When in French (4 page)

“Bonjour, monsieur,” Olivier said. “On voudrait un flanchet, s'il vous plait.”

The butcher rifled around in the cold case, his fingers grazing handwritten placards:
rumsteak, entrecôte, tournedos, joue de boeuf
.
Ronde de gîte, paleron, faux-filet.

“Malheureusement, je n'ai pas de flanchet aujourd'hui,” he said. “En fait, on n'a généralement pas de flanchet.”

“What?” I said.

“He doesn't have a flank steak.”

The butcher reached into the case and pulled out a small, dark purse of beef.

“Je vous propose l'araignée. C'est bien savoureux, comme le flanchet, mais plus tendre.”

“What did he say?”

“He has an
araignée
.”

“What is that?”

“No idea.
Araignée
means spider.”

“Okay, whatever, take it.”

“Bon, ça serait super.”

The
araignée
is the muscle that sheathes the socket of a cow's hock bone, so called because of the strands of fat that
crisscross its surface like a cobweb. In francophone Switzerland, as in France, it is a humble but cherished cut. Different countries, I was surprised to learn, have different ways of dismantling a cow: an American butcher cuts straight across the carcass, sawing through the bones, but a French
boucher
follows the body's natural seams, extracting specific muscles. (American butchers are faster, but French butchers use more of the cow.) If you were to look at an American cow, in cross section, it would be a perfectly geometric Mondrian. A French cow is a Kandinsky, all whorls and arcs. You can't get a porterhouse in Geneva, any more than you can get an
araignée
in New York: not because it doesn't translate, but because it doesn't exist.

A flank steak, I would have assumed, is a flank steak, no matter how you say it. We think of words as having one-to-one correspondences to objects, as though they were mere labels transposed onto irreducible phenomena. But even simple, concrete objects can differ according to the time, the place, and the language in which they are expressed. In Hebrew, “arm” and “hand” comprise a single word,
yad
, so that you can shake arms with a new acquaintance. In Hawaiian, meanwhile,
lima
encompasses “arm,” “hand,” and “finger.”

In a famous experiment, linguists assembled a group of sixty containers and asked English, Spanish, and Mandarin speakers to identify them. What in English comprised nineteen jars, sixteen bottles, fifteen containers, five cans, three jugs, one tube, and one box was, in Spanish, twenty-eight
frascos
, six
envases
, six
bidons
, three
aerosols
, three
botellas
, two
potes
, two
latas
, two
taros
, two
mamaderos
, and one
gotero
,
caja
,
talquera
,
taper
,
roceador
, and
pomo
. Mandarin speakers, meanwhile, identified forty
ping
, ten
guan
, five
tong
, four
he
, and a
guan
.

“The concepts we are trained to treat as distinct, the information our mother tongue continuously forces us to specify, the details it requires us to be attentive to, and the repeated associations it imposes on us—all these habits of speech can create habits of mind that affect more than merely the knowledge of language itself,” the linguist Guy Deutscher has written. We don't call an arm an arm because it's an arm; it's an arm because we call it one. Language carves up the world into different morsels (a metaphor that a Russian speaker might refuse, as “carving,” in Russian, can only be performed by an animate entity). It can fuse appendages and turn bottles into cans.

 • • • 

A
LMOST AS SOON AS I'D
arrived in Geneva, I'd begun to feel the pull of French. Already, I was intrigued by the blend of rudeness and refinement, the tension between the everyday and the exalted, that characterized the little I knew of the language. “Having your cake and eating it too” was
Vouloir le beurre, l'argent, et le cul de la crémière
(“To want the butter, the money, and the ass of the dairywoman”).
Raplapla
meant “tired.” A
frileuse
was a woman who easily got cold.
La France profonde
, with its immemorial air, gave me chills in a way that “flyover country” didn't. I found it incredible that Olivier found it credible that the crash of Air France Flight 447 in 2009 could have been in some part attributable to a breakdown in the distinction between
vous
(the second person formal subject pronoun) and
tu
(the second person informal). Before the crash, the airline had promoted what was referred to in the French press as an Anglo-Saxon-style management culture in which employees universally addressed each other as
tu
. The theory was that the policy had contributed to the creation of a
power vacuum, in which no one could figure out who was supposed to be in charge.

French was the language of Racine, Flaubert, Proust, and
Paris Match
. It wasn't as if I were being forced to expend thousands of hours of my life in an attempt to acquire Bislama or Nordfriisk. Even if I had been, it would have been an interesting experiment, a way to try to differentiate between nature and nurture, circumstance and self. Learning the language would give me a raison d'être in Geneva, transforming it from a backwater into a hub of a kingdom I wanted to be a part of. I wasn't living in France, but I could live in French.

As long as I didn't speak French, I knew that a membrane, however delicate, would separate me from my family. I didn't mind being the comedy relative, birthing household appliances, but I sensed that the role might not become me for a lifetime. There were depths and shallows of intimacy I would never be able to navigate with a dual-language dictionary in hand. I didn't want to be irrelevant or obnoxious. More than anything, I feared being alienated from the children Olivier and I hoped one day to have—tiny half-francophones who would cross their sevens and blow raspberries when they were annoyed, saddled with a Borat of a mother, babbling away in a tongue I didn't understand. This would have been true in any language, but I sensed that it might be especially so in French, which in its orthodoxy seemed to exert particularly strong effects. “Do you want to see an Eskimo?” Saul Bellow wrote. “Turn to the
Encyclopédie Larousse
.”

Our first New Year's in Switzerland, Jacques and Hugo decided to visit.

“They said they want to come in the morning,” Olivier told me.

“Okay. When?”

“In the morning.”

“No, but when?”

“In the morning!”

Olivier, I could see, was starting to get exasperated. I was, too.

“What do you mean?” I said, a little too emphatically, as unable to reformulate my desire to know on which day of the week they would arrive as Olivier was to fathom another shade of meaning.

“What do you mean, ‘What do I mean?' I meant exactly what I said.”

“Well, what did you say, then?”

“I already said it.”

“What?”

His voice grew low and a little bit sad.

“Talking to you in English,” he said, “is like touching you with
gloves.”

T
HE BELLS RANG
every Wednesday morning. The teacher would lift the needle, drop the record on the spindle, and then:

Frère Jacques, Frère Jacques,

Dormez-vous? Dormez-vous?

Sonny LaMatina, Sonny LaMatina,

Ding dang dong, Ding dang dong.

I was five, a kindergartner. The song was pure sound, its hushed opening lines building to a pitter-patter and then to the crash-bang onomatopoeic finale that we liked to yell, hitting the terminal
g
's like cymbals. The French teacher didn't force meaning on us. She let us revel in the strangeness of the syllables, which made us feel special, since we were only just old enough to be able to discern that they were strange. Sonny LaMatina sounded to me like an exotic but approachable friend. I imagined him as a car dealer, like the ones I had heard on WWQQ 101.3, Cape Fear's Country Leader: “Come on down to
Sonny LaMatina Honda Acura Mitsubishi. You can push it, pull it, or drag it in!”

The school occupied a low-slung brick building set back from the highway on a lot of sand and pine. I had lived in Wilmington, a beach town wedged between the Cape Fear River and the Atlantic Ocean, my entire life. My parents, who came from Philadelphia and Long Island, rendering them lifelong newcomers, had moved to North Carolina seventeen years earlier. My father was a criminal defense lawyer, handling everything from speeding tickets to murders. My mother worked from home—from our kitchen table, more precisely—tutoring high-school students in geometry and trig. We had a redbrick house, with green shutters and a picket fence. We knew exactly one person—a Korean-born woman with whom my mother played tennis—whose first language wasn't English.

I loved where I came from. Wilmington was anything but a soulless suburb. Its inhabitants proudly extolled its claims to fame—hometown of Michael Jordan, headquarters of the North Carolina Azalea Festival, the largest port in the state.
Dawson's Creek
was filmed there. The Venus flytrap, a carnivorous plant with leaves like the jaws of a rat, grew natively only within a sixty-mile radius. You could swim in March. June brought lightning bugs, and August, jellyfish: Portuguese men-of-war, sea wasps, cabbage heads.

My family's idea of a good vacation was to spend a week in a rented condominium 4.7 miles from our actual place of residence. My mother would drive home every day to water the grass. My brother, Matt, and I would ride bikes to a hot dog stand where the owner had shellacked a quarter onto the counter as an honesty test. We'd each get a North Carolina (mustard, chili, and slaw) and a Surfer (mustard, melted American cheese, and bacon bits), with pink lemonade that looked as
if it had been brewed by dropping a highlighter inside a cup of water. Fall was oysters, roasted by the bushel and dumped on a table made from two metal drums and a piece of plywood, with a hole sawed out of the middle for the shells. When ACC basketball season arrived, church let out early. Teachers trundled televisions into the classrooms, blaring Dick Vitale.

People who live in big cities get people who live in small towns wrong: they don't want out. Wilmington was a place where people, considering their habitat unimprovable, tended to stay put. Only one member of my family had ever been abroad, once, but by local standards we were considered suspiciously urbane. We subscribed to the newspaper, which many Wilmingtonians detested, because it was owned by the
New York Times
. (A popular bumper sticker read “Don't Ask Me, I Read the
Wilmington
Morning Star
.”) We drove to Pennsylvania every year, in a Volvo, to visit my grandmother. (Another sticker, aimed at tourists: “I-40 West—Use it.”) My parents encouraged us to pursue outside experiences. They were rarely illiberal, even in matters of which they had no direct knowledge. They were both keen readers, especially my mother, whose tastes in fiction were as sophisticated as they were simple in her everyday life. Their horizons were wider than those of many of the people around us, but they extended only a few hundred miles to the north.

Soon the school discontinued French in favor of Spanish, deeming it more practical. I became Laura, not Laurence. Roosters crowed
cocorico
instead of
quiquiriki
. On Wednesdays the record player crackled out “La Cucaracha” and, regardless of the season, “Feliz Navidad.”

One day our English teacher asked us to write a poem. My parents found mine not long ago. They were coming to London for my wedding to Olivier, the night before which we were
planning a big dinner in a pub. Yorkshire pudding was on the menu, and they weren't sure what it was.

My father flipped to the
Y
section of the family dictionary. A piece of loose-leaf paper fluttered to the ground. I had completed the poetry assignment with a fuzzy orange marker:

I wish I could travel around the world, and s-e-e-e all the th-i-i-i-ngs.

Oh, I would see all the countries and beautiful customs.

Oh, I would see all the countries, Romainia Greece and all.

I would see all the beautiful cultures. I wish I-I-I could.

Oh, it would be so interesting. I wish I could travel around the w-o-o-o-o-rld. Oh!

 • • • 

T
HE FIRST PLACE
I ever went was Disney World. We crammed into the car with one tape, Jack Nicholson and Bobby McFerrin doing Kipling's story about how the elephant, on the banks of the “great gray-green, greasy Limpopo River,” got his trunk. The drive took nine hours: Myrtle Beach, where we stocked up on bang snaps and Roman candles; Savannah; St. Augustine; Daytona Beach. Finally, we arrived at Polynesian Village, a longhouse-style resort with koi ponds and a tropical rain forest in the lobby.

I pulled on tube socks and white sneakers and slung a purple plastic camera across my chest. Disappointment quickly set in. I was too scared to ride Space Mountain. Cinderella's castle held little allure—I was more interested in foreign countries than magic kingdoms. To a first-time traveler with dreams of high adventure, Main Street, U.S.A., seemed a scam, a staycation in the guise of a trip down memory lane. The windows of
the shops were filigreed with the names of fake proprietors. I clocked a barbershop and some fudge kitchens. Where were the ziggurats, the cassowaries and the cuneiform tablets, the temples of marble and pillars of stone?

The next morning, we took the shuttle to Epcot. As we crossed into the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow—even now, my impression of exoticism is such that the dome marking its entrance seems less a golf ball than a crystal ball, or at the very least a Scandinavian light fixture—I was transported, exported, by some freaky wormhole of globalization in which one could see the world by essentially staying at home.

We boarded Friendship Boats, approaching the World Showcase Lagoon on the International Gateway canal. We took a left into Mexico, where we rode a marionette carousel before proceeding southwest to the tea shops of China. We strolled around a
platz
. We listened to a campanile toll, saw the Eiffel Tower. We were after the epoch of Equatorial Africa (which Disney had planned, but never built) but before the dawn of Norway (whose pavilion would open in 1988, featuring a Viking ship and a stave church). Pubs and pyramids were coeval. Time seemed to scramble, as though it had been snipped up and pasted back together, like the map.

“All areas of Morocco are wheelchair accessible,” the literature advised. In the medina, we followed the twang of an oud to a courtyard fragrant with olive trees and date palms. A belly dancer shimmied, her abdomen a bowl of rice pudding whose meniscus never broke. One of the musicians grabbed my hand and pulled me into a sort of conga line. Then and forever shy of crowd participation, I let completely, uncharacteristically loose.

French braid flying, I started doing something that would
have looked like the twist, were it not for the way I held my left leg in a
tendu
, the dutiful habit of a longtime ballet student. I was the center of a scrum of guys wearing scarlet fezzes. This, to me, was the magic kingdom. In Italy the Renaissance statues were hollow, impaled on metal rods to combat the Florida wind, and in Canada the loggers' shirts were made of mock flannel to combat the Florida sun. I didn't know. Simulations sometimes anticipate their simulacra. If I was ever going to go to Morocco, it was because I had already been.

 • • • 

I
N THOSE DAYS
my parents occasionally went away too. That fall they took the ferry with some friends to Bald Head, a barrier island known for Old Baldy, its defunct lighthouse. There were no cars there. It was a Saturday morning when my brother and I got the news that, the night before, my father had been thrown from the golf cart that he and my mother and their friends were riding in as it took a sharp curve, hitting his head on a concrete footpath. He was thirty-seven, in a coma. There was blood on his brain. Later, at Sunday school, one of my classmates—a miniature town crier in khaki pants and a blue blazer, lips ringed with doughnut powder—circulated a rumor that he had had too much to drink.

He had been the adventurer in our household, to the extent that there was one. In the summer of 1966 he had traveled to Madrid as part of a delegation from his Catholic boys' high school. One day he and a friend ditched their coats and ties and ran off to Gibraltar, where they hopped a boat to Tangier. The expedition yielded a sheepskin rug and twenty-one demerits, one more triggering automatic expulsion in the coming academic year.

The Marianist brothers of the Jericho Turnpike did not
succeed, however, in stifling his curiosity about the world. He kept a list of every bird he had ever seen, dating from his days as a preadolescent twitcher, stalking the marshes of Alley Pond Park in Queens. Never mind that my father had been outside of America but once: he knew the capital of every country, the name of every river, which sea abutted what strait, how many countries were completely surrounded by other countries (three: Lesotho, San Marino, and Vatican City), why Chicago O'Hare's abbreviation was ORD (it used to be called Orchard Field).

By the time I'd started school, he was half of a two-man law firm that occupied a three-bedroom cottage a few blocks from the county courthouse. His office was my first foreign country: the wooden shingle hanging from the front porch, as though to mark a border crossing; the smell of cigarettes and correction fluid and shirt starch; the gold pens; the yellow pads; the zinging typewriter; the kitchenette drawers full of Toast Chees and Captain's Wafers and Nekot cookies; the sign behind the desk of Teresa, his all-powerful secretary, that read “I Go from Zero to Bitch in 3.5 Seconds.” (Teresa was my first bureaucrat.) One of my father's clients, Marshgrass, paid him in grouper and bluefish. A judge named Napoleon Bonaparte Barefoot presided over district court. The language was crisp, formal, aspirated (affidavit, docket, retainer), and then demotic and slurry (a “dooey” was a Driving Under the Influence charge).

Each morning I helped my father pick out a tie, begging him, as we debated dots or stripes, to walk me through the day's cases. When friends came over for slumber parties, I'd insist that we try our Barbies for prostitution. As I understood it, prostitution entailed sleeping with someone to whom you weren't married. We often declared mistrials, in the knowledge that, having shared a bed, we were probably prostitutes ourselves.

At night I ran to the door, as eager as a sports fan to hear which cases my father had won, which he'd lost, how the bailiff had yelled at a defendant to get a belt. I often asked him to tell the story of one of his first trials, which concerned a man who had had the misfortune to be urinating in an alleyway where someone had recently broken into a car. A police officer approached and told him he was under arrest.

“What the fuck?” he said.

The police arrested him and took him to the station, where they put him in front of a witness, who said that the guy in front of him was definitely not the guy he'd just seen running away from the scene of the crime. The police charged my father's client anyhow, with disorderly conduct.

My father, just out of law school, spent a week in the library, trying to ensure that his client wouldn't end up with a criminal record on account of a single curse.

When the trial date arrived, the state presented its case. My father then rose and asked to approach the judge. Permission granted, he trudged toward the bench, carrying a leather-bound volume in which he had carefully marked the relevant law. Disorderly conduct, the book explained, had been committed only by a person who had said or done something that was “plainly likely to provoke violent retaliation,” not by one who had merely spouted off a profanity without the expectation of a fight.

“I'd ask that you consider this statute—,” my father began.

The judge took one look at the book and cut him off.

“That's
Raleigh
law, boy,” he boomed, churning each syllable around in his mouth as though he were whipping cream.

My father retreated and, for lack of a better option, put his client on the stand.

“How many beers did you have?” the state's attorney asked.

“Nine,” my father's client replied.

The judge banged the gavel, a woodpecker drilling bark.

“Case dismissed! That's the only person who's told the truth in this courtroom all day long.”

My father spun the tale beguilingly, transforming Wilmington into a low-stakes Maycomb, bandying between voices as though he were keeping rhythm for a crowd shucking corn. Now, after two decades in North Carolina, he sounded more or less like a southerner—an affectation, or an adaptation, that troubled my mother's conscience. “Your father's a chameleon,” she would say, upon hearing him drop a
g
or leave an
o
hanging open like a garden gate. Changing the way you spoke, or simply permitting it to be changed by circumstance, constituted, in her view, a moral failing. It was weird, like wearing someone else's socks.