When in French by Lauren Collins Page A

sticks, which, after our marriage, would be replaced with a huge collage of wedding pictures in a heart-shaped frame that Teddy had painted.
    I handed Violeta a box of chocolates.
    She led us to our bedroom, where a package was sitting on the desk.
    â€œMerci!” I said, fumbling with the wrapping. “Merci beaucoup!”
    It was Miss Dior Chérie, my first bottle of perfume.
    That night, we drove around the Arcachon Bay to Cap Ferret, at the tip of the peninsula. I knew the landscape like a friend’s face: the flat-cheeked marshes, stubbled with sawgrass and pocked with hermit crab holes; the sugary topsoil of the pine forests, which a bike could hardly grip. Flats of pluff mud let off a sweet hypoxic reek. The air was low and clammy, as though someone had smothered the horizon with a wet paper towel.
    The sun was going down as we arrived at an open-air bar—striped umbrellas and some tables in the yard—run by a friend of Fabrice’s, a third-generation oyster farmer. Fabrice was in Paris working, but the rest of the family had gathered: Jacques; Hugo; Marie, Hugo’s mother. Jacques looked so much like Olivier. He was shy, but expressive, with a poetic way of phrasing things. “I pray you!” he’d tell me, clasping his hands, his English version of
je vous en prie
, when he wanted to emphasize a point. Wrapped in fleece blankets, we toasted to health. The wine came from Bordeaux. The oysters came from the far side of Mimbeau, a sandbar that jutted out from the cape, two hundred feet from where we sat. It was low tide. The thin wooden poles that supported the oyster beds wavered against the sky like rubber pencils.
    After the apéritif—the pregame show to the French family meal—we proceeded in caravan formation to Jacques and Marie’s. As soon as we sat down for dinner, the table exploded into chatter, followed by rebuttal, counterargument, rejoinder. That was my impression, at least, judging from the unsmiling looks,the disputatious
mais non
s, the blowing of air out of cheeks. I wasn’t sure whether, or when, resolutions came. I felt like an explorer picking her way through a jungle, turning toward stimuli as they chirped and hooted. The language came in an oxytonic rush. It sounded to me like heavy rain, sluicing down a roof.
    Listening to Olivier speak French was a bizarre sensation. I felt as though he had thrown on a jersey, sprinted onto the field, and proven himself a skilled player of a sport to which I did not know the rules. I was impressed by his mastery of the game, but alienated by my ignorance of it. The primal fantasy of intimacy is a secret language—one in which only the two of you can talk. French reinforced the primacy of preexisting bonds over the ones that we had built. It was a sort of conversational clubhouse, a pig Latin of which I was the odd woman out.
    I retreated to the linguistic version of a kids’ table—giggling in international pop-cultural English with Hugo. My thoughts wandered, mainly to what sort of impression I was silently making. Unable to present myself the way I would have liked to, I felt exposed, as though I’d been rousted from bed and dragged to a party, forced to come as I was. But the passivity was also liberating: a free pass from the obligation of attempting to be intelligent, witty, or well informed. It made me consider whether there was some ineffable part of a person that transcended socialization, an essence that remained once the top notes of politesse faded off. Could Olivier’s family smell something fundamental about me, and if so, what was it? What did I exude when I couldn’t talk?
    As much as I worried about how they would judge me, my impulse to judge them seemed to have evaporated with my powers of articulation. My critical faculties in abeyance, for once, I simply thought, What kind people, what a good meal,and how warm a reception. Violeta reminded me in many ways of my own