The Exchange: Day 1

For some reason at the Burk house, getting a foreign exchange student always involves paint. Two years ago, when our French girl came, I totally remember Sophie demanding that I finish painting the downstairs bathroom. Like, right now? An hour before the airport?? There was a small patch over the door, top right, that was left unpainted after I had petered out on a re-do many years earlier. Ran out of steam, not paint. You had to be all the way in the little bathroom, turned around with the door closed (as in, using the bathroom) to see this bald patch, so I had just never bothered. Hours before the airport pickup, however, this undone task mattered to Sophie. So I climbed up on the bathroom counter and painted it. Color it “Taupe Candor.” To be perfectly honest, I’d rather not be painting.

I’m sure other host families tidy up a bit, run a vacuum, make the house presentable so these kids don’t think Americans are slobs. They key word here, is kids. I’m not so stuck on deep cleaning, as I know before the week is out, our rent-a-boy will have been up my stairs in full-on mud caked cleats (“Aye! I did not know!!”), laid his wet swimsuit to dry over a chair back, and flashed me an impish grin as his brownie crumbs hit the floor. When requesting a foreign exchange student for the summer, make sure you ask for a real one. A boy, barely through childhood, ought to do nicely.

This time around, it is the condition of Ellie’s room plaguing us. In a process of pre-college preparation she started over a year ago, daughter #1 began removing the layers and layers of pinned up photos, stickers, clipping, souvenirs and trappings of a childhood lived to the fullest–and her room was at its fullest. Layered over it all were several dozen hand-cut paper snowflakes. Blizzard o’ procrastination, I suspect, one term paper night. It was, to say the least, a busy room. So when she began to dismantle it, trash bag by groaning trash bag, it was a little unbelievable. Left behind were all the dents, dings, holes, marks and smudges of the “display years.” So this is why we kept decade-old paint on a shelf in the garage, lovingly labeled “Sophie’s new room, 2009.” Color it “Heavenly glow.” A sweet shade of peach pink that is, in fact, quite pleasing.  Does it look especially French? Not so much. Does look at all “boy”? Decidedly not.

This is unfortunate, as the inhabitant en route, as we paint, is a 13-year-old-boy named Camille. He will be here within hours. Why am I so excited? I have painted a bedroom,  run the laundry, laundered the curtains and the comforter, cleaned all the bathrooms, mopped the kitchen floor. I have located a little cache of snacks that boys like and placed those with a Captain America beach towel and water bottle in a gift bag by “his” bed. His bed, which is Ellie’s bed, but Ellie does not live here anymore. Ah, is that it? After 18 of the fastest years on the planet, I now have this little one to fill the hole. Is that it? Since she moved out, Ellie’s room stays tidy, and still. So very still. Pillows plumped, bed made-up ready for a magazine photoshoot. There is simply nothing “heavenly” about this vacancy.

I am alone going to the airport. Will and Bill are on a mission trip, tail end, on the hottest week of the summer thus far. They are picking kale in North Carolina and staying at the Mt Olive University.  Sophie is at work. Ellie is, obviously, at camp. She is at camp until the end of summer, or until the end of time, whichever comes first. So it is up to la mere to pull this one off. I think maybe it will work better, for my little jetlagged francophone to come home to only me and the dog. He will be so tired anyway. Now, driving, the thought of us returning to an empty house is a little defeating. I am apprehensive. I wanted more to show for his big trip across the Atlantic. I certainly carry with me enough anticipation and excitement for an entire family. Why is that? I ask myself. I’m the one who got us into this crazy plan, just as it was my idea two years ago. I feel sick with excitement. It’s been building for weeks now. Is it because I did this as a young student—and it opened the world to me? Is it for the travelling life that I put to rest so many years ago? He will come off that plane with the sand of the French Riviera in his shoes and French air still on his skin. Am I reliving the last month of my year abroad, spent in the south of France? Is it my nostalgia, then—reviving an experience of hospitality and friendship extended to me over three decades ago?

Or is for the present? Am I filling in the holes my family has left so abruptly and unexpectedly, almost before the paint dried? In truth, I feel a bit of an idiot, having watched them coming and going before the one did not come back. I, with my last (a boy), often find myself looking up from whatever it is that holds the present moment thinking, Hey where’s my family? Like a tennis match, they come and go come and go, back and forth, until someone knocks the ball over the net, over the fence and it is gone. I think I must have failed to bone up on the rules of the game. But she is already gone.

Second thing out of his barely English-speaking mouth as we walk out to the car: “Where is yoh keds?” Good question, my boy. Where indeed.

If I am without escorts, he is without suitcase. Delta/Air France sent it back to Paris. At least that’s one version of the account now coming through in multiples. Turns out the flight was rerouted through Detroit because of weather issues in New York. The original JFK flight was either cancelled or delayed; bellyful of French students’ suitcases on board. So the bags had a quick trip, I gather, back across the tarmac to Charles de Gaule airport, while their owners boarded a flight to Michigan. We picked them up at RIC. Little band of eager but apprehensive American families, all washed and smiley and not really knowing what one does in such occasions. Some are carrying sweet homemade posters, balloons, flowers. Why didn’t I think of that? Instead, I am instantly and thoroughly relieved that I brought the “good” car, the one that is only a decade old and has both a muffler and a seatbelt intact. There. I did get it right. Working vehicle, good start.

Camille is as easy as the end of a summer day, small and smiling, eager to see who will claim him. No bag to slow us down, we are free and done in that ‘only-the shirt-on-my- back’ sort of way. I travelled like that for the last of a three-month journey once. Discovered that jeans actually wear themselves clean, or become so uniformly dirty you can’t tell, in about three weeks. Decided I didn’t want to pack or carry clothing anymore. At all. So that was that. This little guy doesn’t seem to care in the least that his bag is missing, tells me he didn’t sit with his ‘bruzzer’ on the plane, nor does he wish to meet up with the older boy, Paul, during the time here, and asks where we can go now. I look at him strolling along beside me, eager and agreeable, only minutes into his adventure of a lifetime, and I can hardly believe he is mine.

These days, in some weird form of reverse imprinting, I will mother anyone who comes near enough: the little ones at the library story time, the fascinated and wary toddler at the grocery store, the French kid whose parents signed him up for an American immersion. Anyone need tips on living or your skivvies washed? Or both? Anybody need a shirt mended or an “owie” soothed? Lord knows, there are beaucoup owies out there. I am strengthened by this trip to the airport, renewed and excited for the task in front of me. You can un-mother a child, as she grows, prunes, purges, knows, takes shapes, and flies—and every other childrearing metaphor out there. But you can never un-child a mother. Ever. She will be there, reliving your third birthday party under the mimosa tree even as she hands you cold coffee just the way you like it on your hurried way out the door. With this boy, this little French boy named Camille, I know that I am a mom again, in that I loved him before I met him.

After he plows through three platefuls of leftover pasta I heated up for him and we have discussed a little of tomorrow’s plans, he pushes away from the table and says quite plainly “Ok. Eye can sleep now?” Real quick, I take him on a mini house tour he will never remember: the dining room, the sun room, the living room. He follows, listening to me and then naming the rooms in French: le salon, la salle a manger…. We take our little duet upstairs: Bathroom. Salle de bain. Bedroom. Salle a coucher. This is William’s room. This is Sophie’s room. This is Ellie’s room. Mes trois enfants. Now it is your room. Here.

“Ca c’ est la mein?”

“Yes, Camille. Your room. Color it ‘full’.”