Reality French Lessons in Action, the Butcher Knife and the Glam Doctor

September 23, 2010, Sancerre, France, on solo tour of the Loire Valley. During this portion of the trip I was in a week long language immersion program.

I was sick today and instead of calling the doctor for me, Marianne, my French teacher, suggests that maybe, maybe, I go make the appointment myself.

Up until this point, I had understood her just fine. Now I am left behind a little, because everything all of a sudden has gone from pretend land, where yesterday we “went grocery shopping” with little plastic fruits and veggies, to something that is real. Maybe it is the fever but it strikes me how much this little scene that is unfolding at the Coeur de France Ecole de Langues leaves me feeling like a delirious actress performing a script from a dialogue in an Alliance Francaise workbook.

The town of Sancerre with its one of everything that’s important to French town life would be the perfect location for just this kind of scene were it ever to be filmed. There is one boulangerie, one patisserie, one charcuterie and one Michelin starred restaurant. The only things present that there are more than one of or just plain lots of, are restaurants, wine shops and charm. But what is most important to me today is that there is one la pharmacie and one le médecin (doctor.)

Marianne says something that was pretty close to this: “Marcher vers la place du village, continuez tout droit tout le chemin à la pharmacie. Puis c’est la porte verte à quelques portes dernières de la pharmacie.” In other words, pretty much “walk towards the town square, and the doctor is at the green door that is a few doors past the pharmacy.”

I walk to the location of this green door and am very thankful for Sancerre and its small size. The door is so shiny and green that  I feel like looking around  to see if there is a camera filming my reality immersion lesson. The door looks as if it has been painted in honor of my unscheduled arrival.

I amuse the heck out of the young receptionist, but I manage to make my appointment for “in about an hour.”  When I return around an hour later,  I take a seat in the stark waiting room, which except for a few strange looking creatures that I can’t figure out what they are supposed to be on a French alphabet poster, I could be back in South Carolina. Well that and the large supply of newish French fashion magazines fanned on the table.

As I thumb through their pages pondering France’s national obsession with cellulite, a woman with long dark and very mobile curls, deep set exotic eyes piercing through her Euro glasses, comes into the waiting room from the office area. She tries unsuccessfully to open the restroom door, jiggling it decisively several times when obviously it is locked. I pull my nose out of the French magazine long enough to envy her ability to pull off the shirt she is wearing, a layered tee shirt/sweater hybrid, accented with lace stripes. It is an outfit that if spotted in the US on many, might look to have come from Kmart; on her body in Sancerre, France, it looks as if it may have been bought on Paris’s Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré.

She pulls air through her teeth, making a disgusted,  ”pshhttt..” sound,  a sound that she and French people generally do very well. She opens the door where she came from and disappears behind it again, returning about a minute later. I presume she has brought a key to the locked restroom door back with her.

Instead she is carrying a butcher knife. Le couteau is rather large and shiny, and she looks unhappy or maybe I’m just misinterpreting her being very intense. I’m back to feeling as if I’m in a candid camera/French immersion lesson video; one where now, all of a sudden, there is going to be a une victime d’un crime.

But instead of going all French crime novel on me, she bends down like a thief towards the lock. I must confess that after a week of sustaining myself on large amounts of rich French food, my first thought is why when I gain weight can’t it be distributed in my rear end in the same way it is in this woman. Deftly she wiggles the knife this way then that; in less than 15 seconds, she’s in.

A few minutes later I am called back to see the doctor. That my doctor turns out to be the knife wielding, lock picker with the brown curls and the nice tush doesn’t really surprise me at all.

With a couple of exceptions, we parlons tres bien. My impression is thrown into doubt for a split second when upon coming back out into the waiting area the receptionist is giggling.

But I know what is going on. I was there. Next it’s on to la pharmacie. It’s just a couple of doors down, if you recall, on the way back to school.