When in French (5 page)

Her prejudice was an ancient one. To assume a foreign voice is to arrogate supernatural powers. In Greece, oracles prophesied fates and gastromancers channeled the dead, summoning monologues from deep within their bellies. In Hindu mythology,
akashvani
—“sky voices”—conducted messages from the gods. The book of Acts describes the visitation of the Holy Spirit as an effusion of chatter: “And suddenly there came from heaven a sound like a mighty rushing wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. And divided tongues as of fire appeared to them and rested on each one of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance.”

In Paul's first letter, he tries to discourage the Corinthians from speaking in tongues, saying that it's better to speak five intelligible words than ten thousand in a language no one can understand. (In 2006, a study of the effects of glossolalia on the brain showed decreased activity in speakers' frontal lobes and
language centers. “The amazing thing was how the images supported people's interpretation of what was happening,” the doctor who led the study said. “The way they describe it, and what they believe, is that God is talking through them.”) Muzzling charismatics, the early church established itself as the exclusive font of marvelous voices. By the Middle Ages, the ventriloquist was considered the mouthpiece of the devil. Like my father, he inspired fears of fraudulence. A sound-shifter, speaking from the stomach, not the heart, he might forget who he was.

Still, my parents schooled us in southern etiquette as well as they could, figuring that my brother and I had to grow where they had planted us. We said “Yes, sir” and “Yes, ma'am” to adults, even the ones who'd conceived us. My mother suppressed her cringes when the hairdresser called me Miss Priss. But she was proud of her northern upbringing and her Quaker education: she wasn't going to say that stuff herself. When my father traded “you guys” for “y'all,” she saw an impersonator—a man with a puppet on his knee.

In 1954 Alan Ross, a professor of linguistics at Birmingham University, published a paper entitled “Upper Class English Usage” in the
Bulletin de la
Societé Neophilologique de Helsinki
—a Finnish linguistics journal, borrowing prestige from French. In it, he cataloged U (upper-class) and non-U (middle-class) vocabularies, a taxonomy that Nancy Mitford went on to popularize in her essay “The English Aristocracy,” asserting, “It is solely by their language nowadays that the upper classes are distinguished.” U speakers pronounced
handkerchief
so that the final syllable rhymed with “stiff”; non-U speakers rhymed it with “beed” or “weave.” The former might “bike” to someone's “house” for “luncheon,” dining on “vegetables” and “pudding”; the latter would “cycle” to a “home” for
a “dinner” of “greens” and a “sweet.” Mitford elaborated on Ross's findings, playing expert witness to his court reporter. “Silence is the only possible U-response to many embarrassing modern situations: the ejaculation of ‘cheers' before drinking, for example, or ‘it was so nice seeing you,' after saying goodbye,” she wrote. “In silence, too, one must endure the use of the Christian name by comparative strangers and the horror of being introduced by Christian name and surname without any prefix. This unspeakable usage sometimes occurs in letters—Dear XX—which, in silence, are quickly torn up, by me.”

Wilmington had its own codes. Visitors were “company,” a two-syllable word.
Coupon
was pronounced “cuepon”; the emphases in
umbrella
and
ambulance
were “UM-brella” and “ambu-LANCE.” You “mowed the lawn,” but you didn't “cut the grass.” On a summer night, it was inadmissible to say you were going to “barbecue” or “grill”; you had to “cook out.” A noun rather than a verb,
barbecue
was reserved for what most people would call—I can hardly write it now—“pulled pork.”

Scientists say that in order to speak a language like a native, you must learn it before puberty. Henry Kissinger, who arrived in America from Bavaria, via London, at the age of fifteen, has an accent that a reporter once described as “as thick as potato chowder.” His brother, two years younger, sounds like apple pie. My brother and I had spoken Southern from an early age. But as the offspring of Yankees, our peers reminded us, we existed on a sort of probation, forever obliged to prove ourselves in their ears. We endured as much teasing for the way our mother pronounced
tournament
—the first syllable rhyming with “whore,” not “her”—as we did when my father, in a cowboy phase, broke both arms riding an Appaloosa, generating speculation during his convalescence as to who had wiped his ass.

 • • • 

B
EFORE I WENT TO BED,
my father and I would read. A scratch-and-sniff book was one of my favorite portals to sleep. I'd run a fingernail over a blackberry and find myself in a bramble, juice trickling down my chin. Turn a page, and my bedroom was a pizzeria, reeking of oregano and grease.

One night, as we inhaled, an unusual look wafted over my father's face. He asked me if he could take the book in to work with him the next morning. Sure, I said.

When his car rumbled into the driveway that evening, I flew down the stairs. I was waiting at the door when he came in the house with his jacket creased over his elbow, the sure sign of a win.

That afternoon, he said, he'd tried the case of a client who'd been charged with possession of marijuana. An officer had pulled him over, searched his car, and confiscated several ounces of an herbaceous green substance.

The only weakness in the prosecution's case was that the officer had failed to send the contraband off to the state crime lab for analysis. When he testified, my father had asked him to identify a sample of the substance.

“It's marijuana,” the officer said.

“How do you know it's marijuana?”

“It looks like marijuana, it smells like marijuana. It's marijuana,” the officer replied.

My father handed him my scratch-'n'-sniff book, open to a page that showed a rose in bloom.

“What does it look like?”

“A rose.”

“What does it smell like?”

“A rose.”

“Is it a rose?”

Juliet swore that a rose by another name would smell equally sweet. My father, by luring the officer into a converse fallacy—if marijuana, then herbaceous and green; herbaceous and green, therefore marijuana—was arguing that a “rose” wasn't always a rose. Both of them were getting at something about the fallibility of language. The great design flaw of human communication is the discrepancy between things and words.

Proper names, uniquely, work. Each one corresponds to a single object, meaning that if you say “Napoleon Bonaparte Barefoot,” you're referring to a specific man, not to a set of people who share Napoleon Bonaparte Barefoot's characteristics. But words are basically memory aids, and if every particular thing had to have a unique name, there would be too many words for us to remember them all. Unless we were to heed Lemuel Gulliver's proposal—“Since words are only names for things, it would be more convenient for all men to carry about them such things as were necessary to express the particular business they are to discourse on”—a functional language must include words that refer to types of things rather than to each particular manifestation.

General terms are unbalanced equations. As abstractions, their correspondence is one to many, rather than one to one. In “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding,” John Locke explored the dilemma, asking whether ice and water could be separate things, given that an Englishman bred in Jamaica, who had never seen ice, might come to England in the winter, discover a solid mass in his sink, and call it “hardened water.” Would this substance be a new species to him, Locke asked,
different from the water that he already knew? Locke said no, concluding that “our distinct species are nothing but distinct complex ideas, with distinct names annexed to them.”

Three centuries later, the linguist William Labov took up the problem of referential indeterminacy, devising a series of experiments in which he showed a group of English speakers line drawings of a series of cuplike objects. Labov's experiment revealed that even among speakers of the same language, there was little agreement about what constituted a “cup” versus a “bowl,” a “mug,” or a “vase.” No one could say at exactly what point one verged into the other. Furthermore, the subjects' sense of what to call the objects relied heavily on the situation: while a vessel of flowers might be called a “vase,” the same container, filled with coffee, was almost unanimously considered a “cup.”

Labov was building on a distinction that Locke had made between “real essences” (the properties that make it the thing that it is) and “nominal essences” (the name that we use, as a memory aid, to stand in for our conception of it). “The nominal essence of gold is that complex idea the word gold stands for, let it be, for instance, a body yellow, of a certain weight, malleable, fusible, and fixed,” Locke wrote. “But the real essence is the constitution of the insensible parts of that body, on which those qualities and all the other properties of gold depend. How far these two are different, though they are both called essence, is obvious at first sight to discover.” Replace
gold
with
marijuana
—a body green and herbaceous—and my father's point becomes clear: a rose is only a “rose,” and “marijuana” is only marijuana, in a linguistically prelapsarian world, when the properties of a thing and its name are perfectly equivalent.

After his accident, my father remained in the hospital for weeks. Thanksgiving came and went—familiar food at a
strange table. I was seven, child enough to be entertained by a makeshift toy: a plastic tray filled with uncooked rice. When he was well enough, I went to visit. A vague but specific imprint persists. A right turn from a corridor. Plate glass and a prone silhouette.

Terror came as an estrangement of the senses: a blindfold, a nose clip, a mitten, a gag. I remember only what I heard.

“Do you know who this is?” the nurse said, with the bored cheer of the rhetorical questioner.

He didn't, though. My father looked at me and committed a category error. Instead of my name, he said, “Bluebird.”

 • • • 

T
WO SUMMERS LATER
I flung my sleeping bag—a red polyester number, embellished with parrots and palm fronds—onto the ticked mattress of the top bunk. I had pleaded to go to camp. At first my parents had resisted. But I kept on for the better part of a year, and eventually they agreed to send me, in the company of several hometown friends. For three weeks I would be drinking in the beautiful customs of Camp Illahee in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Transylvania County, North Carolina. Oh!

Illahee
means “heavenly world” in Cherokee. The camp had been encouraging campers to “be a great girl” for nearly seventy years. It was an old-fashioned place, offering horseback riding, woodworking, archery, needlecraft, camping trips to crests that looked out on the deckled blue haze—it appeared to have been rendered from torn strips of construction paper—from which the range took its name. The ethos was brightly self-improving. According to the Log, the camp's collective diary, earlier generations of Illahee girls had been divided into three groups: “under five-three,” “average/tall,” “plump.” A
camper from 1947 wrote, “Vesta told us our figure defects and we found each other's. We studied the ideas of some of the world's great designers and found the clothes best suited for us.”

By the time I arrived, the mode was Umbros and grosgrain hair bows. On Sundays we wore all white—shorts and a polo shirt buttoned to the neck, a periwinkle-blue cotton tie—to a fried-chicken lunch. Vespers was conducted in an outdoor chapel, nestled in a grove of pines. Each of us was allowed one candy bar and one soda per week. Swimming in the spring-fed lake was mandatory, as was communal showering afterward, unless you had swimmer's ear, a case of which I soon contracted.

The wake-up bell sounded at 7:45. I would sail through the morning activity periods, counting my cross-stitches and plucking my bows. But after lunch, when we repaired to our bunks for an hour of rest, my spirits would plummet. While my bunkmates jotted cheery letters to their families, I whimpered into my pillow, an incipient hodophobe racked by some impossible mix of homesickness and wanderlust.

Several nights into the session, I wet the bed. I told no one. Even with the parrots as camouflage, rest hour became a torture. Each afternoon I sat there, marinating in my ruined sleeping bag, convincing myself that catastrophes happened to people who ventured away from their hometowns. “
COME GET ME
! I can't make it three weeks,” I wrote in a letter home. “I will pay you back, just take me away, please!”

 • • • 

T
HE PROGNOSIS,
in the weeks that my father remained in intensive care, was that he would never work again. One day he got up out of bed and, ignoring the protests of his doctors,
checked himself out of the hospital. He resumed his law practice the next week. His recovery was an act of obstinacy, an unmiraculous miracle attributable only to a prodigious will.

Still, it was hard when he came home. Like many victims of brain injuries, he was forgetful and paranoid. His temperament had changed; he was irrational where he'd been lucid, irascible where he'd once been calm. Even more confusingly, as the years went by, I had to take the fact of this transformation on faith from my mother—I'd been so young when it happened—mourning her version of a father I couldn't quite recall. The accident knocked our confidence, aggravating an already fearful strain in the family history. My mother coped with the situation, my brother accepted it, but I was furiously bereft. My desire to tackle Romania, or the Blue Ridge Mountains—my sense of confidence that I could, even—evaporated as I imagined my fate mirroring that of my mother, who was nine when her father had
his
accident.