Too big, the perfect size

          In French class I sit with Grace because she talks fast. Is that enough? She says things that I wouldn’t. I’m always surprised. She says things like: Americans could benefit from psychoanalysis, and Québec is anxious about its identity. These are generalizations, but they’re all we know. Our professor comes to our conversation group and agrees or shakes her head. Sometimes she laughs and her bangs go in her eyes. She corrects us when we flounder with our tongues between our teeth, like fish. 

          Everyone in French class has beautiful eyes. They’re big, bright, and swollen when we speak. In conversation, each one of us turns to the person we think will understand us the most — it’s subconscious, like blinking. We turn to them and hope they will take our gaze in theirs and say, go on. Be special for us. For me this person is Grace. I speak especially for her. She’s better than me: she knows more words. But my accent blurs in a way hers hasn’t, yet. Although she speaks in staccato, Grace doesn’t need a person like I do. She speaks so quickly we all turn to her, and nod. At the root of this nod is any meaning: 

          What you have just said is important to us. 

          This could be a lie (we lie all the time). 

          We don’t have the words to say what we believe. 

          Adjectives are earrings for holes we never learned to stab through.

          We have arrived here from other provinces, countries, cadences we call out in when we have a bad dream. What I know is collected from university classes; nouns like loyer from walking around the city; and a phrase my ex-boyfriend said to me years ago, before he was my ex-boyfriend. We had woken up late, it was summer and easy and he was pouring water. He has never needed French classes. He learned as a child. He poured water into a clean clear glass and turned to me and said, encore plus? More? His eyes were big but not with the wide-eyed panic of class discussion, they were marked by openness, his face all patient too. This memory rooted below all exceptions and registers of any finicky system to become a grammar I turn to like licking a stamp: the simplest phrase inscribed my understanding of what language should do. 

          In class we don’t have a set curriculum, but I’m getting better at making that guttural stalling sound to show my classmates that I’m thinking. Or maybe someone somewhere in a Québec administrative office has made a syllabus but it hasn’t made it to our teacher yet. We’ve been talking about work. 

          —I know it’s a bit flat as a subject, our teacher says as she passes out a list of questions. We are supposed to ask each other these, as if in interview (to which we aspire, of course, an interview, an avenue to work in this province in this language, breathy and blissed, ceaseless, like this). 

          Grace and I glance at each other, and she writes her name with her left hand at the top of the page. 

          Often we use this initial discussion to catch up, we talk about our days and our boys. We both went through a break-up before the session started. This and the precarity of taking a government-organized language course have brought us together—she is my person now, but I haven’t told her. When there are others in our group we have to play along.

          —How would you describe your style of working in a team, Grace asks me and Patrick. Patrick is British but we didn’t know this until two months in when we spoke about formal registers and he broke to say Yorkshire in a puffy English accent, I swear Grace and I near jumped straight out of our seats, I would have told you he was from Alberta or something. He’s a level above, but for reasons unclear the adult education center has put our two levels together with our one teacher who had been running between the classrooms all frazzled-like, but now in May the attendance has cut off steeply and she keeps us in the same room and it works out okay. 

          —I think I am a bit timide, Patrick says, but in the workplace I try to communicate well and ask questions. 

          —I find that I can be shy but it is important to keep people… to inform my colleagues of the place of the project, I say. 

          Where do I get these ideas? I am a year out of university, looking for a job. The project I have currently is perfecting my lemon bar recipe, and keeping my colleagues (roommates) apprised of when to leave their rooms to come try it when the curd on top has set in a crisp yet receptive way. I’ve lived in this province five years. I trip up at the pharmacist.

          In response Grace opens her phrases, lets them sprint.

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          The next day at pause, Grace tells me she’s skipping tomorrow to clean the whole house because her crush is coming to sleep over. Her crush is her ex-boyfriend. We used to spend each pause rushing to the depanneur and on the walk she’d tell me how she hated him. He told her he couldn’t see the world without her and then he said he was seeing a new girl and he never wanted to see her again. This all happened before class started in February. I just saw the aftermath, but now she’s missing class to prepare to sleep with him and I’ll only hear about it a whole weekend later. It’ll have to be in French because when Grace and I speak English the professor comes up to us and we switch to French or at least try, and it involves me doing a little circle with my mouth to make a confused noise that to me sounds Parisian, but to my professor probably sounds like grief. Grace: she’ll miss class and come back and we’ll probably still be learning the conditional. 

          —That’s okay, I say to her. We stopped walking to the depanneur when it started to get warm. Now we sit on the hill behind the building and watch the soccer practice and the parents. 

          —I haven’t seen him in so long, she says.

          —I know, I say. I haven’t seen him since December either. 

          Mine is different from hers. A child scores a goal by sliding through the mud.

          The girl that sits behind us is from Ukraine, and she says her French Rs all ridged, like a blackberry. When we come back from break Grace and I notice she has many fruits: sliced apple, orange, pear. She eats them quickly. We start a new exercise, and Grace and I are a pair, but we have an odd number of people so she joins us too. Everything she says is hard to understand. I feel bad for her and then bad for feeling bad and mad at Grace for raising her head when our teacher asked who wanted to work in threes. 

          Grace breathes loudly when she writes. It is an unbeautiful noise. It irritates me. I feel a pulse of relief that she won’t be here tomorrow.

          When our conversation partner speaks her head is lowered, like prayer, but I try to find her eyes, because they’re well-shaped and clear. We are the same age, twenty-two. A few weeks ago she said she’s married and I felt jealous. She said he’s in French classes too. I saw them together in the lobby, taking a selfie in front of an Easter archway made out of paper. I didn’t feel jealous anymore: seeing them felt like how it feels to enter an apartment when all the lights are off.

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          When I have Grace’s seat open next to me the Silver Fox takes it. Grace and I have named him new due to his fluffy hair. Last week she left early to get groceries and the Silver Fox came at pause and took her chair like it was still warm just for him. At the end of class, when we passed around the attendance sheet, I wrote mine and Grace’s name in precise cursive and slid it to him. 

          —I’m sure I’m not the first, he said, to tell you that’s a beautiful name. 

          His finger was pointing at Grace’s. She has a really nice one. A hyphen and everything: it unfurls. I smiled with no teeth.

          —That’s not me, that’s my friend, I said. She had to leave early. 

          He had started shaking his head the minute I negated the sentence. 

          —Say no more, say no more, he said. He was the first person out of the classroom. When I told her what he said about her name, she said he seemed like the type of person to have caught alleys (allegations). This made us bounce into each other, our shoulders and our laughs. 

          Today, each time I speak, the Silver Fox cocks his head towards me and puts his hand to his ear dramatically, the way you’d hold a shell that rings of ocean. We do a drill where we have to say with what frequency we do something, and replace a part of the sentence with a smaller something else. There is no bliss in this whittling. We get to talking. We’ve been talking: what I mean is we feel less shame when we deviate. We went to the same university, thirty years apart. His eyes are blue, tight when he speaks. His son rock climbs, like me.

          —The culture here is better, he says. In Québec. Francophones have more with which to identify. 

          He’s from Toronto. He’s on sabbatical. Before he taught economics at the university.

          —Montréal culture is better because it’s cheap, I say. I really say that, I don’t know any other way. Or actually I say: The culture here is better because it’s not expensive. They say that, you know, the French, they don’t say what something is, they say what it isn’t. I have been trying to do this too. What is culture anyway? A word too big, the perfect size for language class. 

          After pause we speak again of work. Who would employ these fools in such a great province? With this grasp on the language? Unfortunately we can’t wait until we know French intimately, we need to work now. I wonder in whose t-shirts my classmates sleep. Once I lent my friend a t-shirt at the park and he returned it washed the next day. I slept in it that night because I wanted to sleep with him. But the other day I borrowed a shirt from him and there was too much fabric, it’s no longer winter, it’s May, and the scent made me retch. I want to sleep with my ex-boyfriend like Grace. I want to show him all my new sounds.

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          On the weekend time slumps forward. With no class I think very fast about nothing in particular, and mutter little lyric secrets to myself: je suis venue te dire que je m’en vais (Serge Gainsbourg) or it’s wonderful, it’s wonderful, it’s wonderful, good luck my baby (Paolo Conte). I think about people I could say these things to. I go to the cinema. I like the fifteen minutes after leaving the theatre because all sounds sound like they’re supposed to. It reminds me of my walk home from French class: thirteen minutes down Bernard street, and even when the ground is dry, leaving the building is like going out after it’s rained, like taking a breath on the street outside the cinema, everything soaked in newness, fresh with a feeling I can’t name. 

          I go to thrift stores and flip through novels. I read the dictionaries like news. There’s a French workbook from decades ago about holidays. I slip it in my pocket. 

          —Want to practice? I turn and it’s the Silver Fox across the low bookshelf. He’s hunched like you do to reach a baby’s hand. 

          —Just browsing, I say, I don’t know if he saw me steal, from a thrift store no less.

          His body moves diagonally and I see at his hip is his hand, grasping a leash, and at the end of the leash is the most normal dog I’ve ever seen, like “dog” in the dictionary. Fluffy, ears, mid-size. This fits him, I think. The dog moves quickly. 

          —Fleur, he says. 

          He would, that name.

          —I think she’s ready to go, he says. Are you coming?

          I don’t owe him: I follow him anyway.

          We walk in silence down Bernard. I look down and then I look up, and sometimes to the cars rushing past. It’s a Sunday. I thank God when he gets a call. He passes me the leash and Fleur and I are attached limb to limb. She doesn’t pull much at all.

          —Later? he says into the phone. I thought we said tomorrow. Guests? Fine, fine. 

          —I’m with a colleague about to practice French, he says. News to me. Or: my steps in line with his. His normal dog in my normal hand. 

          He sighs. The dog approaches the street; I nudge her away.

          —I’m sorry about that. He takes back the leash and our hands touch briefly, weirdly. 

          —It’s okay, I say, not seeing any other syllables that would fit here. Are you worried about the exam?

          Some places of work require the test. That you pass, I mean, to keep your job. But in Ontario the Silver Fox has tenure.

          —No, he says. His eyes are bright again, slightly narrowed. I’m right around the corner, would you like to come for tea?

          I smile with no teeth but my eyes get smaller with the smile too.

          His apartment is on the top floor across from Cafe Souvenir. We enter into a room with an upright piano and a round table by a big window overlooking the street. When he takes off his sensible flat sneakers his jeans are tapered, and the fabric probably has stretch. His button-down is untucked in the professor way. But he has expressive, jovial eyebrows. He sets the leash on a crate by the door. Fleur runs into a dark room.

          —You sit down and start thinking of words, he says. We’ll do green tea.

          On the round wooden table are piles: Proust in the original with a bookmark near the front, worksheets on discours indirect, a few volumes of Kundera. New Yorker magazines folded open to their fiction. There’s a photo of him with his arm around a woman in a big sunhat half-visible under a sheet and I keep her face covered. I can hear him fiddling around with an electric kettle. I wonder if he uses loose-leaf or bags.

          I haven’t taken off my jacket, so when I lean forward the holiday workbook in my pocket pokes into my appendix. On its cover, a woman beaming, permed hair, denim jacket adorned with all manner of pins: hearts, stars, sparklers, trees, Canadian flag, Québecois flag, even American flag. In the Christmas section we learn: gift, thank you, angel. The exercise under the Valentine’s day section is a translation that I begin to puzzle out. 

          —Anything good in there, Silver Fox asks. 

          He sets a mug in front of me and takes the chair right to my left, even though there are several around the table, many far away. 

          —Not sure, I say. Just some translation stuff.

          He leans in. Hit me, he says.

          I shrug. The sentences would be awkward to translate from English, kind of colloquial. Certain among them wouldn’t work in another language. You mean berry much to me. Thank you for being mine. Let us go then, you and I. I search for one that couldn’t be misinterpreted when I say it to him straight.

          —It’s easy to love a woman like you, I say. 

          He translates slowly, pausing in the middle. 

          —Let me give you one, he says. He splits the workbook with his palm. Dedicated to everyone who’s ever loved me, he says, even a little bit. 

          He’s leaning toward me. Our heads are still. Out the window I see people walking, children in backpacks and children on shoulders. I’m not far from my home here, a few blocks, from class too. He shifts to peer up at me from below. 

          —I don’t know where to start.

          —To dedicate, he says. He unearths a dictionary from the stack. Or with everyone that’s ever loved you. 

          Voice like bad milk, if colour became sound. I take a sip of green tea. I’m not so old. Prepositions become a list of everyone who has ever paid me kindness. The water is too hot. It hurts me. Grace: how fortunate I was, that her breathing was so close to me for so long that it threaded through my skin. 

          For everyone that’s ever loved me, I repeat, even a little bit.

          Silver Fox raises his pointer finger to his ear like he did in class.

          —Very good, he says. I like this book. These could be useful. 

          He’s begun to flick his eyes at me too intently. Maybe he has been given everything in the world and now wants me too. I imagine it: a string of lips around the wrist, trying not to pull away. Like being spoken to at the bus stop in grade school when I had nowhere else to go: I would, a strange man said, if you didn’t remind me of my daughter. I wish someone was here with me, to ask something of these men, their careers, to laugh at the elision of their sudden attention, so I wouldn’t have to do anything but watch their mouths move. It’s so easy to turn to men when they’re speaking to you. Even if what they’re saying is the stupidest thing in the world. 

          —You can have it, I say. I should go now but I’ll see you in class. 

          —Grace, he says. It’s been a pleasure as always.

          You know, sometimes the only thing you can do is laugh. 

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          The next day of course we are talking about work, but Grace and I immediately deviate. While the professor hands out conversation questions, I ask, how was it? with my eyebrows and a wide sweep of my head, huge eyes. She smiles. She’s glowing. Our professor glides right past us. 

          —We got back together, she says. Or actually she says: We are together again and I am so happy.

          My mouth makes an O, a brief sound that floats like a dry leaf. I can’t tell her about the Silver Fox. He is absent, and she is woven with joy. I gather that learning French and being torn up about a boy are mutually-exclusive forms, despite both peaking in winter after the sun goes down. In spring you can love many things at once: misery, though, requires your whole brain. For Grace, and me too. Thinking about sex or the words I’d tell him, new ones that fit in the mouth all funny, feels impractical. What is practical is learning a language. It rewrites us night after night. 

          Our professor comes back and waits for us, so we glance at the questions and at Patrick, better at French, waiting patiently. 

          —We can start, I say.

          —Do you think you work better alone or with team members, Patrick reads.

          —In a team, without doubt, Grace says. I hate being alone. 

          —Yes, I say. That I detest. 

          I want to say: loneliness feels thin, like hunger, or the music made by flutes. But I don’t know the word for flute, so I consider saying, an instrument like this, and doing the motion with my hands, up and open in the air like something could fall for me to hold. But instead I repeat myself and turn to Grace with hopeful eyes, and she nods and we both turn to Patrick, because describing the world is easier than finding a place in it, except in French class, where we sit in silence or phrase to phrase. Here I think of harmony: or how it happened that all my sentences have begun to go by the same name.

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