Frankie in Paris (2 page)

***

If my grandmother was willing to take me on
this trip, then I would let her be my tour guide.
 
I was fairly certain that we would be able to
find attractions to visit.
 
If we
actually stayed
en Paris
,
then we should be able to find the Eiffel
Tower, right?
 
Notre Dame?
 
The Louvre?
 
I knew we could do
it.
 
Sign me up!

My boyfriend wasn’t as excited as I was about
the idea.
 
Rich and I had been dating for
three years, and he knew Lulu well.
 

“You mean you are going to go alone?
 
Just the two of you?”
 
He had some serious issues with the
plan.
 
His dark eyebrows were raised in
disbelief, and I could see the concern in his gorgeous blue eyes.
 
He’s half Sicilian, and he has thick black
eyelashes—the kind most girls I know would kill for.
 
They make his eyes stand out and look like
they have sparkly light bulbs turned on behind them.

We were sitting on Rich’s floor, in his bedroom,
which had about a dozen punk band posters hanging on the walls and an
impressive amount of sound equipment—including an electric keyboard and an old
drum kit.
 
I used my TK to organize his
record collection.
 

Richie owns more records than anyone I’ve ever
met.
 
Some of them are really old and
collectible.
 
Putting them in
alphabetical order gave me something to do—other than looking at the
disapproving expression on his face.
 
I
had to squint a little to read the titles since they were floating kind of far
across from where we sat.

“We’ll be fine!
 
She lived there, you know.”
 
Ugh.
Did
I really just say that?

“Forty years ago!
 
And she didn’t live
in
Paris.
 
And she’s blind.”

***

I forgot to mention that Lulu is legally blind,
didn't I?
 
She can "see well enough
to drive," but she is blind enough to have a handicapped placard for her
car.
 
This has never made any sense to
me.
 
If you are legally permitted to
 
park in a special parking spot because you
can’t see, shouldn’t you, say, not be driving?
 
She has vision (with the thickest glasses you have ever seen), but she
has no
peripheral
vision.
 

Going to the movies with her is an interesting
experience because you have to sit at the back of the theater and she still has
to move her head around in order to see the whole screen, like she’s watching a
tennis match.
 
It can be super distracting,
especially if you’re seeing a movie like
Braveheart,
which is around three hours long.
 
Her
neck must have been really tired after viewing that masterpiece.

Through the course of her life, she has had
dozens of eye surgeries.
 
She’s even in a
couple of medical journals.
 
Her irises
are no longer round, although you would never be able to see them through those
glass lenses:
 
her pupils are shaped sort
of like a cat’s.
 
Lulu never complains
about her eye problems and goes through life undaunted.

***

I argued my point:
 
“She’s not going to be driving while we’re
there!
 
We’re going to take the Metro
everywhere... ”

Somehow, I had managed to file
David Bowie
behind
Never Mind the Bullocks Here's the Sex Pistols.
 
Calling the square cardboard sleeve out of
the box, I moved it forward to an earlier place in the alphabet.
 
Lifting a few until I found
The Clash
, I was satisfied with popping
Mr. Bowie right behind them.

“I don’t know, Frankie, it sounds kind of
crazy.”

“It’s a free trip to Europe!
 
I have to go!”

Rich understood.
 
But he didn’t like it. Not even a little bit.
 
I’m pretty sure that he thought I was going
to be kidnapped by human traffickers.
 
Sometimes his glass is just a little too half-empty.

***

After I left my grandparents' pool—daydreams of
travel dancing in my head—I got my ugly, teal, corduroy suitcase out of the
storage shed at my parents’ house where I lived.
 

The suitcase was a high school graduation
present from Mom and Dad.
 
When I opened
that gift on that special day, I looked inside for the tickets to Hawaii or Mexico.
 
Or Disneyland.
 
No tickets:
 
the luggage was the present.
   

It was an unattractive, albeit practical
gift.
 

***

Somehow Lulu managed to book plane tickets and
find a hotel. I don’t know for sure, but I don’t think she used a travel
agent.
 
I imagine that it took a lot of
work and a bunch of phone calls. Remember, this was ’95, so most people didn't
have their own computers, yet—let alone the beloved Internet. And no WWW=no
helpful Travelocity gnomes.

***

We would be leaving in exactly fourteen
days.
 
I told my manager, Carole, that I'd
be gone for a week, and she solemnly swore that she would hold my job for me
because I was so terrific at keeping the flannel shirt table straightened.
     

Everything seemed to be falling into place.

 
I didn’t
know how I was going to live through the next two weeks.
 
I suspected that I would mentally pack and
repack those suitcases continuously while spending an eternity at work:
 
 
re-hanging bikinis and listening to grunge
music through a dusty ceiling speaker in a dressing room at Southgate Mall. You
can only listen to
Smells Like Teen
Spirit
a few hundred times before you wish you could hunt down Kurt Cobain
and ask him what the hell he was thinking.
 
I know this from personal experience.

What was I supposed to pack?
 
How does one prepare for a European
holiday?
 
Visions of chic black pantsuits
and little red cocktail dresses danced through my head.
 
I owned neither.
 
I knew what Lulu would pack:
 
Liz Claiborne suits and high heels.
 

You can pretty much depend on my grandmother to
wear a designer silk suit—or something that resembles a designer suit:
 
a boxy blazer and slacks with sharp
creases.
 
And she
always
wears super high heel shoes—not necessarily stilettos,
although she does have some of those.
 
She wears chunky heels, peek-a-boo toe shoes, and shoes with pointy
toes:
 
When you buy them in a ladies'
size five, they look like midget witch shoes.
 

I imagine—and I’m really not exaggerating—that
she probably owns around one hundred and fifty pairs of shoes.
 
All of them have heels that add at least two
inches to her height, although I have, on occasion, seen her in four-inchers,
and I am usually afraid that she will trip and break her hip.

Did I happen to mention that Lulu is almost short
enough to be an official “little person”? She is 4’8’’, if she is standing with
an iron rod back and teases her hair. When she's piloting her enormous car, and
you are driving behind her, you can see her little fluffy white head barely peeking
over the steering wheel.
 

She is one of
those
little old lady drivers.
 
Only she is legally blind.
 

Lulu’s footwear is usually very tasteful, but
when you go shopping in the three to four inch heel department, you eventually
run into Lucite or red plastic heel straps.
 
Sometimes she forays into the tacky shoe territory.
 
Such was the case when she came to my church
confirmation.
   

I was fourteen at the time:
 
the prime age for being humiliated by the
physical appearance of any relative, or even letting other people of this age
group know that you actually have a family.
 
Statistics show that most people have—or have had at some point in their
life—a family.
 
Try telling that to a
moody, hormonal confirmand.
 

My mother’s mother arrived at my Lutheran
confirmation wearing stilettos with a metallic gold city skyline wrapped from
heel to toe.
 
It was pretty evident that
she had experienced a lapse in judgment.
 

Now this is not a woman who attends church with
any regularity.
 
She comes as a visitor,
for the “Big Events”: Christmas Eve, baptisms, weddings, and funerals.
 
I’m not sure that she realizes that weekly
attendance is an option.
 
She has a
cousin in Maryland
who is a Lutheran pastor—maybe she thinks this makes her exempt from regular
worship.

For this
 
Big Event, she must have panicked when trying to find something suitable
to wear.
 
She must have forgotten about
the two-dozen classy silk suits that she wears on a daily basis.
 
She clearly looked in the far reaches of her
many closets—all five bedroom closets in her house are filled with her clothing,
and there are three racks in the garage, bowing with the weight of silk—and
found what she believed to be the perfect outfit for Lutheran Confirmation
Sunday:
 
a purple suede mini skirt and a
black rayon button up blouse.
 

The stilettos with buildings on them were the
cherry on top.
 
Or rather, at the
bottom.
 
There was a New York skyline wrapped around the shoe.
 
Don't ask me to explain it, because I
probably can't.
 
Use your imagination on
this one.
 
Trust me.
 

I have looked everywhere for a photograph of
this outfit, but all I can find are pictures of myself in my white confirmation
poncho-thingy with a constipated look on my face. I think I was just barely
holding back my brain from finding a paper bag in the church kitchen and making
it fly over my head.
 
That would have
livened things up, for sure.
 
It could
have been a religious experience for all who were unfortunate enough to bear
witness.
 
HallelujahAmen.
 

***

Dear God, what would Lulu’s interpretation be
of packing for a trip to Paris?
 
Would she pack a dozen striped T-shirts and
black stretch pants? A
béret
?
 
Would she dig in the garage until she found
the ancient dresses that she purchased when she lived in the Loire Valley?
 
I decided that it didn’t matter.
 
Travel with an eccentric seventy-something
was better than no travel at all.
 

Maybe.

***

Wearing a navy blue and white striped T-shirt, I
went to a local camera shop to have my passport photo taken. Stripes are totally
French-ish to me:
 
maybe it's because of
mimes.
 

With thick bangs above my eyebrows, my hair was
dark and cut just below my chin.
 
Of
course my face was really pale and my lips were covered in dark red
lipstick:
 
oh la la, baby!

My newest phase included wearing loads of black
clothing and my Doc Marten boots.
 
Dr.
Marten must have been some kind of a genius, creating those "Bouncing
Soles."
 
If you've never owned a
pair, then you should.
 
They are the most
comfortable shoes I've ever owned—not to mention the coolest.
 

Our punk friends told me that you could get Docs
for really cheap at the outdoor markets in Paris, so I now had an instant mission:
 
to find twelve-holed-boots.
     

The ones with twelve holes laced up most of
your calf, and this was so very important in our group of friends.
 
Returning home with a pair of that particular
footwear could instantly elevate my status amongst other young adults who
actually bothered to care about that sort of thing.
 
Yeah, I'm kind of a big dork sometimes.
 

I also pierced my ears eleven times. A number
of my friends had pierced other body parts, but I was way too chicken to do it.
The little studs at the top of my ears had hurt when I got it done.
 
A lot.