Leaving again.

This morning Mowmy and I were eating rambutans and tossing the seeds out the window into the heliconia grove in the garden; tomorrow there will be CC and the kid, the water and the winter sun, and maybe a Cheesymite Scroll for breakfast. If I have my wits about me after an overnight flight, I might even remember to pick up a box of Krispy Kremes at the airport.

I want to be excited about traveling tonight, but I’m too lethargic right now. I don’t know what it is, if it’s the warm, still afternoon or the post-lunch loginess or just that indefinable weirdness that always accompanies a travel, but there’s a malaise...just a malaise. Last night I flopped on Mowmy’s bed and said: “I’m tired and whiny, I’m tired and whiny, I’m tired and whiny.” To which she said, “Go and eat your calcium tablet.” My mother, the non-sequitur.

Each little voyage I’ve been taking lately seems like one more in a long line of little voyages. And all this traveling is fun and all, but I feel like I’ve been leaving for a long time now.

The thing is, it’d be nice to arrive somewhere and just be able to sit for a bit.

Well, well, well. Apparently everyone wants to play.

Okay, Leo, the shoe meme goes out to you. Because I remember that time we were in Taka and I had a Kate Spade bag and you had a Jack Spade bag—so clearly you care about the things that matter. But mostly because I know you want to talk about your Puma 5000s, HA HA HA.

Run, Forrest! Run!

Besides that one time in Secondary Three or Four when I completed the 2.4-kilometre run in nine minutes and some seconds, I’ve never been a sporty one. But I was passed this baton, so now I must take it and dash. And dash I will, even in heels.

Total number of shoes you own
Well, it’s hard to say. I’m sort of in transit these days, so I don’t have the collection with me. But let’s start with the ones that are in my immediate city.

The Singapore count is four pairs: new emergency purple heels; two pairs of cloth kungfu shoes from New York’s Chinatown, five dollar each, in red and orange; and gym shoes, for the gym.

The Sydney count is two pairs: pink suede ballet flats and red Converse sneakers. Okay, sure, technically, these shoes are currently in Singapore with me. But they were the designated Sydney winter shoes, and will not be worn till me and my feet get to Sydney this weekend.

The Brooklyn count is also known as the London count, and this one is difficult, because I packed up the boxes weeks ago, and now who knows what’s in them. I remember a pair of pink rubber rain boots; a pair of pointy-toed red leather kitten heels; a pair of tacky-glam gold strappy heels that made Ren suggest she must be touched in the head to still be friends with me; black faux-crocodile wedge heels, sexy as all hell; two pairs of well-worn twenties-flapper-style Aerosoles heels in pink and in black that make people stop me in the street to ask where I got them, and then to repeat, in amazement, “Aerosoles?!”; Las Vegas cowboy boots that will make you fall over in wonderment; and a pair of Eley Kishimoto sneakers in orange and blue.

The story with the Eley Kishimoto sneakers is that two summers ago I went to Hvar to visit my friend Amy, and she’d e-mailed to say I should bring a pair of sneakers. So I showed up in these, and she rolled her eyes and said, with some disdain, “New York.” Apparently by “sneakers,” she’d meant, like, Nike or Reebok or something, something in which to traverse the rocky landscape of Dalmatia. But the thing is, even in fashion sneaks, I can navigate like a mountain goat, and, anyway, I wasn’t showing up in Hvar to abseil, especially not when there was a gelato joint right by the harbour.

The story with the gelato joint is that one of the flavours was Kinderyaye. That means Kinder Egg. That means yum.

The story with Amy is that she is a nice Singaporean girl who met a boy while on vacation in Croatia. After maybe a couple of years of e-mails, she decided to quit her teaching job where the kids called her “’Cher”—this is pronounced as if it is short for “teacher,” because it is, not as if Amy is a big-haired pop diva who has had some number of her ribs surgically removed—she decided to quit her job and move to Hvar to hang out with the boy. Today they sell pretty sachets of homegrown lavender and bottles of olive oil, while the German tourists drink wine-and-Cokes in the town plaza, and the Adriatic Sea lap-lap-laps on the beaches of smooth white pebbles.

Oh, for heaven’s sake. Tym, you see how I couldn’t get this assignment done any earlier.

So. The global count is fourteen, which seems to me a number I need not be ashamed of.

Oh, and I have just now remembered a pair of Peranakan beaded slippers that my grandmother sewed for me, which I’ve never worn out, because they don’t go with anything. I mean, they’re beautiful and all, they just don’t go with anything. The day I wear a sarong kebaya, I’ll give those shoes a call. (I have their number.) But, so, they’re here now, and they will hang out here for a little bit, posterity-like, till I figure out how to work them into my wardrobe.

Hence: fifteen pairs, one of which, let’s just say, is heritage-protected.

Number of empty shoe boxes you cleared out while counting up the tally
Jilo. I don’t do shoe boxes. I do white shelves lined with brown parcel-wrapping paper.

Most expensive pair of shoes
Probably the cowboy boots, which cost two hundred and something American dollars, which is possibly the most I’ve ever spent on an article of clothing. But you can’t trust my memory on this one. My mind has a tendency to block out large sums of cash.

Cheapest pair of shoes
Fi’ dollar fi’ dollar kungfu shoes, we loooove Chinatown.

Brands of shoes represented in your collection
Kenneth Cole. Hush Puppies. Eley Kishimoto. The Old Gringo. Aerosoles. On Pedder. Old Navy. New Balance. Made in China.

The last shoe you bought
Purple emergency heels! Purple emergency heels! And I’d even announced at the get-go that I needed to find a pair of emergency replacement heels, which is generally not the best way to go about a shopping expedition, because then you are sure to come away with, like, a spatula, a Japanese animated character to hang off your cellphone, a char siew bo lo bun, and maybe some apple candy, and NO SHOES. But the gods were with us, and I even had to choose between two pairs. Okay, fine, they were the same shoe, one in purple, one in gold. But a choice had to be made nonetheless.

How many shoes you have under your work desk
Hello, what? And I’m not just saying this because I don’t have a job. Even when I did have a job, there were no stray shoes lurking under the desk. Um. I will admit that said job was at an indie press where the dress code was such that, one day, our boss said to one of the editors, with no malice at all, “The bank is coming by tomorrow to talk about the loan, so would you mind putting on some shoes for the meeting?”

No, but, really. Spare shoes, for what?

Five people I'm passing this baton to
Bowb—Everything should be right in front of you ’cause you’re unpacking, no? Hngh!

BBRUG—Hello, my pink-sandaled friend.

Hector—Hé mec, on veut savoir si t’as des fashion-shoes aussi roses et aussi pooklet que ton blog !

Jeff—Since you actually have a whole shoe theory and all...

Saffron—Do you like shoes like you like fooding? What do your feet wear when you don’t have any raspberry coulis to distract from the sneakers?

Done, and done.

Now, can we talk about how many mosquito bites I have? I would like to take this opportunity to volunteer that I have one rather near my bum.

There are surprises still to be had.

Red in the evening air, floating like breathing, fine like the fairy wings of dragonflies. And the scent of the sea on the breeze. And the city in lights across Marina Bay.

On Keong Siak Road, in a white hotel with a curving staircase, green-gold tiles just bigger than my thumbnail, and mirrors unto mirrors like a dream.

Lotus-flower candles and a makeshift altar on terracotta tiles.

A lychee Bellini in a chocolate booth.

Here, I have been living unawares.

Downtown at lunch hour, the office girls in button-down shirts and slim-cut skirts each carry a wallet and a packet of tissues.

We are girls who will travel for lunch, me and Ren and Jacq, even if two of us don’t know the roads and one of us can’t drive. Ren is picking her Amazing Race companion contestant, and I fear it will be neither me nor Jacq, because Jacq’s idea of directions is, “Smith Street, Smith Street. Food Street lah. Chinatown. Near the multistorey carpark. Chinatown,” while me, I trip down Temple Street in pink heels, hopping on one foot, trying to deal with disobedient insoles.

Look. I don’t normally put up with uncomfortable shoes, I don’t have time for that drama. But this is my sad shoe story. For the last couple of months, I have been living in a pair of pink wedge heels. These are amazing shoes. Girls like them. Boys like them. I put on the shoes the day I got them, and have walked and run and skipped and jumped in them ever since. We’re at the point now where the leather’s scuffed in places, and stretched so that my foot slides forward toward the toe, in effect making the shoe a size or so too big in the back. I got a pair of insoles the other day to save these shoes from the bin, but what eventually happened was that my feet continued to slide forward, and then the insoles made the slide-forward fit tighter, so that then I got blisters from the chafing. If ever there were an instance of kena bang, this is it. Anyway, whatever. As of yesterday’s purchase from the emergency shoe department, I have new shoes. A pair of heels to replace a pair of heels. In the unexpected choice of purple. I’m not sure that I do purple. Only one way to find out...

But,

so.



Yesterday afternoon we found our way to Chinatown, somehow, away from the bankers in grey and black, to the scent of medicinal herbs in the air; to the giant goldfish kite flying red against the blue sky and the jumble of gaily painted shophouses; to the woven bins of round durians and the dollar baskets of mangosteens, of starfruit, of jambu a blushing pink plump; to dim sum and claypot tofu for hungry girls.



Oh but we heart Chinatown, where, down Temple Street, the cool interior of Jing Jing Dessert House offers a hundred and one desserts, including such variations on a theme as black sesame cream, black sesame cream with rice dumplings, and black sesame and walnut cream—and where our post-lunch “coffee” turned into durian pudding, soursop jelly quivering with soursop delight, and the mango ice special, full of refreshing mango goodness.



Outside, on a too-hot afternoon, a girl smiled from just inside the five-foot way, while shopkeepers fanned themselves in the shade of striped awnings.

Girls catch up over lunch, is what we do. Once upon a time we were all in blue pinafores in the same place at the same time; and all of a sudden, some twelve years later, over noodle soups at Madam Saigon, we are New York and London and Singapore, me and Henny and Andrea, a King Chiku shake and a lime-mint ice blended and a sour plum drink.

It’s like Jacq said the other night, after dinner at Da Paolo, where the chef—hello, dark eyes and stubble—kept looking over and smiling. We like boys, what can you do. Oh, Da Paolo Pizza Bar, everyone don’t waste time and go there immediately. The ceiling is furry with cowhide, and the bottles of Aranciata are lined up at the ready. There is pizza with smoked salmon and pesto, and pizza with ham and little mushrooms, and pizza with mascarpone and truffles. And when the waiterman comes by after to ask if you are interested in dessert, you can, if there are six of you, say, as Ren did, “We’ll take one of everything except the ice cream.” Among the chocolate cake and the profiteroles and the mousse, the lemon meringue tart—a thin layer of tart topped with maybe eight centimetres of cream, browned just so—is that kind of good that, really, it might not be so bad to say, “We’ll take six lemon meringue tarts.”

Hummm. You see what we have been up to, out here.

But.

I was trying to say,

sometime after one in the morning, after dinner at Da Paolo, (after the chef, the pizza, the lemon meringue tart), after sitting around at Jessica’s sister’s place with horoscopes and too many fashion magazines, I was walking Jacq back to her apartment while she walked me to a cab, and, a propos of nothing, she said, “Life is funny lah.”

And the thing is, it is.

It has come to this. Two weeks and some at home, and what is going on is, late Sunday morning, I’m just done with a snack of goat’s milk yoghurt with honey and gem biscuits, and CC and I collapse into soft white clouds of sofa.

“I’m lazy,” she said, “so I’m going to throw all these toys at you.” She reached toward the collection of the kid’s playthings on the living room table, and, because she is kind, precised: “I’ll start with the soft ones.” A bumblebee flew across the table at me, then a monkey, a bear, a flower-print dog.

It smelled like rain outside.



At 8:49 Thursday night I snuck a peek at Tym’s watch and said, “Oh, we have overstayed our parking by almost an hour.” It is easy to do, you see, when you have CC and Tym and Terz and a nasi padang feast in front of you.

Thursday night on Liang Seah Street was: sitting outside on the five-foot way, yellow rice and pink iced bandungs all around, while the rattan fans spun above our heads; and then, just down the block, Ah Chew’s Desserts for bowls of black sesame cream and pulot hitam, and discussions of noodles.

There is a noodle hierarchy, you may say you like them all equally as if they are your children, but everyone knows the truth is, one noodle is better than the others. Me, I like mee poh, followed by mee sua. I also like the classic yellow Hokkien mee noodle, and I will say this, unabashed, and in writing, even though Tym is terribly disparaging of it. Also, tang hoon, which has been working its way up the ranks over the years, gets a special mention for its thin strands of slippery glassiness, and for its transparent, crystal-ball aspect of mystery noodle.

Later, Terz was explaining the workings of KTV bars, the seductions of KTV hostesses. “They come over and whisper in your ear,” he said. “What do you mean, ‘They whisper’?” I said, because I am naïve to the shadows of Singapore nightlife—the China girls and Geylang trannie prostitutes. “What do they whisper? Like, ‘What’s your favorite noodle?’”

Oh, but that was a tasty night, well worth the ten-dollar parking violation ticket we found later on the windscreen, timed 8:49.



And I remember now that I keep forgetting to blog about waking up at seven two Sundays ago for a porridge breakfast. Seven on a Sunday morning, now that is dedication to porridge.

Sunday morning in Tiong Bahru, early-like, there is fish porridge, hot and salty, and pork porridge, also good, but watch out for the livery bits.



And the porridge was fine, but the murtabak, well, that was somethin’ special.

Too early on a Sunday morning, the murtabak uncle hasn’t prepared the mutton yet, but offers the sardine with a smile. The boy at the stove slaps the dough onto the counter and fries it up on the spot.



Kopis and tehs for the table, while, just beyond the low blocks of HDB flats, the sun is rising.

Friday afternoon in Holland Village, down the street with the red tin mailboxes, there were pistachio and strawberry mint gelati for a hot day.

At home, after, the mynah birds called in the garden. “Your bed is comfy,” CC said, lying down. “I know,” I said, “so stay.” “I will,” she said, and closed her eyes. Me, too, I stretched out on the cold white tiles of my bedroom floor, and Satie sounded like the afternoon standing still while the fan whirred back and forth.

There is a dress I have been admiring in a store window for days now, every time CC and I go downtown. Today Ren called just after noon and asked where I was. “I’m going to be late,” I said, “but I have a new dress.” What can you do, sometimes a slight tardiness is inevitable if it is good for your fashion.

Over Killiney coffees, later, Jacq and I were talking about Shanghai and New York and London: this is our lives, the possibilities of our lives. Jacq is nimble like a little Chinese seamstress, and when I looked at her hands, I found she had made a small crane out of Morinaga chocolate wrappers.

There is nothing like a thick porcelain cup of kopi, complete with the plastic soup spoon of condensed milk. I don’t know what it is about coffee here, I can’t imagine it’s just the condensed milk that makes the difference, but, man, it’s good and thick and sweet in a way that makes you forget the skim cappuccinos and the double macchiatos. “It’s the way they roast the beans,” Jacq said. “They roast them in butter.”

We were on the dock at the Yacht Club tonight, me and the baby, and her eyes were wide at the big pink cloud in the deep blue sky, the boats bobbing up and down, and the world, the world, the world.

I found out that my mother, behind my back, is going about saying that I am “very competent.” Chinese mothers, what can you do. They grip the door and twitch toward an imaginary brake pedal when you drive, but then you discover from your sources (hello, CC) that really, they think you handle yourself rather well. The point is that all of a sudden I think I can drive in Singapore.

Which is why we are getting very used to this car thing, me and CC, which means that if we have a Sunday morning roti prata date on Upper Bukit Timah Road opposite Beauty World (cha-cha-cha), it is not only on, it is set, and it is confirm. We scam the keys from Mowmy, pack Tym up front for directions, and off we go toward two tables of food, I swear this is true. At Al-Azhar, we were three girls with one still to come, and the waiter boys brought one paper dosai, two plain pratas, two egg pratas, an ice cream prata, two Godzillas and a teh tarik, and all accompanying curries and chutneys, and it took up our table and then some. When Jacq got there, we said, “Don’t be shy, don’t be shy,” and surely she is not shy, this one, so then there were also teh halia kurang manis and a tissue prata, and oily hands all around.



Girls at a Sunday morning prata breakfast natter about multilingual chat rooms for lonely local men, about the state of writing in Singapore, about the possibility of a girl returning home. Oh, it might not be so bad if I had to move back here. I wouldn’t have to scheme and plan and wrangle my way into one more bloody foreign visa, for one. Coming back here would be so easy, is the thing, and it’d be tasty, too. And maybe I’d buy an old shophouse and do it up sweet, with a poured concrete goldfish pond in the inside courtyard, and giant chrysanthemums floating on the pool of sparkle water. I’d have a magnolia tree outside, the large waxy leaves hung low, and the sweetly dizzying scent of pink blooms. There’d be the fat ants crawling in a lazy trail on the cool bathroom tiles, or a furry caterpillar dropping in for a nighttime visit. There’d be the great crackling thunderstorms, and then, after, the smell of lush grass, and rain, and the tropics. And at night the sky’d be the same as it is in London, in Brooklyn, in Paris.

Girls after a Sunday morning prata breakfast are full of drive power, and motor about the city because they can. “Mowmy,” I texted, “we have stolen your car and we are going to Holland Village.”

The baby was asleep and Mowmy was making soon kways in the kitchen and we were sitting about at dinner and I must have thought about six times “If only there were ice creams in the freezer, it has been that kind of day” when CC said, “Maybe after dinner we need to take a walk to Bishan and get mochis.”

“Yes,” I said, “yes, yes, yes.”

(If you are going to share a brain with someone, it is very nice if that someone is CC.)

We walked arm-in-arm to the local mall, big sister and little sister. The night was cool after midday thunderstorms, and the lizards click-click-clicked in the spotlight of orange streetlamps.

CC and I hit up our mum for her car keys this morning and drove to the U.K. visa application office, which is to say that CC navigated and I drove, while Mowmy waved us off, saying: “Take Marymount straight, bear left to Braddell Road, get on the CTE in the direction of Jurong AYE.” What? What?!

All my driving experience has been on the other side of the street on the other side of the world. I can figure out how to get just about anywhere in Singapore on the public transportation system, but I have driven in this city maybe once. This one!-time!-only! affair took place sometime back in 1996 or 1997. I’d just gotten my driver’s license in America, and was back for the school holidays. I thought I’d take the car for a whirl round the neighborhood—really, just down the street and back. My mum came along, gripping the passenger-side door while I tried to re-orient myself to driving on the left side of the street. Every time I hugged the curb, she twitched. I never drove in Singapore again, but I am very good at swiping my transit card through the turnstiles.

This morning, the dual-track running commentary in Mowmy’s Renault was like so: “Wait, AYE? What? There is no sign for the AYE. It says CTE, PIE, BKE. Are we going north? No, wait, do we want to go to Bukit Timah? Eh? Exit on the left? Should we turn ar— oh, no, never mind. Eh, AYE! Wait, turn here? Um, um, sorry Mr. Lorry Man, I’m just going to edge my way in here, thank you thank you. Oh! We are going into the tunnel, yay!” When we got to the office on Robinson Road, CC said: “I can unclench my shoulders now.”

Two girls with their mother’s car and a full tank of petrol means we could have packed our passports and headed for Bangkok, but, instead, after the visa papers were handed in, we headed back to our neighborhood mall to guzzle sugary ice-blended coffee drinks and buy gem biscuits and laugh at plastic Japanese products.

There is a shop of wonderment on the top floor of Bishan Junction 8. Mu-Ee is a thing shop, a thing shop of wonderment, and these days everything seems to be ten percent off. Are you familiar with the thing shops of Singapore? Mu-Ee sells—among, like, eight thousand other things—Astroboy watches, packaging tape printed with grinning cartoon tigers, apple-print wallets, bunny-print wallets, and all kinds of knick-knacks and geegaws to hang off of your cellphone—an enamel Totoro, a cluster of multicolored baubles, a figurine that is at once a girl and a bell. If it were possible to hang a pork loin off of your cellphone, Mu-Ee would probably sell it.

The crowning glory of Mu-Ee is a canvas tote that is printed, front and center, with a drawing of a pig. Above the pig, large, cursive lettering reads: Spoony Spoon Spoon. Above this, there is a drawing of a cow and a compass point. The cow is maybe a third of the size of the pig—Spoony Spoon Spoon—and is accompanied by smaller cursive lettering that reads: the cow is further north.

You see what I mean? The world is full of amazing things.

It’s been a while since CC and I have been home at the same time, and it’s been never since CC and I and the kid have been home at the same time, so it has been family fun all day every day since I arrived last week.

There has been a trip to the beach at Sentosa, where the baby cooed at the peacocks and charmed even the pimply teenage boys who came up to play ball with her;

the Bishan pasar malam, where, just like at the best heartland night markets, the hawkers laid out fifty-cent underwear; aluminium made-in-China shaving kits; fishballs on sticks; small packets of boiled peanuts; cold sugarcane juice in plastic bags; and the glorious bounty of local fruits, I don’t know why my dear mother wastes her time with oranges and apples, common, common. The fruitsellers holler “One dollar one dollar one dollar” amid piles of longans, rambutans, duku langsats, and mangosteens, and then the durian uncle deftly pries a fruit open to announce: “Yellow!”;

clearing out old toy chests to find countless teddy bears, a Smurf the size of a four-year-old child, a panda dressed in plaid, and a China Monopoly boardgame complete with paper visas to Germany. One of the bears is the color of a butter cake, with arms long enough to wave above his head as if he were railing against the price of honey these days. His name is Bear-Bear. In the great tradition of Chinese-spoken English, “Bear-Bear” is pronounced: third tone, second tone. I’d hoped we’d find Lambie (third tone, second tone) too, but I think he must have perished in the soft-toy mold-a-thon. Mary’s little lamb went to school, but Lambie went on all family vacations. He was, at some point, lost in some European hotel and, subsequently, refound in the laundry. He’d been stitched up several times over the years, but my last memory of him still sees stuffing escaping through a small hole in the neck.



Altogether, down-home family time—where we shop for a bookshelf for upstairs and a shower hose for downstairs—is not necessarily making for a news revolution on this blog, but it is awfully nice, and the baby smells like sweetness.

Oh, blurgh. I’ve been up writing an earnest essay for the British High Commission explaining why I’m after a U.K. visa. It reads, in part:

I will admit to a particular weakness for the culinary arts—one of the guides for my proposed trip is a Saveur magazine article of substantial length on Devon’s cream teas, while another is the entire March 2005 issue of Gourmet, in which London is heralded as the newest hotspot of gastronomica—and volunteer that one of my primary propositions is to explore new English cooking.

I hope one does not find me flippant; I do not plan to spend the next two years in unadulterated gluttony.

CC came downstairs around midnight to see how I was going, which was especially sweet because she is the kind of girl who is generally early to bed and early to rise, whereas I potter about in the wee hours of the morning, and then fall asleep with a book face-down on my head.

She read the first draft, laughing at the right parts, then corrected all the American spellings to British ones. Ten years ago I had to pinch myself to remember to spell “defence” defense. Now I will have to tie a ribbon around my finger to remember that “realize” is once again realise.

To celebrate, we skipped to the kitchen, latenight lightfoot, to see what sorts of things might be in store for us. Half past midnight saw me and CC and our visiting cousin Jojo at the round rosewood dining table, three girls and three cakes, we are that sort of lucky.

We can’t help it, we are girls who like to eat, and try as I might—well, okay, I am not really trying—I cannot be one of these Singapore noodle girls, straight up and down.

It seems easy enough to get on a train from here to there, and then a plane from there to here, and I suppose there’s an air of glamourama jetsettering to lunch in Paris and dine in London, to breakfast in London and lunch in Singapore—but, really, it’s a little discombobulating, and sometimes a girl just needs a quiet moment in one place. I guess I’m not totally ready to be on the cover of Prestige magazine quite yet.

A week ago I was in Paris, rocking the airwaves, and having Gab laugh at me because I kept complimenting myself on my own deejaying. “Great song,” I said, when I put on Aretha’s “Think.” “Great song.”

Six hours north from the countryside and its velvet sky, the last days in Paris included a kefta sandwich and the city stretching out from the top of the parc de Belleville, a selection of Tunisian pastries in a pink box, and an introductory course in the musical stylings of Kurtis Blow and Dr. Dre.



This is how to say good-bye to Paris in style: lunch on rue des Cinq Diamants—a mega salad, a love story, a dark espresso. Scootering through the city, bumping about on cobblestones while Notre Dame towers above us. We puttered through the throngs of tourists—“Pardon, pardon, s’il vous plaît, merci”—and zoomed free round the corner. Eyes closed and holding on tight, it felt like flying. The Eurostar not till 16:07 left time for an arm through an arm and Berthillon ice creams by the Seine.

Four hours later, this is how to say hello to London in style. Well—maybe a different kind of style: a chatty chat with the local cabbie, at the end of which I say, “This is a stupid question,” and then ask how much I should tip him. A chatty chat with the Indian grocery store owner, in which I ask, with some surprise, if one can actually put money in the payphones. He looked at me as if I were from another planet, so I explained: “I just got here...from not here.”

But the thing is, soon I will be from there, because the London keys to the London flat worked like sliding a hot knife through cold butter, and inside it was white and clean and new and waiting for me. Inside, there is a shower with a big, round showerhead where the water comes down like rain; inside, there is a skylight for a personal patch of blue; inside, the kitchen windows open to a hodgepodge of balconies and backyards across the way.

And it was all well and good inside, but I didn’t come here to be inside, especially when outside it was just like on the map, the tube stop minutes away, and Henny and John for a welcome dinner, laughing till our stomachs hurt, laughing till we could no longer laugh, laughing till we were only shaking, silently.



By the next morning, the map was in my head, at least for a few blocks, and already I know: the post office is right, and right again;

the RV1 bus goes straight to Henny’s place, and also to Thushala’s;

the strawberries on sale at Marks & Spencer have their farmers’ names printed on the packet;

the neighborhood Hare Krishna fella is from Kuala Lumpur, like me;

the local coffee joint has brioches and chocolate croissants and coconut macaroons, a skinny girl in slouchy boots, and small wooden booths in which you knock knees with your neighbors.



But all this isn’t for a couple of months yet, and in the meantime there’s home in the tropics—humid, sticky afternoons, and then the moon smiling above the coconut trees.

The sun was out in time for Saturday morning. We piled into the convertible, three girls and a shopping list, direction Pleaux. The bourriol stand was up and at ’em in Place Georges Pompidou, three hot plates with buckwheat crêpes in the making. I ordered six to go, and the nice man gave me one for the spot, slip slap strawberry jam and wrapped in a paper napkin.

Post-lunch, a lie-down on the lawn. At the level of the green, grasshoppers grasshop and butterflies butterfly. I fell asleep in the sun, summer under my skin, and when I woke the breeze sounded like Jill Scott. I got up, finally, and stretched, and Maud was reading on the stone steps. “Yup,” I said. “Yup,” she said.



We were invited to tea after, with the grandpère and the grandmère and the tante Malou. Down the road with the black-and-white cows, Tante Malou’s house is a yellow room and an orange room, a bird room and, upstairs, a forest room. In the garden, the pink rose bushes smelled like pink rose bushes. Like baby bears, we combed her redcurrant plants. The berries stained my fingers deep pink, no complaints here.

In a copper pot back home, redcurrant jam in the making was fuschia like my skirt.

I’m sure some people live like this all the time, but this is all very Fresh Air Fund for me. Thumbs up all around for country living: a bowl of Fruit n’ Fibre topped with Mamie Nova lychee yoghurt while the roosters mosey across the lawn in the dewy morning. Shelling walnuts at the kitchen table and then, not two hours later, espresso and a slice of walnut cake warm from the oven, with Stevie Wonder playing in the big room. Thin slices of pain bis slathered with demi-sel butter, and then dipped into a bowl of day-old vegetable soup, still good, and sweet from the leeks.

Late this afternoon, Maud came in with sweetpeas from her grandmother’s garden. I shelled them at the marble table on the porch out back, and they are being steamed, with lettuce and shallots and carrots, for dinner tonight. There is a gigot of lamb in a thick cast-iron pot on the stove, and all around me the light, delicious smell of mint just picked.

For later—because there is always a later—India and I have made a chocolate-apricot tart, which, as chocolate-apricot tarts do best, is sitting pretty.

Quelqu’un veut du café?

These days around the house we are moaning “Cindy, what have you done to me?” because Maud and I have taken to doing the 1993 Cindy Crawford “Le Grand challenge” video in the afternoons. It is Cindy Crawford in a two-piece leotard and chunky white sport shoes, jumping, lifting, lunging, and dubbed into French. Stretching, l’étirement. Weights, les haltères. When Cindy calls for a twenty-five-second break, we swig, like the toppest top-models, great mouthfuls of water from 1.5-litre bottles of Volvic.

The sun is out today, though, so in lieu of sweatin’ to Cindy, I thought it would be appropriate to take a gander in the countryside. Pink on pink and a straw hat from the side table.



Left out of the big gates brought red tractors and an old farmer, wildflowers in purple and yellow, a woman climbing down from a cherry tree. In the bushes, sometimes, a something scurried. There was the smell of freshly mown fields, and a wood fire somewhere in the distance, and cows on a dirt road.



The way back was everything in reverse, of course, the smell of cows on a dirt road, and a wood fire somewhere in the distance, and freshly mown fields. Then through the large iron gates and into the big room for tea.

In the country we leave the doors open, the big one out front and the big one out back, and sometimes it’s the chimneysweep who stops by, and sometimes it’s Maud’s grandmother with a bag of cherries, impossibly red and unstoppably sweet, and sometimes it’s cousin Benoît come to cook us a truffade. Chimneysweep, le ramoneur.

The last so many days in France, I’ve been trying to keep all the genders straight; truly, gendered nouns are the bane of my French-speaking life. Maud says I get them wrong une fois sur deux, which is probably about right, but goddamn it, there’s no bloody logic to explain why a forest is feminine and a choice is masculine. Our lunch today near undone me, what with the endive-walnut-bleu d’Auvergne salad, and the tomato-tomme salad, and the spinach stirfried with garlic and lemon, and the herring and shallots and dill, and the bowl of bitey radishes. Shallot, une echalote. Endive, une endive. Zucchini, la courgette. All these nouns, and there’s only so far you can go trying to stifle the gender in a muffled cough: mrfradis, hrmendive.

My gut feeling said the radish—in a deep pink dress and a flouncy green sunhat—would be feminine, but no. Radish, le radis. In the great vegetable village in my head, the radish is now a dandy in a sharp pink suit and a green fedora, cane optional. It’s clear that the endive is feminine, because the endive is the village wetnurse. Similarly, it is clear that asparagus is feminine, because the asparagus are the gossipy aunts at tea. Asparagus, une asperge. Maud wanted to know what spinach is, but spinach is nothing, because spinach is what the other vegetables grow in their vegetable gardens.

But where I was going with this is, it is good when all sorts of people stop by, as long as none of those people is the lettuce come to kill us. The lettuce story is, there is a stone fountain in the big garden which holds not a fountain but several massive gorgeous heads of lettuce. A couple of nights ago we were clearing out the fridge for a snacky dinner of leftovers thrown together, and what is nice to go with a snacky leftovers dinner of cheeses and saucissons and jambons both blanc and de pays is a fresh salad, which is what started the madness.

I asked if it was too late to go out and get a head of lettuce, because it was after eight, when, clearly, the lettuces are already asleep. “No,” Maud said, “they are already sleeping.” And I was all warm and fuzzy inside with how French people and Chinese people have a shared mythology, when it became quite clear that in fact French people were mocking Chinese people, because then Maud handed me a knife and said: “Go get a lettuce.” And then there was all sorts of nervous giggling and knife-gesturing, and then Maud said: “Go get a lettuce,” for she is single-minded, this one. Bloodthirsty and single-minded.

We stood in the doorway, finally, while India marched out into the dusky garden, dagger in hand. And her figure got smaller and smaller as she walked away from us and toward the dry fountain. And it was very quiet, except for my cloth shoes on the stone steps as I fidgeted from one foot to the other. India bent over into the lettuce bed and somewhere inside me there was a very little scream, because I could see the big green leaves reaching up and out to envelop her and swallow her. I could see the big green leaves like big green leafy hands, and I could see her tumble in, and I could see her legs kicking desperately in the air as her muffled shouts echoed into the night.

At the kitchen table minutes later, the lettuce was cold and crisp, sweet, barely dressed with a balsamic vinaigrette. Lettuce, la laitue.