Free French Lessons: A Memoir by Alice Kaplan Page A

gonna tell where you girls are going," Johnny threatened. We ignored him. I was wearing a sleeveless knit dress,
blue and yellow stripes. It was as many inches above the
knees as the College allowed. The Italian boy ran his hands
down the sides of the dress and asked me how old I was. I
told him I was fifteen and he laughed; he said he was twenty.
He looked much older to me, creased, with beard stubble.
He seemed reluctant to touch me after he found out I was
fifteen. "I should have lied," I thought. I ran back to the hotel
with Priscilla, up over the sea wall in the dark, giggling all
the way because we were so late. We walked into the hotel
room where our mothers had been waiting for us; my
mother's voice was high and shrill and tragic and Mrs. Vanderveer's low and firm and final. Priscilla apologized. She
looked sheepish and sincere. I was already calculating our
next escape: I couldn't wipe the devious look off my face or apologize to my mother, whose panicked voice made me
want to bolt. Priscilla and her mother always looked so normal to me; they acted the way mothers and teenage daughters were supposed to act. Was I a worse teenager than
Priscilla, I wondered, or was Priscilla a better liar, feigning
her daughterly affection?

    A few days later, I ate a bouillabaisse with my mother,
alone, after the Vanderveers had left for England: a conciliatory bouillabaisse, big clawed shellfish, spicy red out of the
same pot. It was hard to get my mother to eat without thinking of her ulcer, and I was still on my breadcrust diet, but
France had gotten to both of us-its pleasure principleand our separate abnegations had broken down in sync.
The bouillabaisse involved a ritual of croutons, aioli, special
thin forks for penetrating mussels, bibs to encourage carefree manners. We went at the bouillabaisse with total determination. She forgot she was sick; I forgot I was angry. We
put away the whole pot.

    Coming Home
    In June I took the plane home. I could feel the French
sticking in my throat, the new muscles in my mouth. I had
my ear open, on the plane, for the sounds of anyone speaking French because those were my sounds now. I was full of
French, it was holding me up, running through me, a voice
in my head, a tickle in my ear, likely to be set off at any moment. A counter language. When I got off the plane the
American English sounded loud and thudding-like an insult or a lapse of faith. I would have to go hunting for French
sounds, if I wanted to keep going.
    It wasn't easy. People's voices sounded stretched and
whiny-because of the diphthongs, I suppose. There was
no control, no rhythm in the language I heard. At the airport
in New York everyone was yelling and honking. The noise
kept on in my head when I got home to the Midwest, where
the streets were quiet. When I spoke I felt like I was outside
my own body, listening to someone else, and translating. I
felt small and neat and the people around me looked messy.
In bed at night I felt exposed, because there was no bunk
over me. No loudspeaker to wake me up. No reason to get
up.

    I squeezed my French toothpaste tube dry to make it last
all summer. I doled out my Klorane "shampooing au
henne" (for auburn highlights) in tiny portions. I lived in my
tailored size 38 white cotton shirt, the kind the Lebanese
girls wore. I kept my last pack of Swiss "Camel Filtres" ("un
paquet de Camel Filtres, s'il vous plait") after the last cigarette was smoked. These objects were my proof that I had
lived in Europe. I had my orange and pink two-piece
bathing suit from Cannes; my Bled's grammar and my Cahier de composition, filled with verb conjugations, homework assignments, and the record of my diet; on my finger I
wore the Libyan gold ring that Pam gave me. M. Frichot had
awarded me a copy of Les Fleurs du mal at the end of the term.
He inscribed it "a ]a meilleure eleve du ioeme" (to the best
student in the tenth). He cut out the poems I wasn't