Read When in French for Free Online Page A

grandmother. (Another sticker, aimed at tourists: “I-40 West—Use it.”) My parents encouraged us to pursue outside experiences. They were rarely illiberal, even in matters of which they had no direct knowledge. They were both keen readers, especially my mother, whose tastes in fiction were as sophisticated as they were simple in her everyday life. Their horizons were wider than those of many of the people around us, but they extended only a few hundred miles to the north.
    Soon the school discontinued French in favor of Spanish, deeming it more practical. I became Laura, not Laurence. Roosters crowed
cocorico
instead of
quiquiriki
. On Wednesdays the record player crackled out “La Cucaracha” and, regardless of the season, “Feliz Navidad.”
    One day our English teacher asked us to write a poem. My parents found mine not long ago. They were coming to London for my wedding to Olivier, the night before which we wereplanning a big dinner in a pub. Yorkshire pudding was on the menu, and they weren’t sure what it was.
    My father flipped to the
Y
section of the family dictionary. A piece of loose-leaf paper fluttered to the ground. I had completed the poetry assignment with a fuzzy orange marker:
    I wish I could travel around the world, and s-e-e-e all the th-i-i-i-ngs.
    Oh, I would see all the countries and beautiful customs.
    Oh, I would see all the countries, Romainia Greece and all.
    I would see all the beautiful cultures. I wish I-I-I could.
    Oh, it would be so interesting. I wish I could travel around the w-o-o-o-o-rld. Oh!
    Â â€¢Â â€¢Â â€¢Â 
    T HE FIRST PLACE I ever went was Disney World. We crammed into the car with one tape, Jack Nicholson and Bobby McFerrin doing Kipling’s story about how the elephant, on the banks of the “great gray-green, greasy Limpopo River,” got his trunk. The drive took nine hours: Myrtle Beach, where we stocked up on bang snaps and Roman candles; Savannah; St. Augustine; Daytona Beach. Finally, we arrived at Polynesian Village, a longhouse-style resort with koi ponds and a tropical rain forest in the lobby.
    I pulled on tube socks and white sneakers and slung a purple plastic camera across my chest. Disappointment quickly set in. I was too scared to ride Space Mountain. Cinderella’s castle held little allure—I was more interested in foreign countries than magic kingdoms. To a first-time traveler with dreams of high adventure, Main Street, U.S.A., seemed a scam, a staycation in the guise of a trip down memory lane. The windows ofthe shops were filigreed with the names of fake proprietors. I clocked a barbershop and some fudge kitchens. Where were the ziggurats, the cassowaries and the cuneiform tablets, the temples of marble and pillars of stone?
    The next morning, we took the shuttle to Epcot. As we crossed into the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow—even now, my impression of exoticism is such that the dome marking its entrance seems less a golf ball than a crystal ball, or at the very least a Scandinavian light fixture—I was transported, exported, by some freaky wormhole of globalization in which one could see the world by essentially staying at home.
    We boarded Friendship Boats, approaching the World Showcase Lagoon on the International Gateway canal. We took a left into Mexico, where we rode a marionette carousel before proceeding southwest to the tea shops of China. We strolled around a
platz
. We listened to a campanile toll, saw the Eiffel Tower. We were after the epoch of Equatorial Africa (which Disney had planned, but never built) but before the dawn of Norway (whose pavilion would open in 1988, featuring a Viking ship and a stave church). Pubs and pyramids were coeval. Time seemed to scramble, as though it had been snipped up and pasted back together, like the map.
    â€œAll areas of Morocco are wheelchair accessible,” the literature advised. In the medina, we followed the twang of an