where are you now?

I don't remember how I met Annick. I think it was between the first two years of college--my first first year and my second first year. At any rate, I was about nineteen and bored, and I had begun to study French from a book-and-tape series I found at the library. "Le Francais est Facile" or something like that, produced for tourists and business trippers. I loved it. I did pushups in my room as I chanted with the dry British host of the program, "Je suis alle, tu es alle, il est alle..." (I was also trying to condition myself for surfing, another wished-for skill.)

That was why my mother pointed me toward Annick. Her family started coming to our church after theirs broke up. Her husband had been a pastor there, and as I learned much later on, he had come to our pastors almost upon arrival and asked when he could start preaching at our church. Maybe this doesn't seem so out of order to some people. To us, it seemed something like the former president of one country approaching the president of another country and suggesting that they begin to share duties.

Somebody must have mediated the introduction--it might have been my mother, but I can't remember that she was particularly friendly with Annick. It seems so unlikely, as I look back on it. I was nineteen, restless, lazy except for a few chosen projects, with no immediate goals beyond making an hourly wage at Starbucks and practicing French and push-ups. She was in her mid-thirties, with three little girls and an out-of-work husband. She was tall, with black hair improbably long for a woman her age, that stayed shiny and smooth though she wore it loose. She had ice-blue eyes and a classic profile and graceful arms. She carried herself like the curator of an art museum. She spoke with a southern California accent. I can't even remember how she came by her French pedigree.

Somehow I ended up at her house for dinner one night, on the purpose of practicing French together while she made dinner. We conversed innocuously in French, but here and there she broke into English when she confessed the difficulties of her life. She was afraid for how they were going to pay the rent--they had just lost their house and had to move to a condo community in the northern wilds of Escondido. Their neighbor was a drug addict, or a pervert, or both--he had come over once or twice, in the beginning, and one day had sneaked in the open window of the house and surprised her while she was in the shower. Most of her friends had deserted her, now that her husband's former church had split up. And her husband...there she paused. No one understood him, and she allowed that he was sometimes hard to understand.

Her little girls were drawing pictures at the kitchen table. The oldest one, who was probably seven, drew a boy and a girl wearing striped middy blouses and berets with pompoms. The middle one scribbled. The baby I remember best--she was not a chubby American-style baby, but long-limbed, almost lanky, with a mature face and solemn eyes as big as puddles. Her reddish hair tendriled over her forehead in a china doll curlicue, as if it was her concession to infancy.

Annick wore a long dress with no sleeves. She opened plastic freezer bags and somehow constructed something that looked like Provencal chicken in her frying pan. I remember that it smelled delicious and that there were mushrooms. I asked her how to make it, and she gave an unexpected laugh--there wasn't any recipe, it was just something you throw together. Most French cooking is like that, she told me. She pulled out a couple of old textbooks and a dictionary, and gave them to me, saying that sometime I should give her back the textbooks but I could keep the dictionary.

Then her husband came home. He slammed the door and looked at me with an aggression that was almost lewd. He seemed to be sizing me up, whether I was worth challenging or not. He never smiled, even when he kissed his daughters hello. We sat around the table and he threw some French phrases at me--grammatically correct, atrociously pronounced. He asked if I spoke any other languages, and I told him that I spoke Spanish. Then he assailed me with a barrage of questions, straight out of Spanish 4. I didn't want to fight, so I gave simple answers and tried to indicate my willingness to be the beta dog. He gave up on me and looked at his middle daughter, saying, "Eat. Mangez." I smiled at them all, in turn.

Annick gave me a ride to the church, where her daughters did Awana club that night, and where my mom was going to pick me up. We chatted some more in the car, but a somber resignation seemed to have come over her. We stood in the parking lot and watched the kids mill around in front of the entrance to the church. I wish that I could remember what she told me then, because it was probably the key to much of her mystery. It had to do with her husband's pugilistic nature, the circumstances of their church rupture, and the uncertainties that plagued her more than ever. All I can remember is thinking, "I'm nineteen. She shouldn't be telling me this." She finished it by saying, "And there, now you know it. Our histoire triste." Then I realized that I should have been paying much more attention. Why didn't I, I wonder now? Was I bored?

But I also look back with wonder on the way she concluded. It seems so melodramatic, so uncharacteristic of her, at least according to how I had learned her that evening. It was a mystery then how a woman like her ended up with a man like him, but that precipitate confession with its final phrase--"our histoire triste"--might be just what would resolve it all.

Somehow, that last phrase embarrassed me so that I hardly spoke to her again at church. They did not stay long, whether because of her husband's insufferability or because no one but a nineteen-year-old would befriend her, and even that for only an evening.