teacher gave me a puzzled look. “Isn’t that an American song?”
“Yes, but you said native language, and I was raised speaking English.”
Ooohs and ahhs of surprise from the girls.
“Well, it doesn’t really matter,” the teacher sighed. “The main point is that you’re a foreigner.”
“True,” I agreed. “I’m not French.”
More ooohing and ahhing from big-eyed girls. The teacher shushed them again.
I took a deep breath and started the song:
Do, a deer, a female deer,
Re, some stuff about the sun
Mi, a girl who likes to run
Fa, La, Ti, etc.
By the time the second stanza landed back on “Do,” the girls started singing along on cue. The weirdness of the situation hit me between Mi and Fa the second time around. Here I was, a Korean-American graduate student, singing an English song from an American movie set in wartime Salzburg to twenty French six-year-olds and their teacher in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. I felt like a combination of Julie Andrews as Sister Maria, and Bugs Bunny as Maestro Toscanini. By the time we’d built the song up to its big crescendo, we’d become a gleefully possessed chorus. Nothing like a bit of singing to unify the masses! We’d also gathered a little audience of confused tourists struggling to decipher the performance. I would have been very pleased if at least one tourist mistook us for busking musicians, but nobody threw us a few centimes or anything.
When the song finished and we’d caught our breath, the teacher thanked me and briskly checked off her list. Twenty schoolgirls echoed her in chorus, “Merci beaucoup mademoiselle!” and off they scattered, vanishing with alarming swiftness behind the rows of linden trees. A few Germans hung around, waiting to see what would happen next, so I shooed them off in French, announcing, “That’s all, folks!” Then I gave them a big, toothy, American smile, gathered up my things, and skipped down the path.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was casting a spell on myself, singing a song that set out my destiny, starting off with Do, a deer, a female deer and ending with a triumphant Do!
Do what, exactly?
A deer, dummy.
The French schoolgirls knew all the words to the song but not their meaning, and so we understood each other perfectly. One of the perks of speaking a foreign language in a foreign country is that nobody expects to understand you. To the small pink ears of my fluffy new friends, Rogers & Hammerstein’s definitions for the Sounds of Solfeggio were as good as any in a city where wombats jirbled while lunting. (These are actual words, by the way, taken from Jeffrey Kacirk’s nonfiction book, The Word Museum. Jirble: “To pour a drink with an unsteady hand.” Lunting: “Walking while smoking a pipe.” Wombats are crepuscular marsupials with stubby legs. I have been accused of bearing a certain resemblance to them.) Like the schoolgirls, I thought I was on a scavenger hunt, scrounging for items that were terribly important at the time. If I’d been paying attention, I would have realized that the girls were doing the hunting, and the Do they’d found was Mi.
Now, there are millions of deer on the planet, but they’re oddballs in the city. Do deer like shopping? Will they stay for lunch? No, they flee into the nearest woods, until they find something they can eat. That is how, by going around and around in circles and running a very long way, I ended up in a totally different place from where I started, because where things began, and where they ended, were both in Paris. One Paris was in France. The other was in Maine.
It would have been a more efficient use of my time on earth if I’d just figured it out right then, headed back to my home state, and started hunting for deer instead of singing show tunes about them to schoolgirls bestowing buttery kisses on my cheeks. But there is one thing that I’d learned from cooking my own meals: you can’t rush the process or the dish will get burned. So I carried on in the archives, dutifully conducting research and feeding my curiosity, the only appetite I could indulge freely without worrying about emergency trips to the bathroom.
A famous nineteenth-century novel by Emile Zola, Au Bonheur des Dames, tells the story of a provincial girl who comes to Paris and gets a job at the Bonheur des Dames (Ladies’ Paradise). Plain and penniless, Denise joins the flow of material goods imported from around the world. Caught up in the ritual of commercial exchange, she slowly loses her naïveté, her bad haircut, and cloddish shoes. It is not an improvement. The inspiration for the Bonheur des Dames was the Bon Marché (Good Market) in the 7th arrondissement. The world’s first purpose-built department store, the Bon Marché is still an impressive ode to commerce, but what sets it apart is its enormous gourmet food shop on the ground floor.
I couldn’t afford to shop for groceries at the Bon Marché, but I’d visit every once in a while because it was always good for a laugh and cheaper than going to the movies. Once, I watched a portly woman in a hot pink dress going around the store with an empty shopping cart, and putting back every single item she’d picked off the shelves. Finally, after going round the store about six times, she picked out a square half-pint jar of honey, turned it round and round in her hand, and then she carefully placed the cube in the very center of her cart, creating a little island. Then she kept going.
She was clearly not Parisian. If she were, she would have known that the fastest way to a food decision was to make sure you had no way to carry it.
Here are ten more useful things to know about living in Paris that aren’t in guide books:
One. Paris is not France.
Many French people think Parisians are snooty. Many Parisians would agree. What is the problem?
Two. Dogs are everywhere.
Dogs are to Paris what sheep are to Ireland: no matter where you go, there they are. And so are their cute piles of poop. Despite warnings, you will step in it. It will be your fault.
Three. The pharmacist will identify your wild mushrooms so you don’t die from eating them, and will prescribe suppositories if you do.
Suppositories cure everything, including sore throats and freckles.
Four. Organ meats are omnipresent.
Livers, hearts, brains, tongues, and gizzards are featured on most respectable menus. If you get sick of cow and pig and ask nicely for a big plate of fresh vegetables, it is very likely that a duck will end up on your table. This actually happened to my sister. Vegetarians should consider themselves warned.
Five. Chic Parisiennes wear see-through blouses. Do not try this at home.
The “chic” part depends on the expression, which must be stern and flat chested. To complete the look, it is necessary to hold a man instead of a handbag.
Six. Apartments are very small, and closets are optional.
If they do have a closet, it is the water closet. It is rarely used for clothes. It often doubles as a library.
Seven. You get one outfit per season, and sometimes less.
In the Great Heat of 2003, for example, an unwritten rule emerged: you shall go totally naked in your
