Falling in with Sigrid, a girl as hard-edged as her name, during the predeparture orientation on Long Island had not been helpful. We were supposed to be preparing for our impending summer abroad, a cultural immersion program run by the American Field Service, which would begin with a month of classes and culminate in a monthlong homestay with a French family. Instead, we’d ditched the prep schedule to “party” in an abandoned college lounge.
Sigrid has to mean “up to no good” in some language. Flown in from one suburban wasteland or another, she had forced yellow hair, pointed features, and an inborn smirk; if it had been the aughts and not the eighties, she would have had multiple piercings and at least one Sanskrit tattoo. After several hours of drinking smuggled alcohol, she whipped out a joint, which she sprinkled with white powder from a small vial. Cocaine! Sigrid reeled in another blonde, who partook with gusto. This second girl looked like Marilyn Monroe, and we shellacked her in Maybelline to accentuate the resemblance, then took dozens of Polaroid pictures of ourselves, mostly the second blonde, who struck a series of half-lidded poses. In the course of forty-eight hours, we used most of the film intended to document our respective summers abroad.
I nearly left my camera behind. I nearly missed the plane. I almost wished I had missed the plane, because it hit a patch of rough air over the Atlantic and dipped its way to Europe in bell-curved swoops. I’d never been on an overseas flight and was petrified. By the time we got to France, I felt more dead than alive. I have no recollection of the journey out of Paris, other than that it took place under a sour pall of resentment at being cheated out of the most important part of the country. A lucky batch of students got to stay in the ?le de France area while the rest of us splintered off into various corners of the country. Somehow, my group made its way to the tiny backwater of Mauriac, a place so lost in the center of France that every French person I’ve met subsequently has furrowed their brow in confusion when I named the location of my July 1988 sojourn: “Où?! C’est dans quel département? Mais c’est n’importe où!,” which translates roughly into “Where the hell is that?”
Even a parochial American adolescent could tell that Mauriac was up somewhere in France’s armpit. I had finally gotten “out there”—outside my books and my town and into a life that could possibly be a story instead of just a life reading about other people’s stories—and yet I was still nowhere, in the kind of charmless spot even Peter Mayle couldn’t make appealing. Why, of all corners of France, from its alpine heights to its Mediterranean beaches to its lavender-scented hills to its chic metropolises, had I been sent to wretched Mauriac, a down-on-its-heels town with one hypermarché and a dwindling population of four thousand? A place known primarily for its cheese, which frankly isn’t a mark of distinction in rural France. A place founded as if in error, when the daughter of a Frankish king had a vision of the Virgin Mary carrying the baby Jesus and accompanied by Saint Peter, which led her to build a chapel by a small stream. She’d clearly been deluded onto this path to nowhere. Everything about this place was wrong and I, peevish teenage ingrate, felt wronged, too.
I was epically hungover and thoroughly jet-lagged, and like a child angrily scratching at a poison ivy rash to make it go away, I kept making it worse. I refused to enter my new time zone and slept instead, waking up at odd hours and reading, reading, reading.
Kafka’s opening line in The Trial seemed to carry a personal message, as it surely has for many readers feeling surly with the world: “Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.” Exactly right. I, too, was being unfairly punished. Fine, I’d been a bad kid, skipping out on orientation, but was that so disgraceful I had to be stuck in a town where acid-washed jeans were still the height of fashion? (Sigrid was long gone, swept off to some doubtless more sophisticated province where she was probably shooting up French heroin.)
The other kids in my unit surely hated me already. What kind of jerk has the audacity to blow off an entire transatlantic orientation program? Why come to France if you aren’t going to participate? Who’s so fancy or neurasthenic she can’t bother getting out of bed for thirty-six hours?
It felt appropriate then that I was reading The Trial, a tale of injustice if ever there was one. I, too, was the victim of a cruel and arbitrary yet somehow preordained fate. All my seventeen years, I’d never gotten to travel, a tragedy rubbed in by classmates from the wealthier parts of town, kids who seemed to fly off to Club Med every winter break, their peeled noses a mark of status upon return. My family, an unwieldy blend of stepfamilies totaling eight kids, never went on vacation. We didn’t have the money, there were too many of us, and not enough of us got along.
Instead, we had sporadic visits to indifferent grandparents in Florida and Virginia and long weekends of East Coast skiing, during which my brothers paired up with my city stepbrothers and dumped me in the singles line, yet another instance in which being the only girl was a strike against me. Once they abandoned me at Killington, where I descended the wrong slope of the mountain and cried into a mound of dirty snow until an announcement over the resort’s loudspeakers summoned me to return. Other kids at school seemed to go to Italy or even Disney World. I’d been to Disney World once, back when you had to pay per ride and so I got to choose exactly one (It’s a Small World, no less); we ate warm Saran-wrapped sandwiches that we brought with us because eating out was “a fortune”—don’t even think about asking for a Mickey Mouse–shaped balloon. I was too busy feeling deprived to realize that this was still in fact rather privileged.
And now, once again, my parents’ stinginess had ruined things; if only I’d been allowed to do the more upscale Experiment in International Living program rather than the cut-rate AFS. Of course I’d ended up tired and friendless in a lost patch of barely French France.