Paris Times Eight (28 page)

But in getting them to dream with me, I might have overstepped myself. I hadn't considered the consequences of blithely getting my children to play truant. My son's grade
3
teacher retaliated by loading us down with a bagful of math homework (“so he won't fall behind,” she had said firmly) to be completed by the time we returned to Toronto eight days later. I say “we” because I was the one who had to organize the morning study sessions and know the right answer from the wrong answer in order to help my eight-year-old get through the work.

It was geometry, which I hadn't contemplated in years, and in a way it was ironic that we had brought it with us to Paris, the city where several centuries earlier Descartes had formulated a system of knowing the world based on geometric principles. Soon after arriving there, my brain was swimming with questions regarding the relative position of figures of varying shapes, sizes, and spatiality in relation to others. It was hard going; math has never been my strong suit. It was exact. My thinking seemed to be more all over the place. It also reminded me of my shortcomings as a mother, of how much I had become like the one I used to come to Paris to escape. Impatient, agitated, a yeller. Like at that moment, tapping a finger on the textbook page explaining how the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. I shouted at my son to repeat the rule back to me. We'd gone over it a zillion times, but still he wasn't getting it. “Focus!” I hammered. He looked to be daydreaming, his green-blue eyes fixed on a spot beyond the window. I shouldn't have blamed him.

Our room was located on the
17
th floor of a residential building in the
15
th Arrondissement, a suburban neighborhood close to parks and a supermarket. I hadn't wanted to chase tots up spiralling staircases in a centuries-old hotel—charming in another life, but utterly impractical now. So on this trip I had opted for a kitchenette suite in an apartment-hotel, a relatively new concept for Paris, and a sign that the city was warming to the idea of family travel. It was a spacious corner unit, with windows for walls and sweeping views of the city, stretching from the undulating Seine in the east to the dome of the Panthéon in the west. Immediately before us loomed the Eiffel Tower, global icon of Paris. Now that I had geometry on the brain, I noted that it was a large three-dimensional column with a square base, a mathematically balanced structure. Bronze in color. A thing of rare beauty. My son called it the rocket ship, observing that its steel-clad nose butted the air as if at any moment it might burst through the clouds and take flight, high above Paris.

Beyond, looking like a milky mirage upon the hill, was Sacré-Coeur, reminding me of my husband, whom I had left behind. He was a professor now and he couldn't skip class. But not bringing him had been a mistake, I told myself. He was the good cop; I was the scolder-in-chief.

My four-year-old daughter was used to it. While I ranted at my son she sat quietly at my feet, drawing with her crayons a smiling, dark-haired lady with a heart on her dress and a rainbow for a hat. “It's you, mama,” she smiled, holding up the picture for me to admire. Lovely. Heartbreaking, really.

I stood up and looked out the window at Paris, my mood connecting with the silt-brown gush of the river. Trees lined the banks of the Seine, their leaves still green, despite it being the first day of December. I could see flowers in bloom on the rooftop gardens of surrounding apartment buildings. I could see people watching television. People having lunch. A man in a red scarf walked a dog on a leash in the park below, where children in colorful hats used sticks to trace their own made-up shapes in the mud.

I thought of the day before, our first day in Paris together, and how I had made us withstand the urge to sleep after our transatlantic flight. Maybe we were all still just very tired. I had taken them first to the grocery store, where we bought frozen pizza, chocolate milk, and candied chestnuts,
marrons glacés,
the dessert that always said Paris to me. After, we walked the short distance from our hotel on Rue du Théâtre to the quay near the Eiffel Tower, where we boarded a Bateau Mouche. I thought a boat ride down the Seine would be a good way to give them a feel for the city without them having to walk. We sat on the open deck, the weather that first day being full of sunshine. They were too young to heed the boat's prerecorded commentary illuminating the history of Paris through some of the monuments edging the Seine. As we chugged along under the city's bridges, they called out nonsense words to hear them echo back, as they laughed uproariously.

My daughter eventually nodded off, dropping like a stone into sleep, the way children will suddenly do. Her daisylike head wilted onto the boat's railing. I had to hold on to her for fear she'd topple into the river. When the ride came to a stop, I revived her with an invitation to ride the carousel near the Jardin du Trocadéro, close to the riverbank. With her brother, she whirled round and round on a painted horse, waving at me each time she passed me by. I bought them crêpes smeared with Nutella at the nearby concession booth. A pair of gypsy women attired in head kerchiefs and thick layers of colorful skirts worked the crowd. In their hennaed hands they held a stack of index cards. I hadn't paid attention until one of them shoved a card under my nose, compelling me to read. “I am sick, with six children to feed. Please help.” I was halfway through the typewritten plea when I realized I'd bitten the bait. I saw her signal to her cohort. She had caught one. An unsuspecting
étrangère
with more money than brains. They probably just wanted my handbag. But I glanced fearfully at my children, stuffing themselves, their little pale faces smeared with chocolate, worried the gypsies would snatch them instead. I rushed over to pull them close to my body, a nervous mother hen.

Turning now to my son, still gazing out the window, I said, with a softer voice this time, that if he couldn't tell me by the count of three how far a straight line between two points could reach, that was it. No swimming pool. “Um.” One. “Ah.” Two. “Indefinitely!” Three. Saved by the bell.

There was a swimming pool in the bowels of the building. I herded the kids out into the hallway, their bathing suits already under their clothes, and pushed the elevator button. It didn't ding. It spoke.
“La porte est ouverte,”
announced a discombobulated but dewy-sounding female voice as the door opened.
“La porte est fermée,”
it acknowledged as the door closed.
“Descendez,”
continued the voice, assuredly, when the high-tech lift plummeted, taking us two floors below the reception area to the subterranean spa. That's what I need, I thought as the kids stood spellbound inside the polished-chrome box. Computerized emotion. Everything regulated. Destination defined.

The doors opened again, and my kids ran to jam their things into a wall of lockers. I watched as they,
mes enfants
, scurried to the pool's edge: their elegantly proportioned limbs, their effortlessly straight backs, pliant as plasticine, the funny way they went forward on tiptoe, elbows fused to ribs, sucking on their fingers from excitement, and the goose-pimpling cold. They danced the tarantella as they peered deliriously into the blue, daring each other. “You go! No, you!” Both then leapt in fearlessly at the same time, smiling as they sank. “I can touch the bottom,” yelped my son, bubbling back up to the surface. “Can you?” I murmured, “Can you, really? Clever boy.”

The swim had tired us out—it was already ten o'clock at night—and once back upstairs in our ultramodern hotel room, upholstered in sapphire blue and pumpkin orange, I dressed my twosome in their pajamas and got them straight under the starched white sheets. I read them a story, something with a nativity theme given the season, and before turning off the lights sat with them to look out the window at the Eiffel Tower. It was lit up like a Christmas tree, sparkling and flashing in the velvety darkness. Paris in the sky with diamonds. Inside the tower's straddled legs were large boxlike elevators. We watched them go down, their steady rhythm making us all rather sleepy. I reached to turn off the bedside light and promised the children that we'd go up ourselves. They asked me what we'd find. I told them I couldn't say, exactly. In all my years coming to Paris, I had only ever admired this ur-symbol of the city from afar, never venturing up. This was because I had heard that it typically took hours of waiting in line to ride to the top, and that had seemed a waste of time to me. I also hadn't thought that looking out over Paris from above would serve me better than exploring it on foot below, preferring serendipitous discoveries of the city's treasures and mysteries to some prescribed touristy journey. But what was that to kids? They wanted the destination, not the journey. They wanted to go straight to the top. I wasn't going to deny them that pleasure, so I promised them, yes, we would ride the Eiffel Tower.

But the next day we woke to rain and bruised skies. Not good for riding to the top of Paris, I said to their chorus of moans. They clamored for a return to the swimming pool, which I vetoed, wanting to hold it in reserve as a treat for good behavior. I bundled them up, and we went outside, where the trees sighed and dropped the last of the summer's leaves into the gutter. But I wanted this to be a day unlike the days before. A day when I wouldn't yell. A day I would just try to enjoy for itself, I thought, as I marched the kids down the bustling Avenue Émile Zola, which was overhung with Christmas lights shaped like chandeliers, sparkling despite the downpour. I gave each child a coin and told them what to say in French to buy one of the cookies heaped delectably in a shop window. My daughter was game, but my son grew tongue-tied. Tears welled in his eyes. He said he was afraid of making a mistake, which I said was ridiculous, before realizing that in Paris I often had the same fear. He was the spitting image of my husband; everyone said so. A narrow face with rosebud lips and vaulted eyebrows. But at that moment I realized he was more like me. When we had been in the grocery store on the first day, I had brusquely hushed them when they went about chattering loudly in the aisles, playing sport with the live lobsters holed up in a much-too-small aquarium in the seafood section. “Stop speaking English!” I had blurted, feeling my foreignness in that store like a brand on my frowning forehead. “But we speak English!” wailed my daughter. I told her to shut up altogether, then. I was so embarrassed by my own imagined sense of inferiority among the French that I lashed out, hurting my own children. I left the store loaded down with plastic shopping bags, my children skipping gaily ahead, wondering, when in Paris would I ever relax?

The French tourist office had organized a lunch for us at Chez Clément, on the Champs-Élysées, its contribution to my story about children in Paris. I suppose the idea was to make sure I made note that the city of gastronomic adventure was inclusive of finicky palates of all ages. In any event I was glad for the free meal and a glimpse into an establishment that definitely would have eluded me in my life before kids. The decor consisted of old pots and pans hanging from the rafters, gingham curtains, and brightly painted flowerpots. The restaurant was large and spread out over two floors. Adults sat at most of the tables, it being Paris at noon, the time when everyone in the city, it seemed, stopped for lunch. We were shepherded down-stairs, making me think that little had changed in Paris where children and dining was concerned. But there I spied whimsical furnishings in the form of high chairs made out of old grandfather clocks. The tight-lipped maître d' handed us three large menus, obviously assuming the children could read, and read French. For which I didn't want to chastise him, glad to think someone else recognized them as budding prodigies. The menu offered typical bistro fare—poached salmon, roast chicken, crème brûlée. There was also a children's menu, offering simply a main dish, a dessert, and a drink. But it was recommended I select from the elaborate five-course prix fixe menu, which I did, being a guest. My ravenous children ate steadily through the bread and the beef, but they turned their noses up at the liver pâté and the
soupe à l'oignon
that came with their meals. They claimed suddenly to be full and repeatedly ran out of their brightly painted chairs to the bathroom, leaving me to finish their chocolate ice creams. The maître d', whom I thought had been barely tolerating us, appeared smiling at meal's end with yo-yos, which he gave to each child. My son's was royal-blue, my daughter's pink. They sat transfixed as this suddenly jolly man showed them tricks like how to rock the cradle and walk the dog.
“Merci,”
said my son, trying out some French.
“Merci,”
said my daughter. Instant cosmopolitans.

They played with their new toys as we exited the restaurant to merge with the strolling afternoon crowds out on the avenue. Rolling them up, rolling them down. They were too absorbed with their playthings to care that flowers were freakishly in blossom near the Grand Palais, or that the high-heel ankle boots on the leggy women ambling with their packages seemed to be the latest Paris fashion. I took in every detail. The fancy car dealerships. The purple awnings etched in gold. Club Med and Guerlain, internationally recognized French brands. The international banks, the perfumed boutiques, the huzzah. A world of wanting and getting, singing its own praises. I enjoyed observing the commercial hubbub, not feeling at all shut out. Been there, Done that, Time to move on.

The children were unaware, but I had planned for our walk down the Champs-Élysées to end at the Place de la Concorde, where there was a giant Ferris wheel, a leftover from the city's millennium celebrations seven years earlier. When they finally saw it, their eyes popped, and they did a little jig, asking me, please, oh please, could we take a ride.

We lined up to buy our tickets, and when it was our turn to board the Roue de Paris, a worker with large arms hoisted my kids into one of the cars before offering me a hand to climb in myself. He clicked the bar shut, a slender piece of steel, and suddenly off we flew, fast into the air. I felt the jolt of liftoff and slid wildly, threatening to crush my children laughing loudly next to me. With a start I realized that there were no safety belts, no barriers other than that puny bar which I gripped, my knuckles turning white. In Canada this would never have been allowed! A lawsuit waiting to happen. But too late. “Hold on!” I screamed as I felt the mighty wheel turning. “Whatever you do, don't fall off!”