Cover image: Photo from the Panier district of Marseilles, by Pina Piccolo.
My French Wiles
Sometimes at the Maubert Market I fingered the shawls and scarves as if I intended to buy one so the seller would tell me how wonderful I looked wrapped inside it or with it swooped it around my neck, and this would deepen the pleasure I took in being somebody else, somebody French. I had practiced suitable responses, Monsieur, vous êtes trop gentil or Je préférerais quelque chose de bleu clair although préférerais was hard to pull off like a native speaker so I practiced shrugging while smiling, looking rueful, shaking my head, murmuring Eh bien, je vais y réflêchir and moving slowly to the next stall, all the while suppressing a triumphant smile if no one had responded to me in English. On days when someone did, I went back to the flat and practiced harder, waiting for the next market day. For years I’d mispronounced Monsieur, sounding the r at the end instead of making a vague eh sound, a dead give-away that I was American. But now I lived in Canada, so I could botch many words and be dismissed as a hick from the woods of Quebec, un plouc des bois du Québec, but where would that get me in my quest to be taken for authentically, indisputably French? Some days I said nothing, muette comme une tombe, pointing at whatever I wished to buy, nodding, gesticulating, and I carried strawberries and Anjou pears and my favorite Brillat Savarin cheese back to the flat where I laid a picnic for one on the wide table and strolled about, popping a strawberry into my mouth now and then, slicing a morsel of the cheese, careful not to let it ooze over the knife while I talked to my French lover, who would write about love as brilliantly as Albert Cohen but would never tire of me or my delicious wiles.
Une femme d’un certain âge
ACCÈS INTERDIT read the sign. I pretended not to understand and began to climb the rock in the middle of Parc Monceau. A bright afternoon, the park crowded enough, but no one happened to be near the rock at that time, so I climbed. I was not dressed to be climbing even a ladder—sandals, a breezy skirt. But once I began, there was no stopping. It’s not as if the rock’s that high, I kept telling myself, but when I reached the top, trembling from the exertion, I couldn’t find an easy way down. I began to panic, thinking I’d have to shout AU SECOURS! AU SECOURS! and be met with ridicule. But maybe I could just slide down—if I ended up with abrasions and ruined my skirt, so be it; I’d packed two others. Retracing my climb seemed too risky; I’d made many reckless maneuvers on the way up. So I took deep breaths. I studied the rock. I promised myself not to do anything so stupid again. And somehow I picked my way back down without falling or scraping even a hand. No one noticed me. So it had happened: I had become invisible.
Lunch, with Words
One morning at the Bastille market with my string bag and rehearsed phrases, I looked at Provençal tablecloths, the yellow of sunflowers splashed with olives black as the sea at night,
but I didn’t know if it was authentic Provençal or a cheap rip-off. My instincts said rip-off, but what was the French word for rip-off? This happened before you could look up a word on your phone, so I smiled and said nothing, moving on to the shawls, where a man who resembled my father stood, bored. When I touched the first one, he leaned close to tell me in English that the wool was excellent quality. I said I preferred to speak French, having come to Paris to practice. Practice away, he said, still in English, and I was back on the sofa with the slide rule in hand, my father telling me it was easy, easy, any fool could do logarithms if she put her mind to it, and my utter speechlessness then was my speechlessness now, so without buying anything, not the shawl or the lettuce or fig bread and cheese I’d come for and knew how to ask for, I slunk back to the flat where I made tea, speaking all the French words I could muster, shaking them out like a tablecloth, a cloth napkin, a bunch of wet grapes, biting into them like bread and good cheese.
Parisian Fantasy
I wanted to look Parisian. So I went to Printemps and ransacked les robes en solde. I found a mini dress, its fabric thin like a many-times washed tee-shirt, and almost gasped when I saw the cost—having assumed a 20% reduction would amount to more than it did. But I had something to wear with it: the shiny black tights my friend Nellie had given me. So the next day, having decided to go to the Musée Rodin, I donned the tights and dress and walked to the St Paul Métro. On the jammed train, a handsome guy, late 40s, early 50s, kept smiling at me, and at the next stop he moved closer—we were both standing, and more people got on—and asked if I lived in Paris. I felt triumphant—my outfit worked! — and told him I was from California, here to improve my French. I was a poet, I added, and several stops later, he’d managed to get my email and to invite me to coffee before we came to his stop. When he asked again if I wanted to get off with him at his stop and have coffee now, I shook my head and said he could email me. I could feel myself blushing. I had finally realized from the stares of other passengers that my outfit was not, after all, a triumph. Instead of looking chic and Parisian, I looked like a hooker, and even worse, an aging hooker trying to snag a much younger man.
The Long Abandonment
My mother was with me that day. She’d been dead for four years, but she was beside me as I walked through the Luxembourg Gardens, stopping near the statue of Paul Valéry. I cried out to her when I saw that unlike last year, it was now surrounded not by marigolds but by brown-eyed Susans, my mother’s favorite flower. It’s emblematic of my mother that the flower she most loved would be one found in fields or alongside roads. It’s also cultivated for ornament, but it was the flowers popping up in the wild that drew my mother to them, with their sudden bright yellow, their unadorned forthrightness. Not for her the dense luxury of the rose or peony.
I stared back and forth for a while from the brown-eyed Susans to Valéry, who said something about writing poems that I love as much as my mother loved brown-eyed Susans: A poem is never finished, only abandoned. I thought of the poem grief makes when someone beloved dies. The grieving is never finished, only abandoned, at the griever’s own death.
Lynne Knight is the author of six full-length poetry collections and six chapbooks. Her work has appeared in many journals, and her awards and honors include publication in Best American Poetry, a PSA Lucille Medwick Memorial Award, a RATTLE Poetry Prize, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. She lives on Vancouver Island.
