The French House: An American Family, a Ruined Maison, and the Village That Restored Them All by Don Wallace

Author:Don Wallace [Wallace, Don]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non-Fiction, Travel, Biography
ISBN: 9781402293337
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Published: 2014-06-03T07:00:00+00:00

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In the new year, to save pennies and slough off the sour smell of Success, I walk home at night instead of taking the bus or subway. Who needs a gym? As far as I’m concerned Manhattan is just one long treadmill anyway.

I usually pick up takeout. We sit down at a little table overlooking Rory’s playpen and eat our greasy grub—cheap Italian, Greek, Hunan, Peruvian (try the chicken, not the guinea pig), Southern, Afghan, or simply diner—all of which, Mindy often points out, are unhealthy and which, I retort, are keeping us from saving any money so why don’t you cook? to which she retorts, Because I’ve spent all day with the baby and we don’t have a kitchen!

This last isn’t strictly true, but I concede the point. We have a strangely flattened galley in the foyer that hides behind folding accordion-style panels. When we fling them open at night it looks like an ant farm, there are so many scuttling roaches.

Two visits from the pesticide guy later, with visions of string-bag shopping in Le Palais and Sauzon and on the rue de Buci in Paris, I am emboldened to go farther afield in search of true food. Under the rusted iron train-track trestles and piss-yellowed concrete underpasses of the Port Authority I find a small cluster of open markets in the French style.

Well, maybe “French style” is overdoing it, but I am excited. There’s a bread shop! A pork store (that is actually what the sign outside says: Pork Store). A West African market full of exotic vegetables and rudely carved icons that turn out to be roots you can eat.

What really grabs me is the block’s bookend fish markets: long, white fingers of crushed ice, be-ringed with shimmering vermillion poissons du jour, stretching out to claim the sidewalk and snatch me inside. Wherein all is clamorous and chaotic and grungy, the fishmongers scornful of any attempt to please the customer—especially timid, bespectacled Young Sophisticate Strudel in his thin poly-cotton Oxford shirt, half-knotted necktie, cheap chinos, and scuffed black Rockports. The clientele around me is mostly thick-bodied, half-shaven men in wool duffel coats. I watch them grunt and point and peel twenties off fat rolls, buying by the case. The fishmongers look right through me.

At last I spot an elderly black lady going right up to the head Italian fishmonger standing in his rubber boots on his wooden box. No nonsense, she grills him about his porgies. He gives monosyllabic answers, no allowance made for her age and maybe some subtracted for her race. But she gets her porgies, and when she asks to have them cleaned, they do it.

Before the lady’s arrival I’d been staring, transfixed, at a great, wet, whiskery head resting on the ice like the head of John the Baptist. I’ve seen that face before. On the quai of Le Palais after the fishing boats came in. La Lotte. The first time I ever tasted lotte, during our winter of 1980, we’d

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