1664

We've found a pizza place the next village over; you drive back behind the Mairie and the local Michelin one-star restaurant, past the memorial to the war dead, and it's tucked in next to a real estate office. Two rooms, one of them with the kitchen opening into it--and it's not some LA open-kitchen MBA-designed see-the-chef-set-things-on-fire kind of place, it's a place with a large hole in the wall between the kitchen and the dining room because it gets hot in the kitchen and the cuisinier wants some air.

It's called L'Éléphant for reasons that remain mysterious, except that there are three or four elephant figurines lined up on top of the wine refrigerator and the menu stand. It seems equally likely that the restaurant is called The Elephant because the owner had some elephant figurines that he had gotten from a great-aunt and his wife didn't want them cluttering up the family room anymore, so she killed two birds with one stone--naming the restaurant and clearing off a shelf--or that the owner took a dare: the most ridiculous name for a pizzeria that his boules buddies could come up with. And then, once the sign was painted, they started giving him elephants. In any event, there's no elephant on the menu; nor are there any dishes that seem to have originated in places with elephants as long as you don't count the National Zoo and the pizza stand opposite the Elephant Pavilion.

These are the kinds of conversations that C and I have when we are waiting for our pizzas to come. We always sit at the same table, which we suspect is designated as the foreigners table, in the corner just across from the kitchen. From there we have a good view of the front door and can watch the extended families coming in to get their Friday night marguerites and reines and quatre saisons. We can see the owner, too, busy at the oven, and we can speculate as to whether the lone waitress is related to him by blood or marriage or neither. It doesn't matter; they both seem to know everyone who comes in, even, after a visit or two, us.

Last time we were there C decided to depart from our usual quarter carafe of vin rouge (I know; we really should cut back) and order a beer. There were two choices on the menu: Heineken, in a bottle, and Kronenbourg 1664, on tap. He chose the latter. Ordinarily, that would be the end of this story. He would have placed his order, had a beer, and we would have gone on with our evening. But not so in la belle France.

As with so many things in France, sometimes a thing is known by the word on the label and sometimes it's known by another word entirely. Take--for instance--the Kronenbourg 1664. Sometimes it's listed on menus as Kronenbourg; sometimes, as 1664; sometimes, both. Are they always the same beer? Probably. Without some serious study, though, it's difficult to say. It matters because, having decided to order one, C had to figure out how to identify it, what name to call it.

My endorsement was early and strong: order a Kronenbourg, never mind about the date. C had higher ambitions, though. He wanted to order it by the date: mille six cent soixante-quatre, one thousand six hundred sixty-four. We practiced it til the waitress came. Mille six cent soixante-quatre. Mille six cent soixante-quatre. Try saying it fast, and casually. I'll have a mille six cent soixante-quatre. You can try it in English if you want to: oh, yeah, and I'll have a one thousand six hundred sixty-four, frosted mug if you've got one. It's difficult to sound nonchalant.

He had gotten it down pretty well when the waitress finished giving the bises to the newest clients and came over to take our order. I ordered my usual reine--ham, mushrooms, olives, cheese--and a glass of house red. C ordered his quatre saisons--artichokes, mushrooms, olives, peppers, and, of course, ham--and then he said: Je voudrais une bière, un mille six cent soixante-quatre. He acquited himself of it pretty well, I thought, especially the bit around the x.

The waitress glanced at him over her pad. Excusez-moi? The way she said it was the French equivalent of, Come again?

He smiled a little sheepishly. Un mille six cent soixante-quatre? This time he ended on an up note, and I could see him thinking that maybe just saying Kronenbourg would have been easier.

She looked at him for a long moment, pencil poised a centimeter over the paper. We both had time to wonder if C had just reminded her of her first husband, the biker dude who left her broke and pregnant, or if he had just accidentally told her that he was an agent of the revenue service and would be needing to see the books. Then her eyes cleared as light dawned.

Ahh! she said. Un seize soixante-quatre, a sixteen sixty-four!

We all laughed--foreigners, they are so funny when they are speaking themselves the French, non?--and off she went. She brought the beer back a couple of minutes later and set it down with a flourish in front of C. Voilà, un seize soixante-quatre, monsieur, and she gave us another smile.

Now we know what it's called, and even I, who am not a big fan of beer, order it sometimes. Pour moi, un seize soixante-quatre, s'il vous plaît, and every time I do, I expect to catch sight of myself in the mirror and see someone impossibly chic and confident, maybe Coco Chanel, looking back.

Blackberries

The wild blackberries are ripening now. It's that moment when summer is at the very peak of its peak, and in another breath, with one more breeze, it will begin to coast downhill, away from the heat and the cicadas and the long twilights. Our last guests have gone home. We don't expect anyone else until the end of October, which is--shh--a record for us here. It will be the longest time we've been alone, the four of us and the dogs, in this house.

The girls and I took down the kitchen calendar and counted up all our visitors. It's a 16-month calendar that began last September, so that's when we started our count. I had noted, as I do, the comings and goings of everyone to be sure to have supper cooked and clean sheets on the beds and a plan, or at least a vision, and we used my notations to count up. The total: 157 days of houseguests out of the last 365. We were impressed. It had felt like a lot of company, but we didn't know that it had been quite that much. Almost every other day, if you spread it out. That's a lot of laundry, a lot of meals. But also a lot of conversations and walks.

We're not used to visits like this. In our other life we had quick dinners or weekend visits which had nothing like the intensity of an extended house party. When people come to visit us here, they're not just coming to visit us: they're coming to France. This is a trip overseas, a trip generally long- and carefully-planned, costly, involving the purchase of guidebooks. We are hosting them not just in our family but in this country, showing them our lives here and showing them the place itself. And we need to do that at the same time as the girls are doing their schoolwork and Olivier is replacing roof tiles and we're running out of flour mid-recipe. It's a delicate balance to strike: the local mill for A.O.C. olive oil and the local chain supermarket for Special K.

The only model in my experience for this sort of visiting is the visiting that went on among Jane Austen's characters. Elizabeth Bennet and Elinor Dashwood went on journeys that took several days of hard travel, with bad food and missed carriages, and then stayed with friends for several weeks, seeing the local sights, yes, but also sitting around doing the mending. They did not pop in for a night. They came to stay. This kind of visiting means a slower rhythm, one in which every quarter hour is not accounted for in advance, in which an afternoon can wind away in reading or a long walk instead of in a tight series of appointments and obligations.

Elizabeth and Elinor went all that way and stayed all that long because, in a world without email or commuter flights, that was the only way to keep up with their friends and relations. If someone moved a hundred miles away, in those pre-autoroute days, they were gone for good unless you went to visit. Now we've moved an ocean away and we find ourselves in the same situation: an overnight visit is not an option. The only way to keep up, to be together, is to come to stay.

And so the wild blackberries are ripe. They are all around, like the wild asparagus was a few months ago, except there's more of them, and they're easier to spot. The first day or two I took a colander up the lane with me and picked enough to bring home. But ten minutes off the vine they don't taste as sweet. Now I've stopped taking a colander. We go and stand and graze, picking the ones that look likely in one spot and eating them, right there, until we go on a few steps and pick a few more. There are several vines in our own hedge--just next to the fosse septique, I'm afraid--and those berries are especially full and large and sweet. Our dog Wendy is perpetually eating whatever she finds on our walks, and now she and I stand and munch together, although she's not terribly interested, herself, in blackberries.

Over the weekend, guests came with their toddler. We took him up the lane, and he went up on his father's shoulders for safe-keeping. I picked berries and handed them up until his cheeks and fingers were purple and it was time for lunch. It's a slower way of being in the world, standing by the blackberries and sampling. It's not about accomplishing anything, or putting anything by for later. Just about right now, in the dappled shade, tasting summer, together.

Paris je t'aime

We are just back from celebrating G and E's 13th birthday with L and her family in Paris. The girls' birthday wish was to take a bâteau mouche down the Seine to finish off their birthday night, so after cake and kir royale (and fizzie apple cider for the girls), we walked down to the Trocadero and crossed the bridge to the foot of the Eiffel Tower.

There are all sorts of boats that make the tourist trip up and down the Seine: covered ones that offer dinner and dancing; uncovered ones that shine their own colorful lights up at the monuments. The boat that we always take is the plainest: no dinner and dancing or lights, just some recorded commentary. The commentary is faintly ridiculous--the English sounds as if it was translated directly, maybe with a free Internet translator, from the French, and the French sounds as if it was translated directly back from the English. The sentences dangle. But it doesn't matter. As the boat pulls away from the dock on the hour, the lights come on on the Eiffel Tower, and it starts to shimmer and twinkle. This summer, it's lit in blue, to honor the French presidency of the European Union. And the tower is huge: an obvious thing to say, I know, but you see a thing so often, you forget what it really looks like, and it becomes just an image on a postcard or a tshirt. When you see the tower up close, though, it's astonishing. Huge and gangly and absurd, and graceful and beautiful and touching. And, every hour on the hour, sparkling.

The girls and C sat on the bench behind L and my mother and me. It was C's first trip down the Seine, and from up front we heard them talking and laughing and pointing things out. The girls kept leaning up and touching my shoulder, asking questions, pointing things out, wanting me to settle bets. The three of us on our bench were quiet. We watched the monuments float by us: the Musée d'Orsay, the Louvre, the Institut; Henry IV on his horse, the Conciergerie, Notre Dame. And then back: Samaritaine, Châtelet, more Louvre, the Tuileries, the fairy lights in the trees just before the Pont d'Alma.

It's one of the most touristy things to do in Paris, take a cruise on the Seine. But it doesn't feel cheap and tacky and like someone's just trying to make a euro. It feels like a privilege. Here we are, living through times that, even to my historian's long-term eye, look pretty damn dark; and here we were, on the birthday night, looking down the barrel of the girls' adolescence and our own--dare I say it?--inevitable middle age, and getting ready, too, to say goodbye to L's magical time in Paris, as she and her family go back to America at the end of the month. And yet building after beautiful building scrolls by, each one perfectly proportioned, each one, despite and even because of the foolishness of the people who built it and lived in it and around it--each one so perfectly situated, so perfectly at home. It feels as though Paris was ordained to look like that, like at the beginning of time, right after figuring out DNA and moon pies, God said, and then let's have a city on a river, with boulevards and quais and one, no, make that two, islands in the center, and we'll call it Paris.

It's reassuring, that beauty, that solidity. It makes me think that, despite all the evidence to the contrary, beauty and truth and balance and proportion matter, and that maybe, just maybe, they last longer than all the other stuff. Even the Eiffel Tower--it's ridiculous, useless. But there it is, a testimony to our ability to create whimsy when we want to, a witness to our ability to create beauty. And if that were not enough, it twinkles: earth hath not anything to show more fair.

Every time I leave Paris, I like to think about how it goes on without me. Driving out of the city in a taxi when the girls were smaller, taking them home after their first trip to the city, I watched the shopkeepers raising their shutters, the market vendors setting out their cabbages, and I thought, this will happen the same way tomorrow, and the next day, and every day after that (except, of course, in August, when everyone goes on vacation), until I come back. On the birthday night we didn't talk much on our bench, we just watched as Paris went by. I was feeling a little melancholy, with all the changes of birthdays and departures in the air. But as we sat there listening to the laughter behind us I began to feel grateful instead, gliding through this wondrous lit-up city with people I love. I wondered how I managed to be set down in this life. And I knew, then, as much as you can ever know these things, that the city would be there waiting when we made it back.

As the boat returned to its mooring, a dinner cruise drew alongside. In a glass-enclosed room, couples leaned together over round tables, sipping champagne in tall flutes and gazing out at us. We gazed back. There was a small deck at the end of the boat, and a young couple was standing on it--actually, she was sitting; he was standing. As they drew alongside us, the young man threw out his arms and called, in an accent that made it clear English was not his first language, I love you Paris! He didn't pronounce the 's', so it was Pareee, and the vowel echoed across the water.

Our boat docked and we lined up to get off, and then walked back across the bridge. The tower began twinkling again, and we could see its lights reflected in all the windows of the boulevards as we walked home.

Hungry Heart

We've been loyal customers of the concrete block pizza hut at the rond-point since last summer. It really is built of concrete blocks, and it sits in the middle of the parking lot. You pass it if you're on your way to the service station and the car wash, or if you're stopping to add air to your tires. It's painted a faded yellow, with a open counter, covered by a shutter during the day, on one of the long sides, a door on one of the short sides, and a wood-burning oven on the other. The preparation area takes up the back wall. It's the size of a large SUV, no more. Across the top is a neon sign: Pizza Pierre, it says, in wavy letters that suggest heat, and with two tiny flashing pizzas to dot the i's.

The neon comes on every evening around 5, and the shutter over the counter goes up. Smoke has already been rising out of the chimney for an hour or so. Bar stools appear, a bottle of rosé or two sits beside the takeaway menus on the counter. Usually there's an old man who sits and nurses a beer, his own brought from home or bought there I'm never sure; there's no beer on the menu. Nor does he ever seem to be ordering or picking up a pizza. He's just there.

The pizzas are standard local fare: about 12 inches around, very thin crusts, toppings ranging from green peppers to smoked salmon but mostly cheese and tomato sauce and olives and--remember we're in France--ham. They're pretty good. Especially if you've not had the habit of cooking every single night of the week, or if it's Sunday evening and you realize you forgot to get provisions at the store before it closed Saturday afternoon.

We took L to Pizza Pierre when she visited in September. We ordered the pizzas when we got there, so we stood in the parking lot and waited for a little while while Pierre made them. At one end of the lot, Pizza Pierre's teenage son folded pizza boxes out of the back of his open Peugeot 105. His friends kept stopping by on their motocyclettes, their girlfriends sitting on the back wearing cheap stilettos and too much eyeliner. The old man was at the counter, as usual. A woman came up with her two children and ordered. The kids were young--6 and 8ish--and tow-headed and skinny. She could have been 25 or 45: running to heavyset, dyed hair, poured into her office clothes. She smoked a cigarette while they all waited and tapped out her ashes about an inch from her daughter's scalp. Over by the car wash, a woman got out of her minivan and stepped up on the chassis to brush leaves off the top of the car. She was wearing zebra-striped pants, a tight red tank top, and 4-inch cork-soled sandals.

L and I took all this in, and then took our pizzas home. In the car she turned to me and said: I think everyone in southern France who could be a character in a Bruce Springsteen song was in that parking lot. It was all there: adolescent longing on the motos, midlife struggle in the face of the mother, a determination not to give in to the odds. We laughed about her observation and it stuck.

A few weeks after that, Pierre went away--on vacation, we figured, to recover from the summer crowds--and Madame his wife took over. Pierre was a runner, with the elastic tanned compact build of a marathoner. He was always friendly; one time he gave C a bottle of the hut rosé (drinkable only with a view of the Mediterranean). Madame was also small and wiry, but pale where Monsieur was tan. She doled out smiles carefully and rarely. Pierre was gone for a couple of weeks, and then a couple of weeks more, and then just gone. I was pleased to think of telling C and L that it appeared that Pierre "had gone out for a ride and never come back," like in the Springsteen song. Then we didn't think about it any more.

Until yesterday. The quilting ladies came, and between talking of which stand we bought peaches and lettuce from, talk turned to Pizza Pierre. I wondered idly what had ever happened to Pierre. Martha, our English neighbor two blind curves up the lane, knew the story, as she seems to know most stories in our village.

First, Pierre wasn't Pierre. The original Pizza Pierre was a postman who retired on disability and opened first a pizza shack and then, when the euros began rolling in, a pizza hut. Then he retired again, for good, and the man whom we had thought of as Pierre bought the business. He had been trained as a restauranteur, and, before coming to our rond-point, had worked in large hotels on the coast. He and his wife ran the hut together for several years and did a pretty good business. Then things went south between them, and he left. Martha said she'd seen him working in one of the restaurants in the place in the next village, but now she's heard he's back down on the coast, working in one of the seaside bars.

Meanwhile, his wife stayed on, and she's the new Pizza Pierre. She's bought a potted palm that she rolls out every evening beside the bar stools. The words to the song about heartache and hard work are just about there already; if I knew a few guitar chords, I could maybe have a hit. We travel, as much as we ever do, within the context we have. And while I can't look out our windows and see a white boat off the coast of Antibes without thinking about Auden's expensive delicate ship sailing calmly on, I won't, either, order pizzas from the hut again without hearing a little Bruce Springsteen.

Cross-pollination

Olivier was here the other day, advising about this and that and fixing things. The girls and I were awash in apricots and plums--bins, litres, gallons, pounds of each (about which more later)--and I was trying to figure out how to make jam in French and in France . Olivier's visit was really about the (still open) trench at the bottom of the garden, and the ground water that has collected or seeped or wandered into it, but while he was here, and since he is the source of most of my reliable information about the mechanics of daily life, I asked him about the jam.

Comment fait-on de la confiture en France? I asked.

He tilted his head and looked quizzically at me. Comment fait-on de la confiture aus Etats-Unis? he replied.

I explained about cooking the fruit, adding sugar, boiling it, and putting it in sterilized jars. He nodded his head at each step, following my pantomimes. And then you take the jars, screw on the lids, and turn them over to seal, yes? he said.

Exactly, it's the same process, we do it the same way. But where do I find the jars?

He shrugged. Clearly he was not the person in his family who bought the jars; he was just around for the cooking. At the supermarket? was all he had to offer.

I nodded: I had been to the supermarket, and there were no jars--but there are other supermarkets, and I envisioned passing my afternoon in making a tour of them. Still, I was ahead of where I had started out, so I thanked him, and he turned to go.

Then he remembered something he had wanted to tell me, and turned back.

Speaking of Violette, he said, although we hadn't actually been.

Oui? I said.

Je pense qu'en anglais, on l'appellerait une redneck. I think that in English, she would be called a redneck. Roll the r, give the d a nice strong echo, and come down hard on the k and you'll just about have it.

I laughed, taken aback at this sudden influx of colloquial English. Bien sûr, I said, that's exactly right.

Olivier laughed, pleased with himself. Mon fils--Olivier's son spent a few years studying in Florida--told me that I should tell you that word for Violette, and that it would make you laugh.

Tell him he was right, and thank him for me. Violette--lifting the dead sanglier into the trunk of her car, wearing her rabbit-fur trimmed jean jacket, and speaking without opening her mouth--could, as L pointed out, be dropped straight into the middle of a Flannery O'Connor story and, without a whole lot of linguistic difficulties, be crochetting pastel Barbie-doll dress toilet paper covers in about six months.

Olivier shook my hand to say goodbye, picked up his tools, and went back up the hill.

Market day

Yesterday morning we took our current guests to the market to collect picnic supplies. Melons from the organic farmer down the road; tomatoes, salad, and peaches from the reserved but cheerful woman next to the rotisserie chicken truck; mushrooms from the shy mushroom man; eggs from the egg lady. She's missed the last two weeks at the market--her eggs have been there, sold by someone else, a younger brother maybe, or a cousin--but she was busy having a baby. Yesterday she was back, with the baby snuggled deep in a sling across her shoulders.

I wanted to buy some cheese for our picnic, and we walked down to the far end of the market to find my cheese man. He lives in the Var, an hour or two away, and does the market circuit--our village market Mondays, Valbonne Friday, I imagine others in between. He always has a few words for me--he meets almost all our guests, makes recommendations about where to take them, tells me about his favorite beaches. We compare notes on life here versus life in the States: we agree that, in general, it's awfully nice here. We both have high hopes for the election this fall. I look forward to buying my crottin de chêvre each week. He's kind about my French, eager to laugh, gracious, kind. This winter, when I brought three different guests on three successive Mondays, he shook his head and said to me: "C'est un hôtel chez vous. You're running a hotel at your house."

But Monday he was not there, so we got in line at the other cheese man's stall. I don't like the other cheese man. Occasionally when I've had to buy from him in the past, he has spoken English to me. Now, my French may not run to long wine-infused dinner parties, but I can buy cheese, and it offends my pride to get English back when I offer French. He also sells all sorts of charcuterie--sausages, hams--and varieties of bread--olive, fig, walnut. He jokes loudly with customers, and calls out to people as they pass his stall, drumming up more business.

C, along with me because it was Bastille Day, pointed out that cheese from the market, even cheese from the wrong cheese man, was still good cheese. And a lot of other people agreed: I waited at least ten minutes. At the market, there's rarely a line in the American sense of the term, everyone neatly, tidily lined up one behind the other, no breaking, please. It's more of a free for all that relies heavily on eye contact and small nods. I made the eye contact after a few minutes, and still it took a while before my turn arrived.

While I waited, a svelte and bleached blonde grandmother arrived beside me, market basket bulging on one side, granddaughter on the other. The granddaughter reached just below my waist, waiflike, with limp ponytails and hot pink plastic-rimmed eyeglasses. La petite was fascinated by the flies on the cheese and sausages, and began commenting on their numbers in her lovely high child's voice. "Mémé, regarde les mouches sur le fromage! Granny, look at the flies on the cheese!" The fromager heard her and reassured her: "C'est normale, c'est normale, les mouches, n'inquiète pas.'' The little girl was mollified for a moment, and then, when the next customer was up, she said: "Il y a des mouches sur le saucisson! Mémé, regarde! There are flies on the sausage, Granny, look!"

I could tell that my turn was about to come up--it's a sixth sense you develop--and I was figuring out which kind of tomme to buy (cow's milk, goat's milk, or sheep's milk--I always end up just choosing randomly). The fromager handed the little girl a tiny, finger-sized sausage to eat, no doubt to silence her observations. He turned to me: deux crottins de chêvre and un morceau de ce tomme-là. Turned out it was brébis and expensive; also very good. As I handed over the money and took the cheese, I felt something touch my derrière and turned, startled, to see what it was.

La petite looked up at me, saucisson in one hand while she brushed at my dress with the other. "Madame," she said, ''il y a une mouche sur votre fesse. Madame, there's a fly on your butt."

I'm fairly certain that her grandmother's turn came next.

At the Préfecture

It was time this week to renew our annual long-term stay permits, our cartes de séjour. Getting hold of one of these cards is not that easy--it's not designed to be easy--and so C's company, which sponsors us here, employs someone to manage the process. Madame Tie is short and solid and, for a Frenchwoman, stout--a lot out in front and a fair amount out in back. She bustles. I can't decide whether she is more like the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria in full sail or a high Victorian grande dame whose corsetry you can hear creaking from the next room: suffice it to say that Madame Tie is a Presence.

Here is what you need to bring with you to the Préfecture, the administrative office of the département, in order to secure a carte de séjour:

• three copies of your passport;
• three copies of a letter stating that you are gainfully and legally employed in France, and likely to remain so;
• three copies of your bank statements for the past six months;
• three copies of your latest paycheck stub;
• three copies of a document attesting to your having health insurance;
• three copies of an electric bill that lists you as the resident and bill-payer at the address to which it was sent;
• three copies of your marriage certificate, translated into French;
• three copies of your birth certificate, likewise;
• three identity photographs.

We had all that, thanks to Madame Tie. In fact, we've actually been here long enough, now, that we just have copies of all those bits of paper lying around. I can prove at the drop of a hat that I was born, got married, and have a bank account; we even have copies of all of those papers for the girls, too--not the bank account or the marriage license, of course, but the birth certificates and the passports.

The office that handles requests for cartes de séjour opens promptly at 9:00 a.m. We arrived, marshalled by Madame, at 8:52. Upwards of 100 people waited outside the locked doors. Madame Tie took us in by another set of doors, past two security guards who nodded, almost smiled, and wished her a good day. Thence into a large and grimy lobby--with Madame kissing or shaking hands with every fonctionnaire we passed, addressing them all with the familiar tu instead of the more formal vous--and to the far side of the lobby, where the beginning of a low-ceilinged, narrow corridor was marked with a painted yellow line on the floor. We stopped at the line. Down the hall we could see signs for each of the administrative departments: permis de conduire, driver's licenses; cartes grise, vehicle registration; étrangers, foreigners. That was ours.

When the hands on the clock in the lobby clicked over to 8:59, Madame stepped over the yellow line and briskly down the corridor. We turned in at Etrangers--a smaller grimy lobby, with stanchions set up to manage the people waiting--and went straight to the desk. Madame perfunctorily took the numbers that the fonctionnaire handed her, asked after his new baby, and directed us to sit down in the foremost row of chairs. She took our file and proceeded to the first window. Blowing some good morning kisses to the woman sitting behind the window, computer screen and stapler at the ready, Madame sat down and drew out the papers.

A minute or two later she beckoned me to come and sit down beside her. I watched as she put our papers in order, all the while chatting with the lady behind the window about children, families, the new office design, the heat. They passed papers back and forth through the slot at the bottom of the window; Madame Tie wrote my name on a form, with my address and a line of text underneath, and handed it to me to sign.

When C and I were married, I did not take his name. I went from Mademoiselle Marron to Madame Marron, but, for a whole host of reasons with which I could fill a college Women's Studies seminar, I chose not to be known as Madame C. I explained that once or twice here in France. When I told our family doctor as he entered me in his list of patients, he nodded. Of course you may call yourself anything you like--it sounds less brusque in French--but here we file everything under the family name. When we told Jules that my name was different from C's, and that our post box should include it, he asked if we were really married. It was all the same to him, and we could tell him the truth. (I'm still not sure if he believes that we are.)

So, officially, in France, regardless of what my passport says--and it says, simply, Madame Marron--I am known, officially, as Madame Marron, épouse C--and the C trumps the Marron. It hasn't changed here in centuries: I've handled passports, cartes d'identité, ration books made out the same way, the words scratched in quill pen onto vellum. And, maybe for that reason, it doesn't bother me much. Being called Mrs. C in our other life, even when it was in the context of being my daughters' mother, got under my skin like little else. I can let it go here, maybe because C's name sounds better than mine in French, maybe because being the épouse C connects me to all those women whose centuries-old papers I handled.

I signed the paper that Madame Tie gave me and passed it back to her. She nodded and smiled, and switched to English for me. This paper says that you will not work in France, that you are here only with your husband.

Another bit of identity messed with: from independent professional woman using her own name to someone's wife forbidden, because of foreigner employment laws, to work. It's a lot to handle before lunch.

I finished my turn at the guichet and went back to my place next to C. While my back was turned, the room had filled. Dozens of people now filled the rows of fixed metal chairs. Dozens more waited in line. None of them, so far as I could tell, had the help of a Madame Tie. There were no other Americans there that I could spot. A few eastern Europeans, from countries that have not yet been admitted to the European Union, clustered together. Most of the rest were North Africans, the women in headscarves and the men wearing skullcaps. Everyone, grâce à les flourescent lights, looked old and wan and tired. The atmosphere in the room was one of anxiety. Babies cried. Strangers compared notes. People watched for the "now serving" number to change and then rushed to the windows. Do I have to have that? But no one told me. I cannot come back tomorrow. or: When did that become the law? or: He will not sign the paper for me, but it is true, I promise. Or, worse than anything else, silence from the petitioner when the fonctionnaire finds the flaw in the dossier, and shuffling away.

We sat for perhaps half an hour while Madame Tie, the only native Frenchwoman on our side of the glass, conducted our business for us. When I was a child, my mother took me to New York City. Our friends were to meet us at the Port Authority bus terminal--we had taken the bus in from my grandparents' house in New Jersey--and we arrived a little before the appointed time. I stood there, close to my mother, and surveyed the room. It was the mid-seventies, so I can only imagine what the bus terminal denizens looked like. We're the only normal people here, I said to her. And, in the family story, my mother responded: Do you know what that makes us? Not normal.

I thought of that yesterday. C and I were the only people there who looked like people like us. Most of the others looked like they had worked hard to get here. Not like a multi-national company had sent someone to pack up their porcelain on one continent, and unpack it on another. Not like they even owned porcelain. I wondered if we looked as startling to them as they did to us, if we unnerved them as they did us.

Madame Tie ushered us out, back into the main corridor. We walked along in her wake. A woman followed us, walking quickly to catch up with Madame. She was wearing a long flowered pale pink robe and a white headscarf. She put out her hand to touch Madame on the arm. I need someone to help me with my dossier, she said. I will pay you. Will you work for me as well?

Madame shook off her hand and shook her head. The woman tried again. Please, Madame, s'il vous plaît.

Non. Je ne peux pas. I cannot. The woman fell back then, and Madame opened the glass door to the outside. She held it so that C and I could follow.