Chapter 45
LUCY
“Hi. I’m Lucy Daley.”
I extend my hand to a woman I supposedly know from San Francisco, but have no memory of. She takes mine, pumping it up and down two times, really hard.
Interesting.
When she sees me looking at our grip, she explains. “That’s how they do it here. Not like us back home where we shake up and down several times.”
Okay. One of my first cultural lessons, but not as important as learning you have to buy something in order to use a restaurant’s toilet.
“Come on in, Lucy. I’m Frenchie.”
I thought her name was Susan.
She sees the confusion on my face. “I know. It’s a nickname. Throws everyone off here. But all my life I wanted to live in France so badly my friends started calling me Frenchie. And now that I’m here, I decided to keep the name. The French all think it’s hilarious.”
I bet.
“Your French must be really good by now,” I say, accepting a Perrier as we take a seat in her cavernous all-white living room.
How does someone with little kids keep a white living room clean? Shit. Is that one of the things I’ll be expected to do? I can’t even keep my own apartment clean.
Frenchie waves a hand at me, laughing. “Are you kidding? I can barely ask for the bathroom.”
Ha. At least I’ve got that one down.
“I just use Google translate. I mean, why bother learning when you have a translation app in your pocket?” She giggles.
“But your husband’s French, right? How does he feel about that? Is his family okay that you don’t speak French?”
She waves her hand again with an offhand laugh. “Oh, totally. They love me. When we get together, they speak French the whole time. My hubby promised to tell me if they say anything about me, but he swears they never do.”
Can we say denial?
I smile brightly, or at least as brightly as I think nannies are supposed to. “What can I tell you about myself?”
I can’t bring myself to use her stupid nickname.
“I know a little from Petal. There is one thing that concerns me,” she says, shaking one finger in the air.
Holy crap. Why didn’t Petal give me a heads up?
“You worked for that free paper in San Francisco. What’s it called?” she asks, her nose in the air.
“Oh. The Freekly. Yeah, they just closed down?—”
She shakes her head and cuts me off. “Right. Right. The Freekly. When I was growing up, my parents wouldn’t let me read that.”
I nod in agreement, a little uncomfortable with where I think this is going. “I get that. I mean, the content really is geared toward adults.”
“Well, I know it’s one of those subversive type of publications, and I want to make sure you don’t bring any of your… radical ideas into my home.”
Wow.
But I shake my head. “No problem,” I say, my smile starting to fade.
We talk for a while longer and I think she’s getting more comfortable with me, at least until she explains she doesn’t want a French nanny because she thinks their hygiene standards are not up to US levels.
Jesus.
She looks at her watch. “Hey, I’m going out to dinner with some of my friends. Maybe you’d like to come?”
“Oh my God. I’d love to, thank you.”
Awesome. A chance to hang out with some French speakers.
“Hey, how do you communicate with them if you speak no French?”
She laughs again, a privileged laugh that is completely clueless in its entitlement. “Oh, they’re not French. I have no French friends. Mine are all American wives married to Frenchmen. We do everything together. Shop, travel, entertain in each other’s homes. You’ll love them, and you’ll meet their nannies too. You’ll have some friends here in Paris, and you just arrived!”
Yay.
I want to backtrack on accepting Frenchie’s dinner invitation, but I don’t see how I possibly can. So, I follow her out the door and into an Uber because, as she explains, she never takes the Metro, and I suffer through dinner with five women who are exact carbon copies of her.
She does pay for my meal, though.