It’s a little after eleven o’clock when we leave his office with Madame P holding the prescription, probably afraid I’ll lose it, and we’ll have to start over.
Her goal is to get to the eyeglass store before noon so I can get my glasses, and she can return to the life she had before I called. We race to the optical shop the doctor recommended. It’s in Douarnenez, about twenty miles away on small country roads. Madame gets us there in less than half an hour, a time I’ve never come close to duplicating. We enter the shop, and I start looking through hundreds of designer frames. French people wear glasses like jewelry, as an accoutrement, embellishment, and couture—my choices are wide and varied, from staid, prosaic banker’s wire rims to outrageously spectacular look-like-a-raccoon-Elton-John-horn-rims: Dior, Klein, Boss, Porsche, Vuarnet, Lacoste. I find an emerald green Vuarnet frame that I want badly, but Madame says I look like a frog, “une grenouille,” a word I avoid on menus, and convinces me I should get the Calvin Klein tortoiseshell. Since she sees me more than I do, I follow her advice. Besides, she’s French and much better at this than I am—and my ride home.
Madame hands the tortoiseshell frames and the doctor’s prescription to a saleslady, a woman in her midfifties wearing stiletto heels and a push-up bra that puts the laws of Newtonian physics in doubt. She points to a chair behind a table and indicates I should sit there and wait. The good news is it’s almost noon, so I know I won’t have to wait too long. I think she’s going to put the frames on me, quickly adjust them, and get us out of the store as they do in the U.S, but in the U.S., glasses are glasses; in France, they’re la pièce de résistance.
The saleslady returns with a binocular headset that looks like it’s right out of Star Trek, the kind of apparatus a not-so-friendly alien would wear or you’d use for protection in a nuclear reactor meltdown. She places it on my head and starts measuring my eyes: length and width, the distance between them, pupil size, forehead, nose, ear to ear, and, for all I know, my brains—like this is some sort of eye-size–intelligence measurement left over from the good old days of endomorphology and phrenology. She writes each measurement on a piece of paper and makes all kinds of calculations and quantifications, like a female Dr. Frankenstein.
While she’s working away, I’m watching the clock. If it hits noon before she finishes, we’re here for two more hours. She finishes at three minutes to twelve and hands me the paperwork: the equivalent of three hundred dollars for new Calvin Klein tortoiseshell frames and photo-gray glass that I seriously suspect will turn blue, green, or yellow when the sun hits them, not the gray I want.
I pay with my Visa card, knowing if the prescription is wrong or the glass is not photo-gray or the frames don’t fit, I can challenge the expense and not have to pay. As she rings me up, I ask, “À quel jour c’est fini?” What day will they be ready?
“Demain. Après-midi.”
One day! Saturday afternoon. Right! In the U.S., I have to wait seven to fourteen days.
The next day, Madame P picks me up at two o’clock, not trusting me to walk to her house without my glasses—maybe even with them—probably worried I’ll fall into the river and she’ll have to dive in to save me, and then do my laundry as well. It’s easier to pick me up.
She takes the scenic route via Locronan, and we still arrive in record time. She parks in the blue disabled zone, probably feeling justified because of me, and indicates I should get the glasses while she waits in the car. Her confidence amazes me. First, that I’ll be able to say what I want, and second that the glasses will be ready.
I walk into the shop. The woman who measured me yesterday, wearing her stilettos and gravity-defying bra, goes behind the counter and hands me a beautiful leather Calvin Klein case. She hands it to me in a way that tells me not to open the case and try the glasses on, that she’s a professional, and whatever she did yesterday—the measurements, calculations, formulations—were sufficient, and the glasses will perfectly fit. I’m not so sure. My entire shopping history tells me to put them on, to be sure they fit and I can see across the street, because it’s easier to do now, while I’m here, than to ask Madame P to drive me back. What to do? Trying them on would be to doubt the woman’s work, deny her expertise, maybe constitute a public denigration. She’s waiting, smiling—and definitely wants me out of there—happy, satisfied, and gone. I put the case in my shirt pocket and leave.
Back in the car, Madame indicates I should put them on, probably because she doesn’t want to have to drive back if they don’t fit. I open the case expecting the worst. They’re the right frames. I put them on—they sit well—and I can see, better than with my old glasses, which were five years old. I look in the visor mirror. I look better—the frames are classy—and I see better, and Madame can get back to her life. Winners all around. The photo-gray is even gray.
When I tell my French friends about the whole experience, half of them are amazed I saw a doctor so quickly and got specially tinted glasses in one day. The other half shrug and say, “C’est normal.” But everyone asks who the ophthalmologist is, and when I give them his name, they all say, “Ah oui. C’est le meilleur.” He’s the best.
No one and nothing escapes evaluation in France. Everyone is a critic, about everything—and once again I’m thankful I have no idea what people are saying about me.
At the Hospital
When I return from dog-sitting on the Île aux Moines, Madame tells me Monsieur is in the hospital in Brest, and we’re going to visit him.
I’m carrying a shopping bag full of Madame-cooked goodies. She’s carrying fruit, nuts, and nibbles in a purse that must weigh at least ten kilos. Side by side, we march into the lobby. The only person there is an old guy in pj’s, sitting hunched over on a couch. He has metal crutches on one side of him, an oxygen tank on the other, and a long plastic tube running from the tank to his nose. Monsieur is in the hospital for respiration—breathing problems—so Madame asks the fellow if he knows her husband, Monsieur P.
“Non,” the man answers.
“Quelle est la direction du service respiratoire?”
The man points and directs us down the hall, telling us to go to the third floor. Madame leads the way.
We take the elevator to the third floor and start walking down a long, empty hallway. My usual hospital-visiting routine is to peer into every room I pass to see what horrible things can happen to people and hope none of them happens to me. Here, all the doors are closed. It’s not like any hospital I’ve ever been in. There are no wheelchairs, gurneys, or stacks of food trays lining the hall. Even the smells are regular, like those in a Holiday Inn or clothing store—not decaying flesh, bodily waste, or antiseptics. If I hadn’t seen the sign—“Hôpital”—I’d swear I was in a government office building after closing, when everything, including the air conditioning, has been shut off because it’s sweltering.
I’m sweating through my shirt. Madame is wiping her face. I figure Sunday is not a good day to be ill at “the end of the world,” Finistère. I later learn Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays aren’t any better—as the air conditioning isn’t “off,” it’s nonexistent in Brittany and most of France. I don’t know if this is the result of cost-benefit analysis or another example of planned inconvenience. All I know is it’s like a sauna: think 72nd Street subway station in ninety-degree heat and eighty percent humidity, and you’re close.
Madame finally stops and knocks on a door. A voice from inside calls, “Entrez,” and we do.
Monsieur’s wearing his plaid slippers and a bathrobe and has a tube from an oxygen tank clamped under his nose—and he looks great, like he’s on holiday, and the oxygen tank is for scuba diving. He’s tan, smiling, and happy to see us. Madame kisses him on the cheek and drops her purse on his bed. I kiss him on both cheeks, and say, “Bonjour.”
She starts unpacking: peanuts and cashews, chips, apricots, peaches, plums, fresh bread, galettes, homemade jam, cake, and still-warm crêpes, as if the hospita
l is starving him. It doesn’t matter that he’s just eaten lunch, a bar of chocolate is on his bed table, cherries on the windowsill, and probably more of everything tucked away in his dresser—she adds to the stash. If she didn’t, she’d feel remiss. In the U.S., bringing patients food is verboten, the assumption being “outside” food will make the person worse, even though the “inside” food is terrible. In France, it’s the reverse. If you don’t bring food, you’re verboten, and however good the hospital food is—and it is—food from home is better, even if it comes from Leclerc. In France, it’s the gesture that counts. In the U.S., it’s the product—think orchids, a hardcover book, or a double CD.
As we’re chatting away, the door opens. A crutch enters, a slippered foot, another crutch . . . It’s the guy we spoke with in the lobby, the guy who didn’t know Monsieur and directed us to the third floor. He’s Monsieur P’s—Joe’s—roommate, making his way to the other bed. He didn’t know Joe’s last name because family names are private, and nobody needs to know—whereas peeing in public, showing your body parts, and sharing bodily functions with strangers are not.
Madame offers him a plum. He says he’d rather have a glass of wine, and we’re off. While we’re talking, there’s a knock on the door. Everyone, including me, calls, “Entrez.”
A svelte, mid-to-late-forties nurse, wearing a crisp, blind-ingly white uniform—how does she do it in this heat?—walks into the room, says “Bonjour,” and asks Monsieur P and Monsieur K if she can take their temperature and blood pressure. Mine would go up if she touched me. She finishes her work and thanks them, then adds her numbers to the charts and leaves them hanging from the beds for anyone to see. Madame picks up Joe’s, reads it, asks him a series of questions, and admonishes him about his diet, exercise, and smoking, which he continues to do even with the oxygen tank, though not in the hospital. Somehow she restrains herself from reading Monsieur K’s chart, though I know she wants to.
After a while, Madame suggests she, Joe, and I go to the coffee shop for goûter, afternoon tea time. We have forty pounds of food in the room, not including whatever Monsieur K has hidden, yet we’re going down two floors to eat—and so is everyone else. Anyone who can walk, wheel, crawl, or breathe—at least forty people in various stages of repair and disrepair—is in the coffee shop. It looks like a combination of Lourdes and the Oakland emergency room. People are in casts, bandages, neck braces, attached to IVs. Wheelchairs and crutches are everywhere, and one person is strapped to a gurney, chewing and trying to swallow a brioche while lying on his or her back.
We sit at the last unoccupied table. Monsieur parallel parks his oxygen tank beside him. Behind me, someone coughs. I look around. An entire family wearing surgical masks and protective paper gloves and booties—husband, wife, daughter, and two kids—sits with an older woman in a wheelchair who is not wearing a mask, gloves, or booties, and who never stops coughing and spitting phlegm, bile, or her insides.
I hold my breath and breathe through my nose. The last thing I want is to eat in this place. It looks like an incubator for hell. Coffee, if the water’s been boiled. But no food.
Madame says, “Que voulez-vous manger?” What do you want to eat?
It’s taken me years and zillions of calories to learn the one sure answer to getting out of eating is, “Je suis malade,” and rub my stomach. Unfortunately, I didn’t know it then, so I say, “Rien.” Nothing. “Rien.”
Madame returns with three coffees and three brioches. She and Joe talk and eat their brioches. I save mine for the proverbial “later.” When they are finished talking and eating, we walk Joe and his oxygen tank back to his room and say goodbye to him and Monsieur K.
Monsieur K has been in the hospital four days, Joe six, and there’s no rush to get either out. There’s no “slam-bam, thank you, ma’am,” that will be $750,000. Of course, there is no air conditioning either.
The following year, when I arrive, Monsieur tells me Madame is in the hospital in Quimper. She had surgery six days ago—six days!—and is being discharged in two days. My God, what can it be?
She’s in the same hospital where I met Jacques, the fellow whose car I hit when I was driving Peggy to the airport, so finding it is easy. Finding the room is not. None of the signage is clear, at least to me.
After several false starts, I locate the correct wing and head down the corridor looking for the room number Monsieur gave me. It’s like when I visited him in Brest—more like a hotel at three in the morning than a hospital. No one is in the halls, not even a custodian.
I see the room number and stop in front of Madame’s door, take a deep breath to prepare myself for the worst, and knock.
“Oui. Entrez,” comes a cheery voice from within.
Oh my God, it’s worse than I thought. In my U.S. hospital-going experiences, the more cheery a patient’s voice, the sicker he or she is—unless, of course, they’re cured and healed and about to go home. She’s been here six days and is staying another two, how good can it be? I open the door expecting doom.
The room is blindingly bright, light, and airy, a double room with Madame the only resident. On her lap is a tray with real dishes (ceramic), silverware (stainless), and a glass-glass, nothing plastic—not even the food: a chicken breast, green beans, carrots, soup, salad, cheese, bread, and crème brûlée. It all looks good, but this is France—everything looks good. It’s what’s underneath you have to worry about, like my design-perfect thermos that won’t keep liquids hot or cold.
“C’est bon?” I ask, pointing at the food.
“Oui, bien sûr.”
“Bon,” I say, surprised, hurt, and disappointed. She has more enthusiasm for this hospital food than she has for mine. Ever since tasting my mustard-balsamic salad dressing, she eats my food with the doubt and foreboding of Stalin’s food taster.
“Quand vous êtes retour aux chez vous?” When are you coming home, I ask?
“Deux semaines.”
“Deux semaines!” Holy shit. Two more weeks! This is serious, critical, maybe terminal. My God. “Monsieur dit moi vous êtes parti en deux jours.” Monsieur said two days.
“Oui, oui, pour la récupération.”
“Recuperation?”
“Oui.”
My vocabulary is expanding all the time. It seems the French have this silly notion that after surgery, a patient needs to recuperate. Never mind that they hold you in the hospital five times longer than in the U.S. When they discharge you, you don’t go home, you go to another place to be cared for. In the U.S., you’re out of there—fast. It doesn’t matter that you live alone in a four-story walk-up, there’s no food in your house, your neighbors and friends are on vacation, your nearest relative lives five hundred miles away, and you’ve just had a hip replacement or hernia repaired. The doctor says he’s done, and you’re gone. You’re fixed—the rest is up to you. The only thing worse is if they do send you someplace to recuperate—a skilled-nursing facility or rehab center—places run like a factory, a poorly run factory, with understaffed, low-paid workers who are angry and tired and not happy to see you, care for you, or hear from you—treating you like the enemy you’ve become; places where the food is crap and it smells like a toilet or septic tank’s overflowed, where you’re every bit as likely to get worse as better. Unless you’re Bill Gates or Warren Buffett, these are your choices: take care of yourself or go to hell.
Not in France. Madame P is discharged from the hospital in two days and sent to an auberge-y building facing the sea in Bénodet—a beautiful resort town, where English and French people pay beaucoup euros to bathe and relax. After another hospital stay, they send her to Roscoff, a beautiful resort town on the “English” Channel.
The French have this idea that a person needs calm, beauty, and relaxation—mental and physical—after surgery, and nothing provides it better than the sea. Madame has her own room and a choice of meals, even a menu. She has physical therapy every day. She’s in Bénodet and later Roscoff for ten days, and comes ho
me looking healthy, relaxed, and tan—and it’s all part of French universal health care, those socialist fools!
But what about foreigners? Americans? Me! What happens to us? That’s what I want to know.
I soon find out.
Jerry and Sheryl are visiting from California. Jerry is a high school principal, retired and on disability after five heart attacks. Sheryl is a gerontologist, also retired and on disability, and the recipient of a recent Stanford University Hospital double-lung and kidney transplant. Both use and carry more medication than the average pharmacy stocks. Any change in their health is serious and life-threatening—and doesn’t slow them down or deter them a bit. When Sheryl needed dialysis and wanted to visit New Orleans for Mardi Gras, she booked a hotel next to a dialysis center. After Jerry had a stroke, was wobbly and using a cane, he went to the Galapagos Islands, fell, broke his arm, came home, and booked himself an African safari. Now they’re visiting Donna and me for a week.
(Not Quite) Mastering the Art of French Living Page 19
