Laughter Trumps Every Ill
I am so tan right now it's disgusting. A caca color. But boy does it feel great to be young and brown and healthy and well-fed. When I lay out spread-eagled on my beach towel I can feel the sun invade all over and my organs feast on the light. In fact, regardless of what I put my body through when I come to Annecy—four kilos of Nutella, fifty wheels of cheese, a pound of marijuana, whatever—I think it's the healthiest time of the year for me, because I'm always so happy. Laughter trumps every ill.
Yesterday Caroline and I went for an eleven-mile bike ride with Grand-Pere, or rather, he took us, because even at seventy-eight, he can still lap us (I credit his twice-daily aperitif with keeping him in fighting form). In our defense, however, it is only fair to point out that while he was riding the bicycle equivalent of a La-Z-Boy, we had to take turns on the “third bike,” which we unhooked from the ceiling, releasing eddies of dust. The third bike was a big performer in the eighties, but it’s the kind that so hunches you forward when you ride that your head ends up lower than your butt, with a seat that minces your crotch into carpaccio two minutes into the run. I thought of how Laura and Russ just made it from Providence to Seattle on two wheels. Then I thought, they’re fucking crazy.
On a good bike though, or if you can deal with your butt’s becoming lasagne, the ride is gorgeous. My favorite part is not so much the stunning lakeside vistas with the purple-green mountains behind, but the moments when the path wends behind houses and I can see what people are growing in their potagers. It’s shocking to Amélie, who grew up in the country, that I can’t identify a carrot plant by its leaves when the orange cones I see at Stop&Shop are buried underground. I still get a kick out of the fact that people have the option here of getting nuts from trees instead of Planters’ flip-top cans—for some reason I don’t at all associate nuts as food that grows on trees (city girl). It gets dangerous when I’m craning my head to look back at a particularly attractive row of cabbage, and a covey of German lesbians who think they’re Lance Armstrong incarnate shears past. “Oh, please,” Caroline sneers. “Don’t be a martyr. And your hair looks like tempura. Wash that shit.”
I shouldn’t follow that with a paean to her and Amélie, but they can’t help the fact that they’re so otherwise fabulous. How is it that we find each other again so well, every summer? We all live and grow on disparate poles of the globe, and yet we seem to do it in tandem. Is it innate, part of our genealogical makeup, the route we’d take regardless of external factors? Or do we just manage to keep each other so close, even when we’re not—in email, in messages related through other bodies, in thought—that our psychic locations trump the physical? In quizzing the girls about the idiosyncrasies of their character makeup it’s revealed how many we communally own—secretly believing that imagining the worst possible outcome of a situation will prevent it from happening; choosing the same superpowers to fantasize about. (Guiltily, we admit that boogers can make a fabulous dinner or midnight snack.) The stories we tell after a year apart recreate our worlds for each other, simultaneously making us self-review (the yardstick I was talking about in the last entry). But our favorites—the canon of our years together, hauled out of the mind’s cellar, dusted off, and flipped through with pleasure—affirm and re-affirm our friendship and the shared experience of living with the same blood.
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