In my American suburbs, on the nickel lawn, “posters proudly announce that your child has just finished the nursery”

My street isn’t called Wisteria Lane, I don’t have dead bodies in my cupboards, and I’m not a desperate housewife. But maybe I’ll end up like this. It’s been six months since, to tell you about the United States, I established my base camp in Bethesda, a suburb of Washington that looks like something straight out of a TV series. It took me a while to absorb the shock of landing in the land of sheriffs, millionaires and platinum blond brides. And then I said to myself that if the daily life of an American suburb had been able to feed the eight seasons of a soap opera, it could well give rise to a chronicle.

Six months ago, therefore, I crossed the Atlantic in the manner of Christopher Columbus. Like him, I thought I was setting foot on familiar ground (what a mistake!) and, like him, I brought all kinds of ultra-contagious diseases in my suitcases: my husband and I the inevitable Covid, my eldest sons of enormous lice, and my baby has chickenpox. « Is he OK ? » asked horrified, the first person I passed, pointing to my toddler covered in red pustules in his stroller. First big drawdown: in real life, Americans are not like us. They don’t know anything about the itching of chicken pox, this initiation rite which in France produces the men and women of tomorrow.

They are another kind of Westerner, those who vaccinate against chickenpox as they wash their chicken with chlorine. Or