French Lessons

She’ll call Philippe and tell him to meet her at a cafe.

She’ll call Fadwa or Fawad or Fadul downstairs and ask her to babysit. It’s a school day. The girl won’t be home. She’ll ask the girl’s mother, but the woman doesn’t speak English. She’ll gesture: Baby. Sit. Like charades, she’ll show the baby and then sit in a chair. That’s ridiculous. The word in Arabic probably doesn’t have anything to do with sitting.

Breathe, she tells herself.

“Why rain, why rain, why rain, why rain?” It’s become a chant as unnerving as a police siren, and Cole runs around the house like he’s on fire.

Riley looks at the clock. Seven-fifteen A.M. Where the hell is Vic this early?

They fought last night, in the only time they spent together before crawling, numb and exhausted, into bed. “You think I like this life? You think I want to work all hours of the day and night?”

“Yes,” Riley said.

“That’s ridiculous,” Vic snapped. “I have to pull together a team from four different countries and most of them hate each other. I can barely understand half of them myself. You think I wouldn’t rather build sand castles in the park in Place des Vosges?”

He was standing in the bathroom in his pajama bottoms, his bare belly gone soft and pale. He stabbed the air with his toothbrush like a fierce bathroom warrior. Riley looked at him and thought: Everything you say is the opposite. You love being the big shot who makes an international team work. You hate the sand.

“Get a grip, Riley,” he said, spitting toothpaste into the sink.

And when did he start wearing pajama bottoms? Riley had a momentary wish to walk up to Vic and slide his pants down, wrap her body around her naked husband and whisper, “Come back to me.” But he pushed past her and headed into the kitchen for another brownie, left over from a care package her mother sent a few days before.

Riley smells the top of Gabrielle’s head. It’s perfect baby smell and she remembers to breathe.

The phone rings and she jumps and Gabi’s mouth pulls from her breast, taking her nipple with her. She screams and the baby cries. But the phone has stopped ringing. Then Cole walks in, carrying it. He’s smiling. “Nana,” he says.

He’s never answered the phone before. She’s amazed. Soon he’ll put on a tie and leave for work at seven in the morning like all the other competent people in this household.

“Mom?” she says into the phone. She does a quick calculation-it’s one in the morning in Florida.

Her mother is crying-or she’s making a gulping sound of trying not to cry.

“What’s wrong?”

She’s not sentimental enough to be crying because her grandson answered the phone for the first time.

“Mom?”

“I don’t want to bother you with this-”

“With what?”

“I didn’t even want to tell you that I was having tests-”

And Riley knows everything she needs to know. Her father died of cancer years before, and somehow she waits for everyone she knows to get it and die. On TV, people survive; in her life, they die. She is crying, silently, a steady stream of wet stuff pouring down her face.

“Mama?” Cole asks.

“Mom?” Riley asks.

“Mama?”

“Shh, honey. I’m okay,” Riley whispers. Or maybe that was her mother whispering to her. She’s squeezing the baby too tightly.

“What tests?” she finally asks.

“Ovarian cancer.”

“You should have told me.”

“I’m telling you.”

“I’m coming home.”

“You’re not coming home.”

“Mom.”

“Mama?” Cole is tapping her shoulder. She looks down. Gabi is hanging from one foot off her lap, ready to fall. How is it that Riley got a hold of this foot? And why is the baby laughing like this is some kind of game?

“Sorry, sweetie,” Riley says, pulling Gabi back to safety. But there is no safety. Gabi throws up in Riley’s lap.

“Mom, I’ll call you back.” And she hangs up.

She’s holding Gabi in the air. Vomit puddles in her pajama bottoms. And Cole pats her shoulder. “It’s okay, Mama.”

Soon she will clean the mess and call her mother back.

Soon Cole will find a French cartoon on TV and watch happily as if he understands every single word of this damn language.

Soon she’ll call Vic and ask him why he had to call a breakfast meeting when he had a dinner meeting last night and will have another dinner meeting tonight.

Soon she’ll call every pediatrician listed in the guide her realtor gave her and ask every snooty receptionist, “Parlez-vous anglais?” until she finds someone who does, and she’ll make an appointment to check Gabi’s ears.

Soon it will stop raining.

Soon she’ll see Philippe.

Riley slides into a chair inside the cafe-the rain has stopped for a moment, but she knows Paris well enough to know that the wet stuff will rain on her parade.

She’s amazed she has managed so much already today. She called her mother back but Mom said she was going to sleep-it was 1:30 in the morning in Florida and she needed her beauty rest. Riley convinced the woman downstairs to watch the kids. She found clean clothes. They almost fit her-another ten pounds and she’ll be back to her fighting weight. But she’s not giving up the pain au chocolat and there is the problem of her enormous milk-laden breasts. Tant pis. She’s learned that expression-too fucking bad. So the shirt pulls tight across her chest and the jeans hug her hips. Tant pis, Victor.

She’s early. She opens her notebook to last week’s lesson. The words swim in front of her eyes. She used to be a smart person. She used to be a person who had long conversations with intelligent people about politics and the arts and why her neighbor in apartment 3B sang in the middle of the night.

Now she’s either silent or she talks to infants. Either way, there’s been a diminishing of intelligence, she’s noticed. Hard to discuss global warming when she’s got potty mouth.

And Philippe won’t speak English. She’s sure he can-he’s got that European je ne sais quoi that usually means “Oh, I speak six languages. And a little Japanese.”

He thinks that if she has to speak in French, then she will. Instead, she sits there as if she’s a timid soul, one of those mousy girls in high school who never raised her hand. “I’m the teacher’s pet! she wants to scream. I’ve got so much to say that you can’t shut me up!” But she has nothing to say, because she doesn’t have any of the words with which to say it.

Her wondrous career, which she gave up three weeks before Cole was born-though she can’t remember why anymore-had her writing crisis communications for major corporations. Stock tumbling? I’ll spin that! CEO caught in the men’s room with the mail boy? Give me a second and I’ll explain how this is good for the company! But now she can’t even turn her own life into a good story-because she doesn’t have the words for it. Je suis lost.

The waiter comes over and asks her something that she knows she can answer. “Cafe, s’il vous plait.” Then he says something else and she nods. He’s probably going to bring her a plate of pigs’ feet with her coffee and she won’t be able to complain. Because she doesn’t have the words!

Six months ago, Cole went through a tough phase. Her American mom friends told her: “It’s the terrible twos,