Just One Day

Twenty-seven
JUNE
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Intro to French runs three days a week for six weeks, from eleven thirty to one, giving me yet another reason to be out of the House of Disapproval. Though I’m at Café Finlay five nights a week these days, and all day on weekends, on weekdays, I still don’t go in until five. And the restaurant is closed on Monday and Tuesday, so there’s a lot of dead time for Mom and me to avoid each other in.
On the first day of class, I arrive a half hour early and grab an iced tea from the little kiosk and find the classroom and start looking through my book. There’s lots of pictures of France, many from Paris.
The other students start to filter in. I expected college kids, but everyone except me is my parents’ age. One woman with frosted blond hair plops down at the desk next to mine and introduces herself as Carol and offers me a piece of gum. I gladly accept her handshake but decline the gum—it doesn’t seem very French to chew gum in class.
A birdlike woman with cropped gray hair strides in. She looks like she stepped out of a magazine in her tight linen pencil skirt and little silk blouse, both perfectly pressed, which seems impossible, given the ninety percent humidity outside. Plus, she’s wearing a scarf, also strange, given the ninety percent humidity.
Clearly, she is French. And if the scarf wasn’t a giveaway, then there’s the fact that she marches up to the front of the room and starts speaking. In French.
“Are we in the wrong class?” Carol whispers. Then the teacher goes to the board and writes her name, Madame Lambert, and the name of the class, Intro to French. She also writes it in French. “Oh, no such luck,” Carol says.
Madame Lambert turns to us and in the thickest accent imaginable tells us in English that this is beginning French, but that the best way to learn French is to speak and hear it. And that is about the only English I hear for the next hour and a half.
“Je m’appelle Thérèse Lambert,” she says, making it sound like this: Teh-rez. Lomb-behr. “Comment vous appelez-vous?”
The class stares at her. She repeats the question, gesturing to herself, then pointing to us. Still no one answers. She rolls her eyes and does this clicking with her teeth. She points to me. Clicks again, gestures for me to stand up. “Je m’appelle Thérèse Lambert,” she repeats, enunciating slowly and tapping her chest. “Comment t’appelles-tu?”
I stand there for a second frozen, feeling like it’s Céline again jabbering away at me disdainfully. Madame Lambert repeats the question. I get that she’s asking me my name. But I don’t speak French. If I did, I wouldn’t be here. In Intro to French.
But she’s just waiting now. She’s not letting me sit down.
“Je m’appelle Allyson?” I try.
She beams, as though I’ve just explained the origins of the French Revolution, in French. “Bravo! Enchantée, Allyson.”
And she goes around the class asking everyone else’s name the same way.
That was round one. Then comes round two: “Pourquoi voulez-vous apprendre le fran?ais?”
She repeats the question, writing it down on the board, circling certain words and writing their English translations. Pourquoi: why. Apprendre: learn. Voulez-vous: do you want. Oh, I see. She’s asking why we want to learn French.
I have no clue how to begin to answer that. That’s why I’m here.
But then she continues.
“Je veux apprendre le fran?ais parce que . . .” She circles Je veux: I want. Parce que: because. She repeats it three times. Then points to us.
“I can do this one. I know this word from the movie,” Carol whispers. She raises her hand. “Je veux apprendre le fran?ais parce que,” she stumbles over the words and her accent is awful, but Madame just watches her expectantly. “Parce que le divorce!”
“Excellent,” Madame Lambert says, only she says it in the French way, which makes it sound even more excellent. Le divorce, she writes on the board. “Divorce. La même,” she says. The same, she writes. Then she writes down le mariage and explains that this is the antonym.
Carol leans in. “When I divorced my husband, I told myself I was going to let myself get fat and I was going to learn French. If I do as well with the French as I’m doing with the fat, I’ll be fluent by September!”
Madame Lambert goes around the room, and people stumble to explain why they want to learn French. Two of the people are going on vacation in France. One is going to study art history and needs some French. One thinks it’s pretty. In each case, Madame writes down the word, its translation, and its opposite. Vacation: vacances. Work: travail.
I went first last time, and this time I’m last. I’m in a bit of panic by then, trying to think of what to say. How do you say accidents in French? Or because I think I might have made a mistake. Or Romeo and Juliet. Or to find a lost thing. Or because I don’t want to compete, I just want to speak French. But I don’t know how to say that in French. If I did, I wouldn’t be here.
Then I remember Willem. The Nutella. Falling in love versus being in love. How did he say it? Stain in French? Sash? Tache?
“Allyson,” she says. “Pourquoi veux-tu apprendre le fran?ais?”
“Je veux apprendre le fran?ais,” I begin, mimicking what I’ve just heard everyone else say. I’ve got that part down. “Parce que . . .” I stop to think. “Le tache,” I say finally.
It’s such a weird thing to say, if that’s what I’ve said. A stain. It doesn’t make any sense. But Madame Lambert gives a stern nod and writes la tache on the board. Then she writes task. I wonder if I remembered the word wrong. She looks at me, at my confusion. And then she writes another word on the board. La tache: stain.
I nod my head. Yes, that’s it. She doesn’t write down an opposite. There is no opposite of stain.
When we’re all done, Madame smiles and claps. “C’est courageux d’aller dans l’inconnu,” she says, writing it down on the board. She has us write it down and deconstruct it with a dictionary. Courageux we get is courageous. Dans is into. L'inconnu is the unknown. D’aller. It takes us twenty minutes, but we finally get it: It’s courageous to go into territory unknown. When we figure this out, the class is as proud as Madame.
Still, I spend the first week of class living in a state of half terror of being called on—because everyone gets called on a lot; there are only six of us, and Madame is a big fan of class participation. Whenever we get shy, she reminds us, “C’est courageux d’aller dans l’inconnu.” Eventually, I just sort of get over myself. I blunder every time I speak, and I know I’m butchering the grammar, and my pronunciation is awful, but then we’re all in the same boat. The more I do it, the less self-conscious I get and the easier it is to just try.
“I feel like a damn fool, but it might just be working,” Carol says one afternoon after class.
She and I and a few of the other students have started getting together for coffee or lunch after class to practice, to recover from Madame Lambert’s verbal barrages, and to deconstruct what she really means when she goes “pff” and blows air through her lips. There’s a whole language in her pffs.
“I think I had a dream in French,” Carol says. “I was telling my ex terrible things in perfect French.” She grins at the memory.
“I don’t know if I’m that advanced, but I’m definitely getting the hang of it,” I reply. “Or maybe I’m just getting the hang of feeling like an idiot.”
“Un idiot,” Carol says it in French. “Half the time, you add a French accent and it works. But getting over feeling like un idiot might just be half the battle.”
I imagine myself, alone in Paris. There are so many battles I’m going to have to fight, traveling alone, facing Céline, speaking French—all of it is so daunting, some days I can’t believe I’m actually even attempting it. But I think Carol might be right about this, and the more I flub and get over it in class, somehow, the better prepared I feel for the trip. Not just the French. All of it. C’est courageux d’aller dans l’inconnu.
_ _ _
At the restaurant, Babs blabs to the entire staff that I’m saving to go to Paris to meet my lover, and I’m learning French because he speaks no English, so now Gillian and Nathaniel have taken it upon themselves to tutor me. Babs is doing her part by adding a bunch of French items to the specials menu, including macarons, which apparently take hours to make, but when I eat them—oh, my God, I get what all the fuss is about. Pale pink, hard outside, but spongy and light and delicate inside, with a raspberry deliciousness filling.
In between classes, hanging with my fellow students, and being at work, I’m spending a fair amount of time, if not speaking French, then thinking about it. When Gillian buses plates into the kitchen, she’ll drill me on verbs. “Eat,” she’ll call out. “Je mange, tu manges, il mange, nous man- geons, vous mangez, ils mangent,” I’ll call back. Nathaniel, who doesn’t actually speak French but used to have a French girlfriend, teaches me how to swear. Specifically, how to fight with your girlfriend.
T’es toujours aussi salope? Are you always such a bitch?
T’as tes règles ou quoi? Are you on the rag or what?
And ferme ta gueule! Which he claims means: Shut your piehole!
“They can’t say ‘shut your piehole’ in France,” I say.
“Well, maybe it’s not a direct translation, but it’s pretty damn close,” he replies.
“But it’s so crass. The French are tasteful.”
“Dude, those people sainted Jerry Lewis. They’re human just like you and me.” He pauses, then grins. “Except for the women. They’re superhuman.”
I think of Céline and get a bad feeling in my stomach.
Another one of the waiters loans me his Rosetta Stone CDs, and I start practicing with those too. After a few weeks, I start to notice that my French is improving, that when Madame Lambert calls on me to describe what I’m eating for lunch, I can handle it. I start to speak in phrases, then sentences, sentences I don’t have to map out beforehand like I do with Mandarin. Somehow, it’s happening. I’m doing it.
_ _ _
One morning, toward the end of the month, I come downstairs to find Mom at the kitchen table. In front of her is the catalog from the community college and her checkbook. I say good morning and go the fridge for some orange juice. Mom just watches me. I’m about to take my juice out to the back patio, which is sort of what we’ve done if Dad’s not home as a buffer—if she’s in one room, I go into another—when she tells me to sit down.
“Your father and I have decided to reimburse you for your French class,” she says, ripping off the check. “It doesn’t mean we condone any part of this trip. Or condone your duplicity. We absolutely don’t. But the French class is part of your education, and you’re obviously taking it seriously, so you shouldn’t have to pay for it.”
She hands me the check. It’s for four hundred dollars. It’s a lot of money. But I’ve already saved nearly a thousand dollars, even with the money I paid for my class, and I just put a deposit down on an airplane ticket to Paris, and Babs is advancing me a week’s wages so I can buy it next week. And I have a month yet to save. The four hundred dollars would take the edge off. But the thing is, maybe I don’t need the edge to be off.
“It’s okay,” I tell Mom, handing back the check. “But thank you.”
“What, you don’t want it?”
“It’s not that. I don’t need it.”
“Of course you need it,” she retorts. “Paris is expensive.”
“I know, but I’m saving a lot of money from my job, and I’m hardly spending anything this summer. I don’t even have to pay for gas.” I try to make a joke out of it.”
“That’s another thing. If you’re going to be working until all hours, you should take the car at night.”
“That’s okay. I don’t want to leave you stranded.”
“Well, call me for a ride.”
“It’s late. And I usually get a lift home from someone.”
She takes the check back and with a violence that surprises me, rips it up. “Well, I can’t do anything for you anymore, can I?”
“What does that mean?”
“You don’t want my money or my car or my ride. I tried to help you get a job, and you don’t need me for that.”
“I’m nineteen,” I say.
“I am aware of how old you are, Allyson. I did give birth to you!” Her voice cracks like a whip, and the snap of it seems to startle even her.
Sometimes, you can only feel something by its absence. By the empty space it leaves behind. As I look at Mom, all pissed and pinched, I finally get that she’s not just angry. She’s hurt. A wave of sympathy washes over me, taking away a chink of my anger. Once it’s gone, I realize how much of it I have. How angry I am at her. Have been for this past year. Maybe a lot longer.
“I know you gave birth to me,” I tell her.
“It’s just I’ve spent nineteen years raising you, and now I’m being shut out of your life. I can’t know anything about you. I don’t know what classes you’re taking. I don’t know who you’re friends with anymore. I don’t know why you’re going to Paris.” She lets out something between a shudder and a sigh.
“But I know,” I tell her. “And for now, can’t that be enough?”
“No, it can’t,” she snaps.
“Well, it’ll have to be,” I snap back.
“So you dictate the rules now, is that it?”
“There aren’t any rules. I’m not dictating anything. I’m just saying you have to trust the job you did raising me.”
“Did. Past tense. I wish you’d stop talking like you’re laying me off from my job.”
I’m startled by that, not by her thinking of me as a job, so much as by the implication that I am in a position to do the firing. “I thought you were going to go back to some kind of PR job.”
“I was, wasn’t I?” She guffaws. “I said I’d do it when you started middle school. When you started high school. When you got your driver’s license.” She rubs her eyes with the heels of her hands. “Don’t you think if I’d wanted to go back, I’d have done it by now?”
“So why haven’t you?”
“It wasn’t what I wanted.”
“What do you want?”
“For things to be how they were.”
For some reason, this makes me angry. Because it’s both true—she wants to keep me fossilized—and such a lie. “Even when things were ‘how they were,’ it was never enough. I was never enough.”
Mom looks up, her eyes tired and surprised at the same time. “Of course you were,” she says. “You are.”
“You know what bothers me? How you and Dad always say you quit while you were ahead. There’s no such thing as quitting while you’re ahead. You quit while you were behind. That’s why you quit!”
Mom frowns, exasperated; it’s her dealing-with-a-crazy-teenager look, one I’ve gotten to know well this past year, my last year of actually being a teenager. Oddly enough, it wasn’t something she had to zing me with much before. Which I now realize was maybe part of the problem.
“You wanted more kids,” I continue. “And you had to settle for just me. And you’ve spent my whole life trying make me be enough.”
That gets her attention. “What are you talking about? You are enough.”
“No, I’m not. How can I be? I’m the one shot, the heir and the spare, so you have to make damn sure your one investment pays off because there’s no backup.”
“That’s ridiculous. You’re not an investment.”
“You treat me like one. You’ve poured all your expectations into me. It’s like I have to carry the load of hopes and dreams for all the kids you didn’t get to have.”
She shakes her head. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says in a quiet voice.
“Really? Medical school at thirteen. Come. On! What thirteen-year-old wants to go to medical school?”
For a moment, Mom looks likes she’s been punched in the gut. Then she places her hand on her stomach, as if covering the place of impact. “This thirteen-year-old.”
“What?” I’m totally confused now. But then I remember how in high school, Dad always sent me to Mom when I needed help with chem or bio, even though he was the doctor. And I can hear Mom reciting the pre-med requisites by heart when the college catalog came. And I think about the job she once had, doing public relations, but for a drug company. Then I remember what Grandma said to her at the disastrous Seder: That was always your dream.
“You?” I ask. “You wanted to be a doctor.”
She nods. “I was studying for the MCATs when I met your father. He was just in his first year of medical school and somehow found the time to tutor in his spare time. I took the tests, applied to ten schools, and didn’t get into one. Your father said it was because I didn’t have any lab experience. So I went to work at Glaxo, and I thought I’d apply again, but then your father and I got married, and I wound up moving over to PR, and then a few years went by, and we decided to start a family, and I didn’t want your father and me to both be in the midst of school and residencies with a small baby and then we had all the fertility issues. When we gave up on having another child, I quit working—because we could afford to live on your father’s income. I thought about applying again, but then I discovered I liked spending time with you. I didn’t want to be away from you.”
My head is spinning. “You always said you and Dad were set up.”
“We were. By the campus tutoring center. I never told you everything because I didn’t want you to feel like I’d given up on account of you.”
“You didn’t want me to know you’d quit when you were behind,” I clarify. Because isn’t that exactly what she did do?
Mom reaches out to grab my wrists. “No! Allyson, you’re wrong about quitting while you’re ahead. It means being grateful. Stopping when you realize what you have is enough.”
I don’t entirely believe her. “If that’s true, maybe you should quit while you’re ahead now—before things between us get really messed up.”
“Are you asking me to quit being your mother?”
At first I think the question is rhetorical, but then I see her looking at me, her eyes wide and fearful, and a little bit of my heart breaks to think she’d ever truly think that.
“No,” I say quietly. There’s a moment of silence as I steel myself to say the next thing. Mom stiffens, like she’s maybe steeling herself too. “But I am asking you to be a different kind of mother.”
She slumps back in her chair, I can’t tell if it’s in relief or defeat. “And what do I get out of this?”
For a brief second, I can picture us one day, having tea, me telling her all about what happened in Paris last summer, what will happen on this trip I’m about to take. One day. Just not yet.
“A different kind of daughter,” I say.