French Lessons: A Memoir (9 page)

Mrs. Vanderveer had all the train schedules mastered for
our trip to the south of France. From the train window I
watched the landscapes change, from the gray roofs of Paris
to the blue slate roofs of the Loire and then the red roofs of
the Midi. The land got craggier, hillier, like a painting by
Cezanne: cubes of space overlapping.

Mrs. Vanderveer had organized a strategy for getting us
and our baggage off the train within the time constraint of
the three-minute stop. My mother wasn't strong enough to
carry hers and we didn't have time to make two trips up and
down the corridor of the train. Johnny threw all the bags out
the train window; Priscilla and I were waiting to catch them
from the quai.

We switched to a rental car. We visited Gallo-Roman ruins,
including an enormous aqueduct. We drove to Avignon,
where nine popes had lived in exile from Rome. We drove
through the town of Grasse, dedicated to growing flowers
for perfume: my joy perfume had started in those fields.
Mrs. Vanderveer read us salient facts from the Blue Guide.

"Augustus and the minister to Louis XV lived here."

"When Smollett passed this way he described it as 'very
inconsiderable, and indeed in a ruinous condition,' but he
was well-lodged, and 'treated with more politeness than we
had met with in any other part of France."'

"Bullet holes from World War II strafing can be observed
on the northeast corner of the cathedral."

"A dam had burst here in 1959, claiming 420 victims."

There was no inch of unknown territory; even the history
of visits to the town over the centuries had been recorded.
You had to think about France like a cubist, in overlapping
layers.

When we got to Cannes, Priscilla and I went straight to the
shopping district and got identical two-piece bathing suits
in an orange and pink flowered cotton. We snuck down to
the water where we met two Italian boys, waiting for girls
like us. The song "Hippy hippy dove vai?" was number one
on Radio Monte Carlo. We lay on the rocks with the Italian
boys and listened to the song. The air was warm and dry.
The rocks were hot. The boys knew other boys who walked
by, looked at us, murmuring phrases in Italian that made the
boys laugh deep pleasurable laughs. That night, after a sensible dinner with Johnny and the mothers, we snuck out
again.

"I'm gonna tell where you girls are going," Johnny threatened. We ignored him. I was wearing a sleeveless knit dress,
blue and yellow stripes. It was as many inches above the
knees as the College allowed. The Italian boy ran his hands
down the sides of the dress and asked me how old I was. I
told him I was fifteen and he laughed; he said he was twenty.
He looked much older to me, creased, with beard stubble.
He seemed reluctant to touch me after he found out I was
fifteen. "I should have lied," I thought. I ran back to the hotel
with Priscilla, up over the sea wall in the dark, giggling all
the way because we were so late. We walked into the hotel
room where our mothers had been waiting for us; my
mother's voice was high and shrill and tragic and Mrs. Vanderveer's low and firm and final. Priscilla apologized. She
looked sheepish and sincere. I was already calculating our
next escape: I couldn't wipe the devious look off my face or apologize to my mother, whose panicked voice made me
want to bolt. Priscilla and her mother always looked so normal to me; they acted the way mothers and teenage daughters were supposed to act. Was I a worse teenager than
Priscilla, I wondered, or was Priscilla a better liar, feigning
her daughterly affection?

A few days later, I ate a bouillabaisse with my mother,
alone, after the Vanderveers had left for England: a conciliatory bouillabaisse, big clawed shellfish, spicy red out of the
same pot. It was hard to get my mother to eat without thinking of her ulcer, and I was still on my breadcrust diet, but
France had gotten to both of us-its pleasure principleand our separate abnegations had broken down in sync.
The bouillabaisse involved a ritual of croutons, aioli, special
thin forks for penetrating mussels, bibs to encourage carefree manners. We went at the bouillabaisse with total determination. She forgot she was sick; I forgot I was angry. We
put away the whole pot.

Coming Home

In June I took the plane home. I could feel the French
sticking in my throat, the new muscles in my mouth. I had
my ear open, on the plane, for the sounds of anyone speaking French because those were my sounds now. I was full of
French, it was holding me up, running through me, a voice
in my head, a tickle in my ear, likely to be set off at any moment. A counter language. When I got off the plane the
American English sounded loud and thudding-like an insult or a lapse of faith. I would have to go hunting for French
sounds, if I wanted to keep going.

It wasn't easy. People's voices sounded stretched and
whiny-because of the diphthongs, I suppose. There was
no control, no rhythm in the language I heard. At the airport
in New York everyone was yelling and honking. The noise
kept on in my head when I got home to the Midwest, where
the streets were quiet. When I spoke I felt like I was outside
my own body, listening to someone else, and translating. I
felt small and neat and the people around me looked messy.
In bed at night I felt exposed, because there was no bunk
over me. No loudspeaker to wake me up. No reason to get
up.

I squeezed my French toothpaste tube dry to make it last
all summer. I doled out my Klorane "shampooing au
henne" (for auburn highlights) in tiny portions. I lived in my
tailored size 38 white cotton shirt, the kind the Lebanese
girls wore. I kept my last pack of Swiss "Camel Filtres" ("un
paquet de Camel Filtres, s'il vous plait") after the last cigarette was smoked. These objects were my proof that I had
lived in Europe. I had my orange and pink two-piece
bathing suit from Cannes; my Bled's grammar and my Cahier de composition, filled with verb conjugations, homework assignments, and the record of my diet; on my finger I
wore the Libyan gold ring that Pam gave me. M. Frichot had
awarded me a copy of Les Fleurs du mal at the end of the term.
He inscribed it "a ]a meilleure eleve du ioeme" (to the best
student in the tenth). He cut out the poems I wasn't ready
for yet.

My brother was home from college. He said he didn't recognize me because I was so thin. He approved. When he
saw me sulking around the house, he handed me a book
about the Black Panthers: "Here. Read about struggle. Read
about people with real problems." The Panthers had discovered an obscure California law that gave them the right to
carry guns, thereby protecting themselves against the racist,
violent police force of Oakland, California. They posed for
photographs wearing guns and berets.

Mary invited me to Lake Minnetonka for a boat ride. We
ran into Ted on his boat-fiberglass with a big outboard motor. He hadn't written me since confessing his love for Mary
a month after I left for Switzerland. Mary had dumped him
in April for David Bateman. He was dating Sue now. A hundred stories had transpired among my friends during the
school year. I couldn't keep track. According to my well rehearsed fantasy, Ted was supposed to fall in love with me
again the minute he saw me, thin and exotic in my French
bathing suit, exactly as we had imagined it together in the
cemetery the previous summer. Instead, he looked embarrassed. I froze.

I was seized with an enormous hunger; it was summer,
and I would go swimming by myself in Lake Harriet and
come home and eat Wonder Bread with margarine and cinnamon sugar on top of it until I didn't feel so small and neat
anymore.

At a lawn party at Mary's I discovered that my classmates
had new rituals: drinking from flasks, smoking pot in the
bushes, talking about rock concerts. I felt formal in my tailored white shirt. I stood watching them, twisting Pam's
gold ring around my ring finger.

Steve, a serious senior, offered me a tab of synthetic
mushrooms: "Don't worry, it's a mellow trip-perfect for
your first time." I spent the first six hours after taking the
drug in a coffee shop with Steve, rehearsing our philosophies of life while the buzz came on. I spent the rest of the
night perched on my bedspread reading Les Fleurs du mal.
Steve had said I would have visions. I didn't see much-the
world was covered in a slimy green film that came from having stayed too long under the fluorescent lights in the coffee
shop. But I heard noises. I heard the light bulb buzzing in my
room. I heard the plaster creaking under the wallpaper. I
heard every syllable of my own thoughts echoing back at
me as I read Baudelaire's "Invitation au voyage": "bit es-tu,
ou es-tu, ou es-to???" Where was I? The next day I had the
sensation of having lived for a hundred years in one night. I
felt thin again. Empty.

"You look so world-weary!" My mother was driving me to a needlepoint workshop at the Edina Needlepoint Emporium, to help me stop smoking. I concentrated on filling
holes with colored wool, slow and steady.

Louise was home from boarding school for the summer. I
thought she would understand me. She, too, had a year behind her that no one at home could share. We sat on the
floor of her room and chain-smoked until my stomach got
queasy. We didn't talk about loneliness. We complained
about our bodies. She told me at her school the girls took
Ex-Lax if they ate too much so they wouldn't gain weight. I
told her I wrote down every bite I ate, every day, in French.
She told me she had a rule always to leave half the food on
her plate, no matter what the portion. I told her I took the
center out of the bread and only ate the crust.

Mr. D and Louise invited me to the D family cabin at Lake
Azur, in the north of the state. I got to sit next to Mr. Don the
private plane. He told me his latest business plan: a chain of
bookstores, a new corporate logo, money from his profits
for the arts. Louise and I tried to stay on our diets at Lake
Azur, in spite of the cook's famous onion rings and steak.
Mr. D took us water skiing, rowing, fishing, walking. He
wanted us to be better friends to each other than we were.
We were skimming the surface.

I returned to my school in the fall in my new role as the
girl who had been away to Switzerland. At the annual
French Chapel I got to read the story of the birth of Jesus in
French, showing off my new accent. My teachers were impressed at my "r" and the way my intonation rose and fell. A
representative had come from Vassar College to tell us that
students there could design their own courses of study; one
boy had lived six months in a teepee in order to understand
the life of indigenous Americans. Vassar had a policy of ad mitting "unusual students" after the junior year. They admitted me.

I was a freshman in 1971, the height of the Vietnam War. I
took courses in political science and economics, telling myself I wanted to understand what had gone wrong in the
country. I tried to concentrate on the charts in Samuelson's
Economics, guns on one curve and butter on another, but I
couldn't. French was what I was good at. I had a stack of purple and white Nouveaux Classiques Larousse on the floor of my
dormitory; I was in a survey course of French theater from
the Middle Ages to the Theater of Cruelty. In the dorm, my
friends were passing around a book of Eastern Philosophy
for Westerners called Be Here Now. "I don't want to be here
now!" I told my roommate. I hated the idea of living in the
moment.

I left Vassar at the end of my freshman year to join my sister in Berkeley. I knew I was going to like it as soon as I
stepped off the plane. The air was easier to breathe, cool
and dry. On the way home from the airport, my sister
stopped at the Black Muslim bakery to get us muffins for our
breakfast. There were people in the bakery wearing fezzes,
saris, earrings as long as their necks, long robes, and short
leather jackets. The world was bigger here than at Vassar,
filled with people who had their own ideas about how to
live. You could see across the Bay Bridge to San Francisco
and across the Golden Gate Bridge to Mount Tamalpais. The
horizon was bigger here. My sister arranged for me to live in
a grass-matted Japanese teahouse in back of the house she
rented. I did political work to meet people. I worked for the
April Coalition City Council campaign, the McGovern for
President campaign, and for Bobby Seale, member of the
Black Panther Party, when he ran for mayor of Oakland. At Panther headquarters I met Ann Smock, who taught French
literature at Berkeley. I learned from her that Jean Genet had
been in New Haven to support the Panthers during their
1971 trial. Students and faculty at Yale had gone on strike in
solidarity. It was a revelation to me that literature could be
political-mastering the guns and butter charts might not
be the only way to change the world.

I enrolled in Ann Smock's contemporary poetry course in
the spring of my sophomore year. She talked about literature in a way that I recognized from my private experience
of reading but had never heard articulated. She didn't worship literature as "high art" the way my high school English
teachers did. She didn't drop names. She entered the poem
she was teaching. She showed us around. She was baffled by
literature, amused by it, suspicious of it. Literature is essential to survival and impossible to understand. Literature lies
and tells the truth about lying. Writing is the opposite of
making something present, I learned from her. Writing is
effacement. I say: a flower! and there rises the one that is absent from all bouquets. The paraphrase is from Mallarme's
"Crise de vers" (crisis in poetry), which she taught us. There
were poems in French that were nothing but love affairs
with the layers of meaning of a single word over time, she
told us. For a French poet the Littre dictionary was more
essential than having a soul: the dictionary was the soul of
poetry.

I got so wrapped up in a point she was making about the
Littre that I lit the filter end of my cigarette. Everyone in the
class laughed when they noticed. I took the cigarette out of
my mouth so I could laugh with them. I had been so intent
on the idea of the dictionary that for a moment I had forgotten myself. I had unlearned my most automatic habit in my relationship to the object world; it was exhilarating to be
distracted by ideas.