March 2019: French Lessons
The summer before the seventh grade, I got a letter in the mail. Because of my good grades, the junior high school said I was recommended to take a foreign language elective. The letter included a form to mail back with three choices: Spanish, German, or French.
I chose French.
I was not a good French student. Wrapping my tongue around another language was unlike anything I’d ever been asked to do in school. Our teacher was a petite Canadian woman who had somehow found herself in this small town halfway between Philadelphia and the Amish. She wore beautiful dresses and full make up and loved the overhead projector. She would put up a transparency with various verb conjugations and ask us to read them together, as a group. This is where I found that I could make myself invisible. I would mouth along, shrinking into myself. I couldn’t trust French. I wanted to - like all beautiful things, I wanted to know it all immediately and perfectly, without any of the time or practice or failure it would take to learn it. One day after school I came home and put on cartoons, and when Animaniacs began, it wasn’t the usual Animaniacs. They were singing the theme song but in another language. I remember how my ears clicked, how excited I was to realize what was happening. I went to the phone in the kitchen to call my friend Courtney (the only other Courtney I had ever met). “Animaniacs!” I exclaimed. “It’s in French!”
Our French textbook - On y va! - offered vocabulary lessons organized by activity. The first one we all learned was how to go to a restaurant. Je voudrais un Coca, s’il vous plait. The next lesson was how to find an apartment. What a bizarre but exciting thing for a seventh grader! The language to find an apartment - in Paris! Je voudrais un appartement avec quatre chambres. Whatever would we need quatre chambres for? I came up with a fantasy: I would find un appartement with quatre chambres and live there with three of my friends. There would be other Courtney, my friend Lindsey, and maybe my brother. Animaniacs would be in French every day. We’d go to all the cafes and order all of the Cocas we voudraised. The most beautiful thing about learning a foreign language at age thirteen was the immediate fantasy it gave me of being someone else, somewhere else. I chose French because Spanish seemed too practical and German seemed too harsh. I also had a crumb of history from my father, who apparently had been to France, and been to Paris, and in fact had spent three days at the Louvre. My father was a shit pumper who loved Nascar and smoked Marlboros. I couldn’t believe he had been to France. French was going to unlock something for me. French was going to transform me.
I did not like to practice. I remember the cold panic of weekly quizzes, guessing the answer. What is more important in France: ton anniversaire ou ton fete de nom? I circled birthday, then never forgot the correct answer - our French teacher saying that your Saint’s name day in France was much bigger than birthdays. When she had us recite verb conjugations, she found that I was just moving my lips. “Arretez!” she cried. “Catherine, seulement.” Catherine was my French name. It had a hard C at the front and transformed the later half into something effervescent. Caught, I guessed at the syllables on the screen, my face hot. At the end of the year, when I marked on my schedule that I would not take French II, our teacher clucked her tongue. “Rien, Catherine?” Then she shook her head. “N’est pas bien, n’est pas bien.”
Those final words of French echoed in me for so long. What would I ever need French for? Until suddenly, I am thirty six, and I find very cheap tickets to Paris in mid March. It’s back in November, and Emily and I are on our couch, eating take out and watching Top Chef. We are the opposite of French. We have never been to Paris. We are in need of fantasy. And so - On y va! - we book a trip to Paris. Now there are evenings we stand in the kitchen and try to practice our French. Nous avons trois chats, she says, her accent thick with Spanish (finally, someone who is worse at French than I am). Oui! I shout. C’est vrai! Je voudrais un cafe s’il vous plait. Je voudrais un croissant! Deux croissants! Touts les croissants!
There are so many moments I want to stand in the doorway of young Courtney’s life and just beam, for all the unknown, for all the love that’s yet to come. French was the first class I ever got a C in. I would stare in anxiety at the charts of verbs and the little drawings of cups of tea, bottles of water. Just you wait, I tell her. Just you wait.
xoxo,
c