Dreaming in French by Megan McAndrew

Author:Megan McAndrew
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2009-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

31

ASTRID HAD WANTED TO LIVE in Greenwich Village, her old haunt, but it wasn’t cheap and bohemian anymore, so we had to settle for Yorkville. When we went to look at the local high school, she burst into tears. I would never have admitted it, but the fortresslike building terrified me, too. There was a security guard at the entrance, and as we walked in, a group of black girls sized us up—not the chic African diplomats’ daughters familiar to me from the École Colbert, but tough urban girls with knowing eyes. That was when I told Astrid about Briarwood, though I hadn’t called Frank’s mother, who I understood was instrumental to my getting in.

“Call her,” Astrid said, her eyes hard. “I’m not putting you in a school for teenage mothers and drug addicts.”

Briarwood was arranged, the price Sunday lunch in Greenwich. I took the train from Grand Central and was met at the station by a driver. The car was an old Volvo, and it wove its way through the winding lanes that led to Frank’s childhood home, which, I now recalled from my two prior visits, was a white house with columns, like a Greek temple, that stood at the top of a hill. They didn’t have houses like that in France, and at the time it had seemed exotically grand, like something out of Gone With the Wind. Now it just looked forbidding. My grandmother was waiting at the door when we drove up. She presented a talcum-scented cheek, and stepped back to inspect me.

“You look just like your mother,” she said, her tone so dispassionate that I couldn’t tell if it was an observation or a judgment. I remembered Astrid calling her cold and cheap, but my mother had always found formality suspect. I wondered suddenly if I would be expected to be disloyal. Would that be the price of the extended hand? But my grandmother only smiled, and said that I must be hungry, and that lunch was waiting in the dining room. As we crossed the vast living room, its windows looking out on Connecticut’s preternaturally blue winter sky, I searched for signs of habitation; but the pale carpets that muffled our steps, the pristine chintz-covered sofas and armchairs seemed unacquainted with human traffic. Where were the marks and mess of life? The stacks of books and magazines, the wine stains, the half-eaten chocolate bar accidentally sat on? I shivered in my thin sweater, a reaction that I first attributed to nerves, until I realized I was just cold.

In the dining room, a maid served us Campbell’s tomato soup in china dishes. I knew it was Campbell’s tomato soup, because Maybelle used to bring cans over for Astrid, who had a secret fondness for it that I shared. With the soup came a basket of little plastic packets of oyster crackers, bearing the name, I noticed, of various establishments, such as Captain Sam’s or The Chowder Hut. I could hear myself reporting to Astrid,

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