I'll Never Be French (no matter what I do) Read online

  Madame shows us. There’s a special broom for the tile of the kitchen floor, another for the wood in the living room, and another for the linoleum in the bathroom. There are three different mops as well. There are also different cleaning supplies for each type of floor as well as for drinking glasses, windows, dishes, silverware, the stove, the oven, counters, cabinets, the walls, the shower, the bathroom, the toilet, the sink. She and Monsieur are a team. She calls for an item, he hands it to her, and she demonstrates, careful to make sure she doesn’t actually touch anything herself. After demonstrating each item, where and how it is to be used, Madame looks at me and shakes her head.

  On their third trip, they carry a vacuum cleaner, lots of vacuum bags, garbage bags, two packages of paper towels, each containing twelve rolls, sponges, plastic gloves, a scraper, steel wool, laundry detergent, bleach, and several buckets. It’s hard to believe so many different products could exist and be used, as opposed to, say, Ajax. What I’m learning here are two facts of French life: (1) the propensity for cleanliness. In the U.S., cleanliness is next to godliness. In France, it is godliness; and (2) the deeply held faith in specialization. In France, there’s a product for everything—just as there is a worker for everything. One does not hire a general contractor. One hires a plumber, an electrician, a carpenter, a person for the heater, the roof, the floors, the windows, the door, the gate, the terrace, etcetera. Each person is specially trained and certified. The same holds true for doctors and auto mechanics: spécialistes. After all, if a product cleans a floor, how could it possibly clean a counter? If it cleans a counter, how could it clean a stove, a toilet, a sink? So here I am, surrounded by a zillion supplies and implements and a beaming Madame, Monsieur, and their dog. They leave with a smile and an “Au revoir,” neither of which makes me happy.

  The plan is simple. We’ll approach it like Normandy. The first thing we need is beachhead. The kitchen is the place. The refrigerator is Omaha, and mine. Kathryn will take Juno, the cabinets and the sink. Neither of us mentions the oven, though my plan is to boil and stir-fry all summer. I have no idea what Kathryn plans, but I know it won’t be good for me.

  The first thing I do is scour four pots so we can boil water on the stove because the two-minute wait for forty-five-second hot-water heater is death. If we rely on that, we’ll be cleaning well into the end of the third millennium—and that’s an optimistic projection. We keep the water boiling and refill the pots. If this is war, we are M*A*S*H.

  It takes all morning to clean the refrigerator. Even the ice cubes are dirty. I pull my T-shirt over my nose and make my way through, shelf by shelf, wall by wall, wiping and scraping out gunk that’s so far past its prime it isn’t even possible to determine what it began as: solid or liquid; salad or dessert; meat, fish, or fowl; animal, vegetable, or fruit. Talk about the mystery of life!

  Meanwhile, Kathryn cleans the dishes, cups, glasses, and silverware: everything that is out and dirty; plus everything that’s in the cabinets and just as dirty. She cleans every single utensil, then lays out rows of paper towels five layers thick to serve as shelf paper before putting everything back.

  At 12:30 I sit down in the living room, hungry and thinking about lunch. I’m about to ask Kathryn what she wants to do, when Madame comes in carrying more bundles. “Déjeuner,” she says, “déjeuner.” I think it’s more cleaning supplies, something especially designed for breakfast.

  She sees Kathryn working in the kitchen and me sitting down and shakes her head sadly but definitely not in surprise. She clears off the dining room table, waving me away when I stand to help, and covers it with her own clean tablecloth, then places two plates, glasses, knives, forks, and spoons on the table along with sugar, butter, honey, three kinds of her homemade jam, and a large bottle of Vichy water. I’m hoping this makes her a collaborator with us.

  “Mangez, mangez,” she orders, and like a magician, pulls a tinfoil-covered plate from her basket and uncovers it. On it is a two-inch pile of crêpes. I’m so hungry and thankful I want to hug her, but I know if I do, she’ll deck me.

  “Merci,” I keep saying, “Merci, merci, merci beaucoup.” Kathryn kisses her four times, twice on each cheek. I shake her hand, then she leaves, and we sit at the table and eat. The crêpes are warm and chewy. The butter melts into them and infuses them, and when sugar, honey, or jam are added, they become breakfast and dessert in one: comfort and extravaganza. I’m hooked—on crêpes and the view from the window.

  Three swans float lazily past. It’s so bright you’d think they’d need sunglasses. A girl paddles lazily in a rubber raft. On the hillside across the road cows munch away, happily oblivious to what’s next. Horses snooze. A salmon leaps out of the water. A tractor starts up. It’s a perfect interlude, the promise of life to come, if we don’t die of the plague.

  “Bonjour,” Madame calls as she knocks and pushes open the door. She’s carrying a huge bouquet of mixed hydrangeas—red, pink, blue, white, and purple. She surveys the table, sees all the crêpes are gone, smiles, and says “Ahhhhhhhhhh” in a lilt going up three octaves. She holds the flowers out for Kathryn. “Pour vous. Pour la maison propre.” Pour moi, there’s that look—like what besides that can you do?

  I try to show her. I pick up the dishes, glasses, and silverware and start to carry them into the kitchen. Madame grabs my arm. “Non! Attention! Arrêtez!”

  She wants me to think I’m not to do the dishes because lunch was a gift and I have so much other cleaning to do. But I know: she doesn’t want her things anywhere near that kitchen, let alone in the house. She’s probably going home to disinfect everything, assuming she still has any disinfectant in her house. That’s what I want to think. It’s the English lady’s kitchen she’s avoiding, not the American man’s washing. She gathers all her things, puts them back in her basket, and leaves, once again exchanging four kisses with Kathryn and looking at me askance.

  We spend the rest of the day in the kitchen: cleaning the walls, ceiling, the floor, and the cabinets, and rewashing and drying all of the laundry that’s in the washer and dryer. Neither of us mentions the stove.

  By seven o’clock we’ve finished one room. We have a beachhead. I’m ready to shower, even a forty-five-second shower. Anywhere else, I’d clean the shower while I wash. Not here. Not a chance. In our cache of supplies, I find the special French product for shower cleaning. Kathryn finds the one for the sink. We spend the next thirty minutes trying to scrub and sterilize them. “That’s it,” I say. “I quit. It’s clean enough for this filthy body for forty-five seconds.”

  I step into the shower and soap myself in hot water and rinse and shampoo in cold. I finally understand why the French have a bazillion hair products. It’s not hair texture, color, length, or health that matters but the temperature of the water in which the hair is being washed: arctic cold, winter cold, cold cold, luke cold, or plain cold. I get dressed while Kathryn waits for the water to reheat so she can shower. Then she gets dressed and we head out to eat.

  “Let’s picnic,” she says.

  It’s 8:00 in the evening and bright as day. I can’t imagine we’ll find a place to buy food, but I follow Kathryn’s directions as she navigates toward the ocean. In Plomodiern, I see a man locking the door of a charcuterie. I pull over and stop. Kathryn jumps out, runs to the man, and says something. He shakes his head, No. She says something else and he opens the door. Twenty minutes later she comes out beaming, carrying a plastic sack, a baguette, and a bottle of wine.

  “What did you say to him?”

  “I told him we’ve been working all day and lost track of the time and we’re hungry.”

  “That did it?”

  “No. I told him we just arrived from America. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘I thought you were English. Come in.’”

  “Where now?”

  “The beach. Sainte Anne la Palud.”

  I’ve been in France less than twenty-four hours, long enough to know not to have great expectations. We could be heading toward a
beautiful, natural, protected beach, like the beaches I spent my summers on as a kid—Brighton, Rockaway, Jones Beach, and Fire Island, with velvety white sand and clean, warmish, swimmable water. We could also be heading toward a rock-strewn, man-made inlet filled with garbage, seaweed, and jellyfish, with scrotum-crunching cold water like the northern Pacific and forty thousand campers, each with three kids, a TV, stereo, grill, and two dogs packed closer together than ants in a hill.

  I follow the signs to la plage and park in a designated parking place, the only person in the lot to do so, maybe the only person in France. I get out of the car and climb the dunes, expecting anything but what I see. The tide is out, and it’s at least one thousand yards of glittery white sand—ten football fields—to the sea. The beach is a natural cove sandwiched between two heather-covered cliffs. The ocean is the color of jade.

  We unfold the blanket, sit in the dunes, and eat a chewy white bread called le zig-zag, pâté de campagne, two cheeses, Morbier and a Pont l’Éveque that smells to me like rot. We also have a bottle of Vouvray and a salade niçoise and for dessert a mini tarte tatin. It’s every bit as good as it sounds, even the Pont l’Éveque. When we finish, I walk to the sea. Fifteen hundred yards—the beach is fifteen football fields long. I put my foot in the water. It’s warm and pristine, with groups of little fishies still in school swimming around my toes. The foam is like a scallop of lace. On the drive back we stop at a glacier on a larger, also beautiful beach in another natural cove between two heather-covered cliffs, and have ice cream on the terrace, under the moon, listening to the incoming surf.

  It takes four more days to clean the house, during which we establish a routine. I get up first, dress, and jump out the window. I never do get the lock. I go to the boulangerie and buy the same thing: a baguette and two croissants. The second day I come in a look of panic crosses the baker’s face—as in, Jesus, what will he want today? In the U.S., the guy would have been overjoyed to see me. Like, holy cow, I’m really going to get my money from yesterday. Not this guy. He’s terror-stricken. I can see it in his eyes. All he wants is to do his job, get it right, make someone happy, and here I am screwing him up, again. No one else tests his mettle. Everyone else knows what they want, how to ask for it, and how to pay. What he can’t see is I’m more terrified than he is. The issue for both of us is, Who’s the idiot? In the U.S., I’d try to make it him. Here, there’s no question: it’s me. It’s always me. Every day—in a zillion ways. What’s interesting is how we approach it. Without either one of us acknowledging it, we try to help out the other. I, by buying the same thing every day. He, by giving it to me before I ask, point, or beg. It goes like this.

  I enter the shop around 7:00 a.m. and say “Bonjour” as soon as I push then pull the door open. The regulars and the baker all say “Bonjour” right back to me. I then take my place in the wedge and add my voice to the “Bonjours” whenever a new person arrives. When it’s my turn—it’s still unbelievable to me how long it takes each person to tell the baker how she is, make up her mind about what to buy, and pay—the baker treats me like a regular. He says, “Ça va?” I say, “Bon,” and ask, “Et vous?” He says, “Ça va.” That’s it. Meanwhile, he’s bagged my croissants, and in acknowledgment of my foreignness and my assumed—no matter how filthy I’m dressed—concern with sanitariness, he wraps a piece of paper around my still warm baguette. Nobody else gets the paper. They take it hand to hand. To pay, I reach in my pocket and hold out a handful of coins for him to take what he wants. Then I say, “Merci. Au revoir,” and he says, “Merci. Bonne journée.”

  I bring the goodies back to Chez Sally, always stopping and saying “Merci” and “Bonjour” to the World War I infantryman. Then we eat and clean. Madame arrives a little before noon to survey our progress, make sure I’m doing my part, and feed us. She brings us lettuce, onions, green beans, potatoes, shallots, radishes, carrots, and leeks from her garden, sometimes still warm from the earth. She also brings eggs from Monsieur Charles and melt-in-your-mouth, soothing-to-eat crêpes wrapped in tinfoil and covered in cloth to stay warm.

  On the third day she asks Kathryn where we buy our bread. Kathryn tells her and Madame says “Bon,” it’s good bread, the best, “meilleur,” because the baker is a “spécialiste, un artisan.” She’s even more impressed when Kathryn tells her I buy the bread and decided which boulangerie to go to. I don’t bother telling her about my first morning and the lady with the dog and the direction her baguette pointed. I can see I’m looking better in Madame’s eyes, and that’s a good place to be.

  After lunch, we clean until 7:30 or 8:00, take our forty-five-second hot showers, and drive back to the same charcuterie, where Kathryn buys different wine (Muscadet, Champigny, Anjou); cheese (Cantal, bleu d’Auvergne, Livarot); pâté (goose, chicken, pork); and ham (Bayonne, Vendée, jambon de Paris, salami). I had no idea you could do so many things with a pig. Then we drive to a different beach—Bénodet, Morgat, Tréboul, Pointe du Toulinguet, Cap Coz—and picnic. The sea changes color every day—opalescent, mother-of-pearl, diamond, lapis lazuli, emerald, turquoise—depending on the sky, time, clouds, weather, and light. It’s the reason Gaugin lived in Pont-Aven and Monet, Signac, and Seurat came to Brittany. The only marring sites are the concrete and rebar German bunkers that string the coast like prehistoric markers, a reminder that nowhere is safe, nothing is perfect, and even in beauty, evil can exist.

  At the end of the week, the house is clean and we’re ready to write. I carry my computer and books to the third floor, the deuxième étage, and find Kathryn’s already there. “Hey,” I call, “what’s this?”

  “What?”

  “How come you get the third floor? I want the third floor. I get up first and want to be able to work.”

  “You can work on the second floor. I can’t stand the sound of the traffic.”

  “You live in New York, for Christ’s sake. I live in California, in the hills, near a park, where it’s quiet. You’re used to the noise. I’m not.”

  “That’s why! You have quiet all the time. You should be more considerate.”

  This from the person who took the space without asking. If she were French, the baker, for example, I would have made this a win-win. But she’s American, and so am I, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to lose. “Let’s flip a coin,” I say, and call heads before she can object. I lose. “Okay. Fair’s fair, but you clean the stove.”

  She looks at me as if I’m crazy. “What are you talking about? One thing has nothing to do with another. Let’s flip.” She takes the coin from my hand and calls tails. I lose again.

  It’s one of the filthiest, nastiest jobs I’ve ever done, ranking right down there with cleaning latrines at Boy Scout camp. It takes me half a day. I’m absolutely black, covered with I cannot even imagine what on my face, arms, hair. I stink from the oven, sweat, and special cleaning products for stoves, ovens, and grease. Madame comes in and sees me. I expect the worst, looking the way I do. But she smiles, outright beams, lets out that long, multioctave “Aaaaaah,” and gives me four kisses, two on each cheek. That’s it. From that moment on, Madame thinks I’m okay.

  She walks through the house, room by room, looking and approving, giving it the Madame Seal of Approval and becoming outright joyous. Why not? This is the French at their best: being helpful, of real assistance in a crisis, making a difference, being friendly, genial—gentil—Lafayette saving America, Jacques Cousteau saving the sea, Docteurs Sans Borders saving the world, being clean and propre—and blaming the whole catastrophe on the English. To be able to help and clean and blame the English all in the same act, it’s a French dream come true.

  Kathryn and I thank her profusely for everything and invite her and Monsieur to dinner the following week. They accept, then we accept their invitation, and they accept ours again and again, all summer.

  Monsieur is retired from the navy and rarely leaves the house, but he drives us three hours north to show us Île-de-Bréhat. Madame hates to leave the
earth and hates open water and boats even more, and she braves the fifteen-minute ferry ride to Bréhat. Philippe, their elder son, career navy, solid as a house, several times national black-belt karate champion, fluent in English, lover of the Doors, visits from Cherbourg with his wife and two children, and introduces me to chouchen (fermented honey), lambig (Breton whiskey), and Adelscott (beer laced with whiskey). I reciprocate by sharing two of the three bottles of Macallan’s I brought and give him the third when he leaves. Henri, their younger son, who is also fluent in English, is living in Brest, studying to be an emergency medical technician. He and his girlfriend, Renée, return for Sunday family meals, to which Kathryn and I are invited as if we’re family. Three or four nights a week and at least one day a weekend we spend with Monsieur and Madame and their family. Monsieur and Madame don’t speak English, and I don’t speak French, and none of it seems to matter. Mostly what we do is laugh, and not all the time about me.

  One night, there’s a knock on the door. In the U.S., I’d assume a salesperson, Jehovah’s Witnesses, or the FBI. In France, I assume it’s Madame P or someone from her family. I open the door, and to my surprise a very pretty woman, with long, dark hair and smelling like a flower, is standing there holding a book with an English title. She’s not dressed like any Frenchwoman I’ve seen, more like a clean grown-up hippie in an ankle-length, colorful Indian print skirt. I point to the book and ask, “You speak English?”

  “Of course, I’m Canadian. I’m here to return Sally’s book.”

  I invite her in. We discuss books and writing and fiction. She, Sharon, is a serious, critical, and intelligent reader who has read lots of American authors. She invites us for apéritifs the following night at her house. Apéritifs means drinks. No dinner. The commitment is safe and proscribed: drink, nibble, talk, go home. It’s for a few hours, not a lifetime.