Paris Times Eight (2 page)

She leaned heavily on the horn and waved her arms angrily. I retreated into my book, trying to shut her out.

I had friends with more traditional moms who thought mine cool for seeming to be so liberated. But they didn't know what they were talking about. I hated having a single mom, hated being left alone at home while she was sleeping around, going out dancing, staying out without calling home. I waited and read and worried.

When she had spent all her money, she came to me for a loan. She said she was exhausted, on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and needed all I had to buy a ticket to Bermuda. Doctor's orders. I was devastated.

I had been scrupulously saving for months to get to Paris and away from her, doing any number of low-paying jobs after school and on weekends just to make sure I had enough. I had read Gertrude Stein's
The Autobiography of
Alice B. Toklas
and imagined Paris as a place where art was king and the only rule was being true to yourself. I imagined aimless strolls down wide avenues and dapper Frenchmen bowing to kiss my hand. I imagined Paris to be a city where I would, for once in my life, feel free. It was no accident that for my dream city I chose a place that was physically and culturally as far away from my mother as possible. But when she asked for the money, how could I refuse? Of course I needed to help her. It was my responsibility. I was the kind of daughter who did as she was told. I put Paris on hold. I told the Canadians that I wouldn't be able to make it. They'd have to find a new babysitter.

But then my mother surprised me.

Instead of paying me back, she bought me the ticket to Paris. That was why we were now driving to Montreal. It had been a cheap fare, about $
100
less than flying from Toronto—cheap on paper anyway. She hadn't factored in the cost of gas or the time spent driving such a vast distance to save a few dollars. But that was her—always looking for a bargain, but impulsively, erratically. She chortled that we were having an adventure. I read on, or pretended to.

But the book in hand was leading me down the thorny path of sex, sex, sex—sex in Paris, to be precise. Sex was usually something I tried strenuously to avoid. I wasn't entirely a sexual person; I was too consumed by fear to give myself up to the call of the wild. Sex was something that could lead to pregnancy, and pregnancy meant disaster, the end of your ambition and of your life. My mother had taught me that. She had become pregnant with me when she was nineteen, the same age as I was now.

She had never been interested in my father except for the fact that he had nice dark hair and strong eyebrows, qualities that she had hoped would pass on her to child. “And you do have nice eyebrows, you know. So I wasn't wrong about that.”

He was what today is known as a donor, except he hadn't a clue. He had married my mother for love, she told me. He loved you too, she said. But he was gone by the time I was six.

“Aw, he just loved you too much. That's why he left. It hurt him. He loved his kids.”

Her words left me completely bewildered. He loved me but had to leave me.

Love and desertion, love and hurt. I would always make the connection.

Now, as we raced to get me off to Paris, a city she had never been to yet imagined to be wonderful, full of promise, my mother screamed at me, “You are living my dreams! Don't ever forget that!”

Her voice clanged in my brain like a gong. I was paying attention to her now. She had pressed her body even tighter into the steering wheel. Her hands were fists, white at the knuckles. Suddenly she leaned on the horn. She began raging at a passing driver. But this time she apologized for her outburst. This shocked me; she never said sorry to anyone.

She rooted in her handbag on the floor next to her and pulled out a small packet of pills. “I'm sorry. I'm sorry,” she said. Her voice sounded frantic. “It's a Valium. I have to take it.”

She had never revealed a dependency to me before. She prided herself on never having touched a drink before she was twenty-eight, of never having smoked and having stayed away from drugs. But here she was now, sedating herself. She was strong! She was in control! And so her pronouncement unnerved me—the more so because she was still driving.

We had crossed the border into Quebec some time ago. The signs said
aéroport
instead of airport. The distance was now just twenty miles. I suddenly became aware that this was it, the end of our journey together. I wondered if I would miss her. But I didn't want to think about that now. I closed the book that had been sitting on my lap for hours, mostly unread. My mother was also strangely quiet. Maybe it was the pills she had just popped, or maybe it was the realization that I was finally going.

Approaching Dorval airport, we suspended our ongoing family drama to focus on the more mundane matter of getting me to my flight on time. Where was the exit for international flights? Where was the gate? My mother didn't want to pay the steep airport parking fees and so screeched to stop outside the terminal's sliding doors. We yanked my baggage out of the trunk and ran. We found the counter easily enough and were panting as I handed over my tickets. The agent told me where the departure lounge was and to be quick. Mother and I ran to the security wall and then, suddenly, it was time to part.

We looked at each other awkwardly. Who would reach out first? Neither of us was good at this anymore, not like when I was a little girl, eagerly flinging my arms around her neck and crying, “Oh, mommy!”

I think she, like me, was biting back tears. I had that panicked feeling again. What if I never saw her again? She was my tormentor, but she was the only family I had. “See Paris,” she said, her voice strained. “Have fun. Have fun for me.”

On that point, I thought, I won't let her down. Away from her and her suffocating ways, Paris was where I would find freedom. Even happiness. I already envisioned it as my dream city. The light at the end of my road. I willed myself not to cry, and stepped forward, past two uniformed men with electronic wands scanning my body for hidden weapons. They couldn't detect my breaking heart. I feebly waved to my mother and walked on, with Paris, my destination, before me, and my life in Toronto at my back. When I looked around again, my mother was gone.

*
Most names have been changed.

ONE

Au Pair
·
1979
·

ON THE PLANE
I shoved my face against the window and hoped that no one would see the tears streaking my face. I took out my journal, my constant companion since I was ten years old, and started scribbling. I tried reading Anaïs Nin again, her tales of desire and debauchery in Paris. Oh, I would never measure up.

A couple had settled in next to me. Their coziness, their two against my one, made me withdraw even more deeply into myself. Eventually I slept, but fitfully, and stirred only hours later when the captain announced our descent into Paris.

Deplaning at Charles de Gaulle airport, I desperately sought proof of the city's uniqueness, its enviable otherness, in the faces of every one of the baggage handlers, customs agents, and custodians buzzing around me. Was this the national character? I scrutinized the unsmiling faces, the black and bushy eyebrows knit in consternation. And then, waiting for my baggage, I saw the women, real
parisiennes,
a unique breed. They might have been wearing security badges and regulation uniforms, but they had natural flair. Their neck scarves were jauntily tied, their lipstick was bolder and their eyes more defined than what I was used to. They walked from the hip, the rolling, self-confident stroll of the born-to-it femme fatale. I will perfect this walk, I said to myself.

But at that moment my steps were hesitant. I had five years of high school French under my belt, but I was nowhere near being bilingual. I could conjugate verbs very well on paper, and I had a memory filled with French words. But coming from Toronto, where it was rare to hear any French spoken outside a classroom, I had little experience with the language in real time. I still struggled to piece sentences together to have a conversation. And so, in the airport, I walked in circles until I understood what door to exit from.

Adding to my confusion was my quest for a woman I had never met before. The plan was for me to stay with her in her apartment for a week, after which Jenna and Nigel were expected to arrive in Paris with their two sons. I would then move in with them in the large Left Bank apartment they had rented for July and August. I was told we would live there
en famille,
as a family, until I flew back to Toronto at the end of the summer to begin classes as a new-bie undergraduate at the University of Toronto.

Without consulting me, Jenna had scheduled her arrival in Paris after mine, stranding me in a city where I knew no one. The woman I was meeting, my temporary chaperone, was a friend of a friend of a friend. I had only a name, but still I strained to look for her, which was stupid because I had no idea what she looked like.

Then I saw her: birdlike in her smallness, not chic like the Sirens I had seen just beyond the gate, but quirkier, with lank brown hair falling over an aubergine linen vest paired with a cream-colored, knee-length skirt and black leather high heels worn without stockings. In her hand was a sign with my name on it, written in the flowery French hand, the first letter drawn out so that it resembled a curving line of poetry.

I walked up to her and with a small cough said I believed I was the person she was looking for.

“Enchantée,”
she responded and held out a fragile arm.
“Je
suis Yolande Thiolat.”

She didn't so much speak the words as sing them. The first part was low register, the second part high and melodic, like the ringing of bells. She smiled and with her thin hand shook mine. In an instant she made me feel not a burden but a guest.

She escorted me to her car, a minuscule egglike structure just perfect for a birdwoman like her. It was bent and scratched beyond the ken of a North American like me used to large buffed cars, and it was littered with old newspapers and magazines, for which she didn't apologize. When she turned the key in the ignition, the radio wailed an exotic tune. She lit a cigarette and asked if I'd like one.
“Non, merci,”
I said, as I craned my neck left and right so as not to miss a single detail on the
A3
expressway to Paris.

Yolande, I could see, was as shy as I was. She didn't know any English, so I was forced to push through my self-consciousness to communicate with her. My first name she found impossible to pronounce. Deer-a-la? Drew-dree? I told her to call me DiDi instead, if that would help.
“Bon!”
She looked relieved. She asked me about the woman who had brought us together, someone I didn't know at all, an acquaintance of Jenna's back in Toronto. But to spare her the complicated rehashing of how I ended up, a stranger, in her car, I just said,
“Elle est ça va,
er,
très bien. J'espère.”
She was fine, I hoped.

Then suddenly, there it was: the Eiffel Tower. It didn't need translating. I had seen this image—a skirted triangle crisscrossed with steel, a towering interjection, Paris stretched between heaven and earth—a million times before in pictures, on television, in travel books. But to be confronted with the real thing? I couldn't believe it! Yolande felt my enthusiasm and smiled generously as she emphatically pronounced the obvious,
“Ah, oui! La Tour
Eiffel!”

She lived in a tiny one-bedroom apartment, a cozy nest of a place, in the
19
th Arrondissement. The neighborhood on the northern outreach of Paris had the feel of a village.

Her building had at its doorstep a small café, a grocery store, a
boulangerie,
and a mechanics shop on the corner. There, men in blue overalls aired themselves out with talk and cigarettes and coffee drunk out of dainty white demitasse cups that shone against their blackened hands. Everyone greeted each other with a solemn
bonjour
and a nod of the head. These Old World manners had a certain archaic quality that immediately charmed me and made me feel I had broken through the looking glass. I was now dreamily on the other side, in a world made exotic by all these little differences between home and here.

Yolande had unrolled a mattress for me on the floor. I would sleep in her living room, which was about as big as a baby's carriage. The telephone was next to my head. French doors closed off the room from the hallway leading to her room. The closetlike toilet and a kitchen barely accommodating a round table lay just beyond my feet. Paris might sit big in the imagination, but in reality it is small, a city in which space is at a premium. I was taking it all in, my mind swimming in new thoughts and sensations.

Yolande asked if I was tired. I was. It was barely noon, but I was ready for bed. She left me alone, and I thought of my mother. In spite of everything, I loved her. Her face was before me as I blinked my eyes and fell asleep.

I DIDN'T WAKE
up until almost twenty-four hours later. Rising the next day—my first Parisian morning!—I was greeted by Yolande, who had prepared a steaming bowl of café au lait for me, along with a wedge of leftover baguette that she had grilled in her oven and that she served with dollops of raspberry jam and butter. It was delicious. I reminded myself to wake like this every day, from now until death, amen.

I felt tongue-tied, but I had to speak; she was being so kind to me. I asked her about her work. She said she worked with a charitable organization, giving aid to people in Africa. She travelled sometimes, she said, rubbing her belly, which is how she met the father of her unborn child, an American whom she was supposed to marry in time for the baby's birth. I was taken aback. I hadn't realized.

They had met in some far-flung airport, both of them waiting for connecting flights: she to Paris, he to California, where he was from, and where she was expecting to move in a few months' time. She needed a visa first. He was going to call her today; would I help her, as her English was terrible?