The Harm in Asking: My Clumsy Encounters with the Human Race (5 page)

Delphine endured. And then thought,
God
, I’m fucked.
Par-don
. I mean,
Mon dieu. Je suis foutue
.

THE FOLLOWING DAY
started with a bit of
famille
-bonding as a precursor to an all-exchange-group tour of the Evian factory. I emerged from my bedroom with
bloodshot eyes and strolled into the kitchen. I feared I’d be confronted with a rabbit omelet care of Madame Raffal, but the only sign of life was the young woman seated at the kitchen table.

“Sara?” she asked.

“Yes.
Oui
,” I said. “Lucille?”

“Yes.
Oui
,” she said.

She, Lucille, was eating a sandwich of mayonnaise and rabbit. “Sand-weesh?” she asked. “You want?”

“No,
merci
,” I said. Lucille shrugged like,
Suit yourself
. We sat for a moment.

“And your brother, Guy?” I asked. “He is home now too?”

“Non,”
said Lucille. “He go to zee house.”

“Zee house?” I repeated. “What house?”

Lucille furrowed her brow. She thought how to say it in English. Seconds went by. Five. Ten. Twenty. Finally, she said, “Zee house for zee pee-pull …”

She trailed off. I tried to help.

“A house for the people?” I asked. “What kind of people?”

“Zee house for zee pee-pull … 
comme ça
,” Lucille said, and then she wound her index finger near her head in the universal sign for nut job.

I thought for a moment. Seconds went by. Five. Ten. Twenty. Finally, I said, “A mental hospital? For Guy?”

“Oui!”
said Lucille. “
Exactement
. Guy, he ees having many problems all zee time.”

This was surprising information. It was not every day I heard of someone going to a mental hospital. It was also depressing information. I’d had high hopes for Guy and me. Perhaps, then, I should have been either surprised or depressed. Or surprised
and
depressed. Perhaps I should have been even the littlest bit curious as to the circumstance
that had landed Guy in a mental hospital in the first place. But I was not.

On the contrary, I thought I understood.

I considered the tan walls and the tiny window. The
maman
and the
papa
and the unvacuumed floors. I considered the rabbit—the sound of someone
chewing
rabbit—and then I considered Lucille. I looked her up and down.

If my sister looked like that
, I thought,
I think I’d go crazy too
.

First off, let me say how impressive it was that Lucille was able to sit upright in light of how much metal she’d voluntarily inserted in her face. And when I say “face,” I do mean “face.” Her ears had been reserved for spacers, those dime- to quarter-sized horrors one puts in one’s earlobes so as to free them of any speck of natural elasticity; her hair, for jet black dye. I may lack a knack for deductive reasoning, but even
I
know an aesthetic like this means a lady does not care to flower-weave.

Lucille invited me into her bedroom. It was similar to my brother’s bedroom insofar as she had covered it in posters. However, Lucille’s posters were of the death-metal variety, and their method for objectification was to present womyn bound, gagged, and raped by mythic demons. These visuals were used as a backdrop upon which to scrawl band names like Cannibal Corpse and Grave and Suffocation.

It became clear to me on this, our first morning together, that Lucille’s idea of a good time was having me translate English-sung death-metal lyrics she’d read in the liner notes of various CDs. We’d cover impressive ground over the course of three weeks, studying useful English phrases like “meat hook” and “open wound,” “skull scorch” and “embedded in my cortex.”

These translations became my little morning pick-me-up.
Because it picks one up, considering how best to mime a phrase like “At one with my sixth sense, I feel free to kill.”

MY AMERICAN SCHOOL
had chosen to do its exchange program with a French school on a year-round schedule. As such, my mornings with Lucille were followed either by field trips with our French and American cohorts, or by hours in class spent studying alongside her. I’d never heard of a year-round schedule before, and while it sounded like an okay place to be enrolled—to miss out on summer if it meant you made it up elsewhere in the year—it was
not
an okay place to be exchanged. If that was the case, then you, the exchanged student, wound up spending your summer in school. It meant you wound up missing your vacation.

The fact of this put most of my fellow Americans in a mood to misbehave.

We all took a language class together each week, and while the horizon expanders feigned interest in what the teacher was saying, the brainiacs would sleep. The rebels, for their part, would work to make the teacher’s life a living hell. The worst of those rebels was Danny Carter, he of the midflight makeshift sanitary pad. He was always raising his hand and asking the teacher:
“Voulez-vous couchez avec moi ce soir?”
The teacher would ignore him or whatever rebel companion he’d inspired to behave similarly. She would turn promptly back to the rest of us for help translating a word like “locker,” for example, or “napkin.”

But the rebels were not to be deterred.

They’d shout over whoever tried to answer, phrases ranging from “fat dick” to “big dick.”

“American friends: Please tell zee word for
casier. Oui?
Sara?”

“Ca veut dire—”

“FAT DICK!”

“
Non
, Danny. ‘Locker.’
Maintenant
: Who know zee word for
serviette
? Oui? Sidd?”

“Ca veut dire—”

“BIG DICK!”

“
Non
, Danny. ‘Napkin.’ ”

This sort of rabble-rousing happened all the time. I found it only mildly annoying, however, and that is because every moment spent away from Lucille’s death-metal posters felt like a momentary reprieve from a terrible headache. Sidd didn’t seem to mind much either, and I attributed this to the fact that he was as attracted as I was to Danny.

Danny
.

His grotesque personality was juxtaposed by a dumpling of an ass and the pillowy lips of a young Macaulay Culkin. I make this particular comparison, as I think Macaulay evokes just the right sort of sexual appeal. And just in case this makes me
sound
as pedophiliac as Monsieur Raffal
looked
, I’ll say again that I was fifteen at the time, and Macaulay, one year younger.

Sidd and I would sit beside each other, and as Danny yelled “fat dick” umpteen times or asked some nearby French girl if she was “having a boner”—the word
bonheur
sounds dangerously like “boner” and translates roughly to “good time”—we’d glare at him and say what an asshole he was. But we were stern in content only. There was saliva dripping from our mouths and it set a different tone.

Neither Sidd nor I discussed our true feelings toward Danny, and that is because it is embarrassing to crave someone so rudely disgusting. It is also a natural part of life. But we were fifteen at the time, not yet hardened to the sad reality that men who act the part of douchebag(uette) don’t make you go, “Eww,” really. They make you go, “Let me
up on it, boy. Let’s grind.” Additionally, Sidd was in a life phase wherein he was writing his overall effeminacy off as general charisma rather than definitive homosexuality, so being, like, “Look at Danny’s ass, Sidd! JUST LOOK AT DANNY’S ASS!” would not have helped his cause.

I, too, had reason to keep my mouth shut. The last young lady to express interest in Danny had paid a pretty penny for it. Julie was her name, and she was one of our fellow exchange students. Rumor had it that following our Cluses arrival, Julie had written Danny a note suggesting a late-night rendezvous, and that Danny, in response, had written “SLUTTY BITCHES RULE!”
on
Julie’s note, which he’d then taped to a tree in the French schoolyard.

Attractiveness-wise, I was the “Before” to Julie’s “After,” the Gary Busey to her Nick Nolte, the Jan to her Marsha. I therefore shuddered to think what would befall me if
I
made a move, passed a note, snaked an arm around a waist, and so on. Instinct told me that regardless of other particulars, stained underpants
would
be involved.

Like Sidd, I kept my hands to myself, my attitude seemingly disdainful.

SIDE NOTE: JULIE
did not wind up a stripper or unkempt agoraphobe or whatever else can result from grade-A humiliations in one’s formative years. My ten-year high school reunion revealed her to have maintained a slender waistline and scored a decent job. I can’t recall what exactly, other than it made me feel bad about myself. As for Danny, he was but a less noble Dexter, a less accomplished Keyser Söze. For he was not justly punished for his crimes. He’d remained empirically attractive, and this, I thought, was a real heap of bullshit, since when are schoolyard bullies
ever
rightly punished? Everyone I know
has got a story on the subject, yet no adults will admit to having played the starring role.

An annoying social blight. I thought I’d do my own small part to solve it.

ON OUR WEEKDAYS
off from French schooling, my classmates and I went on field trips to towns like Sochaux to visit the Peugeot headquarters or to Albertville to see the out-of-use exhibition halls from the ’92 winter Olympics. These tours didn’t feel informative so much as they did boring to the point of physical discomfort: like being given a sedative, then forbidden from sleep. Worse still were our euphemistically titled “scenic hikes” in which we were forced to meander around a hill, then graze on a picnic lunch of butter and mayonnaise sandwiches.

I understand it’s not the best way to score likability points, bitching about your teen tour
en France
, about
la pauvre petite toi
wandering amid Alpine foothills. In my
own defense, I would therefore like to say that I’ve done so only so that I might demonstrate how deeply I hate nature walks. I
hated
them. I
hate
them. I can just about struggle through a city walk where there’s at least the option of a subway, but where walks through nature are concerned, my baseline mood is one of real misery. I become obsessed with the repetitive quality of the scenery. Oh, that’s a nice mountain, I’ll think. And then three hours later when I’m inevitably staring at the same mountain, Oh, what a nice mountain. Honestly, though, what I wouldn’t do for a hammer to the vaginal canal. Anything, really, to save me from the boredom.

As for the weekends, I would spend them
chez
Raffal. They were nothing more than a test, really, to see how much snot my shirtsleeve could absorb. It needed a good wringing out by the time they were over, and that’s owed to the crying jags that, in turn, were owed to the homesickness.

If a month earlier you had told me that I would get to France and
cry
because I
wanted
my
family
, I would have showed you my brother’s bowel movement and told you that you were less intelligent than the bowel movement itself.

But that was then. This was now. This was weekends spent alone with Papa, Maman, and Lucille.

In the otherwise sparse living room, both Papa and Maman had their own La-Z-Boy chairs. They would spend the weekends in those chairs, in the lack of natural light. They didn’t talk a lot, or at all. They would mostly watch TV. Sometimes Maman would go to the bathroom and come back with a tube of unidentifiable cream, which she would then rub
on
her knees and
in
her armpits. Sometimes she would get out of the La-Z-Boy chair to go make rabbit and mayonnaise sandwiches for Papa,
Lucille, and me. You’d think that by this point I might’ve put my foot down about the whole rabbit situation, but honestly, whatever animal I was eating by this stage was
way
beside the point. For while Maman was nice enough to make the sandwiches, she was not nice enough to wash her hands before she made the sandwiches. I would watch Maman squeeze the unidentifiable cream onto her hand and into her armpit, and then I would watch her compile those sandwiches and I would think, I am
eating
her armpit! I am
eating
the cream! I resented Papa for leaving the domestic duties entirely to Maman, although this had less to do with my burgeoning feminist tendencies and more to do with Maman’s cream-application situation. In Papa’s defense, however, he did give me four more coloring books during the course of my stay.

I had no choice but to interact mostly with Lucille. She spent large portions of our weekends together chasing not only my explanations of death-metal lyrics, but also proof of my own affection for the genre.

“Good, yes?” she’d ask while adjusting her dog collar. “You like?”

Was there a question? I mean, please. There I was in my breathable travel shirt and the compression stockings I’d taken to wearing as everyday socks. I’d been reared on musical theater. I believed a musician’s primary responsibility was evoking joy and/or lyrical dance. The clearest sense I had of “dark” and “rebellion” was Paula Abdul’s “Cold-Hearted Snake” music video, and suffice it to say that
Do you think he really thinks about you when he’s out / He’s a cold-hearted snake, girl!
sung while jazz-handing in a high-rise thong is quite the far cry from
Let’s flagellate the sluts with their serpentine wings
, for example, or
Blood spills on the sluts grinding the staff of the priests
. Still, though, I told Lucille I liked
her music very much, and that is because it’s simply the right thing to do when dealing with a human in a dog collar.