Sharon Harrigan

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Paris Journal: “That’s the Way the French Do It”

 

As we huddled on the street, waiting to be let in the school for a meeting with new families, I found several parents from my daughter Ella’s class chatting about how difficult their children’s workload is and how public the humiliation is if they don’t do well. For instance, each day the children have to recite a French sentence they learned the day before. When each child is finished, the teacher grades him or her aloud: tres bien (very good), bon (good), ca va (OK), or horrible. I don’t tell them that Ella doesn’t complain, that instead, she’s grateful to be challenged. (It would sound unsympathetic.) She is not the best French speaker in the class. Some children speak perfectly but just need to work on their writing. “I love being average!” she said, the other day, which made me laugh. “School is designed for the kids in the middle,” she explained, “and for once I’m the target audience.”

Leave it to me, American provocateur that I am, to steer the conversation from homework to sex. “Did your kids tell you about the movie?” I asked. They hadn’t. I said Ella was excited to tell me yesterday that the teacher had shown a movie with naked children in it and that they could see their “private parts.” The teacher had explained, matter-of-factly: “That’s the way the French do it.”

Every Monday the class watches a little movie, then they use it as a springboard for vocabulary, spelling, and acting out scenes. This week the movie was “Bath Time.”

“Maybe it’s only in America that teachers wouldn’t show a scene like that,” I said to two mothers, one Dutch, one British. The Dutch mother shrugged her shoulders. I thought of Amsterdam’s legal prostitution and wondered if anything shocked her kids. The British  mother said, “They wouldn’t show that kind of movie in England because of recent scandals with priests and coaches.”

Today the children will choose roles, and on Friday they will act out the scene. I wonder if it will be in authentic (un)dress! At the end, I hope the teacher says “tres bien.”

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Paris Journal: Taking Our Clothes Off

On gym day this week at my daughter’s school in Paris, the girls were changing in the locker room while a group of children, boys and girls, walked through. The boys didn’t pay much attention to the disrobed girls; they were just trying to get to class, and this was a convenient route. But my daughter turned red when she told me. “I was so embarrassed,” she said.  When I told another parent about the experience the next morning after drop-off, she said, “The French don’t mind taking their clothes off in front of other people.” Her own children, girls and boys, routinely dress in front of each other.

I’ve always known that physical modesty—the willingness to show one’s flesh in public—is a cultural notion. When I lived in New York City, among Orthodox Jewish women in wigs and skirts down to their ankles and among Muslim women in veils, I’d imagined that native-born Americans were on the immodest end of the spectrum. Now I know better.

What’s interesting is that the boys were so matter-of-fact about the lockerroom encounter. I can picture American boys hooting and teasing, instead. Perhaps there’s an analogy here to the way the French deal with alcohol: Everyone is exposed to it, beginning at a young age, in moderation, so they are less likely to abuse it. Children are used to seeing naked bodies—in advertisements on the metro and in their own homes—so there’s no reason to gawk.

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More Lost in Translation: Jeune Fille

“What is your nom de jeune fille?” the banker asked me, as he entered my vital info in his computer to open my account. Jeune means young and fille is girl, or daughter, but the phrase jeune fille means something else altogether. A teenage girl, or a woman in her twenties. A sweet young thing, a hot chick, or as they say here, a nana (which is not a synonym for grandma, believe me). What’s my hot chick name? I don’t know? Can I make one up?

I didn’t say that, though. Instead, I asked, “The name of my daughter?” and started to spell it.

“No, your name before you were married.”

My maiden name. Because a jeune fille is also a maiden (or at least she was in Shakespeare’s time). A mademoiselle.

“We have to ask whether you want to use your maiden name,” he said. “And we have to use Madame, whether you are married or not. It’s a new law.”

“Really?” I asked.

“Everyone received a memo from the government. It’s illegal to use Mademoiselle anymore.”

“We got the memo, too,” said the woman from human resources, who was acting as our intermediary (because, apparently, it’s next-to-impossible to open an account without a connection).

“You can’t even call children Mademoiselle?” my husband asked. He was trying to endear himself to our French bureaucrats by engaging in the small talk we’ve been told is essential to doing any business here. If a fifteen-minute transaction takes an hour, count it successsful, because it’s all about “relationship building.”

“If fillettes start opening bank accounts, imagine, I’ll have to call them Madame!” our banker chuckled. I wondered, but didn’t ask, why little girls need titles at all.

Our previous account, at a different bank, listed our names (without asking how we wanted them) as M ou Mme James Harrigan, or Mr. and Mrs. James Harrigan. A title is not just symbolic, but practical, since this one caused many wasted hours trying to track international wire transfers that were unable to make the connection from Mrs. James Harrigan to me. I had disappeared.

But I’m back. I can’t choose my own nom de jeune fille, but I can invent a nom de plume. Candy? Bunny? Gigi? Perhaps something, like the phrase jeune fille itself, which seems to mean so many different things to so many different people—young but not too young, innocent and old-fashioned, worldly and nubile—at the same time.

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Paris Journal: Patron Saint of Bargains, Headaches, and . . . France

Is Paris expensive? That depends. Not if you shop at the Sunday market in Saint Denis. Today we rode the number 13 metro about forty minutes and arrived at this largely immigrant banlieu, a few stops past the periphery of the city. I bought four dining-room chair cushions for 8 Euros total, about $10. Ella blew half her allowance on a fancy hand fan for 1 Euro (about $1.20). Bin upon bin of underwear and lingerie could be had for 1 Euro apiece. Part North African bazaar, part flea market, part fishmonger/cheesemonger/greengrocer/butcher, the Saint-Denis market is so large and bustling that we thought we’d seen it all when we’d only pushed our way, New York-subway-crowd-style, through the spillover and not even entered the main stalls. Once inside, even the gourmet choices were not super-expensive: e.g. marinated swordfish and salmon kebobs for 18 Euros a kilo, or about $9 a pound. The hundreds of hooves, feet, tongues, brains, heads, livers, and intestines of pigs, cows, and lambs could be had quite a lot less (though you’d have to pay me to buy them). On the other hand, a couple days ago Ella and I rollerbladed to the the tony and touristy seventh arondissement, sat at a cafe, and spent 10 Euros, or about $12, on two nonalcoholic drinks. For that I could have bought a dozen racy panties, a pair of shoes, or a week’s worth of farm animal appendages at the Saint Denis market.

Who is Saint Denis? According to legend, about two thousand years ago, he was decaptitated near Montmartre and carried his head in his hand five kilometers until he collapsed in the town and cathedral that are now named for him. Because of the way he died, he is the patron saint of headaches, and I said a little prayer to him for all my friends who are suffering from migraines because of the blue moon. He is also the patron saint of France, and his name is the French version of Dionysus. I’ll drink to that. With the money I saved, I can treat myself to the good stuff.

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Paris Journal: Virgin Among the Virgins

 

Yesterday, we took our first day trip from Paris, to Rouen. Our guidebook says that Rouen is a city of 400,000, ten times the size of Charlottesville. But when we walked back to the train station at the end of the day, Rouen seemed small. After just two weeks, we are starting to see the world from the vantage point of Paris.

Though not completely. “Why are there so many lingerie stores in France?” Ella asked, as we strolled the streets of Rouen. I’m not sure why she didn’t ask before, since our block sells more underthings than food.

“Because lingerie is pretty,” James said.

“But nobody gets to see your underwear,” she said.

“I almost told her I get to see yours,” James told me later “But she’ll figure this all out soon enough.” Or too soon.

I’m not really a prude, though I admit to sometimes enjoying my daughter’s naievete. My attitude often backfires, though, since she chooses the most public and inopportune moments to fill in the gaps of her sex education. In a place where advertisements for beds feature naked women lying over the covers, where kiosks display explicit magazines in plain view and cartoon condoms smile down from posters, she’s getting a crash course.

When she asked me yesterday what a prostitute is, we were sitting on the steps of the Musee des Beaux Arts of Rouen, so close to a twenty-something couple, they could have heard us whisper. (You didn’t notice the prostitutes we saw the other day in the Bois de Boulogne? I thought but didn’t say. Or do you think all French women wear hot pants and high heels and smile at passing cars?)

Ella’s question was prompted by a passage in her (children’s) book, which was recommended by a librarian here in Paris. Ella was taking a break with me, resting and reading, while James took one last look at our favorite painting in the museum: Gerard David’s 1509 masterpiece, “Virgin Among the Virgins,” pictured above.  I laughed to myself, thinking about the contrast between what he and I were doing. “A prostitute is someone who has sex with someone else for money,” I told Ella.

“What’s that?” she asked.

“What’s what?”

“What’s sex?”

“You know what sex is,” I said. Did she really want me to give step-by-step details in front of this nuzzling couple? Or have questions just become a reflex with her, now that she lives in a place where everything seems to need explanation?

She had blitzed us with questions all day, sometimes suggesting we check our smart phones if we didn’t know the answer. Tell me the story of this saint, that saint, she’d said, in the cathedral. How did John the Baptist lose his head?  What is the tree of Jesse? Who is Salome?

“Sex is what people do to have babies.” She finally admitted that she knew.

“Yes,” I said. “But there’s more. We’ll talk about it at home.”

And we will. Today. So she can truly see the world from the vantage point of Paris.