Now we are in Paris, in the cold and the dark, homeless and friendless and tongue-tied. Unbelievably, I hear myself asking: Why on earth did we come? Just then an elderly woman hobbles into the cobblestone courtyard and makes for the door nearest ours. Our new French neighbor! A distant memory lifts my spirits.
When I arrived in London to live outside the United States for the first time in my life, I was fitting the key into my new front door when an elderly woman called to me from the neighboring garden. “My name is Amanda Martin,” she said in an ancient voice, “and I’ll be your friend if you’ll have me.” Just like that, Amanda Martin had taken me into her life; I had a friend. She’d turned one hundred that year. The queen had sent her a telegram to congratulate her. When you know someone with that kind of standing in society, you somehow feel you belong, too. “Assimilation” is just another word for acquiring a bit of the local status.
I eye our new old French neighbor with longing. And even though I know that the moment history looks as if it is repeating itself is exactly the moment it is not, I feel a little leap in my spirits. I walk over, open a door for her, and say bonjour. She doesn’t even look up, just keeps tap-tapping on by with her head down and right into her apartment. As she closes her door, the odor of stove gas wafts into the courtyard. A voice behind me says, “She’s so old she forgets to turn off her gas burners when she goes out.” I turn around. There stands a young man wearing a black stocking cap, a navy pea coat, and a grim expression. He looks like something dreamed up by Dostoyevsky, yet he sounds perfectly American. He motions to the door closing behind the elderly Frenchwoman: “One day she’ll come back here, light a match, and this whole building will be a crater.”
He puts his hand in the pocket of his pea coat. “I have your key,” he says.
HERE IS HOW we spend the first half hour of every day in Paris:
Each morning between seven and seven-thirty, Quinn begins to sing. She’s only eight months old, so she doesn’t know any words. Still, she sounds as if she is practicing her scales. I crawl out of bed and tumble downstairs to turn on the heat, rigged by the French handyman so that it cannot run for more than about twelve hours on end without busting. I then clean up the mess invariably left by Vegas on the kitchen floor—one of several evil new tricks she has picked up from the local dogs—and toss her out into the garden. For a minute or so I watch through the window to make sure she doesn’t get any ideas about the Camembert. Like French people, we now keep our smelly cheeses in planting pots outside. Imprisoned in the refrigerator, the Camembert still had the power to stink up the entire house. I’d open the door to grab a cold drink and be driven backward by the odor; a minute later, whoever was on the third floor would shout in panicky tones, “Shut the fridge! Shut the fridge!” Relations with the cheese had reached the point where one of us had to go.
Once Vegas is past the Camembert, I turn and race upstairs to snatch Quinn from her crib before she stops singing and becomes outraged. Coming up the stairs, I sing “Old MacDonald Had a Farm.” On his farm he had a rooster, I assume. “Cock-a-doodle-doo” is the signal for Quinn to reach out with her arms and be lifted from her crib. Rising, she smiles and kicks her feet as if something really great is about to happen. I try not to disappoint. Together, we draw the curtains on the third-floor windows and peer up at the back of the crepuscular neighboring apartment building to see if any French people are doing anything particularly French. They are: sleeping. This is a nation of vampires; our streets are empty each morning until nearly ten. “Coo,” Quinn says after a minute of staring at the old building, then swivels and tosses her warm little arms around me in her version of a bear hug.
As we move to the changing table the mood shifts. The moment she is laid on her back, Quinn loses her love for me and becomes as impatient as a race-car driver waiting for the tires to be changed. To keep her still enough to be unwrapped, cleaned, and then wrapped again, I must find ever more exotic ways to trick her into thinking something worth paying attention to is about to happen, right here, in her own bedroom. She never falls for the same trick twice. This morning, for instance, I danced the Parisian Trash Bag Dance—a performance she watched less with amusement than with a kind of morbid fascination. The Parisian Trash Bag Dance involves grabbing one of the giant blue trash bags they sell at the local market and swishing it back and forth over my head alluringly, while swaying my hips, like Salomé charming Herod. Once Quinn is mesmerized, I am able to remove one hand from the bag and do the dirty work, dancing all the while. A moment’s pause in the entertainment and she’s flipping herself onto her stomach, in a suicidal attempt to vault sideways off the changing table.
The diaper changed, I grab Quinn, put her under my arm like a football, duck beneath the low staircase ceiling, and plunge down the narrow, unbelievably steep stairs to our bedroom. There, Mother sleeps. There, for Quinn, is bliss. She raises her arms and cheers and kicks up such a delighted fuss that I am reminded all over again what a dull pleasure I am to my own child. I am the warm-up act. The featured attraction, inured to her own importance, reaches up from under her covers and drags Quinn under the covers.
Sadly, there is hardly a moment to spare on self-pity. By now there is the most unbelievable ruckus coming from outside. The dog, somehow already possessed of a French dog’s sense of her rights, is busy breaking down the door with her head. Sometimes, for fun, I open it just as she is about to strike again and she goes flying across the kitchen floor like a vaudeville comedian in a skit, crashing into the opposite wall.
LEAFING THROUGH A brochure that advertised “Activities for French Children,” my wife came across an odd photograph. She held it up. It showed an infant and an adult swimming together underwater. It’s hard to believe that a six-month-old baby could be taught to hold its breath and flap its arms and propel itself along the bottom of a swimming pool. But there it was, in black and white. The ad, so far as I could make out, went on to explain the importance of acclimating babies to water before they learned to be afraid of it. To that end, it offered thirty-minute private sessions in a womb-temperature pool. Bébé l’Eau, the company was called.
This struck me as a French twist on the business of preying on the insecurities of new parents. If you have a gift for frightening new parents, your fortune in this world is secure. New parents are not rational; they worry about all sorts of things that it makes no sense to worry about. For instance, I am at this moment worrying about when Quinn will learn to walk. I’d like to assume that our child will walk when she walks and that she’ll do it well enough to get around. But my wife will not let me. She believes our child will walk only if we worry about it. Still, when was the last time you saw a full-grown adult crawling around the streets on all fours?
As I read the ad for Bébé l’Eau, it occurred to me that I never had any trouble learning how to swim. And I don’t recall, as an infant, anyone ever treating me to any thirty-minute private sessions in womb-temperature water. But Tabitha’s mind was already years ahead of mine. “What if she is afraid of water and never learns to swim?” she said. “What if she fell into a swimming pool?”
After a lot of phone calls, she finally got through to the authorities at Bébé l’Eau. We needed to fill out some forms, they said, which they’d send along. This sounded ominous. It was. A week later, a thick envelope arrived in our mailbox. Among other things, it contained one form that needed to be signed by a French pediatrician to prove that Quinn had been vaccinated, and another by a French GP to show that we adults had no rare skin diseases. Even back home this would seem like more trouble than it was worth.
But no: The life of our child was at stake. Tabitha became even more intent on gaining entry to Bébé l’Eau. If it required a great deal of effort, that was only because it was so desirable. She tried to persuade me that in addition to saving Quinn’s life, it would also be fun. A private session in a giant pool brimming with womb-temperature water. She conjured up a vision of the three of us swimming happily toge
ther, underwater, released from the ordinariness of our daily lives.
It took two months of awkward phone calls in French and visits to the various doctors’ offices, but she finally compiled the required paperwork and sent it to Bébé l’Eau. A few days later the authorities at Bébé l’Eau called. We were in. A private session.
On the appointed day, at the appointed hour (Sunday, crack of dawn), we climbed into a cab. Bébé l’Eau’s neighborhood was curiously down-market; the address itself was merely a door leading to a long alley damp with mildew. We walked the length of it and emerged in an empty room lined with hard wooden benches. Paint flaked from the walls, an empty desk was stacked high with unopened mail. We sat on the bench and waited. Exclusive, perhaps, but in the wrong sense of the word.
After about ten minutes we heard, from a great distance, a splashing sound. It came from the end of yet another long corridor. We walked down it and found a closed door. It opened upon a scene. In a pool not much bigger than a large Jacuzzi frolicked a dozen scantily clad Frenchmen—two, I couldn’t help but notice, with bright red rashes on their backs—and a half dozen children, several with snot running down their faces. A Frenchman in a snorkel and mask and not much else floundered about, hollering instructions and waving plastic bathtub toys. Any sane person who wandered into the room would ask: Why are all these people crammed into this little tub?
I looked over at Tabitha. Tears pooled in her eyes. “They said it was private,” she said.
“Who are you?” shouted the Frenchman in the snorkel. I explained, but it rang no bells.
“Come on in anyway!” he shouted.
There wasn’t much else to do. And even though there hardly seemed room for three more bodies, we squeezed ourselves into the Jacuzzi. In doing so we entered the realm I have come to think of as Weird French Expertise. The French, of course, are famously expert on all sorts of rarefied subjects: wine, food, lovemaking, etc. But they are also expert in designating some slender body of learning as a “subject” and in establishing themselves as its sole authority. In the Luxembourg Gardens there is a woman who is a connoisseur of swings. Around the corner from our house is a club devoted to the scribblings of some obscure anthropologist. Our next-door neighbor holds meetings for those who are interested in Christopher Columbus’s letters to his son.
It is no accident that Jacques Cousteau was French. The French know how to find categories ignored by the rest of the world and colonize them. Here, at Bébé l’Eau, was another example: baby dunking.
The point of what occurred during the next half hour remains a mystery to me. But there was, evidently, a point. The Frenchman in the mask and snorkel could not have been more earnest about his job. He ignored everyone else in the pool to focus on the newcomer. First he draped Quinn over a triangular flotation device. Then, just as the look of terror came into her eyes, he swooped her away and dragged her through the water on her back. Then, finally, as she began to howl, he dunked our only child’s head under the surface of the womb-temperature water. Quinn came up spluttering and reaching desperately for her mother, who reached desperately back for her. But the Frenchman seemed highly pleased with the result. He asked if we would all come back next week, when we would make further progress.
But the strangest thing about this strange experience was how it ended. It is rare, even in a family of three, for everyone to be feeling the same emotion. But on the way out of Bébé l’Eau there was no question about it. We shared a moment. And the emotion we all felt was: satisfaction with a job well done.
ON THE RARE days I do my fair share of the parenting, the mood in Paris changes. This is true especially on the mornings I agree to escort Quinn to her twice-weekly Gymboree class. In the few minutes between the morning feeding and my racing out the door, baby in arms, in a long and often futile search for a taxicab, a single unspoken sentence echoes off our kitchen walls. The sentence is: “Now you will get a taste of what my life is like.”
The truth is that parenting, in small doses, isn’t as bad as all that. At the Gymboree office, I am once again treated as a charming oddity: the wonderful father who has taken the morning off from work to spend it with his baby daughter. About a third of the other adults are nannies; the rest are actual mothers. All of them find the notion of a man free in the middle of the day amusingly lovable, which is what, of course, I strive to be. From this and other evidence, I deduce that the French male has cut an even harsher deal with his spouse than the American one has. The American deal—or at any rate the American deal currently fashionable in my socioeconomic bracket—is that unless you can prove you are out making money, you had better at least pretend to be caring for your child. You might think that the French male, so conspicuous in his disdain for commerce, would be left holding the Gymboree bag more often. Alas, never, except on weekends, when he is unable to pretend that he is in his office.
A pleasant woman with a big smile has already plastered name tags onto the chests of the nine other babies in the class. All nine sit patiently on the floor, staring at each other’s name tags like salesmen at a conference. Quinn wants no part of their act; when I put her down to sign us in, she hunches up into her peculiar crawling stance (straight-legged, knees off the ground, only palms of hands and bottoms of feet touching floor) and bolts for the room with the toys. By the time I catch up, she’s halfway up a rubber staircase with a purple Wiffle ball in her mouth. She is deterred from her ascent only by the familiar Gymboree call to arms: Bonjour, mes petits amis!
The woman in charge of Gymboree has the manner of a Chief Mouseketeer, and even looks a bit like Annette Funicello. She prances into the room carrying a giant rag doll named Gymbo (pronounced JEEM-BO) and greets the babies in her falsetto singsong. (“Bonjour, Quinn!”) My great fear is that Quinn will do her usual worst, and swat either Gymbo or Ms. Gymbo upside the head, thus wrecking the Gymboree atmosphere, which is thick with at least the pretense of goodwill. But today, for whatever reason, she behaves and even seems to enjoy the rituals that open the Gymboree games. At the start of each class, each mother and pseudo-mother is required to grab her child beneath its armpits and drag it, behind Gymbo, in a goose-stepping parade around the gym. At the parade’s conclusion, the parent is meant to squeal, “Wewewewewewewe,” and hurl her baby into a pile with the other babies at the center of the room, at the feet of Ms. Gymbo.
Gymboree, I am told, is an American company. But it could not have found more fertile soil abroad in which to plant itself, importing, as it does, the love of order into a chaotic marketplace. Like Bébé l’Eau, it appears to be a carefully crafted, scientifically based institute for infant development. Just beneath the science, however, is an infant rendition of Lord of the Flies. Today, for example, Ms. Gymbo has strung from the various ladders, slides, tunnels, barrels, and seesaws that fill the room (and that the babies fight with each other to control) brightly colored sacks stuffed with pungent spices. In French too rapid for me to follow, she explains how important it is for infants to associate odors with places. I want to ask why; but after a minute or two she’s lost me, and it takes all my mental energy to figure out what I’m supposed to do next with Quinn. What I’m supposed to do next, apparently, is to lead her by the nose around the room and persuade her to take big whiffs of the various sacks. But Quinn, who has yet to read Proust, has no interest in olfactory associations. Her eyes remain fixed on the purple Wiffle ball, which has rolled off, odor-lessly, into a corner.
This creates the usual problem of disguising my child’s lack of interest in personal development. If Ms. Gymbo notices that Quinn’s father is neglecting his duties, she will come over and speak to me sweetly in her rapid falsetto French, to the vast amusement of the French mothers. Thus Quinn and I cut a deal: I allow her to race up ladders and down ramps after her purple Wiffle ball and ignore the spice bags until Ms. Gymbo turns her attention to us, whereupon I grab the nearest sack and thrust it against her nose, with the insistence of a bank robber chloroforming a security guard.
However, Quinn reneges on the deal, shrieks, and cries real tears. “Très bien!” says Ms. Gymbo, and, to my relief, moves on. When she’s gone I stick my own nose into the offending sack. It smells, distinctly and pungently, of dog shit. What kind of experiment is this? I want to ask but of course don’t. Has Ms. Gymbo stuffed dog shit into one of the sacks as, perhaps, the control?
French Gymboree ends, as it began, with a slightly frightening group ritual. The babies are once again heaped together at the center of the room, where the bigger ones torture the smaller ones to tears. Then Ms. Gymbo blows bubbles over them. The babies all love this, and for a brief moment something like harmony reigns. But at precisely that moment, Ms. Gymbo puts away her bubbles and drags out her multicolored parachute. Anyone looking for evidence that babies have minds of their own need only observe one Gymboree parachute ritual. When they are piled up on the parachute and dragged around the room by us mothers as we sing some incomprehensible French song, they become, as one, solemn. And when their mothers help Ms. Gymbo make a tent of the parachute, and make to drop it onto their heads, all hell breaks loose. You’ve never seen a baby crawl until you have seen it trying to escape a Gymboree parachute descending upon its little head. Within seconds babies are here, there, and everywhere except where they are meant to be. The chute hits nothing but bare ground, and the class ends, as always, in chaos.
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