Lunch in Paris (26 page)

Onion soup used to be made especially for winter market-goers like me. It’s the kind of soup my parents ate on their first
trip to Paris in the narrow cobblestone streets next to Les Halles. (My father, apparently, was tickled pink to be approached
by a middle-aged prostitute on the rue Saint-Denis.) The trucks would
converge on Paris’s central market at around five a.m., and the
vendeurs
would fill up on a bowl of steaming broth before spending hours in the cold hawking apples, oysters, and recently plucked
chickens.

I got home and began peeling with a vengeance. Working with one dullish serrated knife, I sliced a small Kilimanjaro of onions,
tears stinging my eyes and fogging up my contact lenses. Surely this was some kind of initiation. French soup required suffering.

That winter, I became a soup machine. Unlike the chunky American ones I’d grown up with, most French soups are smooth vegetable
veloutés,
eaten as a first course or with bread and cheese for a light meal. The idea of making soup out of
fresh
vegetables was new to me. In our house, matzo balls aside, soup was something you made from leftovers—bits and bobs that
had been hiding for an indeterminate length of time at the back of the fridge. Naturally, it never turned out the same way
twice. This concoction even had a name; we called it Tuesday Soup. Auntie Lynn used to make Sunday Soup, throwing in the week’s
scraps. When my mother got married, she decided she should have her own day of the week.

The best thing about learning to make French soup was that it required power tools. The hand blender became my new best friend;
the deafening bbbrrrizzzzzzzzzzz was a satisfying outlet for my frustrations. I had to be tender with Gwendal, solicitous
toward Nicole, jocund with Yanig, but the vegetables received no mercy. Carrots were crushed, potatoes pulverized, leeks boiled
to within an inch of their lives. I filled up the freezer with Ziploc bags of liquid solace.

My onion soup was a success. I stopped short of the ugly brown crocks with the single blunt handle, buying myself some thick
white ovenproof bowls instead. I bashed apart a
boule
of sourdough bread,
so stale the knife barely scratched the surface. I sprinkled a cushy layer of Gruyère on top, putting the whole thing under
the broiler until the cheese bubbled and the oven threatened to fill with smoke. It was good. In fact, it was excellent. But
a warm bowl of soup wasn’t quite enough to fill the cold spot that had opened up inside me.

O
n my mother’s most recent trip to Paris we stopped into Dehillerin, a famous French kitchenware supplier near Les Halles.
My mother was in search of a long rectangular springform pan; Aunt Joyce bought one in Paris twenty years ago and never found
another. We browsed the worn wooden aisles filled with miniature tart molds and sieves big enough to drain pasta for the Italian
army. We spotted the pan, and my mother, flushed with the thrill of the find, raced up to a gentleman in a white coat, and
before I could intervene, blurted out in English, “I’d like to buy this. Please.” I saw a half smile emerge, then disappear
under his mustache.

“Do you know what this is for?” asked the gentleman, in his best Maurice Chevalier English.

“I’m going to make cheesecake,” said my mother innocently.

“Ah, mais
non,
madame,” said the gentleman. “This is for pâté, madame, not for
gâteau
.” And with a perfectly straight face, he added, “Why do you want to buy
somesing
when you do
not
know what it is for?”

Americans take a sense of endless possibility for granted. It makes us optimistic, sometimes insensitive, often a little greedy.
In
the States, a salesperson would sell you his left foot if you wanted it, and probably gift-wrap it to boot. The idea that
an object has an immutable—a
correct
—use is a subtlety lost in our culture of the two-in-one. The idea that someone would prevent you from spending money to prove
this point is positively unimaginable.

There is something else at stake here, and that is the personal integrity of your
vendeur
. In France, the customer isn’t always right. On the contrary, the customer is often deeply wrong, and the person behind the
counter will not hesitate to tell you so. Why would you come into their shop to buy a skirt that doesn’t fit or a bottle of
wine that doesn’t complement your meal? There is still very much a
proper
way to do things, and more often than not, it’s the way things have always been done. Change is threatening; innovation is
considered downright dangerous. A salesperson in France is not so much there to do your bidding as to impart a morsel of their
folkloric knowledge, be it about wine, vanilla beans, or plumbing supplies. Since I moved to Paris I’ve radically expanded
my definition of an expert.

The
vendeur
stared us down, his hand stuffed, Napoleon style, over his heart, under his smock. To prevent a Waterloo-sized diplomatic
incident, I shoved my mother out onto the street, quickly paid for the pan, and left.

Back on the curb, I handed my mother the bag. “What was
that
all about?” she said.

I hardly knew where to begin. “You forgot to say
bonjour
.”

I
WAS HAVING
some trouble getting my family to understand the parameters of my new life.

Suddenly everything my mother said or did felt like a criticism. Believe it or not, this was a new feeling for me. I’d been
lucky. Unlike so many teenagers and young adults, I’d always
felt like my mother really “got” me. Now she didn’t understand a thing. She just kept piling on the questions. Of course it
was natural for her to ask about my life. But the deeper she dug, the more I got the sense that she didn’t want to know how
my life in Paris functioned. What she wanted to know was why I wasn’t doing all the things I would be doing if I still lived
in New York.

This wasn’t new. Even now, I know we are gearing up for a fight when she starts a sentence with “Why can’t you
just
…”

As in: Why can’t you
just: