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The Christmas of 1985, I was 19 and living in Paris,
where I worked as a fille au pair for Monsieur and Madame Roth and their two young
daughters. I was homesick and sick in general, subsisting on a diet of
Gitanes, café express, and Monoprix vin de table. The Roths, I suspect, were sick of my wasted-waif routine,
and who could blame them? My predecessor was the Algerian Mary Poppins. I
burned soup, sobbed uncontrollably, and slapped the children. Still, they
couldn’t very well leave me toute seule on Christmas Day with a gas oven and an unattended liquor
cabinet, so they graciously invited me to M. Roth’s parents’
country home, a quaint stone cottage about 40 minutes outside Paris.
The elder Roths were Huguenots, French Protestants,
which was apparently a very big deal. Before dinner, the pink-faced
patriarch launched into a passionate monologue about the persecution
endured by his ancestors, who, I guessed, were kind of like the Jews of
Gaul. I couldn’t figure out whether this lengthy speech was a family
tradition or a quickie tutorial for the dumb American’s benefit. In
any case, the message got lost in translation. Although I’d been
living in France for a few months by that point and could read the language
pretty well, my listening-comprehension skills were sorely deficient. When
the topic concerned something other than naps or snacks or missing socks, I
had to make a decision: Either stand there slack-jawed and wait for some
kindly soul to dumb things down for me or fake my way through the
conversation with a few strategically placed “Ah, bon?”s and “Vraiment”s. The nicer
the people were, the worse I felt about desecrating their language. M.
Roth’s parents seemed very nice, despite their eccentric sectarian
customs, and I didn’t want to abuse their hospitality. All I wanted
to do was turn invisible and stuff my face. I was always starving in those days, and I harbored
an irrational longing for a traditional Christmas dinner with all the
fixings. Mashed potatoes and gravy, roast turkey or maybe baked ham, green
beans boiled with bacon, sweet potatoes with miniature marshmallows, pecan
pie — that’s what they’d be eating back home at my
Grandma Ruby’s house. I knew that the Christmas food in France would
be somewhat different; I just assumed that it would be a more sophisticated
version of the usual fare.
As with so many other things, I guessed wrong. After
an agonizing hour or two of navigating the chitchat minefield (Should I use
the passé composé or the imparfait? Is “wineglass” masculine or feminine?), I was
relieved to sit down at the Roths’ beautiful oak table. Finally I
could occupy my mouth with something it was actually good at! Someone
filled my glass with Champagne, and I obediently drained it. It was promptly replenished,
and I did the same thing. I would have preferred water, actually, but it
seemed impolite to reject what was, for all I knew, a blessed sacrament of
the Huguenot Christmas, so I kept drinking, and they kept pouring. At any
rate, drinking Champagne was easier than speaking French, especially now
that my face was pleasantly numb. I was at that stage of drunkenness in
which all is for the better in the best of all possible worlds. Language
barrier be damned! I suddenly understood everything, and everything was
good.
If I had been anything less than irrevocably soused,
I might have been able to avert the disaster that was headed my way in the
form of a huge tray of oysters on the half shell. As the Roth clan oohed
and aahed over the decadent first course, I should have been figuring out a
polite way to decline something that I knew, without even tasting, would
surely make me hurl (What’s the word for ‘allergic’?
Would they believe me if I said I was Jewish?). Instead, I plucked one of
the trembling mollusks off the platter and willed myself to force it down.
The briny, viscous sensation was disturbingly familiar, like swallowing
phlegm. I smiled gamely at my hosts, who were watching me with hopeful
expressions, and I slurred the requisite compliments. They seemed so
pleased, so heartbreakingly happy, that I couldn’t bear to turn down
the next one. Or the next. I grimly slurped down a succession of the
hideous huîtres, hoping against hope that each one would be my last. No such
luck. By this point I’d downed so many that everyone assumed that I
loved them, and all protestations to the contrary were taken as the feeble politesse of the foreign
charity case. The rest of the evening was a blur. Somehow I
resisted the urge to vomit at the table, although I did make several
surreptitious trips to the bathroom after dinner, where I regurgitated the
equivalent of two months’ salary. I don’t remember the ride
home, how I managed not to ruin the pristine leather upholstery of M.
Roth’s Peugeot, how I got into bed and repeatedly found my way out
again when I had to throw up for the umpteenth time. It must have been a
Christmas miracle.
René Spencer Saller writes about music for Illinois Times.
This article appears in Dec 13-19, 2007.
