Read When in French for Free Online

said.”
    â€œWell, what did you say, then?”
    â€œI already said it.”
    â€œWhat?”
    His voice grew low and a little bit sad.
    â€œTalking to you in English,” he said, “is like touching you withgloves.”

Two
THE IMPERFECT
L’Imparfait
    T HE BELLS RANG every Wednesday morning. The teacher would lift the needle, drop the record on the spindle, and then:
    Frère Jacques, Frère Jacques,
    Dormez-vous? Dormez-vous?
    Sonny LaMatina, Sonny LaMatina,
    Ding dang dong, Ding dang dong.
    I was five, a kindergartner. The song was pure sound, its hushed opening lines building to a pitter-patter and then to the crash-bang onomatopoeic finale that we liked to yell, hitting the terminal
g
’s like cymbals. The French teacher didn’t force meaning on us. She let us revel in the strangeness of the syllables, which made us feel special, since we were only just old enough to be able to discern that they were strange. Sonny LaMatina sounded to me like an exotic but approachable friend. I imagined him as a car dealer, like the ones I had heard on WWQQ 101.3, Cape Fear’s Country Leader: “Come on down toSonny LaMatina Honda Acura Mitsubishi. You can push it, pull it, or drag it in!”
    The school occupied a low-slung brick building set back from the highway on a lot of sand and pine. I had lived in Wilmington, a beach town wedged between the Cape Fear River and the Atlantic Ocean, my entire life. My parents, who came from Philadelphia and Long Island, rendering them lifelong newcomers, had moved to North Carolina seventeen years earlier. My father was a criminal defense lawyer, handling everything from speeding tickets to murders. My mother worked from home—from our kitchen table, more precisely—tutoring high-school students in geometry and trig. We had a redbrick house, with green shutters and a picket fence. We knew exactly one person—a Korean-born woman with whom my mother played tennis—whose first language wasn’t English.
    I loved where I came from. Wilmington was anything but a soulless suburb. Its inhabitants proudly extolled its claims to fame—hometown of Michael Jordan, headquarters of the North Carolina Azalea Festival, the largest port in the state.
Dawson’s Creek
was filmed there. The Venus flytrap, a carnivorous plant with leaves like the jaws of a rat, grew natively only within a sixty-mile radius. You could swim in March. June brought lightning bugs, and August, jellyfish: Portuguese men-of-war, sea wasps, cabbage heads.
    My family’s idea of a good vacation was to spend a week in a rented condominium 4.7 miles from our actual place of residence. My mother would drive home every day to water the grass. My brother, Matt, and I would ride bikes to a hot dog stand where the owner had shellacked a quarter onto the counter as an honesty test. We’d each get a North Carolina (mustard, chili, and slaw) and a Surfer (mustard, melted American cheese, and bacon bits), with pink lemonade that looked asif it had been brewed by dropping a highlighter inside a cup of water. Fall was oysters, roasted by the bushel and dumped on a table made from two metal drums and a piece of plywood, with a hole sawed out of the middle for the shells. When ACC basketball season arrived, church let out early. Teachers trundled televisions into the classrooms, blaring Dick Vitale.
    People who live in big cities get people who live in small towns wrong: they don’t want out. Wilmington was a place where people, considering their habitat unimprovable, tended to stay put. Only one member of my family had ever been abroad, once, but by local standards we were considered suspiciously urbane. We subscribed to the newspaper, which many Wilmingtonians detested, because it was owned by the
New York Times
. (A popular bumper sticker read “Don’t Ask Me, I Read the
Wilmington
Morning Star
.”) We drove to Pennsylvania every year, in a Volvo, to visit my