The Exchange: Day 4

You know you’re a Burk when you’ve been in the country not three full days and you are awakened from a deep sleep by a woman holding a map in one hand and a note in the other. She is leaving. She is going with William down the street. He is cutting the grass for a neighbor and she is going with. There is no one at home. You need to get up. Make the breakfast. Take care of the chores. Then you take a bike and come find us. Don’t forget the helmet. Tu comprends??

And so the day begins. Having decided that the dog’s limp is bad enough to move “pay a vet bill larger than your paycheck” up on the to-do list, Bill is on his way to work with Gus. Sophie is at a friend’s house, due home later this morning. I am here, but I am not here long because this summer I am Will’s lawn care side-kick. William has a lawn care business. “Yard Boy, Inc.” He’s been distributing flyers for several seasons now, but no takers beyond pet care or the random leaf-raking gig. This summer he scored a good one,  and as a matter of safety I accompany him, ostensibly to water the potted plants and garden but also because sending a 12-year-old down the street on a lawn tractor towing a weed-wacker and a push mower strapped to a rickety little trailer is too much for me. Just between nous deux, I want to have a running vehicle in the driveway, a stack of clean towels and the ER on speed dial. Usually I make myself very busy on their property or take mini power walks circling it so William does not get upset having his mom around while he hauls, hefts, and heaves equipment and makes a man of the day. What—moi? Hover? No, I am just worried about those tomatoes and marigolds. Need water.

But what to do about the boy in the bed? The French boy. I know he is tired, but this is Monday morning and with it comes the American family chores and activities. I have already taught him, or asked him, to make the bed and see his own dishes into the dishwasher. I have pulled a basket out of Ellie’s closet for the dirty clothes now dotting the floor and done what I can to incorporate my little French elf into the busy-ness of the Burk house. Last night I actually handed him a little written list of chores, as I did with Will and Sophie, too. They were horrified. What??! Why? I wrote them out in French! Je suis desole. I have always thought that spelling it out gets ‘er done. This is my God complex, you see. But just like the other inhabitants here, “Aye, sorry! I forget”! soon becomes his most treasured phrase. So should I stay with him, make him feel at home? Or should I trot breathlessly along beside my own boy, who I can see out the window is putting the finishing touches on his bungee-cords configuration for all the stuff he straps to the trailer and will soon peel out of here at a whopping 6 mph. Then it occurs to me: a map and a note on the kitchen counter: Chez moi, that is exactly how you know you are home.

I am hurrying through the chores of the morning mostly because of the heat. Who wants to cut grass or drive on asphalt when the temps will soar to 90 degrees by 11 am. Incroyable! But I am also hurrying because we have our first outing planned: to the river. One of the coolest aspects of mapping a foreign exchange student into your world is that everyone in it becomes more pleasant. I have forgotten that bonus, but it was true with Anoukis, too. Children I rarely see or have strained interactions with, birth children, suddenly become the sweethearts I bore for this new addition to the family. They transform before my very eyes. Sophie has not attended church with us all summer, but suddenly here she is, fresh washed and sun-dressed by my side asking where we gonna take him for lunch. She smiles at Camille and asks him stuff and helps him with stuff and explains stuff and considers him in a way that warms my heart. Ahhhh, French boy, we are family.

Is it that they wish to clean up their act, behave nicely for each other and for his benefit? How come they don’t do that for my benefit? Are they aware that their behavior makes my heart gasp some days and makes me worry that when they all blow out of here there won’t be a single stick left in the nest? Now they joke, mes deux, they play around and they speak to each other in ways that haven’t happened in months. Where are my ‘keds’ and what have you done with them? Not only that, today Sophie is coming with us on our excursion and she is bringing a friend. My picnic impulse is at full bore. If I knew how to whistle standing there in the kitchen slinging cold cuts, I would. After years of the other, I discover what joy there is in planning a trip people actually want to go on.

It is one of my favorite places to go: the James River. Who doesn’t love a city with a river running through it? Paris, la Seine. London, the Thames. Madrid, el Manzanares. Remember my “Waters of the World” collection, plucked from rivers I traveled past thirty years ago? Perhaps I should add a few drops of the James. I love the way the buildings make their stately parade along its banks, and how from your tiny inconsequential spot on a rock in the middle of it you can see for miles. I have been on Belle Isle before, on my tiny postage-stamp of earth, unpacking my tote or backpack or bag of woes that got me here,  and when I stand up again, straighten my back and blink into the blinding sun I can’t help but marvel: Here is Richmond, VA, spread out before me in an endless panorama. Richmond: settlement founded on the river’s fall line, the place you can’t get a boat upstream any further so you settle on it. I am, metaphorically speaking, at the fall line in the life of our family, and I can’t get any further upstream. We’ll camp here.

Times past, I spent a lot of time river watching. To start, countless hours by the banks of Sandy Brook, quiet New England rambler through woods and along country lanes. Ale colored in the summer, stretched out thin and taut over its rock bed, here we once loved to “rock walk” by jumping from stone to exposed stone without slipping to fall in. Wouldn’t want to try that in the winter, when the surging dark brown water boils over the rocks and boulders the glaciers once picked up and then deposited like a child evaluating his pocket loot. Then for a short bit the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia, although that was a much more industrial city river. Not so inspiring, mainly because I couldn’t get close to it. And then, of course, my beloved Seine, fat and slow moving  through the stone banks and quays of Paris. How many hours have I stared into her amber eyes? A lifetime of silent moments still at the bottom of my heart’s pocket. I once cracked a bottle of new year’s champagne there il y a mille annees at my favorite spot, on the very tip of the Ile de la Cite. There you will still find it: Le Parc Henri IV, where the island comes to a point and divides the river, and sitting there with the breeze in your hair and the river at your feet you feel as though you command a great ship to wherever you wish to go. Three decades later: James, take me to family.

The passage of water, of course, is a metaphor for the passage of time, and you realize that each water molecule, like each moment in time, will never come again. Ever. You can watch it, but what your eyes are capturing is only the flux. You can reach down and scoop the cool water over your fingers, but you cannot hold it. Only in your memory, in your heart and your mind’s eye, will anything be preserved, and then only if you are paying attention. These days I try to pay attention really hard.

Today, the James is wide. We are up river from Belle Isle, off the North Bank Trail. The water is wide and shallow here, slow-moving and warm. Not like the river of the rapids downstream. I think maybe you could cross its entirety. I have not been here before, to Texas beach. Why is it called Texas Beach? I have no idea. Camille’s bother is in Texas at this very moment, with his American host family. Lucky kid. When I first met Camille at the airport I asked if he’d sat with Paul, his 15-year-old brother on the plane. This is a big adventure for a young boy and surely the company of an older brother would be of some comfort? “Eu, non,” says Camille, pretending to think about it. “Would you like to see him while you are here? We can get together with the other family–share ice cream, make conversation–“? “Mbah, non!” he says more emphatically, pretty insistent for having known each other all of 20 minutes. Later he explains to me en francais that the last time he saw his brother he beat on him and, if I understand correctly, that on the family group chat they are sharing with the parents at home, Paul was only sweet and chatty for a short bit until he got what he wanted: their Netflix password. Ooohh la la, le siblings! Fly high that flag of universality. Are we living parallel lives, or what?!

Another revelation from having a foreign exchange student in your house is this. You can live with a person without really knowing them at all. Isn’t that the plight of any modern parent with teens? I can feed it, and house it, and make sure it does what it needs to and get where it needs to go, and yet, how will I really relate to it? When will I really get to understand it? Talk to it? Learn it? And when will all the love, joy, excitement, admiration and esteem I feel for this child be relevant? When can I share it? Am I really supposed to stuff it? All of it? Surely I must not wait till the day they stand ten feet tall, tassel on their heads, diploma in hand, with their childhoods at their feet? Surely before then. I think the real reason kids pull away in their teens is that the full force of a parent’s love scares them. Most powerful force on the planet, even standing next to this river. Hydroelectric power? Paff! Try a mother’s love.

So when will I really know this boy? Three weeks is hardly enough time.  Will I sit him down and teach him about money, which clearly needs doing? He and his fat stack of $300 USD were nearly separated at Marshall’s on our shopping trip, prompting me to give a mini lesson on the subject. Does he want a snack? Does he need a hug? Should I ask him about stuff in France, knowing that it is partly my responsibility to make sure he speaks English and improves at it over the weeks? Tell me about your family, your pets your pastimes, what cars you like what music you know. Tell me. Tell me. Tell me. It is a teen’s worst nightmare, strapped into the front seat of a mini-van being grilled by the driver. Poor boy, would he the choice perhaps he would not have selected the family with home-schooling wannabe mom. Shall I quiz him with a map, seeing if he can point to where he is (he can’t), or where NC or DC are, the two out-of-state trips we will make? Can he locate the state of Virginia? Well, he can now. I’m all about the novelty and let’s face it, a paper Rand McNally road atlas is about as novel as it gets. My children think I’m a freak. But I know if I wait long enough, my kind of cool will come around again. Just like them turtlenecks. And I’ve got all the time in the world. But how will I get close to him? Shall I teach him how to separate lights from darks or get to the bottom of what he will and won’t eat? So much of an interaction between parent and child is instructive, corrective, didactic. Impart. Impart. Impart. Perhaps this is why the river. Today. Yes, the river. In it we are rebaptized into a single unteachable moment in time, revelling in it for all it contains, and carrying none of it home.

Looking out at the water, past the boys to the city in the distance and the expanse of sky and light that has still hours of life left, I am taken away by the beauty of it. Maybe that’s what Will and Camille are doing also. Un petit pause. They are sitting waist deep in the water with their backs to me, side by side and still, if for just a moment, gazing out at the water. It is a touching picture, their tanned little boy backs, their bony shoulders somehow graceful and pulsing to be men, perpetual bed head. What are they looking at? Can they see it, too? Sometimes I think the innocence deep within a child has a solid grasp on forever, and that’s why we so cherish it, the container. In you, child of mine, I can just touch eternity. In this moment the day appears endless. And I am okay with that.