"It will be good for our butts."

I had all these plans for a series of posts about moving across the country with a two-year-old*, what I think of the San Francisco Zoo**, what there is to do here***, how my eating habits have changed****, and how people treat the environment*****.

Instead, I’m going to tell you a story about Paris******.

I was there for the week between Christmas and New Years about six or seven years ago. I was waiting in the security line for the Louvre and there were a pair of girls behind me. They had to have been cousins who didn’t see each other very often, or friends of friends or something — they were polite and talkative but you could tell that they didn’t have much in common. The more energetic of the two was trying to convince the second one to walk up to the top of Notre Dame that afternoon. The second was doing her best to weasel out of it, but the first girl had an answer for everything she said. When the second girl pointed out that they were going to be walking all day beforehand and that there were over 300 stairs to the top, the first girl said, “Oh come on. It will be good for our butts.”

That line popped into my head a week or so after we moved here. We’re living in a place with stairs for the first time since my junior year of college. That’s at least ten years. (My daughter *loves* them. She loves sitting on them, reading books on them, making you wait at the bottom while she walks up them, pretending each step is its own little bed, and, most of all, running up and down them.) I walk up and down them all the time. I hope it’s good for my butt. God knows it needs to be with my I’ve-been-pregnant body.

(I’ve started running, too, but that’s an entirely different post.)

* The summary: don’t do it.
** Pretty good, but needs some love.
*** A lot, but most of it involves a lot of driving. We really live in the burbs.
**** The fruits and vegetables are SO DAMN GOOD. We’ve seriously cut back on our meat and potatoes intake because there’s so much that’s yummy. And I’m still gaining weight.
***** So much better. The recycling container here is the same size as the trash container back in Atlanta, and the trash container only holds about a quarter of that. And you can’t put extra trash bags on the side of the curb. Well, you can, but they won’t get picked up.
****** This makes sense. Trust me. Also, I promise this will be the last footnote.

Le Divorce

It’s no secret that growing up I generally eschewed anything that could be considered feminine. Sure, there was a brief period in elementary school when I wore skirts, wanted to wear makeup (Even though Mom wouldn’t let me. Thanks Mom!), and played with Barbies. That was the third or fourth grade. The rest of my first eighteen years were spent in pursuit of math and science, and generally eschewing things like housework and my general appearance. (Although I’ve always been rather unhealthily obsessed with clothing. I like shopping. I can sew, and not just to mend things. But all that’s genetic and can’t be helped.) During college, I decided that I liked nail polish and wanted to learn how to cook. And I had a reasonably traumatic experience living in an apartment with six other people, only two or three of whom cleaned up after themselves – things got very messy very quickly. It convinced me that knowing how to keep house was Important, even if I didn’t take the time to really learn how for another few years.

Then I went to Europe, and spent the bulk of my time in France, specifically Paris.

I learned many things: how to hold myself when I walk, why I want long hair, how to make the best use of minimal makeup, how to dress well while only having one suitcase’s worth of clothes, why beauty is important in all aspects of life, why literature is important, and why it’s important to always be thinking. Note that most of these are things I consider to be feminine. Note also that I was happy. Maybe happier than I’d been before.

Yes Kate, you’re saying, but remember the book? Le Divorce? That’s what you’re actually supposed to be writing about here. Not revelations that you had whilst in Europe. Yes, I respond, you’re right. But sometimes you need background in order to understand what’s going on. Read on.

I bought Le Divorce a few months after I got back. I was impressed because Diane Johnson gets the tension between Americans and Parisians exactly right. I mean, nails it right on the head. I fell in love with the book almost immediately. I felt like Isabelle, the main character, because I’d been in those situations, thinking those things. I relished when she figured out that beautiful dishes were good things and lover her interior monologue about the importance of lingerie. Not to mention the regular humiliation of screwing things up. (Like the taboo on eating in public. Unless you’re in a restaurant, it’s just not done. But what do you do when you buy a sandwich from a take-away shop? It’s not like I could walk across the city to go back to the hostel every day. I eventually settled for quickly eating them in hidden part corners.)

This all invites the question: why? Why, despite the screw-ups, did I so enjoy these things that I hadn’t before? Le Divorce has the answer: the existence of a standard. France has a standard for all types of beauty, and a rather high one at that. When something is bland, they don’t put up with it. I like high standards. It’s one of the primary reasons that I like math and loathed my high school English classes. If every answer is going to be right – and they mostly were in those English classes – why should I bother putting any effort into it? French culture shows you what to live up to and then puts the burden on you to live up to them.

And I love a good challenge.

Le Divorce shows Isabelle finding her way, slowly learning how to fit in. Since I already identify with her, it’s kind of like seeing me do that. And so I enjoy vicarious success through her while working hard to make my own life work like that.

Le Divorce: Recommended