I’m not completely in the dark, yet I understood only half of what this teacher was saying. I’ve spent some time in Normandy, and I took a monthlong French class last summer in New York.
The teacher marched in, deeply tanned from a recent vacation, and rattled off a series of administrative announcements. That’s the way they do it here-everyone into the language pool, sink or swim. THE FIRST DAY OF class was nerve-racking, because I knew I’d be expected to perform. “You’ll get used to it,” the woman had said. I am now twice as frightened as I was when, at the age of twenty, I allowed a failed nursing student to inject me with a horse tranquilizer, and eight times more anxious than I was the day my kindergarten teacher pried my fingers off my mother’s ankle and led me screaming toward my desk.
Rather, they have seasoned and multiplied with age. At my age, a reasonable person should have completed his sentence in the prison of the nervous and the insecure-isn’t that the great promise of adulthood? I can’t help but think that, somewhere along the way, I made a wrong turn. No one will ever again card me for a drink or demand that I weave a floor mat out of newspapers. I remind myself that I am now a full-grown man. As an added discomfort, they were all young, attractive, and well dressed, causing me to feel not unlike Pa Kettle trapped backstage after a fashion show. Some accents were better than others, but the students exhibited an ease and confidence I found intimidating. Regardless of their nationalities, everyone spoke what sounded to me like excellent French. Vacations were recounted, and questions were raised concerning mutual friends with names like Kang and Vlatnya. My school is the Alliance Française, and on the first day of class, I arrived early, watching as the returning students greeted one another in the school lobby. I’ve moved to Paris in order to learn the language. AT THE AGE OF FORTY-ONE, I am returning to school and having to think of myself as what my French textbook calls “a true debutant.” After paying my tuition, I was issued a student ID, which allows me a discounted entry fee at movie theaters, puppet shows, and Festyland, a far-flung amusement park that advertises with billboards picturing a cartoon stegosaurus sitting in a canoe and eating what appears to be a ham sandwich.
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