French Lessons: A Memoir (2 page)

After all, that is, everybody who writes is interested
in living inside themselves in order to tell what is
inside themselves. That is why writers have to have
two countries, the one where they belong and the one
in which they live really. The second one is romantic,
it is separate from themselves, it is not real but it is
really there.

-Gertrude Stein, Paris France (i 94o)

-Linda Orr, from "Her Visits," in A Certain X (1 980)

First Words

"Let's get her to say it." My sister was ambitious for me.

"She's only three." My brother was the skeptic.

"Come on, I think she can do it. Come on!"

,,All right, all right, let's see if she can do it."

"OK, repeat after us: 'Everything I like is.' "

"Everythingllike is."

And on it went, ending with the three big words: "illegal,"
"immoral," and "fattening."

Getting my sister and brother's attention, winning a place
in their games, was the biggest challenge. In an ideal world,
my sister would let me sit on her bed when her friend Jane
came over. My brother would let me watch Perry Mason
with him; together we would guess who did it. I couldn't
believe my luck when they decided to teach me a saying.
The two of them together! The saying was immortalized on
a piece of knotty pine one of them had brought back from
camp: "Everything I like is either illegal, immoral, or fattening." The words were burned on the wood with a special
tool you got to use in crafts class. The words were written,
not just printed, with curlicues on the ends of letters, and a
flourish underneath.

I didn't know what "illegal" meant. I didn't know what
"immoral" meant. I had a clue about "fattening," but I didn't
know what it had to do with "illegal" and "immoral." I figured if I could learn to say it, my brother and sister would let
me in on other games. "Everything I like is either illegal, immoral, or fattening. Everything I like is either illegal immoral
or fattening." I said it again and again until I was dizzy and all
the words dissolved into one word, "everythingilikeiseitherillegalimmoralorfattening."

"Not bad." They had a glint in their eye.

My parents gathered around. I performed the sentence
for them, with my brother and sister standing proudly by.
My father laughed loudest.

It was the biggest language thrill produced in the house
since my brother had learned the Tom Lehrer song "Fight
Fiercely Harvard" and explained to his elementary school
teacher that a football was a spheroid. ("Throw that spheroid down the field and fight! fight! fight!") The teacher had
called home to report my brother's astonishing vocabulary.

,well kids, let's hope it doesn't turn out to be true." My
mother made the exit line so she could get started on dinner. The rest of them scattered.

I was left standing in the living room, contemplating my
success. Daddy laughed. He understood. What a miracle. I
didn't even understand the sentence and it still worked! My
father looked just the way he looked when other adults
came over for dinner and they talked in the living room after
dinner, and he would lean back in his wing chair with his
legs crossed, and guffaw. I amused him, as if I were a
grownup. All it took was saying grownup words.

When I started to talk on my own, I couldn't be stopped. When I was in first grade, my sister's friends could hardly
stand to ride to school with me in the car. I was loud and
unrelenting. I liked to run my own bath water while I sang
the song of the rest of my life, endless verses with my own
lyrics: I would rule the world, I would sing on a stage, I
would travel the seas. My father liked to listen to me sing.

Listening now to my childhood as the French professor
I've become, what I hear first are scenes of language. Two
Yiddish words came down to me from hearing my mother
talk on the phone with her Jewish friends. She used a word
for incompetency, "shlemiel," and a word for wild nonsensical ideas, "mishegossen." I heard just enough Yiddish in
childhood to imagine a world of awkward, foolish people
with wild plans that turned to buffoonery. Yiddish sounds,
in and of themselves, were tempting, full of vulgar but thrilling possibilities, like "oy" with its diphthong you could
stretch in your mouth for as long or short as you wanted. My
grandmother, Ethel Yaeger, had a longer version of "oy": "by
vey ist mir." She mumbled it under her breath. There was
also "Gesundheit-ist besser wie krankeit," a ritual sentence
she used if one of us sneezed ("it's better than sickness").
There was "Gut in himmel," part acknowledgment of the
power of God, part anger at whatever inconvenience He
had caused.

The words stuck out too much for me to use at Northrop
Collegiate, the private girls' school I had gone to since kindergarten. They made me feel funny, "oy" especially. "Oy"
was in the same category as swear words, satisfying and ugly.
I liked to say it to myself. "Wherever did you learn to say
that," my mother asked, in mock shock, when I punctuated a sentence with "oy." When I got to college I heard people
`hying" and "oy veying" with great ease, loud and clear. They
sounded brazen to me.

I grew up half a block from a city lake in an old Minneapolis neighborhood populated by prosperous Republicans with names like "Colby" and "Dorsey" and "White." My
parents hadn't migrated with others of their generation to
the middle-class Jewish suburb, St. Louis Park, because my
father wanted to be near a lake. Our house had been built in
1914 for people with servants. There were front stairs and
back stairs, a bell button buried in the dining room floor,
and on the wall of the dining room, an English hunting
scene. There was an eight-burner restaurant stove with a
griddle for pancakes, and a butler's pantry with the cupboards painted cream outside and mandarin red inside.
There were five bedrooms and a library for my father, and a
clothes chute, and a separate garage with a big lilac tree, and
a rock garden for my mother. She had a garden smock and
gloves and would climb around out there while my father
was at work. In the spring the lilac bloomed and the smell
came into our house, the smell of our prosperity.

The previous owners had left a set of papers on the radiator in the dining room, which my parents found the day
they moved in. It was a detective's report assuring the old
owners that although we were Jews, our general comportment was in line with the gentility of the neighborhood.
Was the seller stupid enough to leave the report by mistake,
or did he want us to see it and to understand our social responsibilities? Did it prove that we belonged there, that we
were the "exception"? This episode sat in the back of my
mind as I grew up. I watched us. We were on trial, being upright for the neighborhood.

We were so American. It seems now that no one will ever
again have that sense of being American that we had then, in
the time between the Second World War and Vietnam. It
was the time of our father's success and our growing up.

We spoke American in that house: I can't reproduce this
language, but I know exactly what I mean by it. It was American more for what we talked about than how it sounded,
although it is amazing to think that in one generation, a language could become so native, so comfortable, so normal,
with no sense whatever of its relative newness: my parents
were, after all, the first ones in their families to be born into
English.

"Mom, why did you only go out with Jewish boys?"

"My god, I didn't even think about it. That was our world,
we had no choice. You've got to understand, things were
very different then. At Douglas School they said that Jews
smelled like garlic. We Jewish students sat together in grade
school, in high school, and at the University of Minnesota.
Why, we even had our own table at the library. It was so
limiting!"

The world had kept her at one table in the library. She
wanted our world to be different.

My mother still corrects my English grammar, in speech
and in writing: "'to whom,' not 'to who"'; "'effective,' not
'affective"'; "'he did well,' but'he is good."' She corrects the
number of times I use "very." She is against waste in language. Her sentences are short and blunt, yet ripe with innuendo and the promise that more is being said than meets
the ear. Now I write in the staccato Midwestern style she
taught me.

I could depend on each of my parents to utter fixed expressions in certain circumstances. My father brought the law home from work. "Don't make a federal case out of it,"
he would say. My mother would say-an expression from
around town, Irish maybe-"the jig is up!" When she and I
would come home from shopping for shoes, or a winter
coat, or a new school uniform, she'd open the back door of
the house and peek around the corner into the kitchen and
pronounce us "home again, Finnegan." I liked the satisfying
sounds, the click of the words over her palate, in "jig" and
"Finnegan."

Our dinner table was the place to learn language etiquette: what to say, what rhythm, when to step in, when to
keep out. Our table was civil and civic. Dinner was at the
same time every night, and it took forty-five minutes. Levine
Blue served the meal in time to get the last bus home to the
north side of town, where my father had grown up in a Jewish neighborhood, now a black neighborhood separated
from us by a freeway. My father sat at the head of the table
with his back to the kitchen door, still in his work suit,
brown, light brown shoes with the little holes up by the toe.
My sister was across the table from my father, eating fast so
she would be excused early. I was next to my mother and
across the table from my brother. My brother and I were
fighting under the table with our feet to see who could press
the servant's button under the oriental rug.

Then my father cut the meat. There was pot roast cooked
to a soft gray in onion soup mix and standing rib for occasions. Sometimes there were Swedish meatballs and only
rarely my father's favorite, tongue with Spanish rice, which
the kids weren't expected to eat. My father led the nightly
discussion on current events. He asked my brother questions. My brother could name all the members of the Cabinet except the postmaster general by the time he was nine. My father went to get the World Almanac from his study. He
read from it, to make sure my brother knew all the names,
and the spelling. My sister was fishing the last tomato out of
the wooden salad bowl, down at her end. She wanted to go
upstairs to her room and listen to an Elvis record on the hi-fi
and read fashion magazines. She had a dressing table full of
lipstick and brushes and combs and colognes. If I behaved
right she would let me come in and watch.