Lunch in Paris (23 page)

I was conducting myself like a pro. I had succeeded in tuning my body to the French routine; my inner gremlin was no longer
screaming “Feed me!” I began to feel the slow fullness that comes from a light meal, lingered over for several hours. It was
different from the stuffed turkey feeling I usually had at home.

Then Marie-Chantal brought out the cake. “This was made for me by one of my constituents, she said,
un vrai gâteau Breton
.”
I didn’t know it at the time, but a
gâteau Breton
is essentially salted butter, with just enough flour and sugar to hold the thing together.

“
Elizabeth,
” she said, holding out her hand for my plate. “
Une petite part ou une normale
”—a small piece or a normal one?

“
Normale,
” I said, without thinking twice. But as the second syllable left my tongue, I felt an awful stillness in the room, and I
knew I’d made a mistake. I didn’t quite know where the error was, and I waited for someone to throw me a line.

“Are you sure?” said Marie-Chantal, still holding my plate in midair. “It’s very rich.” Her husband, a family doctor, looked
at me intently, like a father trying to prompt his child to the right answer in a spelling bee. I knew without turning my
head that Nicole wanted to crawl under the table on my behalf. I’d let down the sisterhood.

“
Oui, petite,
” I said, trying to regain lost ground and still wanting my normal piece of cake. I ate in silence.

It took me years to understand exactly what had happened that night. To understand why it wasn’t meant to be mean or humiliating,
even though it was. Simply put, in France, eating is a social activity, and it is socially unacceptable to be heavy. To them,
my American body was already on the verge of being overweight, and naturally, in the French way, I would want to watch myself.
I’m sure nobody, not even Marie-Chantal, thought I should deny myself dessert. But surely, I wouldn’t want to overdo it. I
wouldn’t want to be greedy. It was one little step, one small choice among so many others, that would keep things from ever
getting out of hand.

That’s the real reason why French women don’t get fat: every day they make
petites
decisions that keep the larger weight loss struggle from ever having to begin.

N
ot only does intercultural romance require two languages, two countries, and two bank accounts; it also requires two weddings.

Because there was no religious ceremony in Paris, we decided to have a Jewish ceremony and a small cocktail party back in
the United States. In early October, Gwendal and I packed up with Nicole, Yanig, Affif, and Annick for a trip to New York.

True, the New Jersey Turnpike would not have been my chosen introduction to my homeland, but you have to start somewhere.
We parked in front of the house in Teaneck. It’s a Tudor on a corner, not especially large, but with a little turret and some
ivy that made it seem like a castle to me when I returned from school each day. My mother and father bought the house just
before I was born. (The then shabby brownstone in Brooklyn Heights they
didn’t
buy is still a subject of lament.) My room has slanted walls and shelves filled with all the books I’ve ever read. It’s the
only home I’ve ever known; the place I’ve come back to, whether dumping my laundry after a trip to India, or just showing
up for dinner on the bus from Manhattan.

Nothing makes a new family cozy like sharing a bathroom. Affif and Annick were sleeping downstairs in the den. Everyone else
was upstairs: Yanig and Nicole in my room, Gwendal and I on an inflatable mattress in the third bedroom turned walk-in closet.
As I pushed aside my mother’s silk blouses to make room for my pillow, I was glad we’d already gone on our honeymoon.

It was a little surreal: two people who had been married for three months gearing up for another wedding. I was still settling
into my new title. I liked the words:
husband and wife,
so grown-up and serious, like playing house. I repeated them every day, as Gwendal walked in the door after work.
Hello, Husband,
I said, looking for an imaginary briefcase to snatch or a scotch and soda to stir. I turned the word over on my tongue like
a hard candy, shiny and formal on the outside, liquid and sentimental in the center.
Hus-band
. I have a husband. It sounded even weirder in French. The first time I heard Gwendal call me his wife, it took me a second
to figure out who he was referring to.
Je vais chercher ma femme.
That’s me. Bizarre.

When Nicole and Yanig came down for breakfast the next morning they looked around, wondering, I’m guessing, where the other
thirty guests were hiding. The dining room table was set for eight, but there was food for a battalion: Paul had run out to
get fresh bagels, and there was a platter the size of a birdbath laden with smoked salmon and whitefish, surrounded by romaine
lettuce, sliced tomatoes, and red onion.

My mother had taken out the silver. In our house, any excuse will do. Ever since I can remember, my mother has collected odd
serving pieces: art deco grabbers for ice cubes, and a Victorian meat fork that almost got me arrested at Heathrow. Her favorite
is a set of individual silver asparagus tongs, in the shape of asparagus. At the kind of candlelit dinners Edith Wharton or
Henry James attended, there would have been one of these at
every place setting, so the ladies and gents could elegantly nibble their whole asparagus without cutting (heaven forbid),
or sullying their fingers. This love of pomp and circumstance, an affection for the elegance and specificity of bygone days,
is part of my mother’s inheritance to me, along with the asparagus picker-uppers.