Frankie in Paris (6 page)

“
Merci
beaucoup
!”
 
I thanked him, and
stepped out into France.

***

Suddenly I was standing on the set of an artsy
movie—the kind with subtitles that only play at the pretentious downtown
theaters.
  

A
 
girl was
riding a bicycle with a basket attached to the front.
 
It was filled with books.
 
The women that I saw walking down the
cobblestone street looked terribly stylish and European.
 
They had short haircuts or elegant up-dos,
and there is just something about a French girl’s lips.
 
They always seem to be pouting.
 
Both the upper and lower lips are pushed out,
just a little bit.
 
I thought they were
beautiful and wondered if I could achieve the same effect.
 

Nah, I'd
probably look like I had a problem with my teeth.
 

There was an
actual
French florist
selling
actual
French flowers on the corner of the street.
 
It was extremely warm outside, but it no
longer bothered me because I was so overwhelmed at the sights before me.
 

The buildings all along the street were tall
and had little wrought iron window boxes.
 
Everything looked so old, but elegant and detailed.
 
So different from downtown San Jose!
 
A
chanteuse
sang in my
head.
 
It was Edith Piaf, French cultural
icon.
 
Her voice was trilling
“Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien”,
almost as
though she stood next to me belting out the song.
 
She had died a long time ago, but whenever
you think about France,
I’ll bet it’s Madame Piaf that you hear, somewhere in the background of your
brain.
  

I love
this place.

Lulu motioned me towards a pay phone outside of
the Hotel de Lutèce.
 
I dug the phone
card, which my mother had loaned me for our trip, out of my purse.
 
After a few moments, my grandmother was connected
to Grampy.
 
She explained that we had
arrived safely and she would call again, sometime that week, ending the
conversation with a request that he call my mom to let her know that we had
made it.

Two little old men sat at a round table at a café
across the street.
 
They were having some
sort of argument.
 
I wasn’t able to catch
any of the words, but the tone of their conversation drifted up into the sweet
music of the neighborhood, along with whistling and footsteps and ... too many
sounds to process.
  

A few doors down from the hotel stood a beauty
salon—and I imagined that all sorts of glamorous
foreign
things happened inside.

“Well, where to?”
 
Asked Lulu.

“Let’s just walk for a while.
 
The hotel only serves breakfast.
 
Maybe we can find something to eat for
dinner.”

“Sounds good.”

“Oh, and Lulu?”

She looked up at me and flipped her sunglasses
down over her eyes.

“I love it.
 
I really love it.
 
Thank you so
much!”

“You’re welcome, dear.”
 

Lulu seemed so much shorter without her
heels.
 
I could look right down into her
nest of poufy white-blonde hair.

From where we were standing, the pointy top of
Notre Dame was in view.
 
We were so
close!
 
I knew we were somewhere near the
Latin Quarter, too, but I was too tired to
look for it.
 
I think Lulu was getting
tired, also.
 
She stopped in front of a
bakery.

“Why don’t we get a baguette for dinner?”

My stomach growled.
 
I had hoped for a baguette
with
my dinner.
 
With my
chateaubriand
, for instance.

“Can’t we go to one of those cafés and get a
sandwich or some soup, or something?”
 
The
scents that blended in with the rest of the activity around us practically made
me drool.

“No.”

“Why not?
 
I am starving and—"

“I don’t want to spend any money on dinner
tonight.
 
We should save our money so we
can eat somewhere really nice tomorrow.
 
Bread will be fine.”

Should I have pulled out the money that Rich
gave to me?
 
Starving to death in a
foreign country constituted an emergency, right?
 
I decided that spending my stash within my
first two hours of our arrival would not be such a great idea.
 
I would eat like a prisoner tonight so that
we could eat something wonderful in the near future.

Paying for our long baguette with francs,
 
I was insanely excited to be using foreign
money.
 

The whole place smelled delicious.
 
Fat, rolled, fresh croissants behind a glass
counter and little decadent desserts lined the white papered shelf.
 
I reached into the glass-fronted refrigerator
near the cash register to see if they had any diet soda.

“We’re not buying any drinks here,” a voice
piped behind me.

“We’re not?”

“No, we can have water at the hotel.”

My first night in Paris, France,
and I was having bread and water for dinner.
 
Bon appétit
.

Carrying our meal under my arm as we walked, I
noted that it was half as tall as Lulu.
 
Maybe she didn’t require much food because she was so tiny.
 
I was considerably taller at 5’7’’ and seemed
to need to eat more often than she.
 

I took a jagged deep breath, and we walked back
to the hotel.

The Land of Wine and Romance—and I am stuck with my
grandmother.

I was ready for bed.

***

An overdubbed episode of
Baywatch
was on the TV. The male voice they were using in place of
David Hasselhoff’s just didn’t sound right, making my skin crawl.

Lulu ripped off a hunk of bread and handed the
paper wrapped loaf across the gap between our beds.
 
I tore off a piece and took a bite.
 
Crumbs fell on my chest, like massive
dandruff, so I took larger bites, trying not to make a mess where I would be
sleeping.
  

Reaching
 
into her purse, she produced a plastic bottle of water.
  
After taking a sip, she handed it to
me.
 
It had pink lipstick around the
mouth of it.
 
I wiped it off with my
fingers and drank my half, still able to taste the lipstickiness.
 

When I finished eating, I got out my toiletries
bag and my pajamas and headed to the bathroom.
 

“You’re not getting ready for bed, are you?”

“I’m tired, Lulu.”
 
My inner French girl said, “
Je suis fatiguée
.”
 
I sounded beat, even to myself.

“It’s still light outside.”
 
Indeed it was.
 
An orange feather of light reached down
between the two buildings into our room.
 
I didn’t care.
 

Tepid water fell over my shoulders in the tiny
bathroom, doing nothing to cool me off.
 
I crawled into my bed, deciding to call Rich tomorrow.
 
I already missed him.

“Good night,” Lulu said.

“
Bonne
nuit
,” I yawned and closed my eyes.

When I opened my eyes again, I noticed a little
coffee with cream water stain in a Rorschach pattern above my bed.
 
It looked like it was in the shape of a teddy
bear.
 
No, not a bear:
 
a cat.
 
Two pointy ears floated above a wide oval bump
of paint.

The TV was on, and Lulu was sitting up in her
bed.

“Did you sleep at all?”
 
I asked.

“A little,” she replied.

Due to some of the medication that she takes,
she isn’t able to sleep.
 
She goes to bed
late and wakes up early.
 
When I was a
little girl and I used to spend the night at her house, I would marvel at how
she left her radio tuned to a talk radio station all night long.
 
There were twin beds in her bedroom, and she
would always make me a cozy nest in between them, on the floor (by my request),
and she would let me read romance novels—even though I could barely sound out
the titles.

I would marvel at the pictures on the
cover.
 
Women in ripped dresses, being
held by men with long hair and no shirt or maybe a pirate getup. We would watch
the late, late shows together, and I would finally fall asleep, but she would
stay up listening to the radio.
 

Grampy had moved to another bedroom years
before because he couldn’t sleep with the noise.
 
She claims that she asked him to relocate
because he snored.
 
I still don’t know
who to believe.
 
Maybe they were both
telling the truth.
 

Lulu would always be awake, watching
television, by the time I woke up.

***

Looking up and out of the window,
 
I could see a rectangle of blue sky.
 

“What are we doing today?”
 

“I thought maybe we could go to an outdoor
market.”
 
That sounded wonderful.

My stomach rumbled at me impatiently.
  
Needless to say, our dinner from the night
before had long been digested. “But first, let’s go down and see what they have
for breakfast.”
    

What to
wear for our first day at large?
 
I settled on a black, ankle length, rayon
dress.
 
It had little maroon roses on it,
and I wore a black T-shirt under the thin straps.
 
Lulu was wearing a navy blue silk suit with a
white shell underneath.
 

Watching her apply pancake makeup, I hunted
through my purse for my lipstick.
 
Then
we put on our shoes:
 
mine clunky and
industrial and hers, white and delicate.
 
And flat.

Downstairs, someone other than Henri was at the
front desk.
 
Much younger and handsome,
in a French way—whatever that meant—he had blonde hair and a silver hoop earring
through his left eyebrow and was wearing the hotel's burgundy suit jacket and bright
orangey-yellow bowtie.

 
“
Bonjour
!”
 
he called as we walked by.

Responding in his language, we giggled like
girlfriends.

In the breakfast room, one couple was already
eating. Although there were several open tables, the hostess sat us directly
next to them—probably figuring that we were all American and might want to
talk.

“Hello,” the woman said.

“Hi,” I smiled, “we’re from California.”

“I’m Lu,” said Lulu, “and this is my
granddaughter, Francesca.”

“Please call me Frank,” I corrected firmly.

They introduced themselves and told us that
they were from Hawaii.
 
Neither of us had ever been to The Islands,
and Lulu told them that.

“How are you enjoying Paris?”
 
I asked. “You must be used to this heat, being from Hawaii.”

“We are,” the man agreed.
 
He had a blob of purple jam stuck to the side
of his upper lip.
 
I concentrated on it
until it twisted and landed on his plate with a light plop. A bit embarrassed,
he swiped at his mouth to capture any possible residue.

“We’re ready to be home.
 
This is our last day,” his wife added.

Our waitress told us that they were serving a
continental breakfast.
 
Of course I knew
what this would mean:
 
more bread.
 
Lulu chose a croissant and I opted for
toasted French bread with butter and jam.
 
We both drank coffee, but first I added my customary five sweeteners and
three creamers, turning my beverage the shade of old lady pantyhose.

A short conversation about what we did back
home followed, and Lulu told them that I was an actress.
 
They informed us that their niece was Tina
Something-or-other, from some recent movie that I'd yet to see. Lulu thought
that this was thrilling.
 
I half expected
her to ask for their autographs because they were famous by association.

Finishing our breakfast, we said our goodbyes,
and Lulu went to the front desk to ask how to get to the Bastille Market.
 
The employee behind the desk gave her a local
map and told us how to find the nearest Metro station.

***

Lulu flipped her sunglasses up, and we took the
stairs down to the Metro.
 
I worried
about her lack of peripheral vision, so I held her arm until we reached the
bottom, where we managed to figure out how to buy tickets and waited for the
train.
 
The doors opened, and we boarded,
eager for our first ride on the Metro, hurrying over to the only two seats that
were together.
 

A group of teenage girls huddled together with
foreheads touching.
 
They were whispering
and giggling in what sounded like German.
 
An old woman with a scarf around her head slept with her head back and a
cane in her hands, the bottom of it touching the floor.
 
A thin swarthy man stood against a wall and
stared at me.
 
I patted my waist, where
my passport was hiding inside of my dress.
 
He didn’t look like a human trafficker,
but you never could tell
.
 
Taking
a deep breath, I tried my hardest not to look in his direction.

The map that was glued on the wall inside the
train helped us find the right stop.
 

***

A swirl of colors, sounds and scents announced
our arrival at the street market.
 
I'd
never seen so many different kinds of cheese, wine, and produce. Lulu enjoyed
the samples of
fromage,
and I looked
for gifts to bring home to my friends and family, visiting the tables and
booths packed along both sides of the road, enjoying the rainbows of hanging
dried flowers and homemade soaps.
 

After wandering for an hour or so, I saw
it:
 
a towering stack of shoeboxes, and
on each top box was a different style of Doc Marten boot.
      

I hurried to the booth and started
shopping.
 
A pair of “Oxbloods”—a
burgundy colored boot—seemed to wave, beckoning in my direction.
 
I rubbed my thumb over the fabric
Air Wair
tags that sprouted out of the
back.
 
I had wanted a pair for a
while.
 
They were so terribly punk rock!
 

I searched for a pair of the elusive
twelve-holed boots, but didn’t find any.
 
There were some with ten holes, which I liked enormously.
 
They would work in the absence of
twelve-holers.
  
Here I am on our first full day and I already accomplished my
mission!
 
The beginning sparks of a
shopper’s high began to tingle within me as I caressed the boots and perused
the other merchandise.
 

The vendor came over and asked if I needed any
help.
 
He was sort of cute, wearing faded
jeans and a wrinkled button up shirt—reminding me of the boys at the
university:
 
stylish in a nonchalant sort
of way.
 
Long bangs flopped over fuzzy caterpillar
eyebrows.

“
Combien
?”
 
I asked how much the boots cost.

The Oxbloods were seventy-five dollars, and the
tall boots were one hundred, by my francs to dollars calculations.
 
A
pretty good discount of about thirty dollars each
.
 
They were beautiful, and my feet cried out
for them.
 
It would deplete most of my
shopping money, but this was all I really wanted, anyway.
 
I'd just begun to get down to business when I
heard her voice.

“Don’t DO it!”
 
Lulu called across the crowd.

My face grew hot,
 
like I had grown an instant severe sunburn.

“Don’t buy those shoes!”
 
She was running to close the gap between
us.
 
In my mind’s eye, the whole event
was happening in slow motion.

“But, Lulu, I want these boots.”
 
I sounded like
André
the Giant, in my reduced-speed moment (
anybody want a peanut?
).

“Don’t you know you have to bargain with
them?
 
They
expect
you to bargain with them. You can’t pay what they ask.
 
That’s not how they do it here!"

Getting into a sort of tug of war over the
heavy footwear,
 
I pulled them toward my
chest, and she used a surprising amount of strength to yank them in her
direction.
 
The people around us who
understood her were laughing.
 

This is
completely and utterly humiliating.
 
She was right, of course.
 
I hadn’t even thought about trying to haggle
for my purchase because I had wanted them so badly and they were
already a good bargain
.
 
How did she know how to bargain, anyway?
 
Wasn’t she the same person who could barely
use a map?

My twenty-year-old pride was damaged.
 
There she stood, looking up at me with her
dark glasses over her eyes, hands on her hips, obviously exasperated.
 
The rings on her fingers sparkled like fairy
dust.
 

I want to
die
.
 
I wanted that shifty, dangerous mime to sweep up and grab me and carry
me away.
 
Anything would have been better
than living that moment!

The cute salesman looked at me and
shrugged.
 
I didn’t know what to say. Those
big eyebrows raised, as if to say, “Try me.” He was waiting.
 
I couldn’t do it.
 
I couldn’t even think about doing it.
 
I let Lulu have the boots and pivoted away
from the two of them.
 
As I turned, a row
of shoeboxes toppled off the shelf, nearly hitting the guy in the head.
 
He tried to catch them as they spilled into
the dirt.
 
I hadn’t intended to do it,
but I was so frustrated/angry/embarrassed (take your pick!) that they just sort
of followed my energy as I left.

Shuffling away from that side of the street, I pretended
to look at some purses at another booth.
 
Dozens of them were hanging from a metal rack, but I didn’t really see
them. Everything was blurry from tears of embarrassment,
 
which I just couldn't allow to fall.
 
They fell anyway.

“Did you change your mind?”
 
Lulu called, trotting to keep up with
me.
 
Her flats whispered across the
ground with a
scratch-scratch-scratch
.

“I’ll look again later,” I mumbled.
 

I didn’t buy anything that morning.

***

We were both hungry and decided to find
somewhere to eat lunch.
 

As we were about to leave the market, I saw
some jewelry that appealed to me.
 
A black
velvet table was filled with pieces made from different colors of crystal
beads.
 
I tried to decide who might want
some earrings or a bracelet, back home.
 
My mother would have enjoyed receiving a pair of pink dangly ones.
 
Allie might have liked some, too.
 

A guy sitting in a lawn chair behind the table
heard us admiring the jewelry and comparing names.
 
He was eating a bagel filled with something
mixed with onions.
 
I could have smelled
it from six miles away.