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and she deftly picks up the bits of meat with her fork while Grandmother concentrates on tossing the salad. Mother is still expatiating on the glories of Maxence & Fils. Father asks her if she wants to taste a fruity Minervois, which might be a bit on the heavy side. She swills nearly half a glass and says, “Yes, too sweet.” She’s irritated because Father hasn’t caught on to Maxence & Fils. I think he has other problems on his mind. Mother doesn’t like problems, except the ones she can solve immediately and brilliantly, like a drain to unstop, a room to paint, a child’s dress to make. She is proud that she managed to marry a man who has vineyards, a business, many friends, a great reputation. A good-looking man. Very tall, which is essential for her: she is tall, and needs taller. All her girlfriends from Lyon envy her. She’s made it, that’s all she wants to know. 
    Cheese time, and Mother makes sure Loli puts two petits-suisses on my dessert plate. “Please, just one!” I beg. But Mother is adamant. “Remember, without calcium, your bones will crumble, your body will be crippled, and you’ll never grow tall. Is that what you want?”
    What I want? A life without food. To go to heaven as soon as possible, or hell, or limbo, or any place provided there’s no food in it.
    Petits-suisses are less offensive than Camembert, and less slimy than yogurt, but anything made from milk has this sour smell. Grandmother peels an apple and cuts it up for me. She urges me to hide spoonfuls of petits-suisses between slices of apple. I try; the chalky paste ruins the cool purity of the fruit. Two spoonfuls, and I give up. Thank God Mother is busy again, pronouncing on the last two wines while eating her Roquefort. How can she put that ancient curdled milk into her mouth, so rotten it’s covered with blue spots, so putrid that, if she didn’t know it was Roquefort, she’d look for a dead rat behind the furniture?
    She professes that wines are always best tasted with cheese. She doesn’t use her nose, as Father always does before his lips touch the liquid. She swallows fast, and empties her glass. “Excellent, this one,” she says with complete self-assurance. Father tries to explain its pros and cons, but she isn’t listening.
    On school days, as soon as we’re done with lunch, I have to go and practice the piano for half an hour before we go back to school. Loli brings coffee, Mother takes her cup and saucer and leads me up into the music room, where she sits in an armchair and waits. Not that she enjoys listening to my mindless exercises, but she wants to make sure I never stop.
    Mother never had to play the piano, by the way. Why do I have to suffer what she didn’t? Because. Parce que c’est comme ça .

 
     
Cartwheel
    Again we’re getting ready for a show. “We” means madame Robichon and her ballet students, of whom Coralie and I are the most unwilling. There are nine of us, eight girls and one boy, Jordi Puch. He won’t come back next fall, he told me. He’d rather play rugby, but his mother wants him to finish the year. He says it’s okay, he likes our company. I like him. He is six, and in the downstairs class at Sainte-Blandine. Slender, with pale curly hair. Nimble, energetic. His gestures never look contrived. His feet stretch easily even though he never practices apart from the classes.
    The classes! Who ever got the idea of standing on their toes must have been demented. Justine has friends in Paris who take ballet lessons, and she says they don’t start pointe work until they are ten or eleven, because it can hurt your feet if they’re not “ossified”. Since the Easter vacation I’ve been calling Justine every Sunday morning, around eleven. Father wouldn’t allow it at first, but Justine explained that I’m her confidante. Father said, “All right, six minutes maximum, you’ll have to use the egg timer.”
     
    The show is next Wednesday, and today we rehearse at the theater.