French Lessons: A Memoir (3 page)

I loved to hide in that house. I hid under the grand piano,
to watch the argyle socks of my sister's dates. I crouched on
the staircase, to watch my parents' parties. I hid behind the
couch. Everyone had an activity I wanted to observe.

After dinner, my father sank into the wing chair with a
newspaper and smoked L&Ms. A corner of the living room
belonged to him, consisting of the wing chair, a table with a
chess set on it, and a grand piano across from the table. He
sat in that chair and rubbed one hand through his sandy gray
hair and leaned his cheek, freckled with white stubble,
against a quilted upholstery fabric of green song larks. I can
hear the ice clinking in his glass, one of the gold and black
glasses they'd gotten as anniversary presents with "Sidney
and Leonore" printed on it. He put the glass down by the
chess set next to his ashtray and picked up his cigarette and
breathed in, a deep sigh of a breath.

My family had made the transition from diaspora Yiddish
to American English in a quick generation. You couldn't
hear the shadow of an accent, unless my grandmother was
around.

Until I heard Risa, a recent Russian immigrant who gives
manicures at the Paris Health Club in New York City, I had
completely forgotten the sound of my grandmother's ac cent. I was going there weekly, to the salon, to offset the
strains of my untenured teaching job in the French department at Columbia. "Let me see those hands, darling." I
closed my eyes and surrendered my hands. Risa laid her
hands on mine, deftly scraping away at excess cuticle. It was
my grandmother's soft hands, her voice, too. It was Nanny!
Her "r" had the same lilt as Risa's, more of a gargle than a roll.
There was throat in her voice, too, "acch" sounds and spit.
Her "a"s turned into "e"s: "Ellis," not "Alice"; "fens" instead of
"face"; "nels" instead of "nails," like Risa's.

My grandmother lived on Fremont Avenue in West Minneapolis in a post-Victorian block of two-family duplexes
and brick apartments bordered on one corner by the reform temple, Temple Israel, and on the other by the Red
Owl Supermarket. It was a quick walk to pick up sprinkles
for sugar cookies or some bridge mix or to go to services.
"Don't get in a car with any strangers, don't go with strange
boys!" She would give me a lesson when we walked alongside some innocent blonde grocery boy, wheeling the cart
to 2¢I O Fremont Avenue for his twenty-five-cent tip.

Danger was at bay inside her house. Every surface, from
the gray nubbly upholstery of the chair next to the window,
to the green silk with gold thread covering the couch, to the
gray-green oil painting of my glamorous Aunt Helen, spoke
of familiarity and comfort. Only books were missing. Three
books perched timidly on a built-in bookshelf dividing the
dining room from the living room. One of them was a biography of Pola Negri, the star of silent film. My Aunt Stella
had worked for her. We knew that Pola Negri lost her stardom when talking films came in. No one in Hollywood
liked her accent in the movies, so she retired. I picked up
the Pola Negri biography every time I went to my grand mother's and looked for my Aunt Stella in the index. I
wished Nanny would get some different books. I suspected
she couldn't read or write but I didn't want to ask. She had
an acute sense of propriety, for herself and for anyone who
was Jewish. "It's a shame for the people" was Nanny's line
about any Jewish person who committed a crime, lapsed in
behavior, or called attention to themselves.

There were some topics you couldn't bring up around
Nanny. The social security form she had to sign remained
untouched for months on her coffee table. She had never
voted. In her mind an evil force, bigger than the Red Owl,
bigger than the Temple, lurking, perhaps, in the Social Security Administration or the Registrar of Voters, was waiting to
send her back. Back to Trask, Lithuania, where her mother
had hidden her in the closet so the Cossacks wouldn't rape
her.

Looking at a photo of my grandmother when she was my
age, thirty-eight, I see that she looked like me. The same
lines from her nose to her lips. Low forehead. Full cheeks. A
Victorian pompadour, a heavy bodice swathed in gauzy fabric, a high neck. When she was eighty, our family snapshots
show her in her pink wallpaper brocade, holding herself
primly, her lips pursed disapprovingly.

"Who's that boy? Don't you go with any boys. You don't
know what they're going to do with you."

"Nanny, stop it!"

I made fun of my grandmother's warnings. They came
out of nowhere. Sometimes I thought she was making a
joke. Then I would look at her up close and see the trembling around her mouth, the tightening of her jaw. She was
terrified.

My parents thought it was a good idea to have people other than family members around Nanny. Around outsiders, she would hide her fears so as not to shame her people. After Nanny moved out of the Fremont Avenue duplex,
I took my friend Valerie Golden to visit Nanny's new apartment on this theory. Valerie was the other Jewish girl in my
class at school. She understood about Nanny. "You can't
come in girls, they're coming for me. Not safe, not safe."
Nanny's vowels were fast and choppy. Her tongue was clicking against the roof of her mouth as she talked through the
door. It barely sounded like English anymore. Valerie and I
never even got her to open. Her sociability had stopped
working.

For eight years she languished in the Sholom Home, on
thorazine. The Sholom Home nursing facility, serving the
Jewish community, was located in a no-man's-land between
the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul. You had to follow the freeway signs for "The Midway: State Fairgrounds"
to get there. The false promise of those freeway signs annoyed me.

At Sholom I could hear the foreign din as soon as I walked
in the door. Old people sat in groups and spoke Yiddish.
There was a singular quality to the sounds of the Sholom
Home that disturbed me: they were familiar, although I
couldn't understand a word.

Nanny didn't sit with the others. She sat in her room on
her Victorian chair from Fremont Avenue, rocking and
wringing her fleshy hands. A fuse had blown in her head,
making it impossible for her to control which language she
was speaking. The languages from her past-Russian from
the school she had attended in Lithuania, Yiddish from
home, Hebrew from the synagogue-came up like bile. She had gotten a prayer book as a gift from the Sholom Home
administration. She wore it around her neck on a chord. She
picked it up and closed her eyes, started in on a prayer,
looked up at me, and "recognized" me. "Oh my, I don't
know what I'm saying, Ruthie" (Ruthie was my aunt); then
she stiffened and went silent. The next words she spoke
were in Yiddish. The mode of each language was in place:
her Hebrew sounded incantatory, ritualistic; Yiddish was
conversational, emotional. The change from one language
to another, from ritual to conversation, was all the communication she could produce.

I had never heard my grandmother speak more than a
sentence or two in a foreign language until she lost her
mind. She had kept those past lives tight inside her, until
they came out all jumbled up at the end. I would give anything to have heard her when she was ten or twenty or
thirty-five, when her other languages worked. I imagine my
Nanny in the czar's school. She's an ace at Russian in my fantasy. Even though it's the language of evil men, she picks it
up right away. It protects her from them. I invent a scene: a
wooden desk, a smock, Cyrillic letters on slate, pens and
inkwells.

Today I am a French teacher. I think about my Nanny, sliding from Hebrew to English to Yiddish. Sliding and pushing
away bad memories. Nanny had a surfeit of memories, but
there was no connection between one memory and the
next. "Il n'y avait pas de suite dans ses idees": "There was no
connection between her ideas." Why does that sentence
come to me in French, out of the blue? It flies into my head.
No other sentence will do. I wonder why I switch like thatwhy I suddenly need to think in French. It's not like my grandmother's switching, but it feels disturbed, like hers.
French, for me, is not just an accomplishment. It's a need. I
wonder if I could end up like her?

The Last Summer at Wildhurst Road

Until I was eight, we spent every summer at our lake
house on Wildhurst Road, Lake Minnetonka. We stayed
there from Memorial Day until Labor Day. It was a square,
white stucco, two-story house built by my grandfather Max
Kaplan before he lost his money in the Depression. A stone
wall along the lakefront had fallen into disrepair but the
dock my parents put up got more elaborate every year. By
the time I was seven, the dock was grand: you walked out
thirty feet or more to a generous square that you could lie
on, fish off, or dive off. The important rooms of the house
faced the lake. Downstairs there was a square room the
whole length of the house on the lake side, where you
could watch the sun set. Upstairs there was a sleeping porch
with windows on three sides where my parents slept. It was
a romantic, peaceful room with a view of Lake Minnetonka
through elm trees and a constant warm breeze. In town my
parents slept in twin beds but at the lake house they slept
together in my grandmother's mahogany bed, looking out
at the lake. At the lake we lived in closer quarters than in
town. My room was connected to my parents' sleeping
porch by a glass door, with a curtain for privacy. There was no hallway separating us. I looked out the windows of my
room onto the next-door neighbors' house. I could hear the
sound of the lake lapping against the shore coming in
through my parents' sleeping porch. Daylight savings meant
that dusk didn't come until 9 P.M. I heard too many interesting noises to want to sleep: crickets, waves lapping against
the shore, the purr of outboard motors.

A whole different network of friends lived out at the lake:
on Grays Bay, Tonka Bay, Wayzata Bay, past the Narrows
Bridge. I loved visiting people by boat instead of by car. My
sister took me over to her friend Tuppy's, on the Upper
Lake. I got to play with Tuppy's little sister Gretchen. Once,
when night fell, a bat came into the house through an open
window. We couldn't see it but we could hear the swish of
the wings. We turned on the light in the living room, and the
bat cast its shadow on the walls. It looked like it knew where
it was going, swooping under doorways at scientific angles.

Tuppy and Gretchen's parents weren't home. We ran
through the house, screaming, as if our screams would
make the bat go away. We laughed at the sight of each other
running through the house and screaming. We laughed until we cried, tears of exhaustion and pleasure at our game.
The bat eventually flew out of the house as expertly as it had
come in, then we lay on the couch, the four of us, and
breathed long sighs until we were calm again.

In Minnesota you could look up at any night sky in the
summer and see the bats swooping around under trees. Bats
preferred old barns and garages and attics to living rooms
and dining rooms, but occasionally they got trapped and
had to feel their way out of a human abode.

I was in my room on Wildhurst Road, listening to night
sounds. The overhead light was still on. I looked up at the ceiling and a bat came swooping between me and the light. I
got a good look at its face and wings. The wings made a
shadow against the wall of my bedroom, bigger than the bat
at Tuppy's. I screamed. My parents came running. My father
grabbed a tennis racket from my brother's room. He went
running through the house swinging that tennis racket.
Tennis wasn't his game. He liked golf and fishing. I had
never seen my father move so fast. My mother looked
worried-about him, not the bat. It took him an hour to get
that bat under control. His face was usually a pale sandy
color but now it was red and sweaty. I kept the door to my
room open so I could watch, even though that meant the
bat might come back in. I watched him run down the hall
with the tennis racket over his head. He was swearing. Finally he met up with the bat. He smashed it against a wall. I
left my room to get a closer look. He was wrapping the bat in
newspaper provided by my mother.

"Mom, I want to see the bat."

"Now, why in the world would you even want to see such
a thing? Bats carry horrible diseases."

My mother wrapped up the bat; my father flushed it
down the toilet.

I thought back many times on the glimpse I'd had of the
bat for a split second, swooping across my head. It had a human face.

My parents went out on the lake at night, trolling for walleyed pike. I saw them leave, my mother in an oversize plaid
shirt and my father wearing khaki pants and a khaki shirt,
carrying the fishing gear. His sandy hair and sandy skin and
the khaki made him look all one color.

My brother explained trolling: "It's a special way of fish ing. You need a quiet boat and a long line. You take your
time. You let your line move along the water with the movement of the boat. There are fish you can catch off a dock and
fish you can only catch trolling. Daddy knows the places on
the lake where the fish like to go."

Fish would like a place with lots of seaweed, willow trees
hanging over the water, frogs, flies on the surface. I imagined
my parents in a secret cove, way on the other side of the
lake, with fish jumping out at them.

I pleaded with my brother: "Please, please wake me up
when they get home so I can see what they catch!" I heard
the sound of their motor coming toward the dock from my
bedroom. By then I was already half asleep, dreaming of
bats and fish.

My father taught me how to clean sunfish and crappies.
He covered the top of a retaining wall to one side of our
house in newspaper and transferred the wet fish from a
bucket onto the paper. Sunfish and crappies were little fish,
just my size. First you had to take the hook out, which could
be hard depending on where it was lodged. You knew the
fish was fresh if its eye was clear. If the eye was cloudy, you
threw it away. My father cut the head off a clear-eyed fish. He
slit the fish open and scooped the guts out of the inside. He
pointed out the orange globs inside, which meant that the
fish was pregnant. I got so I could tell, just by looking at the
curve of their belly, which fish would have eggs inside. He
scooped out the orange globs. He scraped the scales off the
fish with a scaling knife until it was smooth. I felt what the
fish felt like when it first came off the line, when the scales
could stick into your hand. I felt how smooth it was by the
time he got done with it. He rinsed the scaled fish in the kitchen sink, dried it with a white flour-sack dish towel,
dipped it in flour. He took a cast-iron pan and melted butter
until the butter was nut brown. Then he fried the fish in the
butter. We sat around a round table on the screened-in
porch facing Wildhurst Road and ate crisp buttery fish with
lemon slices.