I walked into one of those brico-home joints where you can get everything from plates and silverware to faucets and doormats and wrenches. I made it halfway up the first aisle before I crossed the path of a clerk. A guy my age, in jeans and a sweater.
"Bonjour, monsieur, " I said. "S'il vous plaît, I am looking for -- "
"A Prince Charming?"
To be honest, I don't particularly appreciate being smooth-talked right out of the gate like that. I prefer to warm up a bit first. I prefer to get to know someone for thirty or sixty seconds. I hate that feeling of getting pounced on because I am in a skirt -- or because I am a skirt. But whatever. I could see from his ring that he was married. He was wearing glasses, for heaven's sake.
"Are you saying that you have an aisle full of them?"
Chuckle, chuckle. Whatever.
"Actually," I said. "I am looking for a spray bottle [un vaporisateur]."
"This way," he said, and I followed him around to the next aisle. He handed me a metal one that looked nice for misting olive oil on a salad. It also looked like it cost about six euro. (An aside: the 99¢ concept simply does not exist here. Anything in the throwaway plastic range for which you would normally expect to pay 99¢, will here cost 2.99€, if not 3.99€. The dollar being what it is, your 99¢ is closer to $4.60. Close parens.)
I explained that I wanted something in plastic. He led me over to a box of plastic spray bottles and handed me a clear purple one. And priced at only two euro. I asked him, s'il vous plaît, to hand me the blue one instead.
I examined it a moment, pulled the trigger just for fun, picturing it full of my personal swear-by-it mixture of white vinegar-and-water, the miracle solution without which it seems I cannot perform any household chore. Just what we were looking for. I pronounced it perfect.
"Yes, it is perfect," he said. And -- this is where the movie goes all slow-motion -- he reached out and took hold of the neck of the bottle, and proceeded to stroke it slowly, up and down. "Perfect," he said again, nodding at me.
I was so stunned that I might have felt an electric charge go through my body. Or perhaps it was just that in the moment of silence that followed I was picking up the humming of the fluorescent lighting overhead.
Unbelievable: a new low. Never in my life -- for all the trash that has been talked my way, every unwelcome attention, every time I have ever wanted to vanish utterly from sight, or perhaps to pull a gun from my purse the better to express appropriately my outrage -- had anything so overtly vulgar and inappropriate been tossed (heh) my way. And never at such proximity.
I don't count that moment at Martin Luther King Junior High in 1978. I was in a full hallway in between classes on my way to pre-algebra. I was walking along the lockers the better to fight my way upstream. Out of nowhere a hand reached out and felt my -- frankly, nonexistent -- right breast. I looked and was surprised to see a boy, smaller than me, whose face I recognized vaguely but whose name I didn't know, smiling warmly at me.
Smiling at me.
I turned away and kept walking. I have no recollection of ever seeing him again. I was too young at the time to be anything but absolutely bewildered by what had happened. I may have had a fleeting sense of shame, certainly I was surprised, but I simply didn't understand it. Which is probably a good thing.
But standing in this store thirty years later, my hand on the base of the bottle, no bewilderment at all: only questions. What do I do? Laugh? Leave? Spit? I didn't want to give him the satisfaction of getting a rise out of me. He was pathetic, and therein lay the problem: to respond in kind to that sort of crap is to risk "going there;" it is to risk getting it all over your shoes.
I felt a million miles away from both my idea of Paris, and (if it is possible) even further still from the Paris in which I have contentedly spent the past two and a half years. Here, I am Madame: that slightly better version of myself, with all the privileges that entails. Here, I am left alone to my thoughts. I am allowed to mind my own business. I walk safely at night. I am free to go where I please.
I was also tripped up because this was happening outside my language. My synapses in French are slower. The right word doesn't always come when I need it, though the wrong ones often do. I speak more carefully in French, in public at least, because the rules for engaging strangers are so clearly laid out.
This is a place, and a language, where form trumps content regularly.
So what I said next surprised me, because it happened so quickly so as to be almost instinctive. Without even thinking about it, I revoked the formal vous. "Vous" is not just grammar: it is part of a social contract. Addressing each other as "vous" is the means by which strangers assert their mutual respect and equality. But "vous" is a privilege that one can lose. You see it happen from time to time on the street, when a squabble erupts. Someone will use the familiar "tu" in place of the formal -- courteous, "correct" -- "vous." It is a loaded moment.
Properly applied, it can be the verbal equivalent of wiping your feet on someone, telling them to eff off, or of disciplining a bad dog with the swat of a rolled-up newspaper. Improperly applied, it debases the speaker and proves them to be unworthy of respect.
But I knew what I was doing.
I snatched the bottle from his hand. "Arrête." I said, in the familiar. "Ça suffit."
Knock it off. That's enough.
And then, just to make clear that this exchange had taken nothing from me, nor changed my plans, I headed to the cash register. I didn't look back.
