French Lessons: A Memoir (6 page)

My mother consulted with Miss Gray and came up with a
Solution. What did I think about going to Switzerland for a
year? It would be good for me to get away. It was too limiting
here. "I would have taken you kids to Europe after Daddy
died, you know, but your brother didn't want to go: he
didn't want to leave his friends. You're more adventurous
than your brother-you go." That made me want to go, to
be more adventurous than my brother.

My mother remembered a trip she had taken to Europe,
with her sisters, in 1938: they had to come home, finally, because the Nazis had invaded Czechoslovakia. They had seen
Paris and Biarritz and Rome. They even met a Count in Italy.
My mother was ambitious for me to go to Switzerland, in
her place.

"Europe is just what the doctor ordered."

"Think how good it will be for your French."

"You're more mature than other girls your age."

Mrs. Landanius, wife of the Swedish consul general,
mother of my classmate Hedwig, had already investigated
every boarding school in Switzerland with the design of sending Hedwig, whose prospects in the world were international. Some of the schools had been too flimsy academically, some were too military, some were too American. Mrs. Landanius recommended a school with discipline
and good French instruction: Le College du Leman. I sent in
my application.

Ninth grade was traditionally the year when the richest
girls in my school made their move to boarding schools on
the East Coast. My friend Louise was going to the Concord
Academy in Concord, Massachusetts. She told me that she
wanted to go to a place where the other kids were as rich as
she was, so she wouldn't feel strange. The girls at Northrop
Collegiate were rich, but apparently there were girls on the
East Coast who made our classmates look shabby and provincial. "It isn't about having money, it's about culture,"
Louise explained to me as she served us Fresca-on-ice in
heavy Steuben glasses. The Fresca at her house tasted drier
than at mine.

The summer before I went away to Switzerland, Louise
took me to a Woodhill Country Club dance where I met
Ted.

Ted wore a pink Brooks Brothers shirt to show off his tan.
In the winter he played hockey. He was thick, but not too
thick, big enough to make me feel small when we danced.
Knowing there were no Jewish members at Woodhill gave
me a thrill whenever I was there. The night I met Ted I felt
like a spy, charming him undercover.

In August Ted and I spent a whole night in bed together in
the maid's room of Louise's house. We did everything two
people could do in bed without actually taking our clothes
off. Neither of us was old enough to drive a car. Ted's father brought him into town to see me one last time, the day before I left for Switzerland.

Ted was a Wayzata boy; he didn't know the city. I took him
on a walk around the lakes near my house. We wandered
into Lakewood Cemetery, knowing we could be alone there
to curl up on the grass. We went looking for our spot.

Ted put his arm around me as we walked and teased me
about going away. He told me he was afraid I wouldn't want
to talk to him when I got back.

"My sister changed completely at Madeira. You're going
even farther. You'll be so European, you won't even remember old Ted."

I loved his slow way of talking. I loved imagining coming
home, suave and seductive, before I even left. I wanted to lie
down with him. We walked and walked through the cemetery looking for the best place to say goodbye for an entire
year. Ted pointed to a grave marked "Alice": "Alice Bergstrand 1893-1920."

"She wasn't very old when she died."

We lay on the grass next to the grave and kissed. Ted
squirmed, he was embarrassed about being in the cemetery.
This was getting kind of weird. What if we got caught? I
wasn't embarrassed. I kissed Ted with total abandon, knowing I wouldn't see him the next day. No one at my new
school would know anything about me, including this. I
could tell them whatever I wanted. I rolled myself over,
with Ted above me, until I felt the marble of the Alice grave
under my back. It was a perfect feeling: cool marble below;
warm thick Ted above. When I was a kid I had always imagined with my friends that if we dug in the soil far enough
we'd come out in China. Now I imagined the grave would
open up for me, I'd fall through a trap door and come out on the other side of the world, in Switzerland. I'd be a new
person. I wouldn't recognize Ted anymore. I wouldn't even
understand his language.

It was a hot, humid August day. The marble on Alice Bergstrand's grave was refreshing. Ted's kisses came faster. I got
dizzy from the cold of the marble, the warmth from Ted's
mouth; I felt myself cutting, cutting through time and space,
slipping through a trap door into another world. I rolled
over one last time to get hold of myself. Ted was starting to
squash me. With my hands on the marble, I propped myself
up over him. His eyes were closed so I didn't need to look at
him. I looked around me. The hill was covered with tombstones, the grass was as dark and lush as it ever gets in
Minnesota-the heat was making it shimmer in the distance. I could see the lake with a few sailboats on it, across
Lake Calhoun Boulevard. It wasn't my home anymore. It
was a landscape.

Boarding School in Switzerland

"Bonjour. Je m'appelle Alice Kaplan. Je suis a l'aeroport.
Pouvez-vous venir me prendre?" I called the school to pick
me up and stood in the Geneva airport, listening to French,
waiting.

The driver came in a Mercedes van. He looked like a soccer player. He said to me in French: "Don't try to speak to
me in English because I don't understand." He was testing
me. He said, "Where are your bags?" The word came up
from my throat. "La-bas," I said, pointing.

My school was in a village in the suburbs of Geneva that
was famous because an American adventure story writer
and a Scottish racing car driver lived there. The headmaster
was Egyptian, and the owner was a wealthy Swiss businessman with another boarding school in the mountains. The
racing car driver had insisted that the township invest in
safety devices on either side of the road so cars wouldn't
drive off the side. My driver entertained me with this story
on the way to school. The racing car driver still liked to drive
through the town like hell on wheels but the safety devices
protected him. I understood from this that the town had a
kind of safety net. I couldn't get in trouble there.

That first afternoon I met my roommate, Stephanie, who
had just arrived from Germany. She would live in the dorm
in order to learn French, because her father had relocated to
Geneva for tax purposes, and the whole family had to learn
to get along in the new language. I drove with Stephanie and
her brother and their father in another padded leather Mercedes, a sedan, down to Lake Leman, and we drank a sweet
green mint drink. None of us spoke much, we didn't have
the words yet. But we went on the lake in paddle boats and
Stephanie taught me: "Das ist eine kleine Mowe" ("that is a
small seagull"). It was a good beginning. Then we drove back
to the school. I told Stephanie in French, "tell your father
thank you," and Stephanie told me he wasn't her father, he
was their driver.

I had two other roommates, Chris and Laura. Chris's father was an American NATO general. Her mother was
French and beautiful. They were stationed at a base in Stuttgart and sent large boxes of Bazooka bubble gum from the
PX. Chris strutted around the room; she walked with a
swayback and her stomach stuck out-she admired her
own stomach, patting it as if it was a stuffed animal. She
watched me undress. She challenged us to see who could
stick their stomach out the farthest. She dared me to put on
my sweater without a bra. At night she massaged her face
with cold creams wearing a special lace camisole her
mother had given her for her nightly toilette. When Chris
saw I was getting thin she brought me presents of white
chocolate. She laid the white chocolate bars on my bed
hoping I'd fatten up, but I gave them back. I hated her soft
cunning voice, the voice she used when she gave me presents, and her perfect accent in three languages she couldn't
spell in-French, German, and English. Laura was the other American-a Cuban, from Grosse Pointe, Michigan, sent to
Switzerland by her parents because she was too "wild." She
spoke English with a tough thud.

At night we would lie in our bunks under our yellow and
white striped "poof" coverlets, and Chris would whisper to
Stephanie in her southern German accent-lots of soft "ch"
sounds-so that Laura and I couldn't understand. "What
the hell are they talking about?" Laura said. At first there was
just the swish of soft "ch"s. Then I started discriminating the
vowels from the consonants. The same sounds repeated
themselves again and again-those were words-and then
I could hear the difference between the verbs and the
nouns. I heard the articles that went with the nouns, and
then I heard where the nouns and the verbs went in sentences. One night I heard Chris say the words "Jude," "Jude":
I don't know where I recognized the words from-maybe
papers in my father's desk-but I knew those words meant
"Jewish" and that Chris was telling Stephanie I was Jewish.
"Don't think you can talk about me behind my back right in
front of me, Chris, just because you're talking German-I
understand, you know." I could understand. Just by lying
there with my ear and listening, I could understand languages. And because I could understand languages, she
couldn't get me.

Every night I lay in bed on my bottom bunk and listened,
sometimes I felt like I had radar or an antenna sticking out of
my ear that could capture any sound. Our rooms had loudspeakers in them, and every morning we were awakened by
the Swiss news, in French, and then the monitrice, Laurella,
got on the mike to tell us "five minutes to study hall." Every
morning those sounds woke me up. I understood more and
more until I could anticipate the morning greeting of the Swiss news, and lip synch, word for word, the standard formulae. I got used to looking at people from a distance, trying
to figure out what language they were speaking by the merest shadow of sound floating my way or by their gestures. I
always had five or six new words on a personal in-progress
list. Each time I heard one of the words on my list, I would
notice the context and try to figure out the meaning. When I
thought I had the meaning I would wait for the word to
come up again, so I could check if my meaning was still
right. Finally, I'd try the word out to see if a strange look
came over the face of the person I was talking to. If it didn't,
I knew I was home free. I had a new word.

I started thinking of my ear as something strong, and precious. I couldn't stand Chris's strutting and whispering, so
when the girl in the room next door moved upstairs I
moved into her old room, where everyone, a Palestinian
and an Italian and a French girl, spoke French all the time. I
had the bottom bunk again, and I lay under the yellow and
white striped covers and listened.

My ear was getting stronger and stronger.

i kept the College du Leman yearbook, which lists the
school's official goals: "education based on the solidarity of
nations, instilling the love of peace, truth and respect for all
races and nationalities, to combine in its teaching the best of
the Anglo-American and French cultures, and be international in the human relations it would seek to foster within
its walls." There were two of everything at the school: a
tenth grade and then the French equivalent, "Seconde";
a senior year preparing for the SAT's or the 0 levels and a
"Classe Terminale" preparing for the French baccalaureate;
House prefects if they spoke English or moniteurs and monitrices if they spoke French. The director's greatest
achievement was also inscribed in the yearbook: "to assume
a heavy and thankless burden of establishing and maintaining standards of behavior which in our tormented age are
increasingly called in question without any intellectually
credible or morally viable alternative being offered to replace them." It was one year after the French student revolts
of 1968. The school was on alert.

Wealthy parents from all over the world who didn't know
what to do with their children sent them to the school. The
American oil executives in Libya and Saudi Arabia sent them
here. The South Vietnamese general. The Shah's cousin.

There was an Iraqi boy named Karmen who liked to buy
pastries for everyone. The baker arrived at the school midmorning in his Deux Chevaux, one of those stripped-down
economy Citroens that opened from the back. Karmen was
all sad eyes and wallet, serving up beignets and pains au
chocolat to the rest of us. A few years after I left the school I
tried to look him up at the home address he had given me in
Nice. It was an office. A lot of people at the school didn't
have home addresses in the usual sense, because they were
in exile. Some people had four or five addresses, depending
on the season; they were likely to spend half the year in a big
hotel. There was Colette, French and Polynesian, whose
mother was a movie star with an apartment in Paris and a
suite at the Carleton in Cannes and a chalet in Montana,
Switzerland, where the school went to ski. Colette and I
walked through the snow to her chalet on a February evening after sunset. A caretaker opened the front door when
we started up the steps. She said hello to him, a stranger in
the dark in front of a house she only occupied a month out of every year or two. He barely recognized her. I don't know
what she expected-cocoa, or high tea, or warmth. She got
nothing from him. Colette and I didn't say a word on the
way back to the school hotel. I was thinking about our
house on Lake Minnetonka. Strangers were living in it now. I
peered at Colette through the darkness, trying to imagine
what her mother looked like in her starring role in Beauty and
the Beast. I wondered if Colette was adopted.