Air Force Brat (6 page)

I sat at the back of the class in a double
wooden desk that I shared with a girl named Michelle. Michelle was
assigned to me to help me along. Because she was considered the
smartest girl in the class, the ideas was that I would not drag her
down too much.

The other American girl in
the class was Susan Scibetta. She was less of a problem in class
because she was totally compliant, extremely gifted, and very
quickly fit into the flow of the class day. She was soon getting
B’s on her own
dictees
. I, on the other hand, was apt to disrupt class by asking
where the water fountain was (there wasn’t one) and whether or not
we got Halloween off.

Susan sat with Nicole, who
was recognized as the second-smartest child in the class. Unlike
Michelle, who was big and plain, Nicole was delicate and beautiful
with a serene Madonna’s smile. Even so, as smart and sweet and
determined to please as both Michelle and Nicole were, in my year
there I saw both of them brought to tears by
Ma Soeur
.

The schoolroom was large,
with a set of four floor- to-ceiling windows on opposing sides of
the room.
Ma Soeur
sat at the front of the room before a cracked blackboard that
stretched the full width of the room. The opposing wall, where I
sat with Michelle, held the massive double doors that led to the
hallway and out to the cement courtyard. My job was to
“
fermez la porte
”
whenever someone visited our classroom. This was usually the
village priest, who came to torture us every Tuesday with readings
from our Catechism and to hear our recitations of the same. If
anyone could be more sour and mean-spirited than our little nun, it
was “
Mon Pere
.”
Since I wasn’t positive he was in on the “be nice to the Americans”
pact that
Ma Soeur
and the other teachers seemed to abide by, I kept a low
profile when
Mon Pere
visited. It was just as well. While I quickly picked up the
language, my recitations were less than perfect and my
dictee
always a
downright disgrace. Much of this was due to my personality: I was a
bright but indifferent student—even in American schools. The idea
that I needed to memorize four or five pages of French poetry for a
solo recitation the next day was almost immediately dismissed by me
as unnecessary. I remember Michelle telling me one day that I
didn’t need to worry about memorizing a particularly long and
boring tract—I just needed to read it over. I needed to read it
over “one hundred times!” That initially amused me, I realized it
was an insult.

The school was very
primitive. It had been standing for over a hundred years, and
looked it. There were no ballpoint pens. We used dip fountain pens
that held only a charge of ink for every dip into the well. We had
pencils, to be sure, but we did our sums on little chalk slates
that we held up when
Ma Soeur
barked at us, then erased with little
pastel-colored sponges.

Not surprisingly,
Ma Soeur
tied Michelle’s
success together with mine. If I did not perform, Michelle would be
punished. It was a painful motivation, forcing me to step out of my
natural inclination to “let it slide” and take the “C.” With poor
Michelle taking the bullet for my laziness or lack of ambition, I
was forced to work harder than I ever had in school before. Many
school nights found me in tears trying to commit long strings of
incomprehensible foreign words to memory.

Even with my protected
status as an American, there were times when my teacher took her
best shot and struck home. I was supposed to always copy
Michelle’s
dictee
in order to improve what could be improved: my handwriting,
the occasional recognition of a familiar word, the osmosis
understanding of correct French grammar. But it was hard to be
dependent on another, to “be the dummy,” as I saw it. Very quickly
on, and to Michelle’s dismay, I insisted on writing my own
dictee
. A
dictee
was simply a
matter of
Ma Soeur
reading a tract to the class, who would then write it down
with correct spelling and punctuation. I remember clearly the first
(and last) time I chose to do it on my own. After I
finished,
Ma Soeur
invited me to the head of the class where she smiled broadly,
saying over and over again “Verrrry bad, Suzanne!” (This was an
insult in itself since she knew I understood French well enough
without having to speak to me in English) Then she read my
dictee
aloud to a
nervously laughing class. (They were in a bind: they knew
Ma Soeur
expected them
to laugh derisively at me, but they wanted my favor on the
playground later, too). Finally, she placed a ruler into my
cahier
and ripped out
the offending page. This was the extent of her attempt to humiliate
or punish me. I remember being embarrassed by the experience, but I
had already assessed her as a bully, and got over it
quickly.

Later, on the playground,
my friends bustled about me, eager to make amends for having
laughed at my abysmal
dictee
. I was somewhat forgiving of
their betrayal since I had to imagine the
dictee
sounded like something a
retarded and drunk foreigner might’ve written, and because they
were a good audience to my strutting impersonation of
Ma Soeur
without too
many nervous looks over their shoulders.

The playground was more
like a cement prison yard. There was certainly no playground
equipment or grass. There was just us girls and stone walls. The
girls liked to cluster around me and the other Susan, and to touch
our long hair. Most of them had pixie haircuts and pierced ears. We
all wore cotton
tabliers
—little smocks that kept the
ink and chalk dust from our clothes.

Our recess out in the courtyard was the only
time all day we had to eat the lunch we had brought from home.
(There was no lunch break or cafeteria.) There were toilets in the
school but we girls were not allowed to use them. They were for the
Sisters. Instead, there was a small open-air shed at the back of
the courtyard that was covered with straw. It stank badly,
understandably, and of the few times I poked my head in to check it
out, I actually witnessed girls eating their lunch amid the stench
while they waited for their friends to finish. I never had
difficulty waiting until I got home to use the bathroom.

Once a week,
Ma Soeur
would herd us
all out into the school courtyard and down the narrow alleyways to
the heart of the village to the village Catholic church. The church
in Ars is several centuries old, with a parish registry that dates
back to 1673. I sat in it every week for Mass, staring up at the
cold, forbidding stone walls, the beautiful stained glass windows,
and the ancient, faded tapestry of our beaming Lord over the
pulpit. The priest would walk laboriously up the winding stone
staircase to the pulpit and deliver Mass. We girls were always
seated in the first three rows. Once, I remember
Ma Soeur
leaned over
from where she always sat on the aisle and hissed to me that I was
not there to enjoy the pretty stain glass glass windows. I guess I
must have been smiling or something.

We had Thursdays off but
attended school half days on Saturday. Every Saturday we gathered
up our desks’ china inkpots and promenaded up to where
Ma Soeur
stood at the
front of the room dispensing little dippers full of ink into them.
We would then pop the little pots back into the holes in our desks
for another week of blot-free writing in our
cahiers
. Making unsightly ink blots
in your notebook was a particular pet peeve of
Ma Soeur
and was guaranteed to get
you slapped or, at the very least, screamed at with full-frontal
spittle. I often wondered how those poor girls turned out in later
years. Did they become militant feminists? Did they turn away from
Catholicism? Did they grow up to become meek and obedient wives?
Did they start drinking too much at an early age?

I say my relationship
with
Ma Soeur
was
complicated because although I felt fairly certain she did not like
me, and resented my presence
²
in her classroom as a
disruption, she could be nice. Once, during a history lesson—and
one that I had comfortably tuned out of—she was strutting about the
classroom and droning on and on about something when suddenly she
stopped by my desk and put her hands on the back of my chair. I
woke up when she raised her voice and practically shouted: “…at
that point the brave Americans came in and SAVED FRANCE!”
Instantly, all my classmates clapped and smiled insanely at Susan
and me as we took credit for D-Day and the saving of the French
Republic. (We were so totally rock stars on the playground later
that day.)

I also remember another
time with
Ma Soeur
which always tempers my picture of her as a total sociopath
forced to teach mewling, despicable children. It was early evening
on Christmas Eve in the village. I had never seen
Ma Soeur
outside of the
classroom, but I ran into her—both of us alone and she strode over
to me, grabbed my hand and shook it, saying “
Joyeux Noel, Suzanne
,” with tears in
her eyes. I suppose if anything could move her to joy or emotion,
it might be the birthday of our Savior. But there was something
else in the way she reached out to share it so sincerely with me. I
actually felt love from her. For this reason alone, I cannot
characterize her as the meanest person I have ever
known.

Chapter Seven

A Boy’s Wildest Adventure, A Mother’s Worst
Nightmare

The afternoon was wet and gray when we found
the dead body. It had rained for three long, dreary days. Tommy had
been clearing the entrance to the bunker for a week. It was
providential that I was with him that morning as he usually shunned
my company in favor of solitude or the two hulking Scibetta boys—my
friend Susan’s brothers and our far neighbors on the outskirts of
Ars. Tommy, impatient to resume excavation, allowed me to accompany
him to help haul and carry rocks away from the entrance to the
bunker. I’m not sure what kind of child I must have been to have
considered this something I wanted to do, but there I was, slipping
and picking my way on the muddy, steep ground, to where the
mysterious bunker lay hidden.

Tommy discovered the
bunker two weeks earlier but he’d only recently had the time to
turn his attention to exploring it. Six months into our stay in
France, he had already found two caves totally hidden from the
population, one lengthy part of a badly damaged tunnel he was sure
was part of the tunnel system used by the Nazis in the Allied
invasion sixteen years earlier. A labyrinth of German tunnels
between
Ars-sur-Moselle
and Metz created by the German troops still
survived.

Once he tired of his new finds—cave or
tunnel—he would show them to us, his siblings. The entrances to the
caves were absolutely hidden; there were moments we could easily
hear the calm conversations of French farmers or pissing vagrants
without detection. We stashed our stuff in the caves. We plotted in
the caves. We hid in them. We napped in them, read novels in them,
played war in them, camouflaged their entrances, and never spoke of
them to either American adults or French villagers.

I found many opportunities to steal away to
one of the closer caves to sit and read and think about who I was
and my future life. When I think, today, of spending so much time
alone—and it was absolutely essential to the kind of child I was—I
cannot imagine how the children of today survive in the constant
fishbowl of American culture. With a house full of boisterous boys
to escape, I needed my own company to sort things out. Closing the
door to my bedroom didn’t cut it.

Lest there be any romantic notions about
these private playhouses, let me be clear: things slithered and
crawled in them, moss grew inside them, and spiders dropped
regularly onto book pages. The deep backs of the caves were never
fully explored. Sounds and smells emanated from their hidden
recesses. The caves were frozen ice chambers in winter, sweltering
hellholes in summer. We always threw rocks in first to scare off
whatever had taken up residence since the last time we’d visited.
On more than one occasion, the intruder was a human, usually drunk.
Bums and gypsies would sleep in the caves in warm weather.
Thankfully, they never stayed longer than a night.

When we reached the bunker that morning, I
could see the source of Tommy’s frustration. (He had been edgier
than usual that day.) He had already removed most of the rocks
blocking the entrance, and it was very nearly passable. Just an
hour at most would have us inside. It must have killed him to let
it sit three days before finishing the job.

“
So, you thinking World
War Two?” I asked as I began collecting rocks from the
entrance.

He squinted at the bunker. It was half
submerged into the ground, built into the side of a large hill. A
fifteen-foot tree grew nearly smack in the middle of the entrance.
It was sheer luck he’d even found the bunker.