you go girlfriend

You Go Girlfriend

To me, the word "girlfriend" brings to mind Wednesday nights with my

New York girlfriends at Stingy Lulus, drinking frozen cosmos and

reading each other's sexscopes while getting sewing tips from our

drag-queen cocktail waitress. Or watching all kazillion hours of the

BBC version of Pride and Prejudice back-to-back with a sick

girlfriend, and afterwards plotting how we would kidnap Colin Firth

away from his Italian wife and force him to be our cabana boy.

However, when Laurent and I moved back to France two years ago, I

packed the idea of girlfriends away into a box in the back of my mind,

and strategized how I could visit my friends in Paris and London as

often as possible. Because I knew I wouldn't make any girlfriends in

Restign�, fully expecting to be the only Anglophone for miles around.

And with my previous record of making French girlfriends (that record

consisting of "none"), my chances of drinking blenders-full of Pina

Coladas with a Restignion copine while giving ourselves pedicures and

rating Calvin Kline underwear models was going to be pretty thin.

There is a huge controversy amongst expat women in France about the

"girlfriend" issue. Many will tell you that French women don't make

girlfriends. They say that for the French woman, all friends of female

persuasion were made during childhood, and that after grade school

making new girlfriends just isn't done. However, I have had that

theory refuted by several French guy friends who claim to know adult

women who have actually made other female friends. But then again,

these are guys talking, and they obviously haven't experienced the

female-to-female dynamic with une francaise.

All I can tell you is what I know personally. When I asked my SIL a

few years ago if she had managed to make some girlfriends in Cannes,

where she had moved the year before, she looked confused for a few

seconds, looked over at her aunt who gave her a significant look back,

and then said to me, "Why would I want girlfriends? My boyfriend has

friends and when we want to go out, we see them." Then the aunt chimed

in, "She's not a little girl anymore. You only have girlfriends when

you're young. She doesn't need them now that she's an adult." I filed

that conversation away under "cultural differences", and tried to stay

open-minded.

I also know that in the five years I lived in Paris I made an effort

to befriend several girls I met through friends or at parties, and

none would ever return my phone calls. Of course, it could have been

me. Who wants to be friends with the loud American whose idea of a

good time is drinking blenders of frozen cocktails and swooning over

Colin Firth?

I later received reports from a few friends who claimed to have made

French girlfriends, and after questioning them about the nature of

these particular francaises, found that they had all traveled

extensively or lived in other countries. The assumption was made that

these particular specimens had their feelings towards girlie

friendship modified by their experiences abroad. This still didn't

help me with my particular conundrum, seeing that most women I've met

in Restign� haven't traveled much further than Chinon.

And then, all of a sudden, before I even realized what had happened, I

made a friend. In Restign�. She's a woman. And she's French. Do you

remember Sabine*, the woman who had her head between my legs during

the Pregnancy Class swimming session? Well, after that intimate

experience, we swapped phone numbers and met up a couple of times. A

few weeks later, we were walking (or waddling, rather, since we were

both 8 months pregnant) down a street in Bourgueil, when she suddenly

grabbed me by the arm and kissed my cheek and said, "I just know we're

going to be great friends." I almost gave birth right there outside

the boulangerie from the shock. Trying not to act surprised or smile

too big (too American - don't want to scare potential friends off), I

replied, "I hope so," and we continued waddling down the street.

A couple of weeks later, I phoned Sabine up and asked if she wanted to

go to lunch in Chinon. "Would I?" she exclaimed. "I haven't gone out

to lunch with anyone since I moved here from Paris two years ago.

People here don't do lunch. I would die for a lunch at an outdoor

terrace!" So the next day we found ourselves sitting outside a

restaurant in Chinon at a table-for-four, since we were too enormous

to fit at a smaller one, eating gazpacho and talking about our

previous big-city lives.

That night I went into labor. I phoned Sabine the next morning to tell

her that the labor had stopped, but the clinic wouldn't let me go

home, so I basically had to sit around and wait until something

happened. (Laurent was taking care of Max until he got a call from me

to come back.) She arrived an hour later with two pains au chocolat

and kept me company for the afternoon. The next evening I sent her a

text to tell her that Lucia had been born in the early hours of the

morning. She sent me a text back telling me her daughter Sophie* had

been born a few hours after mine.

So now I have a friend who has a daughter with the same birthday as

mine. We live about fifteen minutes apart, and see each other about

once a week. We haven't yet had a Margarita Night, and I haven't

brought up the subject of hot British movie stars. I try not to laugh

too loudly or smile too big so as not to freak her out with my blatant

Americanness. I'm not sure what the rules are for being friends with a

French woman but, if only to know I have someone to go to lunch with,

I'm willing to figure it out.

*Names changed so as not to jinx anything.

Sabine, Sophie, Lucia and me back in July.