Free French Lessons: A Memoir by Alice Kaplan Page B

ready
for yet.
    My brother was home from college. He said he didn't recognize me because I was so thin. He approved. When he
saw me sulking around the house, he handed me a book
about the Black Panthers: "Here. Read about struggle. Read
about people with real problems." The Panthers had discovered an obscure California law that gave them the right to
carry guns, thereby protecting themselves against the racist,
violent police force of Oakland, California. They posed for
photographs wearing guns and berets.
    Mary invited me to Lake Minnetonka for a boat ride. We
ran into Ted on his boat-fiberglass with a big outboard motor. He hadn't written me since confessing his love for Mary
a month after I left for Switzerland. Mary had dumped him
in April for David Bateman. He was dating Sue now. A hundred stories had transpired among my friends during the
school year. I couldn't keep track. According to my well rehearsed fantasy, Ted was supposed to fall in love with me
again the minute he saw me, thin and exotic in my French
bathing suit, exactly as we had imagined it together in the
cemetery the previous summer. Instead, he looked embarrassed. I froze.

    I was seized with an enormous hunger; it was summer,
and I would go swimming by myself in Lake Harriet and
come home and eat Wonder Bread with margarine and cinnamon sugar on top of it until I didn't feel so small and neat
anymore.
    At a lawn party at Mary's I discovered that my classmates
had new rituals: drinking from flasks, smoking pot in the
bushes, talking about rock concerts. I felt formal in my tailored white shirt. I stood watching them, twisting Pam's
gold ring around my ring finger.
    Steve, a serious senior, offered me a tab of synthetic
mushrooms: "Don't worry, it's a mellow trip-perfect for
your first time." I spent the first six hours after taking the
drug in a coffee shop with Steve, rehearsing our philosophies of life while the buzz came on. I spent the rest of the
night perched on my bedspread reading Les Fleurs du mal.
Steve had said I would have visions. I didn't see much-the
world was covered in a slimy green film that came from having stayed too long under the fluorescent lights in the coffee
shop. But I heard noises. I heard the light bulb buzzing in my
room. I heard the plaster creaking under the wallpaper. I
heard every syllable of my own thoughts echoing back at
me as I read Baudelaire's "Invitation au voyage": "bit es-tu,
ou es-tu, ou es-to???" Where was I? The next day I had the
sensation of having lived for a hundred years in one night. I
felt thin again. Empty.
    "You look so world-weary!" My mother was driving me to a needlepoint workshop at the Edina Needlepoint Emporium, to help me stop smoking. I concentrated on filling
holes with colored wool, slow and steady.

    Louise was home from boarding school for the summer. I
thought she would understand me. She, too, had a year behind her that no one at home could share. We sat on the
floor of her room and chain-smoked until my stomach got
queasy. We didn't talk about loneliness. We complained
about our bodies. She told me at her school the girls took
Ex-Lax if they ate too much so they wouldn't gain weight. I
told her I wrote down every bite I ate, every day, in French.
She told me she had a rule always to leave half the food on
her plate, no matter what the portion. I told her I took the
center out of the bread and only ate the crust.
    Mr. D and Louise invited me to the D family cabin at Lake
Azur, in the north of the state. I got to sit next to Mr. Don the
private plane. He told me his latest business plan: a chain of
bookstores, a new corporate logo, money from his profits
for the arts. Louise and I tried to stay on our diets at Lake
Azur, in spite of the cook's famous onion rings and steak.
Mr. D took us water skiing, rowing, fishing, walking. He
wanted us to be better friends to each other than we were.
We were skimming the surface.
    I returned to my