Free French Lessons: A Memoir by Alice Kaplan

in the front, I sat in the back seat
behind her, and in France I ended up behind her again. Mrs.
Vanderveer's Paris was the Paris of her own junior year
abroad at Smith College-the Latin Quarter, and poetry in
bookstores-but she didn't give into it, she didn't indulge
in nostalgia around us. She bit her nails, which was the only
sign that there was a lot on her mind, and that we weren't
always easy to take around. We were on a budget; we would
prowl the streets, her sure gray head in the lead, stopping in
front of the restaurants, studying the plats du jour that were
described on a sheet of paper posted in front. One day Priscilla and I got permission to buy our lunch at the street market on the rue de Seine and what we thought we had
identified as fried chicken turned out to be eggplant: our
first taste of eggplant. We wouldn't have known it was eggplant if Mrs. Vanderveer hadn't been there to explain: that's
eggplant, which is "aubergine" in French and also British
English.

    My mother was sick with an ulcer and a spastic colon. The
medicine she took made her slow and dreamy. Her eyes
were unfocused. I wasn't sure she knew where she was.
"Mom!" I kept turning around while walking to make sure
we didn't lose her. I was afraid we might lose her. Johnny
was easily distracted, too. Priscilla and I were restless. I must
have spent a lot of time looking down at the street, knowing Mrs. Vanderveer was in the lead, because along with the
back of her neck I remember cobblestones-cobblestones
on steep streets that wound around. From my day with Mr.
D I remember sky, and clouds, and the caps on monuments.

    Mrs. Vanderveer had all the train schedules mastered for
our trip to the south of France. From the train window I
watched the landscapes change, from the gray roofs of Paris
to the blue slate roofs of the Loire and then the red roofs of
the Midi. The land got craggier, hillier, like a painting by
Cezanne: cubes of space overlapping.
    Mrs. Vanderveer had organized a strategy for getting us
and our baggage off the train within the time constraint of
the three-minute stop. My mother wasn't strong enough to
carry hers and we didn't have time to make two trips up and
down the corridor of the train. Johnny threw all the bags out
the train window; Priscilla and I were waiting to catch them
from the quai.
    We switched to a rental car. We visited Gallo-Roman ruins,
including an enormous aqueduct. We drove to Avignon,
where nine popes had lived in exile from Rome. We drove
through the town of Grasse, dedicated to growing flowers
for perfume: my joy perfume had started in those fields.
Mrs. Vanderveer read us salient facts from the Blue Guide.
    "Augustus and the minister to Louis XV lived here."
    "When Smollett passed this way he described it as 'very
inconsiderable, and indeed in a ruinous condition,' but he
was well-lodged, and 'treated with more politeness than we
had met with in any other part of France."'
    "Bullet holes from World War II strafing can be observed
on the northeast corner of the cathedral."
    "A dam had burst here in 1959, claiming 420 victims."

    There was no inch of unknown territory; even the history
of visits to the town over the centuries had been recorded.
You had to think about France like a cubist, in overlapping
layers.
    When we got to Cannes, Priscilla and I went straight to the
shopping district and got identical two-piece bathing suits
in an orange and pink flowered cotton. We snuck down to
the water where we met two Italian boys, waiting for girls
like us. The song "Hippy hippy dove vai?" was number one
on Radio Monte Carlo. We lay on the rocks with the Italian
boys and listened to the song. The air was warm and dry.
The rocks were hot. The boys knew other boys who walked
by, looked at us, murmuring phrases in Italian that made the
boys laugh deep pleasurable laughs. That night, after a sensible dinner with Johnny and the mothers, we snuck out
again.
    "I'm