French Lessons: A Memoir (7 page)

In our dorm in Geneva a Palestinian girl, bloated and
acned, sat in the bathtub at the end of the hall crying, her
friend washing her hair because she didn't know how to
wash her own hair. The soap was in her hair and the water
was running down her shoulders. Her father beat her. There
was another immensely wealthy girl in our dorm who stole
compulsively. We were fascinated by her desire to steal. We
understood stealing-wanting precious objects, wanting
attention.

The school encouraged my belief that I had come
through my childhood and that adolescence, too, was behind me. I took up smoking in the smoking room. I drank
coffee at breakfast. I studied five hours a day. I listened to the
stories of the girls in my dorm, which always seemed grander and more important to me than stories at home because
they involved embassies, revolutions, transatlantic divorces.

I watched the other girls closely. Girls with thick manes of
hair, the most beautiful girls I had ever seen, Frenchspeaking Lebanese girls. The French-speaking students
wore tight wool pullovers, with white shirt cuffs folded over
the sweater in a way that made you lust over their wrists, and gold bracelets in rows on their wrists, real gold, from the
souks of Arabia. The American girls who had grown up in
Saudi Arabia looked like they had walked out of a i95os
Sears catalogue; in Saudi Arabia they lived in their own imaginary American world, unchangeable barbecues and picnics
and softball tournaments.

Pam was my best friend. She had grown up in Libya in an
oil company community; her parents had separated and
she was much too old for her age. She said "hon" and "babe"
all the time, like a waitress. She wore dresses of gauze and
lace and puffed sleeves, with hems six inches above her
knees. She had boyfriends in Libya, older men in their twenties, who told her it was good for her to masturbate. She
wore bikinis and gold hoop earrings and bracelets and six or
seven rings from the Tripoli gold market. She gave me one. I
helped her keep her grades up, showed her how to make
her botany drawings. She wanted me to help her be serious.
She told me stories about sex and drugs and boyfriends and
parties. I was her encyclopedia; she was my dirty magazine.
We walked across the marble floor through the salon where
Mlle Laurella sat, on our way to smoke a cigarette, and Laurella would say, "oh my dears you are so mince," and we
would feel smooth and slinky and beautiful.

There was a girl in the dorm named jean who looked like
me. She was serious and studious and did well in the school.
We invented a story that we were sisters, and told variations
to each other. In the yearbook she wrote: "Dearest sister
Alice, Remember that it was your mother who married my
father, then divorced him then married your father who
died and then remarried my father-what a flighty and
fickle woman, wherever she may be!" We loved reinventing our families, exercising our own control over death and divorce. I made up variants on that story to help me get to
sleep.

I look back at my handwriting from that year, in an assignment notebook that never got thrown out. It is small and
round and perfect, no variation from letter to letter. Mostly
what I have on record are conjugations. In basement study
hall before breakfast I copied verb conjugations like a
monk. I had a French grammar book, Bled's Spelling, and I did
extra exercises for the exceptions to the rules. I did this
work the way someone would run a marathon, waiting to
hit the wall at twenty miles, feeling the pain of the wall and
running through it. I liked to work before breakfast. I
thought I memorized better when my head was light.

I wanted life to be the same every day, and mostly it was.
We sat in the living room for mail call and listened for our
names to be read, in French, which was how I first heard my
name pronounced French style with the accent on the
second syllable, ah-LEASE. We had our first study hall before breakfast, our second before dinner, then we walked
across a lawn to the dining hall in the old building where the
boys lived.

Pam and I went on a diet together, the "grand regime." We
took the spongy inside out of the bread and ate the crust. At
breakfast we got to put a spoon of jam on the crust. We
wrote down what we ate every day; I used the same notebook for food and conjugations. Wednesday. Breakfast: two
crusts and coffee. And so on. I wrote "Force de volonte"
(force of will) across my notebook, the way other girls
wrote "Susie loves Ralph." There was chocolate in every
store, on every corner, chocolate bars with colored wrappers showing roses, bottles of milk, nuts in rows of six, three rows deep. For each bar of chocolate I didn't eat I
learned a verb.

I grew thinner and thinner. I ate French.

I had come from a house where the patterns had broken
down and the death that had broken them was not understood. Now I loved the loudspeaker and the study hall and
the marble floor because they made me feel hard and controlled and patterned; the harder I felt the more I felt the sorrowful world behind me grow dim and fake and powerless.
In my stomach was an almost constant moaning, as though I
were hollowed out inside. Before I got up in the morning I
ran my hand over my hip bone, to feel my outlines.

I went into the village in search of French. I went to the
train station. I bought tickets to Geneva, "aller et retour a
Geneve"-that is what you had to say to get a round trip
ticket. I loved to let it roll off my tongue, "alleretretour" in
one drum roll, "to go and return." I bought tickets just to say
it. Most of what I did, in town, I did in order to speak. Complicated conversations at the Tabac, the newsstand, the
grocery.

I was the only American who knew French who hadn't
grown up in a French-speaking country. I was put in the advanced French class. I was seated on the far right of the
room up in front, while all the people who lived in Frenchspeaking countries were in a row down the left side of the
classroom. Eric, who was sophisticated and kind of a roue
with a long thin neck, was there, and Chris, pouting and
playing with her colored pencils in the plastic case. She
spent all her time zipping that pencil case back and forth.
When called on, they spoke French effortlessly, but begrudgingly-"if you insist, if you insist ..." I could prac tically hear it under their breath as they tossed off a sentence. They were bored, the students on the left-hand row,
how could they be bored? Frichot, the teacher, calls on me. I
feel as if I'm on a stage, the lights go down and the desks
disappear. The spot is on me. I'm poised as I speak my lines
from the play we're reading. I speak my lines with muscles
quavering. I come up again and again on that "r," the sound
"r" in French, which is one of the hardest sounds for an
American to make.

In September my "r" is clunky, the one I've brought with
me from Minnesota. It is like cement overshoes, like wearing wooden clogs in a cathedral. It is like any number of
large objects in the world-all of them heavy, all of them
out of place, all of them obstacles. Je le heurte-I come up
against it like a wall.

I didn't realize that my "r" and my vowels were connected. It all went together. By concentrating too much on
the 'Y' I was making it worse because in French vowels are
primary and consonants follow from correct vowels. The
first priority is for The Mouth to be in the right position to
make the vowel sounds: lip muscles forward and tighter
than in English, the mouth poised and round. Americans
speaking French tend to chomp down hard on their consonants and swallow their vowels all together.

So that feeling of coming onto the "r" like a wall was part
of feeling the essence of my American speech patterns in
French, feeling them as foreign and awkward. I didn't know
at the time how important it was to feel that American "r"
like a big lump in my throat and to be dissatisfied about it.
Feeling the lump was the first step, the prerequisite to getting rid of it.

It happened over months but it felt like it happened in one class. I opened my mouth and I opened up; it slid out,
smooth and plush, a French "r." It was the sound my cat
makes when she wants to go out: between a purr and a
meouw, a gurgling deep in the throat. It wasn't loud, it didn't
interrupt the other sounds. It was smooth, and suave. It
felt-relaxed. It felt normal! I had it. With this "r" I could
speak French, I wouldn't be screaming my Americanness
every time I spoke. "R" was my passport.

I looked up at my teacher, M. Herve Frichot, former colonial school teacher from Madagascar. He had a goatee and
glasses with thick black frames. He was a skeptic but he was
looking at me now with deep respect. He hadn't thought I
could do it. He said, "You've done it." He added: "Vowels
next." But that was minor. I wasn't worried about the vowels
because I knew that since I had gotten the "r," I had already
started opening up my vowels. I could perfect them with the
same method I had used for the "r": First feeling them
wrong, like an impediment, feeling them again and again in
their wrongness and then, one day, opening up and letting
the right sound come. Relaxing. The "r" was the biggest hurdle; my system was now in place.

I looked over at the students on the left-hand row; suddenly they seemed less menacing. Chris had a meek nervous look on her face. Eric's hair was greasy and he was
scratching a red spot on his neck. I saw them, because I was
one of them now.

That was what woke me up: absorbing a new reality, repeating it, describing it, appreciating it. I felt a pull toward
learning I hadn't felt since fifth grade: quiet mastery of a subject. Knowing I knew the material, that I had it down. Knowing how to find out more. Inventing methods for listening and making them habits. Feeling a kind of tickle in my ear at
the pleasure of understanding. Then the pleasure of writing
down what I had heard and getting every detail, every accent
mark right.

The French have a verb for the kind of work I did at the
Swiss school: bosser, which comes from a word meaning
"hunched" and means hunkering down to work, bending
down over some precious matter and observing it.

I had found my ability to concentrate. I had woken up
from the sleep I had lapsed into on my ninth-grade desk.

The school's idea of learning was essentially French-the
old Third Republic idea that knowledge is a concrete body
that can be demonstrated and mastered. Memorization,
copying, repeating, taking words down in dictation: these
practices all come from French schools and they are the
practices I excelled in. Don't be original, learn from a readymade reality ready-to-hand. In French schools for many
years, children learned to draw in a class exercise called the
lecon de choses (lesson of things). They drew objects from either the natural or manufactured world and they labeled
them.

My whole year was a lecon de choses. There was the world
out there, the world of Switzerland and French language,
and I drew its contours and labeled it.

In February, the whole school moved up to a ski town in
the mountains called Montana (by now I was pronouncing
it MohntaNAH, not MonTANa). We skied everyday. It was
cold and sunny as we rode the chair lift. We saw crosses
where people had died in avalanches, making us feel like
brave adventurers. At the end of the ski term, we had a slalom race, one section of the tenth grade against another. I knocked over one flag, but my time was good. The gym
teacher took a picture of me coming down the course, with
the big number on my parka. I studied the picture and saw
the angle of my skis, a perfect hockey-stop angle, sending
up snow spray. At home I was the worst in sports; here, miraculously, I was good. It felt like my life had been given to
me to start over.

French had saved me.

When spring came we read The Great Gatsby in English
class. At the end of the novel, after Gatsby is murdered in his
swimming pool, the man telling Gatsby's story talks about
the Midwest. He is trying to understand Gatsby, who is from
the Midwest. We, in class, were trying to understand Gatsby.
I was suspicious of my English teacher, Mrs. Blackburne, because she was always giving us composition topics like "My
family doesn't understand me" or "a five-page autobiography"; I thought she was at it again, using Gatsby. I thought
she wanted us to identify with Gatsby-Gatsby who, as a
youth, kept a self-improvement notebook, Gatsby who reinvented himself as a man of the world.

The man telling Gatsby's story remembered how he felt
riding the train back to Minnesota from the East during his
own boarding-school holidays. There was a whole page
about the train, right near the end of the novel. It had less to
do with Gatsby than with this man telling the story, who
with the death of Gatsby became suddenly very old, and
saw the corruption of his world, and saw how far he had
come with all his midwestern hopes, only to be disillusioned. I felt like a forty-year-old man reading the story, a
tired New York bond salesman with the best part of my life
over. The page about the train and the swollen towns be yond the Ohio made my eyes sting. I couldn't explain it in
my paper-it seemed unfair to me that a book could make
me feel so much pain and loss, the sharp pain of Gatsby's
loneliness and ambition, the dull pain of the storyteller. I
identified with Gatsby, who was so self-made that no one
could say how he had gotten rich, and so alone in the world
that only two people came to his funeral. I identified with
Gatsby because I had spent the whole year inventing a myth
about my own rebirth and isolation. I couldn't say the obvious about my own life: I was afraid to go home, I was afraid
of living alone in the big house with my mother who was
sick and unhappy, I was dreading the charade of happiness.
I had learned a whole new language at boarding school but
it was a language for covering pain, not expressing it. I could
feel things about Gatsby and his loneliness that I couldn't
feel about myself. I felt sorry for him and protective.