Homelife

1. The Manor

Our home, yellow and covered in ivy with Yusuf (pronounced you- soof) modeling the gate. The house is four stories and has four water closets, five bathrooms, and three kitchens. We refer to it as the "manor" when Marianne is not around. It's probably the most spacious house in crowded parts of Western Europe, but alas veers on hoarder-esque. I mean, I'm not exactly known for organization and anti-bacterial soap and I have kind of grown accustomed to the clutter but still, sometimes I feel unclean when I look around the house. There are trinkets covering the surfaces and if you find something you can be sure there are at least nine more of it (past trinket collection discoveries: old shoes, empty perfume bottles, rugs that once had a pattern, singing animatronic stuffed plush ducks). That being said, I feel like Madeline sans Nun (which has been my favorite halloween costume to tell people I'm going to do and never do for years).

2. Laura

Here is Laura, the newest colocataire. She is a "kine" which means nothing to you and that's fine. She's here studying to add "osteopathe" to her title of "kine", a two-year process. She comes home every night at 5:30 (18h30, ahem), asks me to lay on my stomach, and proceeds to crack and stretch my limbs with the ease of someone who is still learning how to do something. This is dinner table talk:

"Today we studied (insert body part here)" - Laura

"That's good!" - Me

"Yeah, I am so tired."

"Oh really, that's hard."
"Yes and those two pregnant girls had trouble."

"Really?"

"Yeah but you know, we're all comfortable now."

"That's cool."

As you can see, my French vocabulary is vast and intimidating.

Laura is great to live with because she offers me chocolate after every meal, is not easily swayed when she has already made a decision (allowing me to follow suit if, say, my ladylady is trying to make us eat pumpkin soup with mold on it), has read every Nicholas Sparks book, is currently keeping up with eight tv shows (she has a chart on a post-it, incredible), has a juicy relationship that I feel part of due to nightly updates, and is close with her Dad and sympathetic towards her Mom. She is from Strasbourg, by the way, so she speaks German in addition to French and eats a lot of saucisson.

3. Yusuf

Sorry about the terrible quality of this photo, it does not reflect the quality of our relationship. When I am being real with myself, I must acknowledge that Yus is the reason I have friends, the reason I know how to buy produce at the grocery story, and the reason I am not late paying rent every month. Unfortunately (or as the French say: malheureusement), he is also the reason I yell understated threats such as, "If you ask me that one more time I am never answering your questions again" and "I'm going to hurt you."

Yusuf is 19, hails from Franche Comte (which, for the first week living here, I thought was him just saying "French Country" in English with a crazy French accent), gets a lot of pleasure out of planning daily events, loves Grey's Anatomy, speaks great English, and has a tendency to misuse cuss words. He also loves to say "Americans are the gendarmes of the world" and "You are not in America, you know" when I do harmlessly American things like eat couscous with a spoon and forget that I can't go shopping during lunch (everything is closed during lunch).

This is a common conversation between us (it should be noted that he speaks to me in English usually and I speak to him in French. I will try to inject the awkward language we both use but that is mostly showcased in our accents):

Yusuf walks into my room.

"Hello! You are tired?" Yusuf

"No?" Me

"You are sick?"

"No?"

"...Okay. You want to eat in ten minutes?"

"It's 6:30!" (The people of Vichy eat at 8, okay)

"I am hungry!" - Yusuf

"Ok, we can go downstairs to eat at seven if you want." - Me

"You ask your friends to come tonight?"

"I don't know, maybe."

"Johannah! Fucking business!"

....

"Johannah, I invite my friends, you invite your friends."

"Yusuf I said maybe!"

"Call them."

"I don't know."

"Call them!"

"How do you say 'nagging' in French?"

"What? I don't know this word. Johannah! Call them!"

"If you ask me again, I will never do it."

"Fuck yourself! You know, in class today we did only crosswords." He then comes and sits on my bed and tells me a lot of stories about class in which I reply:

"That's annoying, how boring."

"Okay, dine at 7. Chao."

An American reading this might be jostled by the expletives, but pay no mind. He doesn't really understand the connotations and the first week in which he said "fucking business" I laughed so hard every time I have erased any possibility in his mind that this phrase could be offensive or just weird and nonsensical.

These conversations both make it seem like I am spoken at and never offer up my own experiences, NOT SO. I chose conversations that I think of as "classic Yusuf" and "classic Laura." Classic me is, well, I don't really know but anyone reading this probably does.

Dinners lately have just been me, Laura and Yusuf because Marianne has been busy and/or out of town. Yusuf speaks some German, though not as well as he speaks English, so one night we had Yusuf tell Laura things in German, Laura would tell them to me in English (she's rusty but really good I think), and then I would repeat it back to Yusuf in French. This was mostly hilarious and not super productive and the moments when we all laughed made me think of a camera gently pulling back from a dinner scene in Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants in which all the girls look shiny and happy.

I would give you a little clip about Marianne but I have just scratched the surface of her personhood, pretty sure. I think this about a lot of people and usually discover that still waters run normal depth, but with Marianne I'm betting my bottom dollar that there's a lot going on.

Proof: She's been to tons of countries (none of which sound lame), her husband died of cancer when he was 30 and when she told me the story I was having a harder time keeping it together than she was, she shares a dog with her best friend, her son and his wife and her two granddaughters lived in Japan for two years, and most depth-indicating: she started a university 25 years ago in Vichy and still runs it.

I am sorry that I also do not have a picture of Marianne. Maybe next time. Speaking of next time, maybe it will be sooner than later since I'm on a facebook hiatus and the internet means nothing to me now.

Missing you, loved ones!