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Clearly, she is French. And if the scarf wasn’t a giveaway, then there’s the fact that she marches up to the front of the room and starts speaking. In French.
“Are we in the wrong class?” Carol whispers. Then the teacher goes to the board and writes her name, Madame Lambert, and the name of the class, Intro to French. She also writes it in French. “Oh, no such luck,” Carol says.
Madame Lambert turns to us and in the thickest accent imaginable tells us in English that this is beginning French, but that the best way to learn French is to speak and hear it. And that is about the only English I hear for the next hour and a half.
“Je m’appelle Thérèse Lambert,” she says, making it sound like this: Teh-rez. Lomb-behr. “Comment vous appelez-vous?”
The class stares at her. She repeats the question, gesturing to herself, then pointing to us. Still no one answers. She rolls her eyes and does this clicking with her teeth. She points to me. Clicks again, gestures for me to stand up. “Je m’appelle Thérèse Lambert,” she repeats, enunciating slowly and tapping her chest. “Comment t’appelles-tu?”
I stand there for a second frozen, feeling like it’s Céline again jabbering away at me disdainfully. Madame Lambert repeats the question. I get that she’s asking me my name. But I don’t speak French. If I did, I wouldn’t be here. In Intro to French.
But she’s just waiting now. She’s not letting me sit down.
“Je m’appelle Allyson?” I try.
She beams, as though I’ve just explained the origins of the French Revolution, in French. “Bravo! Enchantée, Allyson.”
And she goes around the class asking everyone else’s name the same way.
That was round one. Then comes round two: “Pourquoi voulez-vous apprendre le français?”
She repeats the question, writing it down on the board, circling certain words and writing their English translations. Pourquoi: why. Apprendre: learn. Voulez-vous: do you want. Oh, I see. She’s asking why we want to learn French.
I have no clue how to begin to answer that. That’s why I’m here.
But then she continues.
“Je veux apprendre le français parce que . . .” She circles Je veux: I want. Parce que: because. She repeats it three times. Then points to us.
“I can do this one. I know this word from the movie,” Carol whispers. She raises her hand. “Je veux apprendre le français parce que,” she stumbles over the words and her accent is awful, but Madame just watches her expectantly. “Parce que le divorce!”
>She grabs a wad of cash from the vintage register. I take it from her and sprint to the bakery as fast as I can, get Jonas, bark the order, and run back with it, which is harder than it sounds, carrying thirty loaves of bread.
I pant as Babs looks over the bread order. “You know how to wash dishes?”
I nod. That much I can do.
She shakes her head in resignation. “Go to the back and ask Nathaniel to introduce you to Hobart.”
“Hobart?”
“Yep. You two’ll be getting intimate.”
Hobart turns out to be the name of the industrial dish washer, and once the restaurant opens, I spend hours with it, rinsing dishes with a giant hose, loading them in Hobart, unloading them while they’re still scalding hot and repeating the whole enterprise. By some miracle, I manage to stay on top of the never-ending flow of dishes and not drop anything or burn my fingers too badly. When there’s a lull, Babs orders me to cut bread or whip cream by hand (she insists it tastes better that way) or mop the floor or find the tenderloins from one of the walk-in coolers. I spend the night in an adrenaline panic, thinking I’m about to screw up.
Nathaniel, the prep cook, helps me as much as he can, telling me where things are, helping me scrub sauté pans when I get too slammed. “Just wait till the weekend,” he warns.
“I thought no one ever ate here.” I put my hand over my mouth, instinctually knowing Babs would be mad to hear that.
But Nathaniel just laughs. “Are you kidding? Babs is worshipped by the Philadelphia foodies. They make the trek out here just for her. She’d make way more money if she moved to Philly, but she says her dogs would hate it in the city. And by dogs, I think she means us.”
When the last of the diners leave, the kitchen staff and the waiters seem to all exhale at once. Someone blasts some old Rolling Stones. A bunch of tables are pushed together and everyone sits down. It’s well past midnight, and I have a long walk home. I start to pack up my things, but Nathaniel motions for me to join them. I sit at the table, feeling shy even though I’ve been bumping hips with these people all night.
“You want a beer?” he asks. “We have to pay for them, but only cost.”
“Or you can have some of the reject wine the distributors bring by,” a waitress named Gillian says.
“I’ll take some wine.”
