Les surgélés

While wandering around Passy – a neighborhood that houses one of the only shopping malls I’ve seen in Paris, people rich enough to afford a view of the Eiffel Tower from across the Seine, and, in the 19^th century, Balzac – I got hungry. As this is a common occurrence, I weighed the options available to me at the inconvenient hour of 3 in the afternoon.

Cafés were open, but Passy is expensive, and I didn’t want to take the time to sit down when I just wanted a snack. Boulangeries were everywhere, but I had eaten a loaf of bread, plain, for lunch and, while it was very satisfying at the time, the concept was getting a little stale (rimshot).

I wanted a big grocery store – somewhere where I could spend an hour just looking at the different types of breakfast biscuits. This is an easy undertaking at a place like Monoprix, where the three breakfast aisles are filled with one-euro boxes of cookies cleverly concealed as breakfast fare; they are the European equivalent of the muffin, cake’s breakfast cousin. Between semesters in Paris, my friend returned home to the U.S. for Christmas, returning with a box of chocolate chip cookies, a rarity in Paris, for her host family. “Great!” her mere d’accueil exclaimed. “We can share them tomorrow morning!”

But the area seemed too chic for big grocery chains. I tried to retrace the steps of shoppers with plastic grocery bags, until I arrived at the source: a store whose tell-tale florescent lighting outed it as a cheap food emporium. I had never heard of it, though; its lone sign pictured a snowflake and proclaimed that it was called “Picard.” I made Star Trek: Next Generation jokes in my head, because that’s the kind of girl I am.

But as I stepped through the door, I realized they were disturbingly on target. Instead of being greeted by chocolate Easter rabbits in florescent cellophane or cartons of semi-fresh fruit, as at a typical grocery, I found rows of people, staring down into rectangular, glass-covered metal boxes radiating light. There was no music – only the hum of lights and generators in synchrony. Shoppers’ faces were illuminated from below, in that terrifying way that kids with flashlights on camping trips have taken advantage of for decades.

There was nothing else in the store but those freezers: rows upon rows of them, all containing frozen components of a meal. There was the soups aisle, the salad aisle (ew); there were the main courses, the desserts. And all around, people shopping wordlessly for their prepackaged, frozen meals.

After checking out frozen pizza and madeleine prices, I left quickly. As I did, a man stationed at the door wished me a good day, like a Walmart greeter in a parallel and backwards universe.

Les paroles

The first words I learned in my sixth-grade French class were the names of different types of food, specifically possible orders at fast food restaurants. Our professor even brought out fast food menus he brought back from France, which he then laminated before giving to us. We gathered solemnly around the menu for Quick, the poor man’s MacDo (McDonalds’ is surprisingly well-received in France, as well as surprisingly expensive), diligently memorizing the vocabulary: les pommes frites, un Coca, un hamburger. Our next subject was café fare. We listened to songs about ingredients to bring on a picnic. We had a field trip to order croissants from a French bakery, impressing the owners with our food savoir-faire.

Unsurprisingly, I neglected to learn the vocabulary for anything else besides pains au chocolat. While this wouldn’t be a problem if I lived alone in Paris, where my activities primarily consist of ordering bread and asking people at museums if students get in free, as I live with a family, I occasionally have to communicate with people on subjects besides what I ate that day. This is why I need Marcus.

Marcus, the grandson of my host mother, comes over every Friday, and I am obsessed with him. He is energetic. He is hilarious. He is extremely cute. He is ten months old, and is teaching me French.

Martine, my host mother, and I gather around Marcus, who is seated on a blanket depicting various animals.

“Ça?” he asks, pointing at a fish.

“That’s a fish,” I respond. “Un poisson.”

“Ça?”

“Also a fish.”

“Ça?”

“That’s a lion. Un lion.”

“Ça?”

“That’s a … um …” I have no idea what a whale is. I look at Martine.

“Ça c’est une baleine,” she responds. I make a mental note. Baleine = whale.

So far I have learned 50 or so words this way. Tail. Sleeve. Every animal imaginable. There is no baby-talk, which is just the way I like it. “That’s a painting, Marcus,” Martine will say. “It depicts a Chinese village next to the ocean. You are looking very cute today. What are you doing? Please do not scrape that against the wall; it will make me very angry. Thank you very much for stopping what you were doing.”

I’m convinced that this treatment of children is one of the reasons that, in French literature class, my peers give oral presentations referencing Kant, Hegel, and Descartes rather than talking about silly things like “themes.” Rather than reveling over the appearance of a metaphor, as lit majors do so frequently (“I really love how Yeats uses the image of eyes to depict the concept of his memory – did you all get that?”), they pepper their presentations with references to Hegel, sensualist philosophy, and the mock-heroic like my friends drop obscure band names.

It’s a different way of learning about words – more holistic, rather than excavatory – that I first experienced in a sophomore year French lit class taught by a visiting French professor, who seemed puzzled by our methods. “Don’t you see how he uses the rhythm of the sentences to mirror the movement of the carriage across the town’s cobblestone streets? It’s the highest expression of the sensualists! It’s positively John Locke!” We stopped midway through our rapture over Flaubert’s magnificent simile between Charles Bovary and a cow, ashamed.

For someone so purportedly interested in words, I am embarrassed to admit how new these ideas seemed to me. In fact, listening to a recent broadcast of Malcolm Gladwell (www.thisamericanlife.org), I was surprised at how little I think about their exact meanings. While working at The Washington Post, Gladwell and a coworker had a contest to see how many times they could work the phrase “perverse and often baffling” into their copy. When his coworker used it to describe mollusks, his editor noted that mollusks, while potentially perverse, were either baffling or they were not; they did not oscillate between baffling and not baffling. It struck me – often I just write words because they sound good, and not for any actual meaning behind them. Maybe it’s the musician in me. Then again, shouldn’t I be better at poetry?

In any event, as my interactions with Marcus indicate, maybe I should just stick to learning individual words, before I start putting them together. A few weeks ago, alone in the apartment, I heard a key in the lock. In walked a woman I had never seen. “Hello,” she said, “I am la guardienne.” The guardian? Of what? I felt like I was in a J.R.R.Tolkien book. Turns out, it means the housekeeper.

I feel like it will be a while before I’m discussing Kant.