French Toast (21 page)

After a certain age, children are invited to the table with the adults, sit there until very late, even are allowed to taste wine, but never do they become the object of the conversation. They participate, but they don't dominate. They are included, but not to the exclusion of an adult conversation. The good part of this is that they learn to listen to adults and form their own ideas. The adults are happy to have them around and don't feel they are a nuisance or have to be excused.

The flip side of the coin is that French children, forced to be so well behaved around their parents or other grown-ups
(“Bonjour, madame”)
, are often quite noisy or ill-behaved when released from adult supervision. All that bossing has a perverse effect. The children are very well behaved in front of adults, and then, behind their backs, are perfectly horrible—rather like the proverbial preacher's kid.

I got another point of view on this from an American fellow who was working as an au pair. He told me he thought that “French children are obnoxious and very badly behaved by American standards. I think French parents are much more permissive in terms of what they let their children do.” I laughed with delight at these observations, I must say, because for years I had been hearing that American children, mine and others, are horrible little savages. In addition, in France I had encountered very few permissive parents.

I would qualify our family as somewhere halfway between law and order and liberalism. My sons tell me that they have friends whose parents won't let them watch TV or listen to rock music. One of my elder son's friends came to our place for the first time and stopped dead in his tracks when he saw Benjamin's room, which was covered with posters of heavy-metal rock stars. “You mean your parents let you put those on the wall?” he asked my eighteen-year-old incredulously. “And they let you play Iron Maiden?” He couldn't believe it. And
I couldn't believe there are parents who don't let their kids listen to what they want, no matter how much they hate it, and boy, do I hate it! But many French parents, particularly those who have children in the
grandes écoles
, are determined not to have their attention diverted from their studies.

Most French children maintain family ties long after they are grown, either because they really do like their families or because a family comes in handy. Given their reserve, making friends is a difficult task so it is easier to call on the family than on friends. Whereas in the United States a mother might call up her next-door neighbor to take care of Johnny, in France the child is much more likely to go straight to his
mamie
(grandma). Sunday dinners are obligatory occasions, during which
mamie
cooks for everyone, and
maman
and
papa
, even if full-grown, assume the roles of children. Many French families spend their entire vacations together, either in their country home or in a place they rent together. When the family gathers, it is the mother who makes and enforces the rules, which everyone follows. The sons and daughters fall back into being the sons and daughters of their parents, rather than the mothers and fathers of their children!

Language, ironically enough, is another thing that separates me from the French, for in spite of fluency, I am plagued with an accent. And your accent follows you everywhere. For the past twenty years, every time I
open my mouth and say more than two words, people ask, “Are you English or American?” In France, you can have an accent and of course be French—many naturalized Frenchmen have accents—but you know in your heart of hearts that until the day you speak French without an accent, you can never really be French.

The French have such a thing about their language that they will do perfectly abominable things, such as making overt fun of your accent. What I hate the most are the instant imitators. These are the people who hear you say two words and then imitate those two words with your accent—for example,
très bien. “Très bien,”
they parrot with a perfect American accent in French. This may seem hilariously funny to them, but I am
not amused
to hear my own accent thrown back in my face.

One evening, I was at a dinner with an eminent French doctor who did this for the entire duration of the meal. By the end of it, I was out of my mind with rage and humiliation. On another occasion, I put up with a Frenchman's horribly accented English without saying a word—I was brought up to be polite—and when his wife joined us and we started speaking French, she started imitating my accent. On yet another occasion, a very good friend of my husband's looked at me and declared, “When you talk, it's like a caricature of an American speaking French.” Thanks, buddy. My husband's friend, by the way, doesn't speak a word of English.

Being on the receiving end of that for the past twenty years has put me in a pretty aggressive state of mind, and I must admit that when I see it coming, I start yelling (in French),
“Don't even start doing that. I won't take it.”
It doesn't make me the most popular person at the party, but at least it makes things clear.

Otherwise, you're in for comments such as “You must be kidding. You can't have arrived twenty years ago. And you still have that accent?” Oh well . . . It's not just me. It happens to all my friends who are burdened with that visible verbal stamp that says, I'm not French. As it happens, I do have American friends who, fortunately for them, speak beautifully unaccented French; this makes their lives much easier.

“People make fun of your accent because they
like
it,” my husband explained to me. “Did you ever see anyone making fun of a German accent?” Oh,
great
, I thought. “Which means,” I asked him, “that if you like something, you make fun of it?” Are these twisted values or what? But, here again, this may go back to the French educational system, where teachers make fun of students all the time. It probably feels good to be able to do it to somebody else.

Polite, cultivated Frenchmen (generally those who speak another language and know the difficulties entailed) say, “Oh, I really love an American accent,” or, better still, lie: “You hardly have any accent at all.” I
love
those people, and fortunately there are a lot of them.

My husband has a very slight accent in English. While in Jay's Drugstore in Shenandoah on a once-in-a-lifetime visit, he sat down and ordered a Coke. The waitress came up to him, bent over, and yelled in his ear, “Did you say a COKE? A LARGE OR A SMALL ONE?” She figured that talking louder would surely straighten him out. So it does happen the other way around, but for the moment, I'm the one with the greatest number of incidents to report on the accent front.

Of course, one might say I deserve it. As a child, we had only one person in town who had an accent. She called one day, and thinking it was a friend of my sister's imitating the woman, I yelled for my sister, making fun of the person on the phone. My mother and sister immediately let me know how disappointed they were in me for being so cruel. But not to worry. I am paying for that inconsiderate childhood act every day of my life.

My accent-afflicted friends and I are currently devising several solutions to this mockery. Being Americans, we first thought of guns. But being antiguns, we settled on a water pistol, which we would squirt at the surprised offender. A more peaceful solution: a sandwich board with the message
YES I HAVE LIVED HERE FOR OVER TWENTY YEARS. I STILL HAVE AN ACCENT. SO WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO ABOUT IT
? Yet another is immediate: Start speaking English to the offender. This causes instant embarrassment, as the majority of people who make fun of accents don't speak any English at all.
But, I admit, we still haven't stumbled upon the perfect solution, other than taping our mouths shut forever. There's an idea!

Do I sound hostile or obsessed about the accent subject? I talked to a German air hostess, who told me that she had lived in the States for more than twenty years and every time she opened her mouth, she got the “Where are you from?” bit, just as I do. It made me feel
so
much better. Anyway, I am hatching up a secret plan, which is to hire an accent professor who will teach me once and for all to get those
r
's and
u
's down pat. I'll let you know if it works. Until then, au revoir, with the accent included. My name, by the way, has
four r
's in it.
Quelle horreur!

Accents are a problem—unless you speak French with a French accent. But let's say that you do speak perfect French with a French accent. You've still got to get down the subtle art of the lingo, such as expressing a positive thought in the negative.

Another language difference is the highly developed art of understatement. When you drink a glass of the most wonderful Bordeaux you have ever had in your life, you don't raise the glass and exclaim,
“Merveilleux!”
You sniff it, sip it, and then say, with a considered frown,
“Ca se laisse boire.”
(“It's palatable.”) The French speak in negatives, rather than positives, so rather than saying the weather is nice, they say it is
pas mauvais
(not bad). If a French person sees a newborn baby, he will say,
“Il n'est pas vieux, hein?”
(“He's not old, huh?”)

If you're really gifted, you learn to combine understatement with the negative form. For example, the day my son got 19.5 out of 20 on a math test, his teacher wrote,
“Pas mal.”
(“Not bad.”) You have to be French to understand and appreciate this “second-degree” humor. That is to say that in any case, the teacher might have put “Not bad,” but since the grade was so good, it was funnier and more creative to put “Not bad” than just “Great.” Get it?

But on to something more subtle still. Even if you have the language down pat, as many people do, accent and all, there is the whole problem of codes. Of all the reminders out there that I'll never be French, this is the main one. I will never be able either to understand or deliver veiled codes. This art of double-talk, which the French have perfected is, for the moment at least, beyond my grasp. For example, you should know that when someone calls you
“cher ami,”
it doesn't necessarily mean “dear friend” and could very likely mean “Drop dead,” depending on the intonation of the speaker and his accompanying facial gestures.
À très bientôt
, which literally means “See you very soon,” actually means “I
hope we never see each other again,” as far as I can figure out.
Ma chère petite dame
(my dear little lady) also means “Boy, are you a creep.” All of this, of course, is exquisitely polite.

Then there is the use of the word
petit
in general. Everything, it would seem, is
petit
. I, for example, am
ma petite Harriet
, although I am not exactly what you would call
petite
by any stretch of the imagination. But unlike
cher, petit
is generally positive, as in a
bon petit vin
(a nice little wine). Nor are
la petite anglaise
or
la petite japonaise
pejorative. It would seem that all foreigners are
petit
.

Just as the word
petit
is affectionate, so is the word
grand
(big). If someone calls me
ma grande
, for example, it doesn't mean I'm a giant; it means I'm the person's friend.
Vieux
(old) can also be used affectionately, as in
mon vieux
, or
ma vieille
, but if you say this, it's best to make sure that the person is in your age group. If not, it could be insulting.

Being from the Midwest, I'll never get used to the haughtiness of Parisians or the lack of chitchat. When my brother, a congenial and friendly fellow, came to visit me in Paris, I took him to the beautiful Parc de Bagatelle, not far from my apartment. As we strolled down the lanes, he would spontaneously say hi to people. They looked at him as if he had just stripped off his clothes. I must admit that even after all these years, my spontaneous midwestern reflex is to smile at strangers.
When I forget and do this, the reaction is the same: They look at me like I'm crazy.

Nor will I get used to French friendships, which go beyond the limits we impose upon ourselves in American friendships. A French friend will tell you your lipstick is the wrong color for your dress; she won't hesitate to criticize because you are her friend. The implicit agreement I have with my American friends is quite the contrary: You're my friend, so I do everything in my power to make you feel good, and ignore what is not so good.

When a friend of mine was having some real problems, my husband said to me, “Why are you being so nice to her? Why don't you bawl her out? If she was my friend, I wouldn't let her keep doing those things.” I had to explain that if I “bawled out” my friend, I wouldn't have the friend much longer. For him, as for many Frenchmen, you're not a good friend unless you intervene actively in the other person's life. I call this over-stepping the boundaries; he calls my type of friendship indifferent and tepid.