Chapter 1 - Ritual

When she was about six Claire started wondering what had happened to her parents. She tried to ask her grandparents about them, but they got so upset with her that she cried for days and decided never to bring up the subject again. Children tend to believe that everything that’s not right with the world must be their fault and adults will be mad at them for it and stop loving them, and Claire was no exception. Of course she never ceased questioning the issue, silently, and over the years constructed fantastic scenarios about what might have happened to them, stories which were heroic and extraordinary and made her hope that maybe some of their exceptional quality rubbed off on her too.

One wouldn’t call Claire’s life exceptional. One wouldn’t call it miserable either. She had worked so hard at fitting in that the results, which turned out to be the exact opposite of that, were almost hilariously bad. Unfortunately Claire couldn’t appreciate the fine irony because she had lost her sense of humor somewhere along the way and replaced it with a pleasant attitude meant to accommodate any opinion she might encounter on her journey. 

That afternoon, when she asked what had happened to her parents and got scolded, Claire ran out into the garden and hid in the natural hollow created by the thick and gnarly roots of an oak tree where they broke the ground, and that spot became her secret hideaway from the world from that day on, the place where she could go to dream and find comfort in good times and in bad. That oak tree remained her best friend throughout her childhood: it didn’t judge, it had no expectations and it listened to whatever Claire’s wild imagination came up with. A weird friend for a child, but, as I said, Claire herself was weird. 

She was sitting in that natural chair now, eyes closed, listening to the bird song and the tree frogs and the wind blowing through the thick foliage. The clinking of plates and silverware accompanied them - the sounds of her grandparents setting the table for breakfast outside on the patio, as it had been customary for them to do for decades. In the ever changing nature of things having this ritual felt almost like a gift, one of the fixed points which held her life well anchored in reality and kept it from being scattered by the winds. It was always at the same time, too. She kept smiling, with her eyes closed, and waited for the grandfather clock to strike nine. One…two…three…bang…bang…bang…Claire counted the guttural chimes with the clock until she reached nine, then got up to join her grandparents at the table.

“Did you sleep well, bebelle?” Grandmother asked, smiling.

Claire’s sleep had been troubled by strange dreams, most of which she couldn’t remember, but which left her uneasy and wrought. It was the heat, she thought, she’d become unaccustomed to the heat during all of these years she’d been gone, it didn’t use to bother her when she was a child. Glad as she was to be back home something felt off, odd, out of place, like reality had been bent or dented in the present moment somehow, but only very slightly, allowing everything to look almost normal. Almost.

“Yes, thank you, maman,” she smiled politely and her hard acquired social skills kicked in instinctively, eager to smother any chance that candor or, God forbid, a real connection might sneak up on her.

“Don’t lie to me, child. I’ve known you since you were in swaddling clothes,” Grandmother shook her head in a gesture so familiar to Claire it suddenly brightened her mood and made her feel safe. She smiled.

“It doesn’t matter, really.”

“Have some coffee,” Grandmother enticed her.

Claire picked up the old china pot and poured the dark liquid carefully into her cup. Her grandparents had this rule, which Claire had never questioned as a child but never encountered in her grown-up life anywhere else, that each member of the family had to use their own plate and cup, not to be mixed up with anybody else’s. There was a matching china set, of course, complete with tureens and gravy boats and large enough for twenty four people, but it was only used when the family hosted dinner parties and at no other time. Claire’s cup and saucer were made of bone porcelain, hand painted with delicate blue and gold tracery and so thin they became translucent; it seemed almost a miracle they had survived Claire’s entire childhood. 

She wasn’t used to seeing coffee in that cup, given her usual fare as a young girl which consisted of linden tea with lemon and honey or chocolate milk. It made her sad that there was a grown-up beverage in it now, especially since she hadn’t managed to figure out how to be a grown-up yet.

“Milk?” Grandmother offered, as if she’d heard her granddaughter’s thoughts.

Claire poured milk in the already full cup and made the coffee spill into the saucer in the process.

“For luck!” Grandmother dipped her forefinger in the saucer and smeared coffee on the young woman’s forehead, another one of the many customs Claire never questioned. One threw salt over one’s shoulder, ate beans on Wednesdays, wished on the first fruits of the year, wrapped up the outdoor activities at sundown. Life had different ways of marking the passing of time in their household - by the songs of the pigeons in the morning, by the height of the sun at noon, by the sounds of the old bell in the church nearby in the late afternoon. Seasons were announced by scents - the fragrance of the tree blossoms, the overheated aroma of the herbs, the sweet heavy scent of the harvest, the damp smell of the rain. The grandfather clock was the only exception in this world that marked its own time, as if it were brought there from outside just to make a point.

Claire’s grandfather went over the tasks for the day, as he always did at breakfast, taking slow sips of coffee between rare puffs of his morning cigarette, whose tip glowed amber in the rhythm of his puffs, and which stood eerily far from his hand at the end of a very long tortoise shell holder. It was Claire’s task, when she was a child, to prepare the cigarette and stuff so much cotton in the holder that almost no nicotine made it through. 

Slow wisps of blue-gray smoke danced in the morning air, drawn towards the sky by the rising air currents. Grandfather finished drafting the daily schedule and turned towards Claire. He was in a good mood, a state of mind the presence of his beloved granddaughter only served to amplify. 

“I’m going into town, do you want to come?”

He was referring to the daily bicycle trip to the baker from which he always returned wrapped in the irresistible aroma of warm bread. Claire immediately made a mental list of the items she hoped they still made and got up from the table without a word in order to follow him. It’d been decades since she had ridden a bicycle and she felt a little awkward trying to do it again.

“You’re not going to change?” Grandfather turned around. She’d almost forgotten the first rule of going out: one never left the house wearing anything other than street attire. Clothes had to be perfectly pressed, shoes polished to a shine, always one last check in the mirrors before going out the door. Maybe that was the mystery of the parallel mirrors, Claire thought, although one had to admit that even for a family with such high standards for personal grooming reflecting oneself into infinity was a little excessive.