Frenchness finds me, tiny lipsticks, and rational paranoia

All week, my husband has been in Paris without me. This is not unusual for our family, as his job takes him to Paris frequently, and someone has to hold down the home front. The only difference about today is that it is Valentine’s Day. So, yes, my husband is in Paris without me on Valentine’s Day, although I am consoled by the fact that it is cold and miserable there and beautiful here, which is often the case. And he did hide a gift for me to commemorate the day, which I found this morning, and the thing he left is exactly what I wanted without knowing I wanted it.

Come summer, we’ll be closing up shop in the Bay Area and moving to Paris. Which means I notice French things more than usual these days. Or, sometimes, Frenchness finds me.

Take, for example, yesterday in Safeway. I was in the personal care aisle, looking for shampoo, when I was approached by a woman in a perfectly tailored black skirt, black heels, and leather jacket. It was an unusually cold day on the Peninsula, and everyone else was wearing jeans.

“Please, can you help me?” the woman said in a pronounced French accent. She was holding some sort of lip balm, by a brand I’ve never heard of.  Very pink. “I come here, I just need tiny thing for–” she pointed at her lips–“you know, and I find only this.”

She looked at the lip balm as if it was an affront to humanity.

“Lips?” I said.

“Yes! I need something for the lips! But I am too French, see!”

I did not see. Is that a thing, I wondered? Too French? What exactly does it mean to be too French?

Then she explained, sort of. “Everything in America is so big!” she lamented. Which I took to mean that to be “too French” means to be precisely the correct amount of French, and to like small things. Small and exquisite, as my sister-in-law Erin would say. Erin is Irish by birth but French at heart.

I agreed with the lady that it was indeed a very large lip balm. “Maybe you want chapstick?” I said.

“Yes! Like that!” she replied.

I led her to the travel section of the aisle, where we found tiny shampoo, tiny soap, tiny hand sanitizer, but alas, no tiny lip balm.

“Sorry,” I said, even though what I really wanted to say was “je regrette” or maybe “desole.” I couldn’t remember which word would convey the proper sentiment, or if either of them would convey the proper sentiment. Anyway, I’m too nervous to practice my French on actual French people, because the moment I try to speak French I immediately identify myself as too American.

I wanted her to know that I appreciated her country, where grocery stores do not have such big aisles with such big lip balm. So I said, “We’re moving to Paris in June.”

“We go to Paris in June,” she replied sadly. “It has been five years.” It was not the response I was expecting. I guess I expected her to say, “Oh, you will love it!” or something to that effect.

“When did you move here?” I asked, before remembering that, to the French, this might considered a very personal question, not something to be asked of a stranger. She was probably accustomed by now to that too-American trait of inquisitiveness, so she responded,”Four years here, but first three years in Philadelphia.”

I wanted to say, “J’espere que vous trouvez le chapstick,” but even though I think it means “I hope you find the chapstick,” it probably means something entirely different, possibly something obscene, so instead I said, “I’m sorry I wasn’t able to help you.”

We parted ways, tiny lip balm unfound. Minutes later I saw her exiting the store with little daughter, who looked very French, wearing a coat like Madeline from the Ludwig Bemelmans books, and her husband, who was narrow and fit and dressed all in black, and who therefore looked exactly like a thousand other Silicon Valley husbands.

By the time I got to my car, I had already decided the French lady was on reconnaissance, that “Everything in America is too big” was some kind of code, and that I had failed an important test. This is one of the hazards of being married to the man I have been married to for seventeen years. At times, the complex mysteries of his unusual job seep into my exceedingly ordinary life. How many times, in foreign countries, have we had the feeling we were being watched?

Of course, the lady in Safeway really was just a lady in Safeway, with her darling daughter and her Silicon Valley husband, and she really did just want chapstick, which she never found. Of that I am certain. Of many things I am not.

And so we prepare for our move to Paris–where we will probably be too American, but where, in the course of three years, we will strive, daily, to become just a little bit French.

image courtesy of Les Anderson via unsplash

Related reading: learn all about Ludwig Bemelmans and other French writers in the new novel Paris by the Book, by Liam Callahan, forthcoming from Dutton.