by Azadeh Amirsadri
In 1977, I was a student at the University of Pennsylvania, majoring in French Literature. I was 19 years old and pregnant with my first child. I would dress in a long shapeless plaid green and black dress, tie my hair with an off-white headscarf, and wear Dr. Scholl’s slide sandals trying very hard to blend in and look cool and hippyish, but that look wasn’t really working well for me. The scarf at times became a long neck shawl and the ‘cool and I don’t care’ 70’s look became more of a loose colorless dress on top of my plaid dress, giving me the appearance of a field-working peasant. My sandals added absolutely nothing, except making me trip on the sidewalks.
I was an international student, in the process of learning English as I was enrolled in advanced French classes. I was overwhelmed by the size of the campus, all the city blocks it covered and getting to class on time during the 10 minutes I had between classes. I was also both fascinated and secretly envious of the female students who laid on the grass, wearing bikini tops and shorts and studying or just hanging out.
Most days for lunch, I would go to Houston Hall, a large campus cafeteria near Williams Hall, where my classes were held. I was in line one day, trying very hard to be cool and to fit in, and ordered one of the only few foods I could pronounce with ease: cheeseburger, hamburger, or soup. I would not veer into difficult sandwich names where I had to specify the type of bread, toasted or not, condiments, and other words I didn’t know nor could say. The lady behind the counter was working fast and after my burger order, she asked me what I wanted to drink. “Water” I said, or so I thought. It came out as a weak ‘watter’ and she didn’t have time for someone slowing her down. “What?” She yelled and I lost all courage and barely murmured ‘woutter’ trying to make it sound like the way Philadelphians pronounce that word, except it came out even worse than the first time. Terrified, I repeated it, hoping she could understand me. I wish I had thought of Coke or Pepsi or any other beverage I could pronounce. I really wanted milk since I was pregnant and believed drinking it would make my baby stronger, but saying “meelk” was out of the question for me, especially after my lame water request.
I was embarrassed and uncomfortable as I could hear the students in line behind me getting impatient. I looked at the person behind me and he must have felt bad because he turned to the lady behind the counter and said “She wants water.” I forced a smile at him and got my water from the unsmiling lady. I went to a corner of that huge hall, where I ate my burger and drank my water without making eye contact with anyone. I didn’t want to be other in that sea of students, the one who can’t order correctly. After my lunch, I lit a cigarette and enjoyed it thoroughly, happy to blend in, since smoking indoors was the norm and doctors had not raised the alarm about smoking in general, and smoking while pregnant specifically.
Because I had attended a French Catholic school back home and had lived in France for three years, my French was fluent and better than the students who had learned their French in American high schools. One of my classmates was a beautiful girl named Gracie who was extra nice to me and could see through my veneer of trying hard to look cool and not achieving cool at all, yet she liked me anyway. The boys in the class tried to talk to her and she would engage and flirt back with some of them, but nothing too serious it seemed. Gracie was also fluent in French and would talk to me before and after class. Sometimes during class, she would look at me and smile when others did not understand something in French and she would roll her eyes. I would smile back and at times, we’d giggle quietly about our French superiority. As much as I liked her, I felt she was out of my league and I was too insecure on so many levels to accept her friendship and remained just a casual classmate of hers. I would look at her in class and admire her perfect face and body and didn’t understand why she would even want to enter my world.
One of our professors, a kind and bon-vivant Australian shared his joys of 16th-century literature, his love of traveling the world, and his appreciation of French wines. He made Montaigne and Rabelais come to life in class and told funny stories of his trips to France as a young man before he was fully fluent in French. On the last day of class, he brought in a bottle of wine and shared it with anyone who wanted some. Pregnant peasant-looking me had a glass as did beautiful elegant Gracie. We talked some more that day. She told me she travels to Europe a lot, usually stays in France and Monaco, and has to speak French to her cousins, even though they all speak English. She said she is close to her family and loves her aunt in Monaco.
After that semester, I didn’t see her on campus again. At the end of the school year, I moved away from Philadelphia to New London, CT and transferred to another college.
Years later, I realized Gracie was a niece of Princess Grace of Monaco, a family I was obsessed with as a teenager to the point of carrying pictures of Caroline of Monaco (cut from Paris Match magazines) in my book bag because, to me, she was the most beautiful girl on earth. I wish I had known who Gracie was back then so I could tell her how I wanted to grow up and be Caroline, and that she looked so much like her. Gracie had dropped a lot of hints about who she was, but I didn’t pick up on them. But mostly, I wish I could thank her for her acceptance of me and her attempts at being a friend, when I was not very accepting of myself and trying so hard to fit into something I wasn’t.