The Exchange: Day 6

The larger difference, no surprise, is not the language barrier between a boy who does not speak English and a boy who does not speak French, but the world between the ages. Here, there are oceans to cross, indeed. He is a sun-browned child on the cusp of adolescence, with skateboards and pricey sneakers on his mind. I am a middle-aged mom on the cusp of my fourth cup of coffee, who after 23 years of children in the house is occasionally mistaken for Will’s nice gramma at the grocery. (It’s the hair. Got to be the hair). Going into this adventure, I’m thinking about all the wonderful conversations, extended games, American ways, things I will show him, things I will teach him. Now, being in it, I’m thinking about all the places I am driving and how much money is flying out the window. While we drive, I try to keep conversation going. I ask questions, comment on the scenery, tell stories. This is full immersion, kid. You are getting a world-class education in English from the front seat of my minivan. “Camille? Do you understand?” “Eu, non,” says he, quite matter of factly. “I dunt understan because I dunt leesin tue you.” Huh. How ’bout that. Interessant. Glad we are on familiar terms so quickly. Glad it’s not my Euros bankrolling this thing. Not only that, your complete disregard makes me feel like an alien in my own life. Family has a way of doing that.

To be fair, I remember those days. I remember listening so hard for a word or a phrase that made sense that I spent most days with a headache. Nine years of French in school (before college!!) and I was still lost in live translation. Just trying to parse and separate the words of a foreign tongue can be tricky. And what of your own thoughts, your own inner train? There is no room for that in all the chatter and noise around you, because you must abandon it to catch a drop in a driving rain. It all goes soo quickly. Like one of those playground merry-go-rounds they’ve banned, it spins and spins with you forever trying to follow along and anticipate, but your one gap is gone before you can claim it. Rendered mute. No, there is nothing easy about full language immersion.

I think Sophie experienced a little of this last summer when we were in France. Maybe most when we travelled alongside two families, natives. It sounds like life and it looks like life and it moves and feels like life, but you can’t understand a blessed thing, so after a while the noise is unsettling and frustrating and you must tune out to stay sane. People forget to tell you where we are going or what’s going on, even though you are right there. You end up going around with a polite smile plastered on your face nodding as though you are tracking when really you aren’t, and you won’t until somebody patiently halts the conversation and spools out a sentence or question in English then reels you back into the blather.

So Camille is in that place. He’s had two years of English in school, and he confides that he does not do so well in school. Not well enough to recognize where words begin and end, which means no syntax. In French, much of the meaning is in the syntax, unlike  isolationist American English. Meaning leans into the words and the way they are placed. It makes me readily sympathize with his blank looks and furrowed brow, his questioning eyes as he waits for something to register. Soon, he and I resort to a strange combination language we used to call “Franglais”–a little of this, a little of that, a whole lot of efficiency in getting the point across. My own kids look at me funny because I answer them in French, and I when I speak in English I roll it out like a literal translation of the French sentiment occupying my mind. In restaurants I order as though I’m now trying to translate my choices and answers, and then let slip a “Merci” when they hand me my change. I sound like a French person with a terrible accent and a 3rd-grade education trying to communicate in English. In an American McDonald’s! I sound like an idiot. To all except the little one who assures my accent isn’t “too orreeble” and who might, let’s face it, be the slightest bit relieved I can understand almost every word coming out his mouth. Even when he doesn’t understand the words coming out mine. Camille, my boy, do you understand? Camille? “Aye!” he exclaims, shaking his head, Eye yam so tired, eye very do not want speak English.”

Contributing to this etrangement is his age. He’s only thirteen! He wants to make conversation like he wants to fold laundry or unload a dishwasher in some stranger’s kitchen: He will do it if he must to make you happy, but has no interest and isn’t very good at it. He’s thirteen! He doesn’t want to talk about American dining or global warming. He doesn’t want to make seasoned observations about French family pastimes. Not even what kinds of cars French people drive or the World Cup. He wants to know how to operate the remote and “When is deenur?” His speech, with his maturity level, is noticeably devoid of reflection, summary, analysis or comparison. Are his thoughts as well? When will his memory of our time together wear that clothing? Ever? Will he realize one day in musing, maybe in middle age, that all of life hangs in one’s ability to relate to another and that to up the stakes with a foreign exchange is really quite something. Indeed.

He’s thirteen and a boy! He doesn’t want to sit around being interrogated about French family life. Boy with two brothers, he wants to show me: “Well, you see, first I smack him over the head like this, and then he kicks me, so then I….” He has two brothers, and he came wearing gift bruises from the older. He shows me adorable pictures of Jacques, the younger, who he tells me beats on him as well. He is a boy sandwich. They share a room at the moment, but Camille, like any teen, is hoping soon he will have his own space. This is perhaps the deepest language my two boys will speak this summer, after “Gadget” and “Boy”–here is the more tribal tongue of brotherhood, communicated through the scrapes, scratches, and bruises you parlay while wrestling. He and Will have now reached a point at “bed time” which is indistinguishable from the WWF, complete with smackdowns and body blocks. Instead of hollering, ineffectively in either language, to stay off the stairs when they are crashing about up there, I now take the book or newspaper or whatever I was quietly reading, and I go and sit at the top of the stairs as an obvious obstacle to all that could happen. Free tickets, front row seat to “Live Summerslam RAW.” Who needs words for that?

The first full evening that Camille arrived I had to go out, taking the translator with me. Women’s Bible Study class, three hours at least. Bill and the kids start to look a little panicked, wondering how they will communicate with this brand new exchange student in our house. It’s been fewer than 24 hours. How will they begin to get through a meal together? Bill says how sorry he feels for the little guy, not being able to understand anything. So to counteract that he speaks to Camille very loudly, as if the boy is not only a non-English speaker but also part deaf. I can’t tell which aspect of the impending dynamic worries Bill more, that he (Bill) will not be able to understand anything, or that he will not be able to be understood. Since (can we speak frankly?) both my motherhood and my wifehood have involved heavy doses of both realities, I am a lover of context, intuition, body and every other non-verbal language over actual words, any day. Language is but a tool for the communication that is happening all the time. This is the day of the go-kart dance, mind you. The afternoon has already spoken volumes. They will be fine.

Camille is supposed to speak only English, anyway. It is a full immersion program, and perhaps the parents are a little disappointed to find some Americans who speak French. Strange bummer. “How is your English?” asks the Papa in perfect French as he and Camille Facetime at my kitchen table. I am facing his son, ostensibly typing away (and actively eavesdropping) at the laptop while Camille makes video conversation with his dad. “And you are learning a lot of English?” Over the screens I make eye contact with Camille, raise both thumbs and we share a grin before he looks back down at his phone. “Oui, Papa. Oui. Bien sur.” The dad and I have corresponded via WhatsApp earlier in the week. A yacht broker who speaks 50% in English and 25% Italian for his job, he is not surprised to hear that his native tongue is not common in the US. “Yes, we are a small country and it is not a big use to speak French.” My response to that, I sure hope it doesn’t sound supercilious, but it is my worldview in a nutshell (forgive zee accent): “It is not for the use that one learns a foreign language. It is for the opening of the world and the growth of the mind. It makes people more understanding and kind.”

I once carried on a conversation with a guy on a train, travelling from Spain back to France using only a pad of paper. He spoke little English, I no Spanish, not a word, and the French we shared was thin at best. We drew pictures and tried our hardest to forge words out of the raw material between us. Space. And time. Why? Why not? It was to pass the time on a really long train ride. Imagine it — 10 hours on a train, maybe longer, before cell phones or Wifi, before even laptops or tablets, or (land before time) before any internet at all: my little paper pad a true “world-wide web” spun in its most primitive and enduring form: one to one. Here. And now. We could not escape the moment via any “social” media and so, instead, we lived it. Three choices: Read, sleep, or converse. We chose the third, with the unspoken agreement that the challenge was worth the effort. Same thing I thought I’d be doing with boy here. Getting to know another, really know him, before the time of Facebook. Come on boy, you tell me your story. And I will tell you mine.

One of the lasting things my fellow passenger said to me was actually a question in halting English: “Aren’t you…only?” Well, yes, metaphysically speaking, I guess I am. Three-month Eurail pass, quickly depleting my funds, done with college and directionless if I do say so myself, parents divorcing back home, sold my soul to this country a year ago….I guess I am, indeed, only. It was a singularity and anonymity he didn’t mean to capture, swapping adverb for adjective. But yes, I guess you could describe it just like that. And many times in life since have I felt “only.”

Traveling has a way of yanking on that deep human need to communicate, to understand. I remember spending $8 USD on a paperback in a used bookstore in Madrid–an unheard of amount to a starving backpacker–but it was in English and I had been away too long. I was so “only,” and I was desperate for connection. I needed what Sophie needed last summer and what Camille may eventually come to need here: a breath of easy, and a little place and time where you don’t have to work so hard to be. Is our boy in that place? He has come with a group of French teens. I know that on their phones they Facetime, group chat, snap chat, post, peep, cheep and twit all day long. So are they really here? Or are they just the apparatus needed to transport all those thumbs to America to run the French cell phones? What exactly are we exchanging here? Maybe Camille, my little one from oceans and time zones away, already has a hold on the irony: you will indeed have to put away all that stuff to really, really connect. But don’t worry. Don’t worry, my boy.  If you practice, if you stay with it. If you try. One day you will sing in a foreign tongue. And after that, you will dream.

My favorite companion when I was in France the first time was a little girl by the name of Marie-Martine. She was the neighbor’s girl. She was nine. I was nineteen–designed for adult converse, but not on the inside. When I couldn’t take another mot of French speaking I would retreat to her. She was patient and she would show me stuff. Enamored by the exotic American girl, she would make the more patient effort to come into my world and we could do things together. We could sit on a bench or go to the village and just watch the water, but not waste any time talking. Children, of course, are multilingual till we “socialize” it out of them: and their first and most basic fluency is Life.

The boys are like that. Watching them makes me know that in a sense, we are all a little ESL. Their shared experience of life runs deep the moment they meet, so it is really just a fine tuning that takes place over the ensuing weeks. Will knows how to clean a carburetor, now Camille does, too. Camille knows how to execute a triple flip back dive off the board; now Will does, too. They read each other like long books in a native tongue. Bill and Will both teach him how to seek out the bad guys on World of Tanks. “Don’t worry, Papa, eye learn good Inglish!” In this way, the language “training” will be smuggled in, Trojan Horse style, through the barter-ware of boyhood. Together they swim, fish, boat, bike, kick balls, pitch tents–all in speaking the common language of day. Here is a day, and here are the many conjugations of it: “I eat,” “you eat,” “We completely trash the kitchen in a crepe bake-off.” “I sleep,” “You sleep,” “We destroy the upstairs of a quiet residential home with a late night pillow fight.” Then there are all the physics experiments at the fire pit. Or are those chemistry lessons? (“Ah, so you speak ‘accelerant’?”) More exciting than “What does an aerosol can of bug spray do when placed in open flames?” is “What does a mom do when you try?” Explosive, that.

In most of these endeavors, one does not really need language to get bogged down. One need only a few simple phrases, such as “My turn” or “Faster!” or “Wanna climb that”? I would like to write the New French-English Dictionary for Boys. It would contain only verbs. Across the yard, lake, or pool I hear Camille call out Will’s name in a twisted, exuberant “Weel-yum!” to show him something or get him to wait up, and the single word speaks a dissertation of friendship.

Understood by all.