The Case of the Falling Ventouses

It was a dark and stormy night. As I walked across a deserted place, dead leaves skittered along the cobblestones, prodded by unseen breaths of icy wind. A dark figure loomed atop a long-dry fontaine, his stony gaze seeming to follow me. The quincaillerie was unlit, but I could see the silhouette of a woman glowing eerily from within. As I reached up to open the door, a chill ran down my spine. The hinges creaked from disuse. The woman inside spun around and fixed me with her dark eyes.

"Bonjour, Mademoiselle!" she said cheerily.

Cheerily?

Yes, cheerily. And I guess it wasn't so much a "dark and stormy night" as a grey and overcast afternoon. And the place was deserted, but that's because it was a cold Saturday afternoon, and the fountain wasn't running, of course, because it's been turned off for the winter. But the hardware store did draw me in, quite excitedly, since I've been looking for this particular kind of hardware store since getting here. I've wanted suction cups with hooks to stick up in my kitchen to hang my cooking utensils, since I have very limited cupboard space, and the tin can they were in always falls over. I looked in various "housewares" stores, and asked around, but no luck. Of course, all of this looking around was preceded by my looking up the word for "suction cup" in French: une ventouse. Which happens to be the same word for a plunger, so each and every request for these little plastic-y things must be accompanied by a rather lengthy explanation that I'm looking for petite ventouses, avec crochets – with hooks – so I can accrocher – hang – things in my kitchen.

Since all the "real" stores were big no-gos, I was excited to find exactly the kind of hardware store I was sure would have my ventouses. Think less like spacious Home Depot and more like your grandfather's crowded workshop, with the odds and ends necessary for any occasion. Add some dusty and dingy for good effect, as well. That was what I found. And of course, they had exactly what I was looking for.

Or so I thought.

They looked like a slightly-less-dependable French version of the handy American pieces of rubber and wire, so I expressed my concern to the friendly woman running the shop, that they would not hold my lightweight plastic utensils. "But of course!" she assured me. So I paid for them and left. Got home, and, you guessed it, within 20 minutes my utensils and the flimsy ventouses were all over the floor. Many utensil-free trials later, and the ventouses would still not even hold their own weight.

So the unsatisfied American customer in me just couldn't let it go. (I paid a euro a piece for them, after all!) Yesterday I got back from school, took up the handful of ventouses and went back to the quincaillerie. Fortunately, the same woman was there, and she remembered me. I apologetically explained to her (since the French language seems to be such that one cannot be forceful or even irritated without also being apologetic and terribly polite) that indeed, the ventouses just didn't cut it. She seemed surprised and a bit disbelieving. After a few back-and-forths about the conditions under which I tried out the ventouses, she asked me one more question:
"Is your kitchen warm?"
---"Um, sort of, yes?"
"I mean, do you have heat in your apartment?"
---"Yes."
"Ahh. That must be it."
---"!?!? [Do you not expect me to have a heated apartment!?!?]"

She agreed to let me exchange the ventouses for some plastic hooks with adhesive strips (which I really didn't want in the first place, but they're better than nothing), which she assured me would hold better than the ventouses in any case.

And so they have:
And I successfully argued/negotiated with a stubborn older French woman and got my way.

I think.

Because I did leave, after thanking her profusely for her generosity, and promising to come back if I need anything else at all, with the distinct impression that she thought she had gotten her way...

La fin.