French Kids Eat Everything (9 page)

Reassured, Sophie finally began settling into school. It helped that her French speaking skills (like Claire's) had improved dramatically. In fact, both of our daughters had almost forgotten how to speak English. This was partly our fault: to help the girls adjust, we had agreed to speak exclusively French to them. But this had worked better than we expected: by late fall, Claire refused to speak English (and scowled when I tried to speak it to her). Sophie wasn't much better. One day, she innocently looked up at me and asked one of those questions that make you realize how young your children still are: “
Maman, pourquoi on parle Anglais?
” (Mommy, why do we speak English?). When she would consent to speak her native tongue, it came out with a strong French accent—she rolled her r's—and she stumbled over her words.

Although things were better, they were far from perfect. Despite having made friends, Sophie still complained about the food at the
cantine
(although now she did it in French, which for some strange reason I found less irritating). Without fail, she would always tell me that she was
affamé
(starving) when I picked her up after school. Guiltily, I would stuff snacks into her as soon as she jumped in the car. French people, of course, don't eat in their cars. So our crumb-filled backseat became a bit of an embarrassment (and, I suspect, the subject of scandalized village gossip). I would dart out of the classroom with Sophie, jog to the car, strap her in, and drive home. Not a great way to make friends with the other moms.

Still, by early November, Sophie had stopped crying in the mornings when I dropped her off at school. We had reached a new equilibrium, and I began to relax. But then we got our first dinner invitation.

La nourriture des enfants n'est pas un carburant.
Elle est constituée de culture, de paroles, et de plaisirs partagés non mesurables en même temps que de calories et de vitamines
.

Children's food is not fuel.
It is made up of intangible culture, words, and shared unquantifiable pleasures as much as calories and vitamins.

—Dr. Simone Gerber, French pediatrician

To understand why a simple dinner invitation could make
me nervous, a bit of background is necessary. When we first moved to France, social gatherings involving food made me anxious, mostly because I was afraid that I'd have to eat new things in new ways. I might have to wield nutcrackers to extract every last bit of meat from lobster claws. Or I might be asked to use a thin metal toothpick to extract slimy things (whose names I couldn't remember) from slimy shells. And then eat them—gracefully.

So it felt like an exam every time I sat down for a meal with other people, which was made all the more excruciating because the meals could last for two to three hours, or even more. The other thing that I found overwhelming about French meals was that several conversations would be going on at any one time. The French don't really have a linear approach to dialogue at the dinner table. The only rules seem to be that

The uninhibited interweaving of multiple conversations seemed to contradict the rigidity of the French approach to eating (I realized later that for the French, conversation and food go together like beer and sports do for North Americans). I found it intimidating and often simply couldn't keep up, much less get a word in edgewise. It didn't help that my French was far from perfect. I could carry on calm one-on-one conversations, but although I had a good accent, I still sometimes garbled longer sentences and was stumped by translations for complicated words. The pained, confused expressions on people's faces would bring me to a stumbling halt.

Admittedly, this wasn't only an anti-French feeling; I felt the same way about fancy meals anywhere. I remember one miserable meal at Oxford very clearly. I had been invited to sit at the High Table with the dons and found myself sitting face to face with one of the world's top experts in my area of study. He proceeded to grill me about my interests and background while I squirmed in my chair. Almost everything about the setting made me uncomfortable. For starters, there were way more forks, spoons, and knives surrounding my plate than I knew what to do with. Bewildered by the choices, I simply sat still while everyone else started eating. An attentive neighbor must have noticed my lost look; suavely, not missing a beat in the conversation, he reached over and briskly tapped the fork that I was meant to pick up. Grateful yet embarrassed, I started eating.

But my sense of relief didn't last long. We had been served green peas, my nemesis. My neighbors were deftly maneuvering them onto their forks and eating them without a second thought. I, on the other hand, tried to spear them with what I presumed was mannered delicacy (at home I would have used a spoon). But the peas (undercooked in a way only the British could manage) resisted, and I had to chase them around the plate. One vigorous swipe with my fork, and a particularly large pea gave a mighty jump across the table and landed on the plate of my interrogator, bringing our conversation to an abrupt halt.

Memories like these were hard to erase. So when our first dinner invitation came, I wasn't at all eager to accept. Virginie and Hugo, Philippe's old university friends, were organizing a reunion dinner. Half a dozen couples were invited, some of whom Philippe hadn't seen in years. My first reaction was, predictably, anxiety: passing muster at a dinner with old friends was not something I was looking forward to.

In fact, I knew that I probably wouldn't pass muster, at least not through engaging in rapid-fire, witty conversations around the dinner table. In desperation, I picked up a book on French etiquette that was intended for Americans living in France. As I read with a sinking feeling in my heart, Polly Platt's sage advice (based on decades of living in Paris) was to pretend to be a piece of furniture—an elegant chair, to be precise. That way, she advised, you wouldn't feel the need to speak, you wouldn't make everyone squirm (listening to your mangled French), and you wouldn't feel bad when no one spoke to you the entire evening.
This is going to be awful
, I thought.

To be frank, I was also worried that the dinner would be an occasion for Philippe's friends to evaluate me rather than befriend me. The question would apply to my children as well. Were they
bien éduqué
? This upped the ante because I knew that Sophie and Claire were simply not ready to eat the way French children did. Even if I managed to get through a meal without mishap, they probably wouldn't. They would whine (a serious faux pas), react negatively to the food being served (even worse), or refuse to eat (perhaps the worst offense of all).

My reaction spurred the second big fight of our year in France. I didn't want to go, and I certainly didn't want to bring our daughters although all of the other couples were apparently doing so. I didn't really understand why it was so important that we all go together, but it was clear that it was important to Philippe.

“We could leave the kids with your parents,” I suggested to my husband one evening.

“But all of the other children will be there, and they'll miss out on the fun!” protested Philippe.

“We won't start eating until really late, we'll finish way after midnight, and the kids will be exhausted! You wouldn't ask them to run a marathon at this age, so why ask them to stay up all night just for a dinner?” I retorted.

“Because!” snapped my husband, fuming. “That is how
I
was raised! And that is how French children
should
be raised!”

I realized I didn't really have an answer to that one. That
is
how French children are raised. From quite a young age, they accompany their parents through long dinners, which sometimes start very late by North American standards. And in France, get-togethers with family and close friends, especially meals, are often multigenerational affairs. In this case, everyone was not only welcome, but also
expected
to come. From my husband's perspective, it would be rude not to bring the entire family, as well as unfair to Sophie and Claire to exclude them. “Plus,” he argued, “how do you expect them to be able to handle long dinners well if they don't start now?”

I realized that he also had a point here. French kids have more stamina at the table than do most North American adults. I remembered our wedding: dozens of children had come, and they had all sat patiently throughout the entire meal. As we danced until the wee hours, they gradually disappeared without fuss. I later found that their parents had been discreetly bedding them down on a pile of coats and sweaters in a corner, where they slept blissfully while we danced right alongside them.

In contrast, many of my relatives began retreating before the night was over; they couldn't quite believe that the eight-course meal started at 9:00
P.M.
and still wasn't finished by midnight. Some of them missed dessert, and quite a few missed the dancing. One of the few exceptions was my eighty-nine-year-old grandmother, who had a strict sense of duty and a secret love of glamour that belied her staunchly Calvinist upbringing. She sat proudly upright in her chair, nodding approvingly as Philippe and I moved onto the dance floor for the opening bridal waltz (one of the few “Americanisms” that I insisted on), and then surprised everyone by spryly accepting her own turn on the dance floor.

Thinking about the French kids at our wedding, I began to change my mind. It's true, I thought. Sophie and Claire need to be able to keep up with the other children if they're going to fit in to French society. Philippe had won the argument.

Although I didn't want to admit it, part of me was looking
forward to the reunion dinner simply because I was feeling lonely. I hadn't made many new friends in the village yet. Most people kept their distance.

True, Philippe had met some old acquaintances. One night when we were out for drinks at the local brasserie, the burly bartender thrust out his hand in greeting. It turned out that he was Philippe's “cousin” (although that term seemed to be used very loosely in Brittany to refer to any blood relation, no matter how distant). One mother in the schoolyard turned out to be the daughter of one of my mother-in-law's childhood friends. Another turned out to be the nurse who had given my husband his vaccination shots as a teenager (“and not in the arm,” he grinningly told me). And there were some other faces I recognized, like the mayor's deputy (charmingly named Madame L'Amoureux) who had signed our marriage certificate a few years back. But we never got beyond formal, guarded conversations with people, whether old acquaintances or not. The casual complicity between neighbors that we'd had back home just didn't seem to be happening. French people, I was learning, were not open to divulging much to people with whom they didn't share a long personal history.

Another reason I wasn't meeting many people was the fact that the weather had changed. Strong winds whipped dark dense clouds across the bay, and stinging rain and fierce squalls were interspersed with the sunshine. At first, this was exhilarating; a welcome contrast to Vancouver, where low, gray clouds could stack themselves up against the mountains for months on end, and where the winter rains were like an endless, cold monsoon. But as the days got shorter, the sun disappeared. Autumn storms whistled through the house, sometimes so strongly that the walls shook and the wooden beams moaned. We stuffed small rolls of newspaper and rags in the cracks. The old stones grew cold and wet to the touch. Mold grew on the doors, the walls, even the windows. We wore wool hats at breakfast. The romance wore off fast. Our friend Andy had stuck to wandering in southern France for good reason, I realized. In the village, windows were shuttered, and there were fewer and fewer people outside.

It wasn't just the weather, however. I had to admit that I didn't have much in common with the villagers. This particular corner of Brittany is extremely traditional, rural, and Catholic. The French have the largest families in Europe, and the Bretons lead the pack. Most families had at least three children. The record-holder in our village was a woman who looked about my age and was the proud parent of fourteen children. Never raising her voice, and never smiling, she drove around town in a school bus with her alarmingly well-behaved offspring—the girls immaculately dressed, like their mother, in twin-set sweaters and sober skirts. Our Dennis the Menace children were not on their list of approved playmates.