NOR THINGS PRESENT, A Novel
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(most of) CHAPTER ONE
It’s literally impossible to get through French class without completely losing your mind, not because of the French, which I quite like actually, and which I plan to use one day when I am all the way up in my twenties and an international spy, but because of Madame Lensky, who we have to call Madame Lautrec, and who is not only unbearable to listen to because of her shrill voice and her dubious American accent, but who is also unbearable to look at. For starters, it’s hard even to look at her in the face when she calls on you because she has these like totally shocking lips, segmented, like two worms dipped in lipstick, two quivering red worms scuttling along her face like they are trying to escape the notice of her little moustache, which you can tell she bleaches at the end of every month. You can tell this when she calls you to her desk, just before Bleach Day, because you can’t look into her eyes. Your eyes are just DRAWN to the black roots sprinkling the space between her nostrils and her lips, no matter how badly you do not, I repeat, DO NOT, want to look there. And she wears these scratch-o-rific acrylic sweaters so impossibly Grandma-ish in color and cut that you cannot help but wonder if she is actually TRYING to play the part of a nerdy old high school French-teaching fartesse or if that’s really and truly just the real her.
To be honest, the deep-within reason I can’t stand to look at Madame L is because it breaks my heart. Because in the past or maybe even now, she must have had the same feelings I have. Of wanting to love someone and to be loved. And from what I have heard, this happens to everyone at some point, or at least they think it’s happening. So consider the fact that the young and spry version, the Mademoiselle of Madame Lautrec, must have been in love sometime long ago; and then consider the fact that someone must have loved her back for at least a day of real happiness, and then, if you can bear it, consider the fact that since then Mademoiselle became Madame, in age if not matrimony, and then it was nothing but loneliness and moustache bleaching and a buttload of French novels, some of those with love requited but generally just a lot of arsenic and bloody coughing to death, and nothing but That One Day of Happiness has happened since, for years and years and years nothing but movie adaptations rewound eight times to rewatch and rewatch the scene where they finally kiss forbiddenly.
Most definitely, love HAD to have happened sometime in her past, I am sure that everyone gets that moment at least once in a life -- though I myself have not experienced this, not exactly, well, I don’t want to get ahead of moiself, so let me conclude by saying really I just can’t picture anyone kissing or longing to kiss those wormy lips. Even in the past, I mean, even when they were less worm-ful. And even lips aside, because maybe she wasn’t born looking that way, maybe she was even kind of good-looking sometime long ago and had regular lips -- but even based on personality alone, it’s still impossible to imagine that someone could think about Madame Lautrec in that way that when you have a crush on someone, you almost feel sorry for them, something about them just seems so painful and touching that you realize suddenly that this can only mean you love them, and then of course once that happens, you become the pitiful one, and at that point no one will pity you, least of all, least, least of all, the one you love. And even in the best of scenarios cases, when we consider l’exhibit A, could the one that Madame Lautrec loved ever have truly loved her? Je ne crois pas. And all that is why I can’t look at her.
I’m telling you all this not because Madame Lautrec is some major driving force in my life but to explain how it was I became friendly with Andi Seckler, a girl to whom under normal circumstances I would not be able to think of even one word to say, but who turned out to be the perfect companion in French class, and because of this many other things happened even though in fact we never became real friends and still to this day never have much to say to each other except for making jokes in bad French about Madame Lautrec when we see each other at parties, e.g., using a squeaky Lautrec-like voice to say, “I don’t give a merde if le chien a mange ton devoir.” The thing we came up with at that time, and I don’t remember how, actually, was a sort of a game, or more like a technique, a time-passing technique, where we’d figure out how many minutes were left in class and write that down at the edge of our notebook paper, and then one of us would count to sixty, silently of course, and then point to the other, and the other would count to sixty. Then already two whole minutes had passed, and we’d write the new number of minutes left in our notebooks, and then we’d do it again all the way til the end of class, interrupting it only if one of us were called on to answer a question, at which point you had to say out loud, for example, “forty-three,” before answering the question, so that the other one could continue counting while you were answering. It’s very strange how counting to sixty during French class goes much faster than actually just living through those same soixante seconds during the very same French class, but really it does, je vous jure.
So everything that happened started in a way about a month into the school year, when at some point in class I got called on in the middle of my count. I was really out of my head that day -- I was pretty upset about something if you want to know the truth, and I hadn’t been paying even an iota of attention to the class, I was barely even counting on my turn. I don’t think I was faking it, but I was doing it without realizing what number I was on, like one half of my head was keeping time automatically by saying the words of the numbers, but the other half of my head was somewhere else. So I had no idea what Lautrec had asked me. She already thought I was a bit of a smart-ass, though for some reason, perhaps because of my extreme intelligence and staggering wit, she still kind of liked me. Anyway, she called on me, and I said, “Twenty-two! – je veux dire, Madame, que la reponse depend sur les temps,” and her lips curled in a kind of pleased smile, and she squeaked, “Ca c’est peut-etre vrai, Chloe” -- we all had to take French names in that class – I was Chloe, and Andi was Pascale – “C’est tres interressante comme idée,” she said, “mais ca ne fera pas beaucoup de sens avec la chanson – Classe, ecoutez!” and she excitedly turned to the tape player and pressed play. She was really excited about that tape, she was wigglier than usual, and you could sense her excitement sort of shimmying up out of the thickness of her scratchy green sweater and green plaid skirt covering the vast plain of her arse, she was prancing about in anticipation as the tape clicked forward before the song. The sight of her excitement combined with the thought of her choosing that plaid skirt out of the closet that morning to match that sweater, and all in spite of the mid-September summer heat remnant, was so painful that I got a little sick to my stomach, which is unfortunately what happens to me whenever I get emotional about anything -- as I am sure you will figure out for yourself as our story progresses -- and I had to look down at my desk for a while.
The song was really bad; it was some kind of attempt at a pop song by some clever ecrivains at the textbook company, and the worst part of it is that I don’t think I will ever get that stinking song out of my head til the day I die. I must have heard it no more than three times over the course of a one-week French unit, but it still jumps in on my thoughts at least once a day, sometimes for a whole hour. It was kind of a strummy rhythm, with these breathy singers trying to sound like the French Beach Boys --
Bebe, bebe, beee-beeeee,
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Bebe, bebe, beee-beeeee,
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
J’aime mon bebe.
J’aime mon bebe.
Bebe, bebe, beee-beeeee,
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So a lot of the kids in the class started majorly rocking out to the song in their chairs, and Andi and I started laughing, we always gave up the count when something was going on that passed the time -- and then out of the corner of mon oeil I saw something sort of whizz past before it hit my hand. It was this little piece of paper folded up like ten times to a tiny square. On the front of the square was drawn a tiny question mark. I looked around the room kind of surreptitiously and there across the room was Bruno, smirking at me. Bruno was his French class name, I didn’t even know his real name then, but since we were the two major smart asses in that class, we would nod respectfully to each other in the halls, and to be honest with you I had always thought he was cute in a Rumblefish sort of way, though it wasn’t something I would have ever told anyone about. He was more of a serious cut-up in class than I was, like he didn’t mind being outright bad, a depth I don’t sink to; and sometimes he really crossed the line and was actually mean-bordering-on-vicious to Poor Old Lautrec in front of everyone. His French was deadly awful in this really funny way, and in fact I think he wasn’t that good at French because he wasn’t actually all that smart, but he had a great accent because he was mocking it so hard. I’ve discovered actually, with practice in my closet at home, that that’s the only way to get a good accent, to talk like you are mocking a French person. In class everyone except Bruno would have been way too embarrassed to sound like that, so we all had terrible American accents. But anyway, you get the idea, Bruno was a half-punker C-stepper (those are the kids you can find between any class smoking on the steps of C-building) with raggedy-buzz-cut hair and skinny black jeans and very beat-up brick-red Doc Marten boots with yellow laces. He was not the kind of guy who would ever be friends with ol’ straight-laced Sadie with her only minor transgressions against authority. So I was really kind of shocked by the missile-fired note.
I played it cool of course, just gave him a sidelong glance and then, slowly, to avoid Lautrec’s extra-evil eye, I opened up the paper, covering it with my hand and peering under the top fold. It said, “Qu’est ce que la twenty-two?”
I don’t know if you realize what a moment like this really means, and I guess it’s possible that it could mean nothing at all, but when there was something of an attraction on the part of at least one person, and the other unexpectedly wrote and missile-delivered a note trying to get in on what was obviously a private joke in that other person’s world, well, that was not a moment to be taken lightly. Fortunately, though I had never really been on a real date and really hadn’t even been liked by anyone real, I was very good at flirting, so I didn’t have to spend any time agonizing over what to write back. “Ca c’est pour moi to savoir, et pour vous to trouver out.” I wrote my note even smaller than he had written his, and let me tell you, it takes a lot of concentration to write that small. In fact it took so much concentration, that I basically forgot all about the fact that I was supposed to at least look like I was paying attention. I flicked my reply across the room precisely trois secondes before Lautrec pounced upon the unfolded paper that contained Bruno’s message. She snatched it from the desk and carried it back across the room to the tape player, pushing down the STOP button with a loud THWACK and wheeling around to present the note to the class. I could see Boris behind her on the other side of the room, slyly shoving my note into the pocket of his jeans.
“Que’est-ce que la twenty-two,” she announced after peering closely at his note to decipher it, and then she shook her head sadly and said, “Ils ne peuvent meme pas se passer des notes en bon Francais…” And, looking all martyrishedly resigned to her sad fate of being trapped here in downtown Bethesda, Maryland with all of us bourgeois wastoids, when she was clearly born to gaze out over a crumbling stone wall at dusk and sigh longingly at the light in the window of the handsome widower’s stone house across the lavender fields, she surrendered to her duty and forced us into a review of proper usage of “combien,” and “qu’est-ce que,” and made me repeat “combien” three times with different numbers, and then made me explain why you had to have “c’est” after “qu’est-ce que” when asking that question. All around, I think my transgressions, and her use of them, really made her day, she was like totally thrilled with how she had turned things around to create a neat little grammar lesson. And I myself was pretty psyched, because I knew that Bruno was watching me step up to the plate, and that he would have to live through that deliciously long wait before he could look at my note after class. In fact I was glad when Lautrec made Andi and me stay after for a little noodle lashing, because it gave me the chance to catch Bruno’s eye and give him my best Mona Lisa smile as he walked out without ruining things by actually talking to him.
You know how it happens with things like this – someone you weren’t truly even thinking about before jumps into your radar as if he were the Tristan to your Isolde, and then you spend the rest of the day or the week or however long it lasts before the crash and burn endlessly calling his face or his hands or his shoulders into your mind and getting all butterfly-ish and blushy. It was really so delicious after French class to sit in EFAG Honors Extended (that’s Elementary Functions and Analytical Geometry Honors EXTENDED, in case you thought “Honors” was enough for any of these college applications), so delicious to allow that moment when I looked down at the note and then looked across to catch his eye to keep creeping back into my mind and to feel my stomach flip flop and to kind of have to catch my breath.
I know what you are going to say. I know that even though romance has entered the picture in this sorry little tale, you’re like, “Wait, what was that thing you said about being upset about something, back when you were doing the count?“
Why do people want to peg the terriblest, darkest things, more than they want to peg love?
Well, ask yourself this: Would you be as likely to stop to watch some little old man and his wrinkly old wife holding hands, just very simply, talking in voices only they can hear as they shuffled along Leland Street past the azaleas in their fuscia bloom, as you would be to slow down with the other zillion cars slowing down to survey the aftermath of a bloody crash on the highway? We both know why traffic gets backed up for miles. Because we have to look. And even if some of us start weeping for those poor souls as we pass and speed up again, spinning the radio dial, or others of us just say thank god it wasn’t me, trying to shake the feeling that it’s only a matter of time before miles of traffic are rolling slowly past our own violent point of impact – either way, we all stop to look, and we look for as long as we can, and the only reason the car just behind us isn’t wildly honking at us to go faster is because those people are staring for as long as they can too. Then the road’s emptiness opens for the next driver in line to fill it, to floor the gas pedal and start looking at something between the car and the horizon and thus forget the thoughts that came with seeing. But I still think it would be far worse if we all zoomed past without slowing down, if we didn’t look at all. That would be a cold cold world to not even think to care for whom the bell tolls.
So I get it. You want to look at the accident that is my life, and you want to see someone pulling me out of the wreckage with the Jaws of Life. It would make you feel good to feel bad and then feel relieved. The thing is, I don’t want to get too deeply into that home stuff, to be honest I hardly even told my friends about it except to call for them to pick me up when it got to the point that I really thought I’d lose my mind. We were pretty much all in the same boat, you know. Sometimes it was me who had to go and pick them up. So yeah, for now I’ll just say that things in my house are not of the most family-loving variety of family life. I guess it was worse when my parents were together, but you know something? Maybe not, maybe it wasn’t actually worse. The truth is that both ways are like hell on earth, and they’ve actually only been separated since the summer, just after my brother came back from the shrinkie dink ward; but at the moment things are as bad as I can imagine, and I am like counting the days until I can get out of here, aka college, which currently is about one and a half years off, e.g., over 500 days to count during the endless French class that is my current life.