My senior citizen French class started up again for the summer, and we had three new members in our usual classroom along with the usual group. The instructor had forgotten to put the text in his course description, so the new people didn’t have the book with them, and had to sit next to someone who did have it. A new girl was sitting next to me staring over at my book; she had long hair, all the way down her back, and a decent knowledge of French. She looked apprehensive.

When I came in the room, the Russian woman was explaining something to a couple of people, with animation, and insisting that everyone sign in on the class sheet.

It was my third time taking the class, so I am not the new girl any more. Janice was explaining to another newcomer that we are all over the place with our ability to speak French. “There’s people who don’t know much at all. Then there’s people who took French 50 years ago in high school,” she said.

The instructor arrived, settled himself, looked around, and asked if I had signed in. “On the back of the sheet,” I said, and he turned it over as if the attendance sheet didn’t always have two sides to it. He mispronounced my name as usual, then launched into a review of the subjunctive, and I sighed inwardly because we spent all last semester not he subjunctive, but oh, what the hell.

It was nice to fall into our usual routine, the instructor demanding that we repeat ourselves because he can’t hear very well, the usual wild mispronunciations, the usual admonishments from the instructor when too many people were talking. The long-haired woman started to relax. At one point, when Howard said something correctly and the instructor thought he had said it wrong, I leaned over and whispered to her, “Nobody in this class can hear very well,” and she grinned and said her husband was getting a little deaf.

The instructor told us to come up with a sentence using the subjunctive, assigning each of us a verb. Mine was “empêcher,” which felt difficult, but I came up with, “Il faut empêcher que mon chat vomisse sur le tapis,” which means “the cat must be prevented from throwing up on the carpet,” and the instructor couldn’t find anything wrong with my grammar, but made a “yuck” face.

Later on, he assigned me “tenir à ce que,” and I said, “Je tiens à ce que vous m’accompagniez à New York pour voir l’exposition Raphaël,” meaning “I insist that you accompany me to New York to see the Raphaël exhibition,” and everyone started talking excitedly about their plans to go, because that’s how everyone rolls in that class. They were startled to find out I went the day before; I told them it was really crowded. We digressed to discussing the costume exhibition, which I said was in the space occupied by the museum book shop.

“It’s a gift shop, not a book shop,” said Debbie, reprovingly. She’s a reproving kind of person.

“I buy books in it, so I call it a book shop,” I said amiably, and Debbie let it drop.

We staggered on through a discussion of the relative pronouns “qui” and “que,” and the long haired woman, whose name was Kathleen, whispered to me, “This is really fun.”

“It really is,” I said. And it is, god knows why.