“Our daughter?” asks a tanned, handsome older man in confusion, taking in my loose, wild hair, tangled from running down the wide, windy Boulevard de Courcelles. My cheeks are flushed. I take off my hat and try to smooth out my hair and cool off a bit. I’d hoped to be a tad less bedraggled when I met my new family.
“Oh, yes!
Bonjour!
” the man says, dipping to place a warm, wet kiss on either of my cheeks. He’s quite tall, with longish silver hair slicked back with gel. I can’t help but be a bit taken with him. My host father looks like an old-fashioned movie star.
“You must be Penelope,” says a diminutive woman with high cheekbones and shining white teeth. I tower over her. “I recognize you from your application photo.
“Ah,
oui
,” the man jokes. “Your photo was the reason we chose you to come live with us while you study at the Lycée. So much prettier than all the other prospective students!” He bows his head to me. “
Je suis Monsieur Marquet.
Our deepest apologies for not being here to greet your arrival in Paris. We’ve had so many things keeping us in the Dordogne, new job, blah, blah, blah.” He mentions his job as if it’s just something he does to fill the time between parties and benefits.
Mme Marquet tenses. “Yes, well. We’re here now, aren’t we?”
“I’m so glad to finally meet you!” I say enthusiastically, resisting the urge to pull them both into a bear hug of gratitude.
“Penelope,
ma belle
, we’re just leaving for a gala for
Médecins sans Frontières
—we’ve had the tickets for months and we only just remembered that the benefit was tonight of all nights,” M. Marquet clucks his tongue in apology. “We’ll be there until late.” He takes Mme Marquet’s elbow and steers her toward the waiting limousine.
“Oh,” I say, hoping to hide my bitter disappointment. “I didn’t realize . . .”
“
Cherie
, just run upstairs and introduce yourself to our housekeeper, Sonia,” M. Marquet says. “We’ll all get to know each other over the weekend when you join us at our house in the Dordogne. That is, unless you have other plans.”
“Really?” I squeak in disbelief. After just a few minutes of knowing me, they are inviting me to their house in the Dordogne for the whole weekend? Getting them to love me might be easier than I thought. “No, I don’t have any plans!”
“
Oui
, darling, of course you don’t,” Mme Marquet says. Her mouth is set in a hard, unyielding line as they wait for me to go inside. She taps her gold watch.
“See you Friday then,” M. Marquet says, wiggling his long fingers at me as Mme Marquet gingerly steps into the limo, careful of her dark red beaded gown. His eyes sparkle as if we’ve shared a secret. I smile back though I’m still hurt that they’ve abandoned me so quickly. “
Bon soir
for now!”
I’m pleased to find that their housekeeper, Sonia, is as warm and friendly as the Marquets are rushed and distracted. A plump, heavyset Caribbean woman, Sonia speaks a clipped, accented French that puts me immediately at ease from the moment I walk through the front door.
Like Olivia’s apartment down the street, the Marquets live in a splendor that most people only dream about. The main difference here, of course, is that the Marquets’ apartment is nearly three times the size of Mme Rouille’s. Mme Rouille only has two bedrooms and a maid’s quarters, but as Sonia shows me around, I count at least three bedrooms besides the master suite and my own sprawling room on the opposite end of the apartment. This apartment is also much darker, with the thick brocade curtains drawn, and dingier than where I was staying before. Elise keeps Mme Rouille’s apartment sparkling clean, but there is a distinct layer of dust over all the surfaces here. It’s obvious the Marquets have not been spending much time in Paris lately.
“That will change with the season,” Sonia explains. “Fall is philanthropy season in Paris. But weekends, they still go to the Dordogne. They can’t stay away. You’ll see. You’ll fall in love with it, too.”
Friday afternoon, I can’t stop squirming as I sit on the TGV high-speed train racing its way to the southern coastal French city of Bordeaux. At the Bordeaux station I’m going to switch to a train to Perigeaux, where M. Marquet will meet me and drive me to the Marquets’ château in the Dordogne.
Just listening to the French announcements over the train loudspeaker makes me shiver with excitement. I’ve always loved France, loved the language, the culture, the artistic heritage. Annabel loved France too, but for different reasons—she loved the romance of it, the idea that Paris was where you found yourself. But Dave would always tell her they had all the romance they needed right there in Vermont.
Annabel and I used to have a big, classroom-sized map of the world on the wall in the bedroom that we shared. For fun, we’d close our eyes and spin in place, then poke our finger on a spot on the map, pretending it was where we were destined to end up one day. We’d always try and aim for France, and usually end up somewhere in the Atlantic off the coast of Spain when we opened our eyes. We’d get Africa, England, Russia, Israel . . . but never France.
The night Dave asked Annabel to marry him, she came home giddy. She spun around with her eyes closed while I watched her from where I was tucked up in my twin bed.
“Aha!” she cried as she put her finger down on the map. “I got it!”The memory makes me smile a little bit.
So far, my brief meeting with the Marquets just as they were leaving for the benefit is all that I have seen of them. The day after we met, they left for the Dordogne again while I was at school. Sonia is there during the day, but at night I stay all by myself in their palatial apartment. Sonia doesn’t seem too interested in housekeeping. She mostly talks on her cell phone or reads tabloids in the kitchen.
Olivia stopped by briefly to make sure I was okay, but then had to run off to a study session with Sara-Louise and Mary. Olivia is obsessed with the Final Comp, in case anyone hasn’t noticed.
“I found out that your host dad is a magistrate,” Olivia told me before she left.
“Oh, really?” I’d been wondering what M. Marquet’s seemingly negligible job was. Except a
magistrate
doesn’t sound so negligible. “What’s a magistrate?”
“It’s like a judge, but also, like, a political office. Mme Rouille told me that your host dad was just recently elected to the district court in the Dordogne, which explains why they’ve been so absent. But the rumor is,” Olivia whispered in an uncharacteristically gossipy tone, “that he wants to run for national office.”
“Ooooh, Olivia, how scandalous!” I teased her.
She laughed. “Well, that was how Mme Rouille said it! I guess it’s not that big a deal. Still, sounds like you’re living with high society over here.”
The last few days living there have been something out of
Eloise in Paris
—velvet Louis XIV chairs, glittering chandeliers, eight-foot mirrors in gilded frames. I didn’t know anyone besides maybe Marie Antoinette who had ever lived like this—I certainly never expected myself to be in the lap of luxury.
And certainly not after everything I’ve done.
Last night, I bought a baguette and some gruyere on my way home from school, and after Sonia left, I made a sandwich and ate it in the middle of their elegant living room floor, facing the ornate doors leading out to the terrace. The sun was going down, and I opened up the drapes so I could watch the dusk settle over the Place des Ternes. Hilly, animated Montmartre, with the Sacre Coeur crowning its top like a white star in the misty evening, rises just beyond the Marquets’ safe, placid residential neighborhood. Careful of the crumbs on the carpet, I chewed thoughtfully, contemplating the strange roller coaster of the last few months. When I finished eating, I flossed and brushed my teeth, and lay on my bed for several hours, wide awake.
It was the most alone I’ve ever felt.
The train is packed with weekenders, but my seatmate disembarked at the Poitiers station. Families and couples are crowded all around me, restless with anticipation for the weekend as the train chugs across the valleys and hills of southern France. The atmosphere is hospitable, but I feel removed from it.
I open my notebook, thinking (as I often have in the last few weeks) of Annabel. I know my older sister will never get this letter, but I write to her anyway.
Dear Annabel,
You’d never believe it if you could see me right now. You’d be so proud of me. The Marquets barely know me, and already they want me to stay with them at their house in the country.
You’re the only person who could ever understand how much I want this. How much I need them to feel bonded to me, and ask me not only to come for this weekend, but to stay for winter break so I won’t have to go home to Vermont anytime soon. It was the one flaw in my plan, the one thing I didn’t think of until I got on the plane. The program specifically says that all students have to leave their French families for the three weeks of winter break unless formally invited for the holidays by their host families. That only gives me three months to secure that invitation. Only three months to secure my fate.
Besides the things I want to tell Annabel about my own new life in France, there are a million questions I want to ask about hers. My sister was always a mystery, but now, after this long separation, she’s an enigma. Whenever I picture her, she’s running, her hair a dark streak behind her. Her legs even longer than mine, I could never keep up with her.
I love trains. I wish we used them more in the States. It’s dreamlike to be sitting on a train, looking out the window. Even loneliness, even gloom, seem comfortable on a train whistling and rolling through the French countryside in the dark.
Where are you out there, Annabel?
I ask my dimly lit reflection in the window.
Will I ever get to see you again?
All of a sudden I’m reminded of Jay, how he noticed my caffeine habit, how he wanted to work with me on the Louvre project. I’m missing our study date! And the party at Sara-Louise’s, too!
Oh, no,
I despair for a moment. Then I brush off all thoughts of Jay. I’ll deal with that later. Nothing could ever be more important than this trip.
I find a very jolly M. Marquet waiting for me in Perigeaux. He picks me up and swings me around like a little girl. I laugh, too loud.
“Eh, I would have sent Charles—that’s the groundskeeper, the man who tends to the animals and the gardens—but I wanted you to feel welcomed, at home here,” M. Marquet tells me as we loop around the windy roads leading up to their estate. “Marie, the housekeeper here, will get you some dinner, and in the morning, Mme Marquet and I will show you the place. It’s very special. This land has been in my family for a long time.”
The château
is
very special. It’s dark, the way I would imagine an old castle to be, and creaks and shudders in the windy night. I fall asleep immediately in the huge feather bed I’m sent to after eating roast quail and
haricots verts
in the big dining room.
Decked out in sturdy rubber boots and stiff, starchy jeans, the Marquets take me for a robust hike around the grounds the next morning. I’m practically jogging to keep up with them, thinking of questions I might ask to get to know them better.
The house itself, built from bricks that are an almost fluffy pink, is flanked by two cone-shaped towers on either of its rear corners. Surrounded by lush green gardens on all sides, the landscape of the grounds becomes gradually more rugged the farther you get from the château. Each doorway to the house is oversize and regal, fit for kings and queens and the banners and flags that would have attended them and their entourage. The gravel paths trace the rolling hills for miles in every direction, leading to barns, fields, and pastures full of the Marquets’ sheep and horses.
My own sketchy knowledge of French history is based purely on the old portraits I’ve seen in the meager collection of art books at the library of my old school in Vermont. This house looks like the houses I’ve seen in those paintings. At least three hundred years old.
“Five hundred, actually,” Mme Marquet sniffs. “Not including the additions our family has put on over the generations.”
I give her my most genuinely impressed expression. She doesn’t react to it, just carries on admiring her own house.
The front entrance of the château is several stairs off the ground, about as high as a horse’s back.
“So that you could just hop onto your horse without ever stepping on the ground,” M. Marquet elucidates. “The ancestors so hated to get themselves dirty.”
I chuckle. In contrast to their somewhat decrepit, dusty home, the Marquets’ boots, jeans, and barn jackets are spotless. Meanwhile, I’ve managed to get completely sodden with dirt during our exertions.
M. Marquet leads me out to the pasture, a green expanse dotted with black horses. It’s starting to feel cooler now, even in the middle of the day when the sun is high in the sky. I’m glad I brought my dad’s old baggy sweater with me, even if Mme Marquet did give it a funny look earlier.
“Do you like to ride?” he asks me.
“Sure,” I say. “I mean, I’ve never done it before, but I’d love to try.” That’s not exactly true. Dave’s parents have an old pony, and when I was little I rode it bareback along the creek while my sister and Dave made out behind a tree. Somehow I don’t think that’s what the Marquets have in mind.
Mme Marquet looks down at my Converse sneakers. “You can’t ride in those. The soles are too soft. The horse won’t understand your commands.”
“
Pas de problème,
” M. Marquet says, motioning for Charles to take the horses to the stable and saddle them. “Go ask Marie for an old pair of boots. There are dozens in the mud room; there’s sure to be some in your size.”
Mme Marquet sighs.
“Dépêche-toi, Penelope.”