“Montélimar … Montélimar. I think that’s where I took the bus from last time.”
This was cold comfort to me, given that the last time had been in 1948, but I bought the tickets to Montélimar, since that seemed better than staying in Lyon.
Once we were on the train, Grandma unwrapped her bandage and inspected her arm.
“I don’t think it’s broken,” she announced.
“Great,” I said, though I knew sarcasm was on the list of failings she ascribed to American teenagers. “You don’t think? Shouldn’t we call a doctor?”
“Doctor?” She brushed me off. “What doctor? I am a doctor.” She winced as she rewrapped her bandage, and I felt even more frightened as I realized I had never seen her betray any sign of physical pain or suffering. Scared we’d miss our stop, I struggled to stay awake while Grandma dozed. I watched the cherry blossoms and vineyards and the view of the Rh?ne River out the window and wondered how they could seem so beautiful in the midst of my terrible anxiety. When the conductor with his warm southern accent called out, “Montélimar, ici Montélimar,” Grandma snapped into action and rushed me off the train like a drill sergeant.
When we walked out of the train station, Grandma looked around her, and her eyes widened. She inhaled sharply and took a step back, reeling as if someone had knocked the wind out of her.
“My Godt,” she said softly, as if speaking to herself. “It looks so different.”
I took in the louche-looking young men with puffy jackets and slicked-back hair loitering in the plastic chairs outside the station café, the cars, the park with its fountain, the nougat factory. “What do you mean?” I asked. To me, Montélimar looked timeless and old, a nineteenth-century resort town gone to seed.
“It was all bombed out,” she went on, sucking her breath in through her teeth and shaking her head. “All black and broken.”
“Where?”
She gestured with her uninjured hand to take in the whole town. “Everywhere.” She straightened up. “The cherry trees are the same, though. Come on, let’s go.” She started walking toward the taxi stand.
“Grandma,” I protested, “Alba is miles from here.”
She waved her good hand and kept walking.
Despite my fluster and enervation, as the taxi drew up to Alba, I thrilled at the sight of the little stone village, the castle peering shyly off its hill over the rows of green vineyards. We drove through the village and down the hill, and then the driver waited for us in the parking lot of La Roche while we walked under the low arch into the shady street. My grandmother’s movements were slower and more painful with every step, but we finally made it to the house. We didn’t have a key, so there wasn’t much to see: the dark stones, the weathered shutters closed tight, the dim street, and the stone passageway.
I was lost in a tired reverie, thinking how extraordinary it was that we were here, standing in this particular spot on earth, in this tiny, far-off, and extremely old place, when I heard my grandmother say, “Well, I don’t think I’ll go back.”
I plunged into panic again. Grandma’s English always got a little erratic when she was tired or unhappy, and seeing her defeated and diminished and visibly suffering was so inimical to anything I had ever associated with her that I interpreted her words as meaning she was going to die on the spot.
I tried to arrange the thoughts racing through my head. How would I explain to the taxi driver? What would I do with the body? The funeral? The tickets home? Was there a special body ticket? I felt overcome with guilt for having accompanied her.
“Miranda?” Grandma’s voice interrupted my flow of macabre thoughts.
“What? What can I do?”
She looked at me oddly and beckoned with her good arm. “Come on. I think we can do everything we need to do up in the village. There’s no reason to come back down here to the house.”
I felt ridiculous and relieved as we slid into the taxi and drove back to Montélimar. The driver deposited us at the H?tel Dauphiné Provence, traded a few jokes with the owner, checked us in, carried our bags up to the room, and charged us a preposterously small amount of money for the three hours he’d just spent with us.
“You take good care of your grandmother,” he told me as he left. I wanted to cry.
My lack of sleep had given the whole world nightmarish proportions. It’s bad enough to have made it possible for your grandmother to fly across the ocean and injure herself, but I can assure you that arriving in a hotel room covered in wall-to-wall carpeting makes everything feel worse. It was everywhere: the floor, certainly, but also the walls, the headboards of the bed, the toilet seat, the little alcove sheltering the sink. In the twilight, it gave the room, and me, a feeling of tawdry, muffled desolation.
My grandmother was breathing laboriously and having trouble walking. The mute relief with which she lay down on the bed was almost immediately dispelled by the sharp pain that creased her normally smooth face. I felt terrified, haunted by the thought of her dying in this creepy hotel.
It was the first time I had ever cared for an adult. Grandma sat up again, and gingerly, I pulled down her socks, unlaced her shoes, took her hearing aids out of her ears, slid her blouse over her head. For a second, as I undressed her, I leaned my head against her good shoulder and breathed in her scent of roses and iron, wishing I were still a little girl and could have my invincible grandmother back, with her hot milk and strong opinions.
Then I pulled myself together and ventured out to buy dinner for the two of us, since we hadn’t eaten all day. It was Sunday, and Montélimar was conclusively shut. The city had sucked itself up behind shutters and rolled-up awnings and gave away nothing but chipped paint and stone buildings whose stucco was grayed from years of grime or bleached off-white by the sun. All I found were crepes, warm and savory, a comforting weight in the stomach, but too much food, too greasy. After we had eaten what we could, Grandma wrapped the scraps in napkins. “Maybe we can use these later … No refrigerator … They won’t be very good after … Maybe we should throw them … No, I’ll just put them in my bag for tomorrow.”
When she was in the bathroom, I threw the crepes away, hiding them under the other debris in the wastebasket, hoping that she was tired enough that she could forget them tonight and that she’d feel better enough to keep forgetting them in the morning.
Once we were both in bed, I lay listening for each of her breaths, reminding myself of her resilience, her bravado, watching the H?tel Dauphiné Provence’s green neon light flash on and off, on and off, bright and dark through the slats of the shutters. How could I have been so na?ve? How could I have believed that any of this would be easy? Difficulty was my family’s reality: fights and bitterness, illness and injury, trauma, bad memories, and crazy grudges. Restful trips to beautiful houses in the countryside were not our stockin-trade.