When in French by Lauren Collins Page B

mother: full of energy, unstudied, and unserious about herself, but formidable in her willingness to go to any length to ensure her children’s success. They were both the kind of parents who had jumped out of bed in the middle of the night to encourage safe passage from teenage parties; who would meet a plane at any far-flung airport at any inconvenient hour; who were always trying, even if we could now afford it better than they, to pay for our flights. If Violeta had a daughter, I was sure she would greet her as my mother did me every time I came home, stripping herself of necklaces and sweaters and pairs of shoes at the slightest expression of admiration; running up the stairs to plunder her own closet before knocking on my bedroom door; forwarding everything I wrote to her family and many friends, never with less than a dozen exclamation points; accepting, and even applauding, the fact that I had moved halfway around the world, because she only ever thought of my happiness, not hers.
    I was rarely able to appreciate my own mother’s ebullience, though, without criticizing her unworldliness. I sometimes found her naïveté its own form of affectation. It struck me as stunted that she had never smoked a cigarette, eaten a bite of fish, gone to a restaurant by herself, mixed her own drink. The joke in our family went that she had invented sushi, having—one Valentine’s Day in the 1970s—served up a cocktail dish of gelid gray shrimp, not realizing that they were supposed to be cooked. For his part, my father had neither a computer nor an e-mail address, cell phone nor ATM card, such was the fixity he required of the world. As much as I depended on my parents’ constancy—their permanent address, their forty years of marriage, their perpetual availability, their diligence inhanging on to immunization records and school diplomas—I faulted them for a lack of imagination. But at Olivier’s family table, deprived of the tools of discernment, I didn’t have the option to be cutting. I felt like a fool, but a sweet one—opened, in my wordlessness, to the possibility of an uncomplicated kind of love.
    After dinner, Hugo ran off to the kitchen. A few minutes later he reappeared, carrying a cake. As everyone clapped, he deposited it in front of me. It was buttercream, with a marzipan scroll that read, in English: “Welcome to Lauren.”
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    T HE NEXT MORNING, we slept late. When we woke, Olivier and I put on the bathrobes that Violeta had left out for us. Violeta and Teddy, in matching silk kimonos, were up, buzzing around the kitchen. They’d set up a table under a tree in the garden: silverware, cloth napkins, cheery red-and-white polka-dotted cups and saucers.
    I was embarrassed.
    â€œWe slept until lunchtime?” I said to Olivier in English, drawing my bathrobe tighter around my waist.
    He looked at me like I was confused.
    â€œThis is breakfast.”
    We all sat down, a phenomenon I was familiar with from cereal commercials. A plate of croissants went around, followed by jars of fig and strawberry preserves that Teddy had put up in the fall.
    â€œTea or coffee?” Teddy asked.
    â€œWell, it’s kind of weird,” I began, “but I don’t drink either.”
    I was waiting for Olivier to jump in and translate, but he remained silent.
    â€œI don’t know why—people always ask if I’m a Mormon, but nobody drank coffee in my family growing up, and I just never really got started,” I babbled. “Actually, I’m not really big on any of the hot beverages, so I usually just drink water in the morning.”
    Olivier, finally coming to my aid, repeated my excuses—suspiciously, his rendition of the monologue took about half as long as the original version.
    Violeta and Teddy looked at me with benign wonder, as though I’d said I didn’t breathe air.
    After breakfast, I went to take