La petite américaine

In France, I am known as “The Little American.” Inexplicably, I like this. It makes me think of unorthodox superheroes from comics in the 1950s; a small American girl, in pleated Catholic school-girl skirts, has surprising strength for her diminutive stature, and uses it to fight criminals, all thinly-veiled allegories for forces of Communism or other plagues of our nation.

My hostess and her faceless friends on her speakerphone call me this constantly. At first I thought it was because she thought I couldn’t understand what they were saying, but after she would discuss parts of the conversations with me, I realized it was because there was no reason for concealment; it was a term of endearment. I am now considering have all my friends call me this when I return.

I live in an apartment in the 19^th, in a room with floor-to-ceiling windows revealing a view of the building à côte and a tree in which huge ravens fight with each other. It has its own piano, as a result of a housing questionnaire in which I wrote that I would prefer that I would rather have a piano than not have one (who wouldn’t?); I was then informed that a piano had been moved into my room, as per my request. Oh.

I can already tell my vocabulary is improving; for example, now I know the word for cocaine (it’s the same, but pronounced co-ka-EEN). So far my hostess and I have discussed, among other things, interracial dating, pre-marital sex, agnosticism (she’s one too), and parties she attended in the 80s in which her husband tried coke. I didn’t understand the last one at first, which I’m attributing to cognitive dissonance – she couldn’t be talking about this, so I must be misunderstanding. But when she imitated doing lines, there was no mistaking it. Cocaine: the universal language.

From the subject matter, we seem like cross-generational girlfriends at a sleepover, only with more gesturing and incorrectly-conjugated verbs. But what better to create a bond by telling each other our most private stories, things I wouldn’t divulge to my parents. We both want to talk, to connect. We’ll see how long we can string these secrets out.