Paris Was the Place (10 page)

“Falafel,” I repeat. I hold his hand and tears come. “Falafel, Gaird. He wants falafel this morning.” It’s the first time I’ve laughed since I walked into the hospital on Monday.

Gaird rubs his eyes with his hands. “There you go again. Speaking another language with each other.”

“It means he’s hungry.” I laugh out loud again. “He’s ready to leave.” How much can we ever really know someone? Really? But it feels like I know my brother entirely right now. Part of me realizes we can’t really ever know. But I want to. Every day. I want to connect people’s words to the longing in their brains. Falafel. If it’s code, then I understand it entirely. I walk over to Gaird and squeeze his wrist, just like Gita did to me a couple of weeks ago. He looks down at my hand and raises his eyebrows at Luke, maybe to apologize again for his huff. Or to signal that I’m the crazy one and what are they going to do with me? I think of Macon Ventri then. I don’t know why. There’s something about him. I see his face and his smile lines.

At two o’clock the nurses let Luke go home without giving his illness a name. In the end they call it a bronchial virus. I hold my brother’s arm while we move through the revolving glass doors toward the open lot. Gaird brings the car around to the front door of the hospital, and we climb in. He pulls out onto the Quai de Valmy and follows Canal St. Martin.

“You’re doing that ethnic thing with the tunic, aren’t you?” Luke says to me, leaning his head back slowly in the front seat.

“Okay. You shut up.”

“No, it works, sweetness.” Luke laughs and closes his eyes. “But you’ve got to get rid of the pumps. You can’t wear black pumps with a red tunic.” I watch as Quai de Valmy intersects with a street named Rue du Faubourg du Temple. Then we reach the vast Place de la République. This is a part of Paris I’ve been to. This I know.

“Just stop, okay?” I’m in the backseat, with my knees crammed into my stomach, which makes me feel even younger.

“Promise me.”

“I wear the pumps so that I look like I have my act together.” I can joke now. He’s better. We are going home.

“You can’t make me laugh. It hurts. You want to be taken seriously, sweetheart? You must not wear pumps with those balloon pants. You look a little like a clown, and that’s an insult to me.”

“Okay, Mister Hair Down to Your Knees.”

Gaird drives through the middle of the square at République. This part of Paris is epic in scope. I came here once, on foot, during my first week because I wanted to see the sculpture of the famous woman in the plaza. Our car passes her; she’s up on a high stone pedestal wearing heavy bronzed robes. She holds up a tree branch and has a wreath of wheat around her head. “What is that woman doing there?” Luke asks. “Alone in this sea of cars.”

“She’s meant to represent France,” I say. “The entire country. Her name is Marianne.”

“It is not,” Luke says. “You’re joking. Her name is not Marianne.”

“No, I’m serious. I’ve read about this. I came here in September. Meet Marianne. She’s the symbol of French hope after the revolution.”

Gaird grips the steering wheel with both hands and says nothing. We gain speed on Boulevard St. Martin, which changes names so many times until it becomes Boulevard Haussmann and finally turns into Avenue de Friedland at the maddening traffic circle around the Arc de Triomphe. The arch is enormous and peopled by so many commuters and racing cars. A long French flag hangs down in the middle. We turn right onto a tree-lined stretch of Avenue Victor Hugo. Luke and I have been through worse things together than that hospital. We’re hardy.

We’ve spent weeks in the Sonoran Desert with my taskmaster father, camping out in valleys and rationing our water until we became parched and it was hard to swallow. 1970. I was ten and Luke was twelve. Dad was doing field measurements for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. “It’s cartography, for God’s sake, Kate,” he said at the kitchen dinner table the night before we were all meant to leave for
the desert. “A science. Have I ever not been safe?” He threw his hands up in the air and rolled his eyes.

The kitchen was made of wormwood beams Dad had rescued from a nineteenth-century farm in Petaluma. Then my mother had added her own touches: the bird mosaic over the stovetop and the wallpaper with orange finches. Slices of medium-well pot roast sat on white plates, sides of scalloped red potatoes, two full glasses of whole milk. Luke and I laughed. Laughing at Dad’s jokes could make things better or worse, depending whose side you were on.

The next morning Mom put things in our food at breakfast: brewer’s yeast and wheat germ. She was doing this a lot now, said we couldn’t taste it, but I thought it made the oatmeal like newspaper. She didn’t wear a bra either. Just the T-shirt she’d slept in. I could always tell, because her breasts were soft and jiggled and I was still fascinated by them. By her.

She’d begun raising chickens, and carried one like a house cat outside while she watched Dad pack the truck. “I’m not coming,” she said. “It doesn’t feel right.”

I’d learned at school that chickens have very small brains, and it bothered me how much she adored them. I couldn’t tell her, though. You couldn’t tell my mom these kinds of things. She resented you for it. She called them petty criticisms that didn’t help change the world. And that was what she wanted to do more than anything when I was growing up. Heal the mentally ill. Fix people. Her birds slept in a little shed attached to the back of the house by an internal door. They were always going for me, pecking at my feet and making a racket. I went back inside the house and upstairs to get my sleeping bag. Then Mom was downstairs, telling Luke that it wasn’t safe to camp in the Sonoran Desert during flood season. “What is your father thinking? He wants me to let the chickens go. He thinks the chickens are more important to me than our marriage.”

I froze on the stair landing. I’d never heard her use the word “marriage” that way—like it was something separate from our family, a word that didn’t mean me or Luke or the house. Wet things hung from the banister where I stood: Luke’s T-shirts and my striped
underwear and a blue bedsheet. To conserve oil, Mom had unplugged the dryer that month and rolled it into the shed, where the chickens had begun to roost on it.

I ran downstairs and grabbed my jean jacket from the hook in the hall. Then the three of us backed down the driveway without Mom. It always felt like a bad idea to leave her. I was so tied to her. How would she manage alone without me? I waved at her on the porch the whole time Dad pulled away. “Jack!” she yelled. “People die in flash floods every year. They don’t even hear the water coming! Think about this, Jack!”

My father didn’t slow down. The Land Rover had a dented right front fender, and the navy paint was peeling along the grille. But there was a radio. Luke and I lay in the way back with the red five-gallon water jugs and tent stakes and tarp and pressed our ears to the speakers. I tried to forget my mother while Luke sang along to Paul Anka and Johnny Mathis and I just pretended, mouthing the words.

“When do we get to make the maps?” Luke asked.

“Luke!” Dad yelled from the front seat. The yelling worried me and I bit my nails. Dad always became a bigger version of himself on the camping trips, barking more orders. “Longitude and latitude, right?”

“Right!” My brother wore khaki shorts with a metal compass on a clip at his waist and an orange T-shirt with a chest pocket crowded with pens. “Vertical and horizontal.”

“Two lines and a point.” It was their game.

We drove over the Richmond Bridge, toward Oakland and San Jose. The hills were dry and russet-colored, with new subdivisions stretching as far as I could see toward Alameda. After two hours we hit I-5, which took us three hundred miles. We parked in a rest stop at noon to eat the tuna sandwiches Mom had made and to pee. I must have slept for a few hours after that. I woke up when Luke said, “Dad, I’m going to design a radical map of outer space that shows the way to navigate a rocket ship to Pluto.”

“A radical map,” I yelled. I spent a large portion of each day repeating everything my older brother said.

“NASA will use the map for space travel.” Luke smiled out the window.

“Space travel,” I said. We drove another hour, toward Pasadena and I-10. Then past San Bernardino and El Centro and across the Arizona border to Yuma. In the very last half hour I began the tricky business of climbing up to the front seat. “Dad, I need to pee.”

“Give me eight minutes, miss.” His beard hadn’t turned white yet, and he wore his straw safari hat with a chin strap even in the car.

“Too long, Daddy. Eight minutes and I’ll wet my pants.”

He turned off the narrow tar onto the dirt. We were deep in Arizona, flat scrub as far as I could see, broken up by giant saguaros and brown shoulders of the Santa Catalina Mountains. Dad was there to do a revised map of the Sonoran Desert, detailed with water sources and elevation lines. His job was growing in importance, though I didn’t realize then that water would become a commodity. “Don’t think about peeing, or go in the way back and use the cup.”

“I’m not using the cup. The cup’s gross.” My voice got louder. “The cup’s for Luke when he can’t hold it. Not for me!” We’d been driving since morning. I hadn’t peed since the truck stop three hours ago. Dusk made the sky look bruised and dangerous. “You don’t get it. You never get it. Call Mom. Mom knows you need to stop!” I screamed, and Dad slammed on the brakes.

“Don’t you speak to me like that, Miss Willow!” His yelling always made me ashamed, though not for the things he accused me of. Why did he have to yell? He yelled at Mom for the chickens and for the intuitive healing she’d started doing. He yelled at me for forgetting long division with decimals. He didn’t yell at Luke so much. Luke was on some sort of par with him. The older one. They included him in their circle of two so much more often than me. They appealed to his good judgment. His yelling hurt my ears, and it embarrassed me so much I usually forgot what he was yelling about. “For your information, we’re miles into the desert. Not a pay phone in sight. Don’t ever forget whom you’re talking to. This is your father speaking!”

Ten minutes later, we came to a stop in the scrub. I climbed out
of the car sobbing and ran behind a saguaro to pee. Luke dragged the metal cooler out of the back and handed me a root beer when I was done. This was his way of saying how much it sucked. Just pure sucked when Dad yelled. We sat and watched our father make an angry pile of tent stakes. It was July 6 and already 101 degrees.

I gulped the soda. “Dad breaks Mom’s rules, doesn’t he?”

Why hadn’t she come? It was treachery that she’d stayed behind, without me. Maybe this was the start of a feeling I sometimes had later that I couldn’t fully locate my mother in the world. She didn’t quite fit.

“He doesn’t break all of them,” Luke said.

“The soda one and the holding-your-pee one and the sleeping-with-your-clothes-on one.” Why was it so hot? Dry heat that made me breathe too fast until my throat hurt.

“I think Dad breaks rules you have to break when you’re camping.”

“I’m gonna tell Mom about the soda rule. I’m gonna tell her that he wouldn’t stop to let me pee. I’m gonna call her.”

“She knows about the soda, dingbat. He told her he was going to give us soda.”

“The next time we’re in town, I’ll find a pay phone and call her.” I felt like I’d been abducted. I missed her in a visceral way. Her skin and teeth and hair. She was still how I tried to translate the world. Through my brother through her.

Dad carried the telescope from the car and unfolded its legs, and focused the lens. “I can figure out the location of that rock without ever walking over there.” He wrote some numbers down on the small pad he kept in his shirt pocket. “Remember when we talked about triangulation? Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten. Both of you. Don’t tell me that.” He could be strict, or he could be the most fun you’d ever known. But when his voice rose, I got nervous. He might start yelling again. Luke and I stood close and nodded our heads so we wouldn’t be accused of having spaced out. “Here it is,” Dad said to himself while he looked through the lens. “Once I know one side and two
angles.” He stepped back and smiled. “The math is beautiful! The math figures out the rest.”

G
AIRD FINDS
a parking spot on Victor Hugo and jogs around the car to open Luke’s door and help him climb out. Then he turns and pulls Luke’s duffel bag from the trunk. I go hold the wooden door to the apartment building open. “Let’s get him inside, shall we?” Gaird takes Luke’s arm, and they walk past me.

I leave them on the living room couch and call Sara from the kitchen, where I start making them mac and cheese. “We’re here. Eagle landed. But Gaird’s being sort of priggish. It’s a side of him I’ve really never seen.”

“You need to give him room—it’s his apartment, after all. You’re too close to it, Will. Don’t say things you’ll regret.”

“You’re right. He’s a kind man, isn’t he? How did you know that I’m about to say things to him that I’ll regret?”

“Because I’ve lived through your worst love affairs.”

“What I want to say is something about him not being generous. Then I’ll weep.”

“Of course you will.”

“I always weep when I get mad, which makes it more pathetic.” I stand at the counter with the phone deep in my neck and grate cheese with the metal grater I found in the drawer. Tears leak down my face. “My crying has nothing to do with Gaird.”

“You’re jealous.”

“I’m jealous.”

“You don’t like sharing your brother.”

“And I don’t like it when he’s sick.” I circle the kitchen with the phone and reach for the whisk and add cheese to the milk and make a big mess of a knot with the cord behind me. “But the real problem is, Gaird loves differently.”

“Like in a different language? Like Norwegian love? What are you talking about, Willie?”

“There are rules about shoes: none in the apartment. And no
street clothes on the bed—take them off and put a bathrobe on before you lie down. It’s more than that, though. I have to go. I have to feed them.”

When I bring in the plates, they’re watching a black-and-white special on the Allied invasion at Normandy. “I don’t care what you say, Luke.” I put the food down. “You glow. You look healthy. Though why you’re watching this war channel, I don’t know.”