American and the Bus Driver (eBook)

3 – Autrefois

More than twenty years earlier, in 1982, when I was thirteen, my family had moved to France. I’d never really understood which part of my dad’s job as a businessman with a company called Norton made this possible. All I knew was that nothing more dramatic, sexy, or cool had ever happened to me.

When we moved, only my mom had any past experience in French. Still, my parents had insisted that we not live in any of the American communities common in and around Paris at that time. Instead, they moved us to Saint-Nom-la-Bretèche, a small, farm town to the west of Paris and the last stop on the SNCF train from Paris’ Gare St Lazare out to the suburbs.

Worcester, Massachusetts, population 162,000, where we moved from, dwarfed tiny Saint Nom, population 3,500. On weekends, my brother and I took off on our bikes up one of the two main streets past the town hall, a pristine white building that stood next to the lush green soccer field, past the hundreds year old church and the modern supermarket, to the boulangerie.

“Four pains aux raisins, four pains au chocolat, and one bread, please” we learned to say within a week of arriving. We placed our delicate flaky cargo into our bike baskets and took turns carrying the long crusty bread wrapped only in a square of paper under our arms on the ride back home.

Pedestrians with their dogs walked along the wide, clean sidewalks. Clean except for the disregarded caca of the canines left by the dog walkers. Most of the houses hid behind thick walls taller than me. Trees lined the streets. Everything felt peaceful and safe.

My parents enrolled me in the Lycée International de Saint-Germain-en-Laye where learning French was baptism by fire. My total immersion had only one bob up for air each day with a class taught by an American teacher. Anne, Nicole, and Nadia, my three best friends, had the same classes as me. We laughed a lot. We tried to have lunch together. We spent time in between classes putting lip gloss on in the bathroom. We talked about hair and make-up. We whispered secrets to each other about our changing bodies and boys. We debated over MTV, movies, and music.

When I walked around with them, I was in a protective bubble of understanding. School, especially middle school, is terrifying when you don’t understand what anyone is saying and when you assume everyone is talking about you. For me, fitting in and “passing” as French became the focus of my existence for the three years we lived in France.

In my second year there, I matriculated into Troisième, the French equivalent of ninth grade with native French kids. Though school had become much easier, French class had not. I dreaded most of all our two-hour block classes every Friday.

On Fridays, we did one of three things — récitation, film watching, or rédaction. Récitation was the culminating activity after studying a poem or excerpt from a text. One by one, the teacher called us to the front of the class to recite the narrative poems, odes, and epics we had been studying. Without understanding the texts, memorizing and reciting them seemed impossible.

“Mademoiselle Heeder. À toi.”

My turn.

I’d studied. I had, earnestly, desperately. I’d sat at my desk for hours going over the poem line by line. Sometimes I’d even understood enough to fall under the charm of the beauty of the phrases or images they evoked. The combination of facing the class and my lack of confidence in my French, though, meant some days I didn’t even stand up.

“Mademoiselle?”

A last chance to try, but instead I shook my head and stayed seated. I took the failing grade to avoid the embarrassment of not being able to make it past the first few lines. The kids in the back always chuckled when that happened. I’d never felt stupid at school, but I did in French class at the Lycée.

I finally redeemed myself one rédaction Friday, though.

Rédaction Fridays were devoted to writing on a given topic, usually an analysis of a book or film we’d recently studied in class. I always made sure to bring my French-English dictionary and my Bescherelle book of every conceivable French verb conjugation to class those weeks. I didn’t mind writing, but more often than not I didn’t know how to respond to the question that I should have written about for two hours.

I watched with envy as my tablemate, Isabelle, filled her grand format pages with beautiful, calligraphy-like, cursive words. She’d squint her eyes and furrow her brow in concentration as she wrote. Every once in a while, she’d catch me watching her, tilt her head, and smile. I’m sure she had no idea that I basically made stuff up to write in grammatically incorrect French.

Mondays, when we got our essays back, were almost as painful as the Friday before. In the French school system, grades are given on a scale of twenty and all grades from zero to twenty are valid and game. Most of my writing earned me a score of seven to nine. Occasionally I breached the fifty percent mark to earn an eleven out of twenty. Isabelle consistently earned eighteen, nineteen and even the occasional, and usually unattainable, twenty out of twenty. I idolized her.

The teacher often selected two or three submissions to highlight, reading excerpts from them as excellent examples of phrasing, of vocabulary choice, of imagery, or of support of a thesis. I loved hearing the French, hearing how my classmates had strung together words in a way I could not yet.

One Friday in the spring trimester, Monsieur Duprès stood, arms extended, at the front of the class.

“Listen up, everyone.” He waited to have our full attention. “In three weeks, as you know, we leave on our classe de voile to learn to sail in Brittany.”

French schools plan these weeklong field trips for students at all levels to go hiking, skiing, or sailing. The athletic part of these trips is obviously important, but the trips are also meant to teach life skills and to be a positive experience of being away from maman and papa to learn self-reliance and independence.

“In keeping with the sailing theme,” Monsieur Duprès continued, “for this week’s rédaction, you will write about the ocean. Be creative.”

No more direction was given than that, but for once, sitting in French class, I knew exactly what to do.

In my ocean themed rédaction, I kept my French simple to try to be as correct as possible while I worked to paint a picture with words of what I remembered about time spent on the North Shore back in Massachusetts. I had no idea if what I had written was any good, but I left class feeling a little lighter, a little more optimistic.

That next Monday, Monsieur Duprès addressed the class again.

“I was exceptionally proud of one rédaction last week even with its numerous grammatical and spelling mistakes. I want you all to appreciate the imagery being expressed here.”

He began to read about the song of the seagulls, and I recognized my essay immediately. I couldn’t believe it. I’d earned a score of fifteen out of twenty. Though the teacher set me apart from my classmates by highlighting my essay, for the first time ever, I felt like I finally belonged.

We had moved to France not knowing how long we would stay. My father’s position did not have a definite end date. After three years of assimilation, I had fallen in love with France, its language and culture and people. I had made French friends, learned the lyrics to the French songs on the radio, and had a favorite French cereal. I happily envisioned the rest of my life in France.

The day my parents announced we would be moving back to the States, right back to Worcester, Mass, that summer, I couldn’t believe it. I drove them crazy asking why and how every two minutes for weeks, hoping that they were mistaken. At night, heartbroken, I cried into my pillow or angrily threw my stuffed animals against the wall. I proposed boarding school programs and homestay options, desperate to find a way to not have to leave. I didn’t want our summers on the Atlantic coast near Royan where my dad actually took time off from work to be with us to end. I didn’t want to miss out on winter breaks spent skiing in the Alps and the Pyrenees. I didn’t want to no longer spend Sunday afternoons walking and picnicking in the forest around Versailles.

I don’t remember if I cried or pouted or stayed silent. Remorse took away my voice and my fight. I hated being back in the States and hated that my parents didn’t seem to mind. I knew they had not expected to come right back to where we’d lived before, but they seemed to simply accept this as fact.

At my new high school, I tried explaining what I missed about my life in France—biking to the patisserie, opening and closing the window shutters every day, finally learning lyrics to songs by my favorite French artists, but my peers asked questions about France as if I had been on an extended vacation, a tourist. Do French men really wear berets? Are there a lot of poodles? Do French people buy baguettes every day? Do Parisians really hate Americans? Did you get to go to the Eiffel Tower? They couldn’t relate to my experience or understand my metamorphosis. I realized I was an outsider again, a foreigner in my own...