Things I Learned from France (or Didn’t)

I’ve been back in the U.S. for a few weeks. Does the “Paris effect” last? My friend K., who also just returned, said she felt like the year disappeared, as if it were “all a (very pleasant) dream.”

I told myself, though, that what I had going on with Paris wasn’t just a fling. This was a long-term relationship, even if it turned long-distance. I had experienced (multiple!) epiphanies whose transformative effects would not just disappear like cigarette smoke.

Right? Time for a reality check.

Grooming: Before I left the house in Paris, even if it was just to buy the morning baguette or walk a block to the gym, I put on clean, fitted, nonathletic clothes and shoes, brushed my hair, applied make-up, and sprayed perfume. Every time I walked down the stairs, I glossed and rouged my lips. I wouldn’t have thought of showing my face even to strangers without at least this minimal preparation, no more than I would have stepped out naked.

But here? I tried. When I lived in New York City, I had high standards, too, but there’s something about getting in a car that makes me feel invisible.

I started to slip in California, visiting my in-laws. They live in a beach town, and we all piled into the car in our swimsuits then realized on the way back we needed coffee beans. So we sat at Peet’s in our cover-ups, barely covered up. Not that we were the only ones. Then, the other day my son wanted to make eggs for breakfast and we didn’t have any. I was in the middle of my Pilates work-out, but I said, “Sure, I’ll just zip to CVS” in my yoga pants and sneakers. I don’t put on make-up to meet my daughter’s bus. Maybe you’ll have more sympathy for me if I tell you it arrives at 7:09 in the morning? Who’s going to see me, anyway? One of the other moms comes in the overalls she gardens in. Once she arrived in pajamas.

Food: Cheese comes after dinner, not before. Nothing is more rich, delicious, and decadent than a pungent, almost liquified Camembert, so it makes sense to treat it as dessert. This new (for me) concept I have embraced. No snacks between meals, except for the kids’ after-school gouter: I’m down with that, too.  Meals should be eaten slowly, at a table, like a sacred ritual. Mostly I do that. Except yesterday, when I drove my son to college, we were running so late we stopped at the supermarket to buy sandwiches to eat in the car. (Everything about that last sentence shows my standards have plummeted, I know.) Maybe you can blame my son: I was also with him when I bought a coffee to go. (Why do I love coffee to go so much? Is it pretentious to say it feels Proustian to me?)  And then I invited my friend H. for dinner at the scandalously early hour of 6, asking her not to tell anybody. (But now everybody knows.)

Manners: I was completely charmed by the way people address each other as “Madame” or “Monsieur” in France. I vowed I would translate this custom in Virginia, where it’s just Southern enough to use “Ma’am” and “Sir.” But I can’t do it. “Ma’am” somehow sounds too matronly and The Help-ish. “Sir” makes me feel like I’m in the Army.

I try to be more polite to shopkeepers here, as I was in Paris, always greeting them when I enter or leave and bantering a little. This custom occasionally means that a five-minute transaction takes twenty, as when my butcher gave me a manifesto about liver and the cashier at J.C. Penney took my comment about flip-flops as an invitation to tell me about visiting her cousin in rehab while her flip-flops pinched her toes. But at least, in the U.S. when I nod to these strangers, I really do understand what they’re talking about.

What’s my score? Depends how many points I get for The Cheese Lesson. I think that trumps everything.

No? Then maybe I still need more experience in Paris. Is it time to go back yet?