They had stopped outside Nimes for lunch. The plan had been not to drink at all at the restaurant, have a very light lunch and then to drive in to the town, park and have a look at the astonishingly well-preserved, ancient Roman temple there, La Maison Carree. Jodie had scheduled departure for 4 pm so they could reach a small, three star hotel just before Montpelier which Jodie had picked herself out of the Guide Michelin. It had a much lauded terrasse avec une belle vue, the guide enticingly proclaimed.
Since finishing her food, the little sweetheart [sorry – from the author] had been reading the newspaper. It was not that hot beneath the wisteria canopy and she found she could very effectively practice her French comprehension.
Brandy had ordered another glass of house white wine after the meal: her second after finishing the bottle. Helena had ordered a second plate of langoustines. After devouring her cheese.
“They’re still going on about this enfant sauvage,” said Jodie, studying the blurry photograph next to the column she was reading.
“’S’orseshit!!” said Helena cryptically, without looking up from the crustacean she was devouring. Brandy, seated next to Jodie, snorted into her glass of white wine, possibly signalling her agreement with Helena’s view, although possibly she was just drunk again and would laugh at anything. Brandy added no words to elaborate on her involuntary noise.
“How do you know?” said Jodie, ignoring her mother and lowering the French newspaper she had been reading into her lap and looking at Helena who was seated opposite her. Jodie’s intelligent, blue, 12-year old eyes were arrested by what she saw: Helena’s face, temporarily animated by her ungainly, fat-fingered but contented attempt to extract the meat of a langoustine from its protective orange shell. Jodie watched this process advance with a mixture of visible disgust and hidden envy.
“Gotcha,” announced Helena with provocative triumph at its inevitable end; she waggled the unshelled corpse in the air, then popped into her mouth and began chewing noisily. Brandy began to giggle. Lunch was now a war between the 35 year old carnivore and the pre-teen vegetarian.
“It’s dead Helena,” said Jodie, matter-of-factly. “It’s been boiled to death. That’s why it’s turned orange. Telling it you’ve “got it”, as you put it, is somewhat beside the point. It can’t hear you and even if it could it would not wish to participate in your little celebration of its own…” She shook her head in disgust at the spectacle and added under her breath, “…mutilation.”
“Did you enjoy your goats’ cheese salad, again, Jodie?” responded Helena smirking and provocatively picking up the animal’s dismembered claw, she rotated it between her face and Jodie’s. Jodie frowned and looked away from temptation.
Helena was on to her, she knew. Jodie had not enjoyed the salad and now wished that she had not converted to vegetarianism a month or so ago. Of the three new things that she had changed about herself, in response to the bullying at her old school — the Christianity, the patriotism and the vegetarianism— it was the latter she was least sure of. Maybe I’ve overdone this “respect for living things” thing she sometimes thought, wearily and unhappily. It was becoming harder to chide herself with the accusation that she was being weak every morning. She wasn’t so sure of her moral footing any longer.
On the other hand, if she wavered, there was the prospect of humiliation by Helena. And, there was always Helena to look at during mealtimes. There was something about Helena’s unselfconscious, gruesome meat eating habits that helped Jodie’s vegetarian resolve stiffen. And Helena had noticed Jodie’s response and had begun overdoing it for effect. She watched Helena at her distasteful inelegant chewing of the prawn’s corpse. With a mixture of awed disgust and amused bewilderment, the newspaper unmoving in her lap, she watched her mother’s lover reach for the slimed shell crackers in order to disinvest the little boiled creature’s arm of its armour, which was proving no evolutionary match for womankind that day.
“Good God,” said Jodie, aloud and pretty much involuntarily in response to the dismemberment occurring before her.
“Do you want a bib with that?” she asked. Helena’s face and t-shirt were besmirched with her lunch.
The claw shell broke stubbornly and with a not insubstantial merciless CRACK! under the weight of Helena’s muscular butchery converted into more effective force by mankind’s cunning application of Newtonian principles. “God help us,” sighed Jodie sadly in response to the devastation and slowly shook her head.
“He did Jodie. Look!” Helena raised the broken claw to her mouth and began to eat the contents of it.
“He gave us seafood, darling!” she continued.
Brandy laughed into her glass of white wine, but then remembered her parental duty and laid her hand sympathetically and kindly on her daughter’s back and rubbed it up and down. Jodie appreciated the sympathy and looked at her mother, who then burst into laughter again, at her daughter’s expression. But the expression her mother returned also had love in it. And pity.
“You’re animals, you two, you know that?” said Jodie, somewhat for comic effect.
“So are you,” Helena responded sharply and cackled. Jodie hadn’t seen that one coming. Brandy snorted again, spilled her wine onto her dress and quietly exclaimed – “shit!”- in response to the accident, but carried on laughing.
“OK. Very funny.” said Jodie, but not so unhappily. She liked it when the two women enjoyed themselves. She paused whilst they laughed. Helena openly, Brandy trying to hide it— because of the love she had for Jodie—but not succeeding. Rapidly, it became a giggle-frenzy. The two women looked at each other and at the sight of each other’s laughing faces they burst into further, stronger laughter.
Serious conversation about the enfant sauvage phenomenon, real or not, was now pointless.
“Are you two gonna get drunk every time we stop for lunch?” said Jodie, genuinely a little exasperated by the two of them. “God help us. I wanna get to Omaha Beach for D-Day, you know that? We’re behind the schedule I drew up.”
There was more insensitive cackling from the two women in response to this reprimand about the schedule. Their red-haired waitress came up to their table, smiling and asked if everything was OK.
“Oui, cava bien. Merci beaucoup,” said Jodie smilingly and reassuringly. No one was laughing at the food. The waitress retreated bemused.
“You’re regressing you two. You are attracting attention now as well.” This made things worse. The two ladies found the implications of childishness and conspicuous disreputability even funnier. Jodie persisted. She had a serious point to make.
“I wanna get there for D-Day, you both know that. It’s important to me,” she said. “If you get smashed every time…”
“You missed it… D-Day…” Brandy gasped for breath intermittently, gripped by hysterical laughter, “by 31 years,” she squeaked.
“And you wouldn’t have enjoyed it either,” added Helena, almost unable to speak. “People got killed.”
“Nazi soldiers for example,” she continued, unable to stop herself.
“OK, Helena. Stop now,” Brandy said, a parental nerve twitching, but she continued to laugh.
“Oops,” said Helena into her cupped hand.
“Oh, that’s funny, is it?” said Jodie.
“Honey, come on we’re just fooling around a little OK? Don’t get upset” pleaded Brandy, in a conciliatory tone.
“Yes, about Nazis anyway,” said Helena.
“Helena, enough, OK.” said Brandy, more crossly, trying to prevent another eruption.
“I can handle this,” said Jodie to her mother. She continued,
“Some of those Nazis were just young and misled, you know that? And they had sisters and nieces and cousins…”
“Misled?” said Helena, mockingly. “Oh no, that might have given the good guys an edge. Maybe that’s why we won? Shit! Poor Nazis!”
“Helena, stop! She didn’t mean misled that way,” said Brandy, more sharply now.
“And American soldiers, Jodie. They didn’t have sisters, or nieces.” They started to talk over each other now.
“The good guys, Helena? Is it ever as simple as that?” said Jodie “Was World War II a goddamn Disney movie, the kind you think I should keep making for the rest of my childhood? The good guys? OK, let me see, the British, the snobby imperialists, who you hate…”
“Oh Christ,…” said Helena, wearily. “Not this again. Listen, if you’re smart you’ll stay a Disney girl as long as you can. People like that shit.”
”Fine, but shit is the word because it is not exactly art, is it Helena?”
“OK,” said Helena, a little confusedly. “But nor is war.” The volume at the table had fallen now. They were relapsing into discussion.
“No Helena, war is not art, but it does have something in common with it?”
“Oh really,” said Helena, now looking down at her unfinished platter without smiling.
“Yes. It’s generally more complex than a damn Disney movie.”
Helena did not respond at first, then spoke.
“Not that one, Jodie. Not that one.” She said shaking her head, looking down at her plate.
“God, you two…” moaned Brandy in exasperation. Jodie trembled a little, but to her mother’s surprise she then spoke, quite steadily.
“Have you ever heard of the 12th SS Panzer Division?” asked Jodie. Helena raised her eyebrows.
“No, Jodie, I have not. But they sound fascinating. I’ll be sure to look them up when I’m next at the library,” said Helena, with an attempt at sarcastic boredom but unnerved by the specificity.
“No need. I’ll tell you about them. OK?” replied Jodie.
“No, but anyway,” Helena’s confidence was knocked now by the steadiness in Jodie’s voice. She was looking down at her empty langoustines shells and then she decided to look up, but not into Jodie’s face. She’d finished the last langoustine, which she had eaten merely to annoy Jodie. She felt trapped like something was coming but she had nothing to do but listen. She had come back from the restroom fairly recently and couldn’t pretend to go again.
“OK?” repeated Jodie.
Helena sighed, shook her head wearily and looked around at the dappled wisteria-shaded patio. The only noise that of fellow diners, mostly French. Another American table was audible. There was birdsong. Cutlery and crockery, chattered, entwined with the sounds of conversation. She looked back at Jodie, who said in the midst of all that enjoyable peacetime eating—
“About 65% of the 12th SS Panzer Division were 16 or 17 year old children.”
There was a silence then at the table. A silence Helena did not want, but it was powerful and for a moment it reigned over the three females as if demanding to be heard.
After a few moments, the school girl continued, “They were boys Helena. They were teenagers. German boys. Our army even found 12 year old girls operating an anti-aircraft gun.”
Helena just stared at her plate. Then Jodie’s mother asked quietly,
“Is that true?”
“Yes,” said Jodie. She learned forward, to as far as the point where Helena had sardonically twirled the claw between them. Jodie Foster spoke at her downcast face.
“They were just kids. Adolescents. ” she said. “And guess where they fought Helena?”
Brandy was silent observing her daughter.
“Was this that summer project, honey? That’s how you know this?” Then she realised something and put her hand to her forehead. “Oh God, this is what they booed you in class…Oh my God… sweetheart. This is what you wouldn’t show me?”
Jodie continued, looking at Helena’s face. Helena looked down at her plate and exhaled, but she could find no words of rebuttal. Her love for the girl opposite stopped her.
“Where did they fight Helena?”
Helena shook her head, and said weakly, trying to maintain her previous vein of sarcastic humour, “I’ve honestly no idea, but…”
Jodie’s eyes were tearing up now.
“Normandy, Helena. They fought in Normandy. D-Day. They incurred 60% casualties there.” The little girl’s voice broke then.
“Boys. We – the good guys, I mean – killed a lot of them. Children. ” She paused then said, angrily,
“Now funny THAT Helena! Disney THAT!”
The complex girl then stood up, pushed her chair in, folded her napkin, dropped it on the table and said quietly, with a tear-stained face,
“I’m going for a walk. Excuse me.”
There was noticeable hush in the restaurant from the tables nearby, because of Jodie’s intensity, rather than any voices raised in anger. The argument had been noticed by those close by. Helena, head down, eyeing the spent shells, could hear Jodie’s retreating footfall. Exasperated, she raised her head, then she stood, knocking over her chair and shouted loudly and drunkenly but protectively, after the girl she loved so much,
“Your heart’s too fat, kid, you know that?! It is NOT the smart move in this life!”
Immediately, the terrace fell quiet. Brandy blushed, put her glass down, caught the waitress’s eye and signalled for the check.
But the young child did not flinch at the proffered strategic correction that had been shouted after her and instead kept walking without turning around. In fact, in her pink t-shirt, white shorts and snapping pale blue flip-flops, which could be heard above the hush along with her footfall, the rather ordinary looking girl appeared unusually impervious to the wisdom she had just been offered and on reaching the steps, descended them confidently, determinedly, her head defiantly but unpretentiously raised and moreover, as far as the other diners looking after her retreating figure could tell, with the dimensions of her heart, wholly unchanged.
Jodie Foster and the Super 8 