A MEMOIR
The French Lesson
Free, bright, and twenty-one
It was summertime in Norfolk, Virginia, in the Age of Aquarius. I had reluctantly dropped out of college because my father had lost his job in Paris and was living on trains with 30-day Eurail Passes I would send him. He survived — perhaps even thrived — on two-franc couscous dinners at a tiny Algerian restaurant tucked into an alley somewhere along the Left Bank.
I continued taking night classes for a while, especially French class, but it became too difficult, with my new job and having to rely on public transportation. I was lucky to find work at all, not having secretarial skills like shorthand.
My first job
Maybe I should have listened to Mom. She had pushed hard for me to take shorthand and bookkeeping in high school. My only concession to her was to take a typing class. I wanted to be a scientist. I was the only girl in physics and calculus classes. And I wanted to go to college. Mom also thought I should go, but for a different reason — so I could meet an educated boy, get married, and settle down.
Thus, I found myself, at the unskilled and uneducated age of seventeen, working at my first real job. A freight forwarding company hired me as a “girl Friday,” a respectable title for a scrawny kid tasked to walk…
