Tender at the Bone (8 page)

“Wow,” said Jeanie, wistfully, “lucky you.” Then she smiled bravely and said, “Have fun,” in a little voice that made me realize that her weekend was ruined and she envied me going off on a great adventure. I wasn’t so sure.

We took the train, riding through fields that got whiter and bleaker as we sped north. By the time we crossed the border it was snowing hard and the immigration inspectors got on the train stamping their feet and blowing on their hands, the tips of their ears red above their earmuffs. My mother flirted with them a little as she showed our papers. I pulled my coat over me and went to sleep.

When I woke up, the train was pulling into the station in the gray early morning light and Mom was putting on lipstick, using the window for a mirror. She took a little on her finger, daubing it across her cheeks like rouge. “I look so tired,” she explained. I wondered, sleepily, who she was dolling herself up for. “Aren’t we going to a hotel?” I asked.

“Later,” she said, climbing into a cab.

We pulled up in front of a three-story brick building on a broad
avenue. Across the street people streamed up the steps of a huge domed cathedral, but the sidewalk on our side was deserted and there were no signs to indicate what it was. Then my mother opened the taxi door and the chant of children’s voices came sweeping out from behind the building. I fell back onto the seat, away from the door. I wanted the taxi to turn around and go straight back to the station.

But Mom pulled me after her, out of the cab, through a gate and to a door. She rang the bell. A tall, hawk-faced woman, her hair chopped off just below the ears, peered suspiciously out at us.
“Oui?”
she inquired, wadding up a white handkerchief and stuffing it up the sleeve of her blue cardigan. The sour smell of disinfectant came rushing toward me; behind the woman I could see a line of girls in blue filing silently up a staircase. It looked like something from the Charles Dickens books we had been reading in Mrs. Perrin’s class. I shivered. The only French I knew was from the books that Mrs. Peavey had read to me, so I could not understand the negotiations between my mother and the hawk-faced woman. But it was pretty clear that this was a school, and clearer that my mother meant me to attend it.

Outside, the taxi was waiting. It had started to snow again and we twisted through pretty streets muffled in white. The taxi pulled up in front of a hotel that shimmered and gleamed as if it had been carved out of sugar. My mother adjusted her hat as a bellhop led us through the high-ceilinged lobby and down long halls carpeted in red.

“Why?” I asked my mother. “Why do I have to go there?”

“You said in Paris that you wanted to learn French,” she said.

“I didn’t mean …” I said hesitantly. And then, “Does Daddy know about this?”

“You were the one who said you wanted to learn French,” said Mom. “And Daddy agrees that it will be useful in the future if you
speak a foreign language.” She turned, as if there were no more to be said. “Just look at this glorious tub!” She began opening all the jars and potions in the sumptuous marble bathroom and then we went off to spend the afternoon shopping for school uniforms. They were loathsome navy jumpers with three big pleats in the front and I hated them on sight.

Mom spent the weekend trying to cheer me up. She took me out to dinner. She took me to see
My Fair Lady
. But Sunday night, after pickles, potatoes, and big, bloody steaks at a famous Montreal restaurant named Moishe’s, I went back to the hawk-faced woman and my mother went back to New York.

I watched miserably as the door closed behind her. I felt empty inside, and I was overwhelmed by nausea. The smell of disinfectant battled with floor wax as I climbed the stairs behind Hawkface. The building was old, and the reception area, where Mom had been received by the
directrice
, had high ceilings, carved glass, and an elegantly winding staircase; it looked like the entrance of a turn-of-the-century Paris apartment house. I clutched the carved banister, pulling myself up. But the grandeur ended at the second floor. Up here the stairs were narrow, the banister just a businesslike piece of uncarved wood.

“Voozet treesta?” asked Hawkface. “Nap lura pah. Toola mond ette tray jantie.” She babbled incomprehensibly up three flights of stairs and down a hall. She opened a door into a small room with hospital-green walls, barred windows, and three cots with gray blankets. Two round faces peered at me. “Lanu vel fee,” said Hawkface, pushing me in the door. “Elsa pel root.”

“Root,” the girls chorused, gathering around me.

“What?” I said.

“Root!” they insisted, pointing at me. The one with long dark hair pointed at herself and said, “Janine.” She indicated the one with bobbed hair, round rosy cheeks, and glasses and said,
“Suzanne.” Then at me again. “Root!” she insisted. I understood, finally.

It did not seem like an auspicious beginning. On Mars even my name was different.

For as long as she lived my mother asked, at least once a year, “Aren’t you glad you speak French?” She kept asking, over and over, hoping that I would finally give her the reply she wanted. “Total immersion is the only way to learn a language,” she’d say self-righteously. Perhaps, but each time she said it the smell of onions and Javel flooded my nostrils. The pay phone at Collège Marie de France was right by the kitchen, and I stood there every night, huddled against the wall, begging my parents to let me come home.

“It’s only five months,” I told myself the first night as I crouched in a stall of the big yellow bathroom with its naked lightbulbs, crying and berating myself for being so miserable. “I can stand anything for five months.”

By the next morning I was sure I was wrong. Numbly I shrugged on my new white blouse and navy jumper and followed the girls through the long corridors, down the stairs, past the ornate lobby, and into the dining room in the basement. It was windowless, with long, oilcloth-covered picnic tables and it smelled, day and night, like boiled beef.

The girls stood behind their bowls of café au lait, waiting for Mademoiselle Petit, the housemother, to sit down. Then they bowed their heads, crossed themselves, and sang a song that began, “Benny say noo, senior.” I stared down into the café au lait.
“Mange!”
commanded Mademoiselle. I tapped my fingers against the side of the bowl and said under my breath, “Cheerio! Have a nice day.” And then I started crying again. The girls around me
looked away, embarrassed. After breakfast the boarders went to the assembly hall to join the day students and sing the
“Marseillaise”
and the Canadian national anthem. Then they recited the school pledge. “
Je vous salue, Marie, pleine de grâce,”
they intoned together; it was months before I thought to translate the words and more months before I realized that I had been faithfully repeating the Hail Mary every morning.

When assembly was over Janine, who seemed to have appointed herself my guardian, grabbed my sleeve and pulled me along a hall. Accustomed to the raucous freedom of an American high school I was shocked by the silence. The girls watched their feet as they walked to their lessons and bobbed their heads in a silent curtsey each time a teacher passed. Janine led me into a severely orderly classroom and pushed me into a desk next to hers. The room smelled of steam heat, wet wool, and perspiration. The color scheme was entirely monochromatic, with none of the cheerful maps, plants, and drawings my school had. It reminded me of something from the nineteenth century.

Janine tried to tell me something, but of course it was incomprehensible. Looking at my watch, I realized that at this very minute a week ago, on a far-away planet, my best friend Jeanie and I had been walking into homeroom; the horrible, embarrassing lump of tears appeared in my throat and I stared down, hoping no one would notice. Suddenly the room went eerily silent.

“J’attends,”
said an icy voice. Janine tugged desperately at my sleeve. I looked up and realized that all the other girl were on their feet. I leapt up. A small woman stood at the front of the class fixing me with a look of hostile disapproval. She was as colorless as the classroom. Dressed in a black skirt and drab cardigan, she wore no makeup and even her short straight hair seemed to have no particular color. She leveled her pointer directly at me and unleashed a stream of angry words. Janine said something, clearly in my defense, and the pointer went down. The hostile stare did not.
Madame Cartet looked me up and down, shook her head slightly, and said,
“Bien. Asseyez-vous.”
The girls sat down at the same time, as if they were a single organism. I was a beat behind.

Class went on and on. Lunch, more class, study hall, dinner. Nothing made any sense to me. I was on Mars, where no sound, no smell, no emotion was familiar. Even my own thoughts had become alien, and I despised the whining mass of misery I seemed to be. I spent most of my time writing in my diary, chiding myself for being so unhappy, waiting until it was time to call home. “Let me come back,” I pleaded. I knew Dad wanted me back but my mother always answered. And the answer was always the same: no. Then it was Friday and all the other girls left for the weekend. The silence was a relief.

“
Ne quitte pas l’école
,” said Mademoiselle Petit. I shrugged my shoulders; I didn’t understand. “Ça,
alors!”
said Mademoiselle, pushing me down the stairs to the entranceway and pointing to the big wooden door.
“Ne quitte pas,”
she repeated slowly, as if talking to a deaf person. She went to the door, threw herself across it, arms stretched wide, and shook her head vigorously. I got the point.

It had not occurred to me that there was life outside Mars, but she had given me an idea. “What are they going to do, throw me out?” I said to myself the next day as I opened the door of the silent, empty building. I peered outside. “Make me spend the weekend in school?”

I strolled down Queen Mary Road, ignoring the cold and following strangers for the sheer pleasure of listening to what they were saying. When I saw a movie theater with a sign in English I went in. I would have happily watched any movie in a language I could understand, but I was in luck. The feature was
All Hands on Deck
and for as long as the movie played its vapid happiness pulled me along. Then the lights went on and all around me people made plans for the rest of the day. I felt self-conscious, embarrassed for
myself: everybody else seemed to have somewhere to go, something to do, and someone to do it with.

I tried to pretend that being alone was just a temporary matter, that I was really on my way to meet a friend. With as much swagger as I could muster I went into the small deli next door. The smell of dill and pepper and garlic came rushing at me, comforting and familiar. I sat at the counter, watching the cook pull steaming chunks of glistening pink meat out of watery vats. I wondered what it was.

“Smoked meat?” asked the cook. He was speaking English! I nodded.

“Fat or lean?” he asked.

“Fat?” I said.

“Fat’s better,” he agreed, leaning over to impale a piece of meat on his fork. He set it on the wooden counter and began to carve, letting the rosy slices fall away from his knife in ribbons. He scooped them onto a piece of rye bread, slapped a mustard-slathered slice on top, and handed the sandwich across the counter. The sweet, salty pile of meat was the best thing I had ever eaten. I had another, chewing slowly to make it last. And a third. “For a little girl, you do put it away,” said the counterman admiringly.

There was a bakery next door, and I went in and bought two dozen French pastries to tide me over the weekend. I spent all of Sunday in bed, reading
Gone With the Wind
, eating pastries and feeling sorry for myself. Gorged on sugar and fat and the joy of English, I slowly came back to earth. Then my roommates returned, and life on Mars started all over again.

“I realize,” I wrote in my diary, “that I am like the Puerto Ricans who come into our classes in New York. Except we are not nearly as nice. These kids are really sweet, they all help me in my work and don’t mind when I goof up on my French, which is almost always.
Françoise, who sits in the desk next to mine, is trying to help me with spelling. But I don’t think I’ll ever get it.”

Madame Cartet certainly didn’t think I would get it. She acted as if I were a slow and wayward stranger who had been foisted upon her, and when she announced exam scores she always seemed disgusted.
“Zéro, une fois de plus pour Mademoiselle Reichl,”
she would say pityingly, as if any person of normal intelligence would have learned to speak French, much less spell it, by now.

A few of the girls took their cues from her. The worst was the banker’s daughter, Béatrice, the richest girl in school. Her father was said to be very close to General de Gaulle. She had never actually spoken to me, but she had discovered my secret cache of candy, cake, and novels and tortured me by moving it. I knew she was the culprit because she brazenly ate an éclair in my presence, daring me to do something. I shrugged. I suspected that she stole my mail too, but I felt helpless. The odd thing is that if she hadn’t been so mean to me I would have admired her. She was constantly collecting
“mauvaises notes”
for whispering in class, for not being prepared, once for daring to talk back when Madame Cartet spoke of Australian savages.