The Alimentation Générale – the French version of the convenience store – is a godsend on Sundays and late nights, when supermarkets and other businesses are closed.  Often owned by Muslims, whose holy day is Friday, they seem on Sundays like a beacon of light in the commercial fog of a shut-down city.  I, quite fortuitously, live just across the street from an alimentation générale, which carries the usual hodgepodge of slightly overpriced goods, milk and butter one might need in a cooking emergency, bruised produce, snacks and candy, chewing gum, cigarettes, and telephone cards.

I often hop down the four flights when I am in my apartment writing, overcome by a craving for chocolate or sweets.  The owner asks me if this evening it will be my usual Malabars – single-wrapped bubble gum with a cartoon or joke inside, only sixty centimes apiece – or licorice candy.  I joke with him, excusing myself for pulling him away from his shelving to ring up a purchase so insubstantial.  "It won’t be on account of me that you become rich," I say with an apologetic laugh.

Jelal always returns my laugh good-naturedly.  He asks me how I am doing in his jolly voice, lilting with the gutteral rise and fall of his accent, "Comment tu vas?" The second time we spoke, he addressed me with the familiar tu, adopted more easily among Arabs than European French.  It was a relief from the stuffy rules of politesse that dictate French interactions.  It also made me feel like I belonged, and that this alimentation générale belonged to me.  It was comforting, especially after having arrived in a foreign country, and feeling like a boat in stormy waters without an anchor.

In July, when communication had deteriorated between me and the French woman I was working with, I wandered into an alimentation générale late one night near where I was cat-sitting.  Having spent the evening moving my things to the new apartment, I came out of the metro, stooping under the weight of my backpack, only to realize it was too late to buy provisions for dinner at the supermarket.  Exhausted, I hobbled into a convenience store.  Perhaps it was only my imagination, but I thought I noticed sad eyes on the owner.  Perhaps, I mused, it was because he missed his homeland; or maybe he was frustrated because he had been a successful lawyer back in Algeria, but had to become a shopkeeper after immigrating to France.  I felt a kinship with him – two foreigners in a strange land.  I bought the cheese and vegetables for my dinner, and offered a smile as big as I could muster on my way out the door.

The first time I went to my alimentation générale, across the street from my studio on rue de Montmorency, the feeling was different.  Rather than kinship, I felt estranged – both from the stranger at the register and from myself.  I was jet-lagged from my flight, still thinking about the loud hiss on the RER ride from the airport that had made me jump.  I was still measuring time by how many days had passed since September 11^th – that Thursday it was only nine.  I was still trying to sort out my understanding of the world and of myself – how the week before, I had been stabbed by an impulse to destroy – so I could feel safe – whoever was responsible for the devastation I watched play out on my television, terrified that my brother might be dead.  How a shot of adrenaline had coursed through my body when I saw a dark-skinned family walking towards my terminal at Kennedy airport.  How there had been rumors that the owners of the deli on Roosevelt Island – Egyptians – had been threatened and assaulted after the attacks.

When I asked Jelal for a telephone card, I was extra conscious of my accent.  It marked me, just as his Semitic features marked him.  Instead of my usual friendly chatter, I was overcome with a loss for words.  The nightmarish memories that had come, in recent days, to define me, were now taboo.  It felt as though lines had been drawn, and sides had been decided for us.  By mere chance – I had been born in one place and the shopkeeper another – we had been thrown into opposing camps.

Looking to make conversation, I lamented that such a large portion of my paycheck went to communications.  "But it’s important to keep in touch with family," I said.  I did not mention where they were, though I normally boast my New York roots to everyone, and especially now I felt marked by my hometown more than ever.

I wanted to tell this man with the friendly eyes that I missed my city, whose heart had just been torn open.  I wanted to assure him that not all Americans were racist, and condemn any retaliation that might be inflicted upon Muslims in the U.S.  I wanted to apologize for the prejudice Arabs face in France.  I wanted us both to vow that we would not succumb to the polarization, to agree that what the world needed most right now was solidarity and communication.  But I couldn’t.  The narrow counter between us seemed to represent a huge gulf.  It was as though, because of acts committed by complete strangers, we no longer had the right to speak to one another; as though the tangled web of emotions – misunderstanding, fear, guilt – were too great.  Not knowing what else to do, I smiled extra wide on my way out, hoping Jelal would read in my eyes everything that I could not bring myself to say.

The second time I went to the shop Jelal tutoied me, and I wondered if the familiarity was a sign that he had, somehow, understood the message hidden in my smile.  Jelal’s two children were running about the store – two grinning kids with the same fuzzy hair as their father.  When I asked them their names, the boy, who is six, spoke for his younger sister.  Too shy to speak, she stood bravely next to her brother, offering me a timid grin around the thumb that was planted between her lips.  The brother teased her, tugging at the coarse braid sticking up from her head.  His torment was carried out in the same loving-infuriating way my own brother still teases me.  The little girl studied him with the same admiring eyes with which I used to watch my brother.

One evening, I played balloon volleyball with the children.  Jelal’s daughter offered the yellow balloon out to me with a proud grin, brave enough this time to whisper a greeting.  She giggled every time the balloon drifted near the ground.  The boy tried valiantly to prove his prowess, slapping the balloon with confidence every time it floated towards him, then looking up at me for approval.  Jelal watched us play from inside with a grin.

The shopkeeper’s wife was the last one I met; we have never talked much because her reserved nature arouses my shyness.  Mostly, she stays hidden at the back of the store, at the entrance to the family’s apartment.  She watches customers come and go as she feeds the children.  Often, the smell of hearty, spiced food wafts in from the doorway, reminding me of family.  I invent a story for their lives.  I imagine Jelal sitting with his son on his knee, explaining a verse from the Koran, and the mother showing the daughter how to set the table.  I wonder how they spend their weekends, and what television shows they like to watch together.  I try to imagine what it was like when Jelal and his wife fell in love, and I wonder if her hair – which is always hidden under her chador – is long and straight, or short and wavy.  I wonder if she judges me indecent for parading about with my head uncovered, or if she thinks I am a bad role model for her little girl.  If, as she peeks out from the back of the store, she resents the ease with which her husband and I joke when I come by for my sugar fix.

One afternoon, in the middle of my laundry, I realized I did not have enough change for the dryer.  I went to the alimentation générale with a large bill to by a pack of Hollywood Chewing Gum.  A different man stood behind the counter – a friend from Jelal’s bled – his hometown – in Tunisia.  He was tall and slightly built.  He watched, with dancing eyes and lips that twitched in amusement under a broomstick moustache, as I mulled over the flavors of gum.  He reminded me of a favorite uncle, and as I paid for the pack I chose, we chatted easily about the weather and the laundry.

The next evening I stopped at the alimentation générale with my American neighbor.  David and I jabbered in English, cajoling one another.  As the tall uncle watched, smiling, I chose my Malabars and handed him a five-franc coin.  He grinned as he gave me my change.  Then, as David and I were walking out the door, he called out, in thickly-accented English "Good-Bye!"

I wanted to laugh out loud, because I felt at that moment that I had gotten an response to my silent pleas for friendship.  The uncle, hearing us speak English in the brash, carefree American style so disdained in many parts of the world, had gone out of his way to bid us goodnight in our own language.  Grinning, I looked down into my hand, and counted one franc too many.  The uncle smiled warmly at me when I pressed it into the palm of his hand, and a spark of complicity flowed between us.  I climbed the stairs to my apartment, bathed in a feeling of triumph.

That night everything felt – precariously – right.  I wanted to hold on to that feeling, though I suspected that its naïve simplicity would never survive in this world.  Still, I allowed myself to idealize, to believe that if there were alimentation générales across the globe, where hopeful foreigners always bought their 60-centime gum; if everyone addressed one another with the familiar tu, and we all went out of our way to speak the language of a people caught in a cultural war against our own, then the world would be okay.  Everything might be horrible now, but, I dreamed, we would make it out of the turmoil and come out in the clear.

Mail:  GParnes@Yahoo.com

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