When Augusta triedto talkto her mother about it, she only succeeded in making them both upset. “Mom?” she asked. “How did you know Dad was cheating on you?” They were in the barn by her mother’s pink house, her mother grooming her horses.
“Why are you asking this?” Annie frowned.
“Because I think Dad’s cheating again,” Augusta quickly deflected.
“Oh, Augusta.” Annie shook her head. “I really don’t care, and you shouldn’t either.” She began to brush the horse’s coat with long, even strokes.
“I just think he’s making Samantha look like an idiot. Everyone intown can see he’s cheating. It must be humiliating for her,” Augusta tried.
“Augusta, honey, I don’t really want to talk about your father’s romantic life. I’m happy for you to have a relationship, but you shouldn’t get yourself invested in him. He disappoints people.”
She felt guilty, dragging her parents into it, but at the same time, this was all sort of their fault. They hadn’t given Augusta a model for a successful marriage. She had no idea how to talk to Colin about this stuff, how to ask him if he was in love with someone else.
It was devastating. Her brother was the only person in the world who knew Colin as well as she did, and yet he was the one person she couldn’t ask.
When Augusta was sixteen, she had the worst summer of her life. While her mother and Eben were completely fluent in French, Augusta had gotten a B-minus sophomore year, and her mother had decided Augusta needed to immerse herself in the language and do an exchange in Paris to get up to speed. Sylvie Renault was her mother’s college roommate and she had four children, the oldest of whom was just Augusta’s age. Sylvie was a member of the French parliament, she lived in an apartment on Avenue Montaigne in the 8th arrondissement, and she assured Annie that Augusta would tuck right into her fabulousfamilleand would return home in late August with a wider view of the world and a gorgeous Parisian accent.
Augusta arrived with her suitcase in June and met the family: Sylvie and Thibault, and the children, Anne-Laure, Marie, Jean-Paul, and Serabet. Anne-Laure was skinny as a colt, with straight brown hair that hung in her eyes and thick glasses like Coke bottles. Marie wasbeautiful and haughty and immediately sneered at Augusta’s white American sneakers. Jean-Paul was ten, and he shook her hand perfunctorily before dashing over to the television where a soccer match was unfolding, and Serabet was five, pink, blond, and perpetually scowling at everything the world had to offer. The apartment, however, was divine. It was everything you might expect from a four-bedroom Parisian palace on the fanciest street in the city. There were oriental rugs and family heirlooms, gilded frames holding oil paintings, thick velvet curtains, and a grand piano in the salon. Augusta could tell at first glance that Anne-Laure wouldn’t be her bosom buddy, but when it came to summer accommodations in the most beautiful city in the world, a girl could do worse.
And then, on Augusta’s second day in Paris, they left. There had been a lot of conversation at dinner, but frankly Augusta had only understood about half of it. Apparently, they had been talking about their family estate where they would be spending the summer. No one of a certain class was willing to spend the summer months in the city. Sylvie was from a well-to-do French family, and they had an estate that had been with them for generations. It was two hours north of Paris. Her aunt lived in the main house, a mansion maintained by a staff of four, while the Renault family took one of the smaller buildings on the property, a five-minute walk through the forest.
When Augusta got out of the car, she nearly cried. It was a crumbling stone house with broken windows and patchy grass in the middle of absolutely nowhere. Augusta had been dreaming of patisseries and bistros, people-watching on the Champs Élysées, wandering the Tuileries, returning to Greenhead in the fall with a sophisticated French wardrobe and perhaps a secret smoking habit. Instead, there was a long brick wall surrounding the grounds, horse trails that led through pastures and over streams, wildflowers poking up all around them, theFrench countryside of a thousand American movies in which a middle-aged woman moves to France to fix up an old house and takes on a French lover—a fantasy for some, but for a sixteen-year-old it was a complete and total nightmare. Augusta shared a room with Anne-Laure and Marie, neither of whom made any effort to speak slowly or include her in conversation. There was a sad dirt courtyard, a single toilet, peeling wallpaper in the kitchen, and the telltale droppings of mice in the corners.
Anne-Laure took horseback-riding lessons and so Augusta was forced to take them as well, even though she’d been riding since she was four. She hadn’t brought her own riding clothes—who expected to ride in Paris?—so she was given Anne-Laure’s extra riding pants, at least two sizes too small and so uncomfortable Augusta occasionally worried she was damaging her ovaries. The instructor taught only in French, using terms no American high schooler could hope to understand, and when Augusta failed to move her horse in the correct fashion he only yelled louder. One day Augusta’s horse became obsessed with another, bigger horse, a big black Arabian stallion, and would only walk around the ring with his nose directly in the other horse’s butt. It was horrible.
Anne-Laure had cousins in the village, and she would run off with them, bringing along her sister Marie but never Augusta, coming home stinking of cigarette smoke and fun while Augusta read the same three novels over and over and tried unsuccessfully to teach Jean-Paul the rules of American baseball. The smallest child, Serabet, didn’t understand that Augusta spoke English, only that she didn’t speak French, and she treated her with the haughty attitude one might reserve for an especially stupid pet.
There were flies everywhere, they came in through the broken windows. There were scurrying sounds that kept her awake at night. Thedays were hot and dusty and boring, the nights were cold and long. But Augusta’s biggest problem was the food. She was hungry all the time. They ate things for breakfast she couldn’t stomach—pieces of pork and stewed tomatoes—for lunch they would serve strange little cream-colored gelatins with specks of meat. By dinner Augusta would be starving, willing to eat anything they could offer, tortured through courses of strange salad and oily fish. Her kingdom for a chocolate croissant! Augusta had spent a hundred French classes pretending to order in a café, she knew all about croque monsieur and croque madame. But as much as Americans waxed rhapsodic about French tourist food, this was a whole other thing. There was a bread truck that came by once a week and rang a bell, and Augusta would run outside with her money and buy a baguette and eat the entire loaf, ravenous, while the other women in the village looked on in horror.
Augusta was miserable, lonely, depressed. The parents talked to her as they might a seatmate on an airplane, with friendly detachment, but they mostly ignored her. She didn’t have a phone, she didn’t have a computer, and so with pen and paper she wrote long and pathetic letters home to her mother and to Bailey and Fran. Eben was spending his summer hiking across Europe with an American hosteling program, and he arrived in early August to visit.
“Jesus Christ, Augusta, you look awful!” Eben was horrified when he saw her. Augusta knew she hadn’t been sleeping, hadn’t been getting enough to eat, but she hadn’t realized quite how bad it was. Eben took her to his hostel for the night and they stayed up late talking. Augusta was just so lonely and sad. “You’re not going back, Augusta. Pack your suitcase. This is insane.”
The next morning, they returned to the decrepit Renault family outbuilding and packed her things. Eben explained that it was a family emergency, and he took Augusta back to Paris, and they spent the nextweek eating pain au chocolat and sleeping in a hostel for fifteen dollars a night where they shared a room with eighty strangers and Augusta had never been happier.
When they got home Annie was horrified. “They just left you with the ten-year-old all day? Did they think you were their free babysitter?” She was shattered that Augusta had such a terrible experience in her beloved France. She called Sylvie to explain the “family emergency,” lying and saying that Augusta had developed kidney stones but hadn’t known how to explain it. It wasn’t ideal that the Renault family would now imagine her peeing blood, but as furious as Annie was, the Renault family did have an apartment on Avenue Montaigne and it was lovely to stay there when the family visited Paris.
It took a while, but Augusta and Eben eventually began to joke about it, referring to it as the time he rescued his sister from her French captors. It was just a bad match, the wrong family, but it still was a blow to Augusta’s confidence. She had gone somewhere new and hadn’t been able to hack it. But Eben refused to tell that story, and in his hands it became a hilarious, ridiculous thing, an uninhabitable ruin in the French woods with mice the size of sheep and nothing to eat but bits of pork floating in aspic. That was the thing about Eben, he was always just so completely on her side. That’s why it hurt so much to feel him freeze her out.
Correct Anatomical Language
It was the housekeepers who eventually discovered the underwear in the sofa, laundering them, folding them into a neat square, and tucking them away in Augusta’s dresser drawer. When she found them that evening, putting on her pajamas after a shower, she was momentarilymortified that the two old Italian sisters who vacuumed her house thought she’d just abandoned her panties in the living room. But, she reasoned, they probably saw more embarrassing things all the time. After all, her mother’s housekeeper had been the first one to realize Augusta was having sex as a teenager when she found the used condom under Augusta’s bed. Augusta had walked in to grab her field hockey uniform just as the woman had picked it up with a tissue and, together, they both died of awkwardness on the spot.
Augusta took the underwear in her drawer as a sign that the standoff had ended in a détente and threw the little square of blue lace in the trash. It wasn’t a smoking gun, it wasn’t a glass slipper, she wasn’t going to travel all around the kingdom of Greenhead asking women to try them on and see if they fit. Instead of obsessing over whatever Colin had done, Augusta decided to just focus on her kids for the rest of the summer. While Beatrix would still be home with her all day, Jane was about to start second grade and Charlie would be starting kindergarten in the fall. Augusta volunteered to be a class parent, as she had every year, and then on top of that agreed to lead the Parent Ambassador committee. Suddenly her calendar was completely full, and she set about making sure it was the same for every family in the school, organizing drinks following curriculum nights, class play dates on various half days, and holiday gatherings that filled every Saturday ad infinitum.
Augusta was sittingat the kitchen counter with her laptop working on plans for a kindergarten parents cocktail party when Charlie came bounding into the room in his pajamas. “Mom! Mom! Mom! Truth or dare?”
“Don’t pick dare! He keeps daring me to put my head in the toilet.”Jane followed him in, her strawberry-blond hair dripping water on her shoulders, her face flushed prettily from the bath.
“I’m definitely not putting my head in the toilet,” Augusta warned.
“I won’t SAY THAT!” Charlie screamed, outraged.
“Okay, okay, love. Calm down. I pick dare.” Augusta smiled.
“I DARE YOU TO PUT YOUR HEAD IN THE TOILET!” Charlie screamed joyfully.
“Hey, hey, hey.” Colin came in carrying two damp towels. “Mom’s busy in here. Leave her alone.”
