This stymied me for a second, both because it blocked access to half of the room at crunch kitchen-use time and because it was a little surprising to have a peasant just wander in off the street like that. Big, dark-haired, and unshaven, he tilted his chair back to watch us, consuming a good fourth of the space. “This is Monsieur B.,” Titi said, coming back through. “He’s the one who gave us the bales of hay we’re using as extra seats.”

I wasn’t sure the gift of hay excused him for having cramped maneuvering room for knife-wielding women the day before a wedding, but I smiled at him graciously. I liked the idea of associating with peasants. It made me feel as if I was about to lose my head, rather than that I had already lost it.

A few days ago, the first time Titi had mentioned Monsieur B., a local peasant, as a possible source of bales of hay, I had said, “A local what?”

“Paysan,” he said. I laughed incredulously. “What, you don’t have any peasants in America?”

“You still get to call people peasants?”

“Well, sure. That’s what he is. You know, he works the land.”

I gathered the word meant a career we would call “farmer,” but it was still the same word aristocrats had used for peasants for centuries until the latter started cutting the former’s heads off, which would tend to straighten out most people’s vocabulary. “And they don’t mind being called that? Peasants, I mean.”

“Laura, how can people mind being called what they are?”

Well, you know, we were busy, and with an attitude like that, I didn’t think I’d succeed in explaining America and political correctness to him. Besides, if Monsieur B. was a peasant, didn’t that make me a princess? The peasant smiled and asked me how the bales of hay were.

“Fantastic,” I said, hoping we weren’t going to get into the nitty-gritty detail of their quality. “Nice and, uh, square. Thank you.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Mamie free a leaf of lettuce from the pile of heads beside the sink and delicately scrub that one leaf under running water. After a couple minutes of attention, she set it in a bowl on one side and peeled off another leaf, glancing over her shoulder at our work as she did so. “The tomatoes look too small to me.”

I sighed and switched to quarters again. A bit of tomato squirted forth and caught me directly in the chin.

“You need to be cutting them in sixths, I think,” Justine said.

“They’re not too prickly?” the peasant asked. I could call him a peasant in my head and still hold up the American dream, I swear.