The Harm in Asking: My Clumsy Encounters with the Human Race (4 page)

I took the situation in my stride. In fact, I was really excited about it.

All previous summers I’d been forced to attend local park district camps, hellish bogs at which underwashed counselors initiated moronic activities. They’d hand out Popsicle sticks and be like, “Make your mommy a jewelry box!” They’d demand I sing songs that asked not nearly enough of me: “Hey Sara / Someone’s calling my name /
Hey Sara / I think I hear it again …”
Such
consistent insults to my vocal talents. I figured even minimum-wage employment would be a step up, and the previous summer I had accepted a position assistant-teaching geriatric water-aerobics. The students were all hard of hearing, so for an hour every weekday, I’d stand on the side of a pool opposite the teacher repeating her instructions. She’d say something like “Okay, ladies!!! Ballet legs!!! Starting on your left. One!!! Two!!!!” and I’d stand across the pool and shout, “She said, ‘Ballet legs on your left. One. Two.’ ”

I pretty much just acted as a human microphone.

I was not a child who loved summer. But that could change with parents desperate to be rid of me.

I suggested overnight camp as an option, for I imagined that, unlike park district camp, the whole thing would be a sort of fairy wonderland of floral garlands and canopy beds. My mother laughed the whole thing off, though, once she learned eight weeks of overnight camp would cost in the neighborhood of five thousand dollars.

“It’s too ridiculous for me even to be angry!” she said. “It’s
beyond
making me angry! It’s just making me laugh! Ha! Ha, ha, ha, ha, HA!”

There was another, cheaper option: a Jewish overnight camp run by a modern conservative sect. Their pamphlet promised, “Your Chalutzim camper will return and tell you, ’Ema! Aba! I
want
to go on Ta’am Yisrael! I
loved
my Chalutzim Hebrew immersion!’ She’ll return a young woman who’s cultivated her
own
interest in Jewish themes and culture!”

“Sounds disgusting,” said my mother. “I mean: The phrase ‘Chalutzim camper’? I want a shower just
saying
it. You?”

I did think my mother had a point. And I did want her to shower after saying the word “Chalutzim.” At the same
time, though, I didn’t know what else to do. I couldn’t think of any other options.

IT WAS APRIL
of the same year the first time I heard the phrase “exchange program.”

I’d been in my fourth-period French class when my teacher, Madame Cohen, explained the situation: We Highland Park High School students of the French language had been presented with the chance to travel to Cluses, France, a mountainous town near the country’s Swiss border. If we chose to participate, we would be assigned a Clusien host
famille
whom we would stay with for three weeks in July. At the end of those three weeks, we’d return home with our exchange students in tow. They would then enjoy the Midwestern United States for an additional three weeks.

Madame Cohen laid out these circumstances, and asked who among us thought we might be interested.

I pictured my brother’s feces and my demolished photo of Tyne Daly.

I raised my hand.

“Moi,”
I said. “I am interested.
Très
.”

I WENT HOME
that afternoon and shared the idea with my parents.

They were initially intrigued but also concerned about cost and spot availability.

“It sounds okay … in theory,” said my mother, “but do not get your hopes up. I can’t imagine France will work out cheaper than Wisconsin. Furthermore, do you have to apply? Is it in any way selective?”

I
did
have to apply. But it was
not
in any way selective. And that was because so few of my classmates wanted to go. Most of them had already locked down their plans for overnight camp. This fact was a large part of the appeal. I
loved the idea that I would wind up in what I thought of as a fashionable minority, that my summer activity would make me unique. I’d return to school the following fall, and as my peers rambled on about another campfire circle, I would recount my Alpine meanders. I would speak on the subject, and my peers would be intrigued. In fact, they would be
so
intrigued that it would start to overwhelm me.

“Calm down!” I would tell them. “I
know
you all have questions, but you will
have
to wait your turn.”

As for the cost of the program, my parents agreed to keep an open mind and later that week joined me at the informational meeting. Midway through, Madame Cohen addressed the cost issue head-on. The program, she said, would be “… cheap as you’re gonna get for France.” And she really wasn’t kidding. She wrote a number on the chalkboard. It was very,
very
low.

France, impossibly, was a cheaper option than Wisconsin.

France, impossibly, my parents could afford.

I watched them absorb the good news. They hugged each other and hugged me. They stuffed a deposit check into Madame Cohen’s clipboard.

“
Please
don’t lose that,” said my mother. “Sara’s
got
to go.”

Madame Cohen assured my mother that she would not lose the deposit check, and true to her word she did not: one week later, my spot on the trip was confirmed.

To celebrate, my parents treated me to the immediate purchase of compression stockings for long-distance air travel, as well as a vest with inner pockets to make me less susceptible to pickpocketing. The week after that, I was assigned to my Clusien hosts, La Famille Raffal. They were four,
la Madame et le Monsieur, et
their children, Guy
et
Lucille. Lucille, the younger, was the one with whom I’d be
eventually exchanged, and Guy was her eighteen-year-old brother.

I thought it was the ideal host familial setup. Lucille and I, having been denied the bond of sisterhood thus far, would take to each other like
le beurre
on brioche. We’d spend our days lounging in nearby meadows, weaving floral accessories.

“Pour toi,”
she’d say, handing me the belt she’d made of daisies. “But … oh la la! Eet eez too grande! Too beeg! Because toi, you are … how you say?”

“Too skinny.”

“
Oui!
Too skinny for zee day-zee belt I make!”

No matter, we’d just use it as a jump rope, laughing all the while. “Ha!” we’d laugh. “Ha, ha!”

Evenings I’d reserve for Guy so that he and I might nuzzle in front of
la famille
’s grandfather clock. In a pre-departure lesson on Cluses city history, Madame Cohen had explained that Cluses was famous for its clock production. I interpreted this to mean that the Raffal
famille
would own a grandfather clock, and that its forceful, repetitive bong would signal to Guy that it was time to caress my hair. He’d do so staying all the while thoughtfully aware of the floral tiara I had on. Then he’d whisper my name desirously.

“Delphine …”

I’d decided that alongside my compression stockings and vest with inner pockets, I’d need a French name for French travel, and decided, finally, on Delphine. I was going for exoticism, some clear indicator that while my peers had spent their summers at their Wisconsin overnight camps,
I
had mingled with the Europeans.
En
France,
les hommes
would be magnetized by the winning combination of my French name and American vivaciousness. Back home, I’d present the situation as one forced upon me.

“
Je m’appelle
 … Forgive me. My English just keeps
slipping. I’m
Delphine
now. It’s what my host family called me. It just sort of stuck.”

I LEFT FOR
France in early July with fifteen of my fellow classmates. I was thrilled by exactly none of them. Do excuse me while I generalize, but my feeling is that early teens enthused about international travel are real assholes in the making, kids with grating personalities. I include myself in this, of course. Our group was divided into three distinct subgroups: socially incompetent brainiacs, self-satisfied horizon expanders, and rebellious types with behavioral problems whose parents, like mine, needed a break from their kids.

As I was neither cool enough for the rebel sect nor bright enough for the brainiacs, I settled comfortably in with the self-delighted horizon expanders. Specifically, a second-generation Indian named Sidd. Once at the airport, he and I had shared a laugh at the expense of Madame Cohen after she’d asked a black gentleman if he could help us with our luggage. The gentleman stared at Madame Cohen, leaving room for an uncomfortable pause.

“I don’t work here,” he said finally. “Find someone who does.”

Madame Cohen turned back toward us.

“Honest mistake,” she said.

“For a racist,” Sidd whispered, and we laughed and struck up a conversation on religion—“It’s for the weak”—as well as our impressively high maturity levels—“I’m just, like, different from the other kids my age. I want to see the world!”

Sidd and I never discussed Sidd’s sexual orientation. But I figured he was gay. Effeminate male feminists will tend to force that assumption.

MY CLASSMATES AND
I boarded the airplane and clumped across four rows at the back. Midway through
the flight, Danny Carter, a member of the rebel sect, caused a ruckus by forcing his needle-thin legs through the elastic bands of his sleeping mask so as to give the visual impression that he was wearing a sanitary pad.

“I’m in a bad mood!” he screeched, running knock-kneed down the aisles. “Boo-hoo-hoo! I’m bleeding! I’m crying! I’m bleeding! I’m crying!”

I might’ve done one of those fist-in-the-air, power-to-the-people hand gestures and been all like, “Feminism forever, motherfucker. Sexism for never,” except for the fact that one of the rules driving my
personal
feminist style was to avoid peddling my views to boys I thought were cute. And Danny was cute. Empirically cute. I therefore kept my opinions to myself, and this didn’t matter much anyway, seeing as how the extent of Madame Cohen’s disciplinary action was to tell the other students to ignore him.

So you see, my blind eye turned to the mockery of the menstruating wasn’t spineless so much as it was respectful.

WE ARRIVED AT
Charles de Gaulle Airport and hopped a train to Cluses. I exited alongside my classmates onto the train platform where a cluster of people stood waiting to greet us. They were the host mothers, mostly, women who fulfilled American stereotypes of effortless French attractiveness: They all had well-groomed hair and well-shaped eyebrows. The cowl necks of their respective sweaters were all positioned so as
not
to mimic one’s emergence from an impossibly enormous foreskin, which is how I, personally, always look when I wear one.

Among these women stood a lone man. He was possessed of a decidedly less French-ish fashion aesthetic. It’s one I refer to these days as “the Pedophile.” “Look over there,” one might say. “He’s sporting the Pedophile.”

In pursuit of said look, one combines any number of the following statement pieces:

I spotted this man in the crowd and I knew. I knew the way a mother knows her babe from smell alone: This man was mine.
Mine
. He was my fate, he was my father: He was Monsieur Raffal.

Sidd saw me see Monsieur Raffal.

“Yikes. Sorry,” he said, and then was swept lovingly away by a woman who looked exactly like Madeline Kahn.

IT SEEMED SO
unfair to Delphine. Why, as her classmates had
their
hair affectionately tousled,
their
opinions solicited on sweet versus savory pastry, why was Delphine asked only, “Sara? Barron?” then led wordlessly on to a lair of unspeakable depression known as an apartment? My actual parents’ house was nothing noteworthy in the size department, but still: There were windows. There were, to be fair, windows
chez
Raffal, but these were few and far between and the consequent lack of natural light had been compensated for with beige walls and a singular unframed poster of a tiger.

Delphine’s pedophiliac-looking papa explained to Delphine that her French siblings were not at home and that Delphine would therefore be eating dinner alone with her
papa
and
maman
.

I see
, said Delphine.
So what are we going to eat?

We are going to eat a rabbit
, said her papa.
Maman has cooked for us a rabbit
.

Delphine, though, did not want to eat a rabbit. She was
afraid to eat a rabbit. But she was also
more
afraid to tell her papa, “No. I will not eat a rabbit.” So Delphine ate a rabbit. She chewed a rabbit. She tried not to cry.

Then she thought: This rabbit tastes like chicken.

And then she thought: Okay. So I will tell myself it’s chicken. It’s chicken, it’s chicken, it’s chicken.

Delphine repeated her mantra. She did so without interruption since her
papa
and
maman
said nothing to each other through the dinner. They did not speak to each other, and they did not speak to Delphine. They just stared at their plates of rabbit/chicken. Delphine could hear them chew their rabbit/chicken.

Delphine finished her own plate of rabbit/chicken. When she did, her papa stood up. He opened a cabinet door and took out a coloring book. Delphine’s papa gave it to Delphine, who, to remind you, was fifteen years old at the time.

“Here,” said her papa. “Eet ees a toy for you.”

Then he walked her to her bedroom. He told Delphine to sleep.

But Delphine didn’t sleep. She
couldn’t
sleep. All she could do was collapse in hysterics on the carpeted floor for an uncountable number of hours. When eventually she hoisted herself up and brushed her hand against her cheek, she discovered it speckled in filth: hairs, unidentifiable pellets, profuse amounts of dust to which she’d lost her immunity thanks to the immaculate home her real parents kept so as to soothe the asthma of her nemesis.