Me Talk Pretty One Day (19 page)

With practice I will eventually realize my goal; in the meantime, come to Paris and you will find me, headphones plugged tight
in my external audio meatus, walking the quays and whispering, “Has anything else been inserted into your anus? Has anything
else been inserted into your anus?”

T
HERE ARE, I HAVE NOTICED
, two basic types of French spoken by Americans vacationing in Paris: the Hard Kind and the Easy Kind. The Hard Kind involves
the conjugation of wily verbs and the science of placing them alongside various other words in order to form such sentences
as “I go him say good afternoon” and “No, not to him I no go it him say now.”

The second, less complicated form of French amounts to screaming English at the top of your lungs, much the same way you’d
shout at a deaf person or the dog you thought you could train to stay off the sofa. Doubt and hesitation are completely unnecessary,
as Easy French is rooted in the premise that, if properly packed, the rest of the world could fit within the confines of Reno,
Nevada. The speaker carries no pocket dictionary and never suffers the humiliation that inevitably comes with pointing to
the menu and ordering the day of the week. With Easy French, eating out involves a simple “BRING ME A STEAK.”

Having undertaken the study of Hard French, I’ll overhear such requests and glare across the room, thinking, “That’s Mister
Steak to you, buddy.” Of all the stumbling blocks inherent in learning this language, the greatest for me is the principle
that each noun has a corresponding sex that affects both its articles and its adjectives. Because it is a female and lays
eggs, a chicken is masculine. Vagina is masculine as well, while the word masculinity is feminine. Forced by the grammar to
take a stand one way or the other, hermaphrodite is male and indecisiveness female.

I spent months searching for some secret code before I realized that common sense has nothing to do with it. Hysteria, psychosis,
torture, depression: I was told that if something is unpleasant, it’s probably feminine. This encouraged me, but the theory
was blown by such masculine nouns as murder, toothache, and Rollerblade. I have no problem learning the words themselves,
it’s the sexes that trip me up and refuse to stick.

What’s the trick to remembering that a sandwich is masculine? What qualities does it share with anyone in possession of a
penis? I’ll tell myself that a sandwich is masculine because if left alone for a week or two, it will eventually grow a beard.
This works until it’s time to order and I decide that because it sometimes loses its makeup, a sandwich is undoubtedly feminine.

I just can’t manage to keep my stories straight. Hoping I might learn through repetition, I tried using gender in my everyday
English. “Hi, guys,” I’d say, opening a new box of paper clips, or “Hey, Hugh, have you seen my belt? I can’t find her anywhere.”
I invented personalities for the objects on my dresser and set them up on blind dates. When things didn’t work out with my
wallet, my watch drove a wedge between my hairbrush and my lighter. The scenarios reminded me of my youth, when my sisters
and I would enact epic dramas with our food. Ketchup-wigged french fries would march across our plates, engaging in brief
affairs or heated disputes over carrot coins while burly chicken legs guarded the perimeter, ready to jump in should things
get out of hand. Sexes were assigned at our discretion and were subject to change from one night to the next — unlike here,
where the corncob and the string bean remain locked in their rigid masculine roles. Say what you like about southern social
structure, but at least in North Carolina a hot dog is free to swing both ways.

Nothing in France is free from sexual assignment. I was leafing through the dictionary, trying to complete a homework assignment,
when I noticed the French had prescribed genders for the various land masses and natural wonders we Americans had always thought
of as sexless, Niagara Falls is feminine and, against all reason, the Grand Canyon is masculine. Georgia and Florida are female,
but Montana and Utah are male. New England is a she, while the vast area we call the Midwest is just one big guy. I wonder
whose job it was to assign these sexes in the first place. Did he do his work right there in the sanitarium, or did they rent
him a little office where he could get away from all the noise?

There are times when you can swallow the article and others when it must be clearly pronounced, as the word has two different
meanings, one masculine and the other feminine. It should be fairly obvious that I cooked an omelette in a frying pan rather
than in a wood stove, but it bothers me to make the same mistakes over and over again. I wind up exhausting the listener before
I even get to the verb.

My confidence hit a new low when my friend Adeline told me that French children often make mistakes, but never with the sex
of their nouns. “It’s just something we grow up with,” she said. “We hear the gender once, and then think of it as part of
the word. There’s nothing to it.”

It’s a pretty grim world when I can’t even feel superior to a toddler. Tired of embarrassing myself in front of two-year-olds,
I’ve started referring to everything in the plural, which can get expensive but has solved a lot of my problems. In saying
a melon, you need to use the masculine article. In saying the melons, you use the plural article, which does not reflect gender
and is the same for both the masculine and the feminine. Ask for two or ten or three hundred melons, and the number lets you
off the hook by replacing the article altogether. A masculine kilo of feminine tomatoes presents a sexual problem easily solved
by asking for two kilos of tomatoes. I’ve started using the plural while shopping, and Hugh has started using it in our cramped
kitchen, where he stands huddled in the corner, shouting, “What do we need with four pounds of tomatoes?”

I answer that I’m sure we can use them for something. The only hard part is finding someplace to put them. They won’t fit
in the refrigerator, as I filled the last remaining shelf with the two chickens I bought from the butcher the night before,
forgetting that we were still working our way through a pair of pork roasts the size of Duraflame logs. “We could put them
next to the radios,” I say, “or grind them for sauce in one of the blenders. Don’t get so mad. Having four pounds of tomatoes
is better than having no tomatoes at all, isn’t it?”

Hugh tells me that the market is off-limits until my French improves. He’s pretty steamed, but I think he’ll get over it when
he sees the CD players I got him for his birthday.

W
HEN HUGH WAS IN THE FIFTH GRADe
, his class took a field trip to an Ethiopian slaughterhouse. He was living in Addis Ababa at the time, and the slaughterhouse
was chosen because, he says, “it was convenient.”

This was a school system in which the matter of proximity outweighed such petty concerns as what may or may not be appropriate
for a busload of eleven-year-olds. “What?” I asked. “Were there no autopsies scheduled at the local morgue? Was the federal
prison just a bit too far out of the way?”

Hugh defends his former school, saying, “Well, isn’t that the whole point of a field trip? To see something new?”

“Technically yes, but…”

“All right then,” he says. “So we saw some new things.”

One of his field trips was literally a trip to a field where the class watched a wrinkled man fill his mouth with rotten goat
meat and feed it to a pack of waiting hyenas. On another occasion they were taken to examine the bloodied bedroom curtains
hanging in the palace of the former dictator. There were tamer trips, to textile factories and sugar refineries, but my favorite
is always the slaughterhouse. It wasn’t a big company, just a small rural enterprise run by a couple of brothers operating
out of a low-ceilinged concrete building. Following a brief lecture on the importance of proper sanitation, a small white
piglet was herded into the room, its dainty hooves clicking against the concrete floor. The class gathered in a circle to
get a better look at the animal, who seemed delighted with the attention he was getting. He turned from face to face and was
looking up at Hugh when one of the brothers drew a pistol from his back pocket, held it against the animal’s temple, and shot
the piglet, execution-style. Blood spattered, frightened children wept, and the man with the gun offered the teacher and bus
driver some meat from a freshly slaughtered goat.

When I’m told such stories, it’s all I can do to hold back my feelings of jealousy. An Ethiopian slaughterhouse. Some people
have all the luck. When I was in elementary school, the best we ever got was a trip to Old Salem or Colonial Williamsburg,
one of those preserved brick villages where time supposedly stands still and someone earns his living as a town crier. There
was always a blacksmith, a group of wandering patriots, and a collection of bonneted women hawking corn bread or gingersnaps
made “the ol’-fashioned way.” Every now and then you might come across a doer of bad deeds serving time in the stocks, but
that was generally as exciting as it got.

Certain events are parallel, but compared with Hugh’s, my childhood was unspeakably dull. When I was seven years old, my family
moved to North Carolina. When he was seven years old, Hugh’s family moved to the Congo. We had a collie and a house cat. They
had a monkey and two horses named Charlie Brown and Satan. I threw stones at stop signs. Hugh threw stones at crocodiles.
The verbs are the same, but he definitely wins the prize when it comes to nouns and objects. An eventful day for my mother
might have involved a trip to the dry cleaner or a conversation with the potato-chip deliveryman. Asked one ordinary Congo
afternoon what she’d done with her day, Hugh’s mother answered that she and a fellow member of the Ladies’ Club had visited
a leper colony on the outskirts of Kinshasa. No reason was given for the expedition, though chances are she was staking it
out for a future field trip.

Due to his upbringing, Hugh sits through inane movies never realizing that they’re often based on inane television shows.
There were no poker-faced sitcom martians in his part of Africa, no oil-rich hillbillies or aproned brides trying to wean
themselves from the practice of witchcraft. From time to time a movie would arrive packed in a dented canister, the film scratched
and faded from its slow trip around the world. The theater consisted of a few dozen folding chairs arranged before a bedsheet
or the blank wall of a vacant hangar out near the airstrip. Occasionally a man would sell warm soft drinks out of a cardboard
box, but that was it in terms of concessions.

When I was young, I went to the theater at the nearby shopping center and watched a movie about a talking Volkswagen. I believe
the little car had a taste for mischief but I can’t be certain, as both the movie and the afternoon proved unremarkable and
have faded from my memory. Hugh saw the same movie a few years after it was released. His family had left the Congo by this
time and were living in Ethiopia. Like me, Hugh saw the movie by himself on a weekend afternoon. Unlike me, he left the theater
two hours later, to find a dead man hanging from a telephone pole at the far end of the unpaved parking lot. None of the people
who’d seen the movie seemed to care about the dead man. They stared at him for a moment or two and then headed home, saying
they’d never seen anything as crazy as that talking Volkswagen. His father was late picking him up, so Hugh just stood there
for an hour, watching the dead man dangle and turn in the breeze. The death was not reported in the newspaper, and when Hugh
related the story to his friends, they said, “You saw the movie about the talking car?”

I could have done without the flies and the primitive theaters, but I wouldn’t have minded growing up with a houseful of servants.
In North Carolina it wasn’t unusual to have a once-a-week maid, but Hugh’s family had houseboys, a word that never fails to
charge my imagination. They had cooks and drivers, and guards who occupied a gatehouse, armed with machetes. Seeing as I had
regularly petitioned my parents for an electric fence, the business with the guards strikes me as the last word in quiet sophistication.
Having protection suggests that you are important. Having that protection paid for by the government is even better, as it
suggests your safety is of interest to someone other than yourself.

Hugh’s father was a career officer with the U.S. State Department, and every morning a black sedan carried him off to the
embassy. I’m told it’s not as glamorous as it sounds, but in terms of fun for the entire family, I’m fairly confident that
it beats the sack race at the annual IBM picnic. By the age of three, Hugh was already carrying a diplomatic passport. The
rules that applied to others did not apply to him. No tickets, no arrests, no luggage search: he was officially licensed to
act like a brat. Being an American, it was expected of him, and who was he to deny the world an occasional tantrum?

They weren’t rich, but what Hugh’s family lacked financially they more than made up for with the sort of exoticism that works
wonders at cocktail parties, leading always to the remark “That sounds fascinating.” It’s a compliment one rarely receives
when describing an adolescence spent drinking Icees at the North Hills Mall. No fifteen-foot python ever wandered onto my
school’s basketball court. I begged, I prayed nightly, but it just never happened. Neither did I get to witness a military
coup in which forces sympathetic to the colonel arrived late at night to assassinate my next-door neighbor. Hugh had been
at the Addis Ababa teen club when the electricity was cut off and soldiers arrived to evacuate the building. He and his friends
had to hide in the back of a jeep and cover themselves with blankets during the ride home. It’s something that sticks in his
mind for one reason or another.

Among my personal highlights is the memory of having my picture taken with Uncle Paul, the legally blind host of a Raleigh
children’s television show. Among Hugh’s is the memory of having his picture taken with Buzz Aldrin on the last leg of the
astronaut’s world tour. The man who had walked on the moon placed his hand on Hugh’s shoulder and offered to sign his autograph
book. The man who led Wake County schoolchildren in afternoon song turned at the sound of my voice and asked, “So what’s your
name, princess?”