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Authors: Nancy K. Miller
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stories I had heard growing up. Bernard told the stories well, and I smiled hearing the punch lines in translation, even though joke telling itself made me nervous, as though I was being dragged back into the very past I had come to France to escape. Not the Jews exactly, but the humor of adults who joked instead of talking. The culture of the punch line was, Ithought, so—the word bubbled up, that French word in English—so bourgeois .
Albert’s wife, Edith, spent most of her time shuttling back and forth between the kitchen and the round dining room table to check on the progress of the meal. Monique and I sometimes followed her, miming a female solidarity we didn’t remotely feel. Edith was pregnant with twins and huge. It was hard to imagine all of them living together in their one-bedroom apartment. Their first child, a six-year-old boy who sat in front of the television whether it was turned on or not, playing with his toy car and chanting “Vroom, vroom” as he revved its wheels, already made the rooms shrink.
The first time I went to Sunday dinner with Bernard’s family, I picked up a roast chicken leg with my fingers. No one commented until I started gnawing on the bone, as we did in my family, sucking the sweet marrow out of the knobby end. Bernard looked at me askance, gesturing for me to put the bone back on my plate. The line between mock horror and genuine indignation was hard to distinguish. Before Bernard could speak, Monique sensed the great Franco-American battle about to begin and decided to take my side. She put down her knife and fork and started to eat her chicken leg with her fingers, daring Bernard by her gesture to say anything.
On the train back to Paris, Bernard couldn’t resist. “In France one doesn’t eat with one’s fingers, even en famille .”
“And in America one doesn’t spend the entire afternoon watching television.” That probably wasn’t true, of course, except in my parents’ house where television itself was taboo, but I figured I’d make the point about having to watch people watch a soccer match for two hours.
After the third visit to the suburbs, I told Bernard he had to choose between me and le foot . He looked hurt.
“Say I have to take the train to Poitiers on Sundays. I have classes Monday morning.”
Bernard would never have admitted it, but my solution appealed to him. He could be himself with his family, saved from my obvious expressions of boredom, without losing face.
By the time I started traveling to Poitiers, I had formed an attachment in Paris I needed but that I didn’t fully understand myself. Bernard was—the word I kept tripping over—different. “The essential thing, though,” I wrote, “is that I’m very happy and feeling far away from all things American.”
On the other hand, I was teaching what I was feeling so far away from: things American.
A Fine Fly
F ULBRIGHT TEACHING FELLOWS WERE EXPECTED to lecture on the history and geography of their home state. Without a book on the subject issued by the U.S. government that my father had found for me, and that clearly divided New York State into different geographic and economic regions (complete with maps), my course would have been a total fiasco. Instead, I would stand at the bottom of a small amphitheater and weekly hold forth before fifty or sixty master’s students who took notes assiduously, as though I were an authority. This excited me. No one had ever written down what I said. I lectured about the importance of the Hudson River; the role it played in revolutionary history; and the strange fact that as an estuary, it flows in two directions: down from the Adirondacks and up from the Atlantic Ocean, from Manhattan.
The river of my ambivalence, in a word.
I loved my days in the medieval university town, “and when I’m there,” I wrote, “everything is perfect. Little narrow streets, old churches,etc. I go everywhere on foot. My ‘kids’ (who are certainly older than
Albert’s wife, Edith, spent most of her time shuttling back and forth between the kitchen and the round dining room table to check on the progress of the meal. Monique and I sometimes followed her, miming a female solidarity we didn’t remotely feel. Edith was pregnant with twins and huge. It was hard to imagine all of them living together in their one-bedroom apartment. Their first child, a six-year-old boy who sat in front of the television whether it was turned on or not, playing with his toy car and chanting “Vroom, vroom” as he revved its wheels, already made the rooms shrink.
The first time I went to Sunday dinner with Bernard’s family, I picked up a roast chicken leg with my fingers. No one commented until I started gnawing on the bone, as we did in my family, sucking the sweet marrow out of the knobby end. Bernard looked at me askance, gesturing for me to put the bone back on my plate. The line between mock horror and genuine indignation was hard to distinguish. Before Bernard could speak, Monique sensed the great Franco-American battle about to begin and decided to take my side. She put down her knife and fork and started to eat her chicken leg with her fingers, daring Bernard by her gesture to say anything.
On the train back to Paris, Bernard couldn’t resist. “In France one doesn’t eat with one’s fingers, even en famille .”
“And in America one doesn’t spend the entire afternoon watching television.” That probably wasn’t true, of course, except in my parents’ house where television itself was taboo, but I figured I’d make the point about having to watch people watch a soccer match for two hours.
After the third visit to the suburbs, I told Bernard he had to choose between me and le foot . He looked hurt.
“Say I have to take the train to Poitiers on Sundays. I have classes Monday morning.”
Bernard would never have admitted it, but my solution appealed to him. He could be himself with his family, saved from my obvious expressions of boredom, without losing face.
By the time I started traveling to Poitiers, I had formed an attachment in Paris I needed but that I didn’t fully understand myself. Bernard was—the word I kept tripping over—different. “The essential thing, though,” I wrote, “is that I’m very happy and feeling far away from all things American.”
On the other hand, I was teaching what I was feeling so far away from: things American.
A Fine Fly
F ULBRIGHT TEACHING FELLOWS WERE EXPECTED to lecture on the history and geography of their home state. Without a book on the subject issued by the U.S. government that my father had found for me, and that clearly divided New York State into different geographic and economic regions (complete with maps), my course would have been a total fiasco. Instead, I would stand at the bottom of a small amphitheater and weekly hold forth before fifty or sixty master’s students who took notes assiduously, as though I were an authority. This excited me. No one had ever written down what I said. I lectured about the importance of the Hudson River; the role it played in revolutionary history; and the strange fact that as an estuary, it flows in two directions: down from the Adirondacks and up from the Atlantic Ocean, from Manhattan.
The river of my ambivalence, in a word.
I loved my days in the medieval university town, “and when I’m there,” I wrote, “everything is perfect. Little narrow streets, old churches,etc. I go everywhere on foot. My ‘kids’ (who are certainly older than
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