The Seder carries on as usual. Mom, who, in every other part of her life, is respectful, assumes the mantle of rebellious teenager. When Grandma reads the part about the Jews wandering through the desert for forty years, Mom cracks it’s because Moses was a man who refused to ask directions. When the talk to turns to Israel, Mom harps on about politics, even though she knows this gets Grandma crazy. When we eat matzo-ball soup, they argue about the cholesterol content of matzo balls.
Dad knows enough to keep quiet. And Phil plays with his hearing aids and dozes in and out of consciousness. I refill my “juice” glass many, many times.
After two hours, we get to the brisket, which means we get to stop talking about Exodus for a while, which is a relief, even if the brisket isn’t. It’s so dry it looks like beef jerky and tastes charred. I move it around my plate, while Grandma chitchats about her bridge club and the cruise she and Phil are taking. Then she asks about our annual summer trip to Rehoboth Beach, which she usually comes up for a portion of.
“What else do you have planned for the summer?” she asks me casually.
It’s a throwaway question, really. Along the lines of how are you? Or what’s new? I’m about to say, “Oh, this and that,” when Mom interrupts to say that I’m working in a lab. Then she tells Grandma all about it. A research lab at a pharmaceutical company. Apparently, I accepted the position just today.
It’s not like I didn’t know she would do this. It’s not like she hasn’t done this my entire life. It’s not like I haven’t let her.
The fury that fills me feels hot and cold, liquid and metal, coating my insides like a second skeleton, one stronger than my own. Maybe this is what allows me to say, “I’m not working in a lab this summer.”
“Well, it’s too late,” Mom snaps back. “I already called Dr. Baumgartner to decline his offer. If you’d had a preference, you had three weeks to make it known.”
“I’m not working at Dr. Baumgartner’s, either.”
“Did you line up something else?” Dad asks.
Mom scoffs, as if that’s unthinkable. And maybe it is. I’ve never had a job. Never had to get one. Never had to do anything for myself. I am helpless. I am a void. A disappointment. My helplessness, my dependency, my passivity, I feel it whorling into a little fiery ball, and I harness that ball, somewhere wondering how something made of weakness can feel so strong. But the ball grows hotter, so hot, the only thing I can do with it is hurl it. At her.
“I don’t think your lab would want me anymore, given that I’ve dropped most of my science courses and am going to drop the rest of them come fall,” I say, spite dripping from my voice. “See, I’m not pre-med anymore. So sorry to disappoint you.”
My sarcasm hangs in the humid air—and then, like a vapor, it floats away as I realize that, for the first time in my life, I’m not sorry to disappoint her. Maybe it’s the spite talking, or maybe Grandma’s secret wine, but I’m almost glad of it. I’m so tired of avoiding the unavoidable, because I feel like I’ve been disappointing her for such a long time.
“You’ve dropped pre-med?” Her voice is quiet, that lethal mix of fury and woundedness that could always take me down like a bullet to the heart.
“That was always your dream, Ellie,” Grandma says, shielding me. She turns to me. “You still haven’t answered my question, Ally. What are you doing this summer?”
Mom is looking so fragile and so angry, and I feel my will starting to break, feel myself starting to give in. But then I hear a voice—my voice—announcing this:
“I’m going back to Paris.”
It comes out, as if the idea were fully formed, something plotted for months, when in fact, it just slipped out, the same way all those admissions to Willem did. But when it does, I feel a thousand pounds lighter, my anger now fully dissipated, replaced by exhilaration flowing through me like sunlight and air.
This is how I felt that day in Paris with Willem. And this is how I know that it’s the right thing to do.
“Also, I’m learning French,” I add. And for some reason, this announcement makes the table erupt into pandemonium. Mom starts screaming at me about lying to her and throwing my whole future away. Dad is yelling about switching majors and who’s going to pay for my exchange program to Paris. Grandma is yelling at Mom for ruining yet another Seder.
So with all the commotion, it’s a little strange that anyone can hear Phil, who has barely said a word since the soup, when he pipes up, “Back to Paris, Ally? I thought Helen said your trip to Paris got canceled because they were striking.” He shakes his head. “They always seem to be striking over there.”
The table goes silent. Phil picks up a piece of matzo and starts munching on it. Mom, Dad, and Grandma all stare at me.
I could so easily cover this up. Phil’s hearing aid was turned down. He heard wrong. I could say that I want to go to Paris because I never made it there on the last trip. I’ve told so many lies. What’s one more?
But I don’t want to lie. I don’t want to cover up. I don’t want to pretend anymore. Because that day with Willem, I may have pretended to be someone named Lulu, but I had never been more honest in my life.
Maybe that’s the thing with liberation. It comes at a price. Forty years wandering through the desert. Or incurring the wrath of two very pissed-off parents.
I take a breath. I brave up.
“Back to Paris,” I say.
Twenty-six
MAY
Home
I make a new list.
Airfare to Paris: $1200
French class at community college: $400
Spending money for two weeks in Europe: $1000.
All together that’s $2,600. That’s how much money I’ll need to save to get to Europe. Mom and Dad are not helping with the trip, obviously, and they’re refusing to let me use any of the money in my savings account, from gifts through the years, because that’s supposed to be for educational purposes, and they’re the trustees on the account, so I can’t argue. Besides, it’s only through Grandma’s intervention, coupled with my threat to go live at Dee’s for the summer that Mom has even agreed to let me live at home. She’s that mad. She’s that mad without even knowing the entire story. I told them I went to Paris. I didn’t tell them why. Or with whom. Or why I need to go back, except that I left something important there—they think it’s the suitcase.
I’m not sure what infuriates her more. Last summer’s deceit or the fact that I won’t tell her everything about it. She refused to speak to me after the Seder and then four weeks went by with barely a word from her. Now that I’m back home for the start of the summer she basically avoids me. Which is both a relief and also kind of scary, because she’s never done anything like this before.
Dee says that twenty-six hundred dollars is a lot for two months, but not impossible. He suggests skipping the French class. But I feel like I need to do that. I’ve always wanted to learn French. And I’m not going back to Paris—not facing down Céline—without it.
So, twenty-six hundred bucks. Doable. If I get a job. But the thing is, I’ve never had a job before. Nothing remotely job-like, beyond babysitting and filing at Dad’s office, which hardly fills the spiffy new résumé that I’ve printed on beautiful card stock. Maybe this explains why, after dropping it off at every business in town with a job opening, I get zero response.
I decide to sell my clock collection. I take them to an antique dealer in Philadelphia. He offers me five hundred bucks for the lot. I’ve easily spent double that on the clocks over the years, but he just looks at me and says that maybe I’ll do better on eBay. But that would take months, and I just want to be rid of them. So I hand over the clocks, except for a Betty Boop one, which I send to Dee.
When Mom finds out what I’ve done, she shakes her head with such profound disgust, like I have just sold my body, not my clocks. The disapproval intensifies. It wafts through the house like a radiation cloud. Nowhere is safe to hide.
I have to get a job. Not just to earn the money but to get out of this house. Escaping to Melanie’s isn’t an option. Number one, we’re not speaking, and number two, she’s at a music program in Maine for the first half of summer—this according to my dad.
“You just gotta keep trying,�� Dee advises when I call him for job advice from our landline. As part of my punishment, my cell phone has been turned off, and the family Internet password protected, so I have to ask them to log me onto the web or else go to the library. “Drop your résumé at every business in town, not just the ones saying they’re hiring, ’cause usually places that are desperate enough to hire someone like you don’t have time to advertise.”
“Thanks a lot.”
“You want a job? Swallow your pride. And drop off a résumé everywhere.”
“Even the car wash?” I joke.
“Yeah. Even the car wash.” Dee isn’t kidding. “And ask to speak to the manager of the car wash and treat him like the King of All Car Washes.”
I imagine myself scrubbing hubcaps. But then I think of Dee, working in a pillow factory this summer or hosing off dishes in the dining hall. He does what he has to do. So the next day, I print out fifty new résumés and just go door to door, from bookstore to sewing shop to grocery store, CPA firm to the liquor store to, yes, the car wash. I don’t just drop my résumé. I ask to speak to managers. Sometimes the managers come out. They ask me about my experience. They ask me how long I want to be employed for. I listen to my own answers: No real job experience to speak of. Two months. I get why nobody’s hiring me.
I’m almost out of résumés when I pass by Café Finlay. It’s a small restaurant on the edge of town, all done up in 1950s décor, with black-and-white-checked floors and a mishmash of Formica tables. Every other time I’ve gone past, it seemed to be closed.
But today music is blasting from inside so loud the windows are vibrating. I push the door, and it nudges open. I shout “hello.” No one replies. The chairs are all stacked up on the tables. There’s a pile of fresh linens on one of the booths. Yesterday’s specials are scrawled on a chalkboard on the wall. Things like halibut with an orange tequila jalapeño beurre blanc with kiwi fruit. Mom calls the food here “eclectic,” her code for weird, which is why we’ve never eaten here. I don’t know anyone who eats here.
“You here with the bread?”
I spin around. There’s a woman, Amazon tall and just as broad, with wild red hair poking out from under a blue bandanna.
“No,” I say.
“Motherfucker!” She shakes her head. “What do you want?” I hold out a résumé. She waves it away. “Ever work in a kitchen?” I shake my head.
“Sorry. No,” she says.
She looks at the Marilyn Monroe wall clock. “I’m going to kill you, Jonas!” She shakes her fist at the door.
I turn to leave, but then I stop. “What’s the bread order?” I ask. “I’ll run and get it for you.”
She glances at the clock again and sighs dramatically. “Grimaldi’s. I need eighteen French baguettes, six loaves of the Harvest. And a couple of day-old brioche. You got that?”
“I think so.”
“Think so’s not gonna butter the bread, honey.”
“Eighteen baguettes. Six loaves of Harvest and a couple of day-old brioche.”
“Make sure it’s stale brioche. Can’t make bread pudding with fresh bread. And ask for Jonas. Tell him it’s for Babs and tell him he can throw in the brioche for free and knock twenty percent off the rest because his damn delivery guy was a no-show again. Also, make sure I don’t get any sourdough. I hate that shit.”
Just One Day - English romantic Novel
Re: Just One Day - English romantic Novel
She grabs a wad of cash from the vintage register. I take it from her and sprint to the bakery as fast as I can, get Jonas, bark the order, and run back with it, which is harder than it sounds, carrying thirty loaves of bread.
I pant as Babs looks over the bread order. “You know how to wash dishes?”
I nod. That much I can do.
She shakes her head in resignation. “Go to the back and ask Nathaniel to introduce you to Hobart.”
“Hobart?”
“Yep. You two’ll be getting intimate.”
Hobart turns out to be the name of the industrial dish washer, and once the restaurant opens, I spend hours with it, rinsing dishes with a giant hose, loading them in Hobart, unloading them while they’re still scalding hot and repeating the whole enterprise. By some miracle, I manage to stay on top of the never-ending flow of dishes and not drop anything or burn my fingers too badly. When there’s a lull, Babs orders me to cut bread or whip cream by hand (she insists it tastes better that way) or mop the floor or find the tenderloins from one of the walk-in coolers. I spend the night in an adrenaline panic, thinking I’m about to screw up.
Nathaniel, the prep cook, helps me as much as he can, telling me where things are, helping me scrub sauté pans when I get too slammed. “Just wait till the weekend,” he warns.
“I thought no one ever ate here.” I put my hand over my mouth, instinctually knowing Babs would be mad to hear that.
But Nathaniel just laughs. “Are you kidding? Babs is worshipped by the Philadelphia foodies. They make the trek out here just for her. She’d make way more money if she moved to Philly, but she says her dogs would hate it in the city. And by dogs, I think she means us.”
When the last of the diners leave, the kitchen staff and the waiters seem to all exhale at once. Someone blasts some old Rolling Stones. A bunch of tables are pushed together and everyone sits down. It’s well past midnight, and I have a long walk home. I start to pack up my things, but Nathaniel motions for me to join them. I sit at the table, feeling shy even though I’ve been bumping hips with these people all night.
“You want a beer?” he asks. “We have to pay for them, but only cost.”
“Or you can have some of the reject wine the distributors bring by,” a waitress named Gillian says.
“I’ll take some wine.”
“It looks like someone died on you,” says one of the waiters. I look down. My nice skirt and top—my good job- hunting outfit—are covered in sauces that look vaguely like bodily fluids.
“I feel like I’m the one who died,” I say. I don’t think I’ve ever been this tired. My muscles ache. My hands are red from the near-scalding water. And my feet? Don’t get me started.
Gillian laughs. “Spoken like a true kitchen slave.”
Babs appears with the big bowls of steaming pasta and small chunks of leftover fish and steak. My stomach lets out a gurgle. The platters get passed around. I don’t know if her cooking is “eclectic,” but the food is amazing, the orange tequila jalapeño sauce is only faintly orange, and it’s smoky rather than spicy. I clear my plate, and then sop up any remaining sauce with a hunk of Jonas’s not-sourdough bread.
“So?” Babs asks me when I’ve finished.
All eyes turn to me. “It’s the second best meal I’ve ever had,” I say. Which is the truth.
Everyone else oohs, like I’ve just insulted Babs. But she just smirks. “I’ll bet your first best was with a lover,” she says, and I go as red as her hair.
Babs instructs me to return the next day at five, and the routine starts all over again. I work harder than I ever have, eat an amazing meal, and pour myself into bed. I have no idea if I’m filling in for someone or maybe being auditioned. Babs screams at me constantly, for using soap on her cast-iron sauté pan or not getting the lipstick off the coffee cups before they go into Hobart or making the whipped cream too stiff or not stiff enough or not adding the exact right amount of vanilla extract. But by the fourth night, I’m learning not to take it so personally.
On the fifth night, before the dinner rush, Babs calls me to the back near the walk-in refrigerator. She’s sucking on a bottle of vodka, which is what she does before the rush begins. Her lipstick leaves smudges on the rim. For a second, I think this is it, that she’s going to fire me. But instead she hands me a sheaf of documents.
“Tax forms,” she explains. “I pay minimum wage, but you’ll get tips. Which reminds me. You keep forgetting to collect yours.” She reaches under the counter for an envelope with my name on it.
I open up the envelope. There’s a wad of cash in there. Easily a hundred dollars. “This is mine?”
She nods. “We pool tips. Everyone gets a cut.”
I run my fingers over the money. The bills snag on my ragged hangnails. My hands are beyond thrashed, but I don’t care because they’re thrashed from my job. Which has earned me this money. I feel something well up inside me that has nothing to do with airplane tickets or Paris trips or money at all, really.
“It’ll go up in the fall,” Babs says. “Summer’s our slow season.”
I hesitate. “That’s great. Except I won’t be here in the fall.”
She wrinkles her red brows. “But I just broke you in.”
I feel bad, guilty, but it was right there on my résumé, the first line—Objective: To obtain short-term employment. Of course, Babs never read my résumé.
“I go to college,” I explain.
“We’ll work around your schedule. Gillian’s a student too. And Nathaniel, on and off.”
“In Boston.”
“Oh.” She pauses. “Oh, well. I think Gordon’s coming back after Labor Day.”
“I’m hoping to leave by the end of July. But only if I can save two thousand dollars by then.” And as I say it, I do the math. More than a hundred bucks a week in tips, plus wages—I actually might be able to pull it off.
“Saving for a car?” she asks absentmindedly. She takes another swig of her vodka. “You can buy mine. That beast’ll be the death of me.” Babs drives an ancient Thunderbird.
“No. I’m saving for Paris.”
She puts her bottle down. “Paris?”
I nod.
“What’s in Paris?”
I look at her. I think of him for the first time in a while. In the craziness of the kitchen, he became a little abstract. “Answers.”
She shakes her head with such vehemence her auburn curls come loose from her bandanna. “You can’t go to Paris looking for answers. You have to go looking for questions—or, at the very least, macarons.”
“Macaroons? The coconut things?” I think of the gross cookie replacements we eat on Passover.
“Not macaroons. Macarons. They’re meringue cookies in pastel colors. They are edible angel’s kisses.” She looks at me. “You need two thousand bucks by when?”
“August.”
She narrows her eyes at me. They’re always a little bit bloodshot, though, oddly, more so at the beginning of a shift than at the end, when they take on a sort of manic gleam. “I’ll make you a deal. If you don’t mind working some doubles for weekend brunch, I’ll make sure you earn your two grand by July twenty-fifth, which is when I close the restaurant for two weeks for my summer vacation. On one condition.”
“Which is?”
“Every day in Paris, you eat a macaron. They have to be fresh, so no buying a pack and eating one a day.” She stops and closes her eyes. “I ate my first macaron in Paris on my honeymoon. I’m divorced now, but some loves are enduring. Especially if they happen in Paris.”
A tiny chill prickles up my neck. “Do you really believe that?” I ask her.
She takes a slug of vodka, her eyes glinting knowingly. “Ahh, it’s those kind of answers you’re after. Well, I can’t help you with that, but if you hustle into the walk-in and find the buttermilk and the cream, I can give you the answer to the proverbial question of how to make the perfect crème fraîche.”
Twenty-seven
JUNE
Home
Intro to French runs three days a week for six weeks, from eleven thirty to one, giving me yet another reason to be out of the House of Disapproval. Though I’m at Café Finlay five nights a week these days, and all day on weekends, on weekdays, I still don’t go in until five. And the restaurant is closed on Monday and Tuesday, so there’s a lot of dead time for Mom and me to avoid each other in.
On the first day of class, I arrive a half hour early and grab an iced tea from the little kiosk and find the classroom and start looking through my book. There’s lots of pictures of France, many from Paris.
The other students start to filter in. I expected college kids, but everyone except me is my parents’ age. One woman with frosted blond hair plops down at the desk next to mine and introduces herself as Carol and offers me a piece of gum. I gladly accept her handshake but decline the gum—it doesn’t seem very French to chew gum in class.
A birdlike woman with cropped gray hair strides in. She looks like she stepped out of a magazine in her tight linen pencil skirt and little silk blouse, both perfectly pressed, which seems impossible, given the ninety percent humidity outside. Plus, she’s wearing a scarf, also strange, given the ninety percent humidity.
Clearly, she is French. And if the scarf wasn’t a giveaway, then there’s the fact that she marches up to the front of the room and starts speaking. In French.
“Are we in the wrong class?” Carol whispers. Then the teacher goes to the board and writes her name, Madame Lambert, and the name of the class, Intro to French. She also writes it in French. “Oh, no such luck,” Carol says.
Madame Lambert turns to us and in the thickest accent imaginable tells us in English that this is beginning French, but that the best way to learn French is to speak and hear it. And that is about the only English I hear for the next hour and a half.
“Je m’appelle Thérèse Lambert,” she says, making it sound like this: Teh-rez. Lomb-behr. “Comment vous appelez-vous?”
The class stares at her. She repeats the question, gesturing to herself, then pointing to us. Still no one answers. She rolls her eyes and does this clicking with her teeth. She points to me. Clicks again, gestures for me to stand up. “Je m’appelle Thérèse Lambert,” she repeats, enunciating slowly and tapping her chest. “Comment t’appelles-tu?”
I stand there for a second frozen, feeling like it’s Céline again jabbering away at me disdainfully. Madame Lambert repeats the question. I get that she’s asking me my name. But I don’t speak French. If I did, I wouldn’t be here. In Intro to French.
But she’s just waiting now. She’s not letting me sit down.
“Je m’appelle Allyson?” I try.
She beams, as though I’ve just explained the origins of the French Revolution, in French. “Bravo! Enchantée, Allyson.”
And she goes around the class asking everyone else’s name the same way.
That was round one. Then comes round two: “Pourquoi voulez-vous apprendre le français?”
She repeats the question, writing it down on the board, circling certain words and writing their English translations. Pourquoi: why. Apprendre: learn. Voulez-vous: do you want. Oh, I see. She’s asking why we want to learn French.
I have no clue how to begin to answer that. That’s why I’m here.
But then she continues.
“Je veux apprendre le français parce que . . .” She circles Je veux: I want. Parce que: because. She repeats it three times. Then points to us.
“I can do this one. I know this word from the movie,” Carol whispers. She raises her hand. “Je veux apprendre le français parce que,” she stumbles over the words and her accent is awful, but Madame just watches her expectantly. “Parce que le divorce!”
I pant as Babs looks over the bread order. “You know how to wash dishes?”
I nod. That much I can do.
She shakes her head in resignation. “Go to the back and ask Nathaniel to introduce you to Hobart.”
“Hobart?”
“Yep. You two’ll be getting intimate.”
Hobart turns out to be the name of the industrial dish washer, and once the restaurant opens, I spend hours with it, rinsing dishes with a giant hose, loading them in Hobart, unloading them while they’re still scalding hot and repeating the whole enterprise. By some miracle, I manage to stay on top of the never-ending flow of dishes and not drop anything or burn my fingers too badly. When there’s a lull, Babs orders me to cut bread or whip cream by hand (she insists it tastes better that way) or mop the floor or find the tenderloins from one of the walk-in coolers. I spend the night in an adrenaline panic, thinking I’m about to screw up.
Nathaniel, the prep cook, helps me as much as he can, telling me where things are, helping me scrub sauté pans when I get too slammed. “Just wait till the weekend,” he warns.
“I thought no one ever ate here.” I put my hand over my mouth, instinctually knowing Babs would be mad to hear that.
But Nathaniel just laughs. “Are you kidding? Babs is worshipped by the Philadelphia foodies. They make the trek out here just for her. She’d make way more money if she moved to Philly, but she says her dogs would hate it in the city. And by dogs, I think she means us.”
When the last of the diners leave, the kitchen staff and the waiters seem to all exhale at once. Someone blasts some old Rolling Stones. A bunch of tables are pushed together and everyone sits down. It’s well past midnight, and I have a long walk home. I start to pack up my things, but Nathaniel motions for me to join them. I sit at the table, feeling shy even though I’ve been bumping hips with these people all night.
“You want a beer?” he asks. “We have to pay for them, but only cost.”
“Or you can have some of the reject wine the distributors bring by,” a waitress named Gillian says.
“I’ll take some wine.”
“It looks like someone died on you,” says one of the waiters. I look down. My nice skirt and top—my good job- hunting outfit—are covered in sauces that look vaguely like bodily fluids.
“I feel like I’m the one who died,” I say. I don’t think I’ve ever been this tired. My muscles ache. My hands are red from the near-scalding water. And my feet? Don’t get me started.
Gillian laughs. “Spoken like a true kitchen slave.”
Babs appears with the big bowls of steaming pasta and small chunks of leftover fish and steak. My stomach lets out a gurgle. The platters get passed around. I don’t know if her cooking is “eclectic,” but the food is amazing, the orange tequila jalapeño sauce is only faintly orange, and it’s smoky rather than spicy. I clear my plate, and then sop up any remaining sauce with a hunk of Jonas’s not-sourdough bread.
“So?” Babs asks me when I’ve finished.
All eyes turn to me. “It’s the second best meal I’ve ever had,” I say. Which is the truth.
Everyone else oohs, like I’ve just insulted Babs. But she just smirks. “I’ll bet your first best was with a lover,” she says, and I go as red as her hair.
Babs instructs me to return the next day at five, and the routine starts all over again. I work harder than I ever have, eat an amazing meal, and pour myself into bed. I have no idea if I’m filling in for someone or maybe being auditioned. Babs screams at me constantly, for using soap on her cast-iron sauté pan or not getting the lipstick off the coffee cups before they go into Hobart or making the whipped cream too stiff or not stiff enough or not adding the exact right amount of vanilla extract. But by the fourth night, I’m learning not to take it so personally.
On the fifth night, before the dinner rush, Babs calls me to the back near the walk-in refrigerator. She’s sucking on a bottle of vodka, which is what she does before the rush begins. Her lipstick leaves smudges on the rim. For a second, I think this is it, that she’s going to fire me. But instead she hands me a sheaf of documents.
“Tax forms,” she explains. “I pay minimum wage, but you’ll get tips. Which reminds me. You keep forgetting to collect yours.” She reaches under the counter for an envelope with my name on it.
I open up the envelope. There’s a wad of cash in there. Easily a hundred dollars. “This is mine?”
She nods. “We pool tips. Everyone gets a cut.”
I run my fingers over the money. The bills snag on my ragged hangnails. My hands are beyond thrashed, but I don’t care because they’re thrashed from my job. Which has earned me this money. I feel something well up inside me that has nothing to do with airplane tickets or Paris trips or money at all, really.
“It’ll go up in the fall,” Babs says. “Summer’s our slow season.”
I hesitate. “That’s great. Except I won’t be here in the fall.”
She wrinkles her red brows. “But I just broke you in.”
I feel bad, guilty, but it was right there on my résumé, the first line—Objective: To obtain short-term employment. Of course, Babs never read my résumé.
“I go to college,” I explain.
“We’ll work around your schedule. Gillian’s a student too. And Nathaniel, on and off.”
“In Boston.”
“Oh.” She pauses. “Oh, well. I think Gordon’s coming back after Labor Day.”
“I’m hoping to leave by the end of July. But only if I can save two thousand dollars by then.” And as I say it, I do the math. More than a hundred bucks a week in tips, plus wages—I actually might be able to pull it off.
“Saving for a car?” she asks absentmindedly. She takes another swig of her vodka. “You can buy mine. That beast’ll be the death of me.” Babs drives an ancient Thunderbird.
“No. I’m saving for Paris.”
She puts her bottle down. “Paris?”
I nod.
“What’s in Paris?”
I look at her. I think of him for the first time in a while. In the craziness of the kitchen, he became a little abstract. “Answers.”
She shakes her head with such vehemence her auburn curls come loose from her bandanna. “You can’t go to Paris looking for answers. You have to go looking for questions—or, at the very least, macarons.”
“Macaroons? The coconut things?” I think of the gross cookie replacements we eat on Passover.
“Not macaroons. Macarons. They’re meringue cookies in pastel colors. They are edible angel’s kisses.” She looks at me. “You need two thousand bucks by when?”
“August.”
She narrows her eyes at me. They’re always a little bit bloodshot, though, oddly, more so at the beginning of a shift than at the end, when they take on a sort of manic gleam. “I’ll make you a deal. If you don’t mind working some doubles for weekend brunch, I’ll make sure you earn your two grand by July twenty-fifth, which is when I close the restaurant for two weeks for my summer vacation. On one condition.”
“Which is?”
“Every day in Paris, you eat a macaron. They have to be fresh, so no buying a pack and eating one a day.” She stops and closes her eyes. “I ate my first macaron in Paris on my honeymoon. I’m divorced now, but some loves are enduring. Especially if they happen in Paris.”
A tiny chill prickles up my neck. “Do you really believe that?” I ask her.
She takes a slug of vodka, her eyes glinting knowingly. “Ahh, it’s those kind of answers you’re after. Well, I can’t help you with that, but if you hustle into the walk-in and find the buttermilk and the cream, I can give you the answer to the proverbial question of how to make the perfect crème fraîche.”
Twenty-seven
JUNE
Home
Intro to French runs three days a week for six weeks, from eleven thirty to one, giving me yet another reason to be out of the House of Disapproval. Though I’m at Café Finlay five nights a week these days, and all day on weekends, on weekdays, I still don’t go in until five. And the restaurant is closed on Monday and Tuesday, so there’s a lot of dead time for Mom and me to avoid each other in.
On the first day of class, I arrive a half hour early and grab an iced tea from the little kiosk and find the classroom and start looking through my book. There’s lots of pictures of France, many from Paris.
The other students start to filter in. I expected college kids, but everyone except me is my parents’ age. One woman with frosted blond hair plops down at the desk next to mine and introduces herself as Carol and offers me a piece of gum. I gladly accept her handshake but decline the gum—it doesn’t seem very French to chew gum in class.
A birdlike woman with cropped gray hair strides in. She looks like she stepped out of a magazine in her tight linen pencil skirt and little silk blouse, both perfectly pressed, which seems impossible, given the ninety percent humidity outside. Plus, she’s wearing a scarf, also strange, given the ninety percent humidity.
Clearly, she is French. And if the scarf wasn’t a giveaway, then there’s the fact that she marches up to the front of the room and starts speaking. In French.
“Are we in the wrong class?” Carol whispers. Then the teacher goes to the board and writes her name, Madame Lambert, and the name of the class, Intro to French. She also writes it in French. “Oh, no such luck,” Carol says.
Madame Lambert turns to us and in the thickest accent imaginable tells us in English that this is beginning French, but that the best way to learn French is to speak and hear it. And that is about the only English I hear for the next hour and a half.
“Je m’appelle Thérèse Lambert,” she says, making it sound like this: Teh-rez. Lomb-behr. “Comment vous appelez-vous?”
The class stares at her. She repeats the question, gesturing to herself, then pointing to us. Still no one answers. She rolls her eyes and does this clicking with her teeth. She points to me. Clicks again, gestures for me to stand up. “Je m’appelle Thérèse Lambert,” she repeats, enunciating slowly and tapping her chest. “Comment t’appelles-tu?”
I stand there for a second frozen, feeling like it’s Céline again jabbering away at me disdainfully. Madame Lambert repeats the question. I get that she’s asking me my name. But I don’t speak French. If I did, I wouldn’t be here. In Intro to French.
But she’s just waiting now. She’s not letting me sit down.
“Je m’appelle Allyson?” I try.
She beams, as though I’ve just explained the origins of the French Revolution, in French. “Bravo! Enchantée, Allyson.”
And she goes around the class asking everyone else’s name the same way.
That was round one. Then comes round two: “Pourquoi voulez-vous apprendre le français?”
She repeats the question, writing it down on the board, circling certain words and writing their English translations. Pourquoi: why. Apprendre: learn. Voulez-vous: do you want. Oh, I see. She’s asking why we want to learn French.
I have no clue how to begin to answer that. That’s why I’m here.
But then she continues.
“Je veux apprendre le français parce que . . .” She circles Je veux: I want. Parce que: because. She repeats it three times. Then points to us.
“I can do this one. I know this word from the movie,” Carol whispers. She raises her hand. “Je veux apprendre le français parce que,” she stumbles over the words and her accent is awful, but Madame just watches her expectantly. “Parce que le divorce!”
Re: Just One Day - English romantic Novel
“Excellent,” Madame Lambert says, only she says it in the French way, which makes it sound even more excellent. Le divorce, she writes on the board. “Divorce. La même,” she says. The same, she writes. Then she writes down le mariage and explains that this is the antonym.
Carol leans in. “When I divorced my husband, I told myself I was going to let myself get fat and I was going to learn French. If I do as well with the French as I’m doing with the fat, I’ll be fluent by September!”
Madame Lambert goes around the room, and people stumble to explain why they want to learn French. Two of the people are going on vacation in France. One is going to study art history and needs some French. One thinks it’s pretty. In each case, Madame writes down the word, its translation, and its opposite. Vacation: vacances. Work: travail.
I went first last time, and this time I’m last. I’m in a bit of panic by then, trying to think of what to say. How do you say accidents in French? Or because I think I might have made a mistake. Or Romeo and Juliet. Or to find a lost thing. Or because I don’t want to compete, I just want to speak French. But I don’t know how to say that in French. If I did, I wouldn’t be here.
Then I remember Willem. The Nutella. Falling in love versus being in love. How did he say it? Stain in French? Sash? Tache?
“Allyson,” she says. “Pourquoi veux-tu apprendre le français?”
“Je veux apprendre le français,” I begin, mimicking what I’ve just heard everyone else say. I’ve got that part down. “Parce que . . .” I stop to think. “Le tache,” I say finally.
It’s such a weird thing to say, if that’s what I’ve said. A stain. It doesn’t make any sense. But Madame Lambert gives a stern nod and writes la tâche on the board. Then she writes task. I wonder if I remembered the word wrong. She looks at me, at my confusion. And then she writes another word on the board. La tache: stain.
I nod my head. Yes, that’s it. She doesn’t write down an opposite. There is no opposite of stain.
When we’re all done, Madame smiles and claps. “C’est courageux d’aller dans l’inconnu,” she says, writing it down on the board. She has us write it down and deconstruct it with a dictionary. Courageux we get is courageous. Dans is into. L'inconnu is the unknown. D’aller. It takes us twenty minutes, but we finally get it: It’s courageous to go into territory unknown. When we figure this out, the class is as proud as Madame.
Still, I spend the first week of class living in a state of half terror of being called on—because everyone gets called on a lot; there are only six of us, and Madame is a big fan of class participation. Whenever we get shy, she reminds us, “C’est courageux d’aller dans l’inconnu.” Eventually, I just sort of get over myself. I blunder every time I speak, and I know I’m butchering the grammar, and my pronunciation is awful, but then we’re all in the same boat. The more I do it, the less self-conscious I get and the easier it is to just try.
“I feel like a damn fool, but it might just be working,” Carol says one afternoon after class.
She and I and a few of the other students have started getting together for coffee or lunch after class to practice, to recover from Madame Lambert’s verbal barrages, and to deconstruct what she really means when she goes “pff” and blows air through her lips. There’s a whole language in her pffs.
“I think I had a dream in French,” Carol says. “I was telling my ex terrible things in perfect French.” She grins at the memory.
“I don’t know if I’m that advanced, but I’m definitely getting the hang of it,” I reply. “Or maybe I’m just getting the hang of feeling like an idiot.”
“Un idiot,” Carol says it in French. “Half the time, you add a French accent and it works. But getting over feeling like un idiot might just be half the battle.”
I imagine myself, alone in Paris. There are so many battles I’m going to have to fight, traveling alone, facing Céline, speaking French—all of it is so daunting, some days I can’t believe I’m actually even attempting it. But I think Carol might be right about this, and the more I flub and get over it in class, somehow, the better prepared I feel for the trip. Not just the French. All of it. C’est courageux d’aller dans l’inconnu.
At the restaurant, Babs blabs to the entire staff that I’m saving to go to Paris to meet my lover, and I’m learning French because he speaks no English, so now Gillian and Nathaniel have taken it upon themselves to tutor me. Babs is doing her part by adding a bunch of French items to the specials menu, including macarons, which apparently take hours to make, but when I eat them—oh, my God, I get what all the fuss is about. Pale pink, hard outside, but spongy and light and delicate inside, with a raspberry deliciousness filling.
In between classes, hanging with my fellow students, and being at work, I’m spending a fair amount of time, if not speaking French, then thinking about it. When Gillian buses plates into the kitchen, she’ll drill me on verbs. “Eat,” she’ll call out. “Je mange, tu manges, il mange, nous man- geons, vous mangez, ils mangent,” I’ll call back. Nathaniel, who doesn’t actually speak French but used to have a French girlfriend, teaches me how to swear. Specifically, how to fight with your girlfriend.
T’es toujours aussi salope? Are you always such a bitch?
T’as tes règles ou quoi? Are you on the rag or what?
And ferme ta gueule! Which he claims means: Shut your piehole!
“They can’t say ‘shut your piehole’ in France,” I say.
“Well, maybe it’s not a direct translation, but it’s pretty damn close,” he replies.
“But it’s so crass. The French are tasteful.”
“Dude, those people sainted Jerry Lewis. They’re human just like you and me.” He pauses, then grins. “Except for the women. They’re superhuman.”
I think of Céline and get a bad feeling in my stomach.
Another one of the waiters loans me his Rosetta Stone CDs, and I start practicing with those too. After a few weeks, I start to notice that my French is improving, that when Madame Lambert calls on me to describe what I’m eating for lunch, I can handle it. I start to speak in phrases, then sentences, sentences I don’t have to map out beforehand like I do with Mandarin. Somehow, it’s happening. I’m doing it.
One morning, toward the end of the month, I come downstairs to find Mom at the kitchen table. In front of her is the catalog from the community college and her checkbook. I say good morning and go the fridge for some orange juice. Mom just watches me. I’m about to take my juice out to the back patio, which is sort of what we’ve done if Dad’s not home as a buffer—if she’s in one room, I go into another—when she tells me to sit down.
“Your father and I have decided to reimburse you for your French class,” she says, ripping off the check. “It doesn’t mean we condone any part of this trip. Or condone your duplicity. We absolutely don’t. But the French class is part of your education, and you’re obviously taking it seriously, so you shouldn’t have to pay for it.”
She hands me the check. It’s for four hundred dollars. It’s a lot of money. But I’ve already saved nearly a thousand dollars, even with the money I paid for my class, and I just put a deposit down on an airplane ticket to Paris, and Babs is advancing me a week’s wages so I can buy it next week. And I have a month yet to save. The four hundred dollars would take the edge off. But the thing is, maybe I don’t need the edge to be off.
“It’s okay,” I tell Mom, handing back the check. “But thank you.”
“What, you don’t want it?”
“It’s not that. I don’t need it.”
“Of course you need it,” she retorts. “Paris is expensive.”
“I know, but I’m saving a lot of money from my job, and I’m hardly spending anything this summer. I don’t even have to pay for gas.” I try to make a joke out of it.”
“That’s another thing. If you’re going to be working until all hours, you should take the car at night.”
“That’s okay. I don’t want to leave you stranded.”
“Well, call me for a ride.”
“It’s late. And I usually get a lift home from someone.”
She takes the check back and with a violence that surprises me, rips it up. “Well, I can’t do anything for you anymore, can I?”
“What does that mean?”
“You don’t want my money or my car or my ride. I tried to help you get a job, and you don’t need me for that.”
“I’m nineteen,” I say.
“I am aware of how old you are, Allyson. I did give birth to you!” Her voice cracks like a whip, and the snap of it seems to startle even her.
Sometimes, you can only feel something by its absence. By the empty space it leaves behind. As I look at Mom, all pissed and pinched, I finally get that she’s not just angry. She’s hurt. A wave of sympathy washes over me, taking away a chink of my anger. Once it’s gone, I realize how much of it I have. How angry I am at her. Have been for this past year. Maybe a lot longer.
“I know you gave birth to me,” I tell her.
“It’s just I’ve spent nineteen years raising you, and now I’m being shut out of your life. I can’t know anything about you. I don’t know what classes you’re taking. I don’t know who you’re friends with anymore. I don’t know why you’re going to Paris.” She lets out something between a shudder and a sigh.
“But I know,” I tell her. “And for now, can’t that be enough?”
“No, it can’t,” she snaps.
“Well, it’ll have to be,” I snap back.
“So you dictate the rules now, is that it?”
“There aren’t any rules. I’m not dictating anything. I’m just saying you have to trust the job you did raising me.”
“Did. Past tense. I wish you’d stop talking like you’re laying me off from my job.”
I’m startled by that, not by her thinking of me as a job, so much as by the implication that I am in a position to do the firing. “I thought you were going to go back to some kind of PR job.”
“I was, wasn’t I?” She guffaws. “I said I’d do it when you started middle school. When you started high school. When you got your driver’s license.” She rubs her eyes with the heels of her hands. “Don’t you think if I’d wanted to go back, I’d have done it by now?”
“So why haven’t you?”
“It wasn’t what I wanted.”
“What do you want?”
“For things to be how they were.”
For some reason, this makes me angry. Because it’s both true—she wants to keep me fossilized—and such a lie. “Even when things were ‘how they were,’ it was never enough. I was never enough.”
Mom looks up, her eyes tired and surprised at the same time. “Of course you were,” she says. “You are.”
“You know what bothers me? How you and Dad always say you quit while you were ahead. There’s no such thing as quitting while you’re ahead. You quit while you were behind. That’s why you quit!”
Mom frowns, exasperated; it’s her dealing-with-a-crazy-teenager look, one I’ve gotten to know well this past year, my last year of actually being a teenager. Oddly enough, it wasn’t something she had to zing me with much before. Which I now realize was maybe part of the problem.
“You wanted more kids,” I continue. “And you had to settle for just me. And you’ve spent my whole life trying make me be enough.”
Carol leans in. “When I divorced my husband, I told myself I was going to let myself get fat and I was going to learn French. If I do as well with the French as I’m doing with the fat, I’ll be fluent by September!”
Madame Lambert goes around the room, and people stumble to explain why they want to learn French. Two of the people are going on vacation in France. One is going to study art history and needs some French. One thinks it’s pretty. In each case, Madame writes down the word, its translation, and its opposite. Vacation: vacances. Work: travail.
I went first last time, and this time I’m last. I’m in a bit of panic by then, trying to think of what to say. How do you say accidents in French? Or because I think I might have made a mistake. Or Romeo and Juliet. Or to find a lost thing. Or because I don’t want to compete, I just want to speak French. But I don’t know how to say that in French. If I did, I wouldn’t be here.
Then I remember Willem. The Nutella. Falling in love versus being in love. How did he say it? Stain in French? Sash? Tache?
“Allyson,” she says. “Pourquoi veux-tu apprendre le français?”
“Je veux apprendre le français,” I begin, mimicking what I’ve just heard everyone else say. I’ve got that part down. “Parce que . . .” I stop to think. “Le tache,” I say finally.
It’s such a weird thing to say, if that’s what I’ve said. A stain. It doesn’t make any sense. But Madame Lambert gives a stern nod and writes la tâche on the board. Then she writes task. I wonder if I remembered the word wrong. She looks at me, at my confusion. And then she writes another word on the board. La tache: stain.
I nod my head. Yes, that’s it. She doesn’t write down an opposite. There is no opposite of stain.
When we’re all done, Madame smiles and claps. “C’est courageux d’aller dans l’inconnu,” she says, writing it down on the board. She has us write it down and deconstruct it with a dictionary. Courageux we get is courageous. Dans is into. L'inconnu is the unknown. D’aller. It takes us twenty minutes, but we finally get it: It’s courageous to go into territory unknown. When we figure this out, the class is as proud as Madame.
Still, I spend the first week of class living in a state of half terror of being called on—because everyone gets called on a lot; there are only six of us, and Madame is a big fan of class participation. Whenever we get shy, she reminds us, “C’est courageux d’aller dans l’inconnu.” Eventually, I just sort of get over myself. I blunder every time I speak, and I know I’m butchering the grammar, and my pronunciation is awful, but then we’re all in the same boat. The more I do it, the less self-conscious I get and the easier it is to just try.
“I feel like a damn fool, but it might just be working,” Carol says one afternoon after class.
She and I and a few of the other students have started getting together for coffee or lunch after class to practice, to recover from Madame Lambert’s verbal barrages, and to deconstruct what she really means when she goes “pff” and blows air through her lips. There’s a whole language in her pffs.
“I think I had a dream in French,” Carol says. “I was telling my ex terrible things in perfect French.” She grins at the memory.
“I don’t know if I’m that advanced, but I’m definitely getting the hang of it,” I reply. “Or maybe I’m just getting the hang of feeling like an idiot.”
“Un idiot,” Carol says it in French. “Half the time, you add a French accent and it works. But getting over feeling like un idiot might just be half the battle.”
I imagine myself, alone in Paris. There are so many battles I’m going to have to fight, traveling alone, facing Céline, speaking French—all of it is so daunting, some days I can’t believe I’m actually even attempting it. But I think Carol might be right about this, and the more I flub and get over it in class, somehow, the better prepared I feel for the trip. Not just the French. All of it. C’est courageux d’aller dans l’inconnu.
At the restaurant, Babs blabs to the entire staff that I’m saving to go to Paris to meet my lover, and I’m learning French because he speaks no English, so now Gillian and Nathaniel have taken it upon themselves to tutor me. Babs is doing her part by adding a bunch of French items to the specials menu, including macarons, which apparently take hours to make, but when I eat them—oh, my God, I get what all the fuss is about. Pale pink, hard outside, but spongy and light and delicate inside, with a raspberry deliciousness filling.
In between classes, hanging with my fellow students, and being at work, I’m spending a fair amount of time, if not speaking French, then thinking about it. When Gillian buses plates into the kitchen, she’ll drill me on verbs. “Eat,” she’ll call out. “Je mange, tu manges, il mange, nous man- geons, vous mangez, ils mangent,” I’ll call back. Nathaniel, who doesn’t actually speak French but used to have a French girlfriend, teaches me how to swear. Specifically, how to fight with your girlfriend.
T’es toujours aussi salope? Are you always such a bitch?
T’as tes règles ou quoi? Are you on the rag or what?
And ferme ta gueule! Which he claims means: Shut your piehole!
“They can’t say ‘shut your piehole’ in France,” I say.
“Well, maybe it’s not a direct translation, but it’s pretty damn close,” he replies.
“But it’s so crass. The French are tasteful.”
“Dude, those people sainted Jerry Lewis. They’re human just like you and me.” He pauses, then grins. “Except for the women. They’re superhuman.”
I think of Céline and get a bad feeling in my stomach.
Another one of the waiters loans me his Rosetta Stone CDs, and I start practicing with those too. After a few weeks, I start to notice that my French is improving, that when Madame Lambert calls on me to describe what I’m eating for lunch, I can handle it. I start to speak in phrases, then sentences, sentences I don’t have to map out beforehand like I do with Mandarin. Somehow, it’s happening. I’m doing it.
One morning, toward the end of the month, I come downstairs to find Mom at the kitchen table. In front of her is the catalog from the community college and her checkbook. I say good morning and go the fridge for some orange juice. Mom just watches me. I’m about to take my juice out to the back patio, which is sort of what we’ve done if Dad’s not home as a buffer—if she’s in one room, I go into another—when she tells me to sit down.
“Your father and I have decided to reimburse you for your French class,” she says, ripping off the check. “It doesn’t mean we condone any part of this trip. Or condone your duplicity. We absolutely don’t. But the French class is part of your education, and you’re obviously taking it seriously, so you shouldn’t have to pay for it.”
She hands me the check. It’s for four hundred dollars. It’s a lot of money. But I’ve already saved nearly a thousand dollars, even with the money I paid for my class, and I just put a deposit down on an airplane ticket to Paris, and Babs is advancing me a week’s wages so I can buy it next week. And I have a month yet to save. The four hundred dollars would take the edge off. But the thing is, maybe I don’t need the edge to be off.
“It’s okay,” I tell Mom, handing back the check. “But thank you.”
“What, you don’t want it?”
“It’s not that. I don’t need it.”
“Of course you need it,” she retorts. “Paris is expensive.”
“I know, but I’m saving a lot of money from my job, and I’m hardly spending anything this summer. I don’t even have to pay for gas.” I try to make a joke out of it.”
“That’s another thing. If you’re going to be working until all hours, you should take the car at night.”
“That’s okay. I don’t want to leave you stranded.”
“Well, call me for a ride.”
“It’s late. And I usually get a lift home from someone.”
She takes the check back and with a violence that surprises me, rips it up. “Well, I can’t do anything for you anymore, can I?”
“What does that mean?”
“You don’t want my money or my car or my ride. I tried to help you get a job, and you don’t need me for that.”
“I’m nineteen,” I say.
“I am aware of how old you are, Allyson. I did give birth to you!” Her voice cracks like a whip, and the snap of it seems to startle even her.
Sometimes, you can only feel something by its absence. By the empty space it leaves behind. As I look at Mom, all pissed and pinched, I finally get that she’s not just angry. She’s hurt. A wave of sympathy washes over me, taking away a chink of my anger. Once it’s gone, I realize how much of it I have. How angry I am at her. Have been for this past year. Maybe a lot longer.
“I know you gave birth to me,” I tell her.
“It’s just I’ve spent nineteen years raising you, and now I’m being shut out of your life. I can’t know anything about you. I don’t know what classes you’re taking. I don’t know who you’re friends with anymore. I don’t know why you’re going to Paris.” She lets out something between a shudder and a sigh.
“But I know,” I tell her. “And for now, can’t that be enough?”
“No, it can’t,” she snaps.
“Well, it’ll have to be,” I snap back.
“So you dictate the rules now, is that it?”
“There aren’t any rules. I’m not dictating anything. I’m just saying you have to trust the job you did raising me.”
“Did. Past tense. I wish you’d stop talking like you’re laying me off from my job.”
I’m startled by that, not by her thinking of me as a job, so much as by the implication that I am in a position to do the firing. “I thought you were going to go back to some kind of PR job.”
“I was, wasn’t I?” She guffaws. “I said I’d do it when you started middle school. When you started high school. When you got your driver’s license.” She rubs her eyes with the heels of her hands. “Don’t you think if I’d wanted to go back, I’d have done it by now?”
“So why haven’t you?”
“It wasn’t what I wanted.”
“What do you want?”
“For things to be how they were.”
For some reason, this makes me angry. Because it’s both true—she wants to keep me fossilized—and such a lie. “Even when things were ‘how they were,’ it was never enough. I was never enough.”
Mom looks up, her eyes tired and surprised at the same time. “Of course you were,” she says. “You are.”
“You know what bothers me? How you and Dad always say you quit while you were ahead. There’s no such thing as quitting while you’re ahead. You quit while you were behind. That’s why you quit!”
Mom frowns, exasperated; it’s her dealing-with-a-crazy-teenager look, one I’ve gotten to know well this past year, my last year of actually being a teenager. Oddly enough, it wasn’t something she had to zing me with much before. Which I now realize was maybe part of the problem.
“You wanted more kids,” I continue. “And you had to settle for just me. And you’ve spent my whole life trying make me be enough.”