So the other day I’m walking down the street, right? And I see this woman. She’s got a tan blouse and a tanner skirt, but then her purse, scarf, and shoes are all this perfectly-matched Hermès orange. So I’m thinking, “This woman is a million times more pulled together than I stand a chance in hell of ever being,” when it hits me:
What will she wear tomorrow?
Does she have a wardrobe that consists entirely of neutral clothes to pair with these orange accessories? Does she have other sets of matched accessories–like, say, bright green ones, or bright red–and she just rotates them against the clothing backdrops? Or does she break them up on other days–an orange scarf here, a handbag there–so that I only ever would have noticed today, when they happened to all be together? Or (and this one chills me to my core) is she one of those mysterious women who own “Outfits”?
In my closet, the only items that could remotely qualify as “an outfit” are the dresses, because, well, that’s just really easy. I wear them with whichever shoes look the least appallingly wrong and the (Andrea, look away) one purse I own at any given time (you can look back now). The rest of the time it’s mix-and-match in easy, safe solids, which always seems perfectly fine in the house, but then I leave and find myself surrounded by women in Outfits, and I whisper I prayer of thanks for the reasonably stylish coat that hides the hopelessly unstylish rest of me.
I kind of thought that this sort of thing would rub off on me: that just being here would cause me to absorb fashion sense, all osmosis-like. I’d certainly rather do so here than back in New York–I have yet to see a single person wearing Uggs here, for example. But it may not be in the cards–or maybe it’s just that I don’t trust Jolie in stores where anything costs more than 20 euros and so tend to shop during brief, anxious interludes while she’s locked in the kitchen.
Fortunately, osmosis does work for language, even if you spend as much time defiantly talking to your dog in English as I do. I know, for example, that the couple that owns the clock shop across the street watched and laughed all spring while we pleaded with Jolie to just walk already. And I know all about what one of our painters does on his lunch break, because the other one told me before muttering all kinds of creepy stuff to himself that I could totally still hear through the door I had just closed. And I know that the woman who runs the interesting-looking-random-stuff shop up the hill owns two Jack Russells named Millie and Rosie, and that Rosie is useless as a guard dog, because she ignored the thieves that stole the woman’s purse, but barked like hell at the police who came to take her report. I also know that she thinks that Jolie is too long for a Jack Russell, but what she doesn’t know is that I think she’s let Rosie get obscenely fat, because I keep a civil tongue in my head.
Anyway…more people are toughing it out to finish conversations with me in French, is all I’m saying.
You know who’s not talking to me in French? Foreigners. I mean…any of them. And I think I’ve figured out why most of the world resents native English-speakers so very much: there are literally billions of impostors out there.
Tourists walk up to me and say some variation on “Bonjour…uh…do you know which way is Eiffel Tower?” And I can tell that they’re Italian or German or whatever, but native French speakers hear this and assume that they’re American or British, because detecting a foreign accent in a foreign language is insanely hard. So all they know is that there’re all these people wandering around insisting on speaking English to them, and they all want to see the Eiffel Tower.
Stupid lingua franca.