days combined, it seemed, relieved beyond description to not have to keep nocturnal watch over my traveler’s checks and my passport and my expensive camera, which all of the winter drug addicts in every youth hostel I slept in would have razored out of the bottom of my sleeping bag while I slept had I not remained, even in sleep, alert. When I came down to the bar to find Marie Nöelle, the place was open and busy, and there was the smell of coffee being ground each time an au lait was ordered. The room was warm and simple, with a stand-up bar, a small area at the cash register for lottery tickets and cigarettes, and a separate area with a pool table and a table soccer game up a few steps in the back. The crêperie, with its heavy, black cast-iron griddles and just a few tables, was in another room open and adjacent to the bar.
She put me to work at the bar at first, pulling espresso and steaming milk. She introduced me to one of the stout and ruddy-complexioned farmers and as we shook hands, his rough and calloused clasping mine, I said, “Bonjour, Roger.” And Roger bowed slightly and said, “Enchanté, Mademoiselle,” revealing his brown teeth. Marie Nöelle taught me how to pour his little ballon of vin rouge ordinaire with a good splash of water in it, because at eight-thirty in the morning, he and all of the other blue-clad men with terrible teeth who now stood against the bar, with manure and red dirt stuck to their black rubber boots, were on their first of many to follow. Throughout the day they would stop back in for “un coup” while their tractors sat haphazardly parked on the side of the road just outside. Bottles of Pernod, Ricard, and my favorite, the bitter orange-flavored Suze, hung upside down from a clever rack, and I learned to push the glass up against the spring-fitted nozzle to drain out a perfect one-ounce pour.
The eggs sat out at room temperature in the kitchen and Michel, the crêperie cook who wore big thick-lensed glasses that made his eyes huge above his mustache, let the cigarette dangle from his lips as he cracked them into the crêpe batter, made of buckwheat flour each day. The salad dressing was made in the bottom of the bowl with garlic, mustard, vinegar, and oil and tossed in with the Bibb lettuce that we bought at the little open air market that set up every morning across the street.
I stood often with Marino at her post at the cash register and sold lottery tickets, Gitanes, Gauloise, and Rothman Rouge by the carton, and from the register I could look straight into the crêperie where Michel spooned out the batter onto the oversized black turntable griddle and then swirled his little dowel of a baton around like a dj scratching the beat. He was decisive and swift, and he cracked the egg right onto the galette and sprinkled the grated Gruyère and laid out a slice of that jambon with the white fat cap over and over again, working the two griddles effortlessly. To finish and plate each galette, he used his metal spatula to fold in the four sides, forming a square from a circle with the contents exposed still at the center, and deftly ran the spatula under the savory crêpe, delivering it to the plate. “E voilà!” he said each time, and then turned to the next. That meal—with the salad right on top of the complet, and a bottle of the hard cider kept at truly cellar temperature in an actual cellar—was one I ate every day without ever getting bored with it. I had never before given a single thought to how different the lettuces and the cider and even the butter, bread, and eggs tasted when left at room temperature and never refrigerated, but now I was keenly aware of it.
For the duration of the winter I hibernated inside her warm little hub of life in that tiny village and earned a few francs by working every day in the bar or the crêperie or at the cash register selling cigarettes and lottery tickets. I fixated on the local shops—the boulangerie, poissonnerie, boucherie, fromagerie, and pâtisserie—and how they displayed their foods in that careful, precise, and focused way that never, in spite of all that precision and care, looked rigid or antiseptic or strained. Every piece of food