Like Part I, this is from my unpublished memoir, IN THE VINES, and took place around 5 years ago. Enjoy!

"My" castle

Fabienne called back the next day to confirm that she had secured a negligible raise in my pay. I accepted. Even if she hadn’t succeeded, my answer would have been yes. Having had time to think about it, I concluded that this was the only job I had a chance of getting, bar moving to Paris. At this point, I would have paid them to employ me, as long as it meant getting me out of the house and using my brain once again.

“Stop by next week, and Audrey, our guide manager, will give you some study materials.”

“Thanks, Fabienne,” I replied. “And just to confirm, the position is for English Language Tour Guide, correct?”

“Absolutely,” she said. “Unless we need help in French, of course, but that might not even happen.”

“Right,” I said, and hung up the phone, pushing away a sense of foreboding.

The next week I parked in the château’s employee parking lot and walked confidently up to the front desk. The same greeter who had half ignored me when I inquired about English tours the first time looked up and gave me a huge smile.

“Congratulations! I’ve heard we are going to be colleagues. I’m Martine,” she said.

“Amy,” I responded, and shook her hand.

“Audrey’s waiting for you in her office. Up the stairs to the second floor, and it’s the door on the right.”

I climbed up the ancient spiral staircase as if in a dream. It was straight from a fairy tale castle, built entirely of huge stones with curly cast-iron window bars and a rope handrail. I emerged into a room hung with ancient tapestries and furnished with painted wooden chests. An enormous fireplace took up one wall and cast-iron chandeliers hung from massive ceiling beams. I felt a frisson of wonder as I realized that my own country, America, wasn’t half as old as most of the objects here.

Opening a dwarf-sized wooden door in one corner of the room, I walked into a small office, in which sat a tiny old lady. She could have played the part of the woman at the spinning wheel in Sleeping Beauty, if she hadn’t been dressed in a smart suit and wrapped in an enormous woolen shawl.

“Close the door, dear, you’re letting in the draft,” she said, drawing the shawl tighter around her miniature frame.

“I’m Amy,” I said, walking up to her desk and reaching across to shake her hand as I sat down.

“Ah yes, the American,” she said. “I have some reading materials for you.” She took out a large folder of stapled documents and pushed it across the desk. “You’ll need to return them to me when you’re done. And here are some books,” she said motioning to a large stack of tomes on a side table.

“I’m not quite sure I understand,” I asked. “Do you not have a written-out tour that you want me to use?”

“Well, I have an outline for the tour that I give, and you’re welcome to join in on this morning’s tour if you want to take notes. But each guide writes her own tour.”

“I think that would probably be a good idea,” I responded, wondering how long it would take me to read all of these materials in French and translate the important bits for an English tour.

“Come along, then. There’s one starting in a few minutes,” she said, checking her watch, and we left the tiny office to walk together to the castle’s front entrance.

The next forty-five minutes were pure pleasure. Tagging along behind a group of French tourists, I listened as Audrey spun tales of murderous dukes, land-grabbing kings, and princes marrying duchesses in order to end wars. As we moved from room to room, she pointed out the tapestries and furniture and described how everything was used in the everyday routine of the castle’s inhabitants: both noble and common. I was so enchanted that I forgot to take notes, and when the spell wore off I had a paltry page full of unintelligible doodles.

“I hope you enjoyed it,” Audrey said, as I scooped the mountain of books and papers from her desk on the way out.

“It was wonderful. I hope I’m able to make things half as interesting as you do.”

She laughed. “Well, since you’re starting in June, you have six weeks to learn the material. Feel free to phone or stop by if you have any questions.”

As I walked across the wooden drawbridge and down the stone steps to the street, four and a half centuries fell away like a curtain, and life in the 21^st century hit me full in the face, as a group of biking tourists in matching neon shorts-n-shirts cycled by.

For the hundredth time since I had moved to France, I got that feeling: the one where if you had walked up to the me of thirty years ago, a little girl riding her bike under the scorching Alabama sky, and told me I’d be living in France and working in a medieval castle, I would have thought you were insane.

Over the drawbridge and back to reality

Tomorrow: PART III, OH YES, IT HAPPENED.

The following is from my unpublished memoir IN THE VINES, and this story happened about 5 years ago. I’ll give you some today and more tomorrow!

My potential place of employment

I was living in the middle of nowhere. I had just closed down my 19^th-century paintings business. And I had a four-month old baby at home. What kind of job could I find speaking a French that was passable but definitely not professional?

It would have to be something in English. Considering that I had a master’s degree in art history and was living in the middle of castle country, I figured looking for a job as a tour guide might be a good place to start. So I began visiting the local châteaux and abbeys to see if any offered tours in English. None did.

My last stop was the Château de Langeais, a medieval castle just a twenty minute drive from my house. Walking into a grandiose stone lobby with low arched ceilings and a fireplace you could park a horse in, I asked the young, snobby looking woman behind the welcome desk if they offered tours in English.

“Non,” she replied, and looked back down at her work, which consisted entirely of shuffling tourist brochures around on the countertop.

“I’m just asking because I am an art historian and am looking for a job as a tour guide.”

She looked back up with an interested glimmer in her eye. “Well then, you are in luck. We have never had tours in English at the Château de Langeais, but our administration has talked about starting this summer. Send us your resumé.”

“Who do I send it to?” I replied, putting on my best blasé look, while actually buzzing with excitement at having even the slightest shot at a job.

“The Château de Langeais,” she answered.

“Yes, but is there anyone in particular I should address it to?”

“The personnel department,” she replied with a wicked grin. We both knew that a castle with a tiny staff wouldn’t have a personnel department, but I thanked her anyway, and went home to attempt a translation of my resumé in French.

A week later, I was called in for an interview.

This, however, caused me more angst than excitement. An interview meant that I had to speak in French, while simultaneously coming off as passably intelligent. Although my casual conversational French was by now understandable, interview-French was not in my repertoire. I practiced by calling Laurent by the formal “vous” instead of “tu” for a few days, which made me feel very 19^th-century, like I was his chambermaid or mistress.

*****

Seated stiffly on an antique chair in front of an old leather-topped desk, I faced my interviewer and concentrated on breathing. Fabienne, the castle’s “personnel manager,” a beautiful willowy brunette, looked over my resumé and nodded to herself.

“Thank you for inviting me to interview,” I opened. “It was nice of you to see me on such short notice.” And then I froze. I had used the word “tu” instead of “vous”, basically putting Fabienne on the same level as me, or inferring she was my friend. My hand flew to my mouth, and I gasped. “I’m sorry,” I apologized. “The ‘vous’ and ‘tu’ is so confusing when we only use the one word ‘you’ in English.”

Fabienne raised an eyebrow and, grinning, continued to peruse my resumé. She asked me a few questions about my degree and experience in the art world. “We are looking for a perfectly bilingual guide for the summer,” she concluded, “and with your qualifications the position could also involve some research and translating. The job is full-time, six days a week, from June through August, and the pay is…crap.”

Alright, she didn’t actually say “crap”. But she might as well have, considering the hourly rate she threw out at me.

I made some calculations in my head. Childcare wasn’t available on the weekends in the countryside. And since the salary was about the same as what a child sitter cost, I would basically be working for free. I braced myself and told Fabienne that I could work Monday to Friday, and only if the pay was higher.

Fabienne nodded as she listened, then said she would approach the castle director with my concerns while I went home and thought about it.

But before I left, I thought of something she had said earlier. “If you are looking for an English tour guide, why are you asking for someone who is ‘perfectly bilingual’?”

“Because if, by chance, we didn’t have any English-speaking visitors on a certain day, you could give tours in French instead.”

Feeling faintly nauseous, I formulated my confession. “With my medieval art history background, I would be perfectly comfortable giving château tours in English. I would be happy to do translations, and the research would be no problem. But to be honest, I don’t think I am capable of giving tours in French. I am not bilingual, and the language needed would be too specialized for my vocabulary.”

“Don’t be silly,” Fabienne responded, dismissively. “People love an accent. And if you make little mistakes in French they will think it’s charming. I’m sure you’ll do just fine.”

“Honestly, Fabienne, I have to refuse the French tours. I wouldn’t want to be an embarrassment to the château.”

“Listen,” she said, standing up and holding her hand out across the desk to shake mine. “It probably won’t even happen, so don’t worry about it.”

As I stood, I glanced at the stack of resumés sitting on her desk, little passport photos stapled into the upper right corner of each, as is the custom in France. The other candidates all looked fifteen years old. No wonder she was interested. Even with a small pay raise, for a “bilingual” guide with a master’s degree in medieval art history, she would be getting a bargain basement deal. I left, praying to the paycheck gods that they would choose an English-only guide with experience over every employer’s dream: cheap labor.

Read THE CASTLE STORY: PART II

Since I’m going to tell you some stories about when I first moved to the French countryside, I need you to understand how basic (read…BAD) my French was when I got here. This is taken directly from my blog 5 years ago:

—–

I went to the pharmacy this morning to pick up some baby supplies. In France almost everything except perfumed soap and cellulite cream is located behind the counter, so you have to ask the pharmacist to get everything for you. Which means that instead of gathering up what you need and mutely handing it to the cashier, you are actually forced to talk.

So I walk into the one pharmacy in our tiny town (1300 inhabitants) with Max in the baby carriage and my dog Ella on her leash, and wait in line until it is my turn.

I am speaking in French, but here is a direct English translation of the transaction:

Me: Bonjour, Monsieur.

Pharmacist: Bonjour, Madame.

Me: I would like one of those thingies that you put in the baby’s mouth so that it can suck.

Pharmacist: Pause of incomprehension. Is it a liquid?

Me: No, it is made out of plastic. It is for when the baby cries.

Pharmacist: Pulls out a pacifier.

Me: Oui Oui. Merci. And also, I would like one of those things that you put in the baby’s nose when he has a cold to pull out the … (I don’t know the words for “boogers” or “snot’)… stuff that is inside the nose.

Pharmacist: Confused look.

Me: It looks like a ball on one end and is made of … (don’t know the word for “rubber”)… plastic. And you stick it in the nose and squeeze. Seeing that he doesn’t understand, I mime a squeezing-under-the-nose motion, much to the amusement of the people in line behind me.

Pharmacist, as serious as the grave: Pulls out a weird contraption that has tubes and syringe-looking appendages.

Me: No, that’s not it. It’s round on one end and…(don’t know the word for “pointy”)… little on the other end.

Pharmacist: Confused look.

Me: Give me a pen and I will draw it for you. I draw a nasal aspirator.

Pharmacist: Ahh! He pulls out a nasal aspirator. In France we use this for… (and I didn’t understand the rest – something like “putting medicine in the ear”.)

The pharmacist pulls out the tube-and-syringe contraption that he showed me before. “This is what we use to clean the baby’s nose.” He then demonstrates sticking one end in the baby’s nose, and putting the other end of the tube in your mouth so that you are actually SUCKING THE SNOT OUT OF THE BABY’S NOSE.

Me: Make horrified face.

Pharmacist, shaking head miserably: You don’t actually get the mucous in your mouth. See, it is trapped in this chamber here far away from the mouthpiece.

Other customers behind me: Trying to stifle the giggling that has been going on since my nasal charades.

Me: Desperately pulling on Ella’s leash, since she has her nose stuck deep into the back-end of a woman who is bending over, which the woman will realize as soon as she stands up. Max starts screaming. Panicking, I say, OK, I’ll take that (point to the pacifier) and this one (point to the snot-sucker).

I pay quickly and beat a hasty retreat, amid glares (from the dog-groped woman) and laughs (from everyone else), promising myself never to return without a list that has been meticulously translated ahead of time.

In honor of Josephine Angelini, who had her wisdom teeth out yesterday, I thought I’d share my own wisdom teeth story, in hopes that I’d get some stories back from you. (I’m in bed with a cold, so am in sore need of entertainment. We’ll do a trade: I try to entertain you if you entertain me back.)

I was 15 and in high school in Birmingham, Alabama. All 4 of my wisdom teeth were impacted (hadn’t broken through the skin), so they couldn’t just be pulled. They had to be dug out. (I know…EWWWW!) Which meant I had to be put under.

When I was told I would be given an IV with drugs, I freaked. I had a needle phobia that was so exaggerated that I used to pass out if I even saw a shot coming toward me. So I convinced the dentist to give me laughing gas before he inserted the IV into my hand.

Things were going fine until I was just about to go under, when all of a sudden I had this kind of waking nightmare that was so clear and realistic that I was in a state of horror as I went unconscious. I “dreamed” that the dentist couldn’t figure out which tooth to pull, so he pulled ALL OF THEM. I could even feel it. My mouth was empty except for one tooth, and the dentist was yanking it out.

I woke up in a little room with my mom sitting next to me, saying, “Honey, I think we can talk about that later.” Whatever drug I had been given was acting on me like a truth serum, and I had been telling my mom all of my secrets: for example the R-rated movie I had gone to with a boy on a car date. (It was “Cheech and Chong” with Bo Kirkpatrick, and I had claimed he was taking me to “Chariots of Fire”.)

After that, for some reason, I decided I needed to get out of there and began trying to trick my mother to leave the room and get me water so that I could try to escape. Twice.

Flash forward to three days later. Something gross had happened to my teeth (a condition called “dry sockets”, which, by the way, I think would be the perfect name for a death metal band, as long as you write it in lightening letters and use an umlaut above the “o”), which caused me considerable pain. My mother, a sensitive soul, couldn’t stand to see her baby hurting and, along with the antibiotics, kept me completely stoned on pain pills for the entire week.

During that time, my friend William, who I was completely in love with even he was obviously gay, got his driver’s license and came to take me for a ride in his new convertible. We drove around Birmingham with our friend Alison behind me, pinning me by the shoulders to the passenger seat because I was convinced that I was going to fly out of the car and up into the air.

So that is my wisdom teeth story. Now I want to hear yours.

While you were eating breakfast this morning, a man in a suit walked through your front door and, before disappearing in a puff of smoke, informed you that you had just been granted the superpower you always wanted. You’re going to use your superpower for good, of course, but before that you want to have a little fun with it to test its limits. What do you do?

What’s a Dev? Find out here!