When in French: Love in a Second Language. Lauren Collins

I became Laura, not Laurence. Roosters crowed cocorico instead of quiquiriki. On Wednesdays the record player crackled out “La Cucaracha” and, regardless of the season, “Feliz Navidad.”

      One day our English teacher asked us to write a poem. My parents found mine not long ago. They were coming to London for my wedding to Olivier, the night before which we were planning a big dinner in a pub. Yorkshire pudding was on the menu, and they weren’t sure what it was.

      My father flipped to the Y section of the family dictionary. A piece of loose-leaf paper fluttered to the ground. I had completed the poetry assignment with a fuzzy orange marker:

      I wish I could travel around the world, and s-e-e-e all the th-i-i-i-ngs.

      Oh, I would see all the countries and beautiful customs.

      Oh, I would see all the countries, Romainia Greece and all.

      I would see all the beautiful cultures. I wish I-I-I could.

      Oh, it would be so interesting. I wish I could travel around the w-o-o-o-o-rld. Oh!

      THE FIRST PLACE I ever went was Disney World. We crammed into the car with one tape, Jack Nicholson and Bobby McFerrin doing Kipling’s story about how the elephant, on the banks of the “great gray-green, greasy Limpopo River,” got his trunk. The drive took nine hours: Myrtle Beach, where we stocked up on bang snaps and Roman candles; Savannah; St. Augustine; Daytona Beach. Finally, we arrived at Polynesian Village, a longhouse-style resort with koi ponds and a tropical rain forest in the lobby.

      I pulled on tube socks and white sneakers and slung a purple plastic camera across my chest. Disappointment quickly set in. I was too scared to ride Space Mountain. Cinderella’s castle held little allure—I was more interested in foreign countries than magic kingdoms. To a first-time traveler with dreams of high adventure, Main Street, U.S.A., seemed a scam, a staycation in the guise of a trip down memory lane. The windows of the shops were filigreed with the names of fake proprietors. I clocked a barbershop and some fudge kitchens. Where were the ziggurats, the cassowaries and the cuneiform tablets, the temples of marble and pillars of stone?

      The next morning, we took the shuttle to Epcot. As we crossed into the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow—even now, my impression of exoticism is such that the dome marking its entrance seems less a golf ball than a crystal ball, or at the very least a Scandinavian light fixture—I was transported, exported, by some freaky wormhole of globalization in which one could see the world by essentially staying at home.

      We boarded Friendship Boats, approaching the World Showcase Lagoon on the International Gateway canal. We took a left into Mexico, where we rode a marionette carousel before proceeding southwest to the tea shops of China. We strolled around a platz. We listened to a campanile toll, saw the Eiffel Tower. We were after the epoch of Equatorial Africa (which Disney had planned, but never built) but before the dawn of Norway (whose pavilion would open in 1988, featuring a Viking ship and a stave church). Pubs and pyramids were coeval. Time seemed to scramble, as though it had been snipped up and pasted back together, like the map.

      “All areas of Morocco are wheelchair accessible,” the literature advised. In the medina, we followed the twang of an oud to a courtyard fragrant with olive trees and date palms. A belly dancer shimmied, her abdomen a bowl of rice pudding whose meniscus never broke. One of the musicians grabbed my hand and pulled me into a sort of conga line. Then and forever shy of crowd participation, I let completely, uncharacteristically loose.

      French braid flying, I started doing something that would have looked like the twist, were it not for the way I held my left leg in a tendu, the dutiful habit of a longtime ballet student. I was the center of a scrum of guys wearing scarlet fezzes. This, to me, was the magic kingdom. In Italy the Renaissance statues were hollow, impaled on metal rods to combat the Florida wind, and in Canada the loggers’ shirts were made of mock flannel to combat the Florida sun. I didn’t know. Simulations sometimes anticipate their simulacra. If I was ever going to go to Morocco, it was because I had already been.

      IN THOSE DAYS my parents occasionally went away too. That fall they took the ferry with some friends to Bald Head, a barrier island known for Old Baldy, its defunct lighthouse. There were no cars there. It was a Saturday morning when my brother and I got the news that, the night before, my father had been thrown from the golf cart that he and my mother and their friends were riding in as it took a sharp curve, hitting his head on a concrete footpath. He was thirty-seven, in a coma. There was blood on his brain. Later, at Sunday school, one of my classmates—a miniature town crier in khaki pants and a blue blazer, lips ringed with doughnut powder—circulated a rumor that he had had too much to drink.

      He had been the adventurer in our household, to the extent that there was one. In the summer of 1966 he had traveled to Madrid as part of a delegation from his Catholic boys’ high school. One day he and a friend ditched their coats and ties and ran off to Gibraltar, where they hopped a boat to Tangier. The expedition yielded a sheepskin rug and twenty-one demerits, one more triggering automatic expulsion in the coming academic year.

      The Marianist brothers of the Jericho Turnpike did not succeed, however, in stifling his curiosity about the world. He kept a list of every bird he had ever seen, dating from his days as a preadolescent twitcher, stalking the marshes of Alley Pond Park in Queens. Never mind that my father had been outside of America but once: he knew the capital of every country, the name of every river, which sea abutted what strait, how many countries were completely surrounded by other countries (three: Lesotho, San Marino, and Vatican City), why Chicago O’Hare’s abbreviation was ORD (it used to be called Orchard Field).

      By the time I’d started school, he was half of a two-man law firm that occupied a three-bedroom cottage a few blocks from the county courthouse. His office was my first foreign country: the wooden shingle hanging from the front porch, as though to mark a border crossing; the smell of cigarettes and correction fluid and shirt starch; the gold pens; the yellow pads; the zinging typewriter; the kitchenette drawers full of Toast Chees and Captain’s Wafers and Nekot cookies; the sign behind the desk of Teresa, his all-powerful secretary, that read “I Go from Zero to Bitch in 3.5 Seconds.” (Teresa was my first bureaucrat.) One of my father’s clients, Marshgrass, paid him in grouper and bluefish. A judge named Napoleon Bonaparte Barefoot presided over district court. The language was crisp, formal, aspirated (affidavit, docket, retainer), and then demotic and slurry (a “dooey” was a Driving Under the Influence charge).

      Each morning I helped my father pick out a tie, begging him, as we debated dots or stripes, to walk me through the day’s cases. When friends came over for slumber parties, I’d insist that we try our Barbies for prostitution. As I understood it, prostitution entailed sleeping with someone to whom you weren’t married. We often declared mistrials, in the knowledge that, having shared a bed, we were probably prostitutes ourselves.

      At night I ran to the door, as eager as a sports fan to hear which cases my father had won, which he’d lost, how the bailiff had yelled at a defendant to get a belt. I often asked him to tell the story of one of his first trials, which concerned a man who had had the misfortune to be urinating in an alleyway where someone had recently broken into a car. A police officer approached and told him he was under arrest.

      “What the fuck?” he said.

      The police arrested him and took him to the station, where they put him in front of a witness, who said that the guy in front of him was definitely not the guy he’d just seen running away from the scene of the crime. The police charged my father’s client anyhow, with disorderly conduct.

      My father, just out of law school, spent a week in the library, trying to ensure that his client wouldn’t end up with a criminal record on account of a single curse.

      When the trial date arrived, the state presented its case. My father then rose and asked to approach the judge. Permission granted, he trudged toward the bench, carrying a leather-bound volume in which he had carefully marked the relevant law. Disorderly conduct, the book explained, had been committed only by a person who had said or done something that was “plainly likely to provoke violent retaliation,” not by one who had merely spouted off a profanity without the expectation