Missing mademoiselle

Recently I flopped down wearily on the sofa and mournfully declared to my mother, "I miss being a mademoiselle."

I realize that this particular complaint takes so many things for granted that it's a bit like bitching about the scent of the oil the masseuse has chosen for your weekly two-hour session. But it's true. I officially miss France. Beyond the pastries, the duck and the thick yellow butter, I mourn the loss of all the identities automatically bestowed upon me as a youngish woman living abroad. I miss being An American in Paris, and all of that label’s romantic expat connotations. I miss being a Cooking School Student, and waking up each day to new challenges in the kitchen without fretting about creating a gigantic pile of dishes. I even miss being Unemployed, because …well, because now I have to work again.

But perhaps more than anything else, I miss my status as a mademoiselle.

***

When my friend and mentor Alison came to Paris for a visit, she remarked how nice it felt to be appreciated again.

"In the United States, women over forty are invisible," she said.

My mom recently returned from a trip to Mexico, where she spent an evening watching the world go by from a public bench.

"I realized one thing that night: nobody notices me anymore," she told me later.

I'm coming up on thirty, and I'm starting to ponder this eventual anonymity that various women have informed me is a fact of life in youth-obsessed American culture. But in Paris, everywhere I looked I saw glamorous, gorgeous older women who clearly hadn’t gotten the memo that they were supposed to shelve their sexuality with their first grey hair. “I want to be like her when I grow up,” I’d think, admiring the silvery bob and arty jewelry of the woman ahead of me in line at the boulangerie. Everybody else was busy admiring her too.

***

At the same time, though, I always relished this vestigial token of girlishness every shopkeeper in France tossed my way:

Bonjour, Mademoiselle!

As a word, “mademoiselle” is delicate, springy, feminine. It rolls off the tongue and concludes with a pretty chime. Adding “Bonjour” to the mix creates a wonderful series of hills and valleys to be traversed. The exclamation point does no justice to this phrase, but there is no other way to convey in print that particular singsongy cadence exchanged between shopkeeper and customer as readily as goods or money in France.

The same goes for "fille," the French word for girl.

"Bonjour les filles!" our cooking school teacher would trill each morning.
"Bonjour, Chef!" we'd reply in unison.

"Fille" sounds lacy and fine, with the slightest whiff of the equestrian for this Anglophone, who is repeatedly tempted to transform herself into a filly. I loved being "une fille" at school, one of the band of naughty filles who inspired occasional head-shaking and feigned shame from our instructors when our cakes fell or our lobsters wriggled out of our grasp. I know I am and will always be a stompy, clunky American girl, but every time I became a mademoiselle or a fille I felt a little bit transformed, a little bit closer to one day becoming that beautiful silvery woman buying baguette.

***

"Ou est le monsieur?" asked our friend's toddler worriedly when my stepdad left the living room. "Ou est-il?"

"Is Steve le monsieur?" I whispered to my mom.
“I guess so.”

I had never considered my stepdad in this light before. To me, the word "monsieur" will never escape its waxed moustache connotations. Le monsieur wheels out the cheese cart and eyes me suspiciously. He might call me mademoiselle, but he does it superciliously. He is a French stereotype of the worst proportions, brandishing frogs’ legs and snails as he mimes the accordion beneath his beret.

And then there is the dreaded Madame. Madame is regal and elegant, yes. But she embodies austerity. Those that refer to her are denied the pleasure of chirping her title like a joyous canary. Madame is a somber word that peers out from behind velvet drapes and slams the door shut on your tongue with a dull thud. While Mademoiselle skips across the field plucking daisies, Madame wipes her hands on her apron before sternly chastening the gardener.

***

In America, I’m still too young to become a “Ma’am” (incidentally, what a horribly dowdy word THAT is), so nobody calls me anything. The only exception to this rule occurs at Starbucks, where the staff requests my first name when I place my order and duly writes it on my cup, just like a urine sample. When my drink is ready, they trumpet “Cindyyyy!” even though I am standing right there at the counter, a pig at the trough waiting for the slop to be poured. On some days, I become Sydney or Christy or Sandy.

This demand for my first name feels uncomfortably familiar and distressingly intimate. It’s just coffee, after all. I want to rebel and go all haughty on them. “No, you may NOT have my first name. Or my last name, for that matter! You may have nothing of mine but my four dollars for what is really little more than a glass of warm milk! Take THAT!” But I never do. I’m not even a mademoiselle anymore. I have been stripped of my title and my magical powers.

But somehow, I doubt the beautiful silvery boulangerie lady would suffer this forced intimacy. Somehow I think she’d stand up for herself. She is a Madame, after all. Maybe growing older will be fun after all.