Just One Day (20 page)

She takes a slug of vodka, her eyes glinting knowingly. “Ahh, it’s those kind of answers
you’re after. Well, I can’t help you with that, but if you hustle into the walk-in
and find the buttermilk and the cream, I can give you the answer to the proverbial
question of how to make the perfect crème fraîche.”

Twenty-seven

JUNE

Home

I
ntro 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 français?”

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 français 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 français 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 français?”

“Je veux apprendre le français,”
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
tâche
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
pff
s.

“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?”