes you want to dance and do wild things as soon as you arrive, as though you’ve just drunk a bottle of champagne. She’s pleased with herself until she recognizes her thought as a paraphrase from Guy’s best story, “Boule de Suif.” She parks in the lot at the casino to await a man named Jean-Paul, who is supposed to show them to the house at three. She feels heavy when she sees on the clock that it is only eleven.
We’re here! she says.
We’re where? the older boy says. They look together through the windshield at the empty gray beach, the gray ocean, the gray sky overhead.
Nowhere, he says darkly.
The little boy wakes with a start and says, Flags!
She hadn’t noticed, but it is true, there are two dozen flags on very tall poles lining the boardwalk, all frayed for the last foot or so at the whipping ends. Not one is American. This place is for the Swedes of the world, the Danes, the Brits, but certainly not the Americans. She is glad. When she steps out, the wind is chilly, the gulls scream overhead, but she feels a looseness in her joints, a wildness that she identifies as freedom from the doom that had waited for her just around the corner at home in Florida, that she’d even felt watching her in Paris. Yport is so small, so anonymous. It has gone downhill since Renoir painted it. Surely, her bad pet dread would never think to look for her here.
Down on the beach, the boys chunk rock after rock into the boiling waves. They like the rattle the stones make on the hard bottom in the troughs and the gulping sound the stones make in the crests. They climb into a cave in the cliff that is shaped like the nave in a church, but get spooked. She admires the way the wind tousles the older boy’s dark hair, and she doesn’t notice when the little one strips quickly to his underoos and runs into the rough waves. She sees only a flash of gold hair going under. She wades in and drags him out. His skin and lips are blue and his face is startled, but when the older brother laughs at him, he laughs, too.
* * *
—
It is so cold in the wind. Her skirt is wet and the little one is shuddering, but she is too tired to go back to the car to change their clothes. There is a small set of tin shacks on the beach for souvenirs, fried seafood, gelato. There, protected by a lufting sheet of clear plastic, she orders three buckwheat galettes with cheese and egg, and one salted caramel crêpe for dessert. At home they eat sugar only on holiday or in emergencies—she knows it is a poison; it can make you fat and crazy and eventually lose your memories when you are old, and she has a severe horror of being a stringy-haired cackler in the old-age home; she has boys, she’s not dumb, she knows that sad obsolescence will more than likely be her fate if humanity even lasts that long, as girls are the ones who change your diapers when you’ve lost control of your bodily functions, and no son wants to wet-wipe his mother’s vulva—but she wants her boys to love France and has discovered of herself that she isn’t above bribery. She holds the little son against her skin, under her shirt and cardigan, to warm him up. Then the bigger one says that it isn’t fair, that he is cold, too, and so she makes room on her lap and lets him into her cardigan. Like a bag of holding, it stretches to encompass them all. She isn’t hungry, so she drinks her local cider and lets the alcohol warm her. It has low notes of manure and grass, which nauseates her until she thinks of the taste as terroir. This is what Guy de Maupassant tasted long ago, she imagines, sitting in this same salty cold.
Of all the Guys she knows—the Parisian playboy who seduced rich society ladies, the obscene youth rowing and fucking on the Seine, the obsessed Mediterranean yachter chased from harbor to harbor by his madness—she truly loves only the Guy of the Alabaster Coast. He had been a hearty dark-haired Norman child here, running barefoot in the orchards and playing with the children of the fishermen. And she can imagine him on this beach as a very young man, walking into the waves for a dawn swim. Laughing, his moustaches dripping, red in the cheeks. This Guy who was as strong as a bull, not yet a bad man.
Atop the cliffs, there are emerald meadows of grass blown back by the wind like pompadours. There are tiny white specks that she squints to see. Cows or sheep? she asks the boys, and they make fun of her terrible eyesight and finally say, Sheep, Mommy, jeez, definitely sheep.
She holds them in her arms and sniffs their necks and imagines one iconoclastic sheep, after a long life of envying the birds in their graceful rest above the sea, coming to a sudden decision. He’d take a step to turn gloriously bird. Then he’d meet the ocean, turn jellyfish.
When the boys finish their food and hers, they slide to the ground. Her dark green cardigan is stretched hopelessly out of shape, streaked in yellow with yolk.
* * *
—
The boys jump off a low stone wall in front of the casino into a bed of lavender orbited by golden bees. She thinks of herself as a mother who lets her children make their own mistakes. She doesn’t want the boys to be in pain, but she wouldn’t mind if they began to pay more attention to danger, and the world is full of far worse lessons than a bee sting.
Now a stocky sixty-year-old man is coming down the hill, hallooing. This can only be Jean-Paul. His face is windbattered. If he has eyes, they are so deep and hooded by his shaggy brows she can’t see them. His odor shakes her hand before his hand does, some combination of unwashed clothes, body, salt, breath. He smells like a lifelong bachelor.
He apologizes for being so late, says the house is ready, that they are going to be very happy there. He is surprised at her French, he says. It isn’t bad! He says he has a gift for her, that the guy who owns the house has told him that she was researching Guy de Maupassant, and . . . He pulls out a wad of paper from the back pocket of his jeans and unfolds it dramatically before giving it to her.
She looks at it. He’s printed out for her the French Wikipedia page for Guy de Maupassant: Henri René Albert Guy de Maupassant, b. 5 August 1850, d. 6 July 1893, protégé of Flaubert, failed suicide, Naturalist writer of short stories and novels, et cetera. Jean-Paul waits. She swallows her laugh, says it is very nice of him to do that, and that he shouldn’t have, and thanks very much. This is apparently insufficient. He frowns and squints at her, then turns and takes the boys’ hands. The older boy lets him hold his for just long enough to not be rude, then takes it away, but the little one keeps holding the hand and chats with Jean-Paul, despite the odor and mutual incomprehension. They start up a very long flight of stairs, seventy-four steps, she’ll count later, carved into the steep hillside. The mother carries all three of the bags, which are heavy.