“John? A topless bar?” I’d squeaked.
“That’s what I said, but he told me it’s the fashion for dinner these days. God knows what they’ll serve, but I figure I can brush up on my anatomy. Why not? You should try anything once.”
“Where is it?”
“Downtown somewhere—it’s called Zamba or Saba or something.”
“You mean Zambra? It’s a tapas bar.” I dissolved in giggles.
“Well, that makes more sense,” Grandma reflected. “He didn’t strike me as the type, but you never know.” I couldn’t help thinking she sounded disappointed—she’d already tasted Spanish food, after all. How could I have believed that the strength of such a woman was fading?
If I had, as a child, been saved in my nightmares by my grandmother hustling me out the door, her hurriedness now drove me crazy. She had booked an evening flight to Lyon, and I, wanting to spend at least one night of my spring break hanging out with my friends and my boyfriend, decided to arrive at her house on the morning of our departure. Grandma was hysterical. My uncle, who was supposed to drive us to the airport, excoriated me for making her anxious, for wanting to go to France with her, for getting involved with the house in La Roche. “This house is like a beautiful, poisoned dagger,” he fulminated. “It’s brought nothing but trouble to this family. You shouldn’t have anything to do with it.” He started to say more, but my grandmother surged into the room, and we hustled out the door.
We arrived at the airport with five hours to spare before our flight. With great satisfaction, Grandma settled in for the wait. Traveling must be too much like fleeing, I thought. The waiting calmed her: you know where you are; you know where you’re going; there’s nothing more to be done; and if you’ve forgotten something, too bad, in fact, so much the better, you’ll just have to exercise your ingenuity. I watched her observing a couple of parents fail to make their hyperactive children behave. Any minute now, the river of words would start—I could already see her mind putting a story together, crackling with intelligence and her peculiar sideways logic. She laughed and shook her head. “The children in my ward were always loud. Always running around, screaming, shouting, crying. But when they went into my office—” She grinned and halted the remembered children’s noise with a wave of her hand. “Silence.”
“You mean at Rockland State?” For years she’d run the Female Adolescent Unit at the large state mental hospital near her home in Pearl River.
She ignored me. “The nurses were always asking, ‘Dr. Munster, Dr. Munster, how do you make them be quiet?’ So I looked at them, and I’d say, ‘I strangle them.’ ” She cackled. So did I.
“What did you really do?”
“The children would come into my office, blubbering and crying.” Here she gave the mocking imitation of babyish sobs I remembered from my own childhood—still, to this day, the only person I have ever met who could sob with an accent. “So I looked at them, and I would say, ‘If you want to be loud, you can go and sit over there in the loud chair.’ I had a little child-size chair in front of a little table, with crayons and paper and what. And then I would say, ‘But if you want to be quiet, you’re welcome to sit in this big chair next to me. But don’t do me any favors. If you want to scream, go ahead and sit in the loud chair.’ ”
“What did they do?”
“Oh, children are very symbolic. They always stayed next to me.”
I wondered whether her chair technique would have worked without the special sort of sorcery she exercised on children, and I squeezed her hand. “You’re such an extraordinary person. I’m so glad to be going on a trip with you.”
“My Godt.” She pulled her hand away. “Go walk around or something.”
Somewhere in the dim roar of our nighttime flight to Lyon, I realized I had no idea what Grandma and I were going to do once we landed. We had no hotel reservations, no contacts, and no idea of how to get to Alba. Despite my passionate feelings for La Roche, I couldn’t have located it on a map, even if it had been big enough to show up on one. I looked at my grandmother, who didn’t seem at all bothered by these trifles. She was probably the only adult on the plane tiny enough to find the seats comfortable, and she was sleeping peacefully. I tried to settle down and get some rest, too, but I couldn’t. I was beginning to suspect that this trip might be a bit more complicated than I had anticipated.
When it was time to land, Grandma awoke refreshed, drank two cups of airplane coffee, and gathered her things around her, impatient to be on the move. When we got to the gate, she strode down the gangway and brushed aside the wheelchair we had ordered to meet her. Suddenly she tripped and went sprawling onto the floor, wincing like a tiny boxer with the breath knocked out of her, as the wheelchair attendant and I rushed to pick her up. She refused a doctor but grudgingly sat down in the wheelchair.
“Take us to the bus stop,” she commanded.
The wheelchair attendant set off, and I hurried along next to her.
We had been traveling for twenty-four hours. While we waited for the bus, Grandma pulled an elderly bandage out of her purse and laid one end of it on top of her injured wrist, which had begun to swell. “What do you know about wrapping a bandage?” she snapped when I offered to help. Her face was pale and drawn from the pain, and her age suddenly showed. So did mine. I was beginning to feel extremely young and slightly panicked.
The subsequent hours were a blur of worry and exhaustion. We made it to Lyon, and the next thing I remember clearly was standing at the ticket counter in the Lyon Part Dieu train station asking for two tickets to Alba-la-Romaine. The ticket agent clicked the keys on her computer keyboard, then leaned down, opened a drawer, and pulled out a book that looked like an outlandishly thick and yellowed parody of a bygone era. She thumbed through it for a while, then looked up at me. “Mademoiselle, there hasn’t been a train to Alba since 1913.”
“Nineteen thirteen?” I had already been feeling queasy and ashamed of the stupidity of our quest. Now an irrational fear gripped me. What if Alba didn’t even exist?
The woman jabbed a finger at the yellowed page, and I stood on tiptoe, trying to get a look at it, but the print was too small.
“What did the lady say?” Grandma asked. “I can’t hear her.” I relayed what the ticket agent had told me, and Grandma shook her head, no. “That’s not true.”
“What do you suggest we do?” I asked the ticket agent, ignoring Grandma’s last statement.
“The farthest I can get you is Montélimar. Then you’ll have to take a bus, or maybe a taxi. I don’t know. I’ve never heard of the place.”
Grandma was whacking my arm with her good hand, so I turned to her and repeated what the lady had said.