Sharon Harrigan

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Push Ups

soutien-gorge-push-up-etam-lingerie-0

With one week left in Paris, you’d think I would have run out of time to have transformative or embarrassing experiences. I managed to have both, thanks to this bra.

My daughter was at a sleepaway camp for six days. My older son was at camp, too, working as a counselor. My husband James and I were alone in Paris for the first time since our honeymoon eleven years ago. It was the last night of what my friend D jokingly called our “second honeymoon” when I called James at his office and asked if he wanted to meet me at Etam to pick out lingerie. He leapt at the chance.

James had been nudging me since we arrived in Paris a year ago buy new underwear, bras, and nighties. The entire city, with its beautiful window displays of nearly naked women and gigantic ads in the metro of scantily clad babes, had been prodding me, it sometimes seemed. I’m frugal and modest. I resisted. Until now.

James seemed to enjoy rifling through the silky fabrics. He chose a super-short nightgown and two bras. One, I realized only after I tried it on, was a push-up. It pushed way up. It pushed out, too. It had a mind of its own.

At dinner James said, “I had no idea how much difference a bra could make.” He seemed both impressed and disillusioned. All the seemingly well-endowed women on the streets of Paris might just be the beneficiaries of this marvelous technology, he mused. (But now, so was I.)

Some things in life we have to be born with. Others we can acquire, and it’s not really cheating. This is a simple, useful lesson it’s taken me a year (or perhaps my whole lifetime) to learn. That’s the transformative part of my Parisian lingerie experience.

Here’s the embarrassing part. The next day, James and I took the train to pick up our daughter Ella from camp. I had hastily thrown on a button-up V-neck blouse that I had worn many times before without incident. This time, my push-up bra pushed so much that the top button kept coming undone, revealing a lot more about myself than I wanted to show to Ella’s camp counselors and her new camp friends and their families. I would have killed for a safety pin.

When I reunited with Ella, she hugged me and said, “Your bra is showing.”  

The director of her camp, a 20-something guy with a goatee and a hoodie, whom I had just been chatting with, smiled at me as I said, “oops” and quickly buttoned up.

“It’s OK,” Ella said. “It’s a pretty one. Very sexy.”

I’m probably not the only person who has a recurring nightmare of being in my underwear when everyone else is clothed. It may be a symbol of my secret worry of revealing too much, in general, about myself.

Next time my buttons burst, I’ll try to remember the saleswoman at Etam, who was making no effort to hide her hot-pink bra behind her almost-transparent blouse. I’m still too shy to dare something like that, even in my dreams. But I’m going home a little more “push”-y than I was before.

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Bon Courage

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It’s happening. Our time is Paris is about to expire. We will be here for another month, but people are starting to leave for summer trips. I can no longer pretend that we won’t have to say good-bye.

The person I will miss the most is my friend G. The other day, another friend, S., complimented my French, and I told her I have G. to thank. When I arrived here, my French was functional, grammatical, perfectly acceptable. But I was scared to open my mouth. I didn’t want to appear foolish by making mistakes.

Now I speak without fear. Even though G.’s English is impeccable, we speak French almost exclusively, even on the phone (which is the hardest), even with street noise in the background. She is patient and encouraging and puts me at ease.

Sure I made mistakes. G. gently corrected my dipthongs and gender mix-ups, taught me subtleties of slang, and explained cultural enigmas. Thanks to her, I now put my bread on the table instead of my plate and choose French chocolate (which has more cocoa versus butter) instead of Belgian. She’s explained the intricacies of French law, recommended French novels, baked me apple pies and introduced me to the joys of raclette, which is much better than fondue.

She has also made me realize that my inferiority complex is silly. So what if I have an American accent, as long as people can understand me? I’ve always considered French accents in English charming. So maybe my English accent isn’t as ugly as I thought.

I was surprised when G. told me that when she lived in America, she was concerned about making cultural gaffes, too. She even had a handbook for French expats on how to fit in in America. It hadn’t occurred to me that cultural understanding is a two-way street, that even French people can feel out of place and afraid of appearing foolish when they’re away from home and don’t understand the rules.

S. told me, “One thing you don’t mention in your blog is that being an American in France makes you exotic in a positive way. Different can also mean interesting.” She’s right, of course. We’re not still in middle school, yearning above all else to just blend in.

When I return to America, I will be a little bit braver. I’ll stop worrying about messing up. I’ll dare to stand out, even when I don’t need to.

Wish me bon courage. It’s a phrase that means both “good luck” but also “I hope you will have the courage to do what you need to.” Thanks to this year in France, thanks to my hugely warm and welcoming guide and friend, I think I will.

 

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Comfort Food

new-starbucks-cup-design-frontTell me I’m contributing to the dilution of local culture. Tell me I’m part of the problem of rampant globalization. Then tell me, please, that everything’s going to be OK.

Yes, that’s a mermaid on my tall latte. With an avenue of Parisian cafes to choose from, today I opted for Starbucks. Not because the coffee is better (though it is), but because I needed comfort. I needed the memory that Starbucks evokes. Of hope and birth and new beginnings.

It’s been a hard week. My friend Stephanie wrote: “The tone [in your blog] is so open and positive, I can’t imagine that underneath it lurks melancholy and homesickness.  Though perhaps you are feeling those things now, hearing news of the bombing in Boston from so far away.” She’s right.

After the Newtown shooting, I felt those things, too. In the lockerroom before yoga class, several French women said, “I’m sorry for you. For you Americans.” The French feel our pain, but they seem to know that the pain is distinctly ours.

I’ve cried more than once this week, about other things, too. About not being able to help my son, who is in college in the U.S., move out of his dorm. By far the hardest thing about Parisian life is being far away from him.

Why Starbucks? When I was in the hospital for a week, to stop premature labor with Ella, I was strapped to the bed with my feet up in the air. A couple times a day, when I was allowed to leave my bed to use the bathroom, I could barely walk, my legs were so atrophied. But most of all, I was worried about my baby being born too soon.

Every day, my husband James brought me a pastry and drink from Starbucks. The taste of a blueberry scone and foamy milk was the taste of family. Of his generosity and moral support. Of all our aspirations for the future. Sometimes he would bring my son and we would watch Angels in the Outfield or Stuart Little. So Starbucks is also everything magical and childish and plucky. It’s the era when my son and I lived not only in the same country but the same house, when I could comfort him.

The foam sliding down my throat is the feeling that everything is going to be OK. Or, rather, that even when it isn’t, we’ll all stand by each other. We Americans. We, as a family.

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It’s British, But It’s Good

My favorite Paris metro ad of the week is for McVitie’s Digestive Biscuits, a round, flat cookie made in England. The ad reads “C’est anglais, mais c’est bon.” It’s English, but it’s good. The comedy lies entirely in the choice of conjunction.

What’s funny about this ad is how succinctly it expresses the love-hate relationship between the English and the French, the food snobbery which is both tongue-in-cheek and a little for real.

My husband James remembers eating McVitie’s by the tubeful as a child, when his family lived in London. “Eclairs au chocolat they’re not,” he says. “But they’re cheaper.”

Contrast this ad with the one next to it, for Four Roses whiskey. Superimposed on a (not-quite-realistic) rendition of Mount Rushmore are four roses, with a picture of the whiskey bottle at the center. Another one shows Four Roses in Monument Valley, the iconic setting for Westerns. A recent campaign for Jack Daniels whiskey proclaimed “It’s not whiskey, it’s not bourbon, it’s Jack.” The large text was in English, with small print at the bottom translating it into the French.

It’s not as if the French are going to give up their Calvados and Armanagnac, but they like to mix things up. All bars here will serve you a Kir (sauvignon blanc with a drop of cassis) as the classic French cocktail, but more and more are offering American-style ones, importing everything including the names. Sex on the Beach, on the Champs Elysees, anyone?

In the window of Pim Kie, a clothing store on my block, a mannequin wears American-style denim short-shorts that are meant to look “street.” Yet she pairs them with impeccable espadrilles and a tailored jacket slung over her shoulders. The look is perfect, if inappopriate for the season. Maybe she just needs to warm up with a little Jack.

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Writing Lessons I Learned From Pandas and Dragons

My nine-year-old daughter just entered two writing contests. “I hope I win,” she told me yesterday.

“So do I,” I said. “But the odds are that you won’t. And if that happens, it doesn’t mean your story isn’t good.”

One of the contests is run by the American Library in Paris, and I have no idea how many entries were received and how good they were, but I imagine the competition is stiff, and I told her so.  The second contest I have more insight into. I am 1 of 12 judges, so I know that 161 entries were submitted and only 30 can win, fewer than 1 in 5. I also know that most of them are competently written. I couldn’t just sort them into “good” and “bad” because so many were good. I had to use a different kind of filter.

When you read so many pieces, especially when they’re all on the theme of Asia, they tend to blend together. If most people write a fairy tale beginning with “once upon a time,” the first person who doesn’t will get my attention. If nearly everyone has a panda or dragon (or both) in the story, the first person who writes about a hamster or a ham sandwich (or anything besides pandas and dragons) will earn my gratitude. If half the entries include a quest with a riddle, then the first one that doesn’t will seem like the solution to my every problem. And if you tell me something I don’t know (for instance, that kindergarten girls in Tokyo take the subway to school by themselves, with GPS devices embedded in their backpacks) I will follow you anywhere on the planet, for pages and pages, to learn more.

Maybe it was harsh of me to tell my daughter her chances are not good. But 1 out of 5 is much better than the odds I face. For example, when I received an acceptance letter from the journal Pleiades, the editor told me they publish 5 to 10 stories per year and receive over 5,000 submissions. The odds are 1 in 500, at best.

What I learned, as a writer, from this contest can be summed up in two words: Surprise me.

What I learned, as a person, is more complicated. Did I choose the best stories and poems? Yes, if “best” means the result of one idiosyncratic person’s subjective filters. No, if “best” means all the others are not as good. I rejected stories that other people will like more than the ones I chose. I couldn’t choose all that were good enough to win.

I’ll explain this all to my daughter once the results are announced. I’ll also try to remind myself, next time I’m rejected. It’s a useful thing to know. Not just for writing, but for life.