Read Online Mme Proust and the Kosher Kitchen by Kate Taylor - Free Book Online Page B

avenues, stone facades, winding streets, giddy spires, northern walls, southern roofs. The wind blows across a beach in Brittany; the sun warms a roof garden in Provence. Some I can name—Etretat, Bergerac, Vaucluse—but others bear the faintest identities, hardly distinguishable from dreams. There is a place along a riverbank, a few urban streets quickly giving way to small country houses with gardens opening onto the towpath. Men fish, my parents walk ahead of me along the river. Have I visited this place or dreamt it? Was it the destination of a weekend outing or has my imagination given three-dimensional life to a scene painted by Seurat or Monet that I must have seen in a museum? I cannot tell, but cherish its vague outlines, knowing there must be some reason they dwell with me.
    A hundred French villages live in my mind’s eye, but I know only one place in Canada: the cottage. Every other summer, my mother packs huge suitcases, fussing about swimsuits, rain gear, and warm sweaters, while my father struts about the apartment beaming, showing me planetickets and passports, checking the progress of our preparations. We fly to Montreal, a city that flickers large and sprawling beneath the descending plane but on the ground never proves to be anything more than an airport and circling highways. We soon leave it behind because, despite the long flight, my father is impatient to keep going. He rents a car and drives us northward.
    It is always dark when we arrive, alighting in a deep blackness that silences you so thoroughly you can hear the rustle of trees and the sound of waves. I would pause to savour this new yet familiar place where the scent of pine, air, and water hints at a great wildness that might yet be glimpsed if I could wait long enough for my eyes to grow accustomed to the night.
    But my parents have no reason to dally. They hustle forward, anxious to announce their appearance, seeking the warmth and babble of the cottage kitchen with its big stone hearth. The generous room smells of woodsmoke and is filled with the kissing and chattering of uncles, aunts, and cousins. We exchange greetings, unpack gifts, relate our travels, and made hungry by the excitement of arrival, we eat bread and cheese washed down with black tea, talking until exhaustion overtakes us. A long night ends on a narrow bunk in the dormitory behind the kitchen, warmed by the backside of the same stone hearth, and there begins a languorous summer of breakfast in blue jeans before the dew has evaporated, warm swims at noon under big, blue skies, berry picking on scorching afternoons when the heat bugs sing, and gentle evening canoe rides past the large, lurching pine that marks the edge of our bay.
    My cousins laugh at my French vocabulary—
cuisinière
for
poêle, shopping
for
magasiner
—and when it comes toEnglish, mimic my trans-Atlantic accent, but they are happy to include me in their games. They speak largely in French, with English, the language of the schoolyard and the street, thrown in for bravado. We devote a whole summer to paper dolls, a swimming contest—who can make it into the lake every day no matter how cold the water—tag, kick the can, or skipping rope. We teach each other our rhymes.
    “Am
stram gram, pic et pic et colégram, bourre et bourre et ratatam, am stram gram pic dam.”
    “Engine, engine number nine, going down Chicago line… And you are not it.”
    “Ne pleure pas, Jeannette, Alazim boum boum, alazim boum boum, ne pleure pas, Jeannette, nous te marierons… avec le fils d’un prince ou celui d’un baron…”
    “Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief, doctor, lawyer, Indian chief.”
    Jocelyne, the eldest of my cousins, always treads on the bright-pink rubber rope on “rich man” or, failing that, “doctor” or “lawyer.” She already knows these are the professions of wealth, and slow moving with a burgeoning plumpness, she will purposely let the boys catch up