Go pick up a baguette, Madame Sadi tells me in rapid-fire French, and she presses a Euro coin into my hand.
This has become our routine. I come home from school, having ridden the metro 40 minutes from the 6th arrondissement, transferring to Line 4 at Réaumur–Sébastopol and hopping off at our stop in the 11th. Attention à la marche en descendant du train. The message, France’s “please mind the gap,” is seared into my neurons at this point.
Some days I’ll forget to immediately close and lock the door upon stepping into the apartment, for which Madame Sadi will chastise me the same way she chastises me for leaving the lights on or using toilet paper as tissues during my many bouts with the common cold.
Once I’ve dropped off my school bag on my bed in the room I’m technically renting, it’s time to think about dinner. Sometimes we have wine, once we had snails, always we have a baguette. Often, that’s my job.
I’ll clamber down the three flights of stairs one more time — I’m getting in a lot of steps over these three months — and look both ways for scooters as I cross the street to the boulangerie a stone’s throw from Madame Sadi’s apartment. At least, it would be a stone’s throw if I ever opened the windows of my room, which I don’t because there’s always some sort of construction going on on the building directly outside, and workers have a tendency to pop up when I least expect them.
The first time Madame Sadi laid out a dinner of Chinese food, it took me by surprise. The chicken and broccoli and beer seemed so out of place on the marble table in her dining room, the space of which was largely filled with my host mom’s paintings. When I walked into her apartment on the first day of my term studying in Paris, delirious with jet lag and trying to remember any French words, any at all, the paintings struck me right away — colorful and seemingly abstract until about week three, when I glanced around while eating dinner and realized I was surrounded by painted nudes.
Her art only adds to Madame’s natural aura of chic-ness, which is at a level I could only dream of achieving; she’s French-Algerian, has an adorable Persian greyhound named Thalya, and, apparently, she likes Tsingtao beer. So she’s chic, but also kind of a bro; I remember drinking wine, but I remember the green Tsingtao bottle next to my plate more so. With Chinese food, with pasta, with chicken, maybe even with the snails. (Probably not with the snails — I’m pretty sure that would be blasphemy.)
Throughout my time in Paris, I drink hot chocolate at Angelina’s and try wasabi at a sushi restaurant (which does nothing for my clogged sinuses) and I buy 13 euros worth of Haribo candy from a street vendor. I eat dinner at a restaurant in the Indian quarter and sip mulled wine while in line for Sainte-Chapelle. I buy dried apricots at an outdoor market and falafel recommended by Lenny Kravitz and scarf down an inordinate number of banana-nutella crepes.
And that one time, I try escargot.
But when I think of the food, I think of running across the street, inhaling the intense smell of rising bread and shyly asking the clerk for a baguette as I clink a coin down on the counter. I think of the first time I was assigned to pick up dinner at the Chinese food restaurant in addition to my baguette duties and feeling a rush of pride. I think of the tangy taste of Tsingtao. It’s been six years, and I haven’t had it since.