![Private Lives](https://webarchive.library.unt.edu/dentonfracking/20141022225816im_/http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/blogs_v3/firstperson/firstperson45.png)
Private Lives: Personal essays on the news of the world and the news of our lives.
JACKSON, MISS. — I once spent two years as a high school French teacher. I took the post because I was divorcing and needed a paycheck. The school took me even though I had no teaching experience because, under Mississippi law, if a school is hard up for a teacher, it can hire anyone the state designates an “expert citizen.”
For some reason, I found the citizen part personally touching. It conveyed a sense of responsibility packed along with my new, free Blue Cross insurance card and pad of pink detention slips. Yes, though I felt failed and foolish starting over at 48, my credentials were a consolation prize. They said I was an expert when it came to French drills for ninth graders, even if I was not an expert at staying married.
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I quit in 2006, and went back to my old day job of journalism. But not long afterward, a friend asked me to give French lessons to an acquaintance of hers. The woman had just divorced. As part of rebooting her life, she wanted to learn French. I reflexively said yes.
She came to my house the next Saturday morning. She was 53, with long brown hair and a job dealing with cellphone towers. I taught her the ABCs and how to introduce herself. I found myself asking her about her divorce, and telling her about mine. The next Saturday, we practiced “ça va?” and “merci.” I had more divorce questions for her and some thoughts to share with her about mine.
This was more fun than my high school job. Word spread about the French lessons. More people asked to come. I organized classes at my dining-room table and named my business Le Salon Français. Soon, I had four weekly classes coming to my house, one at Thursday lunch and three on weeknights.
It was time to buy textbooks. My old school district, like most in the area, still used the 1997 textbook “Discovering French,” full of white teenagers like Isabelle and Jean-Paul, outdated even then, who party down in pleated pants, shaking their manes of moussed hair to the beat of their Walkman cassettes. Skits on the accompanying videos featured teenagers’ soirees, throbbing with ’80s pop on the record player.
Mississippi perpetually stands near the bottom in public-school spending, and the time-frozen textbook reflected it. It seemed like the rest of the country was through with this publication, judging from the number of copies I found for sale online. I could buy them for $2.95 each. Lots of additional used “Discovering French” paraphernalia were out there. I presume they were semi-fenced goods from French teachers in other poor states like Louisiana and Nevada. Some teacher must have been quietly liquidating the contents of her room’s book closet to sweeten her budget for a summer trip. One week, an extra set of the videos came up on eBay. I was outbid, interestingly. I have to wonder who else could possibly have wanted them.
I don’t think people came to my classes for “Discovering French.” I think I was drawing in other wrecked people via spiritual attraction. Most of my students were women in their 50s, getting over one kind of trauma or another, as I was. Among 16 students, there were seven divorces, including one that involved coming out of the closet; a few breakdowns; two murders of loved ones; cancer; rehab; and caretaker responsibilities for a bedridden sister.
Did I mention that our lessons paused for two weeks for me to have an emergency craniotomy, or that my dog, Sonny, was dying of cancer himself under the dining-room table?
We progressed from pronunciation to the gender of nouns to the present tense. We paused to hear one another’s updates. No matter if we told time in lesson four or play-ordered sandwiches in lesson nine, we always had time for the latest when it came to someone’s divorce, child custody situation, criminal appeal or change of medication.
To tell the truth, the foreign-language gene was recessive in my salons. Sometimes we’d cover the same material three weeks in a row, and it didn’t seem any more familiar to them the third time than the first. After a year, we’d made it only to page 106, lesson 15. It was where the French I class at my high school would have been by January.
My oldest student was 83. The class wasn’t easy for her because her hearing aid crackled a lot. One week I realized that I was turning textbook pages for her during class. I did it as automatically as I used to cut the meat on my daughters’ plates, never slowing the conversation.
But my students weren’t discouraged by their progress. Nor was I.
“Guess what I did yesterday,” my 83-year-old student asked me one day. “I counted the cars that drove down the street — in French. I counted to 126!” She wore little round black-framed glasses like a hip architect and a pressed white blouse. She smiled and lifted her chin. “Of course, I’ve always said French things to myself. I’ve had a spiritual reading, and the lady said I’ve lived several lives in France. That’s why it’s all so natural for me.”
One student said, “I’m dreaming in French now.” This was great news, though maybe a little curious, since her class had a repertory of exactly 12 verbs and hadn’t gotten to sentences yet. Another responded, “When I pray in the mornings, I do it in French.”
But perhaps the most rewarding response was that of a woman — let’s call her Elaine — whose French bliss was even simpler. All she had to do was say “un jus d’orange.” She said it over and over. The sensuality of the syllables transported her. She’d throw back her chin as her eyes rolled back in her head, halfway home on the Meg Ryan spectrum of pleasure. French phonetics can do that.
When I declared my marriage over and myself a French teacher, I figured all I had to do was stay a mere 30 minutes ahead of my students to come off as proficient enough to teach them. That worked for ninth graders, but in adult education, I don’t kid myself that I know anything more than my classes in terms of the core curriculum, which is this: French can save you. So can particle physics, furniture refinishing or any other endeavor you take up while the world spins on. Compartmentalize a spot in your reeling head, and that little space becomes a refuge, full of possibility. At least for one hour a week, anyway.
Ellen Ann Fentress teaches creative writing through the Millsaps College Community Enrichment series and is working on a memoir.