Field Note No.28: City Slippers
Here’s what we’re doing: We’re going out for the day. My father’s sister has come to visit and because you can only take so much goat, we’re driving her to Angoulême. Just so they don’t lose their minds, we take all our visitors here. We always build in a trip to this 16th century city which is walled and sits on a cragged spur above the Charente river.
The main appeal, though, is that more than six people live in it, and they don’t wear overslops. We’ll see them walking the streets and sitting in cafés. They’ll be chatting and smoking, and wearing Chanel. We might hear a little music while we’re there – a man with an accordion, say. Or a hurdy-gurdy on a street corner notching out the melody to some old, sweet song.
Because of the city’s lofty elevation, there won’t be fog. Its spires will pierce an azur sky, and we’ll feel hot in the sun, but glad for the shade cast by a coral Campari umbrella beneath which we’ll sip cat-black coffees and pick idly at warm and oozing pains chocolats.
After that, my aunt and I will head for the covered market. We’ll be looking for glitteringly fresh shellfish which will have made the short trip up from Bordeaux, and possibly a duck which we’ll find hanging on a hook in its feathers (on second thoughts, no thanks).
We’ll pick up some pâté for lunch tomorrow, bread for dinner tonight, olives and a bushel of basil for the pesto we plan to make. And for a little while, we’ll be able to forget.
My father. What will he be doing? Standing on a rampart, wings outstretched? Or batter-ramming some door which clearly says (though en Francais) that it won’t be opened ‘til noon? We’ll find him parched on the step holding an empty glass and a drink ticket.
The terrible truth is that I never want to be alone with him. I never want to be a twosome when once we were a threesome. The glaring vacancy is too much to bear. And everybody senses it; my aunt, then, is just another in a long string of kind people who come to “take our mind off things.” To see that we are okay.
Seeming okay quickly becomes my modus vivendi. Like a dying person in a hospital bed who summons the strength to mow through the bag of grapes their friend has brought, I become (so I fancy) the picture of okayness.
“Look at me! Look at this tarte au citrons I have made! These saucisses au vin blanc! This confit de canard!”
Everything must be fine if I can get these things on the table.
But there are cracks in this veneer. There’s one in the pastry case and one in the custard. There’s one in la marmite and one in la coquotte. And up above the village, where the rain falls sideways and no one comes to find me, there’s a whopping great crack in the road.
But this is what’s happening now. This is a Day Trip to Angoulême. And here’s the rub: I’ve forgotten my shoes. I’m sitting in the back seat of the car as my father rally-drives the anfractuosities of the pleasant French countryside, and I realize I’m wearing my slippers. And they aren’t Uggs. No. They are what my father is about to call my, “old slapper slippers.” Now, to be clear, “slapper” isn’t the French for “tart,” and it isn’t the French for “hoar.” But it is the English for both.
He goes on: “I’m not taking an old SLAPPER into town, in those old SLAPPER SLIPPERS.”
Although he doesn’t seem to be registering the farcicality of all of this, (the quite unintended linguistic playfulness of what he’s just uttered) he’s right; there’s no getting past them – there’s no spinning my mangy squirrels any other way.
I’m sorry, Dad, I was hurrying. You were downstairs freaking out about the impossibility of living in this jerkwater boondock, and it was all I could do to button my trousers. Have mercy, please. Please have mercy. I can pull it off; I can go like this, in my tart squirrels.
But 2022 is a long way off. He doesn’t know that, by then, slippers will be amphibious. Frankly, $300 for a pair of must-have Uggs will demand that they be seen in public.
And he’s having none of it. As he donuts the car on a (for once, blessedly) remote stretch of country road, centrifugal force flings me and my aunt to the windows.
Yup, EVERYTHING IS A-OK.
AB - 12.01.23