41 — I Was the Student That Made My French Teacher a Chain Smoker
Unwilling to yield to the stupid rules of French grammar, my stubbornness broke her resolve
In Junior High, my French class began and ended with taking attendance, and I drew a line in the sand as soon as I sat at my desk.
Our French Teacher, Madame Doolie (or could have been Dooley or Deuxliex, I can’t remember), never wasted an opportunity to have us practice our second official language. So, attendance was not merely her calling out names with the reciprocating, “here.” That was how the English did things; everyone knew three things about the English; they were lazy, terrible cooks, and a dentist’s dream.
Attendance in Madame D’s class was her calling out your name, and then the summoned student would rise from their chair, stand awkwardly beside their desk, and say, “My name is _ _ _,” followed by “Good morning, Madame Doolie.”
Let’s run that through with a nice, regular name like Billy.
Madame Doolie: Billy?
Billy: “Je m’appelle Billy. Bonjour Madame Doolie.”
Easy-peazy-lemon-squeezy.
Now let’s try that with a 25-cent handle like my Hungarian father bestowed upon me — in a small, working-class, mostly redneck mining town in the Canadian Rockies.
While my namesake is a revered hero and unifying King of my ancestral homeland of Hungary and is so common there that the combination of my given and surname makes me the “John Smith” of Hungary, here in Canada, the name Arpad Nagy is about the same as spotting a unicorn.
Making it French only made it worse. And making that even worse was that I went by the standard shortened version of Arpad — Arpy.
Back to hell, err French Class.
Madame Doolie: “Arpy?”
Me: “Je m’appelle Arpy. Bonjour Madame Doolie.”
Madame Doolie: “That is incorrect. You must apply the French partitive article, D’, in front of Arpy. Therefore, the correct answer is, “my name is D’Arpy; Je m’appelle D’Arpy. Please say your name correctly.”
Me, red with embarrassment and fury: “Je m’appelle Arpy.”
Madame Doolie: “D’Arpy”
Me: “That’s not my name.”
MD: “In French, it is.”
Me: “In any language, it’s not.”
MD: “Are you going to obey my instructions or not?”
Me: “Yes, Madame Doolie.”
MD: Please say your name correctly.
Me: “Je m’appelle Arpy.”
MD: Eye tick starts going, fingers fidgeting on her hip; “Report to the office.”
We played a version of this game every class, three times a week.
On good days (for me) and weak days (for her), Mrs. D would come to my name on the roll call, then peering over her attendance clipboard, she would spy me as present, and a swift tick from her pencil marked my place; she moved down the list.
On days when I had won and lost, my punishment was garbage pick-up around the school buildings. Of course, nobody enjoys garbage duty, but I was outside, unbothered and unsupervised for the class duration.
And it was while on one of these rounds of rubbish recovery that I came upon Madame Doolie. Sheltered from the sight of the school windows and leaning into the gymnasium’s brick wall corner, the smoker’s blind spot, she was dragging on a king-size cigarette with all the fervor of a seasoned addict.
I smiled and waved.
My French teacher tugged her cardigan tighter across her chest, shook another cigarette from her pack, and lit it from the butt of the one that burned down.
The silent communication, via body language and eyes, shuttered to slits, required no translation.
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