We'll Always Have Paris (3 page)

The next day, I set out a blanket in front of the Quad Cinema across the street from our apartment building and sold everything I deemed unnecessary in our home. I got a dime for a copy of
The
Stepford
Wives
, fifty cents for our salt and pepper shakers, and three dollars for a pair of my mother’s leather boots. I sold half-filled bottles of alcohol to the three winos who lived in the doorway across the street. A nice woman discreetly advised me against selling my mother’s diaphragm.

My mother quietly accepted the money I earned, but the effects echoed through our apartment for months as she would notice things missing. “Where are the…” she would begin to ask before remembering that I had sold the teacups. It was years before we ever had a full set of dishes. It was even longer before I witnessed her shed a tear again.

The week after my gypsy garage sale, basking in oblivious pride, I informed my mother that I had earned forty dollars selling raffle tickets in our building. “Jennifer, honey,” my mother said tentatively, “what kind of prize are you planning to give away for this raffle?” When I looked at her quizzically, she explained that I couldn’t just sell raffle tickets. There needed to be a drawing and a prize as well. I assured her she was wrong; no one had asked a thing about a prize. She insisted we go to the five-and-dime, buy a glass figurine, and give it to someone who had purchased a ticket. Since there were no ticket stubs, I had to draw from memory. We delivered a frosted glass swan to the guys in apartment 2G.

The following week, my mother and I were walking through Times Square when I noticed a skeletal black man in a green fedora engaging a crowd. A dozen people gathered around his table fashioned from a cardboard box, watching his fluid hands move three cards around the surface. The cards, all face down, were switched from one spot to the next and then another. The man’s voice was hypnotic, promising that players who kept track of the queen of hearts would win fifty dollars. It looked so easy. The payoff was huge. “Let’s play!” I urged my mother who held my hand tight.

“No one ever wins that game,” my mother explained. “At the end of the day, that guy walks off with everyone’s money.”

I turned to her eagerly. “Then let’s watch how he does it!”

“We’re going to be late,” my mother clipped and quickened her pace. As we turned the corner, she smiled brightly. “Did I mention that I got a raise at work?”

“You did?!”

“Yes, a very big raise, so I’ve got us covered from here.”

***

Katie and I woke up fresh and ready to take on Paris. Unfortunately it was 11:00 p.m. We went downstairs to get dinner, but because we had been so lost earlier, my confidence was low. I was determined to stay within a block of our hotel. On the street corner, a woman who looked to be at least a thousand years old with a humped back greeted Katie and me. Her chin sprouted hair and her nose looked like a pickle. She wore a black hooded cape and held out knobby fingers that were made for delivering poisoned apples. I had no idea what she was saying, but she was clearly begging for money. She was telling her story with dramatic flair, her voice fluctuating brilliantly for effect. She wept; she beat her own chest.

I wondered where her breaking point was. Had she been born into the life of a street urchin and never managed to escape? Or did she once live on a quiet street and host ladies’ bridge games? What went wrong? My heart beat faster with the realization that most of us were a few strokes of bum luck away from her fate. This woman was a few bad weeks away from the grave.

“Give her some money,” Katie said, breaking my trance. “Stop staring and give her some money.”

“Oh, right, of course,” I jolted, then reached for my wallet.

The old woman thanked us with even more drama. She beat her chest again and moaned with gratitude.

After a few steps, Katie broke the silence. “That was really sad.”

“No, she was a street performer,” I insisted, swallowing hard. “You know how we see people in Balboa Park playing music for tips?”

“A street performer?” Katie asked.

“Yes, a street performer,” I said, repeating silently,
red
balloons, mimes, and baguettes
.

After a few moments of contemplating my proposal, Katie said, “I hate to break it to you, Mommy, but that was a homeless lady.”

Hours later, Katie and I lay awake, weeping in our beds. Katie sobbed that she wanted to go home. She missed Daddy. I tickled her arm and told her everything was going to be fine. “We just have jet lag,” I explained as tears rolled down my face in our darkened hotel room. I tried to keep my tone calm, but my heart ached because I knew she was right. I had made a huge mistake. She was too young for a trip like this. Maybe I wasn’t up to the task, either.

“Are you crying, Mommy?”

“No, my nose is just a little stuffed.”

As I assured Katie that we would be fine, another part of my brain was frantically devising a plan: we would stay in our hotel room for ten days, order room service, and soon enough it would be time to leave Paris. My mind was racing in tiny circles as I planned our lockdown. Our hotel became a fallout shelter in my mind. There was food in the lobby restaurant, running water, and even a minibar with soft drinks. We had books, a sketch pad, and crayons. If we got desperate, we could channel surf until we found American sitcoms with a laugh track and a thirty-minute resolution to all problems.

Katie and I rose at noon and felt a little better. My sanity was slowly starting to return, so I suggested that since we were in Paris, we should at least walk to the Louvre, which was only six blocks away. I looked at my map and realized it was a straight shot to the museum. Even I couldn’t get lost. That evening, we would have dinner with my cousin Janine, whom I’d never met, her husband Bruno, and their miracle baby, Luca.

Janine was a war correspondent. After twenty years of writing from Bosnia, Chechnya, Somalia, Rwanda, Iraq, and dozens of war zones, she married a French photographer and settled in Paris. Before Katie and I left San Diego, Janine sent an email inviting us to her flat for dinner. She asked if we could bring instant oatmeal from the United States for Luca. These were small steps we could take. We could see the
Mona Lisa
. We could show up for dinner with a variety pack of Quaker Oats. I kept the option to quarantine in my back pocket, or more accurately, in my slash-proof travel purse with multiple safety locks.

The Louvre was magnificent, but my only impression of
Mona Lisa
was that someone really ought to clean the glass box protecting the masterpiece. My Windex trigger finger reflexively extended, wishing I could wipe away all the cloudy smudging.

“It’s smaller than I thought,” Katie said as we bobbed and weaved our heads in order to see through the four layers of tourists in front of us. Camera shutters crackled as people frantically snapped photos. I quickly remembered the camera in my purse and reminded Katie that this shot was a must. She shrugged and continued to look at the painting, shifting and tiptoeing as needed. After taking a dozen terrible photographs of the iconic painting, I glanced at Katie, who had finally found a spot with an unobstructed view of da Vinci’s girl with the enigmatic smile.

“Do you want to take some pictures?” I asked, offering her the camera.

“I see it,” she chirped.

“Not impressed?” I asked.

“I want to look at it for real.”

I tucked my camera back in my purse. “You’re right, it’s not like we won’t be able to find a good picture of
Mona Lisa
on a postcard,” I said.

“Or Google,” Katie said, not taking her eyes off the painting.

After moving to a different area of the museum, I sat on a black leather bench and Katie began to sketch the paintings. When she finally turned her picture for me to see, it was a portrait of me with a glowing halo around my head in Crayola gold. “Wanna know why Mama Lisa is smiling?” she asked.

“Why?”

“Because I just told her a joke,” Katie replied.

I considered asking her about our sob-fest the night before. My bad instincts wanted to revisit and hyperanalyze to be sure that everything was now all right. Thankfully, I realized that this would likely have the opposite effect and refrained from launching a hand-wringing talk-a-thon. Katie was coloring at the Louvre. That was my answer.

I often fretted about whether or not Katie was enjoying her childhood, or if I was screwing up as a mother. On one level, I knew her life was nearly idyllic. She was well cared for and loved. Katie had everything she needed and much of what she wanted. She got to visit Paris, for God’s sake! Still, I worried that somehow I wasn’t doing enough. That
I
wasn’t enough. Or maybe I was doing too much and that I was overbearing. I judged myself mercilessly and grew terrified that, as she got older, Katie would too. My great fear was that at the very moment she decided I was a woefully inadequate mother, I would drop dead. Life had become a series of preemptive apologies for my transgressions, both real and imagined. Every year, I placed notes for her in a file cabinet so she could read them as an adult. Ostensibly they were annual updates about her life, but the subtext was very clear: I love you. I tried my best.

That evening, Katie and I arrived at Janine’s home, a sprawling fifth-floor flat flooded with sunlight. The hardwood floors were covered with soft wicker rugs, and the white couches and seats were knotted cotton, comfy chic. At the dinner table, the adults sipped red wine from thin, bulbous glasses, trying to figure out how Janine and I were related. There were several branches of the family tree separating us, though we were somehow intertwined by our grandmothers. In the end, we decided “cousin” was a close-enough classification.

I caught her up on family gossip, and we giggled over how she could not translate the word “closure” for Bruno when I told her of our cousin’s “severance” ceremony with her ex-fiancé. The couple had gone into the woods, (carefully) burned their marriage license, and told each other every reason why they weren’t meant to be. “They needed to have a proper ending,” Janine explained to her perplexed husband, a rugged-looking guy with three-day stubble on his face. Janine tried again. “They needed to talk about what went wrong and say their good-byes.”

“Why?” Bruno asked, blowing a cloud of blue cigarette smoke.

“Because they wanted
closure
,” Janine said.

“Thees ees silly.”

Janine had a sexy Italian look with voluptuousness that extended to her wavy brown hair. She looked as if she might roll up her linen pants and romp through a fountain at any given moment. My cousin spoke with the indefinable accent of global nomads and laughed generously before suggesting that Katie and I come to the Alps with her family for the weekend. Bruno’s eyes widened with the fear that we might accept.

Janine poured another glass of wine and opened the French windows—or, I guess, just windows—and I saw Paris unfolding at dusk. From the fifth-floor balcony, the city seemed manageable, even inviting. The height made Paris look almost as the map had promised. Directly in front of us was the Tuileries Garden with its orderly rows of bushes, elegant statues, and duck pond surrounded by grass and yellow blossoms.

Pointing at a narrow body of water, I asked, “Is that the Seine River?” Janine confirmed. I watched people walking on each side of the stone-lined riverbank and crossing small bridges.
Perhaps
I
could
do
that
if
I
remember
exactly
where
to
turn
to
get
back
to
the
hotel.
“And is that the train station?” I asked of the mammoth structure with arched windows and a clock.

“That is the Musée d’Orsay,” Janine told me. To the right a few miles, I saw the Eiffel Tower.

I
know
how
to
get
to
the
Louvre
, I silently assured myself.
So
if
I
just
cross
that
bridge
over
the
river, I could also get to the Musée d’Orsay.

As if reading my mind, Bruno asked for my map, offering to show me the best streets for people-watching. “What are all these marks?” he asked, examining the spots of color-coded masking tape dotting the map, marking the important sites. He barely refrained from rolling his eyes and began jotting pen marks on my map, telling me which streets were truly special and which were tourist traps. “To know Paris,” Bruno began, pulling on his cigarette, “you need to relax, have a glass of wine, and enjoy life.” Exhale. His smoke rose like a ghost.

Enjoy
life?
I thought about my travel notebook filled with essential sites. Beside each one was an empty box, which I would have the immense pleasure of checking once we visited them. How would I even know if I had succeeded in the task of enjoying life? When did I get to check that box? Did I get a new box every day, or did I have to sit uncomfortably with an unchecked box until the very end of the trip when I could properly assess whether I had or had not enjoyed life?

I explained to Bruno that I am an American mother and asked if he understood what that meant. I took my daughter to art school, piano lessons, and her doctor and dentist appointments. I regularly volunteered in Katie’s classroom and chaperoned field trips. I coached her soccer team and even spent one year as a Girl Scout troop leader. When I wasn’t shuttling Katie from one activity to the next, I was ordering in the enrichment classes like they were Chinese food. I hired a student at San Diego State University to be Katie’s study buddy on Tuesday afternoons. I even hired a show-and-tell coach when Katie was in first grade. I was a model helicopter parent.