When in French: Love in a Second Language

I wish I could travel around the world, and s-e-e-e all the th-i-i-i-ngs.

Oh, I would see all the countries and beautiful customs.

Oh, I would see all the countries, Romainia Greece and all.

I would see all the beautiful cultures. I wish I-I-I could.

Oh, it would be so interesting. I wish I could travel around the w-o-o-o-o-rld. Oh!

THE FIRST PLACE I ever went was Disney World. We crammed into the car with one tape, Jack Nicholson and Bobby McFerrin doing Kipling’s story about how the elephant, on the banks of the “great gray-green, greasy Limpopo River,” got his trunk. The drive took nine hours: Myrtle Beach, where we stocked up on bang snaps and Roman candles; Savannah; St. Augustine; Daytona Beach. Finally, we arrived at Polynesian Village, a longhouse-style resort with koi ponds and a tropical rain forest in the lobby.

I pulled on tube socks and white sneakers and slung a purple plastic camera across my chest. Disappointment quickly set in. I was too scared to ride Space Mountain. Cinderella’s castle held little allure—I was more interested in foreign countries than magic kingdoms. To a first-time traveler with dreams of high adventure, Main Street, U.S.A., seemed a scam, a staycation in the guise of a trip down memory lane. The windows of the shops were filigreed with the names of fake proprietors. I clocked a barbershop and some fudge kitchens. Where were the ziggurats, the cassowaries and the cuneiform tablets, the temples of marble and pillars of stone?

The next morning, we took the shuttle to Epcot. As we crossed into the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow—even now, my impression of exoticism is such that the dome marking its entrance seems less a golf ball than a crystal ball, or at the very least a Scandinavian light fixture—I was transported, exported, by some freaky wormhole of globalization in which one could see the world by essentially staying at home.

We boarded Friendship Boats, approaching the World Showcase Lagoon on the International Gateway canal. We took a left into Mexico, where we rode a marionette carousel before proceeding southwest to the tea shops of China. We strolled around a platz. We listened to a campanile toll, saw the Eiffel Tower. We were after the epoch of Equatorial Africa (which Disney had planned, but never built) but before the dawn of Norway (whose pavilion would open in 1988, featuring a Viking ship and a stave church). Pubs and pyramids were coeval. Time seemed to scramble, as though it had been snipped up and pasted back together, like the map.

“All areas of Morocco are wheelchair accessible,” the literature advised. In the medina, we followed the twang of an oud to a courtyard fragrant with olive trees and date palms. A belly dancer shimmied, her abdomen a bowl of rice pudding whose meniscus never broke. One of the musicians grabbed my hand and pulled me into a sort of conga line. Then and forever shy of crowd participation, I let completely, uncharacteristically loose.

French braid flying, I started doing something that would have looked like the twist, were it not for the way I held my left leg in a tendu, the dutiful habit of a longtime ballet student. I was the center of a scrum of guys wearing scarlet fezzes. This, to me, was the magic kingdom. In Italy the Renaissance statues were hollow, impaled on metal rods to combat the Florida wind, and in Canada the loggers’ shirts were made of mock flannel to combat the Florida sun. I didn’t know. Simulations sometimes anticipate their simulacra. If I was ever going to go to Morocco, it was because I had already been.

IN THOSE DAYS my parents occasionally went away too. That fall they took the ferry with some friends to Bald Head, a barrier island known for Old Baldy, its defunct lighthouse. There were no cars there. It was a Saturday morning when my brother and I got the news that, the night before, my father had been thrown from the golf cart that he and my mother and their friends were riding in as it took a sharp curve, hitting his head on a concrete footpath. He was thirty-seven, in a coma. There was blood on his brain. Later, at Sunday school, one of my classmates—a miniature town crier in khaki pants and a blue blazer, lips ringed with doughnut powder—circulated a rumor that he had had too much to drink.

He had been the adventurer in our household, to the extent that there was one. In the summer of 1966 he had traveled to Madrid as part of a delegation from his Catholic boys’ high school. One day he and a friend ditched their coats and ties and ran off to Gibraltar, where they hopped a boat to Tangier. The expedition yielded a sheepskin rug and twenty-one demerits, one more triggering automatic expulsion in the coming academic year.

The Marianist brothers of the Jericho Turnpike did not succeed, however, in stifling his curiosity about the world. He kept a list of every bird he had ever seen, dating from his days as a preadolescent twitcher, stalking the marshes of Alley Pond Park in Queens. Never mind that my father had been outside of America but once: he knew the capital of every country, the name of every river, which sea abutted what strait, how many countries were completely surrounded by other countries (three: Lesotho, San Marino, and Vatican City), why Chicago O’Hare’s abbreviation was ORD (it used to be called Orchard Field).

By the time I’d started school, he was half of a two-man law firm that occupied a three-bedroom cottage a few blocks from the county courthouse. His office was my first foreign country: the wooden shingle hanging from the front porch, as though to mark a border crossing; the smell of cigarettes and correction fluid and shirt starch; the gold pens; the yellow pads; the zinging typewriter; the kitchenette drawers full of Toast Chees and Captain’s Wafers and Nekot cookies; the sign behind the desk of Teresa, his all-powerful secretary, that read “I Go from Zero to Bitch in 3.5 Seconds.” (Teresa was my first bureaucrat.) One of my father’s clients, Marshgrass, paid him in grouper and bluefish. A judge named Napoleon Bonaparte Barefoot presided over district court. The language was crisp, formal, aspirated (affidavit, docket, retainer), and then demotic and slurry (a “dooey” was a Driving Under the Influence charge).

Each morning I helped my father pick out a tie, begging him, as we debated dots or stripes, to walk me through the day’s cases. When friends came over for slumber parties, I’d insist that we try our Barbies for prostitution. As I understood it, prostitution entailed sleeping with someone to whom you weren’t married. We often declared mistrials, in the knowledge that, having shared a bed, we were probably prostitutes ourselves.

At night I ran to the door, as eager as a sports fan to hear which cases my father had won, which he’d lost, how the bailiff had yelled at a defendant to get a belt. I often asked him to tell the story of one of his first trials, which concerned a man who had had the misfortune to be urinating in an alleyway where someone had recently broken into a car. A police officer approached and told him he was under arrest.

“What the fuck?” he said.

The police arrested him and took him to the station, where they put him in front of a witness, who said that the guy in front of him was definitely not the guy he’d just seen running away from the scene of the crime. The police charged my father’s client anyhow, with disorderly conduct.

My father, just out of law school, spent a week in the library, trying to ensure that his client wouldn’t end up with a criminal record on account of a single curse.

When the trial date arrived, the state presented its case. My father then rose and asked to approach the judge. Permission granted, he trudged toward the bench, carrying a leather-bound volume in which he had carefully marked the relevant law. Disorderly conduct, the book explained, had been committed only by a person who had said or done something that was “plainly likely to provoke violent retaliation,” not by one who had merely spouted off a profanity without the expectation of a fight.

“I’d ask that you consider this statute—,” my father began.

The judge took one look at the book and cut him off.

“That’s Raleigh law, boy,” he boomed, churning each syllable around in his mouth as though he were whipping cream.

My father retreated and, for lack of a better option, put his client on the stand.

“How many beers did you have?” the state’s attorney asked.

“Nine,” my father’s client replied.

The judge banged the gavel, a woodpecker drilling bark.

“Case dismissed! That’s the only person who’s told the truth in this courtroom all day long.”

My father spun the tale beguilingly, transforming Wilmington into a low-stakes Maycomb, bandying between voices as though he were keeping rhythm for a crowd shucking corn. Now, after two decades in North Carolina, he sounded more or less like a southerner—an affectation, or an adaptation, that troubled my mother’s conscience. “Your father’s a chameleon,” she would say, upon hearing him drop a g or leave an o hanging open like a garden gate. Changing the way you spoke, or simply permitting it to be changed by circumstance, constituted, in her view, a moral failing. It was weird, like wearing someone else’s socks.

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.

BEFORE 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?”