In fourth grade Cheryl Adams and I used hand puppets to act out the Lesley Ann Warren version of Cinderella. In middle school we sang weepy Carly Simon lyrics into Cheryl’s tape recorder. By the end of high school, under the tutelage of Hector Levesque, Cheryl and I discovered we both loved the French language.
Voila, Monsieur Thibault.
Voila, Madame Thibault.
Vous connaissez ma femme?
During our senior year at Tiverton High School, Mr. Levesque took our French V class on a field trip 50 something miles outside of Rhode Island to Boston, where we wandered through the Museum of Fine Arts and then dined on Coquille St. Jacques in a brasserie near the Commons. Coke Key Sand Jock. The words rolled off our tongues, and the scallops, baked in a cheesy, mushroom cream sauce and served to us like Venus on a half scallop shell, melted in our mouths. As we swallowed our final savory bites, Cheryl and I recognized the I-want-to-go-to-Paris, but-I-just-know-we’ll-end-up-in- Montreal yearning in each other’s eyes.
When Mr. Levesque’s niece Simone, a graduate education student, asked her uncle for two volunteers to help her implement a language immersion project, he approached Cheryl and me. Of course, we would stay after school several times a week and help Simone implement her research in effective strategies for teaching French. Cheryl and I appreciated the extra credit, which we could have used to offset our squeamishness for dissecting frogs in honors biology. We were much more comfortable serving as the research subjects, the frogs’ legs in this case. We loved showing off our fluency as we read aloud pages from Le Monde and then demonstrating our peerless reading comprehension through a series of higher order thinking questions.
La Rive Gauche would overflow its bank when we finally arrived.
Our trip began in London, England, in late June of 1979. I was nearing the end of my one-year stint working as an au pair for a family of journalists who lived in a late Victorian home replete with a conservatory and gooseberry bushes on Gwendolyn Avenue off the Upper Richmond Road in Putney. We rode the train from London to Kent, boarded a noisy Hovercraft to Calais, and took a bus to Paris. Our luxury fantasies had been dashed prior to our departure since we wouldn’t be staying at the Ritz, but would be sleeping on the floor of a Moroccan student dormitory, courtesy of a classmate of mine in a humanities course at Chelsea College. The temperature was in the upper 80’s with high humidity, Les Jardins de Tuilleries were long past their blooming, and the Louvre was closed because of a workers’ strike. A chocolate-filled croissant took the edge off, but the price of the sweet and a soda brought it back.
The best part of our trip was meeting Tunisian rugby players, who were quite taken by Cheryl’s voluptuousness, my long blonde hair, and our ability to speak to them in understandable French. We were enamored of their dark handsome features and soft-spoken manner. They catered to our every whim (I’ll omit the urgent sex in a public restroom near the Folies Bergère.) and we ended up eating bull testicles in a darkened café in the Tunisian section of Paris. This was the closest either of us had ever come to living out the adventure and intrigue we’d witnessed at screenings of Casablanca.
On our final day in Paris, we wandered through the Georges Pompidou Center and along the Champs Elysées to a century-old restaurant called Fouquet’s. Cheryl ordered sweetbreads, the thymus glands and/or pancreas of calves, lambs and piglets under one year old. I was torn between the coq au vin and the Coquilles St. Jacques. I ordered the scallops.
I was ready to go home.
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