The Imperfect Tense

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How does staying in an old palace in Paris on the Rue de Rivoli strike you?” my sister-in-law Jill asks.

“Drafty, but probably delightful,” I say. “Why?”

Jill tells me that her daughter is spending the semester abroad and that she will be visiting her next month. Jill knows I love all things French. “Want to come? We could have such fun,” she pleads, and I say, “How can I?”

But when Jill calls again, I surprise her, and myself, by saying, Yes.

Yes, I will go to Paris, because I haven’t been there since the summer I was 16. Yes, because I haven’t been out of the country since my honeymoon to Europe. Yes, although I have never left my children before. The thought makes me nervous and giddy.

Jill speaks no French, so she tells me she is depending on me. Ever the dutiful student, I borrow my son Jonathan’s French grammar review book and grapple with conjugations, irregular verbs and the subjunctive. I listen to French radio stations, understanding perhaps every 15th word, and they are only helper words - avec, avant, après - nothing substantive. Frustrated, I want to beg, Plus lentement, s’il vous plait. Please. Slow. Down. I struggle to decode one sentence, and the radio voice is already two paragraphs ahead. I feel adrift in the sea of language. Reclaiming my high school French is sheer physical exhaustion as I strain to decipher the foreign sounds. I’m still floundering with first-year phrases like La plume de ma tante est sur la table, while it sounds as if the speakers on the air are parsing Proust.

Struggling to master the rudiments of French all over again, I cannot help but wonder: Is this what it is like for my 16-year-old son Mickey every day, struggling to make himself understood in English, a language that feels innately foreign to him? The fatigue, the mental strain, the confusion of idioms? “What did you did today?” he will often ask me. No wonder he still naps every afternoon; he’s exhausted.

My friend Ellen, a former student at the Sorbonne, tries to help and speaks French to me. When I try to answer, it feels like striking two keys on an old manual typewriter: The keys jam in mid-air, metal trapped over metal. The words are stuck; my throat throttles. I can think only in the present tense.