A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries (10 page)

Frédérique’s parents were dead and she was being raised by her grandmother. Either because her grandmother didn’t know any better or because Frédérique was emulating her, she dressed and acted like an old lady. She wore galoshes and knitted shawls, and her long blond braids were tied up around her head, which was shaped like a heart. She made silly granny-chuckles and wiped at her eyes with a lace hankie, walked slump-shouldered, and—of all things!—she knitted during recreation in the park.

Francis Fortescue was a new student. Within a day he had usurped Frédérique’s position, which she’d held for several years, as School Weirdo Number One, because he looked and behaved exactly like a girl. He had a fine, pretty face, black hair, and big eyes whose lashes were so long and dark they looked fake. His dainty white hands fluttered so that you wanted to tie them down behind his back.

By the end of the week, Frédérique and Francis had become fast friends. They had begun to pair up for the walk to recreation in the park. Watching them—her, slump-shouldered and arthritic-looking, him traipsing daintily along—was so amusing that the rest of the class began to call them “
la mémère et sa petite-fille
,” the granny and her granddaughter.

Admittedly, I was no angel; I picked on them verbally as much as anybody, but had not—until that afternoon—raised a hand against them. It had not been a moral issue, only that physical violence nauseated me. But today during recreation, because I’d been in a particularly sour and envious mood, I’d pulled Frédérique’s hair.

Frédérique had just been kicked in the shin by Luc Wang, a huge, half-Chinese boy with a square head; she was hopping around on one leg, crying with a comical, twisted-up face. She looked so ridiculous that I, feeling an odd rush of blood in my lower stomach that seemed to flood outward to my toes and fingertips, came up from behind and swiftly tore one of the braids loose. It fell in a stiff, curving shape onto her shoulder. The look of shock and despair that came over her face made me feel so horrible that my stomach began to come up. I had to go sit on the ground with my back against a tree.

A fight then broke out between Francis Fortescue and Luc. Old Francis spun around and cried out in a high-pitched voice, “I’m tired of you, you big bully!” and slapped Luc hard across the face with a flat hand. While he stood leaning on one hip with his arms crossed, Luc, stunned, came at him with fists, and Francis went absolutely crazy. He started screaming like a wild monkey, doing a dance that looked very much like the Charleston I had seen in
Thoroughly Modern Millie.
He slapped, kicked, and scratched his opponent in a mad flailing of arms and legs. Luc, bewildered, embarrassed, his face like a big strawberry, fled.

Once Francis had calmed down he approached me (I was still recuperating by my tree) and said in perfect American, “And
you
,” pointing, “
you
should be ashamed of yourself. What did that poor girl ever do to
you?”

I was so upset I couldn’t speak. While Francis marched off to console Frédérique, I realized I hadn’t even known Francis was American; his last name was so weird and his French was so good.

Just as I was considering apologizing (in secret) to Frédérique and Francis, someone approached from the back of the bus and took the seat beside me. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Francis. He was sitting primly, arms resting on his
cartable
, legs crossed, staring straight ahead as though his presence were entirely accidental and he hadn’t seen me.

“I didn’t know you were American,” I said in a neutral voice, as an opening.

“You don’t know
any
thing about me but I know a lot about
you,
” he said in an annoying, mysterious way.

I turned toward the window. This was the longest bus ride in the world. My parents didn’t like for me to take public transportation by myself, but it would do in an emergency. I liked the bus much better than the metro although it took much longer, because it was less crowded and went practically straight to my door.

“Yes,” Francis continued in his loud, high-pitched voice. “For example, I know you live on Île Saint-Louis. I know you go to the boulangerie on Rue des Deux Ponts on your way home and sometimes on Saturdays.”

“How do you know that?” I said, frowning at him. He had a nasty little gleam in his eyes.

“Because I
live
on Rue des Deux Ponts,” he said. “You
never
look around you when you walk. You walk with your nose down like a nun.”

We rode on for a while in silence.

“My mother says I should talk to you about sharing a ride with you. My mother would take us in the morning and then someone from your house could pick us up at night. Or the other way around. Whatever floats your boat.”

“Maybe,” I said vaguely.

“You know, you’re not particularly nasty, really. Why did you do that today to Frédérique? You just up and flipped your lid, or what?”

“I don’t know.” The way he talked made me want to laugh for some reason: whatever floats your boat, walk with your nose down like a nun, up and flipped your lid. I hadn’t felt so curious in a long time, and curiosity always had a way of uplifting my spirits.

“Poor Frédérique,” Francis said thoughtfully, and sighed. “She’s such a dope, really.”

“Why are you friends with her if you don’t like her?”

“Oh, she’s okay. You know how it is. Walking
with
somebody to recreation is always better than walking alone.” This seemed profound to me, it touched on something that was disturbing me too.

“I have a dog and a tropical aquarium,” Francis said. “What do you have?”

“My mother has three Siamese cats.”

“My mother has a Deux-Cheveaux. What do your parents have?”

“A Peugeot 404.”

“I’m crazy about opera and I’m learning the violin.”

Opera? I thought. I knew that it had to do with singing but hadn’t the vaguest notion of it otherwise.

“What kind of name is that, Fortescue?”

“American. It’s my mother’s maiden name. I don’t know my father’s. It could have been Rumpelstiltskin for all I know.” He shrugged exaggeratedly and turned his eyes upward, under his fluttering lids.

I laughed. “You’re weird. You act like a girl.”

“I don’t act
like
anybody,” he said, “I act like me. And I know everything about sex and things already. My mother told me.”

“If you know everything then tell me this,” I said, and lowered my voice, even though we were speaking English. “Tell me why the zizis of American boys are round while the zizis of French boys are pointed.”

“It’s got nothing to do with if you’re French or American,” Francis explained matter-of-factly. “It has to do with which hospital you’re born in and also if you’re Jewish or Catholic or Protestant. It’s called circumcision. If you’re Catholic, they cut a tiny piece of skin off the end, see, and if you’re Jewish or Protestant, they don’t. No, wait—maybe it’s the other way around—if you’re Jewish, they cut a tiny piece of skin off…”

“I don’t believe you,” I said, squinting at him. It was more for effect than because I didn’t believe him.

He shrugged. “What do I care if you believe me or not, it’s the truth.”

I thought of all those zizis I’d seen and wondered how it could be that none of those boys were my friends at all, not even enough so that I could ask them such a simple question.

After a short silence, Francis told me he’d like to invite me over to see his aquarium and his dog but that he had to ask his mother first. I told him proudly that I didn’t have to ask anybody and invited him to come over and have a
pain au chocolat
for
gouter
.

Over the weekend, Francis met my parents and my brother Billy, and I met Francis’s mother, his dog, and his tropical fish. He had named every single fish in the tank and could tell them apart. The tank was the only clean thing in the entire apartment. The dog was the ugliest and stupidest dog I’d ever seen, a medium-sized white one with brown and black spots and no tail. You could call it for half an hour and it still wouldn’t come to you.

Mrs. Fortescue had long, knotty dark hair streaked with gray, the same black eyes with long lashes as her son, and a big stomach that made her look pregnant. Her sweater had holes in it and so did her pants and sneakers.

It looked like a storm had come through their apartment, which had a white linoleum floor and no rugs and dog hair everywhere. It looked like dog and it smelled like dog. Opera blasted through the main room, making the windows rattle. This was Mrs. Fortescue’s bedroom and the living room. The connecting room was empty except for boxes and a large, square table. On the table lay an enormous, flat piece of wood. Apparently they were building a train set, complete with mountain ranges, cow pastures, and Swiss villages. The work was going slowly. Francis said they’d started last spring. I contemplated the surrounding mess and was impressed, because in my house such disorder would never have been permitted.

Francis’s room was off down the hall. He owned three string puppets, two women and a man. One of the ladies was blond, wore a pink gown with gold trim, and the other was in dark purple with silver trim and had black hair. Francis told me Esperanza was the good one, the one in pink, and Serpentina was the “evil adulteress, murderess, and home-wrecker.” The little man was Don Francesco. “He’s kind, fragile, and believes anything they tell him,” Francis explained. “He always gets stuck in the middle between them and someone gets killed.”

They looked so alive sitting on Francis’s desk, staring with their lidded eyes, that they frightened me. I would not have liked to sleep with them staring at me like that.

Back at my place, at Saturday lunch, Candida hovered behind us like a big worried bird; her arms swooped down on the table and our shoulders from time to time, like giant wings. “Hi hi hi!” Francis giggled, hands fluttering. He flirtatiously slapped my brother’s shoulder once in a while and said, “My, my, are you a shy one!” and Billy would make an unhappy face. It seemed to me that Francis was just playing the game that was expected of him, but it didn’t seem obvious to Billy at all. Sunday evening, my parents discussed the ride situation over the telephone with Mrs. Fortescue, and by Monday, Francis and I were inseparable.

We arrived at school in Mrs. Fortescue’s Deux-Cheveaux. It was the messiest and noisiest tin can of a car I had ever been in in my life. There was so much dog hair on the seats that you could barely see the plaid pattern on the seatcovers; in the way back were empty yogurt containers that smelled like rotten milk, and paper wrappers from Eskimo popsicles with dog hair stuck to the melted chocolate. When I got out, the back of my blue blazer was covered with dog hair. I kept thinking on my way into the school that my father would have a heart attack if he ever saw Mrs. Fortescue’s car or apartment. I thought it would be a good idea to avoid that situation for as long as possible.