Le Foulard - Part III

“I wanted to discuss…well you see, I was thinking maybe…,” I began, cursing how ill-adapted my colloquial French is to more formal situations, such as pap smears.

Docteur Le Foulard watched me, expectantly.

“The thing is, you see, I’m thinking of perhaps having a third child.”

Docteur Le Foulard frowned slightly.

I panicked. Had I addressed him with “tu” instead of “vous” by mistake? I had been known to do this before in formal situations and there was nothing that threw off the French quite like it; I did not want to throw off the man who would soon be giving me an internal.

“Et alors?” He prompted.

“Well. For one thing, I’m 34 and I’ll be 35 in October. Is that too old?”

He didn’t smile exactly, but his ice blue eyes crinkled un petit peu. “Thirty-five hardly makes one a biblical figure.”

I contemplated this nugget of wisdom for a time. “So it’s not too old?” I said, just to get things straight.

“Non.”

All this time Franck had been sitting patiently in a matching rattan chair beside me, clearly trying to figure out a way to charm the gynecologist into being a bit less aloof.

“She’s had two Casearians,” Franck offered. I was dismayed to realize that my husband, a man who on an off day could charm a Bedouin into buying sand, seemed to be at an utter loss with Docteur Le Foulard.

Docteur Le Foulard seemed a teeny fraction more interested. “And why was that?”

"My first daughter was set to come out feet first," I explained with a laugh at the crap-shoot that is childbirth. “And my second one horizontally.”

“Ah,” was all he said, looking about as amused as an existentialist, and let out a tragic sigh.

I tried to decipher whether the sigh meant that he found these particularly good reasons to have a caesarian, or particularly bad reasons, or whether he was simply contemplating the foie gras his wife was going to serve for dinner. Before I had the chance to draw any conclusions he waved me imperiously towards a little room off his examining room and requested that I undress - using the “vous” form, of course.

Barrel through, Laura, I chanted to myself. Just barrel through...

To be continued...