Page 8 of Grape Juice
“Hmm, I like that. Maybe we’rebothjust whining because we’re the same flavor of unhappy.”
“Same flavor? So, you think unhappiness has a flavor?” He shakes his head. “What does it taste like?”
“Like pennies,” I declare, reverting to English.
He laughs. “Do you always talk like that?”
“Like what?”
“You know what.”
“Yes, I do. It’s why I’m so boring in French. I don’t have any isms.”
“I don’t think you’re boring in French.”
Now, in the warm, ambient blur of the afternoon, I don’t feel boring in French either. I grin, picturing the two of us from overhead: Mirror images, ambling along slowly on either side of the same vine, down on our knees, mid-confession.
IV
Six minutes is both very short and very long when you’re desperately unclean. When you’re caked in very literal dirt. Before dinner, we take turns scrubbing mud from our knees and grape skins from under our fingernails. I try not to linger on the variety of mismatched French bath products lined up precariously by the frosted window like some hygienic nativity scene.
When I emerge from the small, dark bathroom, pink and rubbed raw, there is Henri, waiting with his arms folded, stationed so close to the doorframe we nearly collide. I cling tighter to the towel wrapped around my sternum.
“That was seven minutes,” he chides, tsking his tongue. “Americans are so wasteful.”
I shoot him a dirty look. “You timed me? I thought the French were famous forfashionable lateness.” I mimic his accent.
“Just keeping you honest.”
“How morally righteous of you!”
“Oh?” He inches closer, leaving hardly a knife’s width ofspace. We stand like that, face-to-face, no vines to separate us, for several beats too long. Some strange electricity roots me in place.
Beads of water drip from my hair down my back, and the sensation breaks the spell. “You’re holding up the line.” I push past him, and I feel the sweat on his skin against my bare shoulder as I march toward my room. Ruby is in the doorway, grinning mischievously, her hair piled in a towel atop her head.
“That was a bit saucy, now, wasn’t it?” she taunts and taps my nose with her pointer finger. “Henri, huh. I see that for you.”
“Henri? He’s got a girlfriend. Or... he kind of has a girlfriend. Had? Not that it matters.”
She laughs. “Right, right, not that it matters. It’s just that we happen to be spending weeks working in the throes of what is arguably the horniest premise on earth. And you’ve got athingbetween you.”
I roll my eyes. “This isn’t summer camp.”
“Isn’t it?”
I shrug. She’s right, but I need not concede as much just yet. “We’re basicallycolleagues,” I correct. “There’s nothing.”
“Suit yourself!” She smirks, bending forward to release her towel from its sculptural perch and rubbing her hair dry. “Have you noticed that all French towels feel like sandpaper? It’s like theywantyou to walk around naked rather than wrap yourself up.”
As I kneel over my suitcase, I feel the curious tug ofa smile—some private joy at the fact that the tenor of my rapport with Henri is palpable from the outside.
I rummage around, extracting a clean white T-shirt and a pair of denim shorts, wishing ever so briefly that I’d taken Emma’s advice. That I had anything to wear that might make me look even moderately feminine—or at least, considered in my appearance.
Downstairs in the kitchen, Bea is playing something operatic over a set of small plastic speakers and singing along with unabashed commitment. When she sees me enter, she smiles and begins to sing louder, doing a rotating, triangular dance with her feet while she hacks away at an enormous globe of red cabbage. “Come help me,aide-moi.” She waves me over. “You’re on dessert duty.” Oh, how I love this place already.
She hands me a bowl with a whisk and a glass dairy bottle. “Tonight, whipped cream and fresh figs! They’re like candy this time of year.”
I empty the silky, viscous liquid into the bowl, winding my arm and watching ribbons of white curl into themselves, just beginning to froth at the edges like waves. I hum along to Bea’s symphony and note the gratifying postlabor ache in my biceps.
